Putin defends Christianity

It's been interesting reading the responses in this thread. Pretty much an even split for and against.

I'll clarify what I am saying in non religious terms:

We have a problem in the west; pluralism. Pluralism in itself is a good and necessary thing, because we're not all the same.

But

We've become so pluralistic that there is no dominant guiding voice when it comes to morality and the way our society should be and look like any more. That voice used to be Christianity.

As a result a very pushy group call Wahhabi Islam is trying to take advantage of the fact we have no clear leading voice any more.

I'm not advocating a purist Christian state here, because that would be as bad as an Islamic one.

a reply to: TheCretinHop

The founding fathers were not trying to escape "religion." They were trying to escape the terror and claw of a tyrannical King. These man were all in fact spiritual and very religious. When the puritans first came to America, it was to escape the religious oppression within their own countries; in order to have their own 'religious' freedom. Don't act like people who established America were anything like the nihilistic free-loving atheistic emo kids that exist today.

You are oversimplifying a complex issue to the point where your explanation makes no sense.

Who were the people who established America? Which America do you mean? Spaniards, French and British all held portions of what is now the territory of the USA, and members of all three nationalities, as well as others, settled there. They weren’t all political refugees. Some were conquistadors, some were missionaries, some were on a mission to get rich. The Spaniards, as everybody knows, arrived first.

Even if you restrict yourself to the British settlement on the eastern seaboard that ultimately became the United States, which was settled mostly by the English — which king, pray tell us, were they fleeing? Settlement began in the seventeenth century, at a time when King James I was on the throne. The settlers weren’t refugees but pioneers. Then 50,000 convicts were transported to Virginia. They weren’t political refugees either, but, for the most part, common criminals. Meanwhile, the poor and the opportunistic were also coming over in droves.

The Puritans who began settling New England in 1620 were not refugees, but sought to establish communities along Dissenting religious lines, which was difficult for them at home in England. The earliest ones (the Mayflower arrivals) were being harassed at home by Archbishop Laud and the established Church (which was part of government), but this ‘persecution’ was relatively mild and short-lived. The Puritans’ quarrel was not specifically with the King but with the Church of England whose nominal head he was.

The ‘persecution’ of Dissenting minorities in England that prompted their flight to America is in large measure a myth made up by their American descendants. It is true that Protestant Dissenters did suffer certain civil liabilities in England (they couldn’t enlist in the army, for example), but there was nothing that might seriously be called tyranny or oppression. What in fact happened is that the Puritans failed to carry the body of English public opinion, failed in their attempts to ‘reform’ the Church, and so went off to America to play ball according to their own rules.

And remember, all this was in the Jacobean period, that is, during the seventeenth century. The USA was not founded until a century later.

Your Founding Fathers were not ‘trying to escape the terror and claw of a tyrannical King’. George III was no tyrant, and his governments were characterised more by division and muddle than by an efficient apparatus of terror. There was no British reign of terror in America, except in the fevered imaginations of excitable American ‘patriots’; there was a quarrel over taxation — stamp duties, in fact — which led to a few confrontations, some shootings, and the rest is history.

The story of those who migrated to America from other European countries may be different, but their part in the establishment of the United States of America is marginal. The USA is a British plantation, and the subjects of the British Crown who planted it suffered no great religious nor political oppression; they just wanted their own sandbox to play in.

a reply to: markosity1973

We've become so pluralistic that there is no dominant guiding voice when it comes to morality and the way our society should be and look like any more. That voice used to be Christianity.

This is a myth.

America was pluralistic from its very beginnings.

The colonies were characterized by religious diversity, with many Congregationalists in New England, German and Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, Catholics in Maryland, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the frontier. Sephardic Jews were among early settlers in cities of New England and the South. Many immigrants arrived as religious refugees: French Huguenots settled in New York, Virginia and the Carolinas. Many royal officials and merchants were Anglicans. Source

The government and administration of the United States have always been secular and pluralistic. So are its formal culture and intellectual life. In its ethical as well as its political philosophy the US is a product of the European Enlightenment. It has no religious basis whatsoever; on the contrary, it consciously eschews such a foundation. And it has managed very well indeed without one.

However, the majority of Americans are Christians of one sort or another, and this has determined the evolution of American folk culture, popular morality, politics and so on. Because America is (i) a free country and (ii) a huge country in which communities are often separated by vast physical and cultural distances, members of many of these numerous and scattered Christian communities have come to believe that their local folk culture, their small-town morality, their local way of doing things, is the sovereign American way.

It is not. America is not a Christian country and it never was. It is merely a country with a lot of Christians in it.

a reply to: Astyanax

Americans..... Always trying to make everything exclusively about them

Reread my OP . I talk of ALL of western society.

I never said we weren't pluralistic, I said we have become overly so and lost our dominant (Christian) voice. And as a result Wahhabi Islam is seizing on this and trying to take over.

originally posted by: tsurfer2000h
a reply to: Konduit

The US hasn't invaded a country on their borders either so what is your point?

Despite the fact that geographically Iraq and Afghanistan are just a stones throw from Russian borders, did you completely forget about the situation in Ukraine? NATO backed rebels OVERTHROW the legitimate government, lead by a coalition of groups with notoriously anti-russian and anti-slav backgrounds with Hillary Clinton publicly cheering them on. If a situation like this took place in Mexico with Russia supporting the opposition it would be a new cold war.

originally posted by: tsurfer2000h
a reply to: Konduit

And that region has been destabilized longer than the US has been a country, but hey let's just blame the US for something that's been happening for over hundreds of years.

You never heard a peep out of the ME until the US got involved with the Iranian civil war to install the Ayatollah, the CONTRA scandal and started arming the Mujahdeen in the 1980's. But despite that history lesson, the region has never been more radical and anti-west then since the Iraq War in 2003. Everything you are seeing now with ISIS and civil wars all over the ME is a direct result of the US taking out one of the major powers in the region and leaving it to the dogs.

originally posted by: tsurfer2000h
a reply to: Konduit

SO if you mean bombing of civilians while not bombing ISIS then your right, but what do civilian lives matter as long as you kill a few bad guys...right?

This seems like a pretty blanket statement, considering it's on record that NATO has bombed Syrian Army positions in civilian areas and even the MSM is reporting how Russia has been severely damaging ISIS oil assets and supply lines going in and out of Turkey, which is why Erdogan is sh*tting his pants right now, instead of dropping weapons and supplies to the radicals like NATO countries have which is now also on record.

originally posted by: tsurfer2000h
a reply to: Konduit

Except the US didn't create ISIS, but that fact doesn't matter as long as you defend Russia while they are killing innocent civilians that aren't even near any ISIS fighters...but as long as they say there were fighters near it is okay...right, because that is what they are doing.

Are you serious? Unless you you've had your head buried in the sand for the last 10+ years it's obvious that everything that is going on in the ME is a direct result of what the US has done since invading Iraq in 2003.

ISIS wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for US intervention, and the fact that the US has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to stop this hate group from expanding it's reach is completely mind boggling, even a tool like Donald Trump has figured this out.

But it all comes into perspective when you read about how 900,000+ weapons the US supplied to the Iraqi Army are missing and most of the equipment this group is using has NATO stamps all over it. Western government's ALLOWED this group to exist in an effort to overthrow Assad in Syria and now it has gotten completely out of control.

a reply to: markosity1973

Americans..... Always trying to make everything exclusively about them

My apologies. I am not American. I thought you were.

Reread my OP . I talk of ALL of western society.

Well, in that case, you are very wrong, because ‘Western society’ is even more heterogenous than America ever was.

Have you forgotten the French Revolution, which tried to abolish Christianity?

The Soviet Empire, which almost succeeded?

The massive cultural differences between Protestant Northern Europe and the Catholic south, which Max Weber made the foundation of his famous sociological treatise The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism?

The Ottoman Empire, the so-called Sick Man of Europe as it was once known?

Wahhabi Islam is seizing on this and trying to take over.

That sounds like a seriously paranoid reading of world events.

From my (South Asian) perspective, Islam is a Western faith, not an Eastern one.

a reply to: Astyanax

Ahh, south Asia.

Well wherever you are from, it's quite different than you might think in an actual western nation like mine.

We have undergone a reformation between church and state. However, many of the good guiding principles and morals of Christian theology remain strong tenets of our society to this day.

Yes, Wahhabi Islam is trying to take over. In western Europe they openly say that it is their goal to islamify them. Same thing has been said where I live.

They want Sharia law for starters, which they believe should be carried out within their community with no regard to our existing civil law.

This is not paranoia, it's fact.

Our over pluralism has allowed this to happen. Anti discrimination laws that were meant to protect the weak and downtrodden has been perverted and taken advantage of to push a faith and ideology onto us that is alien and incompatible with our current values.

a reply to: markosity1973

Ahh, south Asia.

Well wherever you are from, it's quite different than you might think in an actual western nation like mine.

So I have noticed on my sojourns abroad (including the years I spent as a schoolboy and, later, a university student in the UK). But I have found, on the whole, that the difference is not quite so great as the untravelled and untutored think it is.

The opinions expressed in your post are arrant nonsense, I’m afraid. However, there is no need to repeat what I have already posted. Clearly any attempt to dissuade you from your fairytale version of history and current affairs would be fruitless.

So I will merely ask why, if Christianity is so great, was Russia under the Tsars such a Hell on Earth?

a reply to: Astyanax

No, no no.

You can believe what you want, but it is not errant nonsense.


The tsars were not good rulers. That had nothing to with Christianity or the values I speak of

I wouldn’t have much fear of Wahhabi Islam taking over in the West


The chances of that are nil in the extreme


Sure some religious lunatics may think that they can do that but it aint happening.


Of course we should be vigilant to stop this poisonous sect, imo.


I knew Wahhabi Islam when it was just preaching, it made only headway where there’s ignorance of it and the Saudis could bribe people

Now that people know what this ugly sect is all about it won’t get far


BTW

Most religions, save those that have gone too sectarian, such as Wahhabism and forms of evangelical Xianity, have great moral teachings, its always men who distort the moral teachings of the faiths

a reply to: Willtell

If they hav nil chance it's because people are waking up at long last.

Islam itself is not a problem. It's the extremists.

Question for you: Other than the Vatican, can you name any purist Christian States?

I can name several pure Islamic states, starting with Saudi Arabia. And none of them offer much in the way of freedom or human rights.

a reply to: Konduit

NATO backed rebels OVERTHROW the legitimate government, lead by a coalition of groups with notoriously anti-russian and anti-slav backgrounds with Hillary Clinton publicly cheering them on.

You do know that his own party voted to have him removed from power?

You do know he stole from the people of Ukraine to fund his lifestyle...



This might interest you too...

yanukovychleaks.org...

As far as anti Russian and anti Slav groups would you be able to name those groups and provide proof they are what your saying they are?

You never heard a peep out of the ME until the US got involved with the Iranian civil war to install the Ayatollah, the CONTRA scandal and started arming the Mujahdeen in the 1980's.

That's right the ME was a fun loving peaceful area that all got along until the US showed up...just because we didn't hear about their problems, that doesn't mean they weren't peeping.

But despite that history lesson, the region has never been more radical and anti-west then since the Iraq War in 2003.

I bet they have, but you need to remember now it is easier to get your message out there with technology whereas before social media you didn't reach as many people that could be radicalized. The hate has always been there.

Everything you are seeing now with ISIS and civil wars all over the ME is a direct result of the US taking out one of the major powers in the region and leaving it to the dogs.

Yes everything is the US fault...having leaders that use weapons against their own people chemical, conventional, and non conventional have no bearing on the removal of that major power in the region?

We don't just leave them to the dogs...we train their military, give them money to rebuild infrastructures, give them the help to get them going and it usually comes back to bite us in the ass thanks to corrupted officials. At some point in time you have to take the training wheels off and allow a country to do the right thing...it's up to them as to whether they do the right thing or not.

This seems like a pretty blanket statement, considering it's on record that NATO has bombed Syrian Army positions in civilian areas and even the MSM is reporting how Russia has been severely damaging ISIS oil assets and supply lines going in and out of Turkey, which is why Erdogan is sh*tting his pants right now, instead of dropping weapons and supplies to the radicals like NATO countries have which is now also on record.

You do know that NATO is not involved in this fight, but some NATO countries are?

Just because a country is a NATO country...that country alone is not NATO and does not represent NATO as a whole.

And just because you have things smuggled over a countries border...that doesn't mean that country is involved in that smuggling. It only takes a few corrupt officials at a the bottom to get things across a border.

Are you serious? Unless you you've had your head buried in the sand for the last 10+ years it's obvious that everything that is going on in the ME is a direct result of what the US has done since invading Iraq in 2003.

No the ME had problems long before anything the US may have done there. In fact it's been destabalized since before the US was even a country.

ISIS wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for US intervention, and the fact that the US has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to stop this hate group from expanding it's reach is completely mind boggling, even a tool like Donald Trump has figured this out.

And you know that for sure?

What has any other country done to stop it?

Syria?

Iraq?

Russia?

It's easy to point fingers of blame, while trying to hide the inabilities of yourself.

But it all comes into perspective when you read about how 900,000+ weapons the US supplied to the Iraqi Army are missing and most of the equipment this group is using has NATO stamps all over it.

That is because when ISIS came calling the Iraqi military went running and left it behind, but of course that is the fault of every one else except the cowardly Iraqi military...right?

And remember ISIS is made up of former Iraqi military personnel so they know where they are able to get weapons without a resistance...which is why they have what they have.

Western government's ALLOWED this group to exist in an effort to overthrow Assad in Syria and now it has gotten completely out of control.

No they didn't, but Iraq and Syria both just sat back and watched the rise of ISIS happen without doing anything about it...why is that?

And Assad let Syria get out of control...not the West.

a reply to: tsurfer2000h

Yes your right, Ukraine was so much worse before NATO decided to back a rebel group to overthrow the government sparking a civil war and a stand off with Russia.

Iraq was much worse before the US got involved, destroyed the power structure and allowed the most radical hate group in modern history to flourish unchecked all over the region.

Libya was much worse before the west supported radical rebel groups who instituted Sharia Law, turning a country with freedom religion and the highest GDP and quality of living in Africa into a third world hard-line Islamic state.

Syria was much worse before the west supported the Free Syrian Army sparking yet another civil war in the ME causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to pour into Europe.

Please Hillary, continue to make things so much better for the people of the ME?

a reply to: Willtell

There is no such thing as Wahabi Islam.

originally posted by: markosity1973

We've become so pluralistic that there is no dominant guiding voice when it comes to morality and the way our society should be and look like any more. That voice used to be Christianity.

Welcome to Enlightened Personal Responsibility. It's a little late but you're finally up to speed.

I suppose if you're really not ready yet to figure out how to behave yourself and need someone to guide you on what is bad and good so you'll know when you've been naughty then you should go find someone who will take you by the hand a little longer and tell you how you should act in civil society.

a reply to: markosity1973

it is not errant nonsense.

Arrant, not errant. Merry Christmas.

a reply to: Konduit

Yes your right, Ukraine was so much worse before NATO decided to back a rebel group to overthrow the government sparking a civil war and a stand off with Russia.

So the citizens of Ukraine are now a rebel group?

In case you forgot Russia sent in military personnel into Ukraine...when did NATO?

Here you go a little insight from Russia months before the Maidan really kicked off...

Glazyev, speaking on the sidelines of the discussion, said the exact opposite was true: "Ukrainian authorities make a huge mistake if they think that the Russian reaction will become neutral in a few years from now. This will not happen."

Instead, he said, signing the agreement would make the default of Ukraine inevitable and Moscow would not offer any helping hand. "Russia is the main creditor of Ukraine. Only with customs union with Russia can Ukraine balance its trade," he said. Russia has already slapped import restrictions on certain Ukrainian products and Glazyev did not rule out further sanctions if the agreement was signed.

The Kremlin aide added that the political and social cost of EU integration could also be high, and allowed for the possibility of separatist movements springing up in the Russian-speaking east and south of Ukraine. He suggested that if Ukraine signed the agreement, Russia would consider the bilateral treaty that delineates the countries' borders to be void.

"We don't want to use any kind of blackmail. This is a question for the Ukrainian people," said Glazyev. "But legally, signing this agreement about association with EU, the Ukrainian government violates the treaty on strategic partnership and friendship with Russia." When this happened, he said, Russia could no longer guarantee Ukraine's status as a state and could possibly intervene if pro-Russian regions of the country appealed directly to Moscow.

"Signing this treaty will lead to political and social unrest," said the Kremlin aide. "The living standard will decline dramatically … there will be chaos."

www.theguardian.com...

That was from Sept. of 2013...seems Russia has fortune tellers in their government, or they planned this and the fact we saw exactly what they said shows it wasn't something that just happened.

And here is an interesting take on Russia's plans for Ukraine.

anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com...

Iraq was much worse before the US got involved, destroyed the power structure and allowed the most radical hate group in modern history to flourish unchecked all over the region.

And yet Iraq has nothing to do with Ukraine...amazing how people always want to make it as though they are.

Libya was much worse before the west supported radical rebel groups who instituted Sharia Law, turning a country with freedom religion and the highest GDP and quality of living in Africa into a third world hard-line Islamic state.

Another conflict that has nothing to do with Ukraine and the fact Russia caused this situation...amazing.

Or is this just your way of bashing the US for what Russia has done to Ukraine?

Syria was much worse before the west supported the Free Syrian Army sparking yet another civil war in the ME causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to pour into Europe.

Against a tyrant in Assad who killed his own people because he is afraid of losing power...but again not even related to the Ukrainian crisis that this discussion is about...guess you really have nothing but the usual Russia good...US bad.

And so you know there are two countries that allowed ISIS to flourish...just look at their base of operations, Syria and Iraq are too blame for allowing this to happen not just the US.

Please Hillary, continue to make things so much better for the people of the ME?

Pretty sure this discussion is about Ukraine and has no bearing on the ME...so why are you interjecting it into this conversation?

The mistake many make who admire Putin is that they focus on a few of his good characteristics, while, at the same time, overlook the fact that this fellow is an international gangster who gobbles up independent nations and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction and then sells them to Iran. Our president, due to his weakness and fear, and because he has so crippled our present military capabilities, simply cannot dare to stand up to Sir Vladimir. Frankly I doubt Obama would stand up to Putin under any circumstances! It's a sad state of affairs indeed.