74x12
Well-Known Member
None of that changes forum rules which is all I was discussing.
And I really didn't make an insult.
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Is Christianity that bad?
- Thread starter Spiderman
- Start date
And I really didn't make an insult.
What forum rule were you addressing when you said
"That would be useful if her post was appropriate in the first place."
I suggest you read rule 1
PureX
Veteran Member
When the Spanish wanted to loot the whole of South America (where they imagined cities of gold existed) they told themselves and the world that they were going there to bring Christ to the godless heathen. And in fact, they did do that.
So was all the murder and mayhem that happened in the name of this Christian mission really the fault of Christianity? Or was it the fault of men masquerading as Christians while they raped, robbed, and murdered their way across a continent? If those men had all been wearing green uniforms, we might exclaim; "damn those greencoats!" But the green coats didn't really define them, nor did the green coats earn anyone's condemnation. It was the men wearing the green coats that earned it.
A murderer is a murderer. What color coat they're wearing at the time, or what religion they espouse, can neither cause them to commit murder nor keep them from it.
So was all the murder and mayhem that happened in the name of this Christian mission really the fault of Christianity? Or was it the fault of men masquerading as Christians while they raped, robbed, and murdered their way across a continent? If those men had all been wearing green uniforms, we might exclaim; "damn those greencoats!" But the green coats didn't really define them, nor did the green coats earn anyone's condemnation. It was the men wearing the green coats that earned it.
A murderer is a murderer. What color coat they're wearing at the time, or what religion they espouse, can neither cause them to commit murder nor keep them from it.
And it should be noted that many Christians at the time - including Pope Paul III, somewhat amazingly - condemned the conquistadors for their actions.
The Spanish scholastic theologians (Dominican order) of the School of Salamanca (at that time Spain's most eminent legal authorities) condemned the conquest and its imperialist rationale as contrary to the natural law:
The School of Salamanca: Intellectual Roots of International Law
The beginnings of international rights and law are rooted in the work of sixteenth century University of Salamanca professor Francisco de Vitoria and is a testament to the rich intellectual history that the university boasts.
A Dominican theologian who assumed the role of chair of Theology at the university in 1526, Francisco de Vitoria was an immensely popular professor whose opinion was so well respected that it was sought out by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain...
In public lectures to students and university and city officials, Francisco de Vitoria labeled each reason that Spanish nobles and public opinion had generated to justify their violence against the natives as immoral and illegitimate and denounced Spanish evangelization efforts as hypocritical in their forceful, brutal nature, emphasizing that faith must be an act of free will, not coercion.
Given the intensely religious underpinnings of Spanish society and culture at the time, these proclamations were especially bold and marked Francisco de Vitoria as a radical thinker very much ahead of his time. Indeed, in an article entitled “Dispossessing the Barbarism,” European medieval historian Anthony Pagden wrote that Vitoria’s was the “most detailed and far reaching discussion of the subject” and “the first to claim that ‘the affair of the Indies,’ as it had come to be called… was a question of the laws of nature.”
In that appeal to the “laws of nature,” he asserted his firm conviction in the intrinsic dignity of all people as a defining, inalienable characteristic of the human condition. Francisco de Vitoria and those who followed his school of thought and formed what is now known as the School of Salamanca advanced the right to life and the right to freedom of thought for all people—principles that seem so fundamental to current Western political thought but that in the sixteenth century were very novel in their application to indigenous people.
A Dominican theologian who assumed the role of chair of Theology at the university in 1526, Francisco de Vitoria was an immensely popular professor whose opinion was so well respected that it was sought out by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain...
In public lectures to students and university and city officials, Francisco de Vitoria labeled each reason that Spanish nobles and public opinion had generated to justify their violence against the natives as immoral and illegitimate and denounced Spanish evangelization efforts as hypocritical in their forceful, brutal nature, emphasizing that faith must be an act of free will, not coercion.
Given the intensely religious underpinnings of Spanish society and culture at the time, these proclamations were especially bold and marked Francisco de Vitoria as a radical thinker very much ahead of his time. Indeed, in an article entitled “Dispossessing the Barbarism,” European medieval historian Anthony Pagden wrote that Vitoria’s was the “most detailed and far reaching discussion of the subject” and “the first to claim that ‘the affair of the Indies,’ as it had come to be called… was a question of the laws of nature.”
In that appeal to the “laws of nature,” he asserted his firm conviction in the intrinsic dignity of all people as a defining, inalienable characteristic of the human condition. Francisco de Vitoria and those who followed his school of thought and formed what is now known as the School of Salamanca advanced the right to life and the right to freedom of thought for all people—principles that seem so fundamental to current Western political thought but that in the sixteenth century were very novel in their application to indigenous people.
And the denunciation reached the Papacy, provoking this from Pope Paul III:
Sublimus Dei On the Enslavement and Evangelization of Indians
Pope Paul III - 1537
"The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of....he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.
We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord....consider, however, that the Indians are truly men....
Notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect."
We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord....consider, however, that the Indians are truly men....
Notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect."
So it isn't even the case that their conduct was unquestioningly accepted at the time by Catholics either.
See:
Bartolome de Las Casas | Biography, Quotes, & Significance
Bartolomé de Las Casas, (born 1474 or 1484, Sevilla?, Spain—died July 1566, Madrid), early Spanish historian and Dominican missionary who was the first to expose the oppression of indigenous peoples by Europeans in the Americas and to call for the abolition of slavery there. His several works include Historia de las Indias (first printed in 1875).
The purpose of all the facts he sets forth is the exposure of the “sin” of domination, oppression, and injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment...
While awaiting an audience with Charles V, Las Casas conceived the idea of still another work, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), which he wrote in 1542: “The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.”
Las Casas’s work finally seemed to be crowned with success when King Charles signed the so-called New Laws (Leyes Nuevas). According to those laws, the encomienda was not to be considered a hereditary grant; instead, the owners had to set free their Indian serfs after the span of a single generation. To ensure enforcement of the laws, Las Casas was named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala, and in July 1544 he set sail for America, together with 44 Dominicans
The purpose of all the facts he sets forth is the exposure of the “sin” of domination, oppression, and injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment...
While awaiting an audience with Charles V, Las Casas conceived the idea of still another work, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), which he wrote in 1542: “The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.”
Las Casas’s work finally seemed to be crowned with success when King Charles signed the so-called New Laws (Leyes Nuevas). According to those laws, the encomienda was not to be considered a hereditary grant; instead, the owners had to set free their Indian serfs after the span of a single generation. To ensure enforcement of the laws, Las Casas was named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala, and in July 1544 he set sail for America, together with 44 Dominicans
dianaiad
Well-Known Member
Why should I? You don't
Heyo
Veteran Member
A strong argument for religious tolerance and the total ineffectiveness of religious moral teachings.
Only that the statistics don't bear that out. Christians are on avarage more criminal than atheists or Buddhists. So it seems that there is at least a speck of truth in the saying that "beliefs inform actions". And the Christian belief seems to inform immoral actions.
(Or, if you want to repeat your no-true-scotsman fallacy, the Christian belief attracts more immoral people.)
Augustus
…
You compiled mostly by plagiarising from 'The Most Made Up List in the World' which appeared on a 2015 thread on Reddit's r/atheism (or one of its derivatives that appear in other internet places wherever highly credulous people congregate),
How Many People Have Been Killed in the Name of … - atheism
Half of the things on that had nothing to do with religion (religiously motivated smallpox anyone?), and most numbers are massively inflated anyway as anyone who wants to think for themselves can work out.
In his book Attrocitology Matthew White has 11 of the top 100 'multicides' (human caused mass deaths) being Religious ones, which is consistent with the estimation that 6-9% of all historical conflicts have been religious in nature.
Jesus wept.
I mean it's not a lack of intelligence that makes you believe this nonsense: "Largely due to [religiously motivated] opposition to condoms"
Given the list you plagiarised from is 5 years old, then that's more people than had ever died (WHO figure is 32 million by 2019), never mind in Africa alone.
Of these how many are Catholic? 5%? 10%? And how many of those 5-10% caught it because they didn't use condoms due to the Church?
This is the standard of the list you chose to believe. It's not an exercise in rational thought, but emotional catharsis. Believing the falsehood is more emotionally pleasing, no matter how ridiculous.
You can lead a horse to water and all that.
The Soviet and Khmer Rouge anti-religious persecutions were 'religiously motivated'
Even Fox News might draw the line at spinning an issue that much.Here is your "lifelong Christian" Joseph Stalin (who backed this up by killing most of the priesthood and almost exterminating the Soviet Church until he changed this due only to the Nazi invasion of Germany)
The seminary was to pull off the singular achievement of supplying the Russian Revolution with some of its most ruthless radicals. “No secular school,” wrote another seminarist, Stalin’s comrade Philip Makharadze, “produced as many atheists as the Tiflis Seminary.” ... The seminary journal reports that Stalin declared himself an atheist, stalked out of prayers, chatted in class, was late for tea and refused to doff his hat to monks. He had eleven more warnings... [Stalin] adored Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Chekhov, whose works he memorized and “could recite by heart.” He admired Tolstoy “but was bored by his Christianity,” later in life scrawling “ha-ha-ha!” beside Tolstoyan musings on redemption and salvation... In his seventies, the dictator was still chuckling about these arguments. “I became an atheist in the first year,” he said, which led to arguments with other boys such as his pious friend Simon Natroshvili. But, after some thought, Natroshvili “came to see me and admitted his mistake.” Stalin was delighted until Simon continued: “If God exists, hell exists too. There’s always a blazing hellfire. To keep the hellfires burning, who can provide enough logs? They would have to be endless and how can endless logs exist?” Stalin remembered, “I burst out laughing! I thought Simon had reached his conclusions by philosophical reasoning but actually he became an atheist for fear that there weren’t enough logs for hell!”... Stalin did not qualify as a priest, but the boarding-school educated him classically—and influenced him enormously. Black Spot had, perversely, turned Stalin into an atheist Marxist and taught him exactly the repressive tactics—“surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings,” in Stalin’s own words—that he would re-create in his Soviet police state.
Young Stalin - S. Sebag-Motefiore
"It is estimated" by nobody except you and perhaps r/atheism subreddit or somewhere else 'rational sceptics' engage in self-congratulatory groupthink.
800 million
We haven't even added the 90-94% of wars that were not religious into that figure yet, which happens to include the vast majority of all conflicts with over 1 million deaths.
10% of all humans ever without accounting for almost all wars, and the vast majority of the deadliest wars. It's a wonder there are any humans left
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PureX
Veteran Member
"Total ineffectiveness of religious moral teaching"? How so? Because humans have used religion to commit murder and mayhem? They've also twisted history, twisted science, twisted politics, twisted philosophy, and twisted egotism to justify murder and mayhem. So it seems religion is not alone in it's inability to prevent human moral failure.
That's complete BS.
Heyo
Veteran Member
It's not that people come from the outside and detect a religious group to exploit. Almost all the conquistadores, witch hunters, murderers and rapists had a Christian upbringing. In the best case it did nothing to them, in the worst case they became immoral because of the Christian upbringing.
I'm not sure how much Christianity is responsible for Christians being "bad people" but it is at least clear that the existence of Christianity isn't responsible for making "good people".
Religion, Atheism, and Crime
You compiled mostly by plagiarising from 'The Most Made Up List in the World' which appeared on a 2015 thread on Reddit's r/atheism (or one of its derivatives that appear in other internet places wherever highly credulous people congregate),
How Many People Have Been Killed in the Name of … - atheism
Half of the things on that had nothing to do with religion (religiously motivated smallpox anyone?), and most numbers are massively inflated anyway as anyone who wants to think for themselves can work out.
In his book Attrocitology Matthew White has 11 of the top 100 'multicides' (human caused mass deaths) being Religious ones, which is consistent with the estimation that 6-9% of all historical conflicts have been religious in nature.
Jesus wept.
I mean it's not a lack of intelligence that makes you believe this nonsense: "Largely due to [religiously motivated] opposition to condoms"
Given the list you plagiarised from is 5 years old, then that's more people than had ever died (WHO figure is 32 million by 2019), never mind in Africa alone.
Of these how many are Catholic? 5%? 10%? And how many of those 5-10% caught it because they didn't use condoms due to the Church?
This is the standard of the list you chose to believe. It's not an exercise in rational thought, but emotional catharsis. Believing the falsehood is more emotionally pleasing, no matter how ridiculous.
You can lead a horse to water and all that.
The Soviet and Khmer Rouge anti-religious persecutions were 'religiously motivated'
Here is your "lifelong Christian" Joseph Stalin (who backed this up by killing most of the priesthood and almost exterminating the Soviet Church until he changed this due only to the Nazi invasion of Germany)
The seminary was to pull off the singular achievement of supplying the Russian Revolution with some of its most ruthless radicals. “No secular school,” wrote another seminarist, Stalin’s comrade Philip Makharadze, “produced as many atheists as the Tiflis Seminary.” ... The seminary journal reports that Stalin declared himself an atheist, stalked out of prayers, chatted in class, was late for tea and refused to doff his hat to monks. He had eleven more warnings... [Stalin] adored Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Chekhov, whose works he memorized and “could recite by heart.” He admired Tolstoy “but was bored by his Christianity,” later in life scrawling “ha-ha-ha!” beside Tolstoyan musings on redemption and salvation... In his seventies, the dictator was still chuckling about these arguments. “I became an atheist in the first year,” he said, which led to arguments with other boys such as his pious friend Simon Natroshvili. But, after some thought, Natroshvili “came to see me and admitted his mistake.” Stalin was delighted until Simon continued: “If God exists, hell exists too. There’s always a blazing hellfire. To keep the hellfires burning, who can provide enough logs? They would have to be endless and how can endless logs exist?” Stalin remembered, “I burst out laughing! I thought Simon had reached his conclusions by philosophical reasoning but actually he became an atheist for fear that there weren’t enough logs for hell!”... Stalin did not qualify as a priest, but the boarding-school educated him classically—and influenced him enormously. Black Spot had, perversely, turned Stalin into an atheist Marxist and taught him exactly the repressive tactics—“surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings,” in Stalin’s own words—that he would re-create in his Soviet police state.
Young Stalin - S. Sebag-Motefiore
"It is estimated" by nobody except you and perhaps r/atheism subreddit or somewhere else 'rational sceptics' engage in self-congratulatory groupthink.
800 million
We haven't even added the 90-94% of wars that were not religious into that figure yet, which happens to include the vast majority of all conflicts with over 1 million deaths.
10% of all humans ever without accounting for almost all wars, and the vast majority of the deadliest wars. It's a wonder there are any humans left
Nope, that list was compiled using my own research wat before 2015, i i often used it on topix (now defunct) but there are posters here who will be able to verify that... But good guess.
All rights of those conflicts etc were because one side of both were fighting in the name of their faith, trying to impose their faith or belief their faith gave them the right
Yes, the resistance to condoms is a Catholic thing. And you can make up any figures you like if it soothes your ego
Did i say religiously motivated or are you making stuff up again?
Stalin, you are confusing nationalism and intolerance of opposition to the revolution with religion. And using revisionist history to agree with your view. Please give any first hand evidence that the man who was know as the only christian in the kremlin was an atheist.
Nonsence, i understand its about 15% of all wars to be religiously motivated, and many of those carry the highest death tolls
I have come to conclude that the merits of any creed are determined, to a very large measure, by how willing it is to learn from its best thinkers as time goes by.
Right there the Abrahamics have a very strong, self-inflicted disadvantage when contrasted with nearly anything else. Christianity is not the worst off, but it definitely has that flaw.
So, no, Christianity is not that bad... now. Mainly because the realization has settled in that it is just a doctrine.
It could be so much better off were it not for the derangement that is teaching it as "truth". Dogmatism does Christianity (or any other creed) no favors whatsoever. Creeds should embrace and encourage sharp insight from their best and brightest, not denounce it as "heresy" or worse.
Right there the Abrahamics have a very strong, self-inflicted disadvantage when contrasted with nearly anything else. Christianity is not the worst off, but it definitely has that flaw.
So, no, Christianity is not that bad... now. Mainly because the realization has settled in that it is just a doctrine.
It could be so much better off were it not for the derangement that is teaching it as "truth". Dogmatism does Christianity (or any other creed) no favors whatsoever. Creeds should embrace and encourage sharp insight from their best and brightest, not denounce it as "heresy" or worse.
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Augustus
…
Do you genuinely believe that list is a rational, evidence based attempt to analyse an issue in an objective and critical manner?
If you claim you made that list years before 2015, and have 30 million AIDS death in Africa alone, I wouldn't be trying to accuse others of making up WHO figures that are published on their website. HIV/AIDS
Global situation and trends:Since the beginning of the epidemic, 75 million people have been infected with the HIV virus and about 32 million people have died of HIV.
The overwhelming majority of all people who have contracted HIV/AIDS in Africa are not Catholics because the overwhelming majority of Africans are not Catholics. HIV is most prevalent in countries which have around 5% Catholic population.
You're quick to accuse others of bias and egotism, but perhaps might want to consider yourself first.
6 to 9%, not 15%. And no, many of the ones in which religion was a significant motivation do not carry the highest death tolls.
Axelrod & Phillips Encyclopedia of War puts the death toll from religiously motivated wars as 2% of total war deaths (from 7% of total wars).
The total from Attrocitology (included events other than wars too) is that 455 million have been killed in the top 100 'multicides'. Of these nearly 200 million come from the top 5 alone, none of which were religious.
The total for the 11 of the top 100 that were defined as religiously motivated was 47 million.
Number 100 on that list has 300,000 deaths, So to reach your "research based" estimate of at least 800 million, you only need to find another 3012 atrocities that killed 250,000 each
Anyway, for all pre-modern wars, religious or otherwise, numbers are most likely too high as:
a) Historical numbers were not remotely accurate (and are often all we have to rely on)
b) Most chroniclers were not even trying to be accurate as they were basically writing propaganda/hagiography
c) Even if they had wanted to, they had no ability to calculate accurately (e.g. even in the lucky rare situation you had some census info, this couldn't tell between people killed, people who simply moved somewhere else and numbers that reflect reduced governmental capabilities to conduct a census)
d) When we do have some evidence to go on, this most commonly shows historical numbers to be massively inflated
e) Many high numbers are caused by disease which may or may not have had anything to do with the conflict (we also don't add this on to modern numbers hence WW1 isn't recorded as having 115 million deaths)
Do you genuinely believe that list is a rational, evidence based attempt to analyse an issue in an objective and critical manner?
If you claim you made that list years before 2015, and have 30 million AIDS death in Africa alone, I wouldn't be trying to accuse others of making up WHO figures that are published on their website. HIV/AIDS
Global situation and trends:Since the beginning of the epidemic, 75 million people have been infected with the HIV virus and about 32 million people have died of HIV.
The overwhelming majority of all people who have contracted HIV/AIDS in Africa are not Catholics because the overwhelming majority of Africans are not Catholics. HIV is most prevalent in countries which have around 5% Catholic population.
You're quick to accuse others of bias and egotism, but perhaps might want to consider yourself first.
6 to 9%, not 15%. And no, many of the ones in which religion was a significant motivation do not carry the highest death tolls.
Axelrod & Phillips Encyclopedia of War puts the death toll from religiously motivated wars as 2% of total war deaths (from 7% of total wars).
The total from Attrocitology (included events other than wars too) is that 455 million have been killed in the top 100 'multicides'. Of these nearly 200 million come from the top 5 alone, none of which were religious.
The total for the 11 of the top 100 that were defined as religiously motivated was 47 million.
Number 100 on that list has 300,000 deaths, So to reach your "research based" estimate of at least 800 million, you only need to find another 3012 atrocities that killed 250,000 each
Anyway, for all pre-modern wars, religious or otherwise, numbers are most likely too high as:
a) Historical numbers were not remotely accurate (and are often all we have to rely on)
b) Most chroniclers were not even trying to be accurate as they were basically writing propaganda/hagiography
c) Even if they had wanted to, they had no ability to calculate accurately (e.g. even in the lucky rare situation you had some census info, this couldn't tell between people killed, people who simply moved somewhere else and numbers that reflect reduced governmental capabilities to conduct a census)
d) When we do have some evidence to go on, this most commonly shows historical numbers to be massively inflated
e) Many high numbers are caused by disease which may or may not have had anything to do with the conflict (we also don't add this on to modern numbers hence WW1 isn't recorded as having 115 million deaths)
Yes, but you dont, that's fair enough.
Yes i said catholic, there literal interpretations of christianity and Abrahamic faiths. will also shun safe sex as a literal interpretation of there religious book. Only in recent years have some religious leaders began to see the light
Considering you accused me of ignorance end more i think payback only fair
Around 15% if you include religion as a motivating factor
Where possible i used evidenced figures, when not possible i used an average min+max claimed figures divided by 2.
Augustus
…
If you are a scriptural literalist you believe sex before marriage is forbidden, as is homosexuality (and, for some, drug use). Assiduous adherence to scriptural literalism would mean fewer AIDS related deaths, not more.
It is not an attempt at rational, objective understanding to start with a number that is far higher than the total number of all people who have died from AIDS ever and then find a spurious reason why we should consider religion to be the primary cause.
It's like saying the slave trade is 'religious' just because it wasn't expressly prohibited in a religion. Abrahamic religion was actually a massive impediment to slavery, as the 'traditional' view on slavery is that you can enslave whoever you like. There was no moral prohibition on slavery, it didn't require 'religious' justification to make it ok.
Both Islam and Christianity actually prohibited enslaving large proportions of the population, hence why there was minimal slavery within Europe after Christianisation (but it was omnipresent before Christianisation). The European slave trade was driven by colonial expansion and the development of labour intensive agriculture that drove them to do business with the preexisting slave markets in Africa.
The Arab slave trade also long predates Islam, and Islam made it more difficult than it was previously. Arabs were actually reluctant to spread Islam to certain regions because they wanted to keep enslaving people there.
Given the role of Christianity in the abolition of slavery, religion has been without doubt the biggest contributor to the decline in slavery.
Again the reasoning is "how can I make religion look as bad as possible", not "how can I look evaluate the issue in a balnced and critical manner".
Source?
Still gets you nowhere near 100 million never mind 800 million anyway.
For most of those there are no 'evidenced figures', and the numbers you would get from min/max would not be those.
Those are almost uniformly max figures or even above max: 30 Years war 11.5 Max, Crusades 6.5m above max, AIDS 30m above max, "Muslim conquests of India" 80m Max (also completely made up, and also a meaningless category for critical analysis. It's like having a category from the 30 Years War to WW2 called the "Germanic Gencide of Europeans" 250 million deaths caused by Germanic nationalism)
(Also the problem with Max figures is that they are almost always obviously false)
PureX
Veteran Member
What about all the people who had a Christian upbringing and did not commit murder and mayhem? In the best case, their religion made them better humans, in the worst case their religion did not make them worse humans. And there are FAR more of them than the murderous ones. Also, it seems that cultures bent on marauding as a way of life were almost universally NOT Christian. They were all pagan.
Actually, that isn't clear at all as we have no way of knowing who would have done what without their experience of Christianity. You only think this is clear because it feeds your bias.
Heyo
Veteran Member
What about all the people who had no Christian upbringing and did not commit murder and mayhem?
We wont come any further with that kind of discussion. It seems we disagree either about the facts or about their evaluation. So let me ask you: do we agree that, as evidenced by the statistics I linked, on average, Christians are more criminal than non Christians?
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
Those such as Stalin didnt act in the name of atheism. But, Christians, in the name of their bloody Cross, are often terrible. My own experiences include harassment, bullying, patronizing, and general disrespect. They made me feel unwelcomed and unsafe where I lived, telling me every so often to leave - leave my family, my friends, my home. My experience has taught me, there a few people who are the antithesis of Jesus and quick to judgement as Christians.