Jordan 2, ISIS/L 1

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
161

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]SexMachine wrote:
It would behave in accord with its nature. The Catholic Church adopted the radical egalitarian agenda in the 60’s hence Vat II.[/quote]

The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.

The Catholic Church could no longer impose its will on others through political or military force, hence its adoption of the radical egalitarian agenda in the '60s, hence Vatican II.[/quote]

That doesn’t make any sense. It’s ludicrous to pretend the church has the same ideology and mindset it once had. An institution is the sum of its members. And its members are soft, liberal, 20/21st Century sheep. If they had power they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

162

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:
There are problems with idealism, caused by other people. They apply to any ideal. If you isolate someone and make them think about a perfect world, they will accept ideals like “do the right thing”, “respect all human life”, etc. It would even be easy to uphold ideals like this in a perfect world.

But in a perfect world, everone would uphold the same ideals with no dissent. The world already isn’t perfect and it never was. So in practice, the above ideals are more practically stated as “i’ll do the right thing if they do”, “i’ll respect human life if they do”. After repeated transgression, different groups of people begin to say “they don’t do the right thing to me so i won’t do the right thing to them.” I’m not defending anyone’s actions here I’m just saying this how humans behave compared to how they think.

You could stand back and watch two kids kick and scream and pull each others hair and say one of them should take the high road. And probably one of them should. But neither of them actually will [/quote]

The entire point of ideals is that they’re meant to give us a direction towards a world that is probably unfeasible, but IDEAL.[/quote]

But UNFEASIBLE…

All I’m saying is the middle has been in turmoil for decades. It has been an unceasing cycle of revenge. If you think the execution of 2 prisoners (already on death row) is a wildly inappropriate response to the execution of a journalist I would agree but I ask what do you expect? I’m just saying these things will continue to happen unless there is a deep idelogical shift. Otherwise there is no way one party will suddenly decide to take the high road when these incidents occur

163

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
The Declaration of Independence lists those as “unalienable rights”. When that was written, they still owned slaves, were slaughtering native Americans by the village (men, women and children) and had no problem what so ever about waging a bloody war with Britain for seven years after that. Methinks there’s just a TOUCH of hypocrisy in that idealism… [/quote]

Their hypocrisy (which many of them fully recognized and had no choice but to deal with given the South) is besides the point. You accused me of hippie crap and I told you that I get my ideals from the Declaration.

Edit-
To add a bit more to this-

You can never uphold an ideal perfectly, nor do people necessarily try very hard. But it is vitally important that the common people keep the ideal alive. That is what it means to keep government and people accountable for their actions.

to claim that X is a failure and a fraud because of occasional misjudgments is a bad argument for that reason.

The U.S. is founded on the principle that we are all free people and must have the freedom to seek our desires. Things take time, and as time passes we see this principle coming to fruition decade by decade. I personally believe that much of the turmoil today is a result of this fruition, and I am perfectly fine with that.
[/quote]Ideals are a dangerous thing. They give false hope to the realization of a standard that will never be achieved. They inspire people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. Ideals are the SAME tool that ISIS is using to motivate it’s followers to brutality - same concept, just a different set of words. I suppose the “romantically inclined” among us can use ideals for inspiration, but they ARE NOT reality. Not on planet Earth, anyway. This is a place of survival of the fittest, not some half baked IDEAL world of peace, love and equality. INEQUALITY is the basis of the friction that has driven human conflict since the time we picked up the first stone and threw it in anger.[quote]

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
A history lesson that has nothing to do with the situation at hand OR what I wrote. [/quote]

You wrote that the a-bomb ended the war. It was part of it, but not the only thing.
[/quote]It was a major factor against an enemy who had a conventional army. Different enemy, different circumstances, different strategic goals. I specifically wrote that IT TOOK THE WILL TO FIGHT RIGHT OUT OF THEM. Not that our war, wearied foreign policy at the time made all the right decisions in the aftermath of that.[quote]

Plus, the all important thing- The Japanese didn’t surrender unconditionally, and that was really the reason why they gave up. If we continued to demand unconditional surrender then in all likelihood they would have fought on, a-bomb and Russians in Manchuria be damned.

In any case, it was MEANT to be a history lesson.

[/quote]Well, you summed up that history lesson with, “you’re wrong, you’re speaking out of your ass”. Which I take exception to. I may very well be wrong - none of us has a crystal ball - but to use an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT set of circumstances to defeat part of an argument is logically unsound. There’s no parallel with the AFTERMATH of WWII to anything I wrote or suggested.[quote]

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

Who gives a fuck about the “moral high ground”? War is not won with “morality”, it is won by destroying your enemy to the point where he cannot attack you anymore. THAT’S IT. Morality has no place in war.[/quote]

You’re confusing war goals and base brutality. As I wrote, it is one thing to be fighting wars. It is another to match brutality with brutality.

For example, why bother keeping prisoner of wars? They waste your food and manpower. Just kill them, right?

[/quote]We keep prisoners to GET INFORMATION, silly! And to provide leverage, among a host of other STRATEGIC reasons - not because we care about their “basic human rights”. LOL C’mon, dude!!! WAKE UP TO REALITY![quote]

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I wasn’t alive during WWII, so I can’t really DO anything about that now, can I? Can YOU? Why are you so pissed about something that’s outside of your sphere of influence. It happened, it’s over, end of story - learn from it and move on. ISIS is HERE and NOW. They are a blight on our planet that needs to be wiped out. We have the power to do it, but not the will. Why aren’t you pissed off about THAT?[/quote]

You miss the point. The German and Japanese took part in arguably the worst war-crimes and atrocities in human history. [/quote]Gotta disagree there - I think the Catholic Church has that trophy on the top of THEIR mantle EDIT: I wrote this BEFORE I continued on reading anything in the thread.[quote] Are they NOT to be called sub-humans simply because it occurred 70 years ago? [/quote]The ones that DID it? OF COURSE we call them sub-human! Why aren’t they doing it anymore? Because we KILLED all of the Nazi’s! The population of Germany decreased by more than an INCH on average because we killed so many of them! And that’s what works. You have to understand: MOST PEOPLE, and I’m talking about 90% of the world population, ARE FUCKING STUPID SHEEP. They are cowards who will not take a stand against ANYTHING that’s “wrong” unless it INCREASES their chance for survival. They will let jack-booted soldiers haul their neighbors way with out so much as batting a fucking EYE, so long as those soldiers leave THEIR family alone… It’s the TEN PERCENT (yes, I just pulled that number out of my ass, with these crazy fucking muslims, the number very well may be higher) who CONTROL the 90% that need to be dealt with. And if some of 90% get killed or fucked up during that process, so be it. I should say that in EVERY oppressed culture, there is also a SMALL percentage who are not happy and are working actively for change. But in the case of muslim extremists, one is typically as fucked up as the other. Their primary points of contention are whether a woman’s clitoris should be cut of in infancy OR should it be cut off at puberty. Not joking. So FUCK THEM. As long as the majority of their population want’s sharia, then the majority of them can be bombed into oblivion. If we kill enough of the religious (or IDEALISTIC) ones, then the rest of them might get a little motivation in the form of self interest and finish the job.[quote]

You are dealing with classification here, and so time is not particularly relevant. It may be that the Germans and Japanese TODAY are not sub-humans because of the enlightening light of Western civilization, but they certainly seemed to be sub-human to me 70 years ago.
[/quote]Like I said before, we killed the sub-human ones (and quite a few of the sheep along with them) and now, THEY ARE NOT KILLING JEWS ANYMORE! Mission accomplished.[quote]

And why am I pissed off about things that occurred 70 years ago? Well gee… BECAUSE MY GRANDPARENTS AND UNCLES LIVED THROUGH IT AND THEY NEVER RECEIVED JUSTICE.[/quote]

LOLOLOLOLOL! “JUSTICE”

Seriously, you fucking literally made me spit out my coffee. THERE IS NO JUSTICE. Not on this world. If God came down and struck down all the bad guys, then I might actually believe in that fairy tale, BUT HE DOESN’T!!! Life isn’t fair, the only people that EVER EVER EVER receive “justice” are the ones that CAN ENFORCE AND TAKE REVENGE IN RESPONSE TO THEIR GRIEVANCES (real or imagined). THAT’S IT! Some people rely on the government to do that for us. Some people take that responsibility on themselves. But that fact that YOUR uncles and grand parents failed to secure themselves any “justice” (as imagined by you) is no one’s “fault” but THEIR OWN.

First of all, they allowed themselves to be victims in the first place. Second, after they (at least some of them) survived (as evidenced by you being alive) they failed to take the proper course of revenge. Israel has had a long standing operation of hunting down and killing Nazis that “got away with it”. Why didn’t YOUR relatives assist with that effort, or something similar against the Japanese? (assuming that’s what you are referring to). They must have felt that it wasn’t worth it. Or they were too afraid to. So why the fuck do YOU care?

Because it doesn’t meet your idealistic sense of “justice”? LMAO

Your people just failed to act and TAKE their “justice”. That’s it. You might not LIKE hearing that, but that’s the truth. And here you are crying about it on the internet…

164

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]Chushin wrote:
Um, and you are…what?[/quote]

As equally mistaken as Angry_chicken, and thus speaking out of my ass as well.[/quote]

Uhhh, I didn’t try to give a history lesson. I offered an opinion about a POSSIBLE course of action. SLIIIIIIIIIGHT difference there, buddy.

165

[quote]SexMachine wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Gkhan wrote:
Muslim thought regarding Christ was taken largely from the Gnostic texts since a lot of them did not believe Christ was a real being and he did not actually die on the cross (see the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter for example).

also see this: it explains Gnostic duality and also some of what you said Muslims believe above:

You might consider Gnostics Christians but they had a different cosmology and do not believe the same as Christians today.

For example, how many Christians today do you know who believe in Barbelo? How many even know who Barbelo is?

All I can say is Christianity went through a lot of changes in 700 years. Muslims have been fighting the same war for over 1300.[/quote]

Christianity went through a lot of changes due to the secularisation of society following the Enlightenment, which resulted in a diminishment of political power for the clergy.

One might congratulate an eighty-year-old rapist for not having raped a woman in the last three decades, but one should consider that one reason for this may just be that he’s been impotent for at least that long.

The odds against Islam ever undergoing a similar secularisation and Enlightenment are at least as slim as they were for Christianity in the 14th century, but if it ever happens, then I think that Islam will evolve into a faith very much like another Abrahamic religion that was birthed in blood and iron and conquest and intolerance and meticulous adherence to a multitude of what we might now consider barbaric, misogynistic and ridiculous laws, but is now all about peace and understanding and social justice.

[/quote]

I’m a little surprised that you would spin out the same narrative as Obama on this; namely, yes they’re bad but Christians were bad too, what the hey. I would expect something more sophisticated from a student of history. So firstly, why are Christians today sheep when once they were wolves? Of course, there are many reasons but there is a main reason: We were pacified by the state.

In Paleolithic times all men were warriors and hunters. The most effective killers had more wives and more children and their children inherited aggressiveness. As you probably know geneticists have identified a “warrior gene” associated with aggression, impulsiveness and higher levels of testosterone. The impulsive trait is suited to a nomadic hunting lifestyle where no planning ahead is required. Game was hunted and they would feast on the meat before it rotted and start all over again the next day.

With the rise of agriculture in the Indus Valley, Mesoptamia, Egypt and China men adapted to plan ahead for sowing, reaping; cooperation for farming; long term planning; knowledge of the seasons etc, storage of surplus grain and trade etc. Along with agriculture there was also livestock rearing. Livestock rearing does not require the same skills nor adaptive biological response. It is little different from the Paleolithic warrior / hunter gatherer lifestyle.

Peoples who have historically reared livestock have been the most warlike the world over. These two lifestyles(farmers and shepherds) are often categorised as “hill people” and “plains people” or “lowland people”. The hill tribes were largely nomadic animal rearers and the lowlands people farmers. The world over it can be seen that the most warlike people are hill tribes / animal rearers.

The next point to understand is the emergence of the state. The state crushes all violent opposition and those who are submissive to the state’s authority have more children. Those who aren’t are killed and have less or no children. However in places like the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan/Afghanistan, the tribal regions of the Arabian peninsular etc, they have never been subdued by the state. They formed their own tribal authority and customs and violently resisted any attempts to rule over them. Essentially, this is why the Islamists are the way they are. Or at least, it’s the most important reason.

In many of these tribal areas in the Muslim world violence is still the norm and the way men establish their authority and prestige. Indeed, the tribal chiefs are essentially the men who have killed the most number of people. They have more wives; more wealth; more power; more children. And over generations they have bred a population of psychopaths. And when I say psychopaths I mean quite literally. If you were to give a professional psychological assessment of these men they would be classed unequivocally as clinical psychopaths.

Of course this is all anathema to the leftist mindset: a population of biological psychopaths who can only be tamed by culling. Sounds awefully non-PC. So what is the answer? Really, the only solution is the process of pacification that Europeans went through over the last thousand odd years. And who is going to do that? Certainly not us. Certainly not their own governments who are afraid to touch them.

At the time of the crusades Western Europeans were savage barbarians, the Byzantines were highly cultured and the heirs to the Greco-Roman legacy and the Saracens were on their way to their own mini-renaissance. However, the warrior class of jihadists; the shock troops, were the same people who are causing all the trouble today. The Swat Valley for example, has been the birthplace of the most warlike people on earth since recorded history. Alexander fought them and described them as the toughest warriors he had ever encountered. This is what we are dealing with.

This is an essay entitled The Roman State and Genetic Pacification that describes the process in talking about in relation to Rome. It’s a good read.

http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP08376389.pdf

[/quote]

SO what I’m hearing here, is that you agree with me? Bomb those fuckers back to the Stone age?

(couldn’t resist)

166

It’s almost seems you guys are saying because the Pope doesn’t call for a new Crusade against the Iranians or the Saudis or the various Protestant groups today it’s because the Catholics have become pussified?

So, do you think the Catholic Church SHOULD be arming Christian terrorists and sending them out to kill unarmed infidels, or do you think the world is better off because they do not do this?

(I think the US should be arming Christian militias around the world who are currently under siege from radical Muslims, like in Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Nigeria, etc.)

167

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
Ideals are a dangerous thing. They give false hope to the realization of a standard that will never be achieved. They inspire people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.[/quote]

Such as inspire millions to rebel against the most powerful empire on the planet in what everyone thought would be pointless rebellion?

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
Ideals are the SAME tool that ISIS is using to motivate it’s followers to brutality - same concept, just a different set of words. I suppose the “romantically inclined” among us can use ideals for inspiration, but they ARE NOT reality. Not on planet Earth, anyway. This is a place of survival of the fittest, not some half baked IDEAL world of peace, love and equality. INEQUALITY is the basis of the friction that has driven human conflict since the time we picked up the first stone and threw it in anger.[/quote]

Look, I agree with you. Ideals are dangerous things. Look at what the British colonists did with it. Literally changed the history of the world in all perpetuity in a manner that virtually no one else could have; I’m sure Sexmachine would agree with me on this.

Ideals lead people to do things that seem utterly insane and outrageous. If you follow that ideal, then those people seem heroic. If you’re against them, then they seem like monsters. I’m sure the British the Boston Tea Party to be an utter outrage; something that only monsters can do. Conversely, the colonials considered it a rightful act against tyranny.

Or what about when the Bostonians rioted and destroyed the homes of a many people they considered pro-British? I’m sure the Bostonians thought they were fighting to protect their rights and values against a government that ignored them and held steadfastly British against their wishes.

It’s just that… the quote above is so incredibly bizarre when taken with quotes like
this-

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
Our President is a fucking LIAR and he is twisting the truth so that he can undermine American values.[/quote]

One moment you’re saying values are important, and the next you’re saying they’re not? What am I supposed to do with that, huh?

I mean, most people would agree that the war against the Islamists fundamentalists is essentially a conflict of ideals. Many of them hate our ideology, and so they kill us. Many of us hate their ideology, and so the liberals either try to change it through talking, while you talk about just killing them all until they change their ideology to something more acceptable.

One way or another, they’re fighting because they disagree with one another. Ideology is at the core of the fight.

And you’re saying that ideology doesn’t matter. Except you’re saying it does matter.

Make up your mind.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
Well, you summed up that history lesson with, “you’re wrong, you’re speaking out of your ass”. Which I take exception to. I may very well be wrong - none of us has a crystal ball - but to use an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT set of circumstances to defeat part of an argument is logically unsound. There’s no parallel with the AFTERMATH of WWII to anything I wrote or suggested.[/quote]

As I alluded to, I was dealing specifically with this claim-

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
IT WORKED! Took the will to fight right out of those imperialist bastards to the point where they GAVE UP THEIR ARMY.[/quote]

and this-

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
Japanese DIDN’T completely and utterly STOP all aggressive activities when we wiped out two of their cities.[/quote]

They DIDN’T stop merely because of the a-bomb. They DIDN’T stop because we destroyed two of their cities. They stopped because we allowed them to keep their Emperor. We didn’t follow through on the unconditional victory demand.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

We keep prisoners to GET INFORMATION, silly! And to provide leverage, among a host of other STRATEGIC reasons - not because we care about their “basic human rights”. LOL C’mon, dude!!! WAKE UP TO REALITY![/quote]

Why don’t we kill them after we pump them for information and decided they have nothing much else to give?

What leverage? Prisoner exchanges? What other strategic reasons?

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

Gotta disagree there - I think the Catholic Church has that trophy on the top of THEIR mantle EDIT: I wrote this BEFORE I continued on reading anything in the thread.[/quote]

Why?

In any case, fair enough. It may be unfair to claim they committed the worst war-crimes, even though I don’t think anyone else have ever killed more than them except Stalin and Mao Zedong.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

If we kill enough of the religious (or IDEALISTIC) ones, then the rest of them might get a little motivation in the form of self interest and finish the job.[/quote]

As long as you’re willing to let others apply the same concept to the U.S., I guess I can’t say much more on this.

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
But that fact that YOUR uncles and grand parents failed to secure themselves any “justice” (as imagined by you) is no one’s “fault” but THEIR OWN.
[/quote]

Well, it turns out that I was wrong. The Americans did secure some justice for the grieved, so hurray!

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
First of all, they allowed themselves to be victims in the first place.[/quote]

So if I hunt you down and murder your family, you allowed your family allowed themselves to be victims? The fact that I’m utterly insane and committed a horrible act is irrelevant?

Just trying to figure this line of thought out. Is both your family and I/solely your family/solely me to blame if I did commit that action?

In all seriousness, I agree with your beliefs concerning ideals and the broader concept of power and its influences. The powerless cannot realistically demand anything because they lack the power to enforce it on their own. I’m probably the first person on any other site to state that might makes right, and all the ideals in the world doesn’t change this.

Where you and I apparently differ on the matter is that you apparently think we shouldn’t have ideals because ideals are dangerous (though even then your support of “American” values seem to contradict this). I think we should have ideals precisely because they are dangerous; as I hinted towards at the start of the post. My definition of freedom is the ability to attempt to achieve whatever we want to achieve. Idealism is a the core of this definition.

I believe that we become nothing but animals if we lack an ideal that drives us forward.

172


“Not in public, you fool! You’ll blow my cover!”

[quote]Gkhan wrote:
It’s almost seems you guys are saying because the Pope doesn’t call for a new Crusade against the Iranians or the Saudis or the various Protestant groups today it’s because the Catholics have become pussified?

So, do you think the Catholic Church SHOULD be arming Christian terrorists and sending them out to kill unarmed infidels, or do you think the world is better off because they do not do this?

(I think the US should be arming Christian militias around the world who are currently under siege from radical Muslims, like in Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Nigeria, etc.)[/quote]

I think you are misreading my exchange with SexMachine. So far we only discussed what the Church COULD or WOULD do. The question of SHOULD is another matter.

My view is that the Church CAN’T, which is a bit different from WON’T. I think SexMachine agrees with me, but as his reasons for agreeing with me are different, he perceives his position as disagreeing with mine.

Anyway, my position is that whereas the Pope used to wield real geopolitical power, with his pronouncements carrying the weight of international law, moving armies across continents, today he couldn’t even get abortion banned in Italy (the most Catholic country in Europe by population) if he tried.

This erosion of pontifical power has nothing to do with Christians becoming “pussies”, as you put it, or even, as SexMachine implies, because they have been browbeaten into submission by the state. No, I think it has everything to do with the fragmentation of Christianity, beginning with the Great Schism up through the Reformation, and continuing today (how many sects of Christianity are there right now, this minute? A thousand? Two thousand? Does anyone know?), as well as secularisation of Western civilisation, most exemplified by the Enlightenment and leading up to Vatican II, which demonstrated that the Church was ready to play by the world’s rules, rather than demanding that the world played by its.

The last papal bull calling for a Crusade was in 1456, against the Turks. By this time Constantinople had already fallen, so it was a case of rallying the troops to close the barn door after the cow had escaped. But the question still stands. Never mind whether or not the pope SHOULD authorise another Crusade, the question is first WOULD he, and COULD he?

Well, there is nothing to prevent Pope Francis setting pen to paper and affixing his seal to it. Would he? All signs seem to indicate that he is a kinder, gentler pope than some of his predecessors, more Kumbaya than Neca Eos Omnes. That said, let us imagine an ISIS attack on St. Peter’s Basilica. I do not imagine even mild-mannered Papa Francisco taking this insult lying down. So out comes the parchment and the bullo, and the Holy Crusade against the Infidel is declared. Then what?

Well, does the bull carry the force of law? Or more to the point, does it supersede national or international law? Would the United Nations pass a resolution declaring the Vatican to be a “rogue state”? Would the United States support such a resolution? On a more practical note, how many Catholics would answer the call? The Vatican likes to boast of a one-billion member congregation, but they are basing this number on baptismal records: if you were baptised as an infant, you are Catholic. But really now, how many of that number are actual practising, believing Catholics? Half, maybe? And how many of that number are even capable of bearing arms? Maybe half again? And of that number, how many have the financial wherewithal to get even fifty miles from the squalid villages in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America where most of them live, let alone halfway across the world?

No, if it is to be a showdown between Christendom and Islam, as many believe it will be, I do not envision Papa Francisco raising the banner. My money is on the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. No, not Kirill. I’m talking about the REAL head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Who is the real head of the Russian Orthodox Church, you ask? Good question, because there hasn’t really been one since the last one was assassinated in 1918. That’s right, Tsar Nicholas.

So I think you can guess who my candidate for Great Crusader of Christendom might be. Yes, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, de facto Tsar of Russia, ruler of the largest Christian nation on earth in terms of land mass–the only Christian nation on earth that not only HAS a nuclear arsenal, but would actually use it.

Although if it came to that, I hope that in a Crusade, Putin would have the slain bodies of ISIS combatants put up on pikes to rot on the battlefield, so that we could refer to him as “Vlad the Impaler”.

Because that would just be badass.

173

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

…The odds against Islam ever undergoing a similar secularisation and Enlightenment are at least as slim as they were for Christianity in the 14th century, but if it ever happens, then I think that Islam will evolve into a faith very much like another Abrahamic religion that was birthed in blood and iron and conquest and intolerance and meticulous adherence to a multitude of what we might now consider barbaric, misogynistic and ridiculous laws, but is now all about peace and understanding and social justice.

[/quote]

This is a load of crap primarily because Islam was bred, birthed and raised in violence. It teaches violence. It has virtually never known a lack of it in its entire history. To be a good Muslim is to accept this and even practice it.

Christianity wasn’t and isn’t that way. It teaches peace. Always has. It has been waylaid at times over the centuries by evil men doing violence in its name but those men do those things in violation, not with support, of its scripture. To be a good Christian is to accept this and even practice it.

There is a difference. Those who can’t recognize this don’t understand Christianity despite their claims to the contrary.[/quote]

I think Varq missed this one…

;-)[/quote]

I don’t swing at wild pitches.

And anyway, I believe Push misunderstood which religion I was comparing Islam to, birthed in violence and intolerance but now all about peace and understanding. It wasn’t Christianity.

174

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

SO what I’m hearing here, is that you agree with me? Bomb those fuckers back to the Stone age?
[/quote]

Or at least the Bronze Age.

Wouldn’t take much. Most of them are there already.

176

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

…The odds against Islam ever undergoing a similar secularisation and Enlightenment are at least as slim as they were for Christianity in the 14th century, but if it ever happens, then I think that Islam will evolve into a faith very much like another Abrahamic religion that was birthed in blood and iron and conquest and intolerance and meticulous adherence to a multitude of what we might now consider barbaric, misogynistic and ridiculous laws, but is now all about peace and understanding and social justice.

[/quote]

This is a load of crap primarily because Islam was bred, birthed and raised in violence. It teaches violence. It has virtually never known a lack of it in its entire history. To be a good Muslim is to accept this and even practice it.

Christianity wasn’t and isn’t that way. It teaches peace. Always has. It has been waylaid at times over the centuries by evil men doing violence in its name but those men do those things in violation, not with support, of its scripture. To be a good Christian is to accept this and even practice it.

There is a difference. Those who can’t recognize this don’t understand Christianity despite their claims to the contrary.[/quote]

I think Varq missed this one…

;-)[/quote]

I don’t swing at wild pitches.
[/quote]

Shit, I’ve seen you swing at pitches thrown toward third base.[/quote]

You would know, having thrown most of those yourself.

180

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Chushin wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

…The odds against Islam ever undergoing a similar secularisation and Enlightenment are at least as slim as they were for Christianity in the 14th century, but if it ever happens, then I think that Islam will evolve into a faith very much like another Abrahamic religion that was birthed in blood and iron and conquest and intolerance and meticulous adherence to a multitude of what we might now consider barbaric, misogynistic and ridiculous laws, but is now all about peace and understanding and social justice.

[/quote]

This is a load of crap primarily because Islam was bred, birthed and raised in violence. It teaches violence. It has virtually never known a lack of it in its entire history. To be a good Muslim is to accept this and even practice it.

Christianity wasn’t and isn’t that way. It teaches peace. Always has. It has been waylaid at times over the centuries by evil men doing violence in its name but those men do those things in violation, not with support, of its scripture. To be a good Christian is to accept this and even practice it.

There is a difference. Those who can’t recognize this don’t understand Christianity despite their claims to the contrary.[/quote]

I think Varq missed this one…

;-)[/quote]

I don’t swing at wild pitches.

And anyway, I believe Push misunderstood which religion I was comparing Islam to, birthed in violence and intolerance but now all about peace and understanding. It wasn’t Christianity.[/quote]

Ok, then let me just ask:

Is it your view that Islam is no more violence-prone than is Christianity?

'Cause I gotta tell ya; I don’t know 1/10 of what some of you know about these religions, but the idea that the teachings of a carpenter and those of a warlord would be roughly equivalent is kind of hard for me to swallow.

(Why do I think I’m going to get a pithy, slightly ridiculing answer back? :wink:
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Oh, my.

Which part of “I was not comparing the origins of Christianity to those of Islam” was unclear?

The teachings themselves, of course the Galilean carpenter wins in peace and Kumbaya points over either the Arab shepherd lawgiver conqueror or the Hebrew shepherd lawgiver conqueror.

Jesus never advocated destroying villages, raping women, slaughtering children, or enslaving people.

He never advocated stoning people to death for apostasy or blasphemy, and even recommended clemency in a clear-cut case of adultery.

In short, he was a nicer guy than Moses or Muhammed.

However, once he was out of the picture, well, let us just say that not every one of his followers was as nice a guy as he was.

In fact, if we really want to do the math, I’m pretty sure that of the Big Three, followers of Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild have killed more people through the ages than have followers of Muhammad and Moses put together.

Does this mean that Christianity is inherently more violence-prone than Judaism or Islam?

Not a bit. It just means that Christianity had the good fortune to be adopted by Western Europeans, who are not only the most efficient killers the world has ever known, but also better at devising technology for mass murder than any other race under the sun.

The Muslims are rapidly closing the gap in technology, as they did at Constantinople. Shortly after the Saracens obtained cannon, the city fell. The question is not what might happen if ISIS gets hold of nuclear weapons, but rather what the Western world will do when they do.