By that sort of logic, it is an evil by the rationalists (ie Robespierre) or the communists (ie Pol Pot, Stalin) etc. There are always bad apples in every group.
Considering it goes against what Jesus taught, it was in spite of Christianity not because of it.
Then what of all the great humanitarians and abolitionist who did not reject Christianity?
I never said otherwise. You are the one trying to claim that Christianity, and Christianity alone is some moral paragon.
Jesus is a small and not very important part of Christianity. He’s mostly a symbol, like Mickey Mouse is for Disney.
They either reejcted the values of Christianity while keeping the name, or they were fundamentally evil or irrational people whose goals by chance resulted in some good. Plenty of the abolitionists for example opposed slavery just because their opposed Christan faction supported it, or because the slaveowners refused to let slaves learn to read the Bible. They didn’t actually care about the salves, just their religion. Actually caring about people is un-Christian; what matters is the soul, the afterlife, and God’s will; flesh and blood people and their real world suffering don’t matter. A true Christian will condemn a million people to a slow death it if saves a single soul from Hell.
Indeed. Curtis is putting words in my mouth. All I said was Christians of his kind don’t try to bug me here, and he somehow turned that into “hedonist’s paradise.” Curtis is the one who brought up sex; as for underage prostitution, as I’ve pointed out in other threads, the police have clamped down on that a lot here, and now all the pedos tend to head for Cambodia. There are still some problems remaining, but it’s certainly been cleaned up to a large extent and the crackdown continues. **Curtis ** will of course probabaly continue with his preconceived notions; sometimes I have a hard time remembering he’s just a schoolboy with no real-world experience and just repeats whatever he finds on the Internet.
True Christianity is.
Considering there would be no Christianity if there was no Christ that’s ridiculous/ If Jesus is not important, what’s the point, seriously?
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They care about both people here on Earth and in the afterlife. It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Maybe that’s how it works in practice, but Christianity wouldn’t exist without the Christ Myth.
This couldn’t be a more perect example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
And for the record, all major are morally virtuous in their purest ideologies.
How do you know? There was no Moses either, and no Krishna. That didn’t stop religions from being based on their presumed historical words and dees.
All that matters is that people believe it. It’s actual historical true value is of no relevance.
Jesus said that people will be judged by how they treat the least among them. According to Jesus, how you treat people on earth is the one and only thing that matters, and the one and only thing you will be judged by. That’s some “true Christianity” for you.
Edit mine.
Which Variety is that? The closest in terms of historical accuracy would be the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine rite Catholics, Followed by the Roman Catholics, followed then by the Protestants and their various offspring.
Anthropologically speaking, Christianity is an Apocalyptic Death cult with a focus on the afterlife, so that measure would be inaccurate.
The various new types of evangelical forms aren’t even remotely similar to the original versions in terms of rites, and significantly differ in dogma to the point where they ought to truly be considered something new all together.
As Dio mentioned, you couldn’t have a purer example of the No true Scotsman Fallacy going on here. If you want to debate the values of a particular branch, then we need to define both that branch and values to speak logically with one another. Otherwise it’s all simply moving the goal posts until you can feel some sort of smug little victory while the rest of us just shake our heads at the amazing amount of self imposed ignorance you are displaying. Qin, you come across as a very intelligent, thoughtful, but extremely sheltered young person. I applaud your willingness to learn and debate, ti’s a valuable skill to have; but these questions only get harder with time and deeper exploration. That is not to say that abandoning of faith is inevitable, but that those who seem to have the deepest understanding of it always seem to be the ones with the broadest views upon it. Honest understanding means turning the glass upon everything, including those positions you take for granted as truth.
So you’re saying that I’m wrong, the evils of Christianity wasn’t pronounced during the middle ages but the Renaissance and after the crusade? That’s supposed to somehow counter the argument that Christianity is inherently more bloody and violent than some of their Eastern counterparts? I don’t think that’s helping you
I don’t think you can say that there would be an equivalent scale of atrocities. Much of the violence were fueled by religion for religious reasons. Witch burnings, massacres of “heretics”, wars, the whole split between the Catholics and Protestants and the suffering caused by it, continuous persecution of Jewish people who even share the same Old Testament with Christians. This has lasted for thousands of years. The scale of that depravity outweighs and outnumbers those in the Eastern sphere. I can’t even recall a religious war where Buddhists killed each other in the name of Buddha, or a forced conversion launched by, for example, Theravada Buddhism on Mahayana Buddhism. The closest equivalent is the continuous persecution of Tibet’s Vajrayana style by the decidedly atheistic Chinese, and that you can definitely say is more political than religious (and nobody’s been burned at the stake for heresy either).
For some reason, Christianity is on the whole a more violent religion. Maybe you should rethink some of your core principles
Comparing the West’s progress to the rest of the world does give us an advantage. Yet within the West there is a scale of enlightenment. However you want to define it will be different from mine probably, but in the West, some of the most tolerant and enlightened countries have moved away from Christianity. Western European countries like Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands are on a whole much more tolerant in terms of equality between the sexes and sexual orientations. They have higher standards of living, their people are healthier, they get paid more, and at the same time go to church less and believe in god less. I don’t believe that’s an accident.
I’d recommend the book Zen At War for anyway who’s so certain that Christianity is inherently more violent than Buddhism.
Obviously, Zen Buddhism isn’t the equivalent of all Buddhism and there are some forms, such as Tibetan under which it’s nearly impossible to justify any sort of violence.
The same is true of the Jains who object to taking the life of even insects.
It’s arguable whether Zen is even a religion. I am a long time, half-assed devotee of Zen, and I see it more as a cognitive discipline than a religious practice.
One aspect that Christianity and Islam have that a lot of Eastern traditions (as well as Judaism) don’t is that they are evangelical. Religions that don’t feel the need to spread or convert people tend not to ever get militarized.
I have always thought that any religion that is based upon the inherent evilness of people and the notion of ‘salvation’ is not very healthy.
That and the fact that Christianity can be categorized as a death-cult with symbolic cannibalism makes it hard for me to consider it a ‘good’ religion.
Excuse me? The books were lost mostly because people were more preoccupied with immediate survival rather than preserving libraries. When an entire civilization is collapsing all around you, making sure that ancient texts survive is not going to seem all that important to you.
You guys sound like a bunch of anti-Semites blaming all the evils of the Western world on the Jews.
Nevertheless, the doctrine you’re talking about was limited to relatively very few Christians, and has never been a part of mainstream Christianity. To speak of this doctrine as though it were an important part of Christian tradition and theology is an extremely serious distortion.
In an alternate universe where the Jews are the world’s largest religion, had gotten that way by conquest and slaughter, and were basically guilty of most of the things anti-Semites accuse them of.
Good thing I didn’t then.
It’s not to counter anything. I’m just correcting a statement of yours. Christianity may have had a lot of evils during the Middle Ages, but it got more intolerant after the 13th century than before it.
There were a bunch of wars between various Buddhist groups in Japan. There were also wars in Tibet among the various sects for control and over doctrine. There was also the Burmese king Alaungpaya, who, as you can tell from his name (embryo Buddha), claimed that his invasion of Siam was because the Siamese had become lackadaisical in their practice of Buddhism and he was going to restore them to the proper level of devotion.
You also have, in Sri Lanka, one of the grievances by the Tamils is that the Buddhist Sinhalese are religiously persecuting them and interfering in their practice of Hinduism.
In terms of forced conversion, the Buddhists in Tibet largely wiped out the traditional Bon religion, and the current military government of Burma has, in the past, tried to forcibly convert Burmese Muslims and Christians to Buddhism, although they’ve largely now changed their strategy to one of incentivizing people who convert rather than punishing those who don’t (by doing things like limiting school access to non-Buddhists and not allowing non-Buddhists to take leadership positions in the government or army). There’s also been conversions of Muslims in Ladakh, in Kashmir, where tensions between the Buddhist and Muslim communities of Ladakh are rising. Then, in the 1600s, Japanese Christians were forced at gunpoint to renounce the religion and convert to Buddhism.
So it happens. It hasn’t happened as much as it has in Christianity or Islam, for instance, but religious wars and forced conversions aren’t alien to Buddhism.
Your view of Christianity, and that of others on this thread, has been shaped by a rabid hatred of Christianity, and not facts.
You most certainly did.
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Christians came up with the idea of “separate creation”, that the different races were essentially different species separately created by God with preordained places. With the whites naturally on top.
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There are no modifiers anywhere in that sentence which would indicate that the doctrine was believed by only a very small percentage of Christians. And when you were called on it, you tried to back away by claiming everyone else had misread you.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes: Of course in reality the reason for that hatred is the things Christianity has done and continues to do. It deserves to be despised for the same reasons ideologies like sexism, racism, Communism and Nazism deserve to be despised; irrationality, tyranny, injustice, exploitation and slaughter. Being a religion doesn’t put it above condemnation.
Because it doesn’t matter in the slightest, since I was refuting the claim that the Hindus and the Hindus alone were guilty of that particular evil.
What on Earth are you talking about? It is a simple historical fact that Early Christians were responsible for the destruction of the only greek/roman back up of the library of Alexandria. Moreover they burned as part of a religious riot in which they were tearing down pagan temples. If we hadn’t had the Arabic copies of the Muslim scholars it is seriously debatable if we would have advanced as far as we have today. The collapse of the Empire was driven by many factors but religious riots from the Christian element certainly played a role and didn’t help.
Give me a break here. There were plenty of libraries throughout the Roman empire, and the loss of the library at the Serapeum temple was hardly the main cause of all those ancient books being lost. For the most part, after the fall of the Roman empire books were lost mainly due to neglect and apathy. Books were expensive and libraries cost a lot to build and maintain. These things became luxuries which only a few could afford. The Christians weren’t primarily responsible for the loss of the ancient world’s literature.