Nope. Saddam didn’t kill people because he was religious, he killed them because he was FANATICALLY religious. I might be religious, but I’m not a fanatic. Der Trihs is “religious” (I would say his brand of atheism is a religion" but more importantly, he’s fanatic.
No one has killed someone over believing snow is cold. People who are fanatic have.
Alright then, Der Trihs isn’t comparable to Stalin; rather, he’s compared to Stalin’s fanatic followers, who are just as detestable.
In that case, Aztec (Aztec-land? Aztecia?) was one messed up place.
Science? Depends. Some people follow science logically; others follow it in a way that is indeed similar to religion. But science itself is not a religion. Atheism itself isn’t always religion either, but Der Trihs’s version sure is.
EDIT: Some people also follow religion logically. Others are fanatics.
I’ll bet that the one tearing the hearts out of people weren’t in fact “mainstream Aztecs” but instead the elite. I’ll bet that the majority of the Aztecs lived ordinary lives, grew crops, fed and educated their children, made love to their spouses, etc. Because as I remember from school, they had a fairly large community, and sustaining such a thing would require that most of them live ordinary lives. It’s possible that they chose the ones to lose their hearts from among those already convicted of crimes.
And since Curtis seems to think that Protestants are better than everyone else, how does he explain that Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth century tortured and killed people they suspected of being witches.
Does this help? “While Christianity clearly created the framework for the Witch Hunts, no single “Church” was to blame, and many secular governments hunted witches for essentially non-religious reasons.”
Actually, they obtained most of their victims by waging unrelenting warfare on their neighbors. Some sacrifices were volunteers from the Aztecs. Some were criminals. But most were captured in warfare.
Human sacrifice was central to the Aztec religion, some ceremonies resulting in the deaths of thousands in an almost assembly-line slaughter. Sometimes, they’d also eat the remains of the human sacrifice as well. Then were the sacrifices to Huehueteotl which involved burning people almost to death, then taking them out of the fire to cut out their hearts. Child sacrifice to the rain god Tláloc, where the children going to their death were forced to cry as tears were an important part of the whole thing.
As for human sacrifice being limited to just the elite - ALL males citizens were trained for warfare, and those who provided a captive, even just one, for human sacrifice were elevated above the common workers. So it’s pretty plain that while not every male was a successfully rising warrior the expectation was that all males would at least try to do this at some point in their lives.
Then there were the private practices of self-torture and bloodletting practiced by just about everyone in Aztec society, with the bloody implements offered as sacrifices or used in private worship.
Sorry, little hard for me to dismiss all that - clearly the whole society was in on the deal and in favor of it. I find human sacrifice and torture quite detestable, hence my vote for the Aztecs as worst offenders. To be fair, plenty of other meso-American groups went in for that sort of thing, but the Aztecs took it to the next level (or two).
Even if you were an Aztec civilian who wasn’t “in on the deal” (i.e., you thought that human sacrifice was a bad idea) what could you have done about it? Do you imagine they could have stood there and objected?
The Aztec capital is now known as Mexico City, just in case you were wondering what happened to it. For all the current faults of Mexico, I do think the present nation represents an improvement over the Aztecs.
Why wouldn’t you be in on the deal? Without the sacrifices, the sun won’t rise, rain won’t come, plague will descend, the Aztec’s enemies would destroy them. What sort of monster would be against human sacrifice, knowing all that?
Attendance is shrinking, as is attendance at most other mainline Christian churches, with the biggest decrease taking place between the 1960s-1970s. In 1965, it had 3,615,000 baptized members, and in 2001, 2,317,000 baptized members. There’s a good argument to be made, though, that it has a lot to do with the decline of the white birthrate, and the continuing move of African Americans away from the Episcopal church. There is, however, another popular theory that it has to do with the church’s move towards more liberal political and theological positions the growth of conservative evangelical churches.
I came in to say this. They’re all disgusting and destructive, every damned one of them, including every flavor of Christianity, itself among the most odious.
That might be the reason. Or it might be that more and more people are atheists, agnostics or even if they do believe, they just don’t associate with any particular church.
That was evil and I agree that John Calvin sinned horribly when he had Michael Servetus burnt at the stake and so did the Puritans in the Salem Witch Trials. Hopefully God showed them the sinfulness of their actions.