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This Century's Martin Luther has arived

Paleocon said:
What? Secularism is the bane of modern political life. It carries a much higher death toll (both in terms of individual humans and in terms of cultures eviscerated) than jihadism.
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Not much into liberty ans religious freedom?
 
JC Callender said:
So the Jews are to blame for Germany's aggression during WW2?
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According to Hitler, the Jews were to blame, at least partially, since Jesus called them the children of the devil, and blamed them for killing Christ. But, how does a warped interpretation in the fevered mind of the Fuhrer translate into what a normal person today believes?
 
JC Callender said:
Are they to blame for getting killed for their religion? And if your talking about sheer numbers of deaths, I think using the 20th century as an example is totally appropriate. Probably the bloodiest century in history and I can't think of a single major religious war.
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So not true.
 
jmotivator said:
This Century’s Martin Luther Has Arrived | The Daily Caller

"Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and devout Muslim, gathered Muslims from America, Canada and Europe to declare a Muslim Reform Movement. Their effort intends to separate mosque and state and confront Political Islam, whose adherents are often referred to as Islamists.

The organization he founded, American Islamic Forum for Democracy, (AFID) plans to post the declaration on mosque doors, encouraging mosques to sign on."


I've often said that Islam is in need of a new testament. I don't hold much hope for this movement amounting to much, but it is good to see none the less.
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So much for the zealots claiming all of Islam is ISIS. For years now we've heard the refrain that traditional Islam either isn't doing anything or not enough. I suggest the posting of a document condemning the activities of terrorist groups on the front door of a Mosque is that very thing.

I hail this man and pray his efforts are successful
 
RAMOSS said:
In the case of Hitler, it was religious motivation to go after the Jews.
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Nonsense. His motivations aren't known, but the best speculation I've seen is blaming them for Germany's loss in 1918.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

jmotivator said:
The organization he founded, American Islamic Forum for Democracy, (AFID) plans to post the declaration on mosque doors, encouraging mosques to sign on."
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I think this posting plan is a certain way to an untimely death.
 
Your Star said:
No clue. But I highly doubt that the 20th was. Especially considering all the advancements that happened during that time.
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One needs to get away from sheer numbers (of losses) and look more towards actual loss percentage (per population and/or country).

That gives a far more comparative picture.

Taking that into consideration the 20th century cannot even begin to compare with the centuries of 1200 to 1400 in China (for instance).
 
JC Callender said:
Are they to blame for getting killed for their religion?
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Didn't blame them for being of any religion. But it was because they were Jews that they were killed.

And if your talking about sheer numbers of deaths, I think using the 20th century as an example is totally appropriate. Probably the bloodiest century in history and I can't think of a single major religious war.
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Using the 20th Century only is a cop out. The list of wars and deaths caused by religion, in history, would out number wars in the 20th Century NOT caused by religion by at least 10 to 1. And that is a very conservative estimate.
 
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Paleocon said:
Ah, 2+2=7. Liberals always do seem to just ignore in convent facts whenever it's suited to them.

"Against a fact there is no argument"
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And, as is typical of you and other extreme conservatives, when your position is shown to be idiotically false, you do absolutely nothing to defend it, other than present an ad hom. You are at least consistent, Paleocon.
 
Chagos said:
One needs to get away from sheer numbers (of losses) and look more towards actual loss percentage (per population and/or country).

That gives a far more comparative picture.

Taking that into consideration the 20th century cannot even begin to compare with the centuries of 1200 to 1400 in China (for instance).
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This is actually an excellent point and shows the real fallacy of the position that wars in the name of religion HAVEN'T killed more than wars that were not.
 
RabidAlpaca said:
None of that had anything to do with secularism. You can't just take anyone who's not religious and attribute all of their actions to some vaguely defined "secularism".
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SmokeAndMirrors said:
Because they didn't kill anyone in the name of secularism. It's that simple. It was related to Stalinism, Nazism, etc, which is its own dogma completely unrelated to whether or not it's secular. In fact, Nazi Germany actually used a lot of Christian religious rhetoric during some eras (although Nazism was unrelated to Christianity in its motivations, just like Stalinism was unrelated to secularism in its motivations).

Just because something isn't motivated by religion doesn't mean it's somehow by default motivated by secularism instead.

Secularism by itself has no inherent dogma. It is by definition completely inert. It is the absence of something, not the presence. No one has ever killed anyone purely in the name of secularism, because there is no reason to do so. Secularism by itself doesn't care what someone else believes. It has no structure, no leader, no rules.

Every religion has killed people in its own name. Even Buddhism. So yes, we can say that religion in general tends to kill a lot of people.

But we can even take that broader, and define it in a way that includes things like Stalinism and Nazism, which aren't religious: dogmatism tends to kill a lot of people.

All religions are dogmatic, but not all dogmatism is religious. Cults and tyrannical regimes can also be dogmatic. And in that case, the "deity," as it were, is usually the leader.

But there is one saving grace to non-religious dogmatism, which is that mortal deities tend to die relatively quickly. Religious ones don't, which is why they have so much destructive capacity. Even if a deity isn't objectively real, as long as someone believes dogmatically in their religion, it continues to live in the mind of its adherents, and thus the potential for violence is there even thousands of years after its inception. Mortal deities never live more than 80 or 90 years, often much less, and usually only have a destructive capacity for a couple of decades.

Dogmatism is something to be fought against in all its incarnations, religious and not. But the greater destructive capacity of a tyrant that doesn't die can't be ignored.
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You guys are kidding, right? It had almost literally everything to do with secularism.

Red Communism and Nazism are essentially "two sides" of the same coin taking the philosophies of the Enlightenment - Revolutionary Egalitarianism, Scientific Objectivism, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Romanticism, Nationalism, "Progressivism," and etca - to their extreme logical conclusions. Granted, these two extremes are hardly the only options available here. Liberal Democracy is a product of Enlightenment era secularism as well.

However, the fact that both Communism and Fascism are ultimately "secularist" flub ups derived from taking certain trains of secular Enlightenment era thought too far isn't really deniable.
 
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Natan said:
Nonsense. His motivations aren't known, but the best speculation I've seen is blaming them for Germany's loss in 1918.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth


I think this posting plan is a certain way to an untimely death.
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It's really not complicated, to be honest. At the time, the Jews were generally associated with Red Communism (hardly surprising, given how many of the movement's founders and leaders were, in fact, Jewish).

Nazism was largely a reaction to a Red Communism, and so it made a particular point of targeting Jews. Besides which, the Jews weren't particularly well liked anyway for the simple fact of their being cultural outsiders.

Of all the motivations behind the Holocaust, religion was least among them.
 
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Gathomas88 said:
You guys are kidding, right? It had almost literally everything to do with secularism.

Red Communism and Nazism are essentially "two sides" of the same coin taking the philosophies of the Enlightenment - Revolutionary Egalitarianism, Scientific Objectivism, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Romanticism, Nationalism, "Progressivism," and etca - to their extreme logical conclusions. Granted, these two extremes are hardly the only options available here. Liberal Democracy is a product of Enlightenment era secularism as well.

However, the fact that both Communism and Fascism are ultimately "secularist" flub ups derived from taking certain trains of secular Enlightenment era thought too far isn't really deniable.
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What you're essentially doing is saying "Everyone who plays baseball is in one category, everyone who doesn't play baseball is in another category. Looks like people who don't play baseball have more net murders and rapes than people who do, therefore moral high ground."

You don't get to group every person and idea on the planet that isn't religious into a super-group of "secularists" in order to 'win' statistics based arguments. If so, I can group all religions, christianity, islam, buddhism, taoism, etc. into one group "the non-secularists" and attack that group as a whole. You'd be right if there were some kind of common secular doctrine to which people in these groups adhered to.
 
CaptainCourtesy said:
Didn't blame them for being of any religion. But it was because they were Jews that they were killed.



Using the 20th Century only is a cop out. The list of wars and deaths caused by religion, in history, would out number wars in the 20th Century NOT caused by religion by at least 10 to 1. And that is a very conservative estimate.
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Why would the 20th century be a cop out? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Also, what's the use of pointing out that more people have been killed "in the name of religion or due to religion"? Is it to blame religion for these things happening?
 
CaptainCourtesy said:
This is actually an excellent point and shows the real fallacy of the position that wars in the name of religion HAVEN'T killed more than wars that were not.
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You cited that the Jews were killed by the Nazi's for their religion...do you consider WW2 a religious war?
 
RabidAlpaca said:
What you're essentially doing is saying "Everyone who plays baseball is in one category, everyone who doesn't play baseball is in another category. Looks like people who don't play baseball have more net murders and rapes than people who do, therefore moral high ground."

You don't get to group every person and idea on the planet that isn't religious into a super-group of "secularists" in order to 'win' statistics based arguments. If so, I can group all religions, christianity, islam, buddhism, taoism, etc. into one group "the non-secularists" and attack that group as a whole. You'd be right if there were some kind of common secular doctrine to which people in these groups adhered to.
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Cheers for dealing with that. Just looking at it made my brain bleed.

Woosh...
 
RabidAlpaca said:
What you're essentially doing is saying "Everyone who plays baseball is in one category, everyone who doesn't play baseball is in another category. Looks like people who don't play baseball have more net murders and rapes than people who do, therefore moral high ground."

You don't get to group every person and idea on the planet that isn't religious into a super-group of "secularists" in order to 'win' statistics based arguments. If so, I can group all religions, christianity, islam, buddhism, taoism, etc. into one group "the non-secularists" and attack that group as a whole. You'd be right if there were some kind of common secular doctrine to which people in these groups adhered to.
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SmokeAndMirrors said:
Cheers for dealing with that. Just looking at it made my brain bleed.

Woosh...
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RabidAlpaca said:
If the USSR were "secularists" doing "secular" things, then nazis were "christians" doing "christian" things.
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How about no, on both counts? What are you even talking about? :screwy

Sorry to burst you guys' bubble, but both the Nazism and Red Communism were, very much, "secularist" movements, following explicitly "secular" ideologies. Again, the Nazis were basically lunatic hyper-Nationalists and Social Darwinists, where Red Communists were "Progressives" and "Social Egalitarians" who enforced the most extreme versions of those principles possible at gunpoint regardless of whether people wanted them or not. Both sides also staunchly believed that "science" and "rationalism" could prove their ideologies to be correct, while either relegating religion to a distant, and thoroughly neutered, second or third place priority behind secular ideology and secular interests, or seeking to stamp it out entirely.

If you can't see how that all traces directly back to the "Secularism" of the Enlightenment, and many of the ideas that grew out of it, I'm afraid you simply don't understand the Enlightenment or its history.

Again, this obviously isn't all there is to Secularism. Liberal Democracy, which I very much support, is a Secular Enlightenment ideology as well. It's just not as extreme.

All I'm saying is that trying to deny the culpability of "Secularism" in many of the atrocities of the 20th Century is simply ludicrous. It'd be like trying to deny that Islam is a religion.
 
Gathomas88 said:
How about no, on both counts? What are you even talking about? :screwy

Sorry to burst you guys' bubble, but both the Nazism and Red Communism were, very much, "secularist" movements, following explicitly "secular" ideologies. Again, the Nazis were basically lunatic hyper-Nationalists and Social Darwinists, where Red Communists were "Progressives" and "Social Egalitarians" who enforced the most extreme versions of those principles possible at gunpoint regardless of whether people wanted them or not. Both sides also staunchly believed that "science" and "rationalism" could prove their ideologies to be correct, while either relegating religion to a distant, and thoroughly neutered, second or third place priority behind secular ideology and secular interests, or seeking to stamp it out entirely.

If you can't see how that all traces directly back to the "Secularism" of the Enlightenment, and many of the ideas that grew out of it, I'm afraid you simply don't understand the Enlightenment or its history.

Again, this obviously isn't all there is to Secularism. Liberal Democracy, which I very much support, is a Secular Enlightenment ideology as well. It's just not as extreme.

All I'm saying is that trying to deny the culpability of "Secularism" in many of the atrocities of the 20th Century is simply ludicrous. It'd be like trying to deny that Islam is a religion.
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LOL. Dude, the nazis were definitively christian, and professed to be christian, like Hitler. You can feel free to try to disown him because you don't feel it represents your christianity, but there is no denying the connection. So far all you've done is double down at the "if they're not religious, they're secular" argument, and haven't shown any connections to each other whatsoever.
 
RabidAlpaca said:
LOL. Dude, the nazis were definitively christian, and professed to be christian, like Hitler. You can feel free to try to disown him because you don't feel it represents your christianity, but there is no denying the connection.
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Hitler was roughly as "Christian" as Napoleon (which is to say, not at all). :roll:

"It is by making myself Catholic that I brought peace to Brittany and Vendée. It is by making myself Italian that I won minds in Italy. It is by making myself a Moslem that I established myself in Egypt. If I governed a nation of Jews, I should reestablish the Temple of Solomon." - Napoleon Bonaparte

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Nazism most certainly was not "Christian." A great many members of the Nazi hierarchy - likely even Hitler himself - basically viewed Christianity as being a "filthy Jew religion" responsible for making the German people weak, and wanted to stamp it out as soon as humanly possible.

In any eventuality, it certainly wasn't any serious Nazis' goal to be a "good Christian." It was their goal to be good Nazis, with religion being basically irrelevant outside of that. That was because Nazism was essentially a secular religion in and of itself, and a jealous one at that.

Take your arguments born out of ignorance and lack of education on the subject somewhere else.

So far all you've done is double down at the "if they're not religious, they're secular" argument, and haven't shown any connections to each other whatsoever.
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A) No, I've specifically pointed out the manner in which both Red Communism and Nazism can be seen to be direct descendants and logical continuations of the explicitly secular ideas of the Enlightenment. In response, you have either jammed your fingers in your ears and ignored it, or fallen back on nonsense Left Wing propaganda like "The Nazis were Chrsitians!" that any grade schooler with an internet connection could refute.

B) "Not religious" actually is the definition of "secular," so you lose either way. :lol:
 
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