The Christian Agenda Continues

[pittbulll]

[quote]lucasa wrote:

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

I could buy some truths are unknowable , It is the truth that the sun has risen everyday in our lives and it has set every evening [/quote]

I don’t have to tell you that the sun doesn’t set and rise. Those words are the convenient artifact of a geocentric ideology. No more true or false than Apollo’s Chariot.

You might say, ‘You know what I mean!’, but that’s the crux of the whole thing, isn’t it?

[/quote]

sun·set

Noun

1 The time in the evening when the sun disappears or daylight fades.
2 The colors and light visible in the sky on an occasion of the sun’s disappearance in the evening, considered as a view or spectacle.

Synonyms
sundown - setting - decline

Let me know if you want me to do sun rise

[bigflamer]

Regarding Hitler and religion, here’s a few select quotes:

[i]We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933

May therefore God give us the strength to continue to do our duty and with this prayer we bow in homage before our dead heroes, before those whom they have left behind in bereavement, and before all the other victims of this war.

-Adolf Hitler, in prayer at the end of a radio address on 15 March 1942.

The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism [Nazism] is hostile to religion is a lie.

-Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1933, writing to the Nazi Party (quoted from John Cornwell’s “Hitler’s Pope”

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people… When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.

-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922

In the Bible we find the text, ‘That which is neither hot nor cold will I spew out of my mouth.’ This utterance of the great Nazarene has kept its profound validity until the present day.

-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 10 April 1923

Just as the Jew could once incite the mob of Jerusalem against Christ, so today he must succeed in inciting folk who have been duped into madness to attack those who, God’s truth! seek to deal with this people in utter honesty and sincerity.

-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 28 July 1922

In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God… Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.

-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 13 April 1923

We have faith in the rights of our people, the rights which have existed time out of mind. We protest against the view that every other nation should have rights - and we have none. We must learn to make our own this blind faith in the rights of our people, in the necessity of devoting ourselves to the service of these rights; we must make our own the faith that gradually victory must be granted us if only we are fanatical enough. And from this love and from this faith there emerges for us the idea of hope. When others doubt and hesitate for the future of Germany - we have no doubts. We have both the hope and the faith that Germany will and must once more become great and mighty.

We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor - the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.

-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 01 May 1923

It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.

-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 01 Aug. 1923

The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognized the Jews for what they were"… I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.

-Adolf Hitler, 26 April 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich][/i]

[Varqanir]

Oh, Bigflamer, you know he didn’t mean any of that, he was just saying it to fool all of his followers, who were also atheists, evidently.

[Varqanir]

[quote]pushharder wrote:

BTW, if you’re going to throw WWI into the theist camp then I reckon all of WWII gets tossed into the atheist camp which would bump my earlier numbers.[/quote]

Implying that belligerents on both sides were atheists. So by your reckoning, France, Italy, England, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United States of America are all atheist countries. I see.

[Varqanir]

The war was actually started by a Serbian anarchist assassinating an Austrian archduke. The first and second world wars were one long war: a Wrestlemania cage match with a decade or two rest period between rounds when all the wrestlers were too worn out to continue without new boots and flashier costumes. A couple of the wrestlers switched sides between rounds, and a couple switched sides in the second round. But both sides were sponsored by the same company, and blessed by the same priest.

[pat]

[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:
There seems to be a lot of talk, and misconceptions, about religion in the Soviet Union so I thought that I would chime in and clear them up:

1. Religion was not outlawed in the Soviet Union, with the notable exception of a few years immediately after the Revolution when all religion was banned and all church property was expropriated. By the end of World War II, the Russian Orthodox Church, Islam, and most other major religions in the Soviet states had reestablished themselves and the vast majority of Soviet citizens were religious and belonged to some kind of organized religion. Nearly all Soviet constitutions had a right to belief in them.

2. Religion was very much suppressed in the Soviet Union. It was a stated goal of the Soviet leaders that they wanted to abolish religion and replace it with atheism. Leninism actually calls for an abolishment of organized religion because it splits the loyalties of supporters between two authorities, but his subsequent followers took it one step further and replaced just abolishing organized religion with establishing atheism. I think that Marx advocated atheism, but his works were banned in the Soviet Union by the time I was born so I am not too familiar with him. In school, atheism was taught and openly religious people were ridiculed, teased, beaten and such. Practicing religion was allowed in the home and in designated places of worship, and that was it. If you tried to preach outside, that was illegal. If you tried to convert someone to your religion, that was illegal. Any kind off mass media messages promoting religion were illegal. If a law or state policy conflicted with your religious beliefs, and you argued against it based on religious beliefs, that was illegal too.

3. The Catholic Church was especially targeted for persecution for two reasons:

              1. Catholics are supposedly loyal to the Pope before any secular ruler (I don't know if this is the truth or not but that was the belief).
   
              2. The major religion in the Soviet Union was the Russian Orthodox Church. The majority of citizens that were religious were                  
              Russian Orthodox (big shocker, I know), and this included Party members (even if they had to keep it fairly secret). There is a very     
              well known enmity between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. They each have stated goals of   
              converting the other to their views.
   

4. Much of the persecution of the Catholics and other Christian religions came from the Russian Orthodox Church. By the end of the second World War, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet government had more or less reached an understanding and the church supported the government (with a few notable exceptions, and there still was some persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church). Many Catholics, especially priests and such were “encouraged” by the Soviet government to break ties with Rome and subordinate themselves to the Patriarch. This was a blatant attempt by the Russian Orthodox Church to forcibly convert Catholics and other Christians. It was fairly successful too, since the other option was to die. It was win-win for the government.

The point I am trying to make here is that atheism was a goal of the Soviet Union, it was not the cause of anything. Communist doctrine was the cause. The persecution of religion in the Soviet Union was not even successful to a noticeable magnitude anyway. Sure, a lot of religious people were sent to gulags and never came back. Good luck proving whether it was because the atheist government just didn’t like their religious views, they were the victims of a power grab by the Russian Orthodox Church, or they were in some other way an enemy of the state. That is why this this particular quote by Pat is disturbing:

Fact: The USSR had a state policy of Atheism

So? Atheism was not widely accepted by the majority in the Soviet Union and we have no way of knowing who was killed solely because they were religious. There were way too many factors involved and not enough information to make any kind of accurate claim.

Fact: The communists murdered millions of Christians and other religious because they consider them a political threat and a violation of the state policy.

You have no way of knowing whether this is because of their religion, or they just happened to be religious and a threat to the state. Keep in mind that for every religious person that was taken away and never came back many more lived out full lives.

Fact: Atheists have murdered more people than any other demographic in the history of the world.
These are the facts, and there is nothing you can do about it. No amount of linguistic gymnastics is going to make any of this, not true. So get over it.[/quote]

You have no way of knowing this, and if you somehow do please present it. And even if this were true, which it may or may not be, that is still not any evidence that atheism leads to violence, just that violent people have happened to be atheist. Let us use this exact same type of logic on the Catholic Church (I am assuming that everyone agrees with me that killing someone for not believing the same as you is wrong):

FACT: The Catholic Church has, at various points, advocated harsh punishments, including death for heresy.
FACT: It is evil to kill someone or start a war just because they hold beliefs that are different then yours.
FACT: The Catholic Church is evil.

You see now why that type of reasoning is childish and wrong? The Catholic Church of today is not the same one that advocated wars against and death for heretics, so it is wrong to judge the modern day Catholic Church based on that criteria, just like it is wrong and childish to blame every atheist for crimes committed because of some atheists, and to claim that because an atheist does something it is automatically a tenet of atheism, as if to be an atheist you have to want to murder religious people.

I never said it caused anything. I didn’t start this line of reasoning. Whatever the cause, they happen to be atheist and mass murderers particularly targeted the religious between 1929 and 1939. And you can’t really say Stalin didn’t have a vendetta against religions as he hated them like nobody else did and persecuted them and did in fact murder them for being religious. I do have a document on demonocide if you wish to peruse the numbers and study there of.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

It’s really a simple point I am trying to make, if you are going to say that Christians killed and persecuted a bunch of people, and use that as an argument against the belief system itself, then I am going to point out that atheists did it more. This is in order to nullify the argument that the actions of the corrupt are not indicative of what the faith is all about. This is done by pointing out that people of the same belief system you hold (not you specifically, but people in general) where not only responsible for the same kinds of actions and worse. Again the purpose is to nullify the argument that bad religious people equal that religion is bad, in the same way you made the point that holding an atheist belief doesn’t make one bad.
It’s a problem that atheists under the umbrella of the ‘New Atheist’ movement like to bring up as an indictment of religion. That unlike atheism, religion compels evil because religious people have done bad things. Then go on to say that atheism have nothing to do with the evil perpetrated by atheists. That’s a bunch of B.S. and if one makes the claim that relgion is bad because religious people have done bad things, then by the same token atheism.
In other words you cannot make the rules and then break them. If your belief system is responsible for the bad behavior of people in the past and their for corrupt and evil, then you have to apply the same rules to yourself. And if we are going to indict people on the behavior of people in the past, then you must also be indicted by the behaviour of people in the past. So that’s my actual point. You either apply the same rules all around or you avoid the absurdity in the first place.

I will be damned however, if I am going to let it slide. If you bring up shit from the past, then I will too.

[Varqanir]

[quote]pushharder wrote:
For that matter, Japan ignited the Pacific Theater because of what had happened in Europe giving them cover.[/quote]

Hitler’s two biggest mistakes were signing the Tripartite Pact with Kusuru, and breaking the Nonagression Pact with Stalin.

He would have conquered Europe, and the Pacific War would have been over in 1943.

No way we would have entered the war against Germany AND Russia, if we didn’t have to.

[Varqanir]

[quote]pushharder wrote:
For that matter, Japan ignited the Pacific Theater because of what had happened in Europe giving them cover.[/quote]

Absolutely. And that’s why I said what I did about the Tripartite Pact. Japan had nothing to lose by attacking and occupying British, French and Dutch colonies, because the armies of those countries were too busy fighting its ally, Germany. Japan had been planning to fight Britain since 1935, and an alliance with Hitler gave them the backbone to do it. Had they been entirely on their own, though, with no strategic alliance with the Germans, it’s doubtful they would have generated enough chutzpah to attack British Imperial territories, let alone Pearl Harbor.

[pat]

[quote]bigflamer wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
Your “facts” in these discussions, are nothing more than biased correlations, and not “facts” at all. It’s telling of your religious bias in that you do not attribute these atrocities to statism, socialism, communism, etc.; rather you and all of your apologist christian friends choose to tack it onto the face of atheism instead. Why? well, as I’ve already said, you NEED these to be atheist atrocities in order to water down the the horrific atrocities that have been carried out since forever in the name of some god or another. Well, guess what,patty cakes, blind faith in an ideology (and the head of that ideology) is what kills, not the secular/atheistic ideals of free inquiry, skepticism, and the pursuit if ideas for their own sake. [/quote]

And I could flip that around insert the word Christian and say the same thing about you.
Fact: The USSR had a state policy of Atheism[/quote]

So? Doesn’t mean that their driving force was atheism. Put your thinking cap on, and try to think about what some of the driving factors of Stalin and the USSR was.

[quote]pat wrote:
Fact: The communists murdered millions of Christians and other religious because they consider them a political threat and a violation of the state policy.[/quote]

Correct.

Do you think that the priests/church leaders were just benign followers of christ? LOL…or that they were also influential leaders with their hands in the politics of the day? Now, knowing that they were politically active, and wielded influence among the people, why would a power hungry statist, demanding total allegiance to none other than the state, want to get rid of such people and their institutions? Hmmmm, think…
[/quote]
hmmm, yeah they killed the other 61,000,000 just in case. And on top of that it didn’t work.

[quote]pat wrote:
Fact: Atheists have murdered more people than any other demographic in the history of the world.[/quote]

LOL…not a “fact” at all. You and all your christian friends love throwing this unsupported claim around, yet it still remains untrue. How “atheist” these atheists you like to claim were, BTW, is still up for debate. But even so, just because they were atheists, does not automatically follow that they did what they did in the NAME of atheism.

Hitler and Stalin also had mustaches; did they kill in the name of mustache?

Ok, then you can stop this stupidity right here then. You can either apply the same rules to yourself or you can let go of this retarded line of thinking all together. Either atheists who did bad things are as representative of the atheist mindset and Christians who did bad things are representative who did bad things are representative of the Christian mindset, or you can let go of the entire stupidity all together. What people did in the past is not representative of what the truth is, but you cannot use the past to indict religious people, but then turn around and be shielded from the past of non-believers. It doesn’t work that way, hoss. If that past is indicative of the truth and value of a belief system then it works both ways, or don’t bring it up. If Christians burned people at the stake, started wars, killed people then Atheists tortured and killed millions with impunity. If Christians did that because they were Christian then atheists did what they did because they were atheists. Or it’s just a bunch of nonsense since I don’t have anymore control of the past than you do. But if you want to persist, then athiests are 10 times the murderers that religious people ever were.

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
If your argument held any water at all, then the most atheistic countries of Scandinavia wouldn’t have the highest standard of living in the world, highest equality, literacy, longevity, low crime, female political participation, etc. If you were right, then Norway and Sweden should be invading countries and occupying them with the regularity of the Olympic games, with troops and basses around the globe and drones killing innocent women and children.

Scandinavia? Who the fuck is talking about Scandinavia? You’re reaching, badly. This is known as a Red Herring.[/quote]

Not reaching at all. This is relevant to the conversation because you’re claiming that atheism is what drove the evil that was done by those regimes. I’ve shown you nations that are majority atheist, and are doing very well; better than the majority christian US in many categories. These nations are some of the most peaceful on this planet, but how can that be? they’re so, ATHEIST!?
[/quote]
Still not relevant. And still a red herring. You are arguing against a point nobody made. You are apparently trying to divert the conversation in some other direction. I made no claim at all, I am merely pointing out the absurdity of your claim. It’s still a reach stretch…
Scandinavia…LOL Whatever.

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
You could end this argument RIGHT NOW, if only you would point out which regime has ever said “There is no God, therefore do this”. Oh, and here’s a protip; don’t try to include Hitler, as the Nazi Party retained strong ties with the Roman Catholic church (there were plenty of crosses about with swastikas on them) and Hitler even saw Jesus as a role model for recognizing the Jews as enemies.

Considering they murdered 4 million Catholics in those camps, your revisionist history is a fail. In the beginning of the regime, they were somewhat Catholic friendly that ended with the mass round up of Polish priests who were subsequently murdered.

Or I could just say, here we go again, the same old tired worn out arguments repeated over and over and over and over again. Cause that really makes a point.[/quote]

Not revisionist history at all, but methinks you know that. And you’re still failing to point me in the direction of a regime, JUST ONE, that did what they did in the name of “no god”. Just ONE that said “there is no god, therefore do this”. Just ONE that had as their driving force, the position of “there is no god”.

So stop fucking around, Pat, and get to it. Prove me wrong and show me this regime. Take all the time you need. [/quote]

I never said they anybody did anything in the name of ‘no-god’ and Christians who do evil in the name of God are blaspheming. In layman’s terms that means that they are doing a very bad thing not only by doing evil, but attributing it to God. So they are not acting in accordance with their faith but against it.
Now killing people because they are religious and persecuting people because they are religious is killing based on religion. Just because they persecuted people for being religious is the same as persecuting people based on religion. You trying to claim that didn’t happen, in staggering numbers?

[dmaddox]

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
For that matter, Japan ignited the Pacific Theater because of what had happened in Europe giving them cover.[/quote]

Absolutely. And that’s why I said what I did about the Tripartite Pact. Japan had nothing to lose by attacking and occupying British, French and Dutch colonies, because the armies of those countries were too busy fighting its ally, Germany. Japan had been planning to fight Britain since 1935, and an alliance with Hitler gave them the backbone to do it. Had they been entirely on their own, though, with no strategic alliance with the Germans, it’s doubtful they would have generated enough chutzpah to attack British Imperial territories, let alone Pearl Harbor. [/quote]

The US made sure Japan had to attack us. We were the largest Oil exporter in the world at that time. Japan needed our oil. When we refused to sell it to them they had no other place to get it from. They had to attack or stop attacking British colonies, French colonies, and the Chinese.

[Varqanir]

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
For that matter, Japan ignited the Pacific Theater because of what had happened in Europe giving them cover.[/quote]

Hitler’s two biggest mistakes were signing the Tripartite Pact with Kusuru, and breaking the Nonagression Pact with Stalin.

He would have conquered Europe, and the Pacific War would have been over in 1943.

No way we would have entered the war against Germany AND Russia, if we didn’t have to. [/quote]

I do have a question: why do you think the Tripartite Pact was a mistake for Hitler? Having a ally in the Pacific certainly aided Germany’s goals.

Breaking the Non Aggression Pact of course is a no brainer.[/quote]

Because Hitler assumed, rightly, that the United States wanted to part of another European war. He signed the pact with Japan calculating that Japan would cripple Britain’s war fighting ability by capturing their primary source of petroleum in Asia, that being Burma. Everything went well for his little plan until the morning of December 7, 1941. Here is some rare footage of the Fuhrer’s reaction to Roosevelt’s speech shortly after.

- YouTube

[Varqanir]

[quote]dmaddox wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
For that matter, Japan ignited the Pacific Theater because of what had happened in Europe giving them cover.[/quote]

Absolutely. And that’s why I said what I did about the Tripartite Pact. Japan had nothing to lose by attacking and occupying British, French and Dutch colonies, because the armies of those countries were too busy fighting its ally, Germany. Japan had been planning to fight Britain since 1935, and an alliance with Hitler gave them the backbone to do it. Had they been entirely on their own, though, with no strategic alliance with the Germans, it’s doubtful they would have generated enough chutzpah to attack British Imperial territories, let alone Pearl Harbor. [/quote]

The US made sure Japan had to attack us. We were the largest Oil exporter in the world at that time. Japan needed our oil. When we refused to sell it to them they had no other place to get it from. They had to attack or stop attacking British colonies, French colonies, and the Chinese.
[/quote]

Yes and no. The US embargo on oil and steel exports to Japan were put into effect before Japan’s invasion of Burma and Borneo, and several months before Pearl Harbor. So Japan wasn’t attacking America in order to steal our oil because they couldn’t get it from anywhere else; the attack on Pear Harbor was a tactical move to keep us from fucking with them militarily while they went somewhere else to get it. Think of a bank robber blowing up the police motor pool right before knocking over a bank.

[dmaddox]

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]dmaddox wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
For that matter, Japan ignited the Pacific Theater because of what had happened in Europe giving them cover.[/quote]

Absolutely. And that’s why I said what I did about the Tripartite Pact. Japan had nothing to lose by attacking and occupying British, French and Dutch colonies, because the armies of those countries were too busy fighting its ally, Germany. Japan had been planning to fight Britain since 1935, and an alliance with Hitler gave them the backbone to do it. Had they been entirely on their own, though, with no strategic alliance with the Germans, it’s doubtful they would have generated enough chutzpah to attack British Imperial territories, let alone Pearl Harbor. [/quote]

The US made sure Japan had to attack us. We were the largest Oil exporter in the world at that time. Japan needed our oil. When we refused to sell it to them they had no other place to get it from. They had to attack or stop attacking British colonies, French colonies, and the Chinese.
[/quote]

Yes and no. The US embargo on oil and steel exports to Japan were put into effect before Japan’s invasion of Burma and Borneo, and several months before Pearl Harbor. So Japan wasn’t attacking America in order to steal our oil because they couldn’t get it from anywhere else; the attack on Pear Harbor was a tactical move to keep us from fucking with them militarily while they went somewhere else to get it. Think of a bank robber blowing up the police motor pool right before knocking over a bank.
[/quote]

I see your point, but tactically was not appropriate. Same thing with Germany attacking Russia.