Now see, I prefer Pope Palpatine myself.
The Papacy has gotten really boring without any Borgias leading the church.
Where are the masked assassins and conspiracies nowadays?
Check out BrainGlutton’s post 15.
Basically Joey Ratz is the last pope to precede a leader of the church who goes apeshit and purges the church in some sort of magnificent fashion.
On the internet, no one can tell you’re masked.
All through this thread, I could hear Randy Newman, singing, “The great nations of Europe, comin’ through!” 
For that matter, John XIII, or maybe even JPI, who, if the rumors are right, was thinking of overturning Humanae Vitae. Would that he had lived a bit longer to bring about changes.
Wrong.
The commandmant is against bearing false witness against one’s neighbor. Far as I can see, presenting an overall positive view of the impact of Christianity on Latin America is not slander against Huitzilopochtli or anyone else, disagree though you might with his assessment (inherently subjective and thus not really capable of being “false” in any event).
Slight nitpick, there weren’t 20 million people in Hispaniola, in fact it almost certainly there still aren’t 20 million people in the island. I completely agree with the rest of your post though.
On the church’s credit, some Catholic (Dominican - as in Dominican order) priests (mainly Las Casas and Fray Antón de Montesinos) fiercely defended the natives (they had been ‘converted’ already), they were rebuffed by the Spanish crown and in some cases exiled from the colony. Of course, to help the Indians they had the magnificent idea of importing African slaves. Very Christian of them. :rolleyes: In the end the entire Taino nation disappeared. All of them. The same happened in Puerto Rico with the Tainos and Caribs and Cuba with the Tainos and Ciboneys. Which doesn’t jive with the flowers and rainbows picture painted by the Great German Inquisitor.
I don’t suffer fools gladly, but I am not sure whether The Great Inquisitor is a fool or just a bit more than slightly evil. The results are the same.
On one occasion, the rededication of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, they sacrificed 80,400 prisoners (or, at least, their historians claimed that figure; it may have been less).
It’s not so much that they were cruel as that their whole religion and culture were so gloomy and death-obsessed. They believed in hungry gods who were always ready to destroy the world if not fed. From Kunstler’s The City in Mind (see link in post #6):
Of course, against this we have got to set the Christian world-view, which has saints and angels in plenty, but in which God is so pure and perfect and exalted that the slightest venial sin against His will merits eternal suffering in Hell.
Later in the same chapter:
There really ain’t no good guys in this story.
It’s really kind of hard, when one sees that sort of drivel, to bite one’s tongue and not blurt out ridiculously stupid interpretations of the atheist world-view, not to mention ignorant backhanded insults directed at someone they love dearly. But one perseveres.
Look, I’m getting that interpretation from Catholic priests. Quoted in one of Durant’s histories, IIRC. There’s also plenty of scriptural evidence Jesus believed in Hell; so if you take the doctrine of Hell out of Christianity, what you’ve got left, while it might have value, is not Christianity. (I’m aware of differing interpretations, the issue has been debated more than once in GD, but never persuasively, IMO.)
Catholicism and Christianity are not synonyms. And even from a Catholic view, your declaration (not stated as an opinion) does exactly what you oppose: it strips Christianity of its doctrine of forgiveness of said “slightest venial sin”. If you don’t recognize Christianity without the doctrine of Hell, then how do you recognize it without the doctrine of salvation?
No, of course not, they’re antonyms – didn’t you know?
I recognize salvation in there, all right, that’s the point of the whole thing; but you have to accept Christ and all that, and if you don’t (or never even hear of Christ), tough luck forever. Why should your soul’s destiny depend in any way on what you believe?! More importantly, it’s based on the assumption that salvation is necessary because you really do deserve Hell. You don’t even need to commit that one venial sin, you were born deserving it. That’s an utterly psychotic world-view. Makes the Aztecs’ look rational and compassionate and civilized by comparison. YMMV.
And that’s exactly the sort of cop-out that Jesus would have ridiculed, if his words as recorded in the Gospels are any guide.
And given that we’re discussing a subset of Christianity here, I think they kind of have to be.
Only to the extent that any falsity about a review of the performance at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 that omits any mention of Lincoln’s assassination is strictly subjective.
And the vengenance the Spaniards brought was to enslave and kill nearly everyone. The Aztec nobility, fine. But did the peasants do any better? How about the enslaved tribes?
Maybe the Allies should have killed 90% of Germany in 1945 and enslaved the rest? Would have been too bad for Ratzi, wouldn’t it? (And the point is that he was not culpable back then, to head off any rants.)
Owning up to the sins of the Church in Latin America while he is in Latin America would seem a bit timely.
That sounds like something Chick would say :eek:
Faith has many different definitions. What many Catholics believe by salvation by faith has less to do with the intellectual component and more to do with the action component of opening one’s life to Love(agape). There are many who intellectually profess faith in Jesus but who dont have love in their hearts
It only takes one sin to make onself seperate from God and thus unable to enter communion with him in Heaven. It’s not about deserving it; it just happens.
I’m not studied up on original sin, but I think of it as ‘humanity’s inclindation towards sin,’ rather than an actual sin.
Apropos of nothing, I once read an action-packed alternate-history novel, King of the Wood, by John Maddox Roberts. It’s set in a world where the Scandinavians colonized the east coast of North America starting in the Ninth Century, eventually forming two large kingdoms, Treeland (Christian) and Thorsheim (pagan). Meanwhile, the Mongol Empire survives, conquers the Islamic world, but leaves Europe alone as it’s too poor to bother with. Around 1485, the hero Hring is exiled from Treeland for kinslaying and eventually winds up in the Aztec Empire, whose religion and customs horrify him, and he flees. In the end, the Mongols invade North America from the west, intent on conquest. Hring persuades them to ignore the Norse kingdoms and instead conquer the much richer Aztec Empire. They do, and suppress the cult of human sacrifice – but with much less destruction than the Spanish in OTL. Otherwise, they leave their new subjects’ religion and culture alone – all the Mongols want is order, obedience and taxes.
Oops, sorry about that. My source (the excellent “That’s Not In My American History Book” by Thomas Ayres) states that “as many as ten million” people lived in Hispaniola ca. 1492. I fuddled his number. It’s not out of the question that there COULD have been in the order of a few million natives living there; Puerto Rico today has around 3 million, and although there’s obviously much more development in the Caribbean today, PR is also smaller than Hispaniola.
The point to drive home is that there were almost no healthy natives left within a few years of the Spanish conquest, and those that were left were enslaved. Not even the Aztecs perpetrated that sort of mass die-off (in fact, there’s quite a bit of evidence to support that their weaponry was not designed to be especially lethal…live captives for sacrifice or slavery were more prized than dead people). So to say “well, the Aztecs had it coming”, as some have done here, is a bit of a straw man, IMO.
It is true, I’ve often read, that almost none of the inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands today have any Indian ancestry – only African, European and East Indian. (There are believed to be some descendants of Carib Indians in St. Vincent, Dominica and Haiti, but the Carib language and culture are entirely extinct.)
You’re aware that everyone is your neighbor, are you not?
It would be a better world if everyone knew that .