Ambitious pipsqueaks hardly ever profit from awakening sleeping giants.
[quote]bigflamer wrote:
<<< the bible thumpers bemoan <<<>>> lie awake at night trembling >>>[/quote]
I don’t do this, EVER, about ANYthing.
We’re all pipsqueaks…let’s cut through mustard with all this seemingly erudite, long winded
historical bullshit…goodness gracious, some of you with your fucking bourgeois historical peacocking
trying to impress one another.
This is us…from a tiny space in the entire universe…this is Earth from Saturn, we’re all riding on that little blue speck
on the near lower right…how did we get there?
Who knows for certain? We’re so tiny in the universe it’s almost scary.
We are all ‘‘pipsqueaks’’…WHAT “sleeping giants”? ‘Giants’ compared to what?
There you have it, folks. The great pronouncement has come down from Karado, the nihilist mustard-cutter.
Sorry about the big words, Karado old chum. But you know, GAL is only a click away.
I am beyond incredulous that more people aren’t upset about Transformers 3.
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
[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 :)[/quote]
Wow, you have a definition for your false ideology! How quaint. I’m sure no religion has their own vocabulary or special dictionaries.
So which truth(s) is right? the sun disappears or the sun doesn’t disappear, it remains pretty fixed at the center of the solar system and daylight fades or the daylight doesn’t fade, it just falls on a different part of the Earth. Or is the truth contextual?
More importantly, are you really supporting a wholly ancient and unscientific interpretation of natural phenomenon over what is (also) an empirical and observable truth? When I say scientific truths are fundamentally unknowable you revert to (what you believe to be) a truth that is so fundamental it has little to nothing to do with science.
[quote]lucasa wrote:
…scientific truths are fundamentally unknowable [/quote]
Tide comes in, tide goes out. You can’t explain that.
[quote]lucasa wrote:
…the sun doesn’t disappear, it remains pretty fixed at the center of the solar system. [/quote]
Well, yes, if by “fixed” you mean “hurtling though space at approximately 488,000 miles per hour in orbit around the center of the galaxy.”
No, but it is relative.
[quote]Karado wrote:
Hey Brother Chris, I’ll ask you because pat, another devoted Catholic here, has totally distanced himself
from answering why he believes the 1917 ‘Miracle Of The Sun’ was a legitimate Holy event, and not a possible
satanic deception, because this was NEVER specifically prophesized, and Jesus never hinted one time in
Scripture that he would send his mother with ANY kind of extra-biblical message or event in the distant future, or
make the Sun dance in the sky for a special audience while others in Europe that had the very same Sun
shining down opon them that day in many other countries didn’t notice it, not to mention it would have been cosmologically impossible for the Sun to move in the sky for a fraction of the World’s population without anybody else in Europe witnessing anything unusual that day.
Why don’t people question these things?[/quote]
They do.
[quote]What gives with this event? Why is it so venerated, and why did so many people fall for this likely
deception?[/quote]
Because it is a miracle, not a deception. A deception would mean there is a scientific explanation behind it or that it was from the devil. Both were proven to be untrue.
Yes, because it was proved that there was no scientific explanation for what happened. The message in part and whole was shown to be a holy message in which Our Lady of Fatima pointed the world to repent and believe in The One True Lord. Ultimately, our Holy Mother Church found it to be a miracle and since Our Lord promised to protect her from error in the matters of faith and morals I feel assured in believing that it was in fact a miracle. Of course, the reasoning behind why it is a miracle is sound by itself.
[quote]I actually believe in miracles Man, I really do…but this supposed legit event friggin’ stinks…something’s ‘off’
here, and I know you know it…what info does the Vatican have the WE don’t that makes them think this was
legit and not a deception?
[/quote]
No, I don’t know it or what you are talking about. Please tell us.
The Vatican has published everything about Fatima to prove it is a miracle. There are eye witnesses of the event, science hasn’t been able to explain how it happened, it is not a natural phenomena known to any science. The message of the apparition is fully revealed and is shown to point to Jesus.
Not sure what the issue is except this fits within your anti-Catholic rhetoric.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
That’s why we call it Christian Heresy, Islam is a reborn Arianism. [/quote]
I guess considering the subject, one could say that Arianism didn’t die and was resurrected, it just faked its death, saying in effect, “You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”
…but then it DID come back, not three days later but three hundred years later.
:)[/quote]
I don’t understand what you just wrote here.
[quote]hungry4more wrote:
I’m sorry if this has been addressed already…but are there any professing Christians here that believe people should be put to death for anything but murder/attempted murder, and possibly rape? Just wondering. [/quote]
Capital punishment is justifiable. However, I am against the death penalty in America because with our penal system we have recourse to justice without taking a life.
It was more merciful to those people who would encounter God’s enemies if those enemies were dead. Think about this, these people often sacrificed their own children to gold statues by burning them alive. If God is merciful, he’ll stop those children from being sacrificed…how will he do that if those people are possessed and actively go against God? He’ll end their life, that is the just thing to those children that would otherwise be mutilated and tortured.
No. Freedom of conscience has been the rule since the Garden of Eden.
God has never commanded anyone be killed for what they believed. He’s always respected their conscience. It wasn’t that these people believed in a different God, it was that how they acted was a complete violation of just laws.
No. This is because we live in a different covenant where it has once and for all been declared that the enemy is not human beings but the Evil one. Everyone is redeemed and so are able to be saved.
Attitude towards religion didn’t much change. Other religions, except that of Jesus are still wrong. What changed is that pretty much we don’t have religions that offer their children to golden statues. Though one can make a case for abortion being equivalent.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Here’s a few to start off with. Didn’t go earlier than the 13th century, nor later than the early 20th. This is only wars. No deliberate pogroms, famines or genocides in this list. I can always add them in if objections to any of the small number of conflicts I selected becomes too shrill.
There really have been an awful lot of wars. I didn’t bother with all the dinky little skirmishes of less than 2 million, and stayed away from the really big old inter-dynastic wars where it was just a bunch of Chinese people killing other Chinese people. First off, it would have gone way over 100 million with only three wars, and everyone would accuse me of padding the figures by over representing the Taoist/Buddhist/Conficianists, which I know someone would inevitably say “well they don’t really believe in, like, a REAL god and stuff…” So I avoided the issue. I am keeping Attila and Genghis. Sky God Religion all the way.
I didn’t count any war past the first world war. First because there was no need to but also because once I got to World War II I realized what a pain in the ass it would be to calculate how many of the Team Atheist casualties were members of Team Atheist killed by Team Theist, and how many were killed by their fellow Atheists fighting for the other side. Don’t worry, Team Atheist still gets credit for the Holocaust, and I also didn’t get to count the Rape of Nanking and Japan’s other jolly adventures in East and Southeast Asia, nor the bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Berlin. So if Team Theist’s numbers seem a little low, that’s why.
I also didn’t list the Inquisition or the Crusades, because bringing up the Inquisition and the Crusades to demonstrate the violence of religion a cliche almost as tired and threadbare as holding Nazi Germany up as an example of an atheist regime.
So here we go. It’s a good start. And there’s plenty of iceberg left if the tip doesn’t satisfy.
Conquests by Mongols (Sky God Religion) 30-70 million
Conquests by Huns (Sky God Religion): 2.5-4 million
Conquests by Tamerlane (Islam): 15-20 million
Muslim Conquest of India (Islam): 50-70 million
Reconquista (Roman Catholic, Islam) 7 million
Thirty Years War (Roman Catholic , Protestant) 3-11 million
French Wars of Religion (Roman Catholic, Protestant): 3 million
Second Northern War (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant): 3 million
Napoleonic Wars (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant): 3.5-6 million
Conquest of Menelik of Ethiopia (Ethiopian Orthodox): 5 million
First World War (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Islam, Shinto-Buddhist, Protestant): 15-35 million.
Obviously, it’s impossible to know exactly how many people died in each conflict, and estimates vary widely depending on the sources you use. Using the lowest figure, I come up with 137 million. The high estimate total is 234 million.
How fucking depressing.
[/quote]
If religion isn’t worth fighting over, nothing is.
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
That’s why we call it Christian Heresy, Islam is a reborn Arianism. [/quote]
I guess considering the subject, one could say that Arianism didn’t die and was resurrected, it just faked its death, saying in effect, “You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”
…but then it DID come back, not three days later but three hundred years later.
:)[/quote]
I don’t understand what you just wrote here.[/quote]
Yeah, I guess that was a little obscure, even for me.
I was referencing the Muslim belief that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, but only made it appear so before his ascension, juxtaposed onto the verse from the gospel of John on which the Arians based their beliefs.
Dumb joke, sorry.
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
If religion isn’t worth fighting over, nothing is.[/quote]
Oh, I agree. You’ll get no argument on that point from me.
Nor from Joshua, David, Alexander, Muhammad, Charlemagne, Genghis, Pope Urban II, Suleyman the Magnificent, Charles the Hammer, Osama bin Laden, or George W. Bush…
…nor from Hitler, I’d wager.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Me studies of jolly ol’ Genghis would leave me to believe that he wasn’t all that religious (yes, there was some paganism in there but…) and his religion certainly didn’t motivate him to conquer.[/quote]
You don’t have to be terribly devout yourself to inspire devout men to butcher other folks and take their stuff. Wars are never really about competing ideologies, but over which side will get to use the goodies up for grabs.
Alexander probably couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Zeus and Ares and Athena, but boy, when he was doing his William Wallace speech for the Macedonian phalanx before he went off and slaughtered Darius’ army, I guarantee you that he talked about the gods demand this and the gods will reward that and divine right and Manifest Destiny and punishing the “evildewers”, but really all he was after were resources and Lebensraum, which were more plentiful in the Persian Empire than they were in Greece.
Temijin was son of the chieftain of his tribe, a post that required him to be, for ceremonial purposes at least, a very pious man. Whether he was cynical about his religious duties, about the effectiveness of invoking the Sky God was in order to influence his credulous constituents, there is no record. Nor do we know whether, if so, he conveyed any of this cynicism on to his son before he was poisoned.
But it stands to reason that a man capable of uniting the clans of the steppes and conquering an entire continent must have used a great deal of appeal to what the Sky God wanted his people to take for themselves. Genghis’ official title of office is commonly rendered as “khan”, which means generically “lord” or “king”, but among the Mongols he was known as khagan, or “khan of khans”. I seem to recall another charismatic figure in history with a similar appellation.
“For by grace are ye saved,” wrote Paul to the Ephesians, “through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.”
Leading people is tough. Especially when they are tough people. It takes a level of personality far beyond that of most mortals to inspire a large group, let alone an army, a cult, a religion, a nation or a horde. Small wonder that throughout history great leaders have been thought of as being divinely inspired, and from that extrapolated the idea that they may be semi divine.
A successful leader is one who capitalizes on this belief, and indeed encourages it. By grace will he lead his army to salvation. But only if they maintain their faith in him (or her, if we’re talking Jeanne d’Arc) as the vessel, proxy, or mouthpiece of the divine.
Oh, by the way, the word Paul used, rendered “grace” in English, forms the root of a word that originally meant “a gift from God”, but had a later meaning of "the talent for leadership and the power of authority. That word, of course, is charisma. All great leaders are charismatic. That is, invested by God with the power to lead.
So perhaps religion played little role in Genghis’ private decision-making process, but you had better believe he used religious zeal to keep the war machine chugging along.
As all leaders must.
The Mongols have gotten a bad rap:
"The Vatican has published everything about Fatima to prove it is a miracle.‘’
By whose law does one follow that just because something cannot be scientifically
explained it’s automatically from the GOOD side of the Supernatural?
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
The Mongols have gotten a bad rap:
Indeed.
“Although his name is now erroneously associated with terror and slaughter, he showed surprising restraint during a time when few others in power did. He allowed freedom of religion, encouraged free trade, developed a paper currency, and observed diplomatic immunity. As he encountered new cultures, he adopted or adapted their best practices, and constantly updated his military strategies.”
This paragraph could be talking about Alexander, except for the part about paper money.
I wonder how long it typically takes before a successful conqueror is reassessed against the culture of his time by sympathetic historians of a later age. My guess is that just as it takes about five hundred years for an emancipated people to achieve real freedom, it probably takes at least as long before an avaricious and charismatic military leader is able to gain the appellation “The Great.”