George Washington a terrorist. You see everything if you live long enough…
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not but Washington specifically used the word terror in his orders.
As you can see Washington specifically ordered that non-military targets were to be attacked, that no surrender be accepted, and that the purpose of this attack was to terrorize the Indians.
So, yes, George Washington a terrorist.
Did I say they’d be nice people? No, I did not. But as I pointed out earlier, even a ruthless tyrant isn’t going to kill people over worshipping the wrong religion if they simply don’t care. Christianity demands that people care about what other people worship, and demands they do something about it.
And for that matter what makes you think that the Christians who have committed atrocities for Christianity throughout history weren’t “nice people”? Christianity twists benevolence into cruelty; if you actually buy it and mean well then you are obligated to do things like torturing people into converting, because by doing so you are saving souls.
It’s rather silly claiming that Christianity doesn’t cause aggression and cruelty living in a world where it became so widespread precisely because it does. A world where it’s still creating misery and death on a worldwide scale.
Indeed: he’ll kill people over something else, probably over resisting his legitimate rule over them.
Make up your mind: are you, or are you not, suggesting that the Christian killers would otherwise be nice people?
Yet I noticed you didn’t name any particular Christian killers who you think would’ve been good people otherwise. Christianity doesn’t cause aggression and cruelty; rather, aggressive, cruel people who practice it often use it to justify their aggression and cruelty. Similarly, kind, empathetic people who practice it often use it to justify their kindness and empathy.
Not so charmingly naive.
Terror is a normal and natural part of war. The only reason Der Trihs has a problem with Washington is because he was white. It didn’t matter that the Iroquois were raiding American villages and stealing our women. It doesn’t matter to him that they were killing our people too. George Washington is an evil terrorist for racial reasons.
Of course he was a terrorist, all successful Generals are with that incredibly loose definition.
You never contemplate the idea that Christ who laid down a fairly pacifistic ideology didn’t have some kind of curbing influence on the excesses of those who came after. You think it was caused by Christianity, but since you refuse to disabuse yourself of your ignorance and actually KNOW what Christianity said you just like to spout off with you opinion that has no basis in fact whatsoever.
I’ve contemplated it, but it’s simply an absurd proposition. We are specifically talking about the people whose stated reason for their actions was religion, and who by their own statements were, in their own eyes, doing good.
Does this mean that absent religion, the crusades wouldn’t happened? Arguably, yes. Something would probably have happened, and it wouldn’t have been nice, but it wouldn’t have been the same, and to whatever degree the conflict was justified and sold based on the religious angle, that degree of it would have been removed, or replaces with some other less-effective jusitification. (If other justifications were equally or more effective, they would have been used instead.)
Could religion have curbed the behavior of other people, who would have been sociopaths if they hadn’t been routed into the priesthood and lived harmlessly as a result? Sure. But we don’t know about those people, because it’s tough to tell after the fact if a person who was nice because of religion, or would have been nice without it. And these certainly are different people who were not suffering witches to live or oppressing catholics over schismatic differences or whatnot - we know that those people were being driven to ovjectively evil behavior by religion - it’s their stated reason, and the stated reason that was accepted by the people who supported them.
Now, does the fact that religion has inspired some evil acts prove on its own that its overarching influence in total has been negative? Not really - it’s difficult to find a complete list of the influences of religion, much less to find a way to weigh them in some kind of an objective manner. (It does get easier if you declare certain atrocities as being so bad that nothing could balance them, though). Either way, though, to try to argue that, say, the inquisition would have been worse if not for the curbing influence of Christianity is just an asinine position.
So that there is no scriptural basis for those actions is irrelevant? We can still lay at Jesus’s door the actions of people who claim to be doing something for him regardless of whether or not it contradicts his teachings?
So say I started killing people in the name of Satyagraha we could then blame Gandhi?
There is no such thing as ‘absent religion’ that’s a logical fallacy. Absent Christianity and Islam there would have been a different war on different fault lines.
Right of course, we don’t know either. Commenting in either direction is giving credit to a counter-factual that you simply made up. In otherwords people are judging the merits of a religion based on their own cognitive dissonance. The facts are essentially irrelevant to the case, they simply don’t matter, we’re busy passing judgment on all of history here, and there are just too many to keep track of so lets skip that part and just make shit up that piss all over the other guy while aggrandizing what I believe in!
If I ever decide to become a mass murderer, I am totally blaming Gandhi.
The Inquisition is generally an overblown buzzword used by people who for the most part are totally ignorant of its meaning and the historical context in which it occurred. I’m not even going so far as the Inquisition here, what about every time some guy wanted to murder his neighbor and his priest talked him out of it? What about the people who wanted to stick up a liquor store and didn’t because they didn’t want to disappoint Jesus? I don’t really care whether you like Christianity or not. I would just like to see some intellectual honesty where you take the good with the bad rather than trying to hijack every thread possible with specious cherry-picked anecdotes to justify a two-minute hate of Christianity.
So you are saying that every single person killed in the name of God by a tyrant would have been killed anyway? This is typical; a complete denial of the possibility that someone might kill someone else for religion, and no other reason. The reality is that there are any number of people that a religiously motivated tyrant will kill that a religiously indifferent one would not have, simply because the indifferent one won’t have a motivation. Or are you going to claim that the indifferent tyrant will find himself magically compelled to kill people he cares nothing about?
I don’t know; some would, some wouldn’t. But they’d have one less reason to kill people. And they’d be lacking on of the better excuses for doing so. And, they’d generally find it harder to get people to go along with the killing.
Ah, yes, the “Christianity can’t possibly motivate anyone to do anything bad!” excuse. It’s amazing how completely without influence religion is portrayed as being as soon as it’s accused of causing problems.
As for your “kind, empathetic people”, Christianity nearly guarantees that they will cause little but harm. It teaches that it’s the soul and afterlife that matters, so those “kind, empathetic people” won’t hesitate to spread misery and death in the name of kindness and empathy.
Ah; support for terrorism and a baseless accusation of racism.
Not a chance. He had a worldview that promoted slaughter and tyranny, and goals that could only be achieved by those things. A few platitudes don’t make up for that.
But it doesnt; his teachings demand and excuse war and tyranny.
Nonsense. Not all religion is identical; replace those two with other religions and there’s no reason to assume the same behavior. And “absent religion” is hardly a logical fallacy.
The fact of the matter is Der Trihs you haven’t studied the subject you spend the most time criticizing. So your opinion is worthless as it’s founded in ignorance.
You hate Jesus completely and totally irrational.
You have nothing of value to add to any discussion of religion because you don’t have the first clue about what religion is, what it does, or the nature and history of Christianity.
Knocking down your straw men is pointless. I’m waiting for Begbert2 to respond so I can discuss this with an adult.
mswas, I was responding to your suggestion that we entertain the theory that the atrocities committed by christains for christians while wearing christain hats and waving christain banners and announcing that these atrocities they’re doing are being done for Christ - the suggestion that we entertain the theory that perhaps their actions would have been worse absent the influnce of Christ. I mean, say what?
As I said in another thread around here, Christ probably had no clue what actions would be done in his name, but that doesn’t change the fact that he provided both inspiration and the justification for various atrocious acts. The fact that most of the people doing atrocities in his name were being, shall we say, rather selective about which bits of his message to act on is pretty much irrelevent to this fact - he’s still the banner under which people gathered to do their business. So while it seems counterintuitive to blame Christ the man for your actions, he did indeed contribute to the result.
It’s kind of like how alfred Nobel felt bad about releasing dynamite into the world - It was never his intent to cause such damage, but he recognized his hand in it nonetheless.
We both know I meant “absent Christianity and Islam” - don’t bother nitpicking just because you have nothing else to do.
And I reject the assertion that absent Christianity and Islam all atrocities would have happened anyway - that’s nonsense. (Would you consider it fair if I dismissed all good effects of religion the same way?) I think that I’ll stick with what I said: Something would probably have happened, and it wouldn’t have been nice, but it wouldn’t have been the same, and to whatever degree the conflict was justified and sold based on the religious angle, that degree of it would have been removed, or replaces with some other less-effective jusitification. (If other justifications were equally or more effective, they would have been used instead.)
Dude. You were answering the specific cases where we do know that “religion” was a tool for evil by speculating that it might have actually been a tool for, uh, ‘evil but not as bad as it hypotheticlaly might have been except we can’t imagine how or why’. I was pointing out that yeah, there probably have been cases where religion tempered people’s behavior, but not the ones that you were responding to. The inquisition wasn’t an example of religion making people nicer. It simply wasn’t.
Personally, I think it’s obvious that religion has had good effects as well; large numbers of people have been guilted into helping the poor to degrees that a mere social club couldn’t have managed, for example. So don’t look to me when you want to find cognitive dissonances. (I do find it quite dubious that the good en total outweighs the bad, though - I kinda weight murder pretty high.)
And if you did, and people gave you more slack as result, then he will have helped your evil cause. Though not as much as if you were actually doing it because of something he said - then it is directly his fault, to the degree that he inspired you to murder more than you would have without his influence.
The Inquisition gets picked on because it’s a pretty clear example of something really, really atrocius and senseless that really just wouldn’t have been anything like it was without religion. Maybe I’m missing some historical context here, but I just seriously doubt it would have happened at all without the religious motivation and justification.
As for the other anecdotes, what are you looking for? When somebody tosses out the inquisition, the point is one or both of: 1) yes, religion has motivated and justified atrocities, despite some people desperately denying that fact, and 2) when it does so, it will often do one hell of a job of it, resulting in massive movements of oppression and destruction. And yeah, it’s spiffy and all that the priest talked down that dude, but that’s being weighed against the inquisition. Great cheeze in the morning, that’s not an equivalence!
Yes, religion does some good here and there, but even if it’s widespreader than I think it is, it’s more of a ‘death of a thousand cuts’ type of effect, than the ‘sledgehammer of doom’ type of stuff we find here and there when religion really gets its evil game on. And, there is also a ‘death of a thousand cuts’-type negative effect of Christianity/Islam too - I’d bet for every person that is talked out of murdering somebody by a priest, there’s another three guys who are talked into murdering somebody by an Imam. For all the happiness and peace that are spread, there’s also isolationism and distrust and bigotry spread as well. Good and bad effects abound.
Now, I readily concede that it can be quite difficult to sum up these billions of different effects in an objective manner, especially since various people will disagree about wether various effects are good or bad (like whether protecting a child from exposure to the evil temptations of the world (like evolution!) is a good thing). But it’s not hard to notice that religion has instigated and/or been used to sell various large atrocities at various points in history, with relatively few obvious massive spectacular anti-atrocities to balance them. (Large ressurections of the dead, maybe? 
) To point this out isn’t intellectual dishonesty. Whether failing to concede that fact is intellectual dishonesty…well, as noted, it’s very difficult to get an objective measure in this manner. How many donations to the poor and needy does it take to balance out one case of torturing somebody to death?
The attacks on Jesus are pretty laughable. I’m sure he’s appalled at all that’s been done in “God’s name”.
If you want to cut the pandemic of misguided “Christianity” short, go for the Church itself, killing off one of the leaders such as Pope Urban II. The real question is which atrocity most facilitated the spread of demoralized Church corruption. I still point to the Crusades as the major turning point. Christianity was not much more than a plague at that point, an aberration of Jesus’ original messages, reshaped in favor of power and dominance, which has never been stopped to this day.