I think perhaps we’ve run out of steam on our diversion now. Apologies for the derail.
But on the bright-side I think we’ve pretty much nailed this “religion” thing now.
4000 years of martyrs, theology and philospohy? pffffft! three random people on a message board is what you need.
You want the big answers? come and ask us. Knock organised religion on the head.
let’s keep all that wine and feasting bit though shall we? I like that bit.
Because No True Christian etc.
There is a discussion of whether Hitler was a Christian in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=579662&highlight=hitler
My own views, from that thread, can be summarized as follows: Hitler, and the Nazis generally, had no coherent approach towards religion, and so pretty well any position along the spectrum described in detail below can be supported. Religion, aside from offhand references to his “destiny” and “Providence”, and the cultural cachet - was simply not very important to Hitler; he happly tolerated Nazi underlings with seriously divergent views on the topic, ranging from religious Christians through hard-core neo-pagans (though he thought the latter were slightly nuts).
On Hitler himself:
On the Nazis generally:
I have forgiven them for their past. I simply deal with the current and even in that case I deal with a religion, a sect and any particular believer seperatley.
ITR Champion, you keep getting you ass handed to you in these debates, over and over again, yet you keep coming back. You’d be a lot more effective if you simply said “yeah, the church fucked up. Big time. But that was then, and this is now. We’ve learned our lesson from history, and we’re committed to not doing that again.” That would be vastly superior to your whitewashing of the church’s ugly history.
I don’t know what thread you are reading, but thus-far all I have seen from the atheist side is bold assertions lacking in cites or any real factual evidence. Even the quote of Cyningablod that you provided is just another example of the outright denial of proper scholarly history that is common in these types of discussions. Faced with proper cites that the Spanish Inquisition was nothing like the way he originally thought, he simply just re-asserts that the Spanish inquisition was evil without any real evidence or cites. I think the problem is that the evil of religion is taken as an article of faith amoung the “New Atheists”, and as they say you can’t reason a person out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into.
Calculon.
What exactly is your definition of “getting you ass handed to you”? I’ve provided solid cites from real historians and journalists to back up every claim that I made about this topic and others. By contrast, Cyningablod and Kobal2 were not able to produce a single cite about any historical topic, despite multitple requests. So, if you want me to believe your version of events, please answer the following questions:
Do you believe that any statement about history that I have made in this thread is untrue, and if so, which one?
If your answer to the previous question is “no” then what exactly did you mean by this post?
Don’t be shy now. Let’s hear your answers.
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing what you can prove when you make stuff up.
First of all, you should have double-checked your math. If the Aztec population was 10 million and they sacrificed 20,000 people per year, that’s not 0.0005% of the population being sacrificed, it’s .2%. It’s not one out of 200,000 people being sacrificed per year, it’s one out of 1,000 people. Get out a calculator and do the math for yourself if you don’t believe me.
More importantly, I had already addressed this silliness in post 57 before you posted it in 70. There’s no logic behind trying to hold members of one religion responsible for what members of another religion did. I could just as easily declare that Aztec sacrifices and Stalinist purges should all be lumped together in the category of ‘violence committed by non-Christians’, but what would that prove?
The simple fact is that if there were any meaningful argument to be made about real, historical atrocities committed by Christians, then it wouldn’t be necessary for those who hate us to make up so many fictional ones. In this thread we’ve seen people falsely accuse Christians of being responsible for the Rwandan genocide (#56), the Bosnian War (#56), and the Holocaust (#76), as well as blaming religion for an unpsecified, fictional reign of terror all throughout human history. Why is it necessary for you folks to make up all these claims?
Yes. You said in #48 (a post conspicuous for its attempts to conflate megadeaths with non-religious causes and aims - such as the Ukraine famine and Mao’s ironically-named Great Leap Forward - with religious persecutions):
Please give details of these religious massacres, and of the “countless other believers” who ended up in the gulags. And I’m not asking for evidence that some gulag victims were priests; of course they were. I’m asking for evidence that backs up your “>10000 massacred” claim.
I actually agree with you on this point. What’s your response to the idea that religions show themselves unsuccessful since there is no religion that has a majority of the world as followers, and the idea that the vast disagreement as to religious and irreligious beliefs means that we shouldn’t trust our own understandings of the universe?
It’s not even that you’re making untrue statements (I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend hours through the library to try to determine the veracity of your statements). It’s that you’re failing to acknowledge that your church has done some very horrible things. The title of the OP is: Should we forgive (and forget) religions past atrocities? Only if there’s sincere contrition about the atrocities. I’ve never seen any sincere contrition from you. You seem to just be playing tu quoque with atheists and quibbling over body count numbers.
Koba the Dread, by Martin Amis is a thorough and exhaustive book about Soviet crimes against humanity and the reaction to them in the West. Among other things, it documents the actions of Soviet death squads who were particularly assigned to exterminate monastaries, convents, and other religious communities that were peacefully minding their own business throughout Russia. Incidentally, that book also covers Christopher Hitchens’ long history of trying to justify the crimes of Lenin, Trotsky, and co.
OK, so I went to Amazon and used their search feature to hunt for the word “massacre” in this book. 7 results:
…Nazi generals gloating about the prowess of their men. Nasty but not about a religious massacre.
Victims are Leninists in this case.
Victims of this one are Tartars.
And this massacre is Cossack troops ambushing German troops during WW2.
Sentence concludes “workers and peasants”.
A passage about novels. Massacre being used as a metaphor, as far as I can make out.
Reference to page 139, “massacre of the kobzars”. Kobzars were “peasant poets”, apparently.
So, lots of massacres. The Soviet (and Nazi) leaders were a vicious bunch of hideous mass-murderers. But we knew that. And if Hitchens is an apologist for them, then he’s an idiot.
No sign of your tens of thousands of religious dead though. Perhaps you can point us to the particular passage that makes this clear?
I can have a go at answering this question:
From a Christian POV it is not expected that everyone would be followers of God, or even the majority would. Moreover the problem is more spiritual than factual. So for instance in the OT large chunks of Israel turn away from God to worship other gods not because they don’t think Yahweh exists, but because they don’t trust him or want to worship other gods more. So in that sense it is posing a problem that doesn’t exist internally within Christianity. The same is probably true in other religions.
The question externally is really the popularity fallacy. Lots of people believing something does not make it true. Only if one person in the world were a Christian that would not make it untrue. Similarly if there was only one atheist that would not make them necessarily wrong either. The belief statnd or falls on it’s own merits, not on how many people believe in it.
Hoever, there is much more global agreement than you would think. Given that over half the world is either Christian or Muslim, the monotheistic idea of a creator God is clearly the majority view. At an estimate of only 1 billion (after a short search on Wikipedia) atheism / irreligion only ranks in at about 1/6th the global population. So it is unfair to characterise the situation as two equally popular views. There is a very definite majority and minority view, and the monotheist view is the majority.
Calculon.
The problem I was trying to look at by asking ITR that particular question is that i’ve been given the impression in the past by his posts that he believes a stronger, in a sense, version of your point 3; that many faiths may actually be worshipping the same overall god, but just give that god different names, have differences in ritual and so on and so forth. And, to an extent, that he believes that rightness would equal popularity. Though these are of course only impressions from debating with him in the past. The questions i’m posing to him aren’t from views I myself hold.
I asked because it seems to me those things might introduce a problem into the notion that holding followers of one religion responsible for the actions of another is an illogical idea. To the extent that, a religious person might hope, the actions of their fellow followers might reflect in part the desires of their deity, it could well be reasonable to suggest that we should hold the followers of one religion responsible for the actions of another. If there is some core truth that many people hold to, with the minor obfuscating facets of religion simply disguising that hidden truth, then it’s not necessarily an illogical point at all.
Which would be a good argument if the thread was about nasties done by Christians, and Christians alone. Which it isn’t - it’s about religions in general. Nobody’s trying to pin Aztec murders on the Pope.
Well, if what you say is true (i don’t think it is), maybe it’s because Cyningablod and Kobal2 are aware that, when confronted with actual solid cites from real historians, you scurry away from a thread, never to be heard from again.
I’m still waiting for your response to post #29 in this thread, which you started, but abandoned as soon as it became clear that your misrepresentations were being challenged by actual evidence.
I think we can all agree that making far-fetched statements and then, when asked to support yourself with evidence, refusing to do so because one of your opponents didn’t respond to a thread almost two years ago, is not a very sound tactic.
Generally speaking, if you want to know what’s in a book you should read it, rather than just fifty words from it. I don’t have my copy with me at the moment so I can’t quote exact passages, but I recall reading it and the information is in there. Further, it’s simply an outstanding history book for documenting not only the Soviet terrors but also the reaction to them in the West. As mentioned in the article by Tom Piatak that I already linked to, the book describes: “a regime that killed 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1922 alone”. That, of course, being just one episode in the long history of oppression of the Church by the Soviets.
But the question that started this all was that some people in this thread denied that totalitarian regimes ever targeted Christians specifically, as opposed to merely as an incidental part of some political campaign of terror. I honestly don’t understand why, when it’s socially unacceptable to deny that the Holocaust occurred, it’s perfectly okay to deny that massacres of Christians occurred with specific intent in the Soviet Union and many other regimes. It’s a fact of European history that anti-Christian or anti-clerical violence broke out many times. In Spain, the Republic confiscated Church property, censored religious publications, and otherwise oppressed the Church in the early 30’s, culminating with the murder of thousands of clergy during the Red Terror. (See chapter 7 of this book). There have been instances of similar attacks by governments against churches in Portugal, France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Cuba, El Salvador, … It’s a fact.
No it’s not, but it can and does contribute to how people perceive your credibility as a debate opponent. You started a debate on a topic that was clearly important to you, made a bunch of strong assertions, and then, when your assertions were questioned and you were asked to back up your far-fetched statements with evidence, you abandoned the thread.
Why is “making far-fetched statements and then, when asked to support yourself with evidence, refusing to do so” a bad thing when other people do it, but OK when you do it?
You brought the damned thing up, not me. Generally speaking, if someone asks you for a cite, you shouldn’t just throw an entire book at them and then complain that they haven’t read it. Why don’t you read the book that you say supports your claim and you tell me which pages/passages/etc provide this support?
Did you read the descriptions of massacres I quoted from in your book? Leninists, Tartars, Cossacks, workers, peasant poets, Kozbars. Off the top of my head, the Soviets also murdered thousands of Polish officers, thousands of Red Army generals in purges in the late 30s, the millions of Ukrainians already mentioned in famines, Menshevik opponents, and political prisoners by the bucketload. I’m sure there are others.
Yet you claim the Christian victims, as a group, are somehow special, separate from all these other groups, targetted for the special reason of their religiosity. And yet the generals were targetted for a special reason (threat to Stalin), and the Cossacks were targetted for a special reason (sided with the Nazis), the political prisoners were special (reactionaries, capitalist running-dogs, whatever the prosecutor made up), and no doubt the peasant poets were targetted for a special reason, their iambic pentameters maybe. Sure, the Christian victims were special - but then all of Stalin’s victims were special. Well they all deserve our pity, and our outrage at the mass-murdering thugs who deprived them of life and liberty. But hey, the Christians’ suffering was special. :rolleyes:
It’s a fact that in European history, Christian-inspired or cleric-inspired violence was much more common. Do you only care about victims when they’re Christian? Or do you care more about them? Serious question. You certainly seem to.