It’s got to be all or nothing with you, doesn’t it? You only find the middle when you are floundering and soft pedaling in an attempt to save face. Even then, it’s a temporary position, and you snap back at the first opportunity.
How many Germans were Nazis? 9% in 1933. Not none, but not the ‘all’ or the ‘vast majority’ you have been flogging. Why not use real numbers instead of hyperbole?
How many Germans were knowing participants in the holocaust? Some? That’s axiomatic. A significant percentage? I don’t know. Nearly all? I kind of doubt it without more proof than your emphatic say-so.
And I mistreat you, I suppose, because I feel generalizations can be dangerous and hurtful and I question them when I see them? Tough titty.
I’m going to ask you a 2nd time to illustrate how I have been dishonest.
Where do you get your 9% figure? And even if that were so, and the party numbers did not increase after 1933 (which I doubt), one did not need to be a Party member to participate in the Holocaust. Poles and Ukranians also participated, as as far as I know, Party memebership was not open to them.
I’ll find a cite, but so? You’ll dispute any cite that disagrees with you.But let’s think for a second–the Nazis could not have pulled off the Holocaust wihtout the active cooperation of the German people in handing over their nighbors, in boycotting Jewsih businesses, in voluntarily enforicing the Nurmeberg laws, in building the crematoria, in running the railroads, in employing slave labor, in not acting to stop it. By contrast, look at the Danes, who actively hid their Jews and refused to cooperate with their German occupiers. Outr of more than 1200 Danish Jews, only 2 were lost. (Dawidowiscz, The War Against the Jews, 1975)
And you’re right to question them when you see them, but you’re mistaken when you claim to see them in my posts.
Maybe you missed it when i poste it the first time:
You paint a dishonest picture of me when you claim that I only post anti-Christian sentiments, and that I am a bigot. Leaner, I backpedal nothing as I have already said. I stand by everything that I’ve posted. Do you deny that you have been insulting to me? Am I not justified in saying OW! to your brand of Christian love?
Hamish, You wrote a thoughtful post and it deserves a thoughtful answer. I’ll post more after I’ve thought for a bit at home.
You claim you don’t make insulting overgeneralizations; you get called on it. You ask for examples; Leander provides them. You then completely sidestep the issue and try and make Leander look like a hypocrit and poor widdle you look like the victim.
You’re mistaken, Homebrew. I’m “very sensitive” about lies and hypocrisy. I don’t want anyone attempting to corrupt and subvert my religion by saying something blatantly false about it, that it’s “about” nothing more than power or hatred. That’s not true, and seeing as how this is a discussion board, I will respond to that by discussing it.
And what you call “sensitivity” in my dealings with gobear is actually my repeated failure to understand him. When I first saw one of his deliberately antagonistic slurs against Christianity, and then saw posters I respect step up to the plate and defend him, I mistook it as an opportunity to find common ground. Two reasonably well-read guys with southern Christian upbringing who also happen to be gay. I’ve been able to reconcile science, faith, and homosexuality, so I figured I could explain how it’s possible, and the constant Us vs. Them mentality was not only just annoying, but destructive.
After seeing this thread, though, and seeing how it’s nothing more than a replay of the same “arguments” and the same transparent tactics he’s used in the past, I realize I was mistaken. There’s no common ground.
There’s only hypocrisy, arrogance, and lies. Condemning fundamentalists for saying that their interpretation of the Bible is the correct one, that only they know what it means to be a Christian, and then doing the same thing himself.
Claiming that his blanket statements about religion are entitled because Christianity is the dominant religion, and then accusing Christians of having a persecution complex.
Constant insistence of how smart he is and how familiar with the Bible he is and how everyone else is ignorant, while showing complete ignorance to the barest basics of it – treating people as you’d want to be treated, not responding to an enemy by using his same tactics, showing compassion and understanding instead of hate.
Reacting to every mention of Christianity in a post with some variation of “Christianity is Evil!!!”, always having to retract it or qualify it, and then accusing everyone else of being overly sensitive.
It used to be offensive, now it’s just tedious. If it really is true that evangelism in the form of communicating tolerance instead of antagonism is necessary to be Christian, then I’m screwed. Because I don’t have the patience for it. And I’ve got a sinking feeling I know exactly who’s going to be my roommate in Hell.
You’ve been… how did that go, again? defined as a fungible group? based merely on that you found fault with something in gobear’s line of argument, so ergo, of course, you MUST belong to a group of people gobear was denouncing.
But Leander failed to do so. i already elucidated the power/virtue question, and your willfully dishonest insistence that i’m “insulting” you is your problem. as for
You, Leander, Waverly, and Sol Grundy aren’t exactly proving me wrong, are you?
Hate, who? ignorance, where? You seem to object to using Scripture to back up points. Leander did a good job of showing verses that contradict my points, and if he hadn’t insisted on dragging this into personal insults, this could have blossomed into a fruitful discussion. and I have never said that I’m “smart,” and I bring up the Bible because, well, you only cited insults, but nothing that would contradict what I’m saying.
I retract nothing, and I fail to understand why you have a problem with qualifying or restating an argument. Isn’t that part of a discussion, to refine an argument, to take in the points an opponent makes and tailor your argument to fit with the new, improved information?
Not one of you addressed the Dalai Lama/ Phelps illustration–you prefer to insist that I’m somehow insulting you when I’m making a point about faith and the nature of religion.
And I quote the Bible to back up my assertions. Why fo you object to that? Why do you expect your unsupported assertions to be taken as unquestionable, yet mine are automatically wrong, even when I find Biblical cites to support my point?
Your sole argument has been name calling, yet I’m wrong. I’ve cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Bible, yet I’m wrong.
[quote]
I plead guilty to arrogance, but I dispute the charge of hypocrisy and lies. Where did I lie? How are my points wrong? I don’t claim my Scriptural POV is the only valid one, but when the sole argument against it isn’t “Ypur argument is wrong, and here’s why”, it;s just “Gobear’'s an asshole.” That may or may not be true, but it doesn’t answer the question.
leander
Charter Member Join Date: Sep 2001
Posts: 1,116
Location:
Quote:
Originally Posted by gobear
Leander, for all your snideness, you haven’t yet done what I asked–show me where I made negative generalizations about Christians. It’s that simple. Can you do it or not? You made the accusation, so back it up. I have already made my position as clear as I can.
Well, you’ve backpedalled quite a bit since that first page, but here’s a few:
Quote:
Christians do not believe in love…
You seemed to have done your best to qualify this one. Let’s not bullshit: no one starts a sentence that way if they’re not meaning to be insulting.
Quote:
Christians believe in obeying power, and far less in inculcating virtue.
“Far less”? I guess that’s your opinion, but it’s also a generalization to state “Christians” without a qualifier and diminish the importance of virtue. But you knew that.
Quote:
Loopydude, of course all religions are superstitious nonsense, but Xianity happens to be the one we are saddled with in this country.
I guess this one covers all religions, though the one we’re “saddled with” just happens to be “Xianity”.
Quote:
You people believe in a God so vicious that He killed His son to fulfill a thirst for blood. “Don’t kill the humans, Dad, take Me instead.”
What exactly were you trying to say with that one?
Quote:
Well, except for your dishonesty and snide comments, but that’s par from the course from the faithful.
So it’s “par from (sic) the course” for Christians to act that way? Nope, no generalization there.
Quote:
You have shown me so clearly the (OW!) strength of Christian love.
See above.
And I hate to break it to you, but even your some of your pals might have a hard time with, “I am not lashing out or expressing anger towards Christians”. It’s so blaringly obvious that either you’re deep in denial or just plain lying.
Oh, and I thought we were doing pretty well too. I even hoped we might get somewhere. But your refusal to listen to any arguments that considered the importance of virtue, while tossing out little annoying swipes at faith, made it clear that you had no intention of doing anything but stand on your soapbox. The closest you came to even allowing for debate was, “They are, at best, heretical Christians teaching non-Biblical doctrines, but I’ll spot you the point and agree that my premise was flawed.”
And I know you won’t believe it, but the purpose of this thread wasn’t to embarrass you. I’m sorry it’s turned out that way. But you still have an opportunity to clarify things – not your position on the whole faith vs. virtue, that’s clear; but your integrity in re: bigotry. I mean, if you’re going to be a bigot, at least have the cajones to stand up proud. I’d rather someone tell me the truth about their views, however misguided and hateful, than to hide behind some pretend erudition and noble spirit.
Stick with what you said. Follow the link and see it in black and white. You stated, and confirmed you meant, that a vast majority of Germans were Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The 9% figure is a Nazi party number, and it appears to be rather generous: Geobbels recorded 450k party members in 1933, and census data from that year numbers the population at 67MM. Do the math.
And why I am I doing the work to disprove your outrageous claims? Usually convention dictates that the outrageous claims are the ones requiring proof. You are intellectually lazy as well as dishonest.
You seem to take some pleasure in labeling me a Christian, and pointing out that I’m an example of how Christians act. Disabuse yourself of that contrivance. I’m agnostic. I’d go atheist, but that is still theist and it takes as much work to vehemently disbelieve as it does to believe.
So…what you guys are saying is that people are good without being christian, and christians only have to believe to get to heaven and not be good at all times.
Right?
You din;t post the link to that thread. You posted to one where I (rightly)pointed out that Hinduism practices racist discrimination as a sacred duty.
My post:
Your distortion:
Note that you didn;t bother to, you know, refute my points, just psoted a completely twisted parody of my post, your MO. As for the other two, one was an insult to a Somali immigrant who tells me to get out of the US because I’m gay. As I said in that thread, fuck her. and the other was, yes, mean and unfair statements about Christians, and I was wrong.
BecauseI don’t post as fast as you like is not a basis for calling me dishonest. I went to the library to get, you know, BOOKS, to see if in fact I was full of shit. Turns out I’m right, you’re wrong.
PART II to follow, plus my reply to Leander, so give me a few secs to type it up.
I’m not sure we are all saying the same thing. Lots of different sects of Christianity have differing views of what it takes to qualify for Salvation, including passionate arguments about volumes of water, level of fermentation in grape juice, and the exact timing of final confessions.
GobearSeems to think that having an opinion differing from his on the exact meaning of a scripture he feels is entirely false makes you a heretic. Given a start like that, consensus doesn’t seem likely to me.
However, there are lots of reasons to try to be a good person. For one thing, it’s better than evil. Why don’t we try that, for a while. Even if it doesn’t convince God all by itself, surely it won’t specifically piss Him off, right?
