Christianity, the religion for anti-intellectuals.
- Thread starter Hume
- Start date
Thanks for blowing the cover on my trolling of Laozi.
Totalitarian atheists were given specific orders by the leadership to murder bishops, priests, deacons, Buddhist monks. The priest in my fathers village was murdered by Bolsheviks. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot specifically intended to eradicate religion in the name of scientific atheism and Marxist materialism.
You can't cite the stories in the Hebrew Bible as history, which are literary events from stories rooted in the Bronze age, and which at any rate is the Hebrew tradition, not the_Christian tradition.
Litmus
Verified User
but also, communism has killed millions and its an explicitly atheist regime.
there is that.
Doesn't seem like it. The first thing you thought of when it comes to moral depravity was the four thousand people killed in the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago, while deliberately sidestepping the 20 million murdered by secular governments just in the last 80 years
Daylight63
Verified User
Sorry not intended. (I give you kudos for doing so!)
But the fact remains that many Christians TODAY cannot bring themselves to critique the story I laid out. Which is kind of the problem.
Religion is dedicated to the concept that there are moral absolutes and one of those, perhaps chief among them, is that murder is bad. We are told time and again that atheists have no morality so they must be liable to murdering people. But in reality religion has a STRICT BAR on it and yet religion accounts for a HUGE number of murders and deaths.
The fact that religion has strict rules against these things which it then turns around and does on a large scale is actually WORSE precisely because we are asked to accept that BELIEVERS have morality and are thus safer people to be around than atheists.
In reality secularism is no better or worse than religion. Both do very bad things, both do very good things. But only one of them justifies their bad actions using the very same excuse they have to believe that there are moral absolutes which should never be done.
This thread was not intended to be a discussion of moral depravity.
When it comes to moral depravity, I am discussing real historical events, and to a degree so is lao tzu.
Stories from the Bronze Age in the Hebrew Bible are not confirmed historical events, and there is no mainstream Christian church today that points to the slaughter of the canninites to justify violence.
The most diabolical crimes of moral depravity in the last century were committed by secular authorities
Daylight63
Verified User
Agreed. I was simply responding to your points.
I think the Crusades are quite real and resulted in the deaths of millions of people for explicitly religion reasons. And then there are countless sectarian violence cases throughtout history in which religion was used as the justification.
I am glad to drop that so long as we don't gloss over the REAL things that religion has done and has been done in the name of religion explicitly.
Do you think it is OK if a philosophy violates its own explicit rules on a relatively common ad hoc basis?
Litmus
Verified User
So you are the type that gets out of the kitchen when it gets too hot. You couldn't compete against the argument that Medieval scholaticism and natural philosophy was a bridge to modern science and the western intellectual tradition, so you had to leave the kitchen and start complaining about moral depravity
Litmus
Verified User
I disagree with your recap.
The crusades were 1000 years ago and have already been adjudicated. There hasn't been a major war, crusade, or inquisition involving Christianity for 500 to 1000 years.
I already acknowledged the Spanish inquisition and it's death count - around 4,000 dead. Lao Tzu just needed to be taught that if he wants to dodge all my points about Medieval intellectual history and divert the the topic to morality, the death count comparison between theocracies and secular governments isn't even in the same ballpark. In the scorecard of depraved bloodthirsty morality, secular governments win hands down, and by a country mile.
So you actually do want to belabor the tangent about moral depravity. Post your proof that any mainstream Christian denomination today points to the Hebrew Bible as a set of rules that justifies and commands genocide and aggressive warfare by Christians
Daylight63
Verified User
Was it shortly after that that Christianity discovered that murder was wrong? Why does it matter how old the crime is? I didn't realize that in a moral system there was ever a "statute of limitations" on murder. I thought the value of religion was to help us know the moral absolutes.
None do.
That's the point.
There's NO version of Christianity in which murder is a good thing. So it is important to understand why those cases in which the faith itself has been used in support of murder happen.
There's no religion on earth that holds murder as a "virtue" or anything less than a grievous moral failure. Yet even today we have people using religion to murder others every single day. You don't have to go back 1000 years. You can just go back a couple years.
So no examples of crusades, inquisitions, or witch burning by Christianity in the last 500 years.
And no proof provided that any Christian denomination today points to the Hebrew Bible as a commandment to commit genocide and unprovoked warfare.
Glad we cleared that up.
Daylight63
Verified User
This doesn't feel like a response to what I wrote.
Why do you have to jump in your time machine and time travel back 500 to 1,000 years to find a major crime against humanity perpetrated by the church?
You and Lao Tsu are making it sound like for the last 500 years the church has looked pretty good at least in comparison to all the 20th century genocides, mass terror, and ethnic cleansing committed by secular and atheist governments.
I guess my comments about Medieval scholaticism, natural philosophy, and the Medieval universities were so overwhelming you and Lao Tsu had to divert the thread topic from intellectual history to crimes against humanity.
Daylight63
Verified User
You don't. You can look no further than modern times to see sectarian violence aplenty. All done in the explicit name of the faith.
And, again, why does it matter when the sin was committed? Was murder OK in the early church?
I really get the sense here that you are not willing to give atheists the benefit of the doubt. You seem quite capable of ignoring the many cases of millions of people dying at the hands of the religious who did so expressly in the name of their religion.
Actually not at all! I loved the Scholastics. I have been to more Medieval sites in my travels around Europe than I care to recount and I know the REAL VALUE of the church to early educational institutions.
I don't think the MODERN CHristian church cares as much about this level of erudition but that's hardly distracting from the amazing work they did do.
Oh, no, I was responding to YOU. Perhaps you were diverting it because Lao Tse did first. I can't speak to that. But my points were all addressed to you. So it would be a diversion you propagated as well.
Sorry for the confusion.
You keep moving the goal post.
We were talking specifically about Christianity.
We weren't talking about 'faith', which is your way of sneaking Hindu-Muslim and Arab-Israeli conflicts into the thread.
There haven't been any major wars, crusades, genocides, or notable war crimes by Christianity in the last 500 years. That's precisely why you have to keep searching ancient history for examples to complain about.
My theory is that the religious wars of the 1600s were so devastating and apocalyptic, that a permanent lasting truce was basically called between competing Catholicism and Protestant sects.
American fundamentalists tend to not value higher education, but that's not universally true for all Christians. Pope Francis is probably the most highly educated leader of a nation state on the planet.
Mason 22
Verified User
You've confused organized religion with a personal relationship with YHWH through the Holy Spirit!
Oil and water!
Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
European Anti-Semitism after 1800
The antipathies of Poles, Germans, Russians and others against Jews are often explained as if they were religiously based in the patristic and medieval manner. From the early 19th century on, however, anti-Jewish sentiment of Catholic and Protestant Europe, itself increasingly secularized, had other roots no less mythical. The proper term for it is anti-Semitism. Its target was Jewish ethnicity. It was primarily politically and economically motivated. Demagogues, however, were only too happy to put the ancient Christian rhetoric of anti-Judaism in its service.Germany was populated with more Jews than any country in Western Europe when Hitler came to power. It also had the same ugly heritage of anti-Jewish sentiment as all Christian Europe. The short-lived Weimar Republic could not deliver Germany from the severe economic hardships it experienced after World War I. Jews had been the Republic’s strong supporters and a few of them were the architects of its constitution, a fact that Hitler capitalized upon. Huge inflation in 1923 and the depression of 1929 increased Germany’s problems. Some leading capitalist families, gentile and Jewish, managed to escape these problems, but the eyes of the angry populace were trained on the Jews rather than the gentiles.
Summary
Was there a direct line from the anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, as some have alleged? Probably not. The line was indirect, beginning around 150 with gentile misreadings of the bitter intra-Jewish polemic contained in those writings. The theological anti-Judaism of the Church fathers, repeated endlessly in medieval and Renaissance-Reformation preaching, was the far greater culprit. It was the continuing rationale for the indefensible Christian conduct of the Middle Ages onward that was xenophobic and angry at Jewish resistance to absorption into the cultural mainstream. But because the Church’s preaching and its catechizing had long shaped the popular mind, a new phenomenon was able to come to birth: modern anti-Semitism.Can the mischief of eighteen and one half centuries be reversed? Catholics point to statements like section 4 of the Vatican II statement on non-Christian religions (Nostra Aetate, October, 1965) which exculpated the Jews of all time of the charge of deicide ("killing God"), and warned Catholics against thinking that anything in their scriptures taught that Jews were a people accursed or rejected. Numerous statements have come from Protestant bodies in the U.S. and Europe deploring Christian anti-Semitism.
