Should Tiger Woods Become a Christian?
Brit Hume boldly suggests Tiger Woods, who considers himself more of a Buddhist, become a Christian because Christianity offers forgiveness. Some Buddhists object. Here’s what Stephen Prothero, a Boston University professor on Buddhism, said:
“You have the law of karma, so no matter what Woods says or does, he is going to have to pay for whatever wrongs he’s done,” said Prothero. “There’s no accountant in the sky wiping sins off your balance sheet, like there is in Christianity.”
But since Buddhists don’t believe in a Deity, one must ask, what is the grounding for morality that makes Karma even possible, and what “accountant” is keeping track of karma? With Christianity, you have grounding for morality (God’s Nature) and you have an “Accountant” keeping track of how one lives in relation to that morality. Of course, that “Accountant” after seeing your negative balance, came to earth to pay your debt for you. Great deal. And it has the necessary quality of actually being true!
Blessings to Brit Hume for his boldness. He didn’t back down on The O’Reilly Factor as you’ll see in this video. (HT: Melinda Penner at www.STR.org)
January 7th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Yes.
January 7th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
I think the reason some people were upset by this, is that this took place in the context of a news show. Brit Hume is often touted by those who accuse Fox News of a right wing bias as an example of an unbiased honest journalist. (As are other anchors like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith, though the latter is also at times accused of editorializing).
I think this is a big complaint here is the venue and Mr. Hume’s expected role on television (which includes some sense of impartiality). He strayed strongly from that here, on what is also supposed to be an objective venue (a news show).
Many people (including right wing commentators on places like HotAir) have criticized Mr. Hume for his silence when “Christian” men recently had similar allegations leveled against them (Mark Sanford, John Ensign, and so on).
I actually think this is related to one of the purposes of this very website. Many here see a problem when supposedly objective professors “proselytize” for atheism in a supposedly objective venue. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why some might be upset when a supposedly objective person “proselytizes” in a supposedly objective venue.
Who here believes that if Keith Ellison (a Muslim member of the House of Representatives) was on a news show and at some point John Ensign (who not only cheated on his wife, but paid off his mistress and her husband), and Mr. Ellison had urged Mr. Ensign to “submit his will” to Allah and stop living for John Ensign no right wing figures would be rather upset?
(To answer this question, just think of all those who object to Mr. Ellison holding the position he does based on nothing more than his religion.)
That said, I have been upset by one thing about this whole controversy, and annoyed by another.
[rant]
Why is Mr. Hume so concerned about Tiger Woods and whether he can achieve forgiveness, redemption and that Mr. Woods can come out of all this.
Who really cares?
Really, Mr. Hume, Tiger is the one you’re worried about?
Not me. What about his wife? What about his kids? How about some advice on how they can get through this. They are the ones who have been hurt here. They are the ones that need support.
This whole controversy just shows how uncaring and shallow we have become as a culture.
But hey, it’s a lot more fun to talk about some egomaniacal famous guy, then to think about people who have actually been hurt.
[/rant]
Sorry. Hey, I admitted it was a rant. It’s obviously targeted at the wider response to the scandal here, and not only Mr. Hume. It’s just as directed at those in the media who are more interested in discussing yet another stupid and worthless controversy then in talking about what should be the real issue (if we’re going to talk about it at all, let’s talk about how families, those hurt — especially the kids — can get through things like this).
It’s infuriating.
(OK, I admit, I do care a bit about Mr. Woods and do not wish him ill, but of all the people for whom I feel in this controversy, he’s pretty low on the list.)
The thing that annoys me here is either Mr. Hume’s cowardice or his lack of knowledge of the English language.
Mr. Hume said: Tiger, turn to the Christian faith
When asked by Mr. O’Reilly if he was proselytizing he said “I don’t think so.”
When I look up the word in Webster’s dictionary, the first definition is:
to induce someone to convert to one’s faith
%-|
January 7th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Ooh, if we’re doing rants, I want one:
[rant]
“You have the law of karma, so no matter what Woods says or does, he is going to have to pay for whatever wrongs he’s done,” said Prothero. “There’s no accountant in the sky wiping sins off your balance sheet, like there is in Christianity.”
And that’s another reason (on the long, long list) why Christianity in particular is so bunk to me….I actually read a chick tract once where a pedophile was “forgiven” and allowed to continue living with the child he’d abused (for years!) all because “he found Jesus,” while in another tract, an honest man who did nothing but charitable work his entire life died and went to hell simply because “he didn’t accept Jesus.”
That says to me, “good and evil don’t matter! It’s about the label; as long as you’re Christian, god doesn’t care how horrible of a person you are!” That is so superficial that it sickens me.
[/rant]
January 8th, 2010 at 1:29 am
Yeah, I don’t really get the fascination with celebrity and politician sexuality. I don’t really care who or how many people these people bed down with. It’s not news. It’s no one’s business. It has no bearing on my life or anyone else who isn’t directly involved. If Tiger Woods were Gus Nobody we’d never hear about it. Should he lose endorsement deals? Why should he? How does him sleeping around have any bearing on his ability to sell Wheaties?
January 8th, 2010 at 2:56 am
Okay, now that we’ve heard from the “there’s no such thing as morality, man! So stop shoving your stupid judgmental beliefs down our throats, man!” side, here’s a little answer to the question posed:
Yes, Tiger woods should become a Christian because, of all the creeds / codes of ethics / etc. that man has operated under, the Christian faith has resulted in more intrinsic goodness, on both individuals and nations, than any other . see: America / her citizens *
* please keep in mind the relative nature of this answer. the fact that America has not been perfect does not mean that she is no better than the nations whose victimized peoples she liberated by the hundreds of millions - a fact that has NO comparison in the history of man
January 8th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Toby R. Said:Should he lose endorsement deals? Why should he? How does him sleeping around have any bearing on his ability to sell Wheaties?
It most certainly does affect his ability to sell Wheaties. Do you think the only thing that made him a good pitchman was his golf skill? His image had much to do with it. Parents wanted their children to grow up to be someone like Tiger Woods, that has all changed.
If a company wants to stick by him (who is perfect after all?), that’s fine as well, but his image on a cereal box no longer conjures up the same image as it once did. His ‘brand’ has changed, and any company that seeks not to have that new brand, and that new image, represent it has the right to do so, and I don’t blame them.
Toby R. said:I don’t really get the fascination with celebrity and politician sexuality. I don’t really care who or how many people these people bed down with. It’s not news. It’s no one’s business. It has no bearing on my life or anyone else who isn’t directly involved.
I question your logic here though. The same could be said of someone who kills his wife when he catches her in adultery. Some murderer like this in Kansas has no bearing on my life or anyone else who isn’t directly involved. Right?
I understand that the degrees are different, and I am using that as an extreme example, but I hope you see my point.
I think it is inarguable that Mr. Woods has hurt his children, in a way that they may never fully recover from. Why should there not be some consequence for that?
Your comment seems to follow the logic (correct me if I’m wrong, please) of ‘the rights of your fist end at my nose — if no one is hurt by your actions, you have a right to perform them. That’s a philosophy I wholeheartedly agree with, but I don’t think that’s the case here. His actions clearly hurt others in my view.
My problem here is/was that any concern from media figures like Mr. Hume is misplaced. Of the people directly involved in this, Mr. Woods should be at the bottom of the list of those for whom we show concern/
If anyone has a few minutes, I strongly urge you to listen to this interview with a little girl whose parents are going through a divorce.
Just go to google and type This American Life Breakup. The first link will take you to an episode TAL did on Breakups. Click on full episode (on the left) to hear the program. Fast forward to 34:50.
It’s heart-breaking: it literally made me cry the first time I heard it.
January 8th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
the Christian faith has resulted in more intrinsic goodness, on both individuals and nations, than any other . see: America / her citizens *
Of course, going by Christian definitions, that means “intrinsic (god)ness.” And since actions are no guarantee of “godliness” or “godlessness” — as the remarks about “clean slates” and whatnot seem to imply — that doesn’t say jack squat about the Christian faith, except that it’s “the most Christian faith out of any other faith in the world.”
…which is, ya know, kind of a duh….
January 9th, 2010 at 12:58 am
Tim said:And that’s another reason (on the long, long list) why Christianity in particular is so bunk to me…
That says to me, “good and evil don’t matter! It’s about the label; as long as you’re Christian, god doesn’t care how horrible of a person you are!” That is so superficial that it sickens me.
Tim,
Do you think that some actions (sins) simply do not warrant forgiveness under any circumstances?*
Or do you think something along the lines of the balance sheet mentioned in the article would be more just — where one can make up for bad acts but doing enough good is most “fair?”
Luke
*Bible trivia: There is actually a sin described in the Bible that fits this description. What is it?
January 9th, 2010 at 1:46 am
Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. Mat. 12:31-32
January 9th, 2010 at 3:06 am
Do you think that some actions (sins) simply do not warrant forgiveness under any circumstances?*
I don’t think there is any one thing you can do that, in and of itself, “robs you of your humanity” or “makes you a monster fit to be damned,” if that’s what you mean.
Or do you think something along the lines of the balance sheet mentioned in the article would be more just — where one can make up for bad acts but doing enough good is most “fair?”
I don’t really think of it as “making up for bad deeds by doing good,” really….I mean, if I do something good, I don’t think of it as a “badness offset” (like a carbon offset or something) that will balance out some future or past mistake. Likewise, if I do something bad, even if I justify it to myself in the moment I tend to come back and regret it, and apologize where it be necessary. But that’s not about “atonement” or “forgiveness,” it’s about doing my best for myself and the people around me, and making sure that those other people know that I am doing my best. It’s up to them to accept that or reject it. It’s a two-way street, ya know.
January 9th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
“Some murderer like this in Kansas has no bearing on my life or anyone else who isn’t directly involved. Right?”
Not actually. A murderer is a danger to others whether or not they are directly involved. Whether or not it was a “crime of passion” it shows a tendency to extreme violence that could become directed at anyone under the right circumstances.
I fully understand what you’re saying about image and him not really being a human anymore, but a brand or figurehead.
I’ve been wondering if the public has a right to know about any of this at all. Do people that find themselves in the spotlight lose all rights to privacy? It seems that we became so obsessed with celebrity that we forget to give them the same benefit of respected privacy. This is one of the few things that I blame the media for, not knowing when to stop digging.
January 9th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Toby said:Not actually. A murderer is a danger to others whether or not they are directly involved. Whether or not it was a “crime of passion” it shows a tendency to extreme violence that could become directed at anyone under the right circumstances.
I agree; I said it was an extreme example.
But look at what you’re saying. You’re not saying that a murderer has an effect on you, rather you’re now discussing the potential to affect you at some point.
(In the same way, Tiger Woods, if he doesn’t change his ways has the potential to break up your family.)
I agree that this potential is enough to put a murderer in jail, but it also points out that you’re using slightly different reasoning (not the effect this person has on others, but the potential for other effects).
I think Dr. Turek could cite statistics for you that would show you what the breakup of a marriage costs a society, largely because of the effects it has on children. So I think one could make a rational and honest argument that actions like those of Mr. Woods do affect you. (I am not saying I would act on such an argument, but I think it can be fairly made.)
Toby said:I’ve been wondering if the public has a right to know about any of this at all. Do people that find themselves in the spotlight lose all rights to privacy?
Do they? Yes
Should they? That’s more complex.
I don’t think it’s fair for someone to reap the benefits of the spotlight, but then complain when they see it’s negative side.
It’s like buying a Ferrari to go fast, but complaining every time you pay the petrol bill.
At the same time, should it be printed on the front page of a magazine when an actress gains weight or starts having disagreements with her spouse? I think not.
Toby said:It seems that we became so obsessed with celebrity that we forget to give them the same benefit of respected privacy. This is one of the few things that I blame the media for, not knowing when to stop digging.
I think the media are continuing to hurt Mr. Wood’s family. It is a sad aspect of our culture — the media circus around celebrity. It’s a subject beyond the scope of a blog though, I think.
I personally don’t have a tv, and don’t read magazines which discuss these things, so I miss much of it. Thankfully.
January 10th, 2010 at 1:13 am
“In the same way, Tiger Woods, if he doesn’t change his ways has the potential to break up your family.”
That is if one cares about inconsequential things as sex. Sex is “immoral and vile” if performed in certain ways, according to christians. Yet it was a holier than Tiger (and buddhists) christian that chose to judge rather than saying, “Hey Tiger, we all fall. We understand. Would you like some help.” No, he gets, “You need to change your ways. Everything you think is wrong. You need a religion that offers forgiveness.” So if he chose that jerk’s religion suddenly he can be forgiven, not only by some supreme being, but by that jerk too? To hell with that guy.
“I think Dr. Turek could cite statistics for you that would show you what the breakup of a marriage costs a society, largely because of the effects it has on children.”
I’m sure he can cite stats on lots of things. I’d read them just as long as he provided sources that I could independently check the veracity for myself. I also have my doubts about the effects of marriage break ups on children. Children are brighter and stronger and more resilient than they’re given credit for. You were one once remember?
January 10th, 2010 at 2:47 am
Toby R.,
As to Britt Hume being a judgmental jerk, I fail to see it. Nosy, yeah, but judgmental no. It is very true that “Christian” hypocrites do a massive lot of harm to the cause but, to be consistent in your outrage, on the scale of things to be outraged by, you would have to be carrying banners condemning Islam and ALL who follow it for sitting idly by as thousands are blown up, mutilated, eviscerated and decapitated in the name of their “religion of peace”. Seriously now, if a “jerk” giving his opinion on a public figure gets you going this hard, how can you not be roiling w/ rage over the everyday practices of female mutilation, torture, honor killings, bombings of innocents and on and on ad nauseum ? You really need to check yourself.
//So if he chose that jerk’s religion suddenly he can be forgiven, not only by some supreme being, but by that jerk too? To hell with that guy.//
Please don’t take this as patronizing, because it really isn’t, but do you know what Christians are called to do? We are called to spread the Gospel. In an accurate dramatic portrayal of “Christians v. Muslims” (something that will never come out of Hollywood), it would be Muslims spilling Christian blood -not the other way. If you don’t think that is true, think to yourself who would be better off: Christians in a Muslim land or Muslims in a Christian land. We already know the answer to that. Muslims thrive in America. But try being a Christian -or worse yet, a convert to Christianity- in a nation run by Muslims. Your life won’t be worth 2 cents. Knowing that, your feelings for Mr. Hume must be multiplied by some astronomical number to match what you should feel for the religion that actually beats education OUT of children. Are they “resilient” enough to deal w/ that? You taking the time to suggest Hume go to hell should manifest in you enlisting in the armed forces so as to send as many mass murdering scum to hell as you can, relatively speaking.
I am sorry if “Christian” hypocrites have made you bitter, I really am, but they have always existed and probably always will -here on earth anyway- so I would hate to see you miss the chance of a life time because of them. We are, after all, better off being patient, w/ hypocrites and the like, whether we’re Christian or not, don’t you think?
January 10th, 2010 at 3:12 am
Toby R.,
As to Britt Hume being a judgmental j***, I fail to see it. Nosy, yeah, but judgmental no. It is very true that “Christian” hypocrites do a massive lot of harm to the cause but, to be consistent in your outrage, on the scale of things to be outraged by, you would have to be carrying banners condemning Islam and ALL who follow it for sitting idly by as thousands are blown up, mutilated, eviscerated and decapitated in the name of their “religion of peace”. Seriously now, if a j*** giving his opinion on a public figure gets you going this hard, how can you not be roiling w/ rage over the everyday practices of female child mutilation, torture, honor killings, bombings of innocents and on and on ad nauseum ? You really need to check yourself.
//So if he chose that j***’s religion suddenly he can be forgiven, not only by some supreme being, but by that j*** too? To h*** with that guy.// (edits mine. trying to get this thing posted.)
Please don’t take this as patronizing, because it really isn’t, but do you know what Christians are called to do? We are called to spread the Gospel. But to a terrorist Muslim out for blood, you are no better an infidel than am I. So, in an accurate modern dramatic portrayal (something that will never come out of Hollywood)of Muslims v. infidels(see: yourself) , it would be Muslims spilling infidel blood -not the other way. If you don’t think that is true, think to yourself who would be better off: Infidels in a Muslim land or Muslims in an infidel land. We already know the answer to that. Muslims thrive in America. But try being an infidel -or worse yet, a convert to “infidelity”- in a nation run by Muslims. Your life won’t be worth 2 cents. Knowing that, your feelings for Mr. Hume must be multiplied by some astronomical number to achieve what you should feel for the religion that actually beats education OUT of children. Are they “resilient” enough to deal w/ that? Your taking the time to suggest Hume go to h*** should manifest in your enlistment in the armed forces so as to send as many mass murdering Muslims to h*** as you can, relatively speaking.
I am sorry if hypocrite infidels have made you bitter, I really am, but they have always existed and probably always will -here on earth anyway- so I would hate to see you miss the chance of a life time because of them. We are, after all, better off being patient, w/ hypocrites and the like, whether we’re infidels or not, don’t you think?
January 10th, 2010 at 8:09 am
In fact many Buddhists are theists. Regardless of this, it is not necessary to accept a God to believe that bad actions can rebound on you. People who gossip a lot will soon find people see them as a spreader of bad feeling and thus become the object of bad feeling themselves. If you tread on others, theyll eventually gang up and kick back.
And if you cheat on your wife she’ll probably leave you and take the kids.
And the latter is precisely what happened to Tiger Woods! Karma in action one could say.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
We are, after all, better off being patient, w/ hypocrites and the like, whether we’re infidels or not, don’t you think?
Actually, straight-up hypocrites don’t really bother me. I only choose to take issue with them when they are openly confronted with their hypocrisy and, without justifying it, continue to do it.
I mean, sometimes it may have just honestly not occurred to the person how hypocritical they may be. Especially if you’re the type of person who has to have an opinion on everything….keeping track of all of those opinions is bound to be difficult, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of them crossed ways without the person realizing it right off.
So, in an accurate modern dramatic portrayal (something that will never come out of Hollywood)of Muslims v. infidels(see: yourself) , it would be Muslims spilling infidel blood -not the other way.
I don’t think Muslims are inherently prone to violence. I think that’s a misleading mischaracterization on the part of militant Christians. There are just as many Quran quotes “supporting” violence as there are Bible quotes, and a lot of the same arguments can be made about the Quran that you’ve made about the Bible — taken out of context, awkward translation obscured the true meaning, etc. etc.
I mean, when I see Christian Bible quotes supporting violent retribution, I see paragraphs upon paragraphs of attempts to justify them. But when I see the same guys quoting from the Quran, there’s often very little attempt to provide a proper context — not historically, linguistically, or figuratively. Also, many of these claims are based on the idea that all of the Quran is meant to be interpreted literally. Seeing that there exist many Muslims who are, in fact, not violent mass-murderers, I find it hard to believe that even all Muslims believe that.
January 10th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Wow, Tim, for someone who worships at the alter “rational thinking”, that was some set of illogical back flips and Olympic quality -Muslim apologetics- genuflecting. Obfuscatingly speaking, that is.
In response to my reality based point that Muslims can live safely in any Christian nation and Christians can NOT in a Muslim nation, Tim says,”I don’t think Muslims are inherently prone to violence. I think that’s a misleading mischaracterization on the part of militant Christians. There are just as many Quran quotes “supporting” violence as there are Bible quotes, and a lot of the same arguments can be made about the Quran that you’ve made about the Bible — taken out of context, awkward translation obscured the true meaning, etc. etc.”
[analogy] I say, “It is very desolate in Death Valley. However, the jungles have a lot of vegetation.” To which Tim says, “The material make up of jungles does not make it any more “prone” to vegetation than the desert. There is just as much soil, oxygen, etc. and you could make an argument that deserts have as much vegetation as jungles - global warming, over population, your Ford Explorer, etc., etc.”[/analogy]
Absurd. Just be straight, why don’t you? You hate Christianity and the God of the Bible. That is why you don’t address my point directly. That is why your perception of Christians as self righteous hypocrites -even though they virtually never carry out atrocities, like muslims do by the thousands daily, and are ALWAYS condemned by real Christians when that happens- allows for you to direct so much anger at them while completely obfuscating the reality of what muslims do or, worse yet, equivocate the two.
You already betray yourself re: your bigotry and hatred. All that is left is for you to declare it OPENLY.
January 10th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
“to be consistent in your outrage, on the scale of things to be outraged by, you would have to be carrying banners condemning Islam and ALL who follow it for sitting idly by as thousands are blown up, mutilated, eviscerated and decapitated in the name of their “religion of peace”.”
I’m am consistent. I think all religion is bunk. I don’t howl and moan about islam and judaism because I wasn’t raised as either and don’t feel comfortable speaking about things I know only a little about. I simply dismiss them as being just a few more religions that worship a sky gods that can make ridiculous things happen like seas parting and resurrections. As for buddhism and hindu religionsI know very little about them other than buddhism might be a very good concept if you pared away all of the unnecessary stuff and are left with “the point of life is to alleviate suffering for yourself and others and always seek enlightenment/knowledge.”
I dismiss all religions simply because they are a manufactured barriers that keep people separate and prejudiced against one another. It kills the chance for humility.
“In an accurate dramatic portrayal of “Christians v. Muslims” (something that will never come out of Hollywood), it would be Muslims spilling Christian blood -not the other way.”
Right. Like during the crusades . . . wait a minute. That was Christians starting wars and spilling muslim blood (not to mention jews, pagans, and whoever else they didn’t like). I guess a movie like that wouldn’t come out of hollywood because alternate reality fiction is just too hard of a sell.
I think you’re the one here that’s bitter. You decry Tim D. as being a hate filled biggot, but that was a pretty ugly (and revealing) screed about muslims. How you feel about this is perfectly clear. I wonder if you’ve ever even met one or do you just hate the ones on TV. You make my point about religion being a barrier. You conflate all muslims as being murderers and that christians are morally superior (forgetting all of the horrible things done on behalf of christianity). You probably say things like Hume did all of the time. “Convert muslims! Convert!”
January 10th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
“I dismiss all religions simply because they are a manufactured barriers that keep people separate and prejudiced against one another. It kills the chance for humility.” Yes, by all means, let us scrap thousands of years of civilization and start anew as Jack Black would have us do! Hey, wanna get married, man?
“You decry Tim D. as being a hate filled biggot, but that was a pretty ugly (and revealing) screed about muslims.” Citation please. What did I say that was not factual or could be reasonably called an “ugly screed”.
“You conflate all muslims as being murderers” That is NOT true, and you should take it back and apologize for saying it.
“. . . wait a minute. That was Christians starting wars and spilling muslim blood” I see, so YOU conflating Christians with their ancestors of a thousand years ago is fine but, you NEVER even MENTION the undeniable scourge of humanity today: radical Islamists and THAT is your clear thinking when illustrating the “bunk” like qualities of ALL religions? Ironic how you don’t allow for the “evolution” of one religion (like the one that launched our liberty based western culture which created the wealth you so adroitly slight, while enjoying the fruits thereof) and instead lock it into a position it held hundreds of years ago while equivocating it w/ the one that is actually still stuck there. That is the essence of bigotry. “That (insert group /person from group you don’t like here___) did something I don’t approve of so, obviously, they are ALL _____.” Hopefully a black person will never offend you or they may well be “to blame” for your, as yet dormant, racism.
And then, to simultaneously forecast and illustrate my point above, you say what I “probably” say in kind with (the “bigoted”, “racist”, “hate filled”, “homophobic”, etc. etc.) Britt Hume. Although, saying “convert muslims” is only hateful if you first believe that said conversion would be bad for said muslim. Which, again, illustrates your negative predisposition toward all things Christian.
All religions are NOT monolithic with one another, no more than all primates, or whales, or birds, or even atheists are. But within each there are common traits. The religion of the Bible= much good fruit in technology AND compassion for fellow humans. The one of the Quran= mass destruction and very little or no advancements in the human condition in recorded history. There are many different species of primates, whales and birds with an array of their own traits. And atheists are “a beginning and end in themselves” so, why are so many filled w/ irrational anger towards the One who died for them? I mean, He doesn’t even exist, right, so who cares?
January 10th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
that was some set of illogical back flips and Olympic quality -Muslim apologetics- genuflecting.
Like what?
In response to my reality based point that Muslims can live safely in any Christian nation and Christians can NOT in a Muslim nation, Tim says,”I don’t think Muslims are inherently prone to violence.
-) If Mulsims are inherently prone to violence, then all Muslims should be violent;
-) They are not;
-) Therefore, not all Muslims are prone to violence.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Absurd. Just be straight, why don’t you? You hate Christianity and the God of the Bible.
Yep. Totally. Ya got me.
…
Is anything not a conspiracy theory to you?
Citation please
Not that I care, but since you asked:
You already betray yourself re: your bigotry and hatred. All that is left is for you to declare it OPENLY.
That is NOT true, and you should take it back and apologize for saying it.
You did. You said that my statement that “Muslims are not inherently violent” was not true; the logical conclusion of which is that you’re saying they are inherently violent. Do you know that “inherently” means “by their nature?” Which means it is present in them universally? Which means it’s present in all of them?
I don’t think he needs to apologize for saying anything. Rather, I’d recommend that you go back and read your own posts before responding, so others don’t have to waste time quoting you to prove that you’ve said something.
January 10th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
“You said that my statement that “Muslims are not inherently violent” was not true”
No I didn’t. I merely illustrated the inanity of your “point” that Islam and Christianity are equally violent, a complete and utter absurdity, thus: “[analogy] I say, “It is very desolate in Death Valley. However, the jungles have a lot of vegetation.” To which Tim says, “The material make up of jungles does not make it any more “prone” to vegetation than the desert. There is just as much soil, oxygen, etc. and you could make an argument that deserts have as much vegetation as jungles - global warming, over population, your Ford Explorer, etc., etc.”[/analogy]
Both of you also perfectly illustrate the “truth is relative” way of “thinking” when you say whatever you want to “prove” your points. You make up -both out of whole cloth and by twisting my words to mean something they didn’t originally- what was said and then condemn it. Using that tact, you don’t even have to try in order to always be “right”. You just need someone else to confirm what you’ve said.
Mike Adams had a good column on his dealings w/ the “truth is relative” set on Townhall recently. You two should avoid it at all cost, lest you risk reality penetrating that visible force field of fantasy surrounding you.
January 10th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
correction: Using that “tact”… (or) Using that tack…
I intended the latter, but either one will suffice.
January 10th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
“Hey, wanna get married, man?”
Is this the homophobia you were mentioning?
““You conflate all muslims as being murderers” That is NOT true, and you should take it back and apologize for saying it.”
“But try being an infidel -or worse yet, a convert to “infidelity”- in a nation run by Muslims. Your life won’t be worth 2 cents.”
“Ironic how you don’t allow for the “evolution” of one religion (like the one that launched our liberty based western culture which created the wealth you so adroitly slight, while enjoying the fruits thereof) and instead lock it into a position it held hundreds of years ago while equivocating it w/ the one that is actually still stuck there.”
Ironic how you mention the “evolution” of your religion that “lauched our liberty based western culture”. Evolution is not the right word choice. The correct choice is “liberalization”. As Tim D. pointed out above there are violent verses in the bible dealing with retribution and punishment that have gradually been dumped. Christianity today would not be recognized even as little as fifty years ago. “My goodness! Women wearing slacks and cutting their hair? EVIL! Men with earrings? EVIL!” Your religion seems the better of the two because it has gradually winnowed away some of the cruelty by the followers recognizing some of the bunk in it. Give a chance I’m sure most muslim countries would look like america today if they only had a decent standard of life.
January 10th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
No I didn’t. I merely illustrated the inanity of your “point” that Islam and Christianity are equally violent
Hm. Alright. Unfortunately, I didn’t say anything about Christianity and Islam being “equally violent.” I was referring to the contents of your respective holy books, compared to the actions of the people who follow them.
Since you didn’t read all of it (or didn’t grasp what you did read), here were my points:
1) There are just as many passages in the Bible advocating violence as there are in the Quran;
2) When you (Christianfolk) criticize the Quran, you often quote singular, out-of-context verses (often as little as one sentence), and you provide little to no context that would make “sense” of the passage in question. Yet, when you defend the exact same types of claims from the Christian Bible, you often rely entirely on the “contextual evidence” to show why you think the claim is valid.
So my question then becomes….from defending your own religion’s violent claims, you should know that context is VERY important when discussing religious literature. So why do you not try to offer (or accept what other people offer) in the way of context that would “justify” such passages from the Quran? Why do you insist, when criticizing Islam, on quoting only small passages with no contextual evidence — or in Mark’s case, providing no evidence whatsoever beyond a vague claim that we’re “more safe” in a liberal nation than in a radical Muslim nation?
January 10th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
“.from defending your own religion’s violent claims, you should know that context is VERY important when discussing religious literature. So why do you not try to offer (or accept what other people offer) in the way of context that would “justify” such passages from the Quran?”
Who was discussing the Koran or ANY religious lit? You. And you were using it to “illustrate” how the Christians are “just as violent as muslims”. It is difficult to think that you are not being intentionally dishonest here. YOU brought up the two religions respective books. That is stupid. Books don’t kill people, radicals following them do. Thus, your “points” regarding the books are pointless other than to illustrate your hate for Christianity which you have since confirmed. Mission complete.
The rest of your illogical assertions are so bizarre as to be completely impossible to engage unless I immerse myself in this reason-free form of “thinking”. That is the problem w/ hate: it leads to such irrationality that all there is left is indecipherable rantings that cannot be responded to w/o coming off like the ranter.
January 10th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
my other post won’t post. will try to try some other time…
January 10th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
And you were using it to “illustrate” how the Christians are “just as violent as muslims”.
See, you didn’t read what I wrote again. My points were:
1) There are just as many passages in the Bible advocating violence as there are in the Quran;
2) When you (Christianfolk) criticize the Quran, you often quote singular, out-of-context verses (often as little as one sentence), and you provide little to no context that would make “sense” of the passage in question. Yet, when you defend the exact same types of claims from the Christian Bible, you often rely entirely on the “contextual evidence” to show why you think the claim is valid.
Which narrows down to….you are inconsistent in that the evidence you rely on to defend Christianity is the very same evidence you deliberately avoid when you attack Islam.
YOU brought up the two religions respective books. That is stupid. Books don’t kill people, radicals following them do.
Exactly. That is exactly my point.
The rest of your illogical assertions are so bizarre as to be completely impossible to engage unless I immerse myself in this reason-free form of “thinking”.
Like what, in particular?
January 10th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
“And atheists are “a beginning and end in themselves” so, why are so many filled w/ irrational anger towards the One who died for them? I mean, He doesn’t even exist, right, so who cares?”
“again, illustrates your negative predisposition toward all things Christian.”
“Thus, your “points” regarding the books are pointless other than to illustrate your hate for Christianity which you have since confirmed. Mission complete.”
I think Mark has a persecution complex. Perhaps, if there is such a thing, a persecution complex by proxy. Sort of feeling persecuted on behalf of jesus.
January 11th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Luke said:In the same way, Tiger Woods, if he doesn’t change his ways has the potential to break up your family.
Toby said:That is if one cares about inconsequential things as sex.
If you take a very myopic view maybe.
Sex is inconsequential?
I can think of many consequences which can result from sex. Children and VD are two which come to the forefront of my mind.
(True, those consequences do not occur each and every time. But you wouldn’t call drunk driving inconsequential, even though most people get home just fine most of the time.)
So maybe you won’t leave Mrs. R because she messed around with Mr. Woods, but you might find yourself raising his child (since you’ve decided to keep the family together), or you may just find yourself going bankrupt trying to treat a new disease (which both of you may have by this time), or worse you may find yourself in a hospital with a dying spouse some years down the line.
What I’m saying is the breakup (or at the very least a radical restructuring of your family can occur even if you’re not some prude who thinks sex might actually have consequences.
Toby said:I’m sure he can cite stats on lots of things. I’d read them just as long as he provided sources that I could independently check the veracity for myself. I also have my doubts about the effects of marriage break ups on children.
Well there is lots of peer reviewed information on the subject that you can easily look up. There are psychologists and sociologist who specialize in this kind of research.
I want to be fair and honest though. The research seems to show that sometimes divorce is good for children. A large Canadian study which came out several years ago (I just remember hearing about it on Morning Edition or something, I can find it if you’d like) found that often children are better off with separate parents than remaining in the home environment from which they were emerging.
That said, there is a lot of research showing the cost of divorce (again it’s at times ambiguous, at times not). It’s not some Christian conspiracy, but solid social science.
January 11th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Mark said:In response to my reality based point that Muslims can live safely in any Christian nation and Christians can NOT in a Muslim nation, Tim says,”I don’t think Muslims are inherently prone to violence.
Mark,
With all due respect, your point was not a good one. One cannot judge things like this by looking at one example in one snapshot in time. Sure, your point may give us some anecdotal evidence (though I think some might argue your point; for example there has been much discussion about the plight of Christians after the fall of Saddam — because they were safe under his rule; a notable percentage of the Palestinian population is Christian, and many have more problems with Israeli policy than with Palestinian policy), but not much more.
When I read your post, I immediately thought of Jewish history in Europe, probably because that’s what I study. If I hadn’t spent hundreds of hours reading about this pogrom or that one — all by Christians directed at their Jewish neighbors, your point might resonate with me.
Having studied these things though, I might as well come to the conclusion, based on what I have read, that Christians are somehow prone to violence, but I simply don’t think that would be a fair conclusion.
January 11th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
No deity/deities in buddhism?
Since when?
Lion (IRC)
January 11th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
^You know Buddha isn’t a deity, right?
I’m aware of some claims on the part of Buddhism that could be classified as “supernatural,” but not of any actual deities.
January 11th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
For a secular -and sane- perspective on the differences between Islam and virtually every other religion, please read this:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010.....l-vlk.html
Fitzgerald puts it much better than I and he is clearly NOT singing the praises of non-islamic religions. He merely points up the reality of islams’ “wretchedness” in comparison. (here’s to hoping this posts - in Jesus name! amen)
January 11th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
the recognition that Muslims wish to conquer the continent of Europe is perhaps the most important part of the statement
How is it that Muslims trying to impose the “moral laws” that they believe to be “objectively true” is in any way different from Christianfolk in North America trying to legislate the “moral laws” that they believe to be “objectively true?”
You, the individual Muslim, are merely part of a collective. You are ideally a “slave of Allah.” Yours not to morally reason or question why; yours but to accept for, as is said, “Allah Knows Best.”
Hmm. Sounds familiar. Let’s try again:
There is no room for spiritual development, because there is no possibility of questioning. You, the individual Christian, are merely part of a collective. You are ideally a “slave of God..” Yours not to morally reason or question why; yours but to accept for, as is said, “God Knows Best.”
But his belief that Islam offers “spiritual values” is wrong. What it offers is a Compleat Regulation of Life and Explanation of the Universe. There are people who need such things, who long for such things. The Nazis, and to a certain extent the Communists, offer simple solutions and complete guides to the universe.
Little too much religious opining for me to accept this as a “secular” piece. It was pretty clearly written by someone with an intense bias — dare I say, “hatred” — of Muslims. It takes a writer with specific emotion invested in the issue to use words like “wretchedness.”
Also, interestingly, all of the arguments presented in that article work against Christianity as well — which actually helps illustrate my earlier point, that you Christianfolk tend to not hold yourselves to the same standards of criticism to which you hold others (like Muslims). Just replace instances of “Muslim” with “Christian” and “Islam” with “Christianity” and you get a lot of what I was already saying. Example:
When Oriana Fallaci saw the Muslims grow in number in Italy as elsewhere, when she saw their initial demands (demands that will never let up, will always be renewed, however many times they are rejected) for changes in Italian laws and customs and social arrangements
How is this any different from American Christians who consistently fight to overturn Roe V. Wade? These “initial demands” Christians make against society, that they refuse to yield or reconsider no matter how many times the Supreme Court shoots them down. It seems that there is a sect of American Christians (of whom Mark is no doubt a member) who think something like this:
“I believe [x].”
“If you disagree with me, then you’re wrong, and it’s the duty of the law to right that wrong.”
“If the law disagrees with me, then the law is wrong, and it’s the duty of the high court to change that law.”
“If the high court disagrees with me, then the high court is wrong and it’s the duty of god to change that court.”
The whole “pounding the law until the law is not on your side, then rallying against it” routine.
But I digress:
The survival of the West, as the West, is not only good for the West, but good for the whole world. Imagine a world where not Europe and America, but Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or the Sudan, or some power that combined all three, ruled things. What would our giddy globe look like then? Where would art, science, literature, intelligence itself, be then?
“Imagine what would happen if Christian fundamentalists got ahold of our country, and were allowed to legislate their personal morality and force it on the rest of us! Our music industry would be restricted to one genre (gospel), there would be no freedom of religion (only a specific subset of Protestant Evangelical Christianity), etc. etc.!”
See, it’s easy to take cheap shots and use scare tactics.
Interestingly, you still haven’t proven one important thing, Mr. Mark: How do you know that the extremist Muslims who you believe are “taking over” Europe in any way representative of “True Islam?” This is what I mean when I say you hold Islam to standards that you don’t hold to Christianity; when a claim of this exact nature is leveled at Christianity, and we call Christianity a “religion of violence” or a “religion of oppression,” you defer and say that “no true Christian would act that way, so they’re not representative of real Christianity.” When Dr. Tiller was murdered, people said, “Murder is un-Christian, so even though the killer acted like he was working on behalf of god, he wasn’t really Christian, so you can’t blame Christians for that.” How is this not also true of Muslims?
That is why it’s so important for you to prove that Islam is a religion of violence, not the people who believe it or distort it for their personal gain — in that sense, the terrorists are not justifications for calling Islam “wretched” or “evil,” because many moderate Muslims (who are not terrorists) use the same argument, that they are misrepresenting Islam and that they are not “true Muslims.”
Your arguments that people “stray from the path” can apply equally to all religions; why do you not look into the Quran and say, “those terrorists are not True Muslims?” in the same way that you look into the Bible and say, “those killers saying they are Christian are not True Christians?”
Why do you insist that there is a set, literal standard that Muslims must follow (and that cannot be justified), while Christianity is allowed a shifting moral base that liberalizes over time and can never be accurately pinned down or summed up?
January 12th, 2010 at 1:28 am
HI Tim D,
Do you argue that the elephant god vision of Siddhartas mother Maya was NOT a separate entity?
Do you argue that zen buddhism has no (Japanese, Chinese or Sanskrit) words for divine beings or realms where they live(d)?
I have read about many.
Lion (IRC)
January 12th, 2010 at 4:48 am
“Imagine what would happen if Christian fundamentalists got ahold of our country, and were allowed to legislate their personal morality and force it on the rest of us!”
They already did. It’s called the founding and first 150 or so years of this Republic. And none of those things you suppose would happen did. Rather, America was taking an already beautiful document -the Constitution- and honing and refining it to a more perfect instrument of justice, liberty and the American way. Then creeping liberalism, well, crept into the picture and ever since it infected us, the poor, minorities, women and anyone else who buys into its agenda have gotten more and more hopeless w/ the passing of every year.
As to your earlier question about my assertion that you have been so irrational, your whole post is a witness to this fact. Muslims are slaughtering, torturing and mutilating innocent human beings wholesale, 24/7/365 with NO other group on the planet within a light year of their depravity and you are making the argument that those “blood-thirsty Christians” are just chomping at the bit to do the same, if only the SCOTUS would get out of their way! That is borderline insanity, if not full-blown psychosis.
Talk about a straw man! You invent -in your hate filled imagination- a scenario where THE most peace loving people on planet earth would be “just like muslims mass murderers” but for some legal technicalities…Can you even get how stupid THAT notion is? You insist that Christians would be just like a bunch of barbarians, who -BY DEFINITION- break every law known to man, if only they could “get their day in court”. You’re embarrassing yourself. Seriously, chum, you should stop before you corner yourself into having to defend this irrational tripe in perpetuity.
“How do you know that the extremist Muslims who you believe are “taking over” Europe in any way representative of “True Islam?”
Who the blank cares what “true islam” is ? Islam is the name of the belief system that is, singlehandedly (literally -remember, they cut hands off for petty crime), causing 90% of the mayhem on earth and the judeo-christian ethic is what brought humanity out of the dark ages. You will deny that, I know, because as you have already stated there is no such thing as truth -in your mind. This is what moral relativism breeds. For anyone who doesn’t know what it is, they should read Tims’ last post and so many others like it. “No one is really wrong, accept those who claim there to be wrongness at all.” “There is no objective truth. And of that truth, I can confirm its objectivity.” “I never said life is meaningless. I only say that it all started in some primordial ooze and meaning, values, morals and such is all subjective and we are all merely the sum of our chemical make-up anyway.” “How do I know Christianity is no more or no less “moral” than islam? A guy that the cbs news told me was a Christian killed an abortion doctor so, what’s the diff between that and the millions killed in the name of allah in the last couple decades?”
Yes indeed, it took longer than old George thought but, we have finally arrived at nineteen-eighty-four.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:13 am
“Imagine what would happen if Christian fundamentalists got ahold of our country, and were allowed to legislate their personal morality and force it on the rest of us!” “They already did. It’s called the founding and first 150 or so years of this Republic. And none of those things you suppose would happen did.”
This is nonsense. For a start, many of the founding fathers were not Christian Fundamentalists. Many held themselves to be deists - George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.
Most importantly, the founding fathers were specifically careful NOT to put God into the document. They debated on many occasions whether to include references to God in the constitution. On every occasion they took a vote of it, and on every occasion it was voted down. They knew what they were doing. Tim’s point still stands.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:17 am
They already did. It’s called the founding and first 150 or so years of this Republic.
Tsk, not quite.
you are making the argument that those “blood-thirsty Christians” are just chomping at the bit to do the same, if only the SCOTUS would get out of their way! That is borderline insanity, if not full-blown psychosis.
You clearly did not read anything I wrote. That is not even close to the point I made.
Who the blank cares what “true islam” is ?
Well for one, I do. If ‘real Christianity’ is as different from ‘fake Christianity’ as ‘real Islam’ is from ‘fake Islam,’ then I’d say there’s a universe of difference.
Perhaps we should ask, next time a known Christian commits a murder or has an abortion or is involved in a sex scandal, “Who the blank cares what ‘true Christianity’ is?” But I’m sure you wouldn’t apply that same standard to Christians as you would to Muslims. Hence my earlier point.
You will deny that, I know, because as you have already stated there is no such thing as truth -in your mind.
I have never once denied that there are Muslim extremists. I don’t know where you’re getting that from.
I never said life is meaningless. I only say that it all started in some primordial ooze and meaning, values, morals and such is all subjective and we are all merely the sum of our chemical make-up anyway.
The Ben Stein routine — I blatantly stated (on multiple occasions) that I didn’t believe that’s how life started. It’s just one theory of many — which, might I remind you, you asked me to provide.
How do I know Christianity is no more or no less “moral” than islam? A guy that the cbs news told me was a Christian killed an abortion doctor so, what’s the diff between that and the millions killed in the name of allah in the last couple decades?”
What’s the difference between that guy and all those Muslims that CNN and TBN and all the other networks (oh, and a bunch of popular Catholic figures) tell us are Muslims? Really?
Yes indeed, it took longer than old George thought but, we have finally arrived at nineteen-eighty-four.
Oy vey….*facepalm*
January 12th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
It’s called “scope”, boys. You look at the current reality of the human condition and come to the conclusion that Christianity is no different than radical islam. That is infantile on its face. But it does help to illustrate how you can look at existence itself and think something like, “Yeah, all of this could have come from nothing. Makes total sense to me. And all those incredible, undeniably spiritual connections that happen between people millions of times, *every second of the day*, yeah, that’s all just a bunch of meaningless chemical reactions. Makes total sense.”
THAT is the type of thinking that can look at the reality of the human condition today and say, “Man, look what RELIGION hath wrought! To bad that stupid Mark can’t see how he’s a part of the same maniacal process that those poor, persecuted muslims are. If HIS religion was poor, just like them, they’d all be out there blowing up Starbucks full of teenagers just like those poor, downtrodden, voiceless islamites.”
That’s rich, guys. Why does it make sense that you probably get straight A’s for “critical thinking” like that now a days? Because professors are equally insane. You still have an option though, and that is to open your eyes and observe reality for what it is. Don’t worry, there’s a slight sting at first but, after you get used to it, it’s quite the positive experience. Go try that out and let us all know how you fare, won’t you?
January 12th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
“Most importantly, the founding fathers were specifically careful NOT to put God into the document.”
Exactly. Further proving the superiority of the Christian faith. It allows for us to be confident enough not to create a theocracy. The founders were Christian folk -your fantasies aside- who passionately debated amongst themselves whether to go WITH or against their own tendencies (remember, some colonies had “official religions”) and, in the end, they went AGAINST their own inclination towards Christianity. In the name of liberty.
Thank you again, liberalism, for poisoning the minds of so many into believing that the founding of the greatest earthly force for freedom that has ever existed was started by a bunch of godless, “dead white guys”. THAT is what is so evil about modern liberalism: it seeks never to lift ANYONE up higher, rather only to debase ALL until we are all “in the muck” to coin a phrase.
But hey, makes sense right? We all came from the muck, so it only serves that we should -in “the thinking persons” reality- still be there, right guys?
January 12th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Yes, I think that Tiger Woods should become a Christian, God loves him just as much as He loves any of us. Jesus died on the cross for him just like He did for all of us. One sin is no worse than another, God can forgive any sin.
He can put this home back together and give Tiger and Elin a love for each other that they never had before. This is my prayer that this will be what will happen, so that those sweet children can be raised in a Christian home.
I admire those that stand bold for Jesus Christ.
January 12th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
The deism of many of the founders is a matter of public record, not fantasy. It is a shame that many Christians today reject the liberal secularist ideals of those great men.
“We all came from the muck, so it only serves that we should -in “the thinking persons” reality- still be there, right guys?”
As distinct from your ‘We’re all born miserable sinners’.
January 12th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
You look at the current reality of the human condition and come to the conclusion that Christianity is no different than radical islam.
…that is not what I said…
I was going to respond to the rest of your post, but then I realized that *everything else* you wrote was expounded off of this single incorrect statement. Thus there’s no need to address any of it until you correct this.
Exactly. Further proving the superiority of the Christian faith. It allows for us to be confident enough not to create a theocracy.
Even if that *were* true (which it pretty obviously isn’t, to anyone who’s taken third-grade history or ever read the Declaration and the Constitution since fourth or fifth grade)…such a shame that modern Christians don’t feel that same confidence, and instead choose to publicly legislate as many references to god and godliness as possible, almost as if afraid that people will think they’re not Christian if they go too long without referring to god.
THAT is what is so evil about modern liberalism: it seeks never to lift ANYONE up higher, rather only to debase ALL until we are all “in the muck” to coin a phrase.
Well, actually, I see that exact line of behavior more prevalently in modern Christianity than in any other worldview, secular or no — I went into that in-depth in the most recent science thread, with the building analogy; creationism has absolutely *no literal evidence* whatsoever; the probability of its “truth” relies entirely on the fact that other theories can’t explain things. It’s trying to claim that it can prove a negative, which is (of course) impossible, and so the only respite is to tear down any possible explanations before they’re explored far enough to be proven (or disproven, even).
But this is a silly diversion in the first place, so why don’t we get back to the points….?
In any case….on the one hand, yes, I am glad that the founders believed in my right to be an atheist and disagree with their views, and to be public about that. On the other hand, there are also a lot of things they did that even a modern “Christian” would consider despicable — they delegated women to property, for example, and only allowed rich white landowners to vote. Need we mention slavery? I’m certainly glad we haven’t followed our “forefathers’” (and their immediate successors’) reccomendations to those ends.
Something isn’t automatically “just” simply because the founders of the nation thought so (nor is it “not just” simply because they thought so). To imply that it is is blind worship of the forefathers — who were very human (like us today), very imperfect (like us today), and very prone to the popular memes and social mores of their day (like us today).
January 12th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Nathan,
Fantasy illustrated herewith: (from Washington’s FIRST inaugural address) “…it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe”
Go to “infoplease.com” and search Washington’s first inaugural address. It’s the first one that comes up. He talked like that all of the time, too. Surely, you don’t learn truths such as this in your modern leftist “education” so, it would not be fair to expect you to know the truth. I assure you, however, as I read your posts it is painfully clear that you are operating under beliefs that ARE pure fantasy. That is why I don’t normally respond. But I realize it is your education. That is why you can be incredulous that I, or anyone, doesn’t “give in” and acknowledge how right you (or Tim) are on a given subject AND YET be willing to say (w/ a straight face, I assume) that a horrendous, record breaking cold front sweeping over your homeland IS actual PROOF of “global warming”.
“The hoax of the gaps”, as i have called it previously, is a self illuminating falsehood that cannot be seen from within (apparently). Actually, THIS hoax covers much more than even God can so, I will refer to it as “The hoax that is proved true no matter what happens”. On the other hand, when discussing who created the universe, “the GOD of the gaps” is used as a statement of derision when aimed at those who believe in Him. Here is why BOTH of those points of view are faulty: re: “AGW”, those who profess it don’t believe in the supernatural (i.e. material universe = logically explainable material reasons for AGW, etc.) and yet can NOT come up w/ a way to accurately forecast the weather 2 DAYS ahead, let alone a year or a decade or more. Hence, they are ALWAYS wrong (again, your fantasy about the last 10 years notwithstanding). And they STILL speak w/ absolute authority as to what steps MUST be taken to avert “disaster”. Utter nonsense. re: “the God of the gaps”, He’s God, of course He is the explanation for so many things we don’t understand. That is part of what a creator of everything implies (see/read Job for more) But I don’t see people applying that in science other than as pertains our origins, and in that area we’re all just as close in our “proof”. Besides, we all must start from somewhere. Christian theists start from, “And God said…” and you start from, “There is no God so we’re bound to figure it out some day.”
How can you know where you’re going if you don’t even know where you’re coming from?
(side note on atheistic faith)There exists NOT ONE “missing link” between 2 “evolved” animals, and still they claim evolution as fact. Now THAT’S a faith based proposition.
I’m just looking for consistency here. For your “God didn’t do it” theories to work, you require that we swallow some pretty big fish. And, without the revelation of who Jesus is, so does Christianity. Where does your faith come from? In what (or who?) does it reside? Your conclusions come from: (unknown) + 2 = the universe. Sorry, bud, but you can’t get here from there. (answer to above question) You don’t know where you’re coming from, so you can’t even know where you are.
Your creed is betrayed in everything you guys say. I think Tim actually has said it. Anyway, here’s a summary of what I here you guys say: “I have faith in science that all will/can be explained some day. But as man is but an object to be studied himself, he may never know. Because it takes a “mind” to “know” stuff and, as a bucket of chemicals reaching conclusions corrupted by my own innate subjectiveness, I can’t really say that my “mind” is able to discern reality in the first place. I mean, if reality exists at all -in the first place before THAT first place.” (that’s more Tim, but you agree w/ everything he says so…)
Kinda make ya feel like folding your feet, palms up, and humming,
“o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m”, doesn’t it?
January 12th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Fantasy illustrated herewith: (from Washington’s FIRST inaugural address) “…it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe”
Mark, do you even know what “deist” means?
That is why you can be incredulous that I, or anyone, doesn’t “give in” and acknowledge how right you (or Tim) are on a given subject
I’m not incredulous about you not “giving in” on anything. I fully expected you to completely ignore my points and launch into (another) rhetorical rant that completely refuses to address anything. This is more of a hobby than anything; seeing exactly how far you are willing to go to avoid answering a question, short of completely ignoring me.
AND YET be willing to say (w/ a straight face, I assume) that a horrendous, record breaking cold front sweeping over your homeland IS actual PROOF of “global warming”.
Sort of like how a lack of mention of god is “proof” that our forefathers believed in Jesus? :/
There exists NOT ONE “missing link” between 2 “evolved” animals, and still they claim evolution as fact.
False. Google or wiki “pelagornithid” or “Anatosuchus minor,” or any of the other so-called “transitional” fossils.
I’m just looking for consistency here. For your “God didn’t do it” theories to work, you require that we swallow some pretty big fish.
The only way your REALLY, REALLY BIG fish could be “swallowed” is if we were unable to swallow any of the other, smaller fish first. Which seems kind of odd given that smaller fish should be easy to swallow 0.0
….don’t worry, I thought your fish metaphor was a bit silly anyway. The point is that “god doing it” explains nothing, it’s not an explanation, it’s a claim. At least naturalistic views are trying to find an explanation for the means by which life began. At the *very* least we know that such explanations are possible, even if they ultimately turn out not to be the case. At the end of the day, if you’re going to say, “God did it with magic,” you might as well say, “it just magically appeared out of nowhere.” They’re the same exact claim.
“I have faith in science that all will/can be explained some day.
False. Nobody here has stated anything even distantly resembling that. If you think I’m wrong, then feel free to quote the exact wording.
Kinda make ya feel like folding your feet, palms up, and humming,
“o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m”, doesn’t it?
You don’t get out much, do you?
January 12th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Ooh, I remember the other one: it was tiktaalik.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
P.S. A couple examples of why it’s important to differentiate between Muslims and Muslim extremists; from CBC news on Saturday, January 9th, just google the headline “Attack on Canada, U.S. is attack on Muslims: imams”
From the article (emphasis mine):
A group of Canadian and U.S. Islamic leaders on Friday issued a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring that an attack by extremists on the two countries would constitute an attack on the 10 million Muslims living in North America.
The 20 imams associated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada said this marked the first fatwa by the Muslim clergy declaring attacks on Canada and the U.S. to be attacks on Muslims.
“In our view, these attacks are evil, and Islam requires Muslims to stand up against this evil,” the imams said in their fatwa.
…
“We are part of this society,” [Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada] said. “This is my home, and if anybody attacks on Canada, in fact, attacks on my home.”
The imams said it is a duty of every Muslim in Canada and the U.S. to safeguard the two countries.
“They must expose any person, Muslim or non-Muslim, who would cause harm to fellow Canadians or Americans,” they said.
“It is religious obligation upon Muslims, based upon the Qur’anic teachings, that we have to be loyal to the country where we live,” said Soharwardy. “We have no problems in Canada; we can practise our religion freely.”
Next, from an article titled, “New study shows Muslim community’s anti-terrorism efforts.” If you google that it’s one of the first results.
From the article:
“Buried among the flood of terrorism news that’s come out over the last couple of days is a new study showing that American Muslims have effectively worked to stop radicalization in their communities.
The researchers, from Duke University and the University of North Carolina, found that…
[it is the Muslim-American communities themselves who play a large role in keeping the number of radicalized members low through their own practices…Leaders and Muslim-American organizations denounce violent acts, for instance, in messages that have weight within communities.
In addition, such communities often self-police — confronting those who express radical ideology or support for terrorism and communicating concerns about radical individuals to authorities. Some Muslim-Americans have adopted programs for youth to help identify those who react inappropriately to controversial issues so they can undergo counseling and education, the researchers said.]
The study also found that “since 9/11, there has been increased tension among Muslim-Americans about their acceptance in mainstream American society,” and that they perceive anti-Muslim bias in the media and discrimination in security and counterterrorism initiatives.
When demagogues openly call for racial profiling, it’s important to remember not only that such measures violate American principles of due process, but also that they single out communities that are already doing a great deal to stop terrorism and facing religion-based discrimination and hostility. It isn’t right, and it isn’t smart.
Yeah. Real monsters, those moderate Muslims….stopping terrorism in their own communities….how un-Christian of them!
:/
January 13th, 2010 at 12:03 am
Mark: “remember, some colonies had “official religions”
And remember how well that worked out when people of other religions tried to settle in their states. Beatings, harrassment, and murders. Try listening to the Steven Waldman interview on NPR’s Fresh Air as he discussed his book,
“Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty”. I’d include a link, but it’s just get moderated for four months. Find it yourself.
I believe it was Benjamin Franklin that said, “Lighthouses are more useful than churches.”
January 13th, 2010 at 12:16 am
Do you argue that the elephant god vision of Siddhartas mother Maya was NOT a separate entity?
Do you argue that zen buddhism has no (Japanese, Chinese or Sanskrit) words for divine beings or realms where they live(d)?
I have read about many.
1) Tell that to Turek, who in the very beginning of this article, says the following:
“But since Buddhists don’t believe in a Deity, one must ask…”
2) Buddhism does not have any deities that are primary objects of worship for Buddhists, as most religions do. A word for such a thing and dogmatic worship for it are different things. Most Buddhist beliefs stem directly from the teachings of The Buddha, not from extraneous deities.
January 13th, 2010 at 5:22 am
Mark, your entire post could be replaced with the words “Mark doesn’t understand what a deist is”.
Why not look it up before making a fool of yourself on this thread any longer. Clue: believing in an almight God is consistent with being a deist. Producting your own version of the bible, taking out the bits you don’t like (as Jefferson did) isn’t.
January 13th, 2010 at 5:32 am
Sorry, I’ll try that again:
a) Believing in an almight God is consistent (by definition) with being a deist.
b) Producing your own version of the bible that takes out the bits you don’t like (as Jefferson did) is inconsistent (by definition) with being a fundamentalist Christian.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:31 am
A (non-exhaustive) list of Founding Fathers quotes on deism and religion:
Benjamin Franklin on Deism: “. . . the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.”
Franklin on Jesus: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity”
A religious fan of Jesus to be sure, but some doubts as to his divinity? Is this a fundamentalist view?
Jefferson: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”
This is not a fundamentalist view, especially not in the ‘IF’.
Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
Paine on Jesus: “The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.”
Ethan Allen: “I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism makes me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not strictly speaking, whether I am one or not.”
Again, I am not claiming that the founding fathers were atheists, or even that none were fundamentalist Christians. I am showing quite clearly that it is ludicrous wishful thinking to claim that America is an example of what happens when fundamentalist Christians put together a country.
Mark, feel free to apologise to me for calling my posts fantasy. However, I doubt you have the self-respect to do so.
January 13th, 2010 at 9:03 am
How did you guys get into the religious beliefs of the founding fathers? I think it is quite clear that Jefferson, Franklin and Paine were deists, although the Declaration of Independence (largely written by Jefferson) is not a deist document with its talk of Divine Providence and a Day of Judgment. Most of the rest were of some kind of orthodox Christian belief, but so what? The issue isn’t legislating religion, but legislating morality which is what all laws do. (Subject of our book “Legislating Morality” http://www.impactapologetics.c.....8;PT_ID=91)
Interesting topic for another thread. But if you continue, keep it civil please.
Blessings,
Frank
January 13th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Frank Turek:How did you guys get into the religious beliefs of the founding fathers?
Who knows.
To bring it back to the original topic a bit — the way Mr. Hume has been treated by some prominent figures — I was struck by the media coverage and general response to Colt McCoy’s post game interview.
He said, in part: G-d is in control of my life and I know if nothing else I’m standing on the rock.
The response to his speech was overwhelmingly positive and complimentary — as it should have been.
Another American football player Tim Tebow is surely among the most loved of public figures in America and is a very outspoken Christian.
To me this just goes to show that the problem people had with Mr. Hume was much more related to the venue of his comments and his role within that venue, then with his heartfelt belief in Christianity.
As I said in my first comment on this topic:
I actually think this is related to one of the purposes of this very website. Many here see a problem when supposedly objective professors “proselytize” for atheism in a supposedly objective venue. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why some might be upset when a supposedly objective person “proselytizes” in a supposedly objective venue.
Frank Turek said:The issue isn’t legislating religion, but legislating morality which is what all laws do.
Slightly off topic, but you brought it up.
I thought of this reading your comment and also my email, which contained a fund-raising appeal from the Red Cross in response to the events in Haiti.
I am sure you agree that giving money to charity is a morally correct thing to do. Would you support a law that required people to donate a certain percentage of their income to charity (this would be a progressive system — the more you earn, the higher the percentage — with the lowest earners excluded)?
(I think I would, by the way.)
January 13th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
How did you guys get into the religious beliefs of the founding fathers?
Through the long process of humoring Mark’s rantings and ravings, somehow.
The issue isn’t legislating religion, but legislating morality which is what all laws do.
Interesting because (aside from the fact that you’re parroting book quotes again):
(1) A law is not the same thing as a moral, so no, not all laws legislate morality; a law is not a moral and vice-versa. To say they’re one and the same is silly. Morality comes into play regardless of whether or not there’s a law about it; there’s no way they can be the same.
(2) Not all fundamentalists are quite as hesitant to conflate religion with morality; so in the vast majority of political cases, yes, an attempt to “legislate morality” is an attempt to “legislate religion,” because the people in question believe that their religion is morality.
In any case, legislating morality is also dangerous. Whose morality do we legislate? Yours? Mine? What makes ours so special? There’s no truly objective selection process to decide whose morality gets legislated. Thus, I’m more content to stick with laws based on constitutional aims rather than some group of people’s personal views on “morality.”
January 13th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
P.S. My entire previous post can probably be abbreviated to this:
I don’t think a law is necessarily “legislating morality” at all; the main reason being that whether or not it’s against the law is sometimes a factor in deciding whether something is immoral or not (it’s also not a factor at times, but the point stands).
January 13th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
@ Tim,
My first two posts were 100% on point. Your first post went thus:
[irrationalhatefilledscreed]”And that’s another reason (on the long, long list) why Christianity in particular is so bunk to me….I actually read a chick tract once where a pedophile was “forgiven” and allowed to continue living with the child he’d abused (for years!) all because “he found Jesus,” while in another tract, an honest man who did nothing but charitable work his entire life died and went to hell simply because “he didn’t accept Jesus.”
That says to me, “good and evil don’t matter! It’s about the label; as long as you’re Christian, god doesn’t care how horrible of a person you are!” That is so superficial that it sickens me.”[/irrationalhatefilledscreed]
To blame others for what you do is “less than honest”, to say the least. You launched, just like Hitchens and all the other people who say “God doesn’t exist and I hate him!”, into one of your indefensible screeds so I joined the fray because, ironically enough considering the thrust of this site, most postings are by angry hate filled people who have hijacked the place for, apparently, no other reason than to gratify your own, painfully obvious, insecurities about “the big issues” of life.
(keeping this short as I type interminably slow and might have said a “magic word” sending this thing to you know where)
January 13th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
My first two posts were 100% on point.
Starting to see a pattern here….I can’t help but notice that about 70% of every single message you post is you asserting your own correctness regardless of evidence or rational argument (the above quote being a perfect example).
just like Hitchens and all the other people who say “God doesn’t exist and I hate him!”
Except I never said that. In fact, I don’t believe I said anything about god at all in that post. It had nothing to do with god whatsoever, much less whether or not I “hate” the idea of god. It had to do with Brit Hume, and the Christians who are praising what is basically an attempt to advertise religion as though it were something like a car or an insurance plan. I’m surprised you guys aren’t mad about him doing that; regardless of the “bunkess” of Christianity one way or the other, it’s a cheap stunt that further dilutes the image of Christianity into something that can be advertised on national TV like some kind of mass-product — a far cry from the days of the Bible when people were told to pray in their closets (not in public), or to do good things in such a way that even one’s neighbor wouldn’t hear of it, because god will see that you’ve done good and that’s all that matters, and people who do “good” and go around telling everyone (or who make sure that people are watching — say, on national TV — before they say or do something) are the types of people who are only doing it for the praise and not because it’s good. If Hume was serious about this, I imagine his comment to Woods would’ve been a private exchange, not a televised pitch.
But I digress….the point I made was that Brit Hume presented his case for Christianity from a very unethical perspective — that Tiger Woods should do it in order to avoid having to face some future supernatural “penalty” over what he did. This is both unethical and illogical.
Buddhism and Christianity cannot both be absolutely true. Therefore, to make the case as though both are absolutely true and that Tiger has to choose from one or the other (”Buddhism doesn’t offer the forgiveness that Christianity offers,” etc.) is to present a point on a false basis — he’s not trying to convince Tiger that Christianity is actually true, just that he should believe in it for his own personal benefit. Ultimately, he is appealing not to the “truth” of Christianity or the “falsehood” of Buddhism, but on which one makes him feel better about what he did. That’s dishonest.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
P.S. It’s also selfish.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Mark said:most postings are by angry hate filled people
What blog are you reading Mark? I read this site almost every day, and I haven’t perceived much hate at all. If anything, I think your feelings on liberalism are among the most negative things I read here. (There may be nothing wrong with this — I hate Nazi ideology, for example — but as far as your quote above, your views are simply among the most demeaning and derogatory, in my view.)
:/
January 14th, 2010 at 5:55 am
So Mark insists for several posts that I’m fantasizing about the Founding Fathers. I think we all now accept that I was correct, unless Mark wants to call Frank a liar too.
Simple rule - if your knowledge is limited on a certain subject, and someone says something about it that you don’t think is true, before you tell them they’re an idiot, why not go and do your own research on it first, just in case it’s actually you that’s got it wrong. Not only is it rude to call them a liar or a fantasist when you actually have no idea what you’re talking about, it also slows discussion down and can lead it completely off-topic.
And if you ARE rude enough to make that accusation, and then waste the other person’s time presenting you with the evidence that you’re completely wrong, and even the guy running the site tells you that you’re barking up the wrong tree, then at least have the guts to apologize for it.
January 14th, 2010 at 11:10 am
“My first two posts were 100% on point.
Starting to see a pattern here….I can’t help but notice that about 70% of every single message you post is you asserting your own correctness regardless of evidence or rational argument (the above quote being a perfect example).”
My first two posts WERE on point. In fact, the second one was an attempt to bring the thread BACK on point as it had gone off point 3 POSTS IN. But, if it will bring peace: those first two posts by me were 100% off topic according to you and, therefore, wrong. Will try to work on that.
As to the implication that all of the founders were deists / I was working from a lack of understanding as to what a deist is: wrong. It was put forth (implied) that the founders would be upset w/ all of the “crazed right wing nuts” and fundamentalists of our time and be more likely to assume a position in line w/ the left. That is absurd and was merely pointing that up.
Nathan: I didn’t call you an idiot (see: “thou doth protest too loudly…”) /
I never said deism doesn’t hold that there is a creator. I was responding to (and directly quoted you in the response as I must here again) your assertion that “Most importantly, the founding fathers were specifically careful NOT to put God into the document.” Then I make my argument. The fact that some were not, specifically, Christian does not discount the fact that NONE were in fact atheists. “…secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America..” Seriously, if they were so hell bent on “separating church and state”, why would they use language like that? These were very direct, no nonsense people. Unlike some who fling their flurries of blurry, counterfeit facts, concocted to confound and confuse. Not that any such person reside here, that is, necessarily.
Back to Tim: “…it’s a cheap stunt that further dilutes the image of Christianity into something that can be advertised on national TV like some kind of mass-product..” Tim, please look up the word “evangelism”. Likewise, you are welcome to question Humes’ motives, but I don’t think it is more than a 50/50 guess as to what they are. I am a Christian so I think, “Good job, Britt.” You hate Christianity -as you have openly stated here- so you see a self-aggrandizing phony. Don’t worry, it will all be sorted out in the end.
and: “…the point I made was that Brit Hume presented his case for Christianity from a very unethical perspective — that Tiger Woods should do it in order to avoid having to face some future supernatural “penalty” over what he did. This is both unethical and illogical.” Oh. Then I have completely missed one of the basic tenets of Christianity. Mayhaps you could have that rewritten into the Bible. Until then, we’ll proceed forth in our lack of your understanding, thank you.
and then this: “Buddhism and Christianity cannot both be absolutely true. Therefore, to make the case as though both are absolutely true and that Tiger has to choose from one or the other (”Buddhism doesn’t offer the forgiveness that Christianity offers,” etc.) is to present a point on a false basis — he’s not trying to convince Tiger that Christianity is actually true, just that he should believe in it for his own personal benefit. Ultimately, he is appealing not to the “truth” of Christianity or the “falsehood” of Buddhism, but on which one makes him feel better about what he did. That’s dishonest.” I feel so lost, did Britt Hume say that they are both correct ? I thought he left that for the viewers / Mr. Woods to figure out. Obviously they can’t both be true, for Christianity holds that it is the only truth (”…I am the way the truth and the life…” I think it says somewhere in the Bible. Jesus speaking of course.). What I saw was Mr. Hume NOT calling into question the truthfulness of Buddhism but rather he was saying -in as diplomatic a way as one could, considering what Christians believe- that Mr. Woods could find peace and happiness should he choose Christianity. The merits of that notwithstanding, that seems like a very compassionate thing to do. Unless, of course, you require that Mr. Hume question his own faith to the extent that he doesn’t even maintain the conviction of its truth. Kind of defeats the purpose of even being a Christian in the first place. And that particular sense of outrage felt for Mr. Hume, or any Christian, implies the defeat of believing anything not approved by the one who is outraged, doesn’t it? But then, that IS your ultimate point. Right, Mr. Tim ?
As to your “70% resolution” (to coin a phrase) re that percentage of my posts / there content: To the extent that you are correct, I suspect it would be due to the fact that you are constantly tearing down basic truths that I hold dear like the origin(s) of life, the universe, truth, morality, reality, etc.
These are weighty issues, and I fail to understand why you would be disturbed that someone would be passionate about them. You state your case w/ much energy and aplomb (although not w/o your own little “evasive maneuvers”, as outlined above) and I simply attempt to defend what I see under attack.
Nothing personal, this is all just an idea exchange, right?
January 14th, 2010 at 11:24 am
Mark said: Oh. Then I have completely missed one of the basic tenets of Christianity.
Mark, do you not believe that Christianity offers forgiveness from any sin (but the one we discussed) based not on works, but on faith alone?
Perhaps it’s better left for another post, but I think the objection Tim brings up is a very valid one for many people.
It’s simply difficult for many to imagine — simply evil even — that a child rapist could be in heaven while Ghandi or some little girl who recently died in Haiti burn in hell for eternity.
I would honestly like to see Dr. Turek’s take on this, and the views of others as well.
I would like to respond to Tim as well, but haven’t had the time to write something proper, and I feel as though it deserves a proper response.
January 14th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Mark: “The fact that some were not, specifically, Christian does not discount the fact that NONE were in fact atheists”
Indeed. But I never said they were. In fact I specifically said: “I am not claiming that the founding fathers were atheists”.
You said the founding fathers were fundamentalist Christians, I replied that many were deists. You then spent several posts denying this and calling me a fantasist. So we now accept that I was right.
Mark: “I was responding to your assertion that “Most importantly, the founding fathers were specifically careful NOT to put God into the document.””
Right, an assertion that you did nothing to refute. You’ve provided NO quotes from the constitution that make reference to God. Keep looking. The only one I’ve ever found is a reference to ‘in the year of our Lord’. Quoting references OUTSIDE the constitution doesn’t refute my claim.
Mark: “I didn’t call you an idiot (see: “thou doth protest too loudly…”)”
Well seeing as I never said that you did, it’s hardly something I can be accused of protesting about, loudly or otherwise. You’re free to your own opinions, just not your own facts.
In an act of enormous hubris on your part, you took my statement - simply that many of the founding fathers were deists - which again Frank and everyone else acknowledges to be true, and you not only denied it repeatedly, you went on to say:
“Surely, you don’t learn truths such as this in your modern leftist “education” so, it would not be fair to expect you to know the truth. I assure you, however, as I read your posts it is painfully clear that you are operating under beliefs that ARE pure fantasy. That is why I don’t normally respond. But I realize it is your education. That is why you can be incredulous that I, or anyone, doesn’t “give in” and acknowledge how right you (or Tim) are on a given subject…”
So you accused me of being uneducated, believing fantasy, unable to know the truth… all because I said something that was true. You’ve given up refuting that there were deists among them, and resorted to refuting claims that I didn’t even make.
So either a) you were very rude, made a big mistake, and now can’t admit it, or b) you are STILL denying that there were any deists among the founding fathers.
There are no other options. There is no third option where you refute claims that I didn’t make, such as that the founding fathers included atheists.
Again Mark, feel free to apologize.
January 14th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Mark: “I didn’t call you an idiot (see: “thou doth protest too loudly…”)”
Well seeing as I never said that you did..” which is preceded by this, “Simple rule - if your knowledge is limited on a certain subject, and someone says something about it that you don’t think is true, before you tell them they’re an idiot, why not go and do your own research on it first, just in case it’s actually you that’s got it wrong.”(emph. mine) in your previous post.
And that makes it oh so clear as to why you don’t quote where I, “In an act of enormous hubris on your part, you took my statement - simply that many of the founding fathers were deists - which again Frank and everyone else acknowledges to be true, and you not only denied it repeatedly…” Again, where is this “repeated denial” of mine?
January 14th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Can everybody just shake hands now?
This he said, she said is just not that interesting.
January 14th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
It’s alright, Nathan. Ever since you started saying crazy things like, “Hitler was fanatically anti-Darwinist” I vowed not to engage you. So, since I broke my own promise, this is all my fault. Now I don’t know what to do as you get more and more, well, like that. Will ponder this while out mowing today. Sorry for any part I had in this mess. Mark
January 14th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Ditto to what Luke said. That’s fine, you can say I’m running away. No worries. But I’ll not be attending the victory parade!
January 14th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Sign. Mark, the presence of the works of Darwin on Hitler’s list of banned literature is not ‘crazy things’ - it is a matter of public record.
Specifically he banned: “Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism”. Look it up.
If me pointing this out led to you deciding not to engage with my posts, then that simply suggests you ignore facts when they’re not convenient to you. That you compound the situation by throwing all sorts of insults at them, makes you look even worse when it turns out the error was yours rather than theirs.
If someone says something you don’t believe is true, why not ask them for a cite rather than shut your mind or be rude to them? The former may lead to increased knowledge, the latter won’t.
Ponder on that while you’re mowing.
January 14th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Sorry, just figured that if he (Hitler) invited Margaret Sanger (the founder of Americas’ “greatest” organization for eugenics - the black population stifling “planned parenthood”) “over for tea”, he must have fell right in line w/ Darwin. Also, there are several famous quotes by him / his underlings to the affect that they in fact were followers of Darwin. Will cite later if time permits. (Oh for “peace treaties”!…nice try though, Luke.)
January 14th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Link: http://www.library.arizona.edu.....uments.htm
The above link contains lists of books marked for ‘purification’ - i.e. burning - by the Nazis between 1933 and 1935. It includes the above quote about Darwinist writings, along with ‘The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism’ and ‘literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes’
Now in my opinion, if someone goes as far as to order the burning of all books about a certain subject, then it’s fair to say “He is fanatically anti-that subject”. Of course you are free to think that’s a ‘crazy’ thing for me to say.
January 14th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
So the Nazis were followers of Darwin, and yet they burned and banned all his books. And they were eugenicists, and yet they followed Darwin, who was an anti-eugenicist, saying quite clearly:
“if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”
Eugenics has nothing to do with evolution anyway. The former is artificial selection, which existed for thousands of years before Darwin was born. It rests on a simple idea that if you kill off a race, it can’t reproduce. We knew that before Darwin. The whole point of natural selection, as the name suggests, is that it happens naturally. ie, not eugenics.
I’m waiting for a post above this one to clear, with a cite for books banned by Hitler, but in the meantime you can easily find it. Google: “Lists of Banned Books, 1932-1939″
Here’s the rest of my text from that post:
The above link contains lists of books marked for â€purification’ - i.e. burning - by the Nazis between 1933 and 1935. It includes the above quote about Darwinist writings, along with â€The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism’ and â€literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes’
Now in my opinion, if someone goes as far as to order the burning of all books about a certain subject, then it’s fair to say “He is fanatically anti-that subject”. Of course you are free to think that’s a â€crazy’ thing for me to say.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Mark: “Again, where is this “repeated denial” of mine?”
OK, so your position now is that although before you said I was believing fantasy and was unable to know the truth - “as I read your posts it is painfully clear that you are operating under beliefs that ARE pure fantasy” - at the same time you WEREN’T denying the one point that I was actually making on this thread? Right ho then.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Eugenics is a big topic and is again off-topic, but since Mark seems to have brought it up, I thought I would offer this little quiz about eugenics in general and Margaret Sanger in particular.
There are a lot of things said about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, many of which are simply not true. I think it’s much better to fight abortion on its moral merits than by smearing the deceased with lies, but apparently there are many who disagree with me. If anyone (Mark included) would like a good place to start some research on Mark’s comment regarding Planned Parethood and African-Americans, I suggest looking up Negro Project conspiracy theory on wikipedia and following the various links and citations).
Now, onto the quiz. The first person to get all these right in the next 24 hours without looking anything up (the honor system is in place) will win a $10 donation to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. I am not joking, so do your best.
1. What famous American woman said the following:
“While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
a. Sarah Palin
b. Margaret Sanger
c. Eleanor Roosevelt
d. Susan B. Anthony
2. Of the following people and groups, which are on record as supporting Eugenics.
a. Alexander Graham Bell
b. The United States Supreme Court (in rendering a decision upholding a state’s right to forced sterilization)
c. Margaret Sanger
d. Woodrow Wilson
e. All of the above
f. None of the above
3. During the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis cited what/who as a defense of their eugenics activities.
a. United States policy and the US Supreme Court
b. Margaret Sanger
c. Charles Darwin
d. Thomas Jefferson
e. None of the above
4. While describing eugenics and it’s goals, who said the following (emphasis mine):
That is, [reproductive choice] must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world.
a. President Herbert Hoover
b. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
c. Margaret Sanger
d. Eleanor Roosevelt
5. While not all supporters of so-called eugenics supported forced sterilization (see #4), many did. How many people were forcibly sterilized by legal means in the United States.
a. at most several hundred
a. around 10,000
a. around 60,000
d. around 250,000
e. none
Please submit your answers by this time tomorrow. Remember, the honor code is in place: no checking references.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
My first two posts WERE on point.
Case in point.
It was put forth (implied) that the founders would be upset w/ all of the “crazed right wing nuts” and fundamentalists of our time and be more likely to assume a position in line w/ the left. That is absurd and was merely pointing that up.
What makes you think they would agree with fundamentalist Christians today? By your own description their beliefs were quite the opposite of those of Christians today — to wit, the founders did not believe in legislating religion or religious beliefs/morals because they believed in the people’s right to believe whatever they want; whereas today’s Christians would prefer that the government decide what is “moral” and claim absolute authority over any and all interpretations of morality.
Seriously, if they were so hell bent on “separating church and state”, why would they use language like that?
If they were so *against* church and state separation, why wouldn’t they deliberately mention the Christian god, Jesus, or Christianity at all?
Tim, please look up the word “evangelism”.
Mark, please look up the Bible quote I cited.
Oh. Then I have completely missed one of the basic tenets of Christianity. Mayhaps you could have that rewritten into the Bible. Until then, we’ll proceed forth in our lack of your understanding, thank you.
Really?! So in your interpretation, you honestly believe that the Bible should be believed for selfish personal reasons and not because it’s true?!
I feel so lost, did Britt Hume say that they are both correct ?
Read the post again. He did not address the truth or falsehood of either religion. His argument had nothing to do with whether or not either one was true. His argument stemmed from personal self-satisfaction — “you should change religions so you don’t have to get what you believe is coming to you.” He didn’t say they were both correct; in order to do so he would have had to address their “correctness” or “falsehood” in some way. Which he did not. He completely ignored that entire area of the argument.
And that particular sense of outrage felt for Mr. Hume, or any Christian, implies the defeat of believing anything not approved by the one who is outraged, doesn’t it?
So you are content with your religion being advertised like a commercial product? Very well. Just figured I’d speak my piece on that. Although personally, I would be irritated if atheists tried to “sell” atheism like that on TV — if I saw someone on TV saying to Tiger Woods, “Atheism offers a worldview that makes you feel better about the horribe things you’ve done to people, and makes it so that you don’t have to repay anyone for any damage you’ve done in their lives, because you don’t have to do anything! It’s every man for himself!” Then I would consider that person to be (a) a very disturbed individual with a very loose grasp on reality, and (b) a very, very bad representative for the potential of an atheistic worldview.
But hey, if you’re fine with that, then that’s that.
To the extent that you are correct, I suspect it would be due to the fact that you are constantly tearing down basic truths that I hold dear like the origin(s) of life, the universe, truth, morality, reality, etc.
I’m simply asking questions, which I genuinely want to know the answers to (or answering your requests for information, few and far between as they are). I’m neither disturbed nor intent on “tearing down” anything. And I’m not even surprised by your reaction, because I’ve seen it a million times from other people — the only thing that’s even remotely surprising to me is exactly how far you take your resistance to any attempt to form a coherent, rational position.
Can everybody just shake hands now?
This he said, she said is just not that interesting.
I *told* you guys it would get dull…
Also, there are several famous quotes by him / his underlings to the affect that they in fact were followers of Darwin. Will cite later if time permits. (Oh for “peace treaties”!…nice try though, Luke.)
I eagerly await your citations, Mark :/
January 15th, 2010 at 12:38 am
“… today’s Christians would prefer that the government decide what is “moral” and claim absolute authority over any and all interpretations of morality.”
You guys always say stuff like this as if it’s a given. Please show me where -in mainstream Christian (or even conservative) circles- this claim is shown to be true. qualifier: If you say Christians “claim absolute moral authority” re; gun control, same sex marriage, confiscatory tax rates,etc. then you are only illustrating how true to the Constitution we are. Or are you saying that, since the founders “believed in the people’s right to believe whatever they want”, they would have been behind all of the laws of leftist lunacy being forced on an unrepresented people by the perverted “men in black” ? That IS the only way you get your way, you know that don’t you? America doesn’t want leftism, we want to be left alone, and the right (yes, even as represented by those Bible thumping “rollers”) is who represents that spirit of rugged individualism, not Obama and the rest of the oh-so-Marxist left.
“If they were so *against* church and state separation, why wouldn’t they deliberately mention the Christian god, Jesus, or Christianity at all?” The same reason they didn’t say, “…in the U.S. where the sky is blue, and grass is green, and water is wet…” Ya see, back then they had something so many are now lacking: common sense
That is why Washington could speak so matter-of-factly about “the great genie in the sky”, or whatever it is you call Him and not have to fear a lawsuit from some moron who actually thought/think the Constitution WAS/IS a “suicide pact”.
“Mark, please look up the Bible quote I cited.”
(usually I attempt to be funny or sarcastic. that was just petty. bygones?)
Praying in ones closet, in that context, was a practice Jesus was recommending as opposed to praying in an insincerely demonstrable way. He was rebuking the “religious types” (no doubt of who you are thinking when your distaste for Christianity shines through), or “pharisees”, of the day, if I am gathering you correctly. And I think I am. Everything has its context in the Bible. Core truths and doctrine are repeated over and over again. Examples, like the one you mention, when only listed once and then taken out of context, are either being exploited by a novice to “prove” something and/or are inconsequential in “the grand scheme of things” . I sincerely apologize for the “tone” of my “suggestion” that you look up evangelism. It wasn’t necessary and I shouldn’t expect you to know any more about the Bible than I do about your strong points -although I appreciate the effort, as I’m sure you appreciate mine.
“Really?! So in your interpretation, you honestly believe that the Bible should be believed for selfish personal reasons and not because it’s true?!” My understanding of what you had just said was that there is NO “future supernatural “penalty” over what he(Woods) did”. Honestly, Tim (and I really, really, really, really, really mean this), I may be wrong, but you give me the very strong impression that you have a litany of misperceptions about Christianity. Will forgo any assumptions about your past experiences, but it does make me wonder.
“His argument had nothing to do with whether or not either one was true. ” Because he KNOWS Christianity is true. Thought that was THE thing about us that sets you off. In any case, extremely detailed and fully explained exhortations aside, I think that Mr. Hume did what he could within the time constraints. Also, don’t you think he had an inkling of the fury of assaults he would be taking for this? My guess is that he didn’t want to compound things by cheering “WE’RE NUMBER 1! GO-O-O-O-O-O JESUS!” and “make things even worse”. A point I would argue w/ as, in the climate we live in today, merely mentioning Jesus Christ w/o neutering him AND yourself will get you, uh, “hung out to dry” so to speak. (you don’t have a problem w/ how He’s depicted on Southpark, do you?)
“His (Humes’) argument stemmed from personal self-satisfaction — (Hume)“you should change religions so you don’t have to get what you believe is coming to you.””(name injections mine) Wow. Will have to refer back to my previous wonderings about your past experiences/current assumptions here. Just a bit too angry for me to handle.
“But hey, if you’re fine with that, then that’s that.” Yup.
“I’m simply asking questions…” Come on now, Tim, everyone here knows you rant on about -your perception- of the evils of Christianity. That’s one of your most common thread “points”. No biggie, it’s just good to be consistent w/ reality don’t you think?
January 15th, 2010 at 5:55 am
How does one become a ‘follower of Darwin’? Wouldn’t this be falling into an ‘is/ought’ fallacy? Newton and Einstein both gave us explanations for gravity. If one is a ‘follower of Einstein’, would that mean you were a fan of things falling? Or just that you accepted the evidence he (and Eddington) presented?
Darwin theorised that species changed over time. He theorised that animals would succeed through many different methods - co-operation, simply producing more children, superior strength, ability to survive on less food that competitors, ability to evade predators. This would apply both within species and between species.
Now whether you believe he was right in the above says nothing about whether you believe it’s the way things SHOULD be. Darwin was saying how he thought things were, not how they OUGHT to be.
So a) the only meaning one can read into the phrase ‘a follower of Darwin’ is ‘a person who accepts the evidence Darwin presented’.
b) Darwin’s observations about the animal kingdom don’t tie in with eugenics, which says that an outside observer should step in and ARTIFICIALLY meddle with the natural system of natural selection for an end determined by that outside observer. This is what dog breeders have done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
On a separate point, ’survival of the fittest’ was originally coined to apply to free-market economics. If you believe in the latter, you pretty much believe in the former. Economists will tell you that in a free market, it’s not always the richest company that succeeds, just like it’s not always the strongest animal that thrives. Sheep far outnumber wolves because they have ’something to offer the market’ - their meat and wool. Sheep are not only far more numerous, they have managed to colonise the world, and have far longer and more comfortable lives than wolves.
Sometimes the product that succeeds is simply the one whose producers manage to produce the greatest number of. VHS beat Betamax simply because they flooded the market with the product, despite it being of inferior quality. In the same way, rabbits beat foxes simply because they can produce greater numbers of offspring.
If you think that the free-market is the most efficient way of producing the best companies, wouldn’t natural selection similarly be God’s efficient way of producing us? Just a thought.
January 15th, 2010 at 8:39 am
You guys always say stuff like this as if it’s a given.
Mark, I am only going off of what you and Frank tell me! I’m referring to the idea of “legislating morality,” which Turek staunchly defends. So as far as this discussion goes, yes, it *is* a given.
If you say Christians “claim absolute moral authority” re; gun control, same sex marriage, confiscatory tax rates,etc. then you are only illustrating how true to the Constitution we are.
Not at all. The constitution does not give the government absolute moral authority, but rather legal authority. And even then, saying “absolute” is a bit of a stretch — citizens have legal rights that even the government cannot just tramp on without a good reason.
Or are you saying that, since the founders “believed in the people’s right to believe whatever they want”, they would have been behind all of the laws of leftist lunacy being forced on an unrepresented people by the perverted “men in black” ?
“Right to believe” refers specifically to religious conventions here.
That IS the only way you get your way, you know that don’t you?
What is “my way,” in your understanding?
America doesn’t want leftism, we want to be left alone, and the right (yes, even as represented by those Bible thumping “rollers”) is who represents that spirit of rugged individualism, not Obama and the rest of the oh-so-Marxist left.
I’m part of America (a born national citizen, actually) and I much prefer more left-leaning policies, generally speaking, though not *radical* leftism (I do consider myself quite a bit more centrist than most “lefties”).
Not that any of this is relevant, of course…
The same reason they didn’t say, “…in the U.S. where the sky is blue, and grass is green, and water is wet…” Ya see, back then they had something so many are now lacking: common sense
Unfortunately, they didn’t base the policy of our nation’s foundation on the color of the grass or the blue of the sky. So there’s no need to explain why those things weren’t mentioned; they weren’t important.
By comparing them, do you mean to say that the fundamental integration of religion and politics as the foundation of a government was so not noteworthy to them that they decided not to even mention it directly because “that’s common sense?” Have you read the constitution or the DoI? They reference so many beliefs about the world that are fundamental to our government system. I see no need to omit every single reference to Jesus or God if, in fact, they were such influential figures in the development of said documents. It’s like writing a paper on how Carbon affects the atmosphere without ever directly referring to Carbon because “it’s common sense that carbon does all that.”
That is why Washington could speak so matter-of-factly about “the great genie in the sky”, or whatever it is you call Him and not have to fear a lawsuit from some moron who actually thought/think the Constitution WAS/IS a “suicide pact”.
I don’t see why anyone would have seen the Constitution as a suicide pact. Especially considering that Washington was a known Deist.
He was rebuking the “religious types” (no doubt of who you are thinking when your distaste for Christianity shines through)
Religious types like Brit Hume, I imagine.
Examples, like the one you mention, when only listed once and then taken out of context, are either being exploited by a novice to “prove” something and/or are inconsequential in “the grand scheme of things” .
So you don’t believe there are any insincere preachers today, and therefore this rule does not apply anymore?
I may be wrong, but you give me the very strong impression that you have a litany of misperceptions about Christianity.
For the purposes of this discussion, most of what I am saying comes directly from either you or Turek (or, in some rare cases, another poster here). That’s part of why I am so confused, is that you guys’ particular brand of Christianity is so vastly different (and so vastly more confrontational and prone to conspiracy theory) than any other Christian I have ever spoken to in real life.
Because he KNOWS Christianity is true.
Irrelevant. He’s making the case to someone who doesn’t. Do you not understand that a self-assuming argument is completely worthless as a persuasion? I can only assume you weren’t on the debate team in high school or college.
Hume did what he could within the time constraints. Also, don’t you think he had an inkling of the fury of assaults he would be taking for this? My guess is that he didn’t want to compound things by cheering “WE’RE NUMBER 1! GO-O-O-O-O-O JESUS!” and “make things even worse”.
So in your opinion, because he couldn’t do a good job, he should just take what he can get, do a bad job, and poorly represent his case? If we were talking about atheism here, I would say the guy should keep his mouth shut until he can make a good case; if people have to make such excuses to explain his case away, then why bother making the case in the first place?
Wow. Will have to refer back to my previous wonderings about your past experiences/current assumptions here. Just a bit too angry for me to handle.
I can only assume this means that you accept that Humes’ argument stemmed from selfishness and not a genuine rational point.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:37 am
On legislating morality. Someone told me yesterday about the ‘Lemon Test’, from a court ruling that established that any law must have a secular, non-religious, justification.
As far as I can see, laws tend to be set up to protect citizens and to allow the state to prosper. These will generally coincide with things people consider moral, hence the idea that laws legislate morality.
But it seems there are lots of things most people view as being immoral that aren’t illegal, nor which many people would wish to make illegal.
For example, while there may be laws against lies that cause financial damage, there aren’t laws against every form of lying. Cheating on your spouse can lead to divorce, which is governed by property and child maintenance laws, but I don’t think it’s illegal to actual cheat. You may think it is moral to honor your parents, but the laws to enforce this are narrow and have more to do with protecting those concerned and assigning responsibility.
And Luke asked an interesting question - although you may think it’s moral to give to charity, do you think that is a moral that should be enshrined in law? I think that there is a certain moral obligation of a state to protect its weaker citizens, and also to lend aid to the weak of other states, as we see in the international effort to help in Haiti.
But this aside, most people see charity as voluntary (or it isn’t charity), and are quick to see ‘enforced charity’ as being IMMORAL, calling it communism or socialism.
On a side note, as a non-American, I find the arguments about the founding fathers quite bizarre. Particularly seeing the far right tying itself in knots trying to say that they’re upholding the constitution, while accusing the left of trashing it, all the while moaning about the lack of state-sponsored prayer in schools and the like. An egregious recent example was the Republicans who wasted Congress time to bring a non-binding resolution (H.RES.951) to ‘express support for the use of Christmas symbols and traditions by those who celebrate Christmas’.
I get the impression that most of these people actually know very little about the constitution or its authors, an impression that posters on this site do little to dispel. It also suggests they can’t justify their arguments on their own merits, and so simply use the argument from authority, or rather what they think the authority would have said, where they here today.
I’ll add to Tim’s post that I have never met a Christian in real life who is anything like the posters on this site. Many of my relatives are Christian, and I’ve got no problem with them. Although I think in the UK it’s fairly rare for Christians to be so homophobic or not to understand evolution and other sciences. These are much more traits associated with Muslims.
In fact that’s why I actually agree with Mark on one particular issue (although he was too busy accusing me of being a fantasist over a simple point of fact for me to actually get round to saying this earlier). Islam seems to lend itself far less than the bible to interpretation. That’s why when new facts and evidence come along, most Christians are able to accept them and incorporate them into their faith. Muslims however have to accept the untranslated word of Allah as literally true.
That’s why most Christians can reconcile their faith with the scientific method, hence the Arab world’s fall from its heights 800 years ago as the centre of scientific learning, and Europe’s assent.
So I don’t see Christianity and Islam as flip-sides of the same coin.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:45 am
Nathan said:although you may think it’s moral to give to charity, do you think that is a moral that should be enshrined in law?
But this aside, most people see charity as voluntary (or it isn’t charity), and are quick to see â€enforced charity’ as being IMMORAL, calling it communism or socialism.
I obviously asked this question because it would help us analyze Dr. Turek’s thesis.
If you do not wish this moral — one which without counting I would guess is the one Jesus spoke about most, probably by a long shot — to be put into law, then we must question whether the laws which we do have in place which seem to reflect certain moral values are in place because they represent those moral values, or for some other reason.
As far as your point on it being involuntary, why is it not the same thing for every other legislation of morality? Why is it fine to compel people through threat of punishment to follow other moral precepts?
Either it is acceptable to force people to act morally under threat of legal punishment, or it is not.
(I don’t think that saying that forcing action is different from preventing action, since many US laws do in fact force actions or certain type of actions. An example that comes to mind that Dr. Turek has mentioned before is building codes — it is moral, Dr. Turek said to protect people when you can reasonably do so. This is an active action. Paying taxes (Mat 22:21) is the same.)
Nathan said:while there may be laws against lies that cause financial damage, there aren’t laws against every form of lying.
This is a good example. As I said in my first point above simply because something coincides with a moral does not indicate that legislating morality was the motivating factor.
If legislating morals was the motivating force, then why would all lying not be illegal?
I think there is a problem with terms here. When most people say “you cannot legislate morality” they tend to talk about cases where no other parties are hurt or injured. This term is usually meant to refer to cases wherein one engages in a consensual action in which no other parties are affected. This is what people say one “can’t legislate.”
I am not sure this is what Dr. Turek means, he seems to include cases where others are affected as well. If we look at this from the standpoint of political philosophy, it changes many things.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:47 am
So how come no one wants to attempt my quiz? I wish Mark would take it. Or Dr. Turek, though I’m sure he’s busy preparing for the upcoming program.
January 15th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Luke, I don’t know much about Sanger. I did a quick google about the so-called ‘negro programme’. I can’t get that worked up about her motives or actions as it doesn’t particular my own views.
As an example, I believe people have a right to eat meat, though my views on the subject are complicated. For example, I eat meat myself but in general feel it would be better if people ate less meat. These views would not be affected at all if you told me that a pro-meat campaigner or pro-vegetarian campaigner committed crimes in their cause’s name. Or if you told me that the campaigner held some views that I found immoral.
I wouldn’t feel that I had to justify their actions, or that they were committing them in my name.
Regardless of your views on abortion, it seems paradoxical to conflate the views of eugenicists or Nazis with the ‘pro-choice’ movement. By definition the two sides are opposed - forced abortion or sterilisation is the opposite of giving someone choice.
On ‘legislating morality’, I saw a good film dramatising the UK’s legal debate over the decriminalisation of homosexuality, which took place between the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the architects of the change in the law made it very clear that they found the act immoral and repellant, but that they did not see it as the UK legal system’s job to prevent people from doing it.
They accepted that one must make a case for the damage an act causes before it can be made a crime. (That is to say ‘criminal damage’ - lots of things aren’t criminal that might be said to damage someone’s feelings, or waste someone’s time etc.)
Now this is taking a purely pragmatic approach to the law. Going back to the ‘Lemon Test’, one must make a secular justification for a law.
So what is left out? Things that one claims are ‘morally wrong’ because they ‘just are’, or because a holy book says it is. Obviously holy books say lots of things are immoral that are also against the law. But as you say yourself: “simply because something coincides with a moral does not indicate that legislating morality was the motivating factor.”
So we go back to the secular nature of the Constitution. You can’t have everyone wanting to get a law passed PURELY on a religious basis.
Of course, a pragmatic basis for morality is denied by many theists as not being a morality at all. If one accepts that premise, then one would conclude that what one is legislating is therefore not morality either.
January 15th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Re: Sanger, she’s often painted as a outright racist who basically sought to limit or even exterminate the black population through abortion.
You can see Mark’s words above. It’s simply not true. Sanger was opposed to abortion and opposed to any eugenics programs which forced anything on anyone — which sadly, in my view — many people sought to do and often put into law. She has been praised by many civil rights leaders. Her clinics provided care and education to minority women that they otherwise would not have had access to — it wasn’t some racist hatred that motivated her to set-up clinics in poor and minority neighborhoods.
I think purveyors of this theory often have a very poor and limited understanding of the history of eugenics and eugenics policies.
To clear up another common misconception. It’s better to view Eugenics as something coming out of modernity (in terms of sociology, not nice new things), rather than any acceptance of Darwinian theory.
Modernity, to sum it up in one sentence, saw human history as always progressing on a straight path toward progress. A more perfect human genome was one aspect, many saw, of the larger march toward progress.
(Post-modernity, instead of seeing things aligned to one path, as modernity does, sees the possibility of many paths and the liberty of any human to find and follow their own path.)
January 15th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
“Modernity, to sum it up in one sentence, saw human history as always progressing on a straight path toward progress. A more perfect human genome was one aspect, many saw, of the larger march toward progress.”
That certainly is a very ANTI-Darwinian view.
If what you say is true, Sanger appears to have been mis-represented in a similar way to Peter Singer.
January 15th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
She is badly misrepresented, from everything I have read, which is probably more than most who spread lies about her.
Think of Marxism when you think of modernity; it’s a classic example of modernist thinking with which most of us are familiar. You go from this system, to that one, then that one and finally arrive at this one which is perfect. Classic modernism — a nice path on which history progresses.
January 15th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Unfortunately Margret Sanger apparently had and has friends like Luke and Nathan who would look the other way at what history has recorded of her thoughts and beliefs. Thus, whether dormant or active, such support helps to keep those thoughts and beliefs alive and well.
Thoughts and beliefs which resemble and are no less despicable than Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity, Jewish people and anyone else who got in his way. Unfortunate as well are those who would actually make the claim that the following words by Margret Sanger can be misrepresented.
But then hey, what are friends for?
The following (A Plan for Peace, Margaret Sanger) was published in Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108):
A Plan for Peace
by MARGARET SANGER
First, put into action President Wilson’s fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.
Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.
b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.
c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.
The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.
Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.
The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers’ health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives—thus reducing maternal mortality.
The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.
With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.
There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.
In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.
January 15th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Becca,
I don’t think Nathan has said a single word defending Margaret Sanger.
I have not defender her, but rather tried to provide clarification on some context. I will provide some more detail shortly.
Luke
January 15th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Luke,
Please let Nathan speak for himself.
As for whether or not he defended her, it appeared he was buying into your defense of her…yes…you did defend her.
To be fair, perhaps you have not read her writings which clearly speak for themselves, and again, are no less despicable and arrogant than Hitlers views were.
If that be the case, I apologize for assuming you were aware of her Nazi like ideology.
January 15th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
“Please let Nathan speak for himself.”
I haven’t said a single word defending Margaret Sanger.
January 15th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
“Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity”
Becca, do you have quotes or cites for the above? Hitler spoke a lot about God and faith, and also mentioned his hatred of atheists. Do you know what religion he was?
January 15th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Becca said:Please let Nathan speak for himself.
Do you have any other rules I should know about?
Becca said:you did defend her.
You are right, I apologize.
I did defend her against the charges known as the Negro Program conspiracy theory. These charges are simply not true, and I felt it right to point that out.
I did not, and do not defend some of her views on eugenics. I do defend her views on abortion as I quoted them above.
What I did try to do, which I guess you see as a defense is put some of those more controversial views into context. It wasn’t just Margaret Sanger that believed in many of these things, but so did many prominent thinkers of her time, including US Presidents and the justices of the United States Supreme Court.
Without some context, she sounds like a psychopath and a monster. With context, things become more ambiguous. Just because I say that, does not mean I endorse those views.
There were many founding fathers who owned slaves. Without much understanding of the context of the period — they were monsters. What else to call someone who thinks they can “own” another human being? While I think slavery is an unquestioned evil, I may not feel it right to call them monsters — because of that context.
Again, at Nuremburg, the Nazi’s didn’t quote Margaret Sanger in their defense, but the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Becca said:To be fair, perhaps you have not read her writings which clearly speak for themselves, and again, are no less despicable and arrogant than Hitlers views were.
Thank you for being fair, but I have actually read a lot of what she has written.
Again, if her views were no less despicable than Hitler’s (I disagree — one thought it was ok to gas people, the other did not), then the same is true of not just her but many other prominent Americans. Why single her out for holding them and not see them as part of a larger social and intellectual movement.
Becca said:If that be the case, I apologize for assuming you were aware of her Nazi like ideology..
In that spirit of fairness have you read what Ms. Sanger had to say about Nazi policy?
January 15th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Nathan said:Becca, do you have quotes or cites for the above? Hitler spoke a lot about God and faith, and also mentioned his hatred of atheists. Do you know what religion he was?
A couple of points:
There is evidence of persecution of Christian churches under Hitler’s regime. However, few historians however see any evidence for the kind of “master plan” Becca mentions.
There is some debate whether Hitler truly believed in Jesus, or if he knew it was politically beneficial to speak and write as if he did. As for the persecution I mentioned above, many believe it was part of Hitler’s reflexive anger at many modern things — he wanted a pure church, not a corrupted one, which he often perceived. I tend to be convinced by this view though am not dogmatic about it.
(I say this to illustrate that persecution of churches is not always evidence of persecution of Christianity as a whole. If it was, we’d have to interpret all violence between denominations as a plan against all of Christianity, and I just don’t think this makes logical sense.)
His distaste for secularism and atheism, is well documented and I don’t think challenged by any historian.
January 15th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Another follow up on Hitler. The evidence that Hitler said what he did for political gain is largely driven by the conclusion one might want to reach. What I mean is there is not a lot of positive evidence (though there are some documents which mention Hitler’s dislike for Christianity, there are not first or second person records).
There is certainly a lot of positive evidence for his hatred of liberals (red triangle), communists (same), Jehovah’s witnesses (purple triangle), Roma (brown or black triangle), homosexuals (pink triangle) and Jews (yellow and other double triangles).
If Hitler viewed these categories as he obviously did, but also hated the opposite of many of the (true Christianity as opposed to JWs or atheist communists) that doesn’t leave much of anything. Leaving Hitler to be just — insane, colloquially speaking.
That’s not a conclusion I’m necessary ready to argue with though. Having studied this in some depth though, I am not ready to agree with Becca’s thesis, though I am certainly open to any evidence she wishes to present.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
So I don’t see Christianity and Islam as flip-sides of the same coin.
It’s good that you don’t, because they aren’t. I’m sure you were able to pick up that that wasn’t my point, however — I was trying to explain to Mark that I was not conflating Christianity with Islam, especially in terms of violent followership.
What I was saying was that there are quite a few Christian Biblical passages which, on first glance, definitely appear to condone violence (sometimes on an extreme level, such as the massacre of an entire city’s population by humans on behalf of god), and that Christians like Mark seem to have little trouble coming up with other passages to “put it in context” and “justify” it so that it’s not actually condoning violence in general, but rather as a particular solution to a particular problem at a particular time, which (presumably) has passed, and thus the call for violence is no longer necessary.
On the other hand, Christians like Mark — even after realizing exactly how important context is to any such text, much less a religious one — do very, very little to put the words of the Quran into similar context. There are many shocking passages in the Quran as well, some similar in nature to those in the Bible, but little to no effort is ever offered by Christians to put those verses in context as would be offered in the case of a Christian verse.
The problem with that is simple: If one would argue that even putting the Quran in context would not absolve its moral dilemmas, then why not prove it by providing context? That would give us the “whole picture” and show that it’s “wrong,” wouldn’t it? So why avoid doing the research? I prefer to look at religion (especially Islam) critically, but I also look at criticisms of religion critically, and this particular criticism of Islam is not convincing to me, especially when there are Muslims out there (quite a few, at that) as I type this who are actively fighting against terrorism and tyranny in their own communities — which would of course be completely unnecessary if *all* Muslims were honor-bound to be the violent psychopaths that they are portrayed to be in the media. Acknowledging this does not require that we deny there are Muslim terrorists (and a lot of them at that), just that we know how to tell the difference and that “Muslim” does not automatically mean “terorrist” any more than “Christian” automatically means “scientifically inept.”
If what you say is true, Sanger appears to have been mis-represented in a similar way to Peter Singer.
Maybe it’s the name? Awfully similar names, there
(It’s a joke, btw)
Thoughts and beliefs which resemble and are no less despicable than Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity
…what?
Becca, do you have quotes or cites for the above? Hitler spoke a lot about God and faith, and also mentioned his hatred of atheists.
Must’ve been one of those “self-hating atheists” trained by the underground Illuminati Conspiracy Group to pose as Christians just to discredit them so future generations would waste time having semantic debates over the true nature of his religiosity instead of getting outside and doing something with their lives.
*looks at self*
*looks at everyone else*
…I guess it worked…:(
(it’s also a joke, btw)
January 15th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Nathan said:
“Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity”
Becca, do you have quotes or cites for the above? Hitler spoke a lot about God and faith, and also mentioned his hatred of atheists. Do you know what religion he was?
First, that is not the full quote by me, so why did you chop it up? That was strange. Here it is again:
“Thoughts and beliefs which resemble and are no less despicable than Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity, Jewish people and anyone else who got in his way.”
Now do have a question?
Second, you will have to do much reading. A good place to start would be at Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion and read, “The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches” and move on from there.
Third, it is quite obvious Hitlers god was Hitler himself. Many people speak of God and faith, what is that supposed to prove or mean? Nothing. Many a person has insisted Hitler was a Christian because he claimed he was, what is that supposed to prove or mean? Nothing.
As the Lord Jesus Christ said:
15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, â€Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, â€Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, â€I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
His is the Only Word that matters, nothing else need be said.
January 15th, 2010 at 10:29 pm
Luke,
I am waiting for you to finish your step by step response to my initial comment regarding Margret Sanger and her Nazi like ideology.
I noticed you finished with what I said and then suddenly stopped which struck me as odd. So as soon as you go step by step through what she wrote in her Peace Plan just as you did with what I wrote in my comment, and when time permits, I will respond to your comments.
January 16th, 2010 at 12:25 am
Becca said:
I am waiting for you to finish your step by step response to my initial comment regarding Margret Sanger and her Nazi like ideology.
I noticed you finished with what I said and then suddenly stopped which struck me as odd.
(emphasis mine)
Sorry Becca. it was not meant to be “odd” in any way.
The reason my response was limited to what you said, was that I was responding to you.
I did not see the need to respond to a deceased woman on a plan for peace written which was written prior to a war which essentially changed the whole world order (rendering any such peace plan obsolete), especially given the fact that I had already described some of her views, as they stand on their merits, as psychopathic and monstrous.
(I think we are all adults here and could guess as to which views I was referring — I did state for example that I did agree with her when she said “I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.” If you did not know which views I was referring to, then you can simply ask.)
Becca saidSo as soon as you go step by step through what she wrote in her Peace Plan just as you did with what I wrote in my comment, and when time permits, I will respond to your comments.
As I said, we are all adults here, and perhaps you got the wrong impression by some of the back and forth above — which is not the way this forum usually proceeds — all parties here tend to treat one another with respect. That is probably the only reason I come back to this forum. I realize that I spend too much time here.
If you would like a more detailed response as to my views on specific points of Ms. Sanger’s ideology, you can simply ask for it. I will answer almost any question when it is asked politely. I don’t mean to be too blunt, but the sort of quid pro quo you talk about above, where you will withhold an answer until I act the way you wish is less likely to get a response.
Thanks,
Luke
January 16th, 2010 at 3:47 am
Luke said:
“Sorry Becca. it was not meant to be “odd” in any way. The reason my response was limited to what you said, was that I was responding to you.
I did not see the need to respond to a deceased woman on a plan for peace written which was written prior to a war which essentially changed the whole world order (rendering any such peace plan obsolete), especially given the fact that I had already described some of her views, as they stand on their merits, as psychopathic and monstrous.
(I think we are all adults here and could guess as to which views I was referring — I did state for example that I did agree with her when she said “I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.” If you did not know which views I was referring to, then you can simply ask.)
As I said, we are all adults here, and perhaps you got the wrong impression by some of the back and forth above — which is not the way this forum usually proceeds — all parties here tend to treat one another with respect. That is probably the only reason I come back to this forum. I realize that I spend too much time here.
If you would like a more detailed response as to my views on specific points of Ms. Sanger’s ideology, you can simply ask for it. I will answer almost any question when it is asked politely. I don’t mean to be too blunt, but the sort of quid pro quo you talk about above, where you will withhold an answer until I act the way you wish is less likely to get a response.”
Luke,
That’s odd as well because the topic was not what I said but what Margret Sanger clearly said and the fact that you claimed, among other things, that she has been “badly misrepresented” and that she was “opposed to any eugenics programs which forced anything on anyone.”
So when I point out just one of her many writings which flatly contradict what you claim about her and which clearly exhibit her Nazi like ideology you AVOID it.
Instead of addressing the issue you continue with self contradictory statements such as going from, “Sanger was opposed to abortion and opposed to any eugenics programs which forced anything on anyone” to “I did not, and do not defend some of her views on eugenics.” You then make strange, irrelevant comments about the war and how it “rendering any such peace plan obsolete” and then move even further away from the issue by bringing up the founding fathers, who by the way are deceased as well.
So no, I couldn’t guess to which views you were referring and I didn’t get the wrong impression either, the impression I have is right on point.
Regarding your last paragraph, I already simply asked you to go step by step (that’s another term for detailed) through her Peace Plan to which you responded with, “The reason my response was limited to what you said, was that I was responding to you.” and “I don’t mean to be too blunt, but the sort of quid pro quo you talk about above, where you will withhold an answer until I act the way you wish is less likely to get a response.”
I do not have the time or the desire to deal any further with the self contradiction, illogical thought and avoidance I have received from you thus far. Thanks anyway.
January 16th, 2010 at 4:59 am
First, that is not the full quote by me, so why did you chop it up? That was strange. Here it is again: “Thoughts and beliefs which resemble and are no less despicable than Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity, Jewish people and anyone else who got in his way.”
I’m not sure why you object to me reducing the quote to “Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity”. Seeing as his plan to destroy Jews is unquestionable, it seemed pointless in me questioning it. I was specifically questioning you saying he had a master plan to destory Christianity. I don’t think removing the rest of the sentence changed the sense of that point. If it did, would you like to clarify?
Are you saying I was misrepresenting your quote? Either you believe he had a master plan to destroy Christianity, or you do not. Why is it?
Secondly, as Luke and Tim pointed out, do you really believe that gassing a man to death is NO WORSE than offering him a cash incentive to have a vasectomy?
“I do not have the time or the desire to deal any further with the self contradiction, illogical thought and avoidance I have received from you thus far.”
Ah well, I guess we’ll never find out then.
January 16th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Nathan said:Ah well, I guess we’ll never find out then.
It happens. No harm done.
To be fair, I was wrong in when I wrote she didn’t support forced sterilization. It’s been a long time since I’ve read her works. It was an honest mistake, not so much an attempt at avoidance. I personally don’t find it shocking that I was wrong about something! I had thought that the quote “[reproductive choice] must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without.” came long after the peace plan and before forced sterilization was a protected US policy. But like I said, it’ been a while since Id read her stuff. As I said, I wasn’t trying to defend Ms. Sanger from any eugenics ideas, but rather from the plan known as the negro project conspiracy theory. Even with all the things I may not like about her views, she does not deserve that — it’s not commonly known as a conspiracy theory for nothing. Even her most despicable views seem less psychopathic when placed in the proper historical context of policy and intellectual movements of the time.
(The bit on immigration laws for example, is particularly said. You guys know, I think, that I study history of the Jews in Central Europe so I am well aware of the many, many who lost their lives because, sadly, Ms. Sanger was not alone in having such thoughts and US immigration policy did become more strict and limited in that time.)
January 16th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
It’s a shame that Becca and Mark are so quick to have hissy fits and chuck their toys out the pram. Because what we still haven’t found out is the reason Sanger was brought up in the first place - her supposed connecting link between Hitler and Darwin.
We’ve established that Hitler banned and burned Darwin’s writings. So where’s the connection? Obviously there isn’t one.
January 16th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
the topic was not what I said but what Margret Sanger clearly said and the fact that you claimed, among other things, that she has been “badly misrepresented” and that she was “opposed to any eugenics programs which forced anything on anyone.”
I don’t think you understand what was meant by “badly represented.” Let me put it this way; if there is a person who did or believed something we all agree is “bad,” it’s still possible to “badly represent” that person (or to point out that that person’s views have been “badly misrepresented”) and still think that said person or (said views) are largely “bad.”
For example….if I said that Hitler was uniquely racist against, say, asian people, and attributed a bunch of random quotes that vaguely referred to, say, Chinese people or something….that would be a “misrepresentation” of Hitler’s views. His real views would still be considered “bad” for the most part. But it still stands that there would be a misrepresentation of his views.
If someone says that a person was “misrepresented,” that does not necessarily mean that their real views are ‘good’ or ‘better’ than the misrepresenation — it simply means that an accepted portrayal of them is not complete, or is false.
January 17th, 2010 at 12:51 am
Nathan Barley Says:
January 16th, 2010 at 4:59 am
Becca R: First, that is not the full quote by me, so why did you chop it up? That was strange. Here it is again: “Thoughts and beliefs which resemble and are no less despicable than Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity, Jewish people and anyone else who got in his way.”
Nathan said: I’m not sure why you object to me reducing the quote to “Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity”. Seeing as his plan to destroy Jews is unquestionable, it seemed pointless in me questioning it. I was specifically questioning you saying he had a master plan to destory Christianity. I don’t think removing the rest of the sentence changed the sense of that point. If it did, would you like to clarify?
Are you saying I was misrepresenting your quote? Either you believe he had a master plan to destroy Christianity, or you do not. Why is it?
Secondly, as Luke and Tim pointed out, do you really believe that gassing a man to death is NO WORSE than offering him a cash incentive to have a vasectomy?
“I do not have the time or the desire to deal any further with the self contradiction, illogical thought and avoidance I have received from you thus far.”
Ah well, I guess we’ll never find out then.
Nathan,
And I’m not sure why you appear to be objecting to the fact that Hitlers master plan for conquering the world included destroying Christianity. Unless of course you are one of those who insist Hitler was a Christian simply because he professed to be, and the reasons anyone would insist upon that are all to evident.
I clearly said Hitler had a master plan to destroy Christianity, Jewish people and anyone one else who got in his way, so why in the world are you asking me if I do or do not believe he had a master plan to destroy Christianity?
Regarding what you say Luke and Tim pointed out, do you really believe manipulating a segment of society into killing and or stripping their offspring of basic human rights is NO WORSE than killing them or stripping them of their basic human rights yourself?
I guess you will never find out what? I have made myself quite clear in all my comments. Any ambiguity you are wrestling with originated in yourself and it is because you, like Luke, continue to duck and dodge the issue. That in turn seems to stem from the fact that you both appear to flirt with and or embrace the irrational idea of moral relativism, the base of which always rests upon the rejection of God.
You say in your last comment, “Because what we still haven’t found out is the reason Sanger was brought up in the first place - her supposed connecting link between Hitler and Darwin.”
Her supposed connecting link? That seems to indicate you are as confused as they were. They all embraced the same thoughts and beliefs, they all arrogantly spoke of fellow human beings as though they were nothing but an inferior species like cattle or gorillas, to be eliminated and or controlled.
They went beyond racism of skin color all the way down to racism of the genes. Eugenic ideas and racism always go hand in hand, you cannot embrace one without embracing the other.
You may dance around the issue like Luke did when he said, “It wasn’t just Margaret Sanger that believed in many of these things, but so did many prominent thinkers of her time, including US Presidents and the justices of the United States Supreme Court” but it won’t change anything. Again, that is nothing but AVOIDANCE as this particular discussion is about Margret Sanger.
How you and others can claim there is no connection between her, Hitler and Darwin always leaves me shaking my head but it never leaves me surprised.
Lastly, I hope and pray you both will eventually see that regarding atrocities of any kind (and that indeed includes abortion) condoned, advocated, or committed by human kind, the common denominator is human kind, our inherent insistence upon OUR OWN WAY and our refusal to admit that without God, we are a lost and hopeless lot.
Religion doesn’t kill people, people kill people. Faith doesn’t kill people, people kill people etc., etc., etc., People have always and will always use a variety of means to achieve their own ends.
Hitlers sickness was glaring. He was deathly sick in his soul, deathly sick in his heart, deathly sick in his mind. Now, you may say there are varying degrees of sickness and that would be correct, but does it really matter whether one is at the top of a slippery pit, the middle of it or the bottom of it where Hitler resided? No, it really doesn’t matter, the end is the same, slow death…then darkness.
To be apart from God is to be in darkness. A darkness that is not only apparent to ones vision, stripping it of reality, it presses upon ones mind, stripping it of reason and is palpable to ones soul, stripping it of morality.
God, in His infinite love, kindness and mercy has provided us the way out. Through His Only Begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, we are and thus can be healed of our sickness, but ONLY through Him.
Luke Says:
January 16th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Nathan said:Ah well, I guess we’ll never find out then.
It happens. No harm done.
To be fair, I was wrong in when I wrote she didn’t support forced sterilization. It’s been a long time since I’ve read her works. It was an honest mistake, not so much an attempt at avoidance. I personally don’t find it shocking that I was wrong about something! I had thought that the quote “[reproductive choice] must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without.” came long after the peace plan and before forced sterilization was a protected US policy. But like I said, it’ been a while since Id read her stuff. As I said, I wasn’t trying to defend Ms. Sanger from any eugenics ideas, but rather from the plan known as the negro project conspiracy theory. Even with all the things I may not like about her views, she does not deserve that — it’s not commonly known as a conspiracy theory for nothing. Even her most despicable views seem less psychopathic when placed in the proper historical context of policy and intellectual movements of the time.
(The bit on immigration laws for example, is particularly said. You guys know, I think, that I study history of the Jews in Central Europe so I am well aware of the many, many who lost their lives because, sadly, Ms. Sanger was not alone in having such thoughts and US immigration policy did become more strict and limited in that time.)
January 17th, 2010 at 1:42 am
Alert! I am wrong. No known quotes by Hitler/nazis claiming allegiance to Darwin/his theories.
(aint been here in days and wanted to get that out of the way before reading these last 40 posts or so…WOW!)
And now, on to the reading……………………………………………………………….
January 17th, 2010 at 2:38 am
…….never mind. Don’t want to pile on after you guys just got your heads handed to you for the last 2+ days. (Gee, Wally, it sure is lucky -for Luke and Co. that is- we don’t live in the “good old” Chauvinist days. Else wise, these guys could hardly show there faces in public after THAT spankin’. “Yes Ma’am, can we have another?” -*WHACK*)
January 17th, 2010 at 3:27 am
Luke,
I am still waiting on that first request.
January 17th, 2010 at 3:33 am
…….never mind. Don’t want to pile on after you guys just got your heads handed to you for the last 2+ days.
No, no, by all means, “pile on!” I’d like to see that.
January 17th, 2010 at 3:41 am
You may dance around the issue like Luke did when he said, “It wasn’t just Margaret Sanger that believed in many of these things, but so did many prominent thinkers of her time, including US Presidents and the justices of the United States Supreme Court” but it won’t change anything. Again, that is nothing but AVOIDANCE as this particular discussion is about Margret Sanger.
How you and others can claim there is no connection between her, Hitler and Darwin always leaves me shaking my head but it never leaves me surprised.
However, the mere mention of this is what makes a problem — you say this discussion is only about Sanger. But why is that, when there were so many others who felt the same way? Why are you not rebelling against the U.S. Presidents or the Supreme Court of the day? It may qualify as “avoidance” to you, but it seems inconsistent to call out a single person who believed in “wrongs” and then not call out other people who did the same thing at the same time.
Now, you may say there are varying degrees of sickness and that would be correct, but does it really matter whether one is at the top of a slippery pit, the middle of it or the bottom of it where Hitler resided? No, it really doesn’t matter, the end is the same, slow death…then darkness.
Misinformation is misinformation. I think telling the truth and being factually accurate about a person like Hitler (or Sanger) is always more preferable than to fabricate lies or perpetuate conspiracy theories, because those things are very easy to disprove or to sow doubt about. If you connect such shaky falsehoods with the “truth” of the matter, and people discover that these conspiracy theories are, in fact, in question, then they may also begin to question broader “truths” which are not really in question.
Basically, if you knowingly perpetuate lies about a “bad guy,” then that information will likely be called into question at some point. When it is revealed that the evidence for such a case is shaky at best, people will begin to assume that other long-held “truths” about that person are questionable as well. I think that the best way to make sure that people recognize the negativity of Hitler’s ways (or Sanger’s ways, if you prefer) is to show them for what they were, not for whatever half-baked BS theory we can paint them to be.
January 17th, 2010 at 5:05 am
Becca: “And I’m not sure why you appear to be objecting to the fact that Hitlers master plan for conquering the world included destroying Christianity. ”
No objection at all - I was merely asking for quotes or cites to support the assertion.
Becca: “Her supposed connecting link? That seems to indicate you are as confused as they were. They all embraced the same thoughts and beliefs, they all arrogantly spoke of fellow human beings as though they were nothing but an inferior species like cattle or gorillas, to be eliminated and or controlled.”
Apologies if I am confused. Given that Darwin was a fervent opponent of slavery, I’m not sure how this ties in with your claims. However, I am happy to listen to any proof you think you may have.
“How you and others can claim there is no connection between her, Hitler and Darwin always leaves me shaking my head but it never leaves me surprised.”
Well I’m still waiting for anything to connect Darwin to these other two people.
Becca: “so why in the world are you asking me if I do or do not believe he had a master plan to destroy Christianity?”
Because when I quoted you as saying “Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity”, you objected, as if I was quoting you out of context. So I wanted to clarify whether you believe it or not, or whether me truncating the quote lost its meaning.
You now confirm you DO believe it, so I wonder why you objected, saying: “First, that is not the full quote by me, so why did you chop it up? That was strange.”
“Unless of course you are one of those who insist Hitler was a Christian simply because he professed to be, and the reasons anyone would insist upon that are all to evident.”
No, I’m not one of those people. I only ever bring it up when people try to find Hitler quotes to claim that Hitler was a socialist, an atheist or a Darwinist. But I’m glad that we all agree that it’s pointless trusting quotes from a mass-murderer. We judge by actions, such as Hitler putting Darwin on his ‘banned books’ list.
January 17th, 2010 at 5:21 am
Mark1: “It’s alright, Nathan. Ever since you started saying crazy things like, “Hitler was fanatically anti-Darwinist” I vowed not to engage you.”
Mark2 “Alert! I am wrong. No known quotes by Hitler/nazis claiming allegiance to Darwin/his theories. ”
So the basis of you deciding I was crazy was in fact based on a falsehood.
January 17th, 2010 at 5:36 am
(prelude to a dead horse beating)
“…….never mind. Don’t want to pile on after you guys just got your heads handed to you for the last 2+ days.
No, no, by all means, “pile on!” I’d like to see that.”
To be accurate, Tim, she was piling on my already well paved path. Just because you don’t know, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen -ergo, thus, hencely and consequently: A running theme in our (yours and mine) interludicrous, intellectual, intertwinings has been your insistence that islams’ and Christianity’s BOOKS are similar in content. A course you set out on for no, apparent, rational reason back here:
(Tim quoting mark) So, in an accurate modern dramatic portrayal (something that will never come out of Hollywood)of Muslims v. infidels(see: yourself) , it would be Muslims spilling infidel blood -not the other way.
(Tim, starring himself) I don’t think Muslims are inherently prone to violence. I think that’s a misleading mischaracterization on the part of militant Christians. There are just as many Quran quotes “supporting” violence as there are Bible quotes, and a lot of the same arguments can be made about the Quran that you’ve made about the Bible — taken out of context, awkward translation obscured the true meaning, etc. etc. [/nonsensicalrant]
1) not ONE person (of legitimate note) has stated that muslims are inherently violent -so, this is a response to, what?, YOUR assumptions of what others think. I wouldn’t “assume” so if you didn’t do this kind of stuff all the time (on issues of Christianity that is). And “militant Christians”? Do such people exist outside the realm of your colorful imaginings? Whoever “they” are, ALL of the muslims who sit by quietly as thousands are murdered, maimed, tortured, sexually mutilated, bombed and beheaded in their names out “militant” them everyday, simply by letting all of that happen w/o raising a finger or a voice to stop it, RELATIVELY speaking. (If you think that’s bunk, just look at all of the Christian outrage being directed at Pat Robertson. And he just said stupid WORDS! The guts, brains, bones, etc. of a thousand innocents are being blown across city blocks virtually every week and there is NOT ONE prominent muslim (other than ex-muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali -God bless her atheist soul- Walid Shoebat, etc.) who stands up to decry these atrocities. And EVERYONE KNOWS that this sickness in their religion can, ultimately, only be confronted from within.)
2) TWO facts: Christians/Christianity has resulted in a net gain -in the last 200+ years- to human advancements in technology, acts of compassion and liberty, beyond the total of the previous several millennium. Islam has PROUDLY shunned modernity and ushered in a kind of new dark ages, wherever it makes a noticeable mark, usually with acts of depravity so shocking to the senses, and traumatizing “decent folk” so deeply, you find people who live thousands of miles from the heart of their dark acts still responding as though under the influence of some terrified, emotionally disturbed Stockholm Syndrome by saying things like, “Look, look, NO! Wait a minute! Right here, I have proof that Christianity says mean things too! THEIR BOOKS ARE THE SAME! THEIR BOOKS ARE THE SAME! Can’t you see?!” when that has absolutely, 100 percently, NOTHING TO DO with the issue at hand. As the lady quoted above, “You will know them by their fruits…”
And that’s no hype, Tim, that’s how you come off. Especially when considering that behind, or even within, all of your posts exists the message that you are unflinchingly logical in ALL of your pursuits. Sorry, man, but you betray your prejudice in this area. And it is blindingly obvious. So much so, evidently, you can’t see it for your own words. Your ranting of supposed similarities in the two beliefs’ texts is based on an apparent desire to equivocate. If not, why then bring it up at all? It would be like saying (if #1 here was true), #1)”Well, you know, Haiti has the same Constitution as America and affords its citizens all of the same liberties so,#2) America and Haiti are basically the same.” 1 Even if part one of that sentence were true, it wouldn’t matter. 2 The fact that the second part of that sentence is so disconnected from reality should lend ones mind to an effort at rectifying where ones “thoughts went wrong”.
Only you, truly, know where that happened. And we are left to observe the symptoms.
January 17th, 2010 at 5:58 am
Mark, you sound angry. Was an atheist mean to you in the past or something?
1) not ONE person (of legitimate note) has stated that muslims are inherently violent
Irrelevant. The point was that you made no effort whatsoever to distinguish between violent and nonviolent Muslims. Whereas you do attempt to distinguish between “violent Christians” and “nonviolent Christians” (see: people who murder abortion doctors), so much so as to label the former as “not true Christians.”
And “militant Christians”? Do such people exist outside the realm of your colorful imaginings?
Yes, one of them murdered an abortion doctor not too long ago. Dr. Tiller, his name was.
Whoever “they” are, ALL of the muslims who sit by quietly as thousands are murdered, maimed, tortured, sexually mutilated, bombed and beheaded in their names out “militant” them everyday, simply by letting all of that happen w/o raising a finger or a voice to stop it, RELATIVELY speaking.
1) So you refuse to acknowledge the peace-keeping efforts of many Muslims all over the world who are actively fighting against their own image as “Islamic Terrorists?”
2) Why do you not ever direct any of this “anger” at Christians who you deem to be false? You seem to dismiss examples of Christians behaving badly as “not real Christians” and then move on, without ever really directing anger at them or acknowledging it as a problem for Christianity. And yet you easily conflate all Muslims together. Why is that?
The guts, brains, bones, etc. of a thousand innocents are being blown across city blocks virtually every week and there is NOT ONE prominent muslim
So it only matters if a famous Muslim says so?
So I guess it didn’t count when the entire Canadian ensemble of Muslim Imams denounced Islamic terrorism via fatwa?
2) TWO facts: Christians/Christianity has resulted in a net gain -in the last 200+ years- to human advancements in technology, acts of compassion and liberty, beyond the total of the previous several millennium.
Scientific advance has little to nothing to do with Christianity (or any other religion…or atheism, for that matter). It has to do with science and scientific minds. It’s possible to be scientific regardless of one’s faith background, and science is where the development of technology has come.
As for “compassion” and “liberty,” we’ve already established that you have a very, very different definition of those words than I do, and so we’ll leave that at that.
Islam has PROUDLY shunned modernity
Popular extremist Islam, yes. There are many Muslims making efforts to integrate with more “modern” societies. Many Christians, however, choose not to acknowledge those efforts and alienate potential allies among Muslims in doing so.
“Look, look, NO! Wait a minute! Right here, I have proof that Christianity says mean things too!
Surely you’re not so foolish as to deny that the Bible has god ordering people to kill each other? The fact is that it happens. Nobody is arguing that one way or the other. The argument stems from how we justify those acts, as opposed to how we refuse to justify similar acts in the Quran.
THEIR BOOKS ARE THE SAME! THEIR BOOKS ARE THE SAME! Can’t you see?!”
Nobody here has said anything like that.
when that has absolutely, 100 percently, NOTHING TO DO with the issue at hand.
Please tell me, then, what do you think “the issue at hand” is?
Especially when considering that behind, or even within, all of your posts exists the message that you are unflinchingly logical in ALL of your pursuits.
I have never said anything of the sort. In fact, I made a pretty clear outline of the fact of my own humanity — and my own subjectivity to error — much earlier when we were talking about science in another topic. Did you not read that post, either?
It would be like saying (if #1 here was true), #1)”Well, you know, Haiti has the same Constitution as America and affords its citizens all of the same liberties so,#2) America and Haiti are basically the same.”
Take off #2 and you have what I am saying. It would look more like this:
“You know, the Bible has accounts of god commanding humans to commit acts of violence against one another, commands that Christians occasionally act upon (such as the man who self-identified as a Christian doing god’s work when he killed abortion doctor Tiller). The Quran also has accounts of god (Allah) commanding humans to commit acts of violence against one another, which Muslims frequently act upon (such as Islamic extremist terrorists).”
In both cases there are “extremists” which are decried by their respective faiths, and in both cases there are “moderates” who are not violent or extreme in their beliefs. Do you acknowledge this much?
January 17th, 2010 at 6:20 am
BTW, a good book as reference: “Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution” by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.
“Desmond and Moore show how Darwin extended to all life the idea of human brotherhood held by those who fought to abolish slavery, so developing our modern view of evolution.Through massive detective work among unpublished family correspondence, manuscripts and rare works, the authors back up their compelling claim. Leading apologists for slavery in Darwin’s day argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate species, with whites superior.”
Again how does this relate to Sanger or Hitler?
January 17th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Becca said:I do not have the time or the desire to deal any further with the self contradiction, illogical thought and avoidance I have received from you thus far. Thanks anyway.
Becca said:Luke,I am still waiting on that first request.
This made me think of that great old Smokey Robinson song, “You Really Got a Hold On Me..”
January 17th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
(Mark) 1) not ONE person (of legitimate note) has stated that muslims are inherently violent
(Tims’ retort) Irrelevant. The point was that you made no effort whatsoever to distinguish between violent and nonviolent Muslims. Whereas you do attempt to distinguish between “violent Christians” and “nonviolent Christians” (see: people who murder abortion doctors), so much so as to label the former as “not true Christians.”
Again, you make my point: that being, abortion “doctor” (geez, now THAT’S an oxymoron for ya!) murdering “Christians” are likely “CINO’s” (Christian In Name Only) is illustrated by their rarity (see my post above re: “scope”) and said rareness is made manifest, as well, by the everyday occurrence of muslim atrocities the world round (which simultaneously illustrates the flaw(s) in their/your belief system). That is PRECISELY WHY you must equivocate the two by comparing baby-murderer killers (what’s that, like 5 since Roe ?) with “Muslims frequently act(ing)” as “islamic extremist terrorists” in order to “make your “point”".
As someone who is always screaming “CONTEXT”, why is it you so easily draw “similarities” between two religions that are universes apart in belief and action without EVER even CONSIDERING that there might be an actual, enormously substantive, difference between the two at their respective origins ? I presume you will NEVER admit your blatant error on this issue so will you please stop beating it to death ? It’s getting really old showing how specious these claims of yours are. [/strawmandismantling]
Now for a lesson on context: Liberals, both here and virtually everywhere they are visible, display inordinate levels of outrage when discussing Christians/Christianity and their/its foibles, as they see them, real or imagined, while concurrently either ignoring the daily occurrences of muslim atrocities or merely sloughing them off as “Oh, we all know that that is a part of life” (see stalin quote: “1 death is a tragedy. One MILLION deaths is a statistic”. Or maybe that was Mao. Ayers? Oh, that’s right, it was Obama when talking about jobs, wasn’t it ? Yeah, that’s it.) Then again, we all “know” it’s all about poverty, right lefties ? That is why poor, rural Christians are always blowing up Walmarts “down yonder” in the hinter land, yes ?
summary: Please stop obfuscating / misrepresenting the point at hand. Islam and Christianity can NOT be equated. One is borne of peace and love and its followers -on the whole (see America)- are a witness to this and, Muhammad started a belief system some 14 centuries ago that has yet to arrive at the century following its inception. Actually, one could make a very good case that islam has devolved the human condition wherever it has reigned over man.
Also: please stop trying to bait me w/ claims that I portray ALL muslims as blood-thirsty killers. That is a lie and you know it. Noting the fact that millions of people stand by as innocents are slaughtered and maimed in their name is not calling them killers. Do I really need to explain this? They DO however protest VIOLENTLY about CARTOONS. Not all but certainly millions more than there are “Christian atrocities”. (look out, folks, here comes a recounting of the Bible / events from centuries ago.) Christian does something bad = much hand wringing and self reassessment in the “community”. Muslim blows up 500 human souls = much rejoicing and parades w/ candy and children idolizing said blower upper. One of these things is not like the other - can you tell the class why ?
SCOPE, man, SCOPE! Pull your head out and take a look at reality, would you? No, I suppose you won’t. So sad.
Haven’t got time to dismantle the rest of the above nonsense, it’s time to go worship our Lord. late
January 17th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Becca said:Luke,I am still waiting on that first request.
If you’re playing that game, shouldn’t you be obligated to take his quiz first?
January 17th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
“That is why poor, rural Christians are always blowing up Walmarts “down yonder” in the hinter land, yes ?”
Hardly comparable levels of poverty, no?
That said, Christians in Northern Ireland spent most of the 20th Century blowing each other up for being ‘the wrong kind of Christian’. And they received an awful lot of support from fund-raising in the US too, courtesy of ‘Nor-Aid’. I’m talking about the IRA by the way, together with their UDA opponents.
“murdering “Christians” are likely “CINO’s” (Christian In Name Only) ”
The ‘no-true Scotsman’ argument can be used equally by Muslims.
January 17th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Directly after I posted the above, I went to The Times’ website and read the following:
Muslim group Minhaj-ul-Quran issues fatwa against terrorists
“A leading Muslim organisation in Britain has issued a fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism, declaring them un-Islamic.
Minhaj-ul-Quran, a Sufi organisation based in East London which advises the Government on how to combat radicalisation of Muslim youth, will launch the 600-page religious verdict tomorrow. It condemns the perpetrators of terrorist explosions and suicide bombings.
The document, written by Dr Muhammed Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former minister of Pakistan and friend of Benazir Bhutto, declares suicide bombings and terrorism as “totally un-Islamic”. It is one of the most detailed and comprehensive documents of its kind to be published in Britain.
The fatwa, which was released in Pakistan last month, uses texts from the Koran and other Islamic writings to argue that attacks against innocent citizens are “absolutely against the teachings of Islam and that Islam does not permit such acts on any excuse, reason or pretext”. ”
Terrorists are therefore MINO?
January 17th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Again, you make my point: that being, abortion “doctor” (geez, now THAT’S an oxymoron for ya!) murdering “Christians” are likely “CINO’s” (Christian In Name Only) is illustrated by their rarity
1) A doctor is someone with expert medical knowledge who performs and participates in medical procedures and offers professional advice. Dr. Tiller fulfilled these criteria and thus was a doctor.
2) Regardless of “rarity,” these types of criminals do exist and they do emerge sometimes. Do you accept that?
That is PRECISELY WHY you must equivocate the two by comparing baby-murderer killers (what’s that, like 5 since Roe ?) with “Muslims frequently act(ing)” as “islamic extremist terrorists” in order to “make your “point””.
1) No, rather it is you who are doing the equivocating. I’ve made it very clear that there are more (and more violent) Muslim extremists as a whole than there are Christian extremists. This point has never been up for questioning, by me or anyone else. No; the point was that regardless of the degree of extremity, there are extremists from each religion (and many others) who take the original views at face-value (such as the “right” to kill someone like Dr. Tiller or Kurt Westergaard) and who make no attempt to provide a social context for those views. Based on that, I felt it was incorrect of you to imply by your original comment that a Muslim is necessarily a terrorist (or that Muslims are somehow “not doing anything” to counteract terrorism) in spite of the clear evidence to the contrary.
2) Are you denying that there are such things as Christian criminals, or that Christians do break the law? Or would you go as far as to say that any Christian who has ever broken a law is “Christian in name only?”
As someone who is always screaming “CONTEXT”, why is it you so easily draw “similarities” between two religions that are universes apart in belief and action without EVER even CONSIDERING that there might be an actual, enormously substantive, difference between the two at their respective origins ?
Hm. I never said anything about their core beliefs being the same (or even similar). The only thing I’ve claimed with respect to “comparing” Islam and Christianity is that they both have instances of violence in their texts — which you have not denied — a point which I drew on to illustrate that Christians tend to draw on context and lore to justify those violent passages and not throw out the work as a whole based on them….whereas the same Christians tend to do the opposite when it comes to Muslim lore.
I guess my question to you, then, would be: Do you believe there is a fundamental difference between a violent Muslim extremist and a non-violent Muslim? Do you believe that a nonviolent Muslim is less of “an enemy” to Christianity as a violent Muslim? Or perhaps to phrase it even simpler: do you believe that nonviolent Muslims have a place in what you call a “Christian” society?
Oh, that’s right, it was Obama when talking about jobs, wasn’t it ? Yeah, that’s it.)
Now that’s just silly -_-
Please stop obfuscating / misrepresenting the point at hand.
What *is* the point at hand, do you think?
Islam and Christianity can NOT be equated.
That’s irrelevant because nobody is doing that.
One is borne of peace and love and its followers -on the whole (see America)- are a witness to this and, Muhammad started a belief system some 14 centuries ago that has yet to arrive at the century following its inception. Actually, one could make a very good case that islam has devolved the human condition wherever it has reigned over man.
So again, you *are* making the case that Islam is fundamentally “bad” at its core?
Also: please stop trying to bait me w/ claims that I portray ALL muslims as blood-thirsty killers.
Well? Do you believe that Islam fundamentally leads people to commit murder? Or do you believe that it’s possible to be a “peaceable” Muslim?
In any case, I find it interesting that you deny classifying Muslims as inherently violent and then you say this immediately afterward:
They DO however protest VIOLENTLY about CARTOONS. Not all but certainly millions more than there are “Christian atrocities”. (look out, folks, here comes a recounting of the Bible / events from centuries ago.) Christian does something bad = much hand wringing and self reassessment in the “community”. Muslim blows up 500 human souls = much rejoicing and parades w/ candy and children idolizing said blower upper. One of these things is not like the other - can you tell the class why ?
People are taking action against extremist Muslims as we speak. Our government is at war with two countries, one of which is directly involved with extremist Islam. We have Muslims here and in Canada who are fighting a daily battle to purge extremism and violence from their communities. We are taking action against Muslims.
Yes, what you say is true — there are a lot of extremist Muslims who *will* “rejoice and hold parades w/candy” and whatnot when a violent act is carried out. But there are also Muslim communities where this does not happen. Acknowledging this is not even close to “dismissing” the acts of violent Muslims. It is not a method of “treating Christians more harshly than Muslims.” It is a matter of acknowledging that there are both Christians and Muslims who ‘do bad things,’ and that it’s unfair to credit Islam itself only for the actions of the people who follow it violently — in the exact same way that it’s unfair to credit Christianity only with the acts of those who are violent in its name.
You act quickly to dismiss violent Christians as “Christian in name only” and brush them aside, painting Christianity as perfection. You do not act so quickly to explain away the violent tendencies of violent Muslims in the same way. I am interested in understanding why that is, beyond that you believe Christianity is true and that you must defame the opposing faith by whatever means necessary.
January 18th, 2010 at 7:05 am
“1) A doctor is someone with expert medical knowledge who performs and participates in medical procedures and offers professional advice. Dr. Tiller fulfilled these criteria and thus was a doctor.”
And Roger Taney was Chief Justice of the SCOTUS.
“2) Regardless of “rarity,” these types of criminals do exist and they do emerge sometimes. Do you accept that?”
And some people die from aspirin. So, according to your line of thinking, aspirin is no more “healthful” than cyanide. You keep embarrassing yourself. Please stop.
“No; the point was that regardless of the degree of extremity”
NO! There is NO point “regardless of the degree of extremity”. That IS the point. What is wrong with you?
“I felt it was incorrect of you to imply by your original comment that a Muslim is necessarily a terrorist ”
Again, you intentionally misrepresent. There is NOTHING in my posts to suggest such. You really need to stop this. It is irresponsible.
“(or that Muslims are somehow “not doing anything” to counteract terrorism) in spite of the clear evidence to the contrary.”
What “evidence” ? Does not the word itself imply a resultant effect from said efforts to “counteract terrorism” ? If so, it seems the entirety of civilization would be in flames if not for these “brave anti-islamic extremist islamists”. Spin to the tenth power by you here.
“2) Are you denying that there are such things as Christian criminals, or that Christians do break the law? Or would you go as far as to say that any Christian who has ever broken a law is “Christian in name only?””
Thank you. One more instance of you creating, out of whole cloth, some demented belief system w/ which to assist in labeling me. Coo-coo.
“Do you believe there is a fundamental difference between a violent Muslim extremist and a non-violent Muslim?”
Talk about “begging the question”! You invent an ideology. Place it in my mind against all indications of reality. Then you ask me to answer such an absurdly insulting question that came from your own wild imaginings. Bravo! You never cease to amaze in your ability to top your own, completely unsupported by facts of any kind, presumptuousness. “Bravo!” I say.
“Now that’s just silly -_-”
Thank you for obfuscating the real point I made that you edited out: “Liberals, both here and virtually everywhere they are visible, display inordinate levels of outrage when discussing Christians/Christianity and their/its foibles, as they see them, real or imagined, while concurrently either ignoring the daily occurrences of muslim atrocities or merely sloughing them off as “Oh, we all know that that is a part of life” (see stalin quote: “1 death is a tragedy. One MILLION deaths is a statistic”.”
“What *is* the point at hand, do you think?”
Christianity is, undeniably, a quantum leap forward from islamism in the order of humanity.
“That’s irrelevant because nobody is doing that.”
I’ve about reached my end w/ this insanity.
“So again, you *are* making the case that Islam is fundamentally “bad” at its core?”
Oh my word! Are you in fact in possession of a functioning “computing device” ?!
“Well? Do you believe that Islam fundamentally leads people to commit murder? Or do you believe that it’s possible to be a “peaceable” Muslim?”
Note to self: reality not the forte of your garden variety leftist (check)
“In any case, I find it interesting that you deny classifying Muslims as inherently violent and then you say this immediately afterward:
They DO however protest VIOLENTLY about CARTOONS. Not all but certainly millions more than there are “Christian atrocities”.
Please observe the presence of the words, “not” and “all”. (yeah, I know he put it there himself. no, I don’t know why I am still trying to get through to him **[hits self w/ sledge hammer, repeatedly, in head]** “OUCH, I, that hurt! Yeah, well, me deserve it.”)
“People are taking action against extremist Muslims as we speak.”
see: American uniformed military personnel
“We have Muslims here and in Canada who are fighting a daily battle to purge extremism and violence from their communities.”
Right, like “CAIR”….OH, WAIT!…
“We are taking action against Muslims.”
The emboldened word there should have been “we”, not “are”. And you don’t sound anything like any “we” I have ever met. To be sure.
“But there are also Muslim communities where this does not happen. Acknowledging this is not even close to “dismissing” the acts of violent Muslims.”
But trumpeting it to the exclusion of reality; i.e. “there’s a whole lotta killin’ goin’ on out dere” in the name of islam and you focus on the fact that “not all muslims are blood thirsty killers, see?” If there was a drug that “only” killed 1 in 500 hundred who took it, would that be okay with you? Would you say one who “persecutes” such a drug over one that has a 1 in 500,000 mortality rate is being unfair ? (yeah, I know he’ll never get it. it’s all about finishing up now….Oh for lost causes!…)
“…it’s unfair to credit Islam itself only for the actions of the people who follow it violently…”
Besides not murdering innocents wholesale, what other “accomplishments” shall we “credit islam itself” with ?
“in the exact same way that it’s unfair to credit Christianity only with the acts of those who are violent in its name.”
Context. Scope. These concepts mean nothing to you, apparently, accept when pontificating on ideas like “AGW” and evolution….No wait, those two myths actually REVEAL your tendency towards this type of faith based, baseless “thinking”.
“painting Christianity as perfection”
Was never said by me or anyone else. (please see: “exception to rule” principle)
This time, no apologies for any perceived sarcasm. Any rational professor / human being would be taken aback by this total willingness to be caught up in the winds of subjectivity. No, you don’t believe in objective truth, but this (your arguments on this thread) is something you should be embarrassed of. Sincerely.
January 18th, 2010 at 7:42 am
The discussion between the two of you now seems purely to be accusing the other of assuming you’d said things you claim not to have actually said.
At least one of you must have completely lost sight of what the other is actually arguing about. You need to draw a line under previous posts. Why doesn’t one or both of you clearly state your position afresh, then the other can try dealing with that alone, ignoring any previous points you think the other has made.
I think that’s what Tim was trying to do in his previous post by asking some simple questions to establish Mark’s views on various points. But Mark somehow managed to reply to each question while barely actually answering any of them, instead relying on snark. It’s not going to move the discussion forward.
January 18th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Mark: “Christians/Christianity has resulted in a net gain -in the last 200+ years- to human advancements in technology, acts of compassion and liberty, beyond the total of the previous several millennium.”
1) Advancements: I believe if you really think about this you’ll see that any “advancements in technology” were the doing of scientists and engineers and inventors and has nothing to do with their religion. Shockly didn’t invent the transistor for the glory of jesus. Marconi and faraday didn’t study radio waves in order to broadcast evangelists. Technology is within the realm of the sciences which are often at first rejected by some of the strict religious groups, an example would be the amish. Some even thought it was unchristian to have a television in the beginning for who knows what reason.
2) acts of compassion and liberty: I don’t think being religious has much of anything to do with this. If anything it’s been the liberalization of religions, the sloughing off of the unreasonable cruelty they can afford, not that all of the cruelty has vanished.
January 18th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
And Roger Taney was Chief Justice of the SCOTUS.
Irrelevant.
And some people die from aspirin. So, according to your line of thinking, aspirin is no more “healthful” than cyanide. You keep embarrassing yourself. Please stop.
There are significantly more Christians who commit violent crimes (if our prison statistics are to be believed) than there are people who are killed by aspirin.
NO! There is NO point “regardless of the degree of extremity”. That IS the point. What is wrong with you?
You are incorrect. The point is that, regardless of the degree of extremity, people take things out of context. Based on the way you defend Christianity, it would be reasonable to expect you to consider this fact (that people take things out of context) when judging Muslims. But you do not. Hence the original question: why do you not use the same rationality to defend Islam that you use to defend Christianity, aside from your belief that Christianity is “objectively right” and therefore the “opposition” must be defamed at any cost?
Again, you intentionally misrepresent. There is NOTHING in my posts to suggest such. You really need to stop this. It is irresponsible.
No. However, you have said (now about three times, as of your recent post), in some way or another, that “Islam murders people,” or that it is the fault of Islam itself (and not the people who “misinterpret” it or bend it to suit their political agendas) that there are so many terrorists.
I tried to explain before that the reason this judgment is unfair (and hypocritical) of you is because there are also people who exploit Christianity for personal gain, or who interpret it in such a way that violent acts are permissible. So if I were to judge Christianity in the same way that you judge Islam, I would have to deem Christianity “a religion of violence” that has “held back society” and “surpressed modernism” for the last few centuries. But I do not believe that, because that would be an unfair judgment.
All I’m asking you to do is provide proof that Islam itself is “bad” — which is what you have repeatedly claimed since your original rebuttal stating that you never said so — in a manner that could not also be applied to Christianity by a criticial thinker.
Also, I must ask: are you saying that you believe that Islam is fundamentally “evil,” while also believing that a Muslim — a person who has pledged his/her life to the service of Islam and Allah — does not inherently adhere to that “evil?”
What “evidence” ?
As I posted before, from the article “Attack on Canada, U.S. is attack on Muslims: imams”:
A group of Canadian and U.S. Islamic leaders on Friday issued a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring that an attack by extremists on the two countries would constitute an attack on the 10 million Muslims living in North America.
The 20 imams associated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada said this marked the first fatwa by the Muslim clergy declaring attacks on Canada and the U.S. to be attacks on Muslims.
“In our view, these attacks are evil, and Islam requires Muslims to stand up against this evil,” the imams said in their fatwa.
From another article, “New study shows Muslim community’s anti-terrorism efforts”:
it is the Muslim-American communities themselves who play a large role in keeping the number of radicalized members low through their own practices…leaders and Muslim-American organizations denounce violent acts, for instance, in messages that have weight within communities.
In addition, such communities often self-police — confronting those who express radical ideology or support for terrorism and communicating concerns about radical individuals to authorities. Some Muslim-Americans have adopted programs for youth to help identify those who react inappropriately to controversial issues so they can undergo counseling and education, the researchers said.]
You have not addressed any of this evidence. I can only conclude, then, that you accept it.
see: American uniformed military personnel
Exactly, yes.
Thank you. One more instance of you creating, out of whole cloth, some demented belief system w/ which to assist in labeling me. Coo-coo.
Unfortunately, the quote you cited from me above would be a natural consequence of the reasoning you laid out.
Talk about “begging the question”! You invent an ideology. Place it in my mind against all indications of reality. Then you ask me to answer such an absurdly insulting question that came from your own wild imaginings. Bravo! You never cease to amaze in your ability to top your own, completely unsupported by facts of any kind, presumptuousness. “Bravo!” I say.
Whether or not I “made up an ideology” or “placed words in your mouth,” this question should be easy to answer, regardless of your worldview: do you believe there is a fundamental difference between a Muslim extremist and a nonviolent Muslim? I see no problem with that question.
Christianity is, undeniably, a quantum leap forward from islamism in the order of humanity.
Very well. That’s your point. My point — stated prior, which you denounced as “off-point” and “obfuscating” — was a response to that point. Do you understand now?
I’ve about reached my end w/ this insanity.
So why are you still responding to me? :/
Oh my word! Are you in fact in possession of a functioning “computing device” ?!
So you are making the claim that Islam is inherently “evil,” then?
Note to self: reality not the forte of your garden variety leftist (check)
So you don’t believe that it’s possible to be a “peaceable” Muslim, then?
They DO however protest VIOLENTLY about CARTOONS. Not all but certainly millions more than there are “Christian atrocities”.
So then do you acknowledge that it’s possible to be a Muslim and not be “evil” or violent, or a terrorist?
If so, how do you reconcile that with the belief that Islam is “inherently, fundamentally evil?” Wouldn’t the inherent evil of Islam corrupt anyone who adhered to it?
The emboldened word there should have been “we”, not “are”. And you don’t sound anything like any “we” I have ever met. To be sure.
Well, neither you nor I are currently serving members of the armed forces, so I think that’s ultimately moot. I speak as an American citizen.
If there was a drug that “only” killed 1 in 500 hundred who took it, would that be okay with you?
This metaphor begs the question; the question is, does the drug kill people who take it?
So the answer is, if it could be shown that Islam inherently drives people to kill, in such a way that there could never be a nonviolent interpretation of Islam (and thus a nonviolent/non-extremist Muslim), then yes, I would oppose Islam.
Besides not murdering innocents wholesale, what other “accomplishments” shall we “credit islam itself” with ?
Well, for starters, Islam brought us among the first attempts to formalize a study of logic and philosphy (”Islamic Philosophy,” “Avicenna,” etc.). You know, logic? That thing Christians and atheists use when they debate the existence of god from a purely philosophical standpoint?
January 18th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
“So why are you still responding to me? :/”
Good point, for I do not know. In other threads you were not so incoherent and irrational. Guess we all have our blind spots and this latest post of yours indicates, even further, the extent to which yours exists. Looking forward to the next item here on site so as to have something else to engage you about. Barring an act of God (or your god -congress?) this is clearly a dead end.
God bless ya, man.
January 18th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Good point, for I do not know.
…
Barring an act of God (or your god -congress?) this is clearly a dead end.
Good move.
January 19th, 2010 at 6:47 am
Luke said:
This made me think of that great old Smokey Robinson song, “You Really Got a Hold On Me..”
Luke,
Your continued avoidance is noted.
Though I already suspected it you have made it quite clear it would be a waste of my time to wait any longer for a straightforward, logical, honest response from you on this subject. I’m fairly certain that applies to any other subject as well.
Thanks anyway.
January 19th, 2010 at 7:09 am
^Perhaps you’re just a little overcriticial, Becca. Luke is probably the least offensive poster here.
January 19th, 2010 at 7:23 am
Becca, instead of posting that you could have made an attempt to explain how Sanger is supposed to provide the connecting point between Hitler and Darwin, which was the context in which her name was initially introduced on this thread.
I could say that YOUR continued avoidance on this is also noted, but I’d much rather ask you again to give us some explanation for the above. Certainly Mark, the person who brought up Sanger in the first place, has backed out of attempted to prove the connection.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:17 am
Nathan said:
“No objection at all - I was merely asking for quotes or cites to support the assertion.”
I directed you to documents you obviously chose to overlook and apparently you do object as it appears you find it hard to believe Hitler targeted the Christian Church just as he targeted anyone else who opposed him and his sick plan. I am well aware why you do that, I only wish you were.
Nathan:
“Apologies if I am confused. Given that Darwin was a fervent opponent of slavery, I’m not sure how this ties in with your claims. However, I am happy to listen to any proof you think you may have.”
I am not the one you need to be apologizing to. Your myopia is glaring. Darwins writings are laden with racist ideas and his hypothesis of evolution is a inherently racist philosophy. Ah yes, He may have appeared to be on the side of social justice for black people, fellow human beings, those whom he likened to “gorillas”. I term that, benevolence of a bigot.
Nathan:
“Well I’m still waiting for anything to connect Darwin to these other two people.”
I cannot do your homework for you Nathan, as I said, you need to do much reading and introspection.
Nathan:
“Because when I quoted you as saying “Hitlers in his master plan to destroy Christianity”, you objected, as if I was quoting you out of context. So I wanted to clarify whether you believe it or not, or whether me truncating the quote lost its meaning. You now confirm you DO believe it, so I wonder why you objected, saying”:
“First, that is not the full quote by me, so why did you chop it up?
That was strange.”
I have no idea what you are referring to when you insist I objected because I thought you quoted me out of context. I suspect it is from the same place you derived the other erroneous idea that I had a “hissy fit” earlier.
I was attempting to set the record straight. I confirmed my belief when I clearly said he targeted the Christian Church and what I objected to was that you seemed to struggle with the thought that Hitler would actually do that.
Nathan:
“No, I’m not one of those people. I only ever bring it up when people try to find Hitler quotes to claim that Hitler was a socialist, an atheist or a Darwinist. But I’m glad that we all agree that it’s pointless trusting quotes from a mass-murderer. We judge by actions, such as Hitler putting Darwin on his â€banned books’ list.”
You appear to be one of those people Nathan and you and I do not agree. You claim it is pointless, “trusting quotes from a mass-murderer” then why did you ask me just a few sentences earlier for, “quotes or cites to support the assertion”?
Again, I cannot do your homework for you. You obviously lack knowledge of and or refuse to see the connecting dots between all three persons. If embracing the same twisted ideology is not enough of a connection for you, then nothing else I point out to you will matter.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Nathan said:
“Becca, instead of posting that you could have made an attempt to explain how Sanger is supposed to provide the connecting point between Hitler and Darwin, which was the context in which her name was initially introduced on this thread.”
I already have Nathan, I cannot help it if you cannot and or will not comprehend it.
Nathan:
“I could say that YOUR continued avoidance on this is also noted, but I’d much rather ask you again to give us some explanation for the above. Certainly Mark, the person who brought up Sanger in the first place, has backed out of attempted to prove the connection.”
But then you be dishonest as I have not avoided anything.
And with that, I believe the same conclusion is in order for you and Tim, the other member of what appears to be triplets who arbitrarily respond for one another;
Your continued avoidance is noted.
Though I already suspected it you have made it quite clear it would be a waste of my time to wait any longer for a straightforward, logical, honest response from you on this subject. I’m fairly certain that applies to any other subject as well.
Thanks anyway.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:37 am
You’re accusing me of lacking knowledge about Darwin, and say you ‘don’t want to do your homework for you’. Fine. But equally I think it is you who lack the knowledge, so I guess we’re at a stand-off.
I’ve already explained why it’s nonsense to call natural selection a ‘racist philosophy’. Darwin showed that we all shared a common ancestor - contrary to the common view of the time that different races were in fact closer to different species. I’ve already given links that showed Hitler was opposed to ‘Darwinist philosophies’.
I don’t see how natural selection even particularly qualifies as a philosophy. It’s a process for which we’ve overwhelming evidence. Whether you accept the evidence depends on whether or not you understand it, not whether you have racist views.
Asserting that Darwin also held racist views says nothing about whether he has anything to do with Hitler or Sanger. For a start, as Luke pointed out, many of the founding fathers kept slaves. Does that mean they qualify too? For a second, Darwin was a fervent anti-slavery campaigner.
“You claim it is pointless, “trusting quotes from a mass-murderer” then why did you ask me just a few sentences earlier for, “quotes or cites to support the assertion”?”
If you give me a quote from someone saying “I hate Christians and Jews - kill them both”, then I will trust they really meant it. If they didn’t mean it then they wouldn’t want Jews and Christians killed! You give me quotes from Hitler saying he wants to destroy Christianity, then I’ll figure he probably did. No-one would say it if they didn’t mean it.
However, if you give me a quote from the same person saying “I’m a Christian and I love small children”, then I would say that quote is worthless. In that case, talk is cheap and I’d want to instead examine their ACTIONS.
Does that make sense to you? Equally, I would say that Hitler’s banned book list is a reasonable insight into his thinking. If someone asks for Bibles to be burnt, I’d guess that would trump any quotes you have from the same guy saying he loves Jesus. In the same way, I don’t care if you call you put the words ’socialist’ or ‘democratic’ in your party name - the important thing is whether you run your party on socialist or democratic principles.
I asked you for quotes or cites because it was the first I’d heard that Hitler wanted to destroy Christianity, and I genuinely was interested where you’d heard it from. I wasn’t trying to catch you out.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Becca1: “First, that is not the full quote by me, so why did you chop it up?
That was strange.”
Becca2: “I have no idea what you are referring to when you insist I objected because I thought you quoted me out of context. ”
Becca, the second quote there directly follows the first - how can you say you have no idea what I’m referring to about you objecting, when it directly follows a quote from you objecting!
Sure, if you want you can say ‘you are interpretting my words wrong, I wasn’t in fact objecting’. But surely you can’t say you ‘have no idea’ which passage I was referring to?
“his hypothesis of evolution is a inherently racist philosophy”
Can you explain what you believe Darwin’s natural selection theory actually is, as distinct from evolution itself? It might help me understand why you believe it to be ‘inherently racist’. Do you believe all the black biologists in the world are ‘Uncle Tom’ figures, who don’t understand their subject as well as you do?
January 19th, 2010 at 8:49 am
“you and Tim, the other member of what appears to be triplets who arbitrarily respond for one another;”
Bit of an odd statement. Luke is an anti-abortion theist for a start.
“it would be a waste of my time to wait any longer for a straightforward, logical, honest response from you on this subject.”
Whether it would be a waste of your time I can’t answer. But I’ve been very straightforward with you and certainly haven’t lied. I’ve tried to be logical too. I really don’t understand what has upset you. Given that you apparently haven’t even noticed that Luke’s stance is firmly anti-abortion, I wonder how much you are actually reading our posts, and how much you are simply reading INTO the posts. It would be a shame for you to get angry about things people haven’t actually said.
“I already have Nathan, I cannot help it if you cannot and or will not comprehend it.”
You made assertions about Darwin that I refute. Have you actually properly read any books by him, or have you just read selected quotes on creationist websites.
If the latter, how is that different from someone presenting you with a bunch of quotes from the bible condoning slavery? Or coming up with a few ‘politically incorrect’ quotes from founding fathers that appear to suggest they saw black people as worth less than whites?
January 19th, 2010 at 10:18 am
By the way, on judging on actions rather than words:
“Hitler championed religious indoctrination in public schools, negotiated a treaty with the Vatican in which German tax money went to the church, and made special protection for Catholic churches and priests, which were de facto applied to German protestant churches and ministers, as well.”
“The only Christians who were sent to the death camps specifically because of their religious beliefs were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were pacifistic and a threat to Germany’s war effort. Most other Christians in the death camps were the German administrators.
Atheists, on the other hand, were targeted for their beliefs and sent to death camps.
“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
— Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on Oct. 24, 1933
“Furthermore: Hitler showed no knowledge of Darwinian evolution or natural selection. Nowhere in Mein Kampf does he mention Darwin, natural-selection or even the word “evolution” (in the context of natural selection).”
January 19th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Becca and all. I had written responses to much of the rest of Becca’s Jan 19th - 8:17 post, but I have left them out because I think the line I quote below is really key to the disagreement here. I am perhaps leaving out some relevant information, and I will post it if it seems to become necessary. The only part I’d like to mention is that it seems to me that the point of contention here is not whether Church persecution took place (I discussed it before Becca posted her article) and there was no objection. The point of contention seems to be whether this was part of some sort of master plan. The point Becca makes here, I think is key to that.
Becca said:and apparently you do object as it appears you find it hard to believe Hitler targeted the Christian Church just as he targeted anyone else who opposed him and his sick plan.
Here Becca, you have hit upon the exact objection that many would have with your claims.
I think that your claim here — that Hitler targeted Christian Churches when they interfered with his larger plans is well supported by historical documents. I don’t really know of any contemporary historian who would disagree.
Here is a key distinction — I don’t know of anyone who claims that Hitler targeted Jews because they “opposed him?”
Look, Hitler destroyed — literally destroyed — much of my country and was responsible for the deaths of some 6,000,000 of her citizens.
If you think he did that to us because we somehow “opposed him” and not because of some sick hatred and misplaced rage, then we will simply have to agree to disagree on our historical interpretation.
January 19th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
By defintion a Buddhist cannot be a theist.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Also, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was put into a concentration camp and executed and he was not a Jehovah’s witness, but a Lutheran. Hitler only momentarily placated the Church in Germany for his political purposes. It was his self-avowed expectation to rid Germany of all remnants of Christ and Christianity in Germany after the war was won. Until then he needed all Germans on his side. He viewed Christianity as basically being a close relative to Judaism and intended on replacing it with a Reich Church complete with Mein Kampf as the replacement for the Bible. No, Hitler can’t be made into a Christian by those who seek to brand Christianity as guilty by association. Hitler had one god only and it was him.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
“By defintion a Buddhist cannot be a theist.”
What definition is that?
January 19th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer was put into a concentration camp and executed and he was not a Jehovah’s witness, but a Lutheran”
Russell, that might have had something to do with Dietrich’s involvement in plans to assassinate Hitler!
January 19th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Certainly Mark, the person who brought up Sanger in the first place, has backed out of attempted to prove the connection.
Not just that, he even admitted that there *was* no connection
I am well aware why you do that, I only wish you were.
This is just a recommendation, of course (which you’re free to ignore), but….has it ever crossed your mind that maybe you’d get a more sincere response if you asked people what they were thinking instead of telling them?
Darwins writings are laden with racist ideas and his hypothesis of evolution is a inherently racist philosophy. Ah yes, He may have appeared to be on the side of social justice for black people, fellow human beings, those whom he likened to “gorillas”. I term that, benevolence of a bigot.
I’m interested in this angle. If you don’t mind, could you post a quote or two from Darwin equating blacks with “gorillas?”
I cannot do your homework for you Nathan, as I said, you need to do much reading and introspection.
Translation: it’s a conspiracy theory.
Again, I cannot do your homework for you.
Or yourself, apparently
[/snark]
And with that, I believe the same conclusion is in order for you and Tim, the other member of what appears to be triplets who arbitrarily respond for one another;
Your continued avoidance is noted.
I want to know how you’ve managed to accuse me of “avoiding” anything, given that you’ve barely responded to anything I have said….
January 19th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Nathan:
By the way, on judging on actions rather than words:
“Hitler championed religious indoctrination in public schools, negotiated a treaty with the Vatican in which German tax money went to the church, and made special protection for
Catholic churches and priests, which were de facto applied to German protestant churches and ministers, as well.”
“The only Christians who were sent to the death camps specifically because of their religious beliefs were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were pacifistic and a threat to Germany’s war effort. Most other Christians in the death camps were the German administrators.
Atheists, on the other hand, were targeted for their beliefs and sent to death camps.
“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
— Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on Oct. 24, 1933
“Furthermore: Hitler showed no knowledge of Darwinian evolution or natural selection. Nowhere in Mein Kampf does he mention Darwin, natural-selection or even the word “evolution” (in the context of natural selection).”
Nathan;
And what religion would that be Nathan? It certainly wasn’t Christianity as revealed in the Bible, so please spare me what is nothing but a type of strawman that was burned long ago as any knowledgeable person is aware.
Hitler makes clear in Mein Kampf:
Political parties are given to compromise; Weltanschauungs never. Political parties recognize opponents; world-concepts declare their infallibility.”
“Man today may be pained to learn that with the appearance of Christianity, the first intellectual terrorism befell the free world of the ancients; but one cannot dispute the fact that since then the world has been oppressed and dominated by this terrorism, and that terrorism can be broken only by terrorism and coercion by coercion.”
As his Nazi minion Martin Bormann said, ” … scientific knowledge poses a threat to their existence. Therefore, by means of such pseudo-sciences as theology, they take great pains to suppress or falsify scientific research. Our National Socialist world view stands on a much higher level than the concepts of Christianity, which in their essentials were taken over from Judaism. For this reason, too, we can do without Christianity.”
And they most certainly did without it.
While the Jewish people were the primary targets of Nazi evil, your ignorance of and twisting of history (not only of these points but of more than I can mention) regarding the untold numbers of Polish Christians, mainly Catholics, who were brutally murdered/tortured/enslaved by the Nazis, is as sad as sad can get.
I had intended on not responded to you any longer but after catching eye of this comment of yours I felt the need to respond in memory of my fellow Christians who were targeted and persecuted by Hitler and his kind, and because you have what seems to be an insistence upon remaining ignorant of all the facts.
It is all too evident you (as many others) have been duped by the lies of Hitler regarding Christianity. It is also evident you are as profoundly ignorant of God and His Holy Scriptures as Hitler was.
Anyone who has read Mein Kampf can see that built upon Darwinian evolution principles, Hitler intended to breed a superior race of humans which of course entailed eradicating in and all “undesirables”. Hitlers religion was Nazism, of which he and “nature” were god.
Ignore all this Nathan as you usually do, I know why you must. Again, I only wish you were aware of it as well.
January 19th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Becca said:your ignorance of and twisting of history regarding the untold numbers of Polish Christians, mainly Catholics, who were brutally murdered/tortured/enslaved by the Nazis, is as sad as sad can get.
Becca,
I mentioned this earlier today. Is it your contention that the Christian Poles were targeted because they were Christians, or do you think they were targeted for other reasons (e.g. Slavs constituted an inferior race), but also happened to be Christians?
Let me ask another way — if the Poles had been largely Muslim or Buddhist or atheist, do you believe they would have been spared?
Thanks,
Luke
January 19th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
“Ignore all this Nathan as you usually do, I know why you must. Again, I only wish you were aware of it as well.”
Becca, I’m not ignoring your points. I’m making a concerted effort to honestly engage with your argument. Here we go:
“Anyone who has read Mein Kampf can see that built upon Darwinian evolution principles, Hitler intended to breed a superior race of humans which of course entailed eradicating in and all “undesirables”.”
This is a non sequitur. I’ve asked you before to explain what you believe ‘Darwinian evolution principles’ to be. Because breeding “a superior race of humans which of course entailed eradicating in and all “undesirables” has NOTHING to do with natural selection or Darwin. I’m afraid if you wish to make your point you will need to put aside the innuendo to spell out what the connection is. I’ve studied this subject and recognise nothing of which you speak.
“the untold numbers of Polish Christians, mainly Catholics, who were brutally murdered”
Yes, and I’m sure many of the liberals, gays, gypsies, communists, dissentors and protestors etc that Hitler targetted were Catholics or Christians. But as Luke has asked you, was it their Catholicism that was being targetted.
“your ignorance of and twisting of history ”
Becca, are you able to make your posts without being condescending or rude? Please make an effort to. I apologise for my reference to ‘hissy fits’ and ‘throwing toys out the pram’. I will try to be civil, and feel sure you can do the same.
“regarding the untold numbers of Polish Christians, mainly Catholics, who were brutally murdered/tortured/enslaved by the Nazis, is as sad as sad can get.”
And drop the moral highground pose here. You are trying to exploit their deaths to make cheap jibes at Charles Darwin, in lieu of any substantial argument, just in the hope that mentioning their suffering in the same sentence as him will do the job for you.
January 19th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“I term that, benevolence of a bigot.”
And what would you term all the Christians who used the bible to justify slavery for centuries? They were FOR slavery, but at least they weren’t bigotted?
Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, “It (slavery) was established by decree of Almighty God and is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments from Genesis to Revelation4.”
So was Davis an idiot? Well…
In Exodus 21 the guidelines for the buying, selling and treatment of slaves is given. God says in verse 4 that if a male slave marries, his wife and children shall remain with the master when the slave departs because technically speaking they belong to the master.
Now if the slave is imprudent enough to protests because he loves his wife and children and wants to stay on, the consequences can be pretty drastic. In verse 6 the master is directed to “Bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for ever”. This is all repeated with some minor alteration in Deuteronomy 15:16-17. Here the master is told to “Do likewise to your maid slaves.” In Exodus 21:7-9 God even instructs men how they are to go about selling their own daughters into slavery. Here it is worth noting that many church officials including popes have owned slaves.
In Joel 3:8 God warns that, “I will sell your sons and your daughters to the Judians, and they shall in turn sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off.”
1 Tim. 6:1-2; “Let slaves regard their masters as worthy of all honor.” Matthew 10:24 and John 13:16 remind us that slaves are never better than their masters. Women take note that in Titus 2:9-10 slaves are ordered to, “Be submissive to your master and give satisfaction in every respect.” Also check Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22 which say, “Slaves obey your master.”
You might point out that Christians also opposed slavery. Great. But where in the bible did they get this from? Neither the Old or New Testament contains an outright condemnation of this infamous institution.
Tim: “If you don’t mind, could you post a quote or two from Darwin equating blacks with “gorillas?””
I don’t care if Darwin was a dyed-in-the-wool racist - a) you’d have to equally condemn half the founding fathers by the same standards and b) it makes no difference to whether of not he inspired Hitler, and as we can see, Hitler already had plenty of material elsewhere to inspire him.
January 19th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Feel free to ignore all the bible quotes. I’m sure you can explain them all away with reference to context, different times, etc. But it’s special pleading to try to tar the other side with the racism brush through selective quoting, when you’re making no effort to do the same ‘reading of context’.
So to keep it simple, please just explain what you believe ‘natural selection’ to be, and what idea you think it contained, that didn’t exist before, that inspired the Nazis.
It can’t be ‘if you exterminate a race or species, that race or species can’t reproduce’ because that’s a self-evident truth
It can’t be ‘evolution means the most brutal survive’, because Darwin showed that this WASN’T true.
It can’t be anything to do with artificial breeding, because that existed for thousands of years before Darwin.
And nothing to with turning Darwin’s ‘this is what happens’ into ‘we believe this is what SHOULD happen’ - because that’s the is/ought fallacy.
So what is it?
January 19th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Nathan;
And what religion would that be Nathan? It certainly wasn’t Christianity as revealed in the Bible, so please spare me what is nothing but a type of strawman that was burned long ago as any knowledgeable person is aware.
The same could be said of his “atheistic” or “evolutionist” pursuits, if any. From Mein Kampf:
“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.“
From a Munich speech on April 12, 1922:
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…. And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people…. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
You can say that he wasn’t a “True Christian,” Becca, but it would be absolutely silly to ignore that he certainly seemed to think he was a Christian. At the very least he self-identified as one.
From a speech in Passau, on October 27, 1928:
We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls…. We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… *in fact our movement is Christian.* We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.
There are plenty more, but you get the idea.
Don’t bother responding, BTW~
January 19th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
P.S. HItler on atheism, from a speech given in Berlin on October 24th, 1933:
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
January 19th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Great discussion going on here(4-7 central):
http://www.thehomeschoolchanne.....bcast.aspx
January 20th, 2010 at 2:26 am
Tim Said:
“You can say that he wasn’t a “True Christian,” Becca, but it would be absolutely silly to ignore that he certainly seemed to think he was a Christian. At the very least he self-identified as one.”
Tim:
Actually YOU and yours are the ones who insinuate Hitler WAS a “true Christian” but it would be absolutely silly to ignore the fact that he certainly LIVED a life absolutely FOREIGN to True Christianity as you and yours CONSISTENTLY DO.
Your reasoning is tantamount to saying regarding Jeffery Dahmer: “You can say that he wasn’t a “True Christian,” Becca, but it would be absolutely silly to ignore that he certainly seemed to think he was a Christian. At the very least he self-identified as one, especially while SEASONING his victims.”
{Oh Dear Father in Heaven forgive this man for having absolutely no sense whatsoever in that he apparently thinks because someone (Hitler, Dahmer) THINKS he is this or that, that he is indeed… this or that.}
Tim, your reasoning is absolutely senseless to me
The following, in no particular order, is but a sample of the of the ACTIONS of Hitler and his Reich against Christian Churches, actions which clearly contradict the WORDS (propaganda) of Hitler you and yours have posted recently.
Austrian private schools deprived of recognition
Complete surveillance of correspondence and telephone calls of Church
Imposed censorship in conjunction with Minister for Propaganda
Planned, organized intimidation of German Churches and Church youth organizations
700,000 Evangelical Youth Members placed under Hitler Youth
Catholic Youth Association dissolved
Regulated conditions of service of general Church officials, Pastors etc.
Prohibited discussion of Church questions in press, pamphlets and books
Forbade the sale of Truth of Catholicism (oh my this is right in line with banning Darwin s books…Hmm…since Nathan insisted Hitler banned Darwin s books and according to him it is PROOF Hitler was anti-Darwin surely Nathan must concede Hitler was also anti-Christian, but will he…I doubt it. )
Denial of freedom of speech and press to clergy
P republication censorship of all Church writings
Defamation of clergy
Eliminated teachers in public elementary schools belonging to religious orders
Forbade clergy in secondary schools
Provisional Church Government and Council of Brethren of the Confessional Synod declared illegal
Central organs of Confessional Churches declared illegal
Forbade printing of materials
Violation of Concordant with the Holy See
Infiltration of German Evangelical Church
Closing of theological seminaries
Elimination of clergy and religious instruction from schools
Note the aforementioned Actions are right in line with the Words of one of Hitlers closest henchmen, Martin Bormann:
“[…] When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God…[we mean] [t]he force which moves all these bodies in the universe, in accordance with natural law, is what we call the Almighty or God. The assertion that this world-force can worry about the fate of every individual, every bacillus on earth, and that it can be influenced by so-called prayer or other astonishing things, is based either on a suitable dose of naivete or on outright commercial effrontery.”
“Any influence that would impair or damage the leadership of the people exercised by the Fuhrer with the aid of the NSDAP has to be eliminated. To an ever increasing degree the people must be wrested from Churches and their agents, the pastors…Only the Reich leadership, together with the party and the organs and associations connected with it, has a right to lead the people. Just as the harmful influence of astrologists, soothsayers, and other swindlers has been suppressed by the state, so it must be absolutely impossible for the Church to exercise its old influence.”
(Martin Bormann, Reich Leader, 1942, ‘National Socialist and Christian Concepts are Incompatible’, From Kirchliches Jahrbuch fur die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, 1933-1944, pp. 470-472, quoted pp. 245-247, George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: A Documentary History).
I will post again a part of the predominant ideology of Hitler and his sycophants:
“Only the Reich leadership (because it is the most physically powerful of course, remember; Survival of the Fittest) together with the party and the organs and associations connected with it, has a right to lead the people.”
Unfortunately, not only did MANY grant Hitler and his sycophants “the right” to lead them then, it appears MANY have granted him the right to lead them now, even those on this thread.
There are PLENTY more, but you get the idea.
Don’t bother responding BTW
Because…NO, I do not want to engage you, Luke or Nathan anymore because I won’t tolerate Ducking and Dodging, Irrationality and Dishonesty from any of you any longer. I am absolutely tired of those such as yourselves who refuse to look at all the facts before coming to a conclusion as all three of you have evidently done.
Adios.
P.S. Hitler on Christianity:
Night of 11th-12th July, 1941:
National Socialism and religion cannot exist together…. The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity…. Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.
January 20th, 2010 at 2:55 am
Oh My…with that last particular quote and everything that preceded it, surely we can all agree Hitler was indeed a LIAR…except of course to those on this thread who continue to use him and his moral, intellectual, and social schizophrenia to further their AGENDA.
January 20th, 2010 at 6:07 am
“oh my this is right in line with banning Darwin s books…Hmm…since Nathan insisted Hitler banned Darwin s books and according to him it is PROOF Hitler was anti-Darwin surely Nathan must concede Hitler was also anti-Christian, but will he…I doubt it.”
Hitler banned Darwin’s books, irrespective of whether or not I insist on it. I could insist he did NOT, and so could you, and it wouldn’t change the fact that he did.
Now, you seem to be agreeing now that if he banned something then it suggests he was against it. Simple question - do you agree with that?
Do you now therefore reject your previously claimed Hitler/Darwin connection?
“won’t tolerate Ducking and Dodging, Irrationality and Dishonesty from any of you any longe”
I’ve asked you some very simple questions, and it is you who refuse to answer them. Meanwhile, I’ve done my best to address your questions. If you are now removing yourself from the discussion, you can’t blame it on us.
“except of course to those on this thread who continue to use him and his moral, intellectual, and social schizophrenia to further their AGENDA.”
But Becca, that is what you continue to do, without evidence, in your attempt to tar Darwin, and hence modern biology, with the Nazi tag. These are serious allegations that you shouldn’t make unless you are prepared to back them up.
January 20th, 2010 at 6:22 am
Becca: “Only the Reich leadership (because it is the most physically powerful of course, remember; Survival of the Fittest) together with the party and the organs and associations connected with it, has a right to lead the people.”
Googling this quote brings up NOTHING. If I remove the part in brackets then I get lots of results. Am I to understand therefore that you’ve taken a Nazi quote and then added your own bits to make it sound juicier and bolster your argument?
Becca, isn’t that somewhat dishonest? I could take a quote from Jesus, then stick a bunch of Hitler quotes in the middle in brackets. It wouldn’t prove anything.
And again, it suggests you fundamentally misunderstand the phrase ’survival of the fittest’. I’ve asked you several times to summarise what you believe natural selection to be, and you’ve not answered. If it doesn’t mean what you think it means, and every indication suggests it doesn’t, then it’s a bit pointless you trying to make these connections.
“it appears MANY have granted him the right to lead them now, even those on this thread.”
Er, who on this thread has granted Hitler the right to lead them? You’ve had a go at posters for ’speaking for other posters’, but I have to call you out on this. If you are equating saying ‘There is no connection between Hitler and Darwin’ with ‘granting Hitler the right to lead them’ then that’s a rather immature, not to mention grotesque, way of trying argue a point.
While I disagree with you, I’d never stoop so low as to suggest this means you condone mass murder. Have a think about the accusations you are making here Becca.
January 20th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Becca said:Don’t bother responding BTW
Because…NO, I do not want to engage you, Luke or Nathan anymore
Becca, you already told me once that you wouldn’t waste any more time on me, then complained that you were still waiting on me to respond to you. I will take you at your word though.
Becca said:because I won’t tolerate Ducking and Dodging, Irrationality and Dishonesty from any of you any longer.
No worries. To be honest though, I don’t know what I am ducking or dodging, but you are free to believe what you wish. I discussed NAZI persecution of Christian churches before you did; I brought up the 3 million Christian Poles who died because of Hitler before you did. (Those are exactly the points you made in the posts you wrote before writing the above.)
You are free to think I am dishonest, but I have never intentionally lied about anything on this board.
I don’t mind if you want to attack my intelligence, but I don’t know why you can’t just stop there and have to attack my integrity as well. Since you’ve arrived here you’ve been full of insults, but have left many politely asked questions unanswered.
January 20th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Nathan said:Am I to understand therefore that you’ve taken a Nazi quote and then added your own bits to make it sound juicier and bolster your argument?
Becca, isn’t that somewhat dishonest?
To be fair, I don’t think she was trying to be dishonest. This was intended as an editorial comment. It was poorly done, and I think you can fairly accuse her of sloppy editing and a poor understanding of punctuation, but I don’t think this was intentionally trying to make anyone believe this was a full quote. (Maybe I am naive, and you’re right, Nathan, but that’s just my honest view.)
(BTW, hasn’t the meaning of ’survival of the fittest’ been explained here repeatedly?)
I am interested in the quote from the night of 11th-12th July, 1941. I can’t seem to find any original citation for it. (I am not saying it’s not genuine, but as a historian, I can’t base beliefs on something which I can’t verify.) Furthermore, it seems to be taken from a private conversation, so factors like who recorded it, etc. are also very important.
Becca said:it appears MANY have granted him the right to lead them now, even those on this thread.
Wow. Just wow. Never mind Becca - feel free to insult and question my integrity any time, just please have the respect to take this back. This is simply shameful.
January 20th, 2010 at 11:53 am
Actually YOU and yours are the ones who insinuate Hitler WAS a “true Christian” but it would be absolutely silly to ignore the fact that he certainly LIVED a life absolutely FOREIGN to True Christianity as you and yours CONSISTENTLY DO.
I don’t care to argue about the difference between a “True Christian” and a “regular Christian” in a situation like this; all that matters is what the person is shown to believe, or self-identify as. And as far as I’ve seen, Hitler identified most prominently as a Christian.
As for whether or not his beliefs reflect “true Christianity” (whatever that may be), that’s another conversation. But the original point was that his actions were, in fact, at least partially influenced by belief in Christianity.
Your reasoning is tantamount to saying regarding Jeffery Dahmer: “You can say that he wasn’t a “True Christian,” Becca, but it would be absolutely silly to ignore that he certainly seemed to think he was a Christian. At the very least he self-identified as one, especially while SEASONING his victims.”
Well, did he ever claim to be a Christian? If he self-identified as a Christian, then of course that would be true.
{Oh Dear Father in Heaven forgive this man for having absolutely no sense whatsoever in that he apparently thinks because someone (Hitler, Dahmer) THINKS he is this or that, that he is indeed… this or that.}
I never said he was “Christian.” I said he identified as Christian and he drew influence thusly. As I said, I don’t care about whether or not he was a “True” Christian (because to this day there is no certainty even among Christians as to what a “true Christian” is, except that if somebody is famous and does something wrong that they are “no true Christian”).
The reason this is all important is because your original claim was that Hitler was influenced by Darwinism (whatever that may be) and not Christianity. When in fact it is pretty clearly demonstrable that he was influenced by his Christian belief, certainly moreso than he was by this “darwinism” — he mentions Christianity often, and in a favorable light, whereas he very, very rarely mentions Darwin or evolution (if at all). Whether or not that belief reflects what you would consider “truly Christian” is irrelevant; the man drew justification for his actions from the Bible and from the words of Jesus and god.
You can question that if you must, of course, but it won’t change what Hitler has said himself many, many times on the public record.
Complete surveillance of correspondence and telephone calls of Church
The church was not the only victim of this maneuver.
Imposed censorship in conjunction with Minister for Propaganda
Again, the church was hardly the only victim.
Planned, organized intimidation of German Churches and Church youth organizations
Jews got it worse.
Forbade the sale of Truth of Catholicism (oh my this is right in line with banning Darwin s books…Hmm…since Nathan insisted Hitler banned Darwin s books and according to him it is PROOF Hitler was anti-Darwin surely Nathan must concede Hitler was also anti-Christian, but will he…I doubt it. )
I dunno, you’ll have to take that up with Nathan. In any case, about Hitler’s relation with the Catholic church….on April 26 1933 he said the following:
The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognized the Jews for what they were”…. I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.
On July 22, 1933, in a letter to the Nazi Party:
The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism [Nazism] is hostile to religion is a lie.
Let’s compare, then:
-Banning one book called “The Truth of Catholicism (which I can find not even one internet mention thereof aside from yours here….feel free to let me know where you got that from if you wish);
-Allying oneself openly and publicly with/being endorsed by the Catholic church.
Denial of freedom of speech and press to clergy
Or anyone else who did not specifically cater to Nazi propaganda.
Pre-publication censorship of all Church writings
Defamation of clergy
And everyone else. Especially Jews.
Eliminated teachers in public elementary schools belonging to religious orders
Like Jews?
Everything you mention here is basically child’s play in comparison, and pretty much all of it was visited upon most of the public circle at the time, not just Christians. Hitler’s Nazi state could probably be compared in some ways to the current North Korean state, with regard to the management of propaganda and censorship. Censorship laws were very tight and very harsh. One gets the feeling that Hitler was very, very paranoid of public dissent in any form.
“Only the Reich leadership (because it is the most physically powerful of course, remember; Survival of the Fittest) together with the party and the organs and associations connected with it, has a right to lead the people.”
That was very misleading of you to insert that quote and falsify the original account….the reason Hitler believed the Reich was the most fit to rule? Well, let’s just say this quote paints a most interesting picture (made just before the Reichsta on April 28th, 1939):
I can give vent to my inmost feelings only in the form of humble thanks to Providence which called upon me and vouchsafed it to me, once an unknown soldier of the Great War, to rise to be the Leader of my people, so dear to me.
Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again. Providence granted that I might fulfill my life’s task-to raise my German people out of the depths of defeat and to liberate it from the bonds of the most outrageous dictate of all times….
I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery.
Another interesting quote, from a speech hitler made in the Reichstag on January 30th, 1939:
The National Socialist State has not closed a church, nor has it prevented the holding of a religious service, nor has it ever exercised any influence upon the form of a religious service. It has not exercised any pressure upon the doctrine nor on the profession of faith of any of the Confessions. In the National Socialist State anyone is free to seek his blessedness after his own fashion…. There are ten thousands and ten thousands of priests of all the Christian Confessions who perform their ecclesiastical duties just as well as or probably better than the political agitators without ever coming into conflict with the laws of the State…. This State has only once intervened in the internal regulation of the Churches, that is when I myself in 1933 endeavoured to unite the weak and divided Protestant Churches of the different States into one great and powerful Evangelical Church of the Reich. That attempt failed through the opposition of the bishops of some States; it was therefore abandoned. For it is in the last resort not our task to defend or even to strengthen the Evangelical Church through violence against its own representatives…. But on one point it is well that there should be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German State we shall destroy.
Oh My…with that last particular quote and everything that preceded it, surely we can all agree Hitler was indeed a LIAR…except of course to those on this thread who continue to use him and his moral, intellectual, and social schizophrenia to further their AGENDA.
If you put his quotes “defaming” religion in context, as I have tried to do with his quotes pertaining to Christianity, maybe you’ll achieve a slightly different perspective. Of course, since you never cited sources for your quotes, it could very well be that you’ve done some minute falsification of your own? Especially given the way you handled that claim with regard to Hitler citing “natural selection” as a reason why he believed his Reich was fit to rule. That was…suspicious, to say the least.
I’ve asked you some very simple questions, and it is you who refuse to answer them. Meanwhile, I’ve done my best to address your questions. If you are now removing yourself from the discussion, you can’t blame it on us.
I find it interesting that, each and every time Becca accused you or someone else of “dodging” a question, it was usually in response to a question that had been asked.
I’m just sayin’.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:26 am
Hitler only told the truth when it suited his purposes. References to Providence were simply rhetorical devices and nothing more. Even Mein Kampf contained factual errors and misrepresentations of his own personal life. I don’t think we can absolutely rely on Hitler’s public statements regardless of the subject.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:59 am
Indeed. That’s why it’s moronic for people to attempt to connect his views with mainstream biology, especially by people who don’t even seem to understand modern science!
January 23rd, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Modern science testifies that intricate creations MUST come from a Mind.
There is not ONE material entity that can create ALL that exists in this Universe, so the cause must be external.
When people bring in abiogenesis, it contradicts logic because mindless matter can’t create all of the intense complexity we see around us today.
So God exists…. and the historicity and reliability of Jesus Christ is extremely well established:
Jesus Christ is the most influential person in the history of the human race.
We have the writings of his followers, just like we know about Socrates from his disciple Plato.
We use the same historical criteria when evaluating the New Testament documents that we use with with other historical documents.
Jesus is cited in Christian, Roman, and Jewish work. We have more information about Him than many major figures of antiquity.
The writings closest to Jesus and his disciples were the ones included in the N.T. canon, the later apocryphal gospels were fakes and greatly embellished legends.
There was insufficient time for legendary aspects to overpower facts of the gospels. The crucial thing to consider is the gap between the event and the evidence, and with the writings in the N.T. that gap is fairly short.
There were eye-witnesses and through the supervision of the apostles false writings were discarded.
Gospel writers have a proven record of historical reliability, like what we have for Luke.
How can Jesus’ radical claim of being the Son of God gotten anywhere when monotheistic Jews would never claim this unless they saw evidence for said fact. This is rooted in Jesus’ teaching and self understanding. He sure wasn’t a mere Jewish peasant. Jesus Christ was the revelation of God the Father.
Why was Jesus crucified if He wasn’t thought to be making blasphemous claims? Namely by claiming to be God.
Jesus’ corpse was laid in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea known to Jew and Christian alike. Why would Christ’s resurrection flourish in Jerusalem where the evidence could be empirically tested, unless it happened?
The tomb was found empty.
Different individuals and group settings witnessed the Risen Christ.
Disciples and eye-witnesses proclaimed Christ as the Risen Lord to the point of their martyred deaths.
The Bible is the best attested book in the closeness to the events and number of manuscripts.
We have ancient historians from outside the Bible that cite Christ like Josephus, Tacitus, Mara-Bar Sapian, etc…
So how do you best explain these facts and intense impact?
It happened.
Just take a look at this quick comparison:
1. Plato “Tetralogies” – 7 copies – written 400 B.C – earliest manuscript – 900 A.D (1300 years)
2. Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” – 10 copies – written in 60 B.C earliest manuscript we have is 900 A.D. (nearly 1000 years)
3. Homer’s Illiad – 643 copies – written in 900 B.C – earliest copy we have 400 B.C. (500 years)
4. Bible – 10,000 manuscripts (part or whole) of the O.T. and over 5,000 manuscripts – N.T – completed before 100 A.D – earliest manuscript we have 200 A.D. (100 years)
** The Bible is on a league of its own… it is the most published, most translated, most sold work in history**
It’s awesome how God has clearly revealed His existence to all of humanity.
1) Creation
2) Conscience
3) Christ
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Thank you for repeating all of that. We’d nearly forgotten all of the other posts in which that same things have been stated. But on the bright side, nice to see you again.