[quote name='thrustbucket']Nah. I'll go ahead and admit for you that religion is the dark veil of the world, opiate to the masses, source of all pain and misery in the world, the final social frontier to conquer for peace to prosper and human-kind to progress.
I'll even admit that people like you who have risen above such barbarous mysticism, and unscientific nonsense, saved by our powerful and enlightened institutions of education and logic - to become totally secular - are truly above, and thus better, than the religious, outside of the cause of the worlds problems, the only ones evolving mankind, and will be the real saviors in this world.
There. I saved you pages of arguments, and we saved time!
(More apologies to the op, bad thrustbucket)[/QUOTE]
Aw c'mon -- now you're just being lazy. Okay, I'm going for full on derail, but only because it looks like people have cleared out. If on-topic folks come back, I'll take this tangent elsewhere, I promise.
Let's begin:
[quote name='thrustbucket']Sorry pal, your tendancy to automatically assume what my religion is or that I am defending one only proves further your membership in the ant-intolerant secular, bigoted left.[/QUOTE]
Actually, thanks to the polygamy thread, I have a pretty good idea of what your views are
not, so I wasn't assuming anything. The point of my example was that it's easy enough to make your arguments, using whatever examples one needs, about pretty much any religion, race, nationality, or other subset of people with -- as Speedracer put it -- "time and opportunity," not that I had necessarily picked
your subset. You were, however, actually, "defending one." In fact, that's exactly what you were doing.
[quote name='thrustbucket']History doesnt record hitler or any recent atrocity comitting dictator as preforming in the name of chriistianity. As much as you want to believe that is the case, you wont be able to prove it's truth.[/QUOTE]
Yeah. You're gonna want to reconsider that.
[quote name='Hitler']"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . ." -- when he signed the ... *ahem* ... Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933[/QUOTE]
[quote name='Hitler']"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!" -- his speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934[/QUOTE]
[quote name='Hitler']"We were convinced that the people need and require 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." -- his speech in Berlin, October 24, 1933[/QUOTE]
[quote name='Hitler']"I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." -- straight from Mein Kampf[/QUOTE]
And
[quote name='Hitler']"My feeling 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 against the Jewish poison.
Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before 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. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.
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 today this poor people are plundered and exploited." -- In a speech delivered April 12, 1922[/QUOTE]
(I promise, Godwin Police; it was self-defense!)
Now, of course, I could
also make a pretty good argument that he
wasn't Christian ... but perhaps now you start to see my point?
[quote name='thrustbucket']But if you insist on completely changing the subject from major organized religions in modern day that turn a blind eye to violent interpretation of their scripture to world famous geonocidal dictators that may or may not be religious - then we are going to have to also discuss all th ani-religious dictators that arguably killed more in the name of secularism in the past century. Which negates and tramples your current argument for justifying your anti-religious bias.[/QUOTE]
Okay, now we get to
your assumptions. Nowhere did I say or even imply that religion was somehow the sole cause of these ills or that the areligious were somehow exempt. In fact, I was attempting to argue -- with YOU, mind -- that religion, contrary to what you were suggesting ("Oh, it's those durn violent Muslims again...") was simply not a deciding factor. Camoor hit this point on the head earlier, and you typically and nonsensically dismissed it.
Let me try this from another angle: the Crusades. A classic example of religious warfare and aggression, right? But you're a guy who likes to look beyond the surface. So what are the odds that the Holy Land, the site of all this strife, also
just happened to be the nexus of the most profitable trade routes in the ancient world?
[quote name='thrustbucket']And maybe you should stop and consider just how people that talk like you are make secularism look as obscenely intolerant, bigoted, and ignorant of religion as any religious person you feel so superior to.[/QUOTE]
As opposed to ... everything you've written in this thread so far? All that objectivity, understanding, and education you've been displaying? This is probably the most laughable thing you've ever written and you've had some
in' howlers.
[quote name='thrustbucket']And as a final note - I stand next you in saying " Christianity". But i dont delude myself about which religions are actve volcanos or dormant.[/QUOTE]
This is an interesting metaphor, and you might want to consider how this differs from "That religion is an active volcano; these other ones aren't volcanoes and never have been."
