Litmus
Verified User
I didn't metntion Marla maples.
Ive talked about your whitewashing of the Catholic church.
Christianity, the religion for anti-intellectuals.
- Thread starter Hume
- Start date
Ive talked about your whitewashing of the Catholic church.
It's more important to talk about your whitewashing of the genocide and mass terror of atheist and secular governments in our own historical time frame, than to look in the rear view mirror to complain about four thousand people killed in the Spanish inquisition 600 years ago.
Litmus
Verified User
I;ve repeatedly said those are also bad.
you want a carve out and excuses for the Catholic church.
Daylight63
Verified User
The flowering of intellectual work within the Church surely must be the Middle Ages. The Scholastics and their logical defenses of the faith are a sign of deeper thought about what the faith means. And the monasteries were about the only place that the written word and knowledge were kept in any real sense. The great universities of Europe arose out of the church in the Middle Ages.
And shortly thereafter we see the wars of the Reformation as the Church split itself apart and explicitly in the name of that same religion which previously had been anchored by some of the great thinkers of our time, saw itself kill up to 17 million people. In the name of Christianity.
I think we can see that whatever the OP wishes to achieve, it wont' really matter in the long run. Since Christianity has almost never in its history truly been free of murder on a grand scale with the BRIEF exception of the last 200 years.
So it becomes necessary for us to explicitly carve out all of Christian history except for the last 200 years and then draw all our conclusions on that because it confirms the "peacefulness" of Christianity and the "evil" of atheism. Well, not really. But you get the idea.
So the OP has a flaw. It presumes there's some lack of intellectual rigor in the modern Christian church. I will go further and say that even when the Church was in FULL FLOWER intellectually it was still mired in normal human bloodlust that makes it no better or more vituous than atheism.
And shortly thereafter we see the wars of the Reformation as the Church split itself apart and explicitly in the name of that same religion which previously had been anchored by some of the great thinkers of our time, saw itself kill up to 17 million people. In the name of Christianity.
I think we can see that whatever the OP wishes to achieve, it wont' really matter in the long run. Since Christianity has almost never in its history truly been free of murder on a grand scale with the BRIEF exception of the last 200 years.
So it becomes necessary for us to explicitly carve out all of Christian history except for the last 200 years and then draw all our conclusions on that because it confirms the "peacefulness" of Christianity and the "evil" of atheism. Well, not really. But you get the idea.
So the OP has a flaw. It presumes there's some lack of intellectual rigor in the modern Christian church. I will go further and say that even when the Church was in FULL FLOWER intellectually it was still mired in normal human bloodlust that makes it no better or more vituous than atheism.
You have studiously failed to acknowledge, recognize, confess that the moral atrocities committed by secular and atheist authorities in our own historical time frame, far far outweigh by many orders of magnitude all the atrocities committed in the Inquisition and Crusades. Outweigh them in both depravity and scale.
Just as important, we have also mostly reflected and learned the lessons about the moral atrocities from a thousand years ago, whilst we are still reflecting on the lessons of the atrocities by secular authorities in the 20th century.
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
So, what is the religion of intellectuals? Just curious...“It is no exaggeration to say that the history of western populism – spiritual and political – began with Paul.” He is “the cultured despiser of culture”, “a learned fanatic of the highest order”, who “held up as spiritual models innocent children, uneducated workmen, and lambs with vacant eyes, forever enshrining reverse snobbery as a Christian virtue”.
Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know by Mark Lilla review – the enduring power of stupidity
A New York scholar’s study of our long history of acclaiming the fool and ignoring the facts is timely and terrifically wittywww.theguardian.com
Litmus
Verified User
They're all bad.
I have acknowledged this.
you want special Catholic exceptions.
catholics are not as better as you portray.
and another thing.
you don't, nor do Catholics, define Christianity.
Daylight63
Verified User
Used to be Christianity about 500 years ago.
Religion seems to be uncorrelated or negatively correlated with education these days in general
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
What about today?
Daylight63
Verified User
I believe I explicitly answered that in the second sentence in my post. Intellectual pursuits seem less a "thing" in the modern Church but certainly not completely absent. I don't see any real significant positive correlation between education and religiousness.
There are highly educated people who are far smarter than anyone on this board who are true believers. And the same type of person who do not believe.
There was a time when the Church was the primary source for knowledge and knowledge management but those days are loooooooooong gone.
Even in the full flower of Christian intellectual pursuits, when the Church was at the top of the heap in information and information management, they still couldn't determine that murder in the name of the religion was "bad". Sure they SAID it was, and the Bible from whom they worked, was pretty clear on the topic from the beginning, the church still found a way to murder with aplomb. That's a very key point. SInce it doesn't confirm Cypress's position that part of Christian history (which accounts for MOST of it) is to be ignored. Despite the fact that at no point has God ever said "OK, that whole commandment against murder, well, that's not really going to be applicable to you until about 1790 or so".
And I'm not singling out the Church! HUMANS murder each other in astounding numbers completely independent of the philosophy that drives them. Atheist, religious, it matters not at all.
Cypress wants to discuss a "bespoke" block of time so that his results match his intuition. But it is flawed in that it is a "windowing" of the data which is not appropriate. Cypress wishes to ignore the distant past of the Church (ironically in a discussion of the Church's history with regards to intellectual pursuits wherein the PEAK of those intellectual pursuits was buried in the exact time frame Cypress wishes to ELIMINATE from the discussion of whether the church has a better track record than non-religious murder.)
Is this a diversion? Well, if it is I was following Cypress in the diversion so I will claim not culpability in this. But I think the concepts can be successfully married.
In reality the BENEFITS secularism brought to the world FAR outweigh the actual benefits brought to the world by religion in the last 500 years. The reason Christians spent millennia dying before the age of 40 is because the religion further shackled science based on their FEELINGS. With the rise of SECULAR thought, often coming from the very same intellectuals in the Church itself (eg Steno for one!), we have the flowering of science which is infinitely more explanatory than the faith that preceded it. It has found truth where the religion could only offer "guesses" and when the guesses didn't hold up to scrutiny, they resorted to forcing it by fiat. Science has significantly advanced our ability to thrive and survive and even explains why murder is bad.
But religion insists for itself some things which are not its to claim. It CAN claim that it provides "comfort" and that is a GOOD THING. IT can also claim to induce people to do "good" (but that's only a hit -or-miss proposition. Just look at the current President who claims to be a Christian but clearly has no interest in Christian charity or any of that other expensive stuff).
What religion CANNOT claim is a corner on moral truth. They just can't. They came out swinging saying THIS MORAL TRUTH WHICH IS OURS IS THE DIRECT WORD OF THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE. Well, that set them up for a fall at the beginning. At no point has humanity even UNDER THE AEGIS OF CHRISTIANITY been free of murder. The faith ESTABLISHED that murder was wrong AT THE VERY BEGINNING yet they turned around and continued murdering with aplomb.
Daylight63
Verified User
@Cypress I will be glad to abandon your diversion on this topic but I did want to share with you one last thing I found in my random wanderings around the internet this morning and it has some key points that actually might help frame your point about the number of Christians the Soviets murdered in the name of atheism for them being Christian.
(Beware, though, it is several paragraphs and I know your disclination for reading too much stuff, so I'll try to highlight the REALLY important bits in bold red so you can just go to those without having to read too much):
From Reddit (LINKY):
In response to the claim that the SOviets murdered 20 million Christians or religious folks:
"There seems to be a lot of disingenuous stuff going on here. For the top end "estimate" of 20,000,000, the source seems to be M. Johnson, Todd (2012). "Christian Martyrdom: A Global Democratic Assessment". McGrath Institute for Church Life. I looked it up, and it offers this, without any further citation:
1921–50, Christians die in Soviet prison camps 15,000,000
1950–80, Christians die in Soviet prison camps 5,000,000
1925, Soviets attempt to liquidate Roman Catholics 1,200,000
I will leave the fact that that actually adds up to 21,200,000, not 20,000,000, aside, as it might be getting into some weird stuff within certain branches of Christianity which don't see Catholics as Christian. The main point, and the first point of disingenuous presentation, is this is using weasel words to claim that over 20,000,000 Christians died in Soviet prison camps, and calling them martyrs, but it doesn't actually prove that they were killed because they were Christians. That is to say, if someone was sent to a camp because they were a Kulak, who happened to be Christian but that wasn't part of their sentence, they are still getting counted here.
That is minor though. The real issue is that they are claiming at least 20,000,000 people died in Soviet prison camps, 15 million under Stalin, and then another 5 million after. The total estimate of the cumulative camp population for the period under Stalin is 18 million. Even adding up all the different alternatives such as exile or forced labor outside of the Gulag system, we're looking at estimates that top out at 28.7 million. And keep in mind that is total people who were placed within the umbrella of this system, not deaths. Even assuming the only deaths were Christians, the claim there would be a mortality rate of 83% if we take camps literally, and still 52% if we use it more expansively.
What is the actual number? The best hard number we can provide is 2,749,163 for combined deaths of both the camps and exile villages in the Stalinist period, based off of Soviet records (although the official tally is closer to 1.7m). Aside from being under 10%, also notice that it is literally an order of magnitude lower than the number given only for Christian deaths by Johnson. That number is a baseline though, especially if you want to include deaths outside of the camp system, but even if we include political executions done outside the camps, we're looking at adding less than 1,000,000 more (786,098 being one of the more precise estimates based on archival records), so still falling well short of that target. Scholars are of course cautious to warn that any uncritical reliance on Soviet records will leave an incomplete picture, but even revisions such as adding in excess mortality of recently released prisoners, who's deaths can be attributable to their time there, means increasing the death toll by perhaps 25%, and remains quite a few hops, skips, and jumps from increasing by an order of magnitude. If we look at post-collapse research, even the absolute highest estimate which might be put in the realm of 'credible' that I am aware of is that of comes from Golfo Alexopoulos, but she still only is arguing that 6,000,000 deaths should be attributed to the Soviet gulags and system of detention, so we still remain quite far off, with a mortality rate of only around 30% under Stalin.
Now, to be sure, that 20,000,000 isn't taken completely out of thin air. It is the number that you will find in The Black Book of Communism, but that of course is considered a wildly problematic source with numbers that are "pure conjecture". And of course, it must again be emphasized that the BBoC was not citing that as a number of Christian Martyrs, but the complete number of all people killed by the Soviet Union for any and all reasons, and not just in the camps, but everywhere. In point of fact, the BBoC doesn't really cite Christianity at all in its (heavily inflated and not well cited) estimates for mortality under the USSR, nor do older scholars the Robert Conquest, who also would offer up much higher estimates than are accepted these days, but certainly won't claim those numbers were all killed for their faith.
...
I've relied here a good bit on Applebaum's Gulag: A History for estimates. Not because I consider her's to be the best source - I'd call it fine but not standout - but specifically due to the fact that the criticisms of her work is that she is a harsh critic of the USSR and that it influences her writings, which is to say I went directly to her as I trust her to provide the most critical analysis she deems supportable, and her numbers to be the estimates she considers to be justified in arguing for even if she would like the number to be higher. To be sure, it is hardly the only estimate out there, and she isn't even the highest, as this continues to be an ongoing debate (See for instance the discussion in Kritika 23, 4 (Fall 2022) between Nakonechnyi and Wheatcroft). Nakonechnyi's chapter in Rethinking the Gulag is also a useful examination of the current state of historiography and recent approaches to revised estimates.
So to recap at this point, several things can be said. The first is that the numbers, broadly speaking, being used by these estimates reflect at best outdated scholarship that was heavily ideologically driven and are quite out of line with modern scholarship on the topic of oppression with the Soviet system; and the second is that even if we take the numbers at face value, the specific application of them to being the deaths of Christians martyred for their faith is completely wrong, as it can only be true if we accept every death caused by the USSR to have been done because the victims were Christian.
At this point of course, one more additional note is worth adding, namely just how persecuted was Christianity in the USSR? I've written a good bit on that here up through the Stalinist period, and to be sure, being openly Christian in the USSR did not mean you were going to have a fun time. Thousands of priests were killed by the Soviet state, in particular during the first years of the Revolution, but that is a fraction of the claimed number. The best place to look that we have hard numbers would perhaps be the Purges, but there we still only see about 50,000 people arrested because of their Christian beliefs in 1937-1938. Many (but not all) were executed, in particular those who were clergy, although those numbers include laypeople as well, but even if we assume all of them were killed, and use the low end estimates of the total killed in the Great Purge, of about 700,000, then only 7% of the dead can reasonably be called martyrs for their faith. And of course taking a high-end estimate such as Robert Conquest who claimed the Purge's toll to be around 3 million, that pushes it down to under 2%. As such, the point here is not to say that the Church wasn't persecuted, as it was, extensively, but it is to say that Christians killed for their faith made up a tiny percentage of the broader spectrum of Soviet oppression and death. For more on the Church in the USSR, I would point to Kalkandjieva's The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948: From Decline to Resurrection.
EDIT: So I checked the other source listed that goes with the still absurdly high 12 million, which is James M. Nelson, “Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality”, Springer, 2009. In this case, the book actually does have a footnote! This claim is cited to `Bergman, S. "Twentieth-Century Martyrs: A Meditation," in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith. Someone kindly put this piece online here so I was able to read it and, the claim there is still quite groanworthy, but it is worth emphasizing that they only claim:
The Orthodox communion of saints, determined by a less technical process than that carried out by the Roman Catholic church, includes hundreds of thousands of such martyrs and estimates as many as 12 million Christians to have perished under the most recent atheistic regime.
The implication there would be that those killed for their faith numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and than 12 million is the number who died while being Christian. The first number... not that outlandish, probably. At least in order-of-magnitude ballpark? The second one is neigh impossible to actually say is reasonable or not given how Christian faith was kept secret by many, but certainly, the claim isn't that they were victims of Christian persecution, just persecuted people who happened to be Christian. So even if we take Bergman at face value, there is a game of telephone here where the larger number is being used for what the smaller number actually reflects. So even the source that ultimately was used here is only claiming martyrs in the range of hundreds of thousands."
(Again, sorry for such a long thing. I know reading is not one of your favorite hobbies in this area)
(Beware, though, it is several paragraphs and I know your disclination for reading too much stuff, so I'll try to highlight the REALLY important bits in bold red so you can just go to those without having to read too much):
From Reddit (LINKY):
In response to the claim that the SOviets murdered 20 million Christians or religious folks:
"There seems to be a lot of disingenuous stuff going on here. For the top end "estimate" of 20,000,000, the source seems to be M. Johnson, Todd (2012). "Christian Martyrdom: A Global Democratic Assessment". McGrath Institute for Church Life. I looked it up, and it offers this, without any further citation:
1921–50, Christians die in Soviet prison camps 15,000,000
1950–80, Christians die in Soviet prison camps 5,000,000
1925, Soviets attempt to liquidate Roman Catholics 1,200,000
I will leave the fact that that actually adds up to 21,200,000, not 20,000,000, aside, as it might be getting into some weird stuff within certain branches of Christianity which don't see Catholics as Christian. The main point, and the first point of disingenuous presentation, is this is using weasel words to claim that over 20,000,000 Christians died in Soviet prison camps, and calling them martyrs, but it doesn't actually prove that they were killed because they were Christians. That is to say, if someone was sent to a camp because they were a Kulak, who happened to be Christian but that wasn't part of their sentence, they are still getting counted here.
That is minor though. The real issue is that they are claiming at least 20,000,000 people died in Soviet prison camps, 15 million under Stalin, and then another 5 million after. The total estimate of the cumulative camp population for the period under Stalin is 18 million. Even adding up all the different alternatives such as exile or forced labor outside of the Gulag system, we're looking at estimates that top out at 28.7 million. And keep in mind that is total people who were placed within the umbrella of this system, not deaths. Even assuming the only deaths were Christians, the claim there would be a mortality rate of 83% if we take camps literally, and still 52% if we use it more expansively.
What is the actual number? The best hard number we can provide is 2,749,163 for combined deaths of both the camps and exile villages in the Stalinist period, based off of Soviet records (although the official tally is closer to 1.7m). Aside from being under 10%, also notice that it is literally an order of magnitude lower than the number given only for Christian deaths by Johnson. That number is a baseline though, especially if you want to include deaths outside of the camp system, but even if we include political executions done outside the camps, we're looking at adding less than 1,000,000 more (786,098 being one of the more precise estimates based on archival records), so still falling well short of that target. Scholars are of course cautious to warn that any uncritical reliance on Soviet records will leave an incomplete picture, but even revisions such as adding in excess mortality of recently released prisoners, who's deaths can be attributable to their time there, means increasing the death toll by perhaps 25%, and remains quite a few hops, skips, and jumps from increasing by an order of magnitude. If we look at post-collapse research, even the absolute highest estimate which might be put in the realm of 'credible' that I am aware of is that of comes from Golfo Alexopoulos, but she still only is arguing that 6,000,000 deaths should be attributed to the Soviet gulags and system of detention, so we still remain quite far off, with a mortality rate of only around 30% under Stalin.
Now, to be sure, that 20,000,000 isn't taken completely out of thin air. It is the number that you will find in The Black Book of Communism, but that of course is considered a wildly problematic source with numbers that are "pure conjecture". And of course, it must again be emphasized that the BBoC was not citing that as a number of Christian Martyrs, but the complete number of all people killed by the Soviet Union for any and all reasons, and not just in the camps, but everywhere. In point of fact, the BBoC doesn't really cite Christianity at all in its (heavily inflated and not well cited) estimates for mortality under the USSR, nor do older scholars the Robert Conquest, who also would offer up much higher estimates than are accepted these days, but certainly won't claim those numbers were all killed for their faith.
...
I've relied here a good bit on Applebaum's Gulag: A History for estimates. Not because I consider her's to be the best source - I'd call it fine but not standout - but specifically due to the fact that the criticisms of her work is that she is a harsh critic of the USSR and that it influences her writings, which is to say I went directly to her as I trust her to provide the most critical analysis she deems supportable, and her numbers to be the estimates she considers to be justified in arguing for even if she would like the number to be higher. To be sure, it is hardly the only estimate out there, and she isn't even the highest, as this continues to be an ongoing debate (See for instance the discussion in Kritika 23, 4 (Fall 2022) between Nakonechnyi and Wheatcroft). Nakonechnyi's chapter in Rethinking the Gulag is also a useful examination of the current state of historiography and recent approaches to revised estimates.
So to recap at this point, several things can be said. The first is that the numbers, broadly speaking, being used by these estimates reflect at best outdated scholarship that was heavily ideologically driven and are quite out of line with modern scholarship on the topic of oppression with the Soviet system; and the second is that even if we take the numbers at face value, the specific application of them to being the deaths of Christians martyred for their faith is completely wrong, as it can only be true if we accept every death caused by the USSR to have been done because the victims were Christian.
At this point of course, one more additional note is worth adding, namely just how persecuted was Christianity in the USSR? I've written a good bit on that here up through the Stalinist period, and to be sure, being openly Christian in the USSR did not mean you were going to have a fun time. Thousands of priests were killed by the Soviet state, in particular during the first years of the Revolution, but that is a fraction of the claimed number. The best place to look that we have hard numbers would perhaps be the Purges, but there we still only see about 50,000 people arrested because of their Christian beliefs in 1937-1938. Many (but not all) were executed, in particular those who were clergy, although those numbers include laypeople as well, but even if we assume all of them were killed, and use the low end estimates of the total killed in the Great Purge, of about 700,000, then only 7% of the dead can reasonably be called martyrs for their faith. And of course taking a high-end estimate such as Robert Conquest who claimed the Purge's toll to be around 3 million, that pushes it down to under 2%. As such, the point here is not to say that the Church wasn't persecuted, as it was, extensively, but it is to say that Christians killed for their faith made up a tiny percentage of the broader spectrum of Soviet oppression and death. For more on the Church in the USSR, I would point to Kalkandjieva's The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948: From Decline to Resurrection.
EDIT: So I checked the other source listed that goes with the still absurdly high 12 million, which is James M. Nelson, “Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality”, Springer, 2009. In this case, the book actually does have a footnote! This claim is cited to `Bergman, S. "Twentieth-Century Martyrs: A Meditation," in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith. Someone kindly put this piece online here so I was able to read it and, the claim there is still quite groanworthy, but it is worth emphasizing that they only claim:
The Orthodox communion of saints, determined by a less technical process than that carried out by the Roman Catholic church, includes hundreds of thousands of such martyrs and estimates as many as 12 million Christians to have perished under the most recent atheistic regime.
The implication there would be that those killed for their faith numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and than 12 million is the number who died while being Christian. The first number... not that outlandish, probably. At least in order-of-magnitude ballpark? The second one is neigh impossible to actually say is reasonable or not given how Christian faith was kept secret by many, but certainly, the claim isn't that they were victims of Christian persecution, just persecuted people who happened to be Christian. So even if we take Bergman at face value, there is a game of telephone here where the larger number is being used for what the smaller number actually reflects. So even the source that ultimately was used here is only claiming martyrs in the range of hundreds of thousands."
(Again, sorry for such a long thing. I know reading is not one of your favorite hobbies in this area)
I specifically said the Inquisition and the Crusades were moral crimes when looking in the rear view mirror by one thousand years.They're all bad.
I have acknowledged this.
you want special Catholic exceptions.
catholics are not as better as you portray.
and another thing.
you don't, nor do Catholics, define Christianity.
The only remaining question is why you are obsessed with thousand year old moral crimes that have long been adjudicated and reflected on, while whitewashing much more horrible depravities in our own historical times, and which we are still coming to terms with.
Litmus
Verified User
moral atheists realize that cooperation and considering the other, and reciprocity and non violence are good for human progress,
and they agree with Jesus on that.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is ultimately rational and excellent advice for living life, even on a purely rational basis.
the only people against this are those who make a living on human on human predation and personal and institutional level deceit.
Litmus
Verified User
that's big of you.
I'm not obsessed.
you have a whitewashing tendency.
we both think they're all bad.
move on.
There to go whitewashing atheist and secular crimes again.
The genocides, mass terror, ethnic cleansing committed by secular authorities in our own historical time frame is many, many orders of magnitude worse than the inquisition and Crusades, in both scale and depravity.
The Crusades shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence with them, or compared to them in any way.
Litmus
Verified User
Litmus
Verified User
cypress is Opus Dei.
Daylight63
Verified User
No one is whitewashing atheist crimes. But you seem to be trying to ignore outright the crimes of Christianity.
Your excuse is to arbitrarily window the data down and likely over-estimate the numbers (see post #151 above). This is not a fair compare since it seems engineered to support your point.
That would be fine and dandy if the Christian church had only discovered the murder was wrong in the 1800's.
It is like a doctor committing murder. We hold them in even more contempt because they explicitly have as their primary goal to DO NO HARM.
Christianity has been that from the beginning. So it is not fair to parse out the history to help support your point because it renders your point meaningless. Either Christianity has value (in the form of eternal moral absolutes) or it doesn't. If it doesn't then it is literally no better and never has been than atheism.
The other key point to remember is that in those benighted days 600 years ago atheism would be one of the quickest ways to get ostracized and possibly even KILLED by the faithful.
Litmus
Verified User
I submit the golden rule and reciprocity notions as christianity's most important eternal moral wisdom and contribution.
the totalitrianism of the Catholic church is an unfortunate occurrence.