Candygram for Mongo! 
Bullies tend to avoid someone who could rip their head off, and look for a safer target? Just a thought.
That is probably true ,but I started lifting because I was sick a lot when i was a kid. Two bouts of rheumatic fever, bowel obstructions, appendicitis and heart murmers kept me very weak and thin. I wanted to get stronger and healthier. Now I am old and look chubby.
I was involved in marches for black rights when i was in my first year of college, the beginning of the 60s. Then I started again when Nam came along. In both cases we preached non -violence . It was not easy to take abuse from so many people . But if the cause is just, it has to win out. That was how we believed. It could work back then.
And even then, only if it is the kind of modern, civilized society where dissidents do not simply disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again.
An historical example can be found in the history of the Chatham Islands:
And, as Der Trihs suggested, it lasted only as long as the isolation:
And many were eaten. :eek: Seems to me a strong form of natural selection against pacifistic societies except in extraordinary circumstances.
Do you see a distinction between someone who is pacifist and someone who is comatose? You seem to be equating pacificism with… narcolepsy?
One can be a pacifist and still:
stand up and argue.
stand in the path of an opponent.
lie down in the path of an opponent
refuse to cooperate
refuse to pay taxes
refuse to work
I’m not sure… can a pacifist encourage non-pacifists to get violent?
That would be just a tad hypocritical.
“Threaten you? why, I’d never dream of harming a hair on your head. But I’m afraid ‘Chainsaw’ Bob here has yet to achieve enlightenment. Do try to minimize the blood spatter this time, Bob.”
I never heard a rule that pacifist can’t be hypocrites. I might have cited Dick Cheney until he shot that guy in the head…
Oh, never mind, IIRC he shot at anything that moved.
But then they wouldn’t really be pacifists. It’s a description not a political party; it’s your beliefs and actions that qualify you, not your name on a membership roll.
Ok, maybe they can’t be hypocrites about violence, only about every other thing.
Pacifists are silly freeloaders.
If we tried some what ? Anyway, thanks very much Gandhi, but at least here when we swallow a drop of water, we don’t have the runs for 3 days :rolleyes:
So there’s a Bible passage of Jesus beating someone up? Sweet!
Being pacific is not the same thing as being passive.
…or atlantic.
Fail, fail and fail. overturning tables is not anywhere near the same as beating someone up.
Other Bible passages are irrelevant to what Jesus said. Jesus said what he said. The things that other people said other places in the Bible do not change or inform the quotes attributed to Jesus.
It’s funny that some of the criticims here – pacifists are “freeloaders,” they depend on “warriors” to protect them, etc. are some of the eaxct reasons that early Christians were despised in the Roman Empire. They were pacifists who refused to serve in the military or fight for their country.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Just shows that some things never change.
Heh. They were also seen as “unpatriotic” because they wouldn’t recognize or patronize the state temples. Supporting the state temples was seen more as a patriotic/nationalistic duty than a religious one and refusing to recognize them or drop a coin in the donation boxes was perceived as roughly equivalent to how modern day Americans view refusals to honor the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance. The early Christians were basically the dirty, liberal hippies of their time