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I get what he's saying. He just has trouble expressing it properly.

He's right that the NT does not command Christians to kill anyone. Jesus taught peace and even pacifism to a degree. The bringing a sword and not peace is a prediction of how disciples of Christ will face persecution from even their own families. This one of the most frequently quoted verses used out of context.

It's not written that Christians cannot kill anyone, either. Neither does bad behavior somehow make someone no longer a true Christian. A true Christian is one who has been saved by accepting God's grace through faith in Jesus' atonement. Good behavior is merely evidence of the change in a Christian's heart resulting from faith. Someone who both claims Christ AND does good is more likely a true Christian than someone who exhibits no change at all but only pays lip service to Christian belief. Christianity is something that is lived out, not something restricted to mere belief. Besides, if a someone claims to have faith and doesn't act on faith, is it really faith?

Based on what you make such assertion? When the Nazis took power, Germany was a largely _Christian_ country.

I disagree, I do not think religion makes society better.

What, and where, is "Dolchavia"?

I think I might know, and I think it is because of my special interest indirectly.

On another thread he mentions he is interested in certain Slavic/Croatian cultures. Now, that's a part of the world I'm interested in for a completely different reason, but I know how to transliterate words from those languages to English pretty well and find translations. Well, I piece together some things and have to change some definitions around.

I had a feeling the word was transliterated, and I might be right. In Serbian, the world 'dolča' means something like depression apparently (my translator is very sketchy unfortunately). However, when you transliterate that word, it becomes 'dolcha'. Given what he has said so far, this seems plausible to me.

I am also guessing he is from South Korea based on what he has said previously (he gave a list of countries), but his definition of 'atheist' is confusing to me. I think he might be grouping nontheists with atheists, am I right?

Interesting.

I just googled it and - apparantely the only usage of the word "Dolchavia" in the entire history of the human race are his posts here on WP!

Actually- I think its a disputed province- fought over by Fredonia, and Lower Slobovia!

Lol!

EDIT: Retracted. More info was collected, and it changed my mind about that statement you made.

Last edited by HerrGrimm on 30 Jan 2012, 7:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

True, but never forget that the future of civilization depends on keeping religious people laboring under the delusion that they are vitally important to it.

If you have any question as to the wisdom of this statement, I invite you come and see our crazy Protestant holy rollers, and you would be quite glad that you have a civilized state church.

The most Orwellian government in East Asia is arguably Burma, but it's not because they're atheistic.

The People's Republican Guard of the Snackistani Union is suspected of manipulating the situation as Dolchavia is known to be coveted by them for its vast veins of pure nougat running under the surface

As a result of atheism, many more people have the opportunity to actually understand how the world works!

And to have guilt-free sex. Which everyone should feel entitled to, by the way.

You are aware that the Jesuits were early pioneers in learning back in the day, right? Also, the scrutiny to which the church held Galileo was little different than how we use peer review in modern times. The only difference is that Galileo crossed theological lines by his actions when he was not qualified to do so. Religious institutions have often encouraged learning, not hindered it.

Nope, I'm only familiar with today's manifestations of those religions. You know, the crappy ones.

Holy gunsmoke, I wish more people would try to comprehend what happened in the time of Galileo. The way people thought about it at the time, it wasn't Galileo v. Christianity then at all. You have to understand it based on why the Church thought the way it did in the first place, and it is impossible to comprehend it without some historical background.

During the rise of Christianity, a major nuisance for Rome was the Parthian Empire, which was the self-proclaimed successor state of the Achaemenid Empire that was founded by Cyrus the Great. Their geographical importance is that they were situated between the Mediterranean and the Han Empire (Chinese), therefore they ended up being a very large cosmopolitan empire.

Well, a lot of people fail really to understand why the Christians hated Emperor Nero as much as they did, and a lot of people still see Nero as a sort of "mad dog" who ordered his old teacher (Seneca the Younger) to kill himself. It's not that cut-and-dried. Although he was only human, Nero was mostly unremarkable as emperors went. He made a few good policy changes, some bad. Some of his decisions were good and well-timed, others didn't work out too well. The reason the Christians hated him was that Nero did not just want the Christians to go to war, which was an affront to their declared pacifism, but he wanted them to go to war against the Parthians. Nero really had the best interests of Rome in mind, though, because the Parthians actually were starting to make moves on Roman territory. The Parthians were in the wrong...at the time.

Well, "what makes the Parthians special to the Christians," you ask, with justifiable skepticism. Well, it makes a lot more sense if you have read the Bible, particularly the parts that relate to events that most likely transpired around the 500s and 600s BCE. The Persians are actually one of the oldest allies of the Hebrew people, and their emperor was one of the few world leaders of the day that the Hebrews regarded as "one of the good guys." We must not underestimate the degree of cultural exchange between the Hebrews and the Persians.

And this had a HUGE impact on the ideas that were passed on to later offspring of the Hebrew religion. HUGE. In fact, the Christians actually organized their church based on Persian ideas, and this is actually WHERE the Christians get the idea that "God is sort of a King of Kings." While the Roman emperors were the monarchs of a pseudo-democratic oligarchic state, they did not have the same hierarchial concept of rule used by the Persians. Nero was the Emperor of Rome, not an "Emperor of many emperors." The system of hierarchy used by the Catholic church is Persian.

However, to understand how the Persians/Parthians differed from the Romans, you have to understand first how the Greeks differed from EVERYBODY, since the Greeks had such a huge influence on Mediterranean thought. The Greeks practiced the belief that people were brought together by competition. They didn't see competition as divisive, but they saw it as the one true source of unity. This affected everything in their culture, from their intellectual traditions to their households. They saw philosophy as a sort of intellectual Olympics.

The Persians/Parthians could not have made this work if they had tried. To the Parthians, wisdom came from authority. This goes back to the Parthian/Persian system of government! If you were a king, you had a king above you, but you were a smaller and less perfect versian of your king. Therefore, the way to become more perfect was to aspire to be more like the person above you who is more like what everyone should be. It was far from anti-intellectual! It was a truly ingenious system, and it was beautiful in the simplicity of its construction. What a glorious machine.

Now, under the scholastic system of the Church, you did not come up with ideas on your own, but you came up with ideas by living up to ancient sages. You either lived up to Aristotle, or you failed to live up to Aristotle. If you were not trying to be more like Aristotle, you were not part of the Kingdom of Aristotle, but you were an outsider. If you minded your own business, you were a stranger. If you started trying to shake things up, you were an invading barbarian. Everyone at the time believed that Aristotle's system of reasoning was the most perfect system of reasoning that could exist, or at least it was as close to perfection as a normal human being could come.

What Galileo did was to break with that convention. Galileo dared to say outright that Aristotle was wrong. He wasn't just wrong, but he was DEAD WRONG. It would have been one thing if he had disagreed with someone on the same level as himself. In fact, it is a myth that debate was discouraged under the scholastic system. However, Galileo wasn't just going to challenge an equal: he was going to challenge the great master. He was going to break away from the convention that held everyone together, and he was going to go and found his own kingdom. He might even challenge the authority of God himself! Scandalous. This guy...this freethinker...had to be stopped.

The mistake I would point out there is that the Church of Galileo's time was not just a religious institution, but it was the center of society. You could not conduct any meaningful business without dealing with the Church, PERIOD. Just because a friar came up with an idea and claimed it was based on Biblical authority doesn't mean that he was actually inspired to have the idea by reading a passage out of the Bible. Claiming that your ideas came from divine/Biblical inspiration was just a necessary formality, and your intellectual liberty was virtually unlimited from there.

Oh...and, if you want to understand what happened to really change this system of thought, listen to Bach. You cannot understand the change in the landscape without Bach, period. It was a unification of the Persian and Greek systems of thought. Competition didn't just bring us together, but it brought us closer to God, and rivals who challenged each other based on honorable intentions were loved as the children of God, even if they were not always right. That was what changed, and you can hear it in the music! It's all there, and it is beautiful!

Look, I know that a lot of the above seems arcane to some people, but I'm not just theorizing here. The Parthian Empire controlled an important part of the Silk Road, and they were very important in our history. I think they are an underappreciated part of our history, and I think it's a crime that we don't teach about it in schools as intensively as we teach about Roman history. It's every bit as important. The Achaemenid Empire and its successor states set precedents that still profoundly affect the way we think today. It's the REASON we find a fractal to be so fascinating. A fractal is a PICTURE of a deeply embedded component of our thought processes.

Damn, trying to teach you mush-minds anything is like lecturing to a brick wall.

Look, it's not hard to grasp. This concept of hierarchial systems DOES come from the Persians, and you can see it in their artwork. Persian rugs, for example, are a form of fractal art. The appeal in them is that one thing builds on the other, and you can create something large and complex by repeating a simple pattern.

Now, when you understand how deeply this kind of thinking runs, it's a lot easier to understand the way the Church was organized and any system of thought that the Church had any control over, and it becomes very clear how we came about the system of thought that led to Galileo being so harshly spurned.

And understanding the nature of this connection makes it much easier to understand WHY the Medieval Church did many of the things it did, in general.

The whyness of it doesn't matter so much as the fact it was done in the first place.