Unfair criticism of the Christian religion...

adjensen wrote:

"Your belief is apparently that if a Christian commits a crime, it's because they're a Christian, but if a Hindu, Buddhist or Atheist does, it has nothing to do with their faith? Sensible approach to bolster your bigotry, not real defensible in a debate, though."

People from all over the planet commit 'secular crimes' independent of cultural background. But abramic religions have commited crimes based on or 'justified' by their religion to such an extent, that it can be compared to war-situation casualities.

When the roman church and the protestant finally had exterminated all 'heretics' and other resisters to christianity, considerable parts of Europe were practically waste of people.

How many died in South America under the regime of the roman orders is uncertain, but it must have been millions. And in North America the puritans considered it OK to kill native americans, because they had 'no souls'.

I know, that adjensen isn't supporting religious violence as an individual, so as I've said before: How much responsibility does a passive consenting of a violent ideology imply?

The violence isn't only from a distant time. It's not many years ago the inter-christian, very violent, irish conflict ended.

Violence is always lurking in big parts of christian ideology, and many christians respond to this.



[edit on 31-8-2010 by bogomil]

Originally posted by bogomil
Violence is always lurking in big parts of christian ideology, and many christians respond to this.

Here's your basic problem. Violence is NEVER lurking in big parts of Christian ideology. It is inherently NOT a part of Christ's teachings. Violence may lurk in the improper application of Christian ideology, but, as it is counter to Christ's teachings, it is contrary to true Christian faith.

Puritans killed the Native Americans? Did they have no reason for doing so? Were they doing it for sport? Conquistadors killed millions in South America? (Well, most deaths were unintentional, due to disease, but we'll let that slide.) Did they also have no reason for doing so?

I've told you both this before -- divorce the motivation from the motivator. Both the English and the Spanish (and the French and the Russians, and pretty much everyone else) wanted something that the indigenous people here were in the way of. Land. Resources. Gold. Whatever.

If they were able to kill the Indians because they "had no souls", do you honestly believe that in the absence of religion, they'd have let the Indians be and given up on their plans for conquest?

People will do whatever they want, and justify it by whatever means they want. Barring religion, they'd cite race, or national pride, or solar radiation fluctuations. Because they'll still want to do what they want to do, regardless of how you limit their justifications.

The number of people killed "in the name of God", and only for that reason, is a lot smaller than you would like us to believe, and the number killed on the orders of Christ is zero. Get that. Zero.

You know, your comment about South America reminded me of something that you may find salient. Back at university, I took a class in Historical Geography, and I remember the professor telling us about an odd geographical anomaly in the Americas. Aside from the United States, Canada, and some of the islands in the Caribbean, the rest of it is uniformly Catholic.

It's Catholic, one surmises, because of the Spanish. Columbus, after all, was Spanish and Spain conquered the place, made everyone Catholic and there you go. Areas which are not Catholic were obviously settled by others (such as the English and French in the US and Canada.)

However, Columbus was not Spanish. He was, in fact, Portuguese, and was working for Spain (the whole "Isabella selling her jewels to pay for his trip") because he couldn't get funded at home. Why? Because they were convinced that he was nuts.

Not nuts in the whole "the world is flat" sense, only rubes really believed that. No, no one figured that he could get to the East Indies be sailing west because they all knew that the planet was too big. We had reasonably accurate measurements of the globe since Eratosthenes in 250BC, and they showed that there was no chance you were going to be able to sail across that distance.

However, Columbus took an alternative measurement, Ptolemy's, fudged on that one a little bit, and sold Isabella on the idea. Ironically, if we wouldn't have been in the way, he'd most assuredly have done what everyone else said he would -- have died of thirst, starvation or mutiny on the way.

But, as we all know, he did not, found a new world, and before too long, it was clear that this was NOT India, and there was some stuff here worth going after. Rather than fight it out amongst themselves, the two major powers of the day, Spain and Portugal, both solid Catholic countries, agreed to let the Pope sort it out, which he did by drawing a line out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Everything west of this line, Spain can have, everything east, that's for Portugal. The intent was to give the Americas to Spain, Africa and Asia to Portugal (from an exploration standpoint -- the Pope wasn't really "giving" them the land.) This was codified in the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494.

Well, not too long after that, two things were evident. There was a crapload of stuff in this hemisphere, and not only couldn't the Portuguese sail this way efficiently to get to the East Indies, they were also missing out on some prime real estate.

However, in 1500, a Portuguese fellow by the name of Pedro Álvares Cabral "accidentally" ran into a chunk of land that fell on the east side of the Pope's line. Turns out that Brazil went quite a bit further east than anyone thought, and the Pope's "middle of the ocean" line wasn't even close to being the middle of the ocean.

Now, you guys who think that Christians only do things in the name of Christianity can probably figure the rest out. The Portuguese obviously said "hey, the Pope made a mistake, no problem Spain, that's your land."

Except, of course, that's not what happened -- the geographical anomaly that my professor spoke of is the fact that, south of the Rio Grande River, although it's almost uniformly Catholic, Central and South America is not uniformly Spanish speaking. To this day, the official language of Brazil is Portuguese.