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Violence on Violence

lewisnotmiller

Grand Hat
Staff member
Premium Member
Yup. Modern society is corrupted. Modern humans will misuse and misinterpret the old testament only to corrupt. the old testament has wisdom. modern humans are bloodthirst. :confused:

Do you think humans (as a whole) were at one point not 'bloodthirsty'?
 

syo

Well-Known Member
Do you think humans (as a whole) were at one point not 'bloodthirsty'?
Yes. humans were cool before christianity. after christianity, they became bloodthirsty. that is why i dislike christianity (because it messes the head and jesus is a fiction character).
 

lewisnotmiller

Grand Hat
Staff member
Premium Member
Yes. humans were cool before christianity. after christianity, they became bloodthirsty. that is why i dislike christianity (because it messes the head and jesus is a fiction character).

You think the Assyrians were...err...cool?
 

Samael_Khan

Goosebender
How does violence against violence solve a problem?

It only solves certain problems, like winning martial arts matches, or in self defense.

Also, if you want to wipe a certain group of people or animals out then it helps with that.

It is pretty worthless when it comes to changing someones ideas.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
How does violence against violence solve a problem?
Modifying the thread's title....
Threat of violence on threat of violence

The best use of violence is as a threatened consequence.
Ideally & ironically, it offers peace without having to injure anyone.
It worked (barely) with the US vs USSR cold war MAD strategy.
At the individual level....
If wisely employed, a person bent on mayhem will be less likely
to act it out if adverse consequences are known & severe enuf to
dissuade perps. But it's complicated.

The who....
Who makes the threat in order to protect from malefactors?
If police do, it' more likely to inflame the protestors than if it's
property owners defending their own. This is because cops
represent the power which protesters believe oppress them.
Owners are just individuals (except to the anti-capitalist types).

The how....
Methods can differ. Cops have shields & less than lethal weapons.
And they have an obligation to insert themselves into dangerous
situations.
Owners don't have those tools. They're involuntarily put in a situation
wherein they defend themselves & their property. They have no
batons, shields, tasers, helmets, or bullet proof vests....just guns.
So they can pose a greater threat than do cops. If armed defense
is made obvioius, this can be effective in keeping the peace.
 

Fool

ALL in all
Premium Member
Personally I don't see how we could have stopped Hitler from dominating the world if we hadn't used violence to counter the violence he was perpetuating. In this case it certainly solved the problem of Nazi expansionism.


Yet you still have neo-nazis and even some nazis that are still living
 

lewisnotmiller

Grand Hat
Staff member
Premium Member
I think the question implies something, and I don't understand what. :D
Wikipedia is my friend, but am i missing something?

Just that you said humanity was cool before Christianity, bloodthirsty after it.

The Assyrian Empire was around well before Christianity and is fairly well renowned for their aggressive expansion and brutal repression of rebellion and dissent.

It's just an example, though, there are others.
 

syo

Well-Known Member
Just that you said humanity was cool before Christianity, bloodthirsty after it.

The Assyrian Empire was around well before Christianity and is fairly well renowned for their aggressive expansion and brutal repression of rebellion and dissent.

It's just an example, though, there are others.
I don't think Assyrians were driven by bloodthirst.

Christians are driven by bloodthirst. They even drink the blood of Jesus. :confused:
 

February-Saturday

Devil Worshiper
I tried to make this post as short as I could, but I had a lot to touch on. I'll preface it by saying that I'm currently a pacifist of the "I'd rather die than hit you" kind.

How is violence a solution to violence? It destroys immediate threats, and the show of force chases future threats out of the public eye. That's true in everything from wars to protestors to police departments. It cannot, however, solve the underlying problems that cause this violence to exist in the first place and arguably leads to greater opposition. In this sense, violence really isn't much of a solution to violence at all. It's also very rarely the only possible solution, even when it can be a ruthlessly efficient one.

The most common example of justified violence is the war against Nazi Germany, but the Nazi movement was laid on the back of fear-mongering, tribalism, economic hardship, disillusionment, and a number of other problems that weren't properly addressed. The Nazis were merely a symptom of a range of unaddressed problems. Violence only addressed the symptom. And this is on top of the fact that the Nazis were undermined by a wide variety of nonviolent actors, so it's hard to say whether this violence was even necessary.

This is obfuscated more because it lead to the Military-Industrial Complex in America, which glorified war to turn profits and created a culture that would later spiral into the Vietnam War. Violence solved the problem of Nazis, but it created nigh-invisible cracks that only lead to further violence. The systemic problems underneath that the Nazis sprang out of in the first place continued to fester, if they weren't outright worsened, but they were harder to see and address when they were no longer goose-stomping in formation.

Theoretically, of course, if the majority of people in Nazi Germany practiced civil disobedience and peaceful rebellion, then its horrors would have been mitigated if not outright prevented before it ever got to the state it did. Unfortunately, the European normalization of the of state-sanctioned violence was instrumental in the rise of fascism and Bolshevism.

TL;DR: This is a really hard-hitting question that I don't think has a clear answer yet. Even in what might seem like the most obvious clear-cut cases of violence being the best solution, the reality is complex. There's a lot to unpack and address, and a lot of history, game theory, social psychology, and ethics to consult experts on. My brief and over-simplified opinion is, "violence doesn't solve violence."
 

Rational Agnostic

Well-Known Member
I don't agree with anyone simply saying "it doesn't." This isn't accurate or representative of some circumstances we actually experience in reality at all.

When I was a kid I was bullied. There was a set of kids who would get off the bus at my stop and call me names, push me, throw things at me, etc. Well, one day, they kept egging one of them on to fight me, but he was a little guy, and I was larger, and the little guy didn't want to get involved, and neither did I, so nothing happened. Well, this little guy had a friend who felt that his inability to fight me was some kind of insult to their friendship, so he decided to fight me himself the next day. I wanted no part of it, but damned if I was just going to take the licks and crawl off somewhere to lick my wounds later. So I fought back. At one point he had me down on my back and was coming at me, and I kicked up off the ground and hit him hard in the chest and he bowled over. In another moment I had a handful of his hair a was beating on his head repeatedly. The fight dispersed when a neighbor came out from their house and scared all the others off. The kid went around telling everyone how he "won" the fight. But I obviously knew better - I had gotten some good, solid violence of my own in there and kept it fairly even, and he knew it. Which is why he never tried it again - and indeed stopped bullying me altogether. They all did.

Violence begets violence. Sometimes you have show someone that if they are willing to approach you with violence, then you are taking that as license to do the same. Just look at any interaction of violence in the animal kingdom. Does one of the animals EVER approach the situation in "peaceful protest?" Not that I know of or have seen. Many seem to think we are so much different - but our base understanding and mentality remains there, and understands that when someone reacts to our violence with more in return than we care to take, the best course is to back down. You can get people to back down. You can. To say "it doesn't work" is ridiculous, foolish even.

Good example. I also think that violence is sometimes necessary. Hitler definitely wouldn't have backed down because of "peaceful protests."
 

Fool

ALL in all
Premium Member
Yet, if we HADN'T used violence during WWII then Nazi's would currently rule the world. Are you suggesting we would have been better off NOT fighting against Nazism?
no, i'm suggesting physical force doesn't change much of anything; if you can't change the heart and mind. might doesn't make right but it can check it, or like a fire, keep it from getting out of control.


being a fire starter is easy. fighting huge conflagrations/fires takes a lot of work
 

QuestioningMind

Well-Known Member
no, i'm suggesting physical force doesn't change much of anything; if you can't change the heart and mind. might doesn't make right but it can check it, or like a fire, keep it from getting out of control.


being a fire starter is easy. fighting huge conflagrations/fires takes a lot of work

I guess we have different definitions of what 'change much of anything' means. The use of violence by the Allies during WWII DRASTICALLY changed the course of history, in my opinion. Imagine living in a world where Nazism dominates everything, where all Jewish people have been exterminated - as well as a long list of other 'undesirables' - where Aryans have rights and everyone else is treated like lesser beings worthy of nothing more than slavery.
 

Kangaroo Feathers

Yea, it is written in the Book of Cyril...
Violence is a last resort. That's different to something to avoid at all costs. Sometimes violence visit c necessary.
 

Fool

ALL in all
Premium Member
I guess we have different definitions of what 'change much of anything' means. The use of violence by the Allies during WWII DRASTICALLY changed the course of history, in my opinion. Imagine living in a world where Nazism dominates everything, where all Jewish people have been exterminated - as well as a long list of other 'undesirables' - where Aryans have rights and everyone else is treated like lesser beings worthy of nothing more than slavery.


ideas, whether good/bad, are bullet proof. service to self/other as self cannot be destroyed, it simply transforms as some other form of the same.


why won't you die?




taken to it's logical conclusion service to self is doomed to fail at the 5 density/dimension. service to self is only logical at the Absolute
 
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