ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

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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.

People who attack atheism as being a 'godless religion' tend to fall into two camps: those religious folk who're sick of angry atheists cracking them and are just firing back, or those people who believe that humanity is intrinsically religious and that the species will inevitably invent something to worship, whether that thing is God or Reason or whatever else.

I find the notion not only ludicrous but deeply, deeply insulting. This idea that we as a species are required to give mindless, slavish, useless devotion to some ideal or other beyond ourselves, that we're hardwired to look for gods to enslave ourselves to, is ridiculous and flies in the face of hundreds of years of scientists, engineers, inventors, thinkers, and many thousands of other talents who did with their own two hands more than God has ever done.

I understand that some individual persons require that sort of veneration in their life. They feel vulnerable, incomplete, or fragile without some sort of Higher Power to which they can devote themselves. Fine. I don't agree with it, but I can understand it and respect the individual's right to enter into a contract with God if they so choose.

The Church - pick a Church, any Church, they all do it - forcing that contract onto people is heinous. Parents forcing their children to sacrifice their freedom of thought for blind, meaningless faith in the Giant Space Man because the parents have convinced them - convinced their young, highly impressionable children who instinctively trust their parents to love them and know the best for them - that if they don't they will BURN FOREVER IN A DEMON-INFESTED NIGHTMARE is literally torture.

Nobody and nothing is worth sacrificing rational thought for. Our capacity for reasoned thought is what makes us human; any individual or organization that demands you set that capacity aside is wrong. End of discussion.

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Khoranth wrote:

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

The Council of Clermont had the initial goal of stopping the conquests by requesting support for the Byzantine Empire. I guess I shouldn't have said it was unrelated since the First Crusade came out of it. However...the Crusades, just by the very definition of the word, is about reconquest of the holy land. They didn't have to go on the offensive to achieve the goal of defending the Christian allies, but they did anyways.

I'm not really comparing them directly to the Nazis. I'm saying atrocities are committed everywhere but there's a boundary for any time period where that much is expected. The Nazis went far over that boundary in the 20th century, while if it happened 2,000 years ago it's pretty much standard practice. The crusaders went over the boundary as well.

Whether the leaders encouraged the atrocities or not is an extremely petty point. The only thing that matters is whether it happened or not. Would the Holocaust be any less terrible if Hitler had condemned it and it happened anyways?

It would still be an atrocity, but i think it makes a difference in whether or not the leadership encourages, or tries to stop the atrocity.

If the USA govt had encouraged the atrocities in Vietnam, that would be sick, regardless of the scale.

Here is a good, honest crusade article, for anyone interested in a truthful perspective.

http://www.ewtn.com/library/chistory/zcrsades.htm

PS I agree the crusades had a twofold purpose, but from a historical perspective, stopping conquest is significantly more important. Stopping the conquest changes history....alot

If you could go back in time and prevent the crusade atrocities, but those people get to succeed in conquering the world, would you do that?

I was going to say, "And here you are linking an article from the 'Global Catholic Network' and claiming it as truthful."

...And then I read it and it's surprisingly accurate. So how is it that you read this and come to the conclusions that you have now? Everything I said is true and some of the things you said are just plain wrong according to this article.

I read the article after a few posts, you correctly poked a few holes.

I'm always happy to be wrong and learn new stuff

My original premise still holds though: the crusades prevented total conquest by those people. It's a big deal, historically

That's one of those history's "what-if"s that's impossible to predict.

Did they really need to go on a series of failed counteroffensives to slow down the Muslims? Would it have been impossible to just rally a successful defense in case they started encroaching too deep into Byzantine territory?

The Islamic world was split in several schisms right around this time anyways. Personally, the grand strategist in me believes that the Christian world would have been much more successful at stopping Muslims by supporting this rift and picking a side instead of going on crusades that may have partially strengthened relations between some of them.

Here's the real zinger question for people who say the Crusades were a splendid episode of historical heroism.

What's to say that the world wouldn't be a better place with Islam, rather than Christianity, as the dominant religion?

Hell, it's already the dominant religion in a lot of places that're doing just fine - and Christianity is prevalent in places that aren't doing fine. Religion is religion. They're all bad, none of the Semitic religions are substantially different from each other in terms of overall beliefs - they just change up which section of the same set of ancient pulp novels is the important one, and which set of weird behaviors is the one their particular version of the Giant Space Man has decided are Good and Proper.

Would the world be substantially worse off if Islam had overtaken Christianity? Impossible to say. Certainly Muslims spend a whole lot more time on their knees prostrating themselves for their Giant Space Man, but they're also a lot less prone to trying to use crushing depression as a means to control their populace (i.e. no Original Sin). Muslims were the most forward-thinking people of their day as an aggregate whole; maybe we would've hit the Renaissance a bit earlier under a predominantly Muslim world, gotten to the Age of Reason more quickly. Impossible to say with any certainty, but perfectly reasonable to speculate about.

As someone who doesn't see a substantial difference in which particular iteration of the same Giant Space Man any of the Semitics venerate, I fail to see how 'defending the world against Muslim conquest' is a worthy historical goal. if the Muslims had 'won', you would've been indoctrinated into Islam from birth instead of indoctrinated into Catholicism and nothing would've changed.

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North2 wrote:

That's one of those history's "what-if"s that's impossible to predict.

Did they really need to go on a series of failed counteroffensives to slow down the Muslims? Would it have been impossible to just rally a successful defense in case they started encroaching too deep into Byzantine territory?

The Islamic world was split in several schisms right around this time anyways. Personally, the grand strategist in me believes that the Christian world would have been much more successful at stopping Muslims by supporting this rift and picking a side instead of going on crusades that may have partially strengthened relations between some of them.

Could there have been a better strategy than the crusades to prevent moslem conquest, 100% yes...obviously. dont think we even need to speculate.

That doesn't change the fact that the crusades did stop their total conquest.

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1453R wrote:

As someone who doesn't see a substantial difference in which particular iteration of the same Giant Space Man any of the Semitics venerate, I fail to see how 'defending the world against Muslim conquest' is a worthy historical goal. if the Muslims had 'won', you would've been indoctrinated into Islam from birth instead of indoctrinated into Catholicism and nothing would've changed.

Actually I converted to Catholicism Easter 2016. For the first 36 years of my life I was just like you in my feelings for organized religion, Despised it. Then I was fortunate enough to stumble across the truth of Catholicism.

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1453R wrote:

People who attack atheism as being a 'godless religion' tend to fall into two camps: those religious folk who're sick of angry atheists cracking them and are just firing back, or those people who believe that humanity is intrinsically religious and that the species will inevitably invent something to worship, whether that thing is God or Reason or whatever else.

I find the notion not only ludicrous but deeply, deeply insulting. This idea that we as a species are required to give mindless, slavish, useless devotion to some ideal or other beyond ourselves, that we're hardwired to look for gods to enslave ourselves to, is ridiculous and flies in the face of hundreds of years of scientists, engineers, inventors, thinkers, and many thousands of other talents who did with their own two hands more than God has ever done.

I understand that some individual persons require that sort of veneration in their life. They feel vulnerable, incomplete, or fragile without some sort of Higher Power to which they can devote themselves. Fine. I don't agree with it, but I can understand it and respect the individual's right to enter into a contract with God if they so choose.

The Church - pick a Church, any Church, they all do it - forcing that contract onto people is heinous. Parents forcing their children to sacrifice their freedom of thought for blind, meaningless faith in the Giant Space Man because the parents have convinced them - convinced their young, highly impressionable children who instinctively trust their parents to love them and know the best for them - that if they don't they will BURN FOREVER IN A DEMON-INFESTED NIGHTMARE is literally torture.

Nobody and nothing is worth sacrificing rational thought for. Our capacity for reasoned thought is what makes us human; any individual or organization that demands you set that capacity aside is wrong. End of discussion.

I'd just like to add some historical perspective and the role of religion since I'm feeling historical today.

Rational thought only really started showing its value fairly recently in human history. Imagine being a random bloke working a farm in the middle of the 11th century. You have no idea how the world works, nobody around you knows how the world works, and nobody in the world knows how the world works. How much is rational thought going to help you here? If you have any book available around you to read, they will tell you that the world is flat and God is watching you so you better behave.

The world is a dark, mysterious place with pretty much everything completely out of human control. Your child could die of an indiscriminate disease next week and you'd be powerless to stop it. Only faith may protect you. As a rational person, would it not make sense to follow this religion? Being faithful and being wrong about the existence of God means you lose nothing. However, being non-faithful and being wrong about the existence of God means no holy protection and eternal damnation.

At the very least, being faithful gives you a peace of mind that someone up there MIGHT be looking after you. It also gave a sense of purpose for many people who otherwise couldn't find any.

What I'm trying to say is that religion isn't inherently bad. There was a time and place in history where religion was an absolutely essential part of an individual, and countless lives were improved by its existence. You just don't read this in the history books, in the same way that you don't hear news about the peaceful life of an average individual.

For the record, I am agnostic. My dad suddenly turned Christian at the age of 55 and his life has very clearly improved for it. I don't want anything to do with being Christian, but I do appreciate what it did for my dad.

Oh right...Trump.

I got to talk to a person that's fairly high up in the steel manufacturing business and I asked him how the 25% steel tariff affects him. He said it is a big mistake with no real upside.

The majority of steel industry in the US is in manufacturing, like maybe 90% or more. While the tariff generates a few thousand extra jobs in steel production, MILLIONS of workers in the manufacturing industry that makes or uses steel products are negatively impacted by it.

Trump claims that we need domestic steel, but we don't. We have so much steel manufacturing companies because it's much more profitable than steel production. So now everyone is going to have to pay more for their refrigerators, cables, tools, anything you can think of that includes steel. All so we can forcefully create a few thousand more jobs in an industry that isn't even that profitable.

There has to be some personal benefit for Trump going on behind the scenes imo.