Why did Christianity spawn the most evil people in history

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salad
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02 May 2021, 12:01 am

Redd_Kross wrote:
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Atheists themselves admit that atheism is amoral. How can a rejection of a positive belief system confer any morality? And by positive I dont mean good, but I mean something that offers and promotes, the opposite of a negative which negates. Atheism is the rejection of religion, which is the only medium of objective morality. Atheism can't be used for objective morality, hence why almost all leading atheist thinkers lean towards moral relativism knowing that they dont have a belief system in place to act as an anchor for objective morality.

Amoral means having no moral code.

Why do I need to be religious to have a moral code? The two are not hardwired together.

I'm interested in your assertion that "Atheists themselves admit that atheism is amoral".

First of all, sources please.

Secondly, do you think that particular view is representative of the thoughts of ALL atheists? Or have you just cherry-picked something specific to make a generalisation?

I could play that game. Apparently, as you are religious, Pope Francis represents every opinion you have. Doesn't matter if you're actually a Catholic or not, you're religious and so is he, so it MUST be true.


I admit I did use the authority fallacy so I retract my statement about leading atheists averring that atheism is amoral.

However atheism is amoral deductively, because the nature of atheism being simply the repudiation of religion does not by definition offer a moral system. That doesnt mean atheists are amoral, but atheism is amoral the same way the ideology that rejects leprechauns is amoral but you and I as presumed leprechaun rejecters scribe to our own morals.


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02 May 2021, 12:02 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
I feel like many atheists ARE moral. Many atheists believe in human-conceived moral values.

To call an atheist amoral merely by virtue of being an atheist is not right.


You misunderstand. I never called atheists amoral.

I said atheISM is amoral.

There's a big difference.


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02 May 2021, 12:14 am

cyberdad wrote:
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[but I can proudly say that historically Muslims had a relatively decent track record of tolerating religious minorities compared to Christians


You don't have to post a response but think objectively if you really believe this is true. I actually don't think there's much difference between the proselytisation of subject peoples invaded by muslims or christians. To claim pride in the behaviour of Arab and Turkish empires is a little strange given they were no better than the European empires that were to come after them.

You are blaming christianity but the proof of the pudding is that as a religion christianity is in decline throughout the western world. It's adherents never practiced it properly and used the bible as a tool for social control. Islam is no different but the difference today is that nation states adopt islam in their political framework making it intolerable for minorities to exist in their borders. That's nothing to be proud of.


I dont deny that Muslims weren't perfect in how they treated minorities, but its a historical fact that there at least EXISTED minorities under the Islam Caliphate, meaning they were allowed to live and even thrive in some cases such as the Jews in Muslim Spain, albeit under certain restrictions and inferior social status. While that pales in comparison to our 21st century secular paradigm where all religions are allowed to exist without the state favoring one religion over another, you have to understand that for that time in history that was still lauded as tolerable by said minorities, which is why the leader of the Jews in Europe sent a letter to his compatriots asking them to migrate to Muslim lands after the Inquisition. I own a Jewish atlas in my house written by the top Jewish scholars in the world and even they admitted that there were 2 times in history where the Jews enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and allowance of growth as minorities, the 1st time being under the benevolent rule of Cyrus the Great of the Achmenid dynasty, and the second time under the Muslim Umayyad rule in Spain.

To compare the Christian treatment of minorities to the Muslim treatment of minorities is a very ahistorical thesis that no serious historian would ever entertain. No matter how inferior the status of Dhimmis in Islamic lands were they at least were unmolested by the state and allowed to exist and prosper. Christians eradicated their minorities. Now it is true that the Muslims did expunge the Zoorastrians from Persia so they weren't perfect in that regard. But at least they allowed Jews and Christians to coexist, as well as other rival sects of Islam, something the Europeans who went as far to even massacre other Christians who weren't trinitarians, that is definitely much better.

That doesnt mean I turn a blind eye away from the intolerance of the Muslim rulers who placed their non-Muslim subjects as inferior Dhimmi, nor do I say that certain Muslim warlords' destruction of Buddhist temples (Mahmoud of Ghazni), conversion of Hindus and Sikhs (Aurengzebh), or persecution of even Christians and Jews (the Almohads of Spain) was justified; I only say that it still pales in comparison to how dissenters were treated in Europe.

Still I dont deny that Islamic treatment of religious minorities is seriously outdated and needs to be supplanted by a secular system where the state doesnt discriminate subjects based on religion; I was only juxtaposing how as bad as the Muslims were they were miles better than their Christian counterparts.


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salad
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02 May 2021, 12:18 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
There is evil in every religion.

There are good Christians, bad Christians, good Muslims, bad Muslims, good Jews, bad Jews.

The original Christians eschewed violence.

It’s incorrect to single out Christianity as the ultimate “evil” religion.


I actually singled out Christianity as a peaceful religion. I singled out Christians for taking a message of love and peace and practically inverting it in a way no other religions' adherents have ever done. Neither Buddhists nor Hindus have ever committed half the atrocities Christians throughout history have, and that's despite Christianity being the most peaceful of these 3 religions.


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salad
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02 May 2021, 12:25 am

shlaifu wrote:
salad wrote:
Redd_Kross wrote:
Ghengis Khan? Pol Pot? Idi Amin? Joseph Stalin? Vlad the Impaler?

I think your analysis is rather selective.


Vlad the Impaler was a Christian.

Idi Amin was still a puppet of Britain, a Christian nation.

For all of Genghis Khan's atrocities he at least allowed other religions to flourish and practiced a form of religious tolerance unheard of since the days of Cyrus the Great himself, something Christians failed to do.

Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin were nasty fellows and do put most of history's villains to shame, and im the 1st to admit that the atheist communist dictators of the 20th century were also among history's worst monsters. However here's why I didnt call them out:

Christianity is a religion that by and large supports love and peace. For most of history's worst atrocities to be committed by Christians rings worse than if Atheists did the same because atheists don't adhere to an objective moral paradigm enshrining the sanctity of life and love. Atheism is inherently amoral and thus does not lend itself to objective morals. Christians who believe in objective morals promoting pacifism and love yet going on to commit history's most barbaric atrocities is much more confounding and thus more warranting of greater investigation to resolve such an anomaly.


Nah, not really.
Christianity is strucurally a doomsday cult - give away your wealth, kiss your enemy etc.
You can't build a society on 'give away all your wealth'. That only makes sense if you die sometime soon, or jesus returns.
But societies are intergenerational, they can't be built on the same rules that apply to mortal individuals.
So, Christianity had a cognitive dissonance to bridge built into it. That's possibly the reason why Christianity eventually developed "modern" societies, because it's inherently unstable. I put "modern" in inverted commas to emphasize I'm trying to use it as a name for the societies, and less as a descriptive term. After all, it's "modern" societies who decided to call themselves "modern", not an evaluation by some neutral observer.


If you look at Genghis khan's empire: it rose and collapsed so fast, the mongols had no time creating institutions to terroroze citizens, or force their religion on anyone with any lasting effect. They were pillaging horsemen. They did however rape any eoman they could get their hands on.

And when it comes to evil *individuals*, unit 731 probably leads the pack.
Speaking if which, neither the Rwandan genocide, nor the rape of Nanjing or the very recent Rohingya genocide have anything to do with Christianity.


I dont know about the Rwandan Genocide, for if memory serves me correct the church leaders were some of the architects of the genocide in Rwanda. And the other 2 genocides you mentioned still pale in comparison to the Native American genocide which was heavily a Christian project to eradicate the godless heathens. Also the Bosnian genocide was as bad as the Rohingya Genocide and the Orthodox Church actually blessed that one.


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02 May 2021, 12:27 am

cyberdad wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
There is evil in every religion.

There are good Christians, bad Christians, good Muslims, bad Muslims, good Jews, bad Jews.

The original Christians eschewed violence.

It’s incorrect to single out Christianity as the ultimate “evil” religion.


I think salad is internalising pervasive values in the society he lives in.


Why use an ad hominem when I haven't done that to you??


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02 May 2021, 12:55 am

To be sure, Christianity has produced more than its share of stinkers. But there were plenty of despicable Non-Christians, too.
Caligula.
Nero.
Mao Zedong.
Just to name a few.


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02 May 2021, 1:19 am

Redd_Kross wrote:
Ghengis Khan? Pol Pot? Idi Amin? Joseph Stalin? Vlad the Impaler?

I think your analysis is rather selective.


Add prophet muhammad to the list.



salad
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02 May 2021, 1:55 am

The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
Redd_Kross wrote:
Ghengis Khan? Pol Pot? Idi Amin? Joseph Stalin? Vlad the Impaler?

I think your analysis is rather selective.


Add prophet muhammad to the list.


I'm the 1st one to admit that Muhammad wasn't a perfect human being; he allowed the owning of sex slaves and thus institutionalized what we would consider today as rape, had poets and people who criticized him assassinated, massacred an entire tribe of Jews for the treason of only a few people, as well as having the indigenous Arab Jews and Christians expelled from the Arabian peninsula, something that bothers me as a Palestinian who knows what it feels like to have religious zealots expel a population under religious pretexts. I get it that in many ways Prophet Muhammad was a charlatan and did some awful things I cant defend, and I agree that he wasn't the perfect saint he's made out to be.

But let's be real: Muhammad being in the same caliber and tier as history's worst monsters is a bloody joke. And I mean bloody joke. Even though Muhammad had flaws at least many of his flaws were either common to the time, such as marrying a 9 year old which was practiced even among the British for hundreds of years, or were more than offset by his preponderant and overflowing virtues, virtues that many people in history such as Thomas Carlyle, Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw and many other European luminaries spoke so highly of. Muhammad established one of the most efficient charity systems and ensured that every orphan, widow and poor person was fed and taken care of; he extolled the extravagant giving of alms and spent a good deal of his life as a social reformer who fought for the plight of the downtrodden in Arabia. He essentially established the 1st and only universalist religion and anti-racist religion and he lived his whole life putting his money where his mouth was in fighting racism by openly accepting as best friends former black slaves in a racist society that scorned such people as trash. Muhammad spent every day of his life praying the entire night until his feet blistered and his knees cracked, he slept on a bed of straw that used to scratch his back, he used to go entire months without any meat and eating only dates even though as the de facto king of Arabia he could have asked for the bare minimum essentials to live decently he refused out of a bona fide abjuration of material wealth and love of asceticism that is unrivaled.

Muhammad spared his enemies on so many occasions - although not always as some Muslim apologists try to claim - but at the very least he spared many of his fiercest enemies, including assassins that tried to take his life, such as the bedouin Surraqah Ibn Malik whom he spared after a failed assassination attempt, as well as pardoning a Jewish woman who technically assassinated him by poisoning him. During the conquest of Makkah he pardoned the man who killed his uncle and surrogate dad Hamza, the killer being Wahshi Ibn Harb, and he spared all of the Meccan chieftains whom he spent his whole life at war with barring only 10 people, and even among those 10 whom he excluded from clemency he eventually still spared several of them who asked for mercy.

Please, I know as an ex-Muslim one of the ways of coping with the disillusionment of finding out the man you used to idolize wasn't as perfect as you thought, I know that its easy to go the other extreme and paint him as a monster on par with Hitler and Stalin, but that is uncharitable and a perversion of truth and sober justice. The truth is Muhammad was a complex individual who was a paragon of some of the most lofty virtues in existence, while having a darker side to him that was corrupted by power and used it in ways that were sordid.

But none of that puts him on the same level as irredeemable genocidal maniacs who killed wantonly and who openly encouraged slaughter recklessly.


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02 May 2021, 1:57 am

salad wrote:
To compare the Christian treatment of minorities to the Muslim treatment of minorities is a very ahistorical thesis that no serious historian would ever entertain. No matter how inferior the status of Dhimmis in Islamic lands were they at least were unmolested by the state and allowed to exist and prosper. Christians eradicated their minorities. .


The exact nature of treatment is different but minorities have been "molested" under both type of empires run by christian or muslim.

Your claim that Dhimmis were unmolested in their state is incorrect. Here's just a few examples;
- The prophet Muhammad himself ordered the genocide of innocent jews as retribution
- Turks murdered millions of innocent Armenians
- Egyptian muslims have been harassing and abducting children from coptic families, especially girls
- Pakistani muslims have been harassing hindus and christians, again christian and kalash girls have been abducted
- Iran attempted to genocide of bahais
- ISIS attempted the genocide of Yazidi people

You keep saying christians eradicated their minorities but that simply isn't true (I think you know this). Europeans committed genocide (Australians have a poor record themselves) but they did not eradicate all minorities.

By the same token I support the Rohingya muslims and muslims in Sri Lanka in their fight to survive who have been subject to attacks by buddhist extremists. Buddhism is also supposed to be a religion (or philosophy) of peace. I notice arabs do not care about the plight of non-white muslims.

Just because somebody calls themselves a christian or a buddhist does not make them peaceful



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02 May 2021, 2:06 am

salad wrote:
But let's be real: Muhammad being in the same caliber and tier as history's worst monsters is a bloody joke. And I mean bloody joke. Even though Muhammad had flaws at least many of his flaws were either common to the time,


To be honest I have no admiration of islam or the arabs for the exact reason you provided.

Think about it, if their philosophy is 1300 years old then the mindset of adherents is dangerously medieval and not with the modern times. Any wonder why so many arab states didn't give up slavery till the 1970s.

One of the only muslims I respect was the late Malcolm X. Through him I understood islamic philosophy (on paper at least) has at its core a universal brotherhood. There are echos of this in the writing of the poets Rumi and Khalil Gibran,

But unfortunately arab racism is no way any better than European racism. I could never contemplate having anything in common with people who claim to be muslims. At least European missionaries bought education/technology to the rest of the world.



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02 May 2021, 2:26 am

cyberdad wrote:
salad wrote:
To compare the Christian treatment of minorities to the Muslim treatment of minorities is a very ahistorical thesis that no serious historian would ever entertain. No matter how inferior the status of Dhimmis in Islamic lands were they at least were unmolested by the state and allowed to exist and prosper. Christians eradicated their minorities. .


The exact nature of treatment is different but minorities have been "molested" under both type of empires run by christian or muslim.

Your claim that Dhimmis were unmolested in their state is incorrect. Here's just a few examples;
- The prophet Muhammad himself ordered the genocide of innocent jews as retribution
- Turks murdered millions of innocent Armenians
- Egyptian muslims have been harassing and abducting children from coptic families, especially girls
- Pakistani muslims have been harassing hindus and christians, again christian and kalash girls have been abducted
- Iran attempted to genocide of bahais
- ISIS attempted the genocide of Yazidi people

You keep saying christians eradicated their minorities but that simply isn't true (I think you know this). Europeans committed genocide (Australians have a poor record themselves) but they did not eradicate all minorities.

By the same token I support the Rohingya muslims and muslims in Sri Lanka in their fight to survive who have been subject to attacks by buddhist extremists. Buddhism is also supposed to be a religion (or philosophy) of peace.

Just because somebody calls themselves a christian or a buddhist does not make them peaceful


I hope you realize that some of the more recent strands of Islamic genocidal fundamentalism are very recent owing to Wahabism and a type of Islamic radicalism that wasn't common in the early Muslim empires but is more recent as a result of many modern factors, such as Islamic fundamentalists with lots of Saudi oil money have great ease with disseminating the most intolerant and hateful strands of Islam and standardizing the religion, whereas in the past owing to lack of Saudi Wahabi standardization there were many tolerant and less radical implementations of Islam, hence why when you look back to the past you'll see art pieces in Muslim Spain of men and women hanging out together with the women playing music and the women not even wearing headscarves; trust me when I say Muslims weren't always as radical as they are now. The fact is throughout history the Muslim empires relied on their non-Muslim subjects for administrative, architectural and especially academic utility, so tolerance was a necessity and thus the type of fundamentalist ISIS Wahabi brand of Islam wasn't as common back then as you think. Proof? For over 1400 years the Muslims ruled the Levant and the Assyrian statues and idols were left unmolested, even under the more Salafi regime of the 1st 4 Caliphs; yet it was only in 2015 under ISIS were these UNESCO heritage monuments and idols destroyed, meaning that no matter how radical the regime the Muslims were a lot more tolerant back then then now. The earliest Muslim empires were not as radical as the Salafist/Wahabi strands of Islam that have gained prominence today and thats why when I was referring to the treatment of minorities under Muslim rule vs Christian rule I was doing that in the context of historically, not contemporaneously. If we're talking contemporaneously no question that the Christians are a lot less violent, but my original thread title and topic was referring to history.

Also you seem to be forgetting something. Some of the cases in history that you mentioned of Muslim leaders slaughtering minorities wasn't because they practiced different religions, its because they were at war and both Muhammad and the later Ottoman Young Turks used extreme tactics to eradicate opposition to their rule. That's not the same thing as intolerant Christians slaughtering minorities on the basis they're minorities.

My family were Ottoman soldiers. I dont justify the Armenian genocide. However there's a context behind it that transcends a mere Muslim power trying to eliminate Christianity, and that is that as the Ottoman Empire was waning and losing a lot of its land following humiliating defeats in the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman stranglehold on its remaining territory was becoming more precarious. This little fact is kind of left out of world history, but before the Ottomans ever massacred the Armenians the Armenians were launching uprisings against the Ottomans and many were actually slaughtering Ottoman civilians and even attacking them (hence why in Turkey they deny the Ottoman genocide, citing their heavy handed response as self defense. Not saying thats right, only saying that the genocide itself was more complex than other genocides like the Holocaust). Clearly no one denies that the Armenians had a right to rebel against the Ottomans and that the Ottomans had no right to use such heavy handed tactics to quell revolt, i.e. genocide, but there's a fundamental difference between wiping out a group that is rebelling versus wiping out a group only on the basis of having a different religion. If the Ottomans were wiping out the Armenians only because they were Christian then why weren't other Christian minorities wiped out? The answer is because they weren't being wiped out for being Christian, they were being wiped out because the Ottomans were on the brink of losing their empire and with the Armenian revolt and attacks against Turks becoming more fierce the Ottomans resorted to genocide as their last ditch effort to quell the type of unraveling of their empire that revolt was facilitating.

The same idea applies to Muhammad wiping out Jews. The Jews and Arabs had a longstanding rivalry in Arabia long before Muhammad entered the scene, but because the Arabs before Muhammad were interlocked in internecine and intermittent civil war they weren't a threat to the Jews, who essentially held control over Medina. As soon as Muhammad unified the 2 main tribes in Medina, the Aws and Khazraj, that's when the political leadership of the Arabs was in ascent and pitted Muhammad's nascent political unit against the already established Jewish power in Medina. Muhammad eliminated the Jews in Medina by using complex stratagem to displace them from the power structure, 1st by using a failed assassination as a pretext to expel 1 tribe, then an incident where a misbehaving Jew was used to expel a second tribe, and the 3rd tribe was wiped out after a few traitors from tribe almost wiped out the Muslims. It's still shady politics but the key thing here is that Muhammad wasn't as intolerant of Jews just existing and following their religion as he was power hungry to consolidate control over Arabia and he knew the biggest obstacle to that were the Jewish power structure, and his expulsion and other atrocities against Jewish tribes was only in the context of making sure there wasn't opposition to his rule.

None of what I said is in defense of the Armenian genocide or Muhammad's expulsion of the Jews but to clarify a key point; Muhammad didn't give a damn if random Jews were just existing and following their own religion so long as they accepted the political authority of Islam. Christians did give a damn if someone so much as had even a difference of opinion on Christianity, which is why something like the Inquisition existed in Christianity as well as actual examples in Europe where heresy and following a different religion was grounds in of itself for annihilation, no nuance or caveat.

Thats all im saying.

Also the Christians did eliminate their minorities. If they didnt why is it as soon as the Romans accepted Christianity was there not a pagan shrine left or non-christian after they spread? If memory serves me correctly in Will Durant's extensive multivolume history of the world he talked about how when the Christian Emperors declared Christianity the official religion of the empire there was a wave of persecution and slaughter of the pagans. I even remember reading in the "Secret History of Justinian" by a court official named Procopious that Justinian slaughtered countless pagans and converted them to Christianity. I also remember in my history class in school learning about different emperors such as Theodosius enacting decrees that helped eliminate paganism from the Roman Empire. So I think I can confidently say that the Christians did exterminate their minorities. Lets not even forget that after the Christians entered Spain a land that was home to mostly Muslims and Jews had not one Jew or Muslim left by the time the Inquisition was finished.


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Last edited by salad on 02 May 2021, 2:46 am, edited 2 times in total.

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02 May 2021, 2:35 am

cyberdad wrote:
salad wrote:
But let's be real: Muhammad being in the same caliber and tier as history's worst monsters is a bloody joke. And I mean bloody joke. Even though Muhammad had flaws at least many of his flaws were either common to the time,


To be honest I have no admiration of islam or the arabs for the exact reason you provided.

Think about it, if their philosophy is 1300 years old then the mindset of adherents is dangerously medieval and not with the modern times. Any wonder why so many arab states didn't give up slavery till the 1970s.

One of the only muslims I respect was the late Malcolm X. Through him I understood islamic philosophy (on paper at least) has at its core a universal brotherhood. There are echos of this in the writing of the poets Rumi and Khalil Gibran,

But unfortunately arab racism is no way any better than European racism. I could never contemplate having anything in common with people who claim to be muslims. At least European missionaries bought education/technology to the rest of the world.


I mean yeah Islam is heavily outdated and many of its values need a renovation, totally agree. But saying you cant get along with Muslims is kind of bigoted, given how many Muslims genuinely are much better people than Islam and as someone who grew up Muslim many of us actually had a very sanitized and saccharine version of Islam imbibed, one where it was all about love, forgiveness, peace and pacifism.

Dont be fooled by the fact that Muslims in theory follow Islam; many Muslims, including yours truly, dont even believe many of the more terrible parts of Islam. I even know conservative Muslims who think that its ok to pray for non-Muslims when they die, despite the Quran explicitly prohibiting that.

Islam as a religion is definitely backwards and could use a reformation. But many Muslims today are genuinely great, kind and loving people and are actually a lot more tolerant than Muhammad or Islam intended them to be.

Followers of a religion arent a perfect one to one correspondence with the texts the religion is putatively based off. Hence why as I was saying in this thread, despite Christianity being more tolerant than Islam Muslims throughout history were the more tolerant of other minorities. Anomaly? Sure, which shows that people are more complex than the religion they profess to follow.


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02 May 2021, 3:10 am

salad wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
salad wrote:
But let's be real: Muhammad being in the same caliber and tier as history's worst monsters is a bloody joke. And I mean bloody joke. Even though Muhammad had flaws at least many of his flaws were either common to the time,


To be honest I have no admiration of islam or the arabs for the exact reason you provided.

Think about it, if their philosophy is 1300 years old then the mindset of adherents is dangerously medieval and not with the modern times. Any wonder why so many arab states didn't give up slavery till the 1970s.

One of the only muslims I respect was the late Malcolm X. Through him I understood islamic philosophy (on paper at least) has at its core a universal brotherhood. There are echos of this in the writing of the poets Rumi and Khalil Gibran,

But unfortunately arab racism is no way any better than European racism. I could never contemplate having anything in common with people who claim to be muslims. At least European missionaries bought education/technology to the rest of the world.


I mean yeah Islam is heavily outdated and many of its values need a renovation, totally agree. But saying you cant get along with Muslims is kind of bigoted, given how many Muslims genuinely are much better people than Islam and as someone who grew up Muslim many of us actually had a very sanitized and saccharine version of Islam imbibed, one where it was all about love, forgiveness, peace and pacifism.

Dont be fooled by the fact that Muslims in theory follow Islam; many Muslims, including yours truly, dont even believe many of the more terrible parts of Islam. I even know conservative Muslims who think that its ok to pray for non-Muslims when they die, despite the Quran explicitly prohibiting that.

Islam as a religion is definitely backwards and could use a reformation. But many Muslims today are genuinely great, kind and loving people and are actually a lot more tolerant than Muhammad or Islam intended them to be.

Followers of a religion arent a perfect one to one correspondence with the texts the religion is putatively based off. Hence why as I was saying in this thread, despite Christianity being more tolerant than Islam Muslims throughout history were the more tolerant of other minorities. Anomaly? Sure, which shows that people are more complex than the religion they profess to follow.


Fair enough, my problem is with literal belief of any book that's thousands of years old. I also have the same feeling at Americans who claim the "every word in the christian bible is the literal word of god". When you read the bible it's self evidence god could not be so stupid.



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02 May 2021, 3:12 am

salad wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
salad wrote:
To compare the Christian treatment of minorities to the Muslim treatment of minorities is a very ahistorical thesis that no serious historian would ever entertain. No matter how inferior the status of Dhimmis in Islamic lands were they at least were unmolested by the state and allowed to exist and prosper. Christians eradicated their minorities. .


The exact nature of treatment is different but minorities have been "molested" under both type of empires run by christian or muslim.

Your claim that Dhimmis were unmolested in their state is incorrect. Here's just a few examples;
- The prophet Muhammad himself ordered the genocide of innocent jews as retribution
- Turks murdered millions of innocent Armenians
- Egyptian muslims have been harassing and abducting children from coptic families, especially girls
- Pakistani muslims have been harassing hindus and christians, again christian and kalash girls have been abducted
- Iran attempted to genocide of bahais
- ISIS attempted the genocide of Yazidi people

You keep saying christians eradicated their minorities but that simply isn't true (I think you know this). Europeans committed genocide (Australians have a poor record themselves) but they did not eradicate all minorities.

By the same token I support the Rohingya muslims and muslims in Sri Lanka in their fight to survive who have been subject to attacks by buddhist extremists. Buddhism is also supposed to be a religion (or philosophy) of peace.

Just because somebody calls themselves a christian or a buddhist does not make them peaceful


I hope you realize that some of the more recent strands of Islamic genocidal fundamentalism are very recent owing to Wahabism and a type of Islamic radicalism that wasn't common in the early Muslim empires but is more recent as a result of many modern factors, such as Islamic fundamentalists with lots of Saudi oil money have great ease with disseminating the most intolerant and hateful strands of Islam and standardizing the religion, whereas in the past owing to lack of Saudi Wahabi standardization there were many tolerant and less radical implementations of Islam, hence why when you look back to the past you'll see art pieces in Muslim Spain of men and women hanging out together with the women playing music and the women not even wearing headscarves; trust me when I say Muslims weren't always as radical as they are now. The fact is throughout history the Muslim empires relied on their non-Muslim subjects for administrative, architectural and especially academic utility, so tolerance was a necessity and thus the type of fundamentalist ISIS Wahabi brand of Islam wasn't as common back then as you think. Proof? For over 1400 years the Muslims ruled the Levant and the Assyrian statues and idols were left unmolested, even under the more Salafi regime of the 1st 4 Caliphs; yet it was only in 2015 under ISIS were these UNESCO heritage monuments and idols destroyed, meaning that no matter how radical the regime the Muslims were a lot more tolerant back then then now. The earliest Muslim empires were not as radical as the Salafist/Wahabi strands of Islam that have gained prominence today and thats why when I was referring to the treatment of minorities under Muslim rule vs Christian rule I was doing that in the context of historically, not contemporaneously. If we're talking contemporaneously no question that the Christians are a lot less violent, but my original thread title and topic was referring to history.

Also you seem to be forgetting something. Some of the cases in history that you mentioned of Muslim leaders slaughtering minorities wasn't because they practiced different religions, its because they were at war and both Muhammad and the later Ottoman Young Turks used extreme tactics to eradicate opposition to their rule. That's not the same thing as intolerant Christians slaughtering minorities on the basis they're minorities.

My family were Ottoman soldiers. I dont justify the Armenian genocide. However there's a context behind it that transcends a mere Muslim power trying to eliminate Christianity, and that is that as the Ottoman Empire was waning and losing a lot of its land following humiliating defeats in the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman stranglehold on its remaining territory was becoming more precarious. This little fact is kind of left out of world history, but before the Ottomans ever massacred the Armenians the Armenians were launching uprisings against the Ottomans and many were actually slaughtering Ottoman civilians and even attacking them (hence why in Turkey they deny the Ottoman genocide, citing their heavy handed response as self defense. Not saying thats right, only saying that the genocide itself was more complex than other genocides like the Holocaust). Clearly no one denies that the Armenians had a right to rebel against the Ottomans and that the Ottomans had no right to use such heavy handed tactics to quell revolt, i.e. genocide, but there's a fundamental difference between wiping out a group that is rebelling versus wiping out a group only on the basis of having a different religion. If the Ottomans were wiping out the Armenians only because they were Christian then why weren't other Christian minorities wiped out? The answer is because they weren't being wiped out for being Christian, they were being wiped out because the Ottomans were on the brink of losing their empire and with the Armenian revolt and attacks against Turks becoming more fierce the Ottomans resorted to genocide as their last ditch effort to quell the type of unraveling of their empire that revolt was facilitating.

The same idea applies to Muhammad wiping out Jews. The Jews and Arabs had a longstanding rivalry in Arabia long before Muhammad entered the scene, but because the Arabs before Muhammad were interlocked in internecine and intermittent civil war they weren't a threat to the Jews, who essentially held control over Medina. As soon as Muhammad unified the 2 main tribes in Medina, the Aws and Khazraj, that's when the political leadership of the Arabs was in ascent and pitted Muhammad's nascent political unit against the already established Jewish power in Medina. Muhammad eliminated the Jews in Medina by using complex stratagem to displace them from the power structure, 1st by using a failed assassination as a pretext to expel 1 tribe, then an incident where a misbehaving Jew was used to expel a second tribe, and the 3rd tribe was wiped out after a few traitors from tribe almost wiped out the Muslims. It's still shady politics but the key thing here is that Muhammad wasn't as intolerant of Jews just existing and following their religion as he was power hungry to consolidate control over Arabia and he knew the biggest obstacle to that were the Jewish power structure, and his expulsion and other atrocities against Jewish tribes was only in the context of making sure there wasn't opposition to his rule.

None of what I said is in defense of the Armenian genocide or Muhammad's expulsion of the Jews but to clarify a key point; Muhammad didn't give a damn if random Jews were just existing and following their own religion so long as they accepted the political authority of Islam. Christians did give a damn if someone so much as had even a difference of opinion on Christianity, which is why something like the Inquisition existed in Christianity as well as actual examples in Europe where heresy and following a different religion was grounds in of itself for annihilation, no nuance or caveat.

Thats all im saying.

Also the Christians did eliminate their minorities. If they didnt why is it as soon as the Romans accepted Christianity was there not a pagan shrine left or non-christian after they spread? If memory serves me correctly in Will Durant's extensive multivolume history of the world he talked about how when the Christian Emperors declared Christianity the official religion of the empire there was a wave of persecution and slaughter of the pagans. I even remember reading in the "Secret History of Justinian" by a court official named Procopious that Justinian slaughtered countless pagans and converted them to Christianity. I also remember in my history class in school learning about different emperors such as Theodosius enacting decrees that helped eliminate paganism from the Roman Empire. So I think I can confidently say that the Christians did exterminate their minorities. Lets not even forget that after the Christians entered Spain a land that was home to mostly Muslims and Jews had not one Jew or Muslim left by the time the Inquisition was finished.


You seem so well informed about history. I wish you would not pick on one religion though. All religions are based on 90% superstition.



salad
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02 May 2021, 3:31 am

cyberdad wrote:
salad wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
salad wrote:
To compare the Christian treatment of minorities to the Muslim treatment of minorities is a very ahistorical thesis that no serious historian would ever entertain. No matter how inferior the status of Dhimmis in Islamic lands were they at least were unmolested by the state and allowed to exist and prosper. Christians eradicated their minorities. .


The exact nature of treatment is different but minorities have been "molested" under both type of empires run by christian or muslim.

Your claim that Dhimmis were unmolested in their state is incorrect. Here's just a few examples;
- The prophet Muhammad himself ordered the genocide of innocent jews as retribution
- Turks murdered millions of innocent Armenians
- Egyptian muslims have been harassing and abducting children from coptic families, especially girls
- Pakistani muslims have been harassing hindus and christians, again christian and kalash girls have been abducted
- Iran attempted to genocide of bahais
- ISIS attempted the genocide of Yazidi people

You keep saying christians eradicated their minorities but that simply isn't true (I think you know this). Europeans committed genocide (Australians have a poor record themselves) but they did not eradicate all minorities.

By the same token I support the Rohingya muslims and muslims in Sri Lanka in their fight to survive who have been subject to attacks by buddhist extremists. Buddhism is also supposed to be a religion (or philosophy) of peace.

Just because somebody calls themselves a christian or a buddhist does not make them peaceful


I hope you realize that some of the more recent strands of Islamic genocidal fundamentalism are very recent owing to Wahabism and a type of Islamic radicalism that wasn't common in the early Muslim empires but is more recent as a result of many modern factors, such as Islamic fundamentalists with lots of Saudi oil money have great ease with disseminating the most intolerant and hateful strands of Islam and standardizing the religion, whereas in the past owing to lack of Saudi Wahabi standardization there were many tolerant and less radical implementations of Islam, hence why when you look back to the past you'll see art pieces in Muslim Spain of men and women hanging out together with the women playing music and the women not even wearing headscarves; trust me when I say Muslims weren't always as radical as they are now. The fact is throughout history the Muslim empires relied on their non-Muslim subjects for administrative, architectural and especially academic utility, so tolerance was a necessity and thus the type of fundamentalist ISIS Wahabi brand of Islam wasn't as common back then as you think. Proof? For over 1400 years the Muslims ruled the Levant and the Assyrian statues and idols were left unmolested, even under the more Salafi regime of the 1st 4 Caliphs; yet it was only in 2015 under ISIS were these UNESCO heritage monuments and idols destroyed, meaning that no matter how radical the regime the Muslims were a lot more tolerant back then then now. The earliest Muslim empires were not as radical as the Salafist/Wahabi strands of Islam that have gained prominence today and thats why when I was referring to the treatment of minorities under Muslim rule vs Christian rule I was doing that in the context of historically, not contemporaneously. If we're talking contemporaneously no question that the Christians are a lot less violent, but my original thread title and topic was referring to history.

Also you seem to be forgetting something. Some of the cases in history that you mentioned of Muslim leaders slaughtering minorities wasn't because they practiced different religions, its because they were at war and both Muhammad and the later Ottoman Young Turks used extreme tactics to eradicate opposition to their rule. That's not the same thing as intolerant Christians slaughtering minorities on the basis they're minorities.

My family were Ottoman soldiers. I dont justify the Armenian genocide. However there's a context behind it that transcends a mere Muslim power trying to eliminate Christianity, and that is that as the Ottoman Empire was waning and losing a lot of its land following humiliating defeats in the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman stranglehold on its remaining territory was becoming more precarious. This little fact is kind of left out of world history, but before the Ottomans ever massacred the Armenians the Armenians were launching uprisings against the Ottomans and many were actually slaughtering Ottoman civilians and even attacking them (hence why in Turkey they deny the Ottoman genocide, citing their heavy handed response as self defense. Not saying thats right, only saying that the genocide itself was more complex than other genocides like the Holocaust). Clearly no one denies that the Armenians had a right to rebel against the Ottomans and that the Ottomans had no right to use such heavy handed tactics to quell revolt, i.e. genocide, but there's a fundamental difference between wiping out a group that is rebelling versus wiping out a group only on the basis of having a different religion. If the Ottomans were wiping out the Armenians only because they were Christian then why weren't other Christian minorities wiped out? The answer is because they weren't being wiped out for being Christian, they were being wiped out because the Ottomans were on the brink of losing their empire and with the Armenian revolt and attacks against Turks becoming more fierce the Ottomans resorted to genocide as their last ditch effort to quell the type of unraveling of their empire that revolt was facilitating.

The same idea applies to Muhammad wiping out Jews. The Jews and Arabs had a longstanding rivalry in Arabia long before Muhammad entered the scene, but because the Arabs before Muhammad were interlocked in internecine and intermittent civil war they weren't a threat to the Jews, who essentially held control over Medina. As soon as Muhammad unified the 2 main tribes in Medina, the Aws and Khazraj, that's when the political leadership of the Arabs was in ascent and pitted Muhammad's nascent political unit against the already established Jewish power in Medina. Muhammad eliminated the Jews in Medina by using complex stratagem to displace them from the power structure, 1st by using a failed assassination as a pretext to expel 1 tribe, then an incident where a misbehaving Jew was used to expel a second tribe, and the 3rd tribe was wiped out after a few traitors from tribe almost wiped out the Muslims. It's still shady politics but the key thing here is that Muhammad wasn't as intolerant of Jews just existing and following their religion as he was power hungry to consolidate control over Arabia and he knew the biggest obstacle to that were the Jewish power structure, and his expulsion and other atrocities against Jewish tribes was only in the context of making sure there wasn't opposition to his rule.

None of what I said is in defense of the Armenian genocide or Muhammad's expulsion of the Jews but to clarify a key point; Muhammad didn't give a damn if random Jews were just existing and following their own religion so long as they accepted the political authority of Islam. Christians did give a damn if someone so much as had even a difference of opinion on Christianity, which is why something like the Inquisition existed in Christianity as well as actual examples in Europe where heresy and following a different religion was grounds in of itself for annihilation, no nuance or caveat.

Thats all im saying.

Also the Christians did eliminate their minorities. If they didnt why is it as soon as the Romans accepted Christianity was there not a pagan shrine left or non-christian after they spread? If memory serves me correctly in Will Durant's extensive multivolume history of the world he talked about how when the Christian Emperors declared Christianity the official religion of the empire there was a wave of persecution and slaughter of the pagans. I even remember reading in the "Secret History of Justinian" by a court official named Procopious that Justinian slaughtered countless pagans and converted them to Christianity. I also remember in my history class in school learning about different emperors such as Theodosius enacting decrees that helped eliminate paganism from the Roman Empire. So I think I can confidently say that the Christians did exterminate their minorities. Lets not even forget that after the Christians entered Spain a land that was home to mostly Muslims and Jews had not one Jew or Muslim left by the time the Inquisition was finished.


You seem so well informed about history. I wish you would not pick on one religion though. All religions are based on 90% superstition.


The only religion I picked on in this entire thread was my family's religion, Islam. Reread all of my posts and you'll see frequent mentions of how Islam is more intolerant and violent then Christianity, I openly praised Jesus glowingly yet was far more critical and condemning of Muhammad, and I reiterated several times in multiple posts how Christianity is the more peaceful religion and more tolerant religion than Islam. If you reread my posts careful you'll actually see a great respect for Christianity that wasn't even shown for Islam, my own family's religion. I would argue that the only religion ive singled out in this entire thread is Islam.

I only singled out Christians on account of how discordant and contradictory many of their actions are with the religion they profess to follow. I am unabashed about this criticism and believe that it needs to be said that even Gandhi knew something was wrong when he said: "I love Christ but dont like Christians. You Christians are so unlike your Christ."

I will admit I have a strong bias against White Christians not because I hate others but because both from history and even today in America the ideals of love, peace, tolerance and kindness that Jesus promulgated are literally inverted by the white Americans I see who call themselves devout soldiers of Christ. Whether its the almost total liaison between white supremacist movements and Christian organizations in America, the militaristic and war hawk obsessed fanaticism that comes from Christians in America who have a porn addiction to seeing the Middle East bombed, the overwhelming support for torture and other human rights abuses that were condemned by atheists but supported strongly by Christians in this country, and the fact that many of the White Christians I met in real life, saw online, or saw on the news were the total opposite of everything Christ stood before; they hated immigrants, hated minorities, hated others, and their only claim to Christianity was that of a nationalistic identity to be used for political consolidation.

I think the Christianity Jesus taught is a wonderful force for good and one of the greatest gifts to the world. I just think based on my experience in America many white Christians follow a form of Christianity totally divorced from the spiritual message of love and peace and politicize it into a hateful identity politics cult of nationalism that puts many people like me off.


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