ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

More blood is in the hands of Christianity than any other religion.

Citation needed. (I wonder: does communism count as a religion?)

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faerwin wrote:

No, it doesn't. Look at how fractioned Christianity is. Look at all those wars in the middle east between the various beliefs of Islam.

Religion divide people a lot more than it unite them.

I just want to point out that war and division are separate things. War is what happens when two or more groups are divided ideologically but at least one of those groups refuses to physically separate enough to allow the other(s) to freely practice the behaviors that/those group(s) believe to be righteous. Dissonance between ideological division and physical unity is what leads to violent conflict.

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faerwin wrote:

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Khoranth wrote:

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

More blood is in the hands of Christianity than any other religion.

Every time I see people saying "it's our God given right to..." or something similar, I cringe. Christianity especially is an ingenious scam / system of control, but at some point it expanded out of control and its lies became truths. Religion is an acceptable existence when it's equal to a hobby or a lifestyle like vegetarianism, but no society ever should be built upon religious standards.

If we dont use a religious standard, then whoever has the power creates the standard, and if power changes hands, that group makes a new standard.

I understand people not liking religion, I just fail to see how letting power dictate standards is significantly better.

At least following the same religious standard creates stability.

No, it doesn't. Look at how fractioned Christianity is. Look at all those wars in the middle east between the various beliefs of Islam.

Religion divide people a lot more than it unite them.

That's when Religion and State are not properly separated. The Catholic church played a significant role in bringing relative peace during the Middle Ages. The biggest deterrent for all these small states fighting one another was the threat of becoming excommunicated. In this case, religion was basically like the referee of the Christian realm but they weren't the ones in direct control of the individual States. As wonky and convoluted as it was, the system worked.

What you're looking at in the Middle East is religion being used as an excuse to exercise power. In this case, religion=power. Either way you look at it, it isn't a good thing.

It shows why democracy has been so successful. You're not letting power or religion dictate standards. It's unfortunately very hard to implement.

The "unification" of the Christian countries didn't allow for peace to come, quite to the contrary. What it caused is the populations to turn onto themselves and eradicate anyone that was seen as an heretic, completely suppressing free thoughts. Then there was the crusades which were EXTREMELY violent. There was also forced conversion to Christianity in the African countries as well as during the colonization of the americas (especially for southern america).

So no, the middle age (also called dark ages) didn't not see an establishment of peace due to Christianity, if anything, the zealotry caused by the rise of power of Rome created far more violence than peace.

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faerwin wrote:

So no, the middle age (also called dark ages) didn't not see an establishment of peace due to Christianity, if anything, the zealotry caused by the rise of power of Rome created far more violence than peace.

Dark, in this context, means there's a lack of historical records from that time.

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North2 wrote:

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Khoranth wrote:

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1453R wrote:

Wow.

Just...wow.

Wow.

If anyone ever doubted why I just don't hold with any sort of large, organized Official Church? Here you go, folks. Here it is. I can't really make it any plainer than this.

I challenge you to go do some actual research on who was conquering and subjugating right up to before the crusades, start at around the 700's, and look at a map of conquest from that time till the start of the crusades.

If you did honest research, you'd be back here thanking the Catholic Church for the crusades.

Hold on a second here. I respect anyone's viewpoints and values, but you're definitely the one that needs to do or re-do some research on the crusades from a non-christian relatively neutral source(like a history book). As a psuedo-history buff, your view of the crusades are very skewed.

The Crusades were pretty much nothing but embarrassment for the Catholic church. Only the First Crusade was even remotely successful, and it was a very disorganized operation with voracious looting and killing done by Crusaders against Christian cities along the way because they were so poorly supplied. The aftermath included massacre of the locals in several of the cities they captured, plus all the Jews that accompanied the Crusade.

All the other Crusades were failures. They couldn't take back Jerusalem and it was just a string of crushing military defeats. At the very least, you should read up on the Fourth Crusade and see for yourself how thankful we should be for that.

Im referencing the initial purpose, and success of the crusades, from the perspective of that purpose. Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear, I was trying to make that point by discussing what was going on before, and what led to the crusades.

The initial purpose was to stop the conquest, and then push back.
Sure the secondary pushback part wasn't a thrilling success, but the initial goal was the most important part, historically

I certainly agree that during the crusades, some troops did some bad stuff, but you can say that about pretty much every military campaign in history. War does things to people, its unfortunate

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

More blood is in the hands of Christianity than any other religion.

Citation needed. (I wonder: does communism count as a religion?)

Communism is an (atheistic) ideology. Some people (mainly those from religious circles) claim that atheism is a religion, and that any atheistic ideology should be considered religious as well. I assume this is what you meant with that question? Either way I disregard this notion, as it's, well, plain stupid.

No citation needed other than history books.

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faerwin wrote:

The "unification" of the Christian countries didn't allow for peace to come, quite to the contrary. What it caused is the populations to turn onto themselves and eradicate anyone that was seen as an heretic, completely suppressing free thoughts. Then there was the crusades which were EXTREMELY violent. There was also forced conversion to Christianity in the African countries as well as during the colonization of the americas (especially for southern america).

So no, the middle age (also called dark ages) didn't not see an establishment of peace due to Christianity, if anything, the zealotry caused by the rise of power of Rome created far more violence than peace.

That's reaaaally just looking at only the bad things. While everything you said is true, that does not in any way argue against what I'm saying.

You can very easily compare the Middle Ages with the Sengoku period of Japan. Both sides had a ton of warring feudal states, but only one side had an overarching religious entity 'refereeing' the whole thing. You can take a guess as to which side had significantly more bloodshed comparative to the total population.

The big problem I see here is that you're applying modern values to view how things were in the past, when they had their own values and reasons for how things were. As an example, you're talking about how 'terrible' religion was back in those days when not having a religion was not an option. If these states didn't have a religion of their own to stand by, another religion would swoop in from next door and spread throughout the populace. So now what? Now you got a populace following a religion that's demanding you to be part of them. Rationalism wasn't even an option at this point in history.

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Khoranth wrote:

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North2 wrote:

Hold on a second here. I respect anyone's viewpoints and values, but you're definitely the one that needs to do or re-do some research on the crusades from a non-christian relatively neutral source(like a history book). As a psuedo-history buff, your view of the crusades are very skewed.

The Crusades were pretty much nothing but embarrassment for the Catholic church. Only the First Crusade was even remotely successful, and it was a very disorganized operation with voracious looting and killing done by Crusaders against Christian cities along the way because they were so poorly supplied. The aftermath included massacre of the locals in several of the cities they captured, plus all the Jews that accompanied the Crusade.

All the other Crusades were failures. They couldn't take back Jerusalem and it was just a string of crushing military defeats. At the very least, you should read up on the Fourth Crusade and see for yourself how thankful we should be for that.

Im referencing the initial purpose, and success of the crusades, from the perspective of that purpose. Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear, I was trying to make that point by discussing what was going on before, and what led to the crusades.

The initial purpose was to stop the conquest, and then push back.
Sure the secondary pushback part wasn't a thrilling success, but the initial goal was the most important part, historically

I certainly agree that during the crusades, some troops did some bad stuff, but you can say that about pretty much every military campaign in history. War does things to people, its unfortunate

Stopping the conquest had nothing to do with the Crusades. The initial goal of all the Crusades was to take back the holy land, and was also at least partially motivated by the Byzantine Empire to take back some of the land along the way. It's only the push back. Again, you gotta read up on it a little more.

Also, the amount of terrible stuff that the Crusaders did can't be chalked up to 'well, every military campaign is like that'. Can you really look at what the Nazis did and say, "Well sure, but every war has its atrocities"? No, you cannot. The Crusaders did a lot of terrible things even for the standards at the time, probably even more if they were more successful.

The Secretary of State and the Supreme Leader.

Christian nations were being conquered and subjugated one after the other leading into the crusades, with no end in sight to the conquest. Suggesting that had nothing to do with the crusades is absurd

And troops have done really horrible stuff in all kinds of military campaigns, you're just soap boxing the crusade atrocities.

Comparing them to nazis is absurd too, Hitler encouraged that stuff. The Pope was telling the crusaders not to do alot of those atrocities and to cut it out. American troops did horrible stuff in Vietnam, and elsewhere, but it isn't the same as nazis cause they weren't supposed to, unlike nazis