Then again maybe there is a perfectly logical explanation as to why history is biased and in favour of the 'white' man: He was one of very few who kept such records and made such expeditions to seek out the rest of the world.
Law of Loud said:I apologize if I was a little too extreme and overstated my own point. I am not trying to express that we were perfect in any sense, but the claim that everybody was better than Europeans is a common thought nowadays. It is surprisingly common.
You are lumping the entire history of the Middle East into one aggregate, and I find this erred and even a little closed-minded. I say this because, living in a still-eurocentrist culture, we tend to differentiate between nationalities and races when it comes to "our own" history--we talk about the Germans doing this and the Spanish doing that and the British the other, and we differentiate because we seek differences between cultures, languages, geographies, and races.Axion said:The key point is that the Crusades were a defensive war.
From 600 AD on, Islam has been an expanding religion, which has aimed to conquer the lands of Christianity. This continuous war or "jihad" began just three years after Muhammad's death and continued continuously for the next thousand years. In this time the Muslim overran the Christian Lands of
You do know that contemporary history completely refutes all those myths about the Inquisition, right?Russebby said:the Inquisition, one of the darkest chapters in European history, one which dwarfs more recent efforts of ethnic cleansing.
I think you are failing to see the wood for the trees here.Russebby said:There are sincere differences between Turks and Arabs in terms of history, geography, and culture. Turks generally came from central Asia, Arabs from North Africa and Arabia. They speak different languages...
It is exactly as insulting to lump all Muslims together, without considering cultures to delineate one people from another, as it would be to lump the US and Germany together as Christians, blame all Christians around the world for the Holocaust, and then badmouth the US. That is essentially what you are doing when you lump the entire Islamic world together.
You are wrong here. The Turks were muslim in 1070 when they poured into the Anatolian hinterland of Constantinople.The Crusades began with a plea from King Alexios of Constantinople to Pope Urban II in 1095 to send aid against the rival Seljuk Turks. Alexios did not talk about Islamic infidels, he did not talk about any greater Christian glory. He talked about saving his city from the Turks, a people about as Muslim in that day as Britain is Catholic.
The Turkish Muslim invasion of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) existed all right. The lands wich had been the breadbasket of Constantinople were depopulated and ravaged. Constantinople and the rest of Europe were threatened. Very different from the non-existent WMD.The Crusades were as defensive a war as is the current war in Iraq, and Urban II played the peoples of Europe just like Bush did America in concocting something that only tenuously existed at best to awaken the animalistic zeal therein.
I think that the fact has to be faced that there is a problem with Islam, and always has been. You are refusing to face the fact that Islam has from the start been a militantly expansionist religion that spread largely through violent conquest. To be a complete Muslim, you must live under Islamic Law, and this requires political control of the state. It is no accident that most of the inter-faith conflicts in the world today involve Muslims:And leaving a laundry list of all things perceived to be Islamic shortcoming, as I mentioned before, is self-serving and perpetuates the myth in America that Islam is little more than a religion for the warmongering.
Pagan (not Christian) Rome crucified Jesus and dispersed the Jews. Christianity spread by conversion and evangelisation. The christians were living at peace throughout the Eastern meditteranean until the Invasions came.Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine 630 AD
The Holy Land was ruled by Rome and the Byzantine Empires, Christian since about 300 anno domini. Rome was notorious for not only crucifying Jesus and every other dissident of the era, they also burned the temple of Jerusalem to the ground and dispursed the Jewish peoples, something that in this day and age might be considered genocide. Both Rome and Byzantium saw the Holy Land as little more than a cash cow and treated the indigenous peoples there with indignation. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS RAN THE HOLY LAND BEFORE THE MUSLIMS CAME.
None of this has anything to do with the Christians of Egypt being overrun in 650 AD in an unprovoked invasion. Napoleon and the western interventions in the 20th Century were largely SECULAR. The Western powers have not been interested in imposing or even supporting Christianity, but in secular wealth and geopolitics.Egypt 650 AD
From the time Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798 to now, the Middle East has been seen as a vassal state to the West. The British and the French carved up North Africa, Palestine, and Mesopotamia at their leisure, breaking them up politically in the attempt to keep them divided and quarrelling. The US got into the act of political manipulation of the area in the 1950's by sponsoring a coup in the nominally democratic Iran and imposing the US-friendly Shah, who ruled that country not unlike the US-backed Saddam Hussein ruled Irag for decades. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS HAVE RUN THE MIDDLE EAST FOR TWO CENTURIES AND UNWITTINGLY CREATED THE VERY TERRORISTS WE ARE FIGHTING TODAY.
I don't see the relevance. My point was that peaceable Christian lands were attacked, unprovoked, by Muslim armies, overrun, and Christianity gradually wiped out.North Africa, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco 700 AD
Italy and Germany ran roughshod over North Africa in the 1930's in their rave for world domination.
Again, Spain was invaded by Muslim armies, churches were replaced by Mosques, and Christians became 3rd class citizens. Yes. There was a fightback, and a long and vicious series of wars. But your argument is rather like blaming the Dutch, belgians and French for fighting back against the Nazi occupiers of their countries, and saying this proves they were as bad as each other!Spain 780 AD
The Catholics spent literally centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula. By 1450 they had almost completely rid the area of Muslims.
I think you have been reading inaccurate histories here.Southern France 790 AD
By the Middle Ages Christians had thrust the Moors back to the other side of the Pyrenees. From the time of Charlemagne to the end of the Crusades, France became a hotbed for violence against non-Catholic peoples. In the Alcase-Lorraine region Jews were persecuted as the continent-crossing Crusaders took them out to practice their warmongering skills. Every few years, in almost every town in France, law-abiding Jews would be purged by any particular town and region. Jews in France and elsewhere were blamed for the Black Death in the 1350's, and they were slaughtered at a level only beaten by the Holocaust, another event which, under your belief of lumping all Muslims togeher, Christians killed off Jews in ghastly numbers. Probably the saddest event in medieval France was the Crusade to slaughter the Albigensians, a nominally Christian people living in Southern France; Pope Innocent III called for a CRUSADE against them in the 13th century, and by 1244 the Albigensians were crushed in one of the most brutal genocidal campaigns in European history. THAT IS WHAT CHRISTIANS DID TO NON-CHRISTIANS IN FRANCE.
But the Turks and Arabs functioned as one under the Sultanate from the 1450s on. They were not separate nations. The Arabs became generally loyal subjects of the Turkish elite.Sicily 850 AD
Southern Italy 860 AD
I like how you make distinctions between Sicily and Southern Italy when it suits you, yet you lump Turks and Arabs together conveniently to prove whatever point you were trying to make. THAT IS WHAT CHRISTIANS DO IN THE ATTEMPT TO PAINT MUSLIMS AS WARMONGERS.
There was a big break after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia in 1070 AD. This was the period of the Crusades, when Muslim advance nto Christian Lands was halted and partially reversed.Central Turkey 1070 AD
Greece 1300 AD
Bulgaria and the Balkans 1400 AD
Constantinople 1450 AD
These last few are incredibly misleading. Realize that these are all the same camoaign. Again you list separate Christian entites for the sake of making the allegedly united Muslim peoples look worse.
I'd have to say that hundreds of native American cultures were indeed wiped out. It may have been aided by disease. But some of the settlers actions were indeed genocidal.It would be equally disturbing--but exactly as consistent as you--to list the hundreds of Native American cultures destroyed by the US government individually and make it look like Anglo-Americans successfully waged genocide over hundreds of peoples.
Yes. And muslims sometimes attacked Muslims. However this does not alter the point that for the vast majority of the period 600AD - 1700 AD Muslims were the consistent aggressors against Christianity, and Christians merely reacted to this, mostly defensively.in 1204 the Venetian fleet sacked Constantinople in an event that would have made the Vikings jealous--you can still see the booty in Venetian museums to this day.
The nazis were not Christians. they despised Christianity. Christians had to renounce their allegiance before taking rank in the SS. The Million ROMANI killed, were virtually all Christians.while Christians were slaughtering SIX MILLION JEWS, they also murdered ONE MILLION ROMANI!
No. I would say that evidence shows clearly that the Muslims were the initial and the constant aggressors from 600 AD to the Crusades, and from the Crusades to 1700, when Europe finally gained a huge technological advantage. Like other peoples, Christians were involved in wars. However Islam grew primarily by conquest, and Christian lands were the prime target. The Koran makes fighting the "infidels" a duty on all Muslims, while the Bible places no such duty of conquest on Christians. That is a historical fact. The crusades were defensive in that they were a response to continued Muslim assaults on Christian lands.Realize that Christians in roughtly the same era and same part of the world were just as warmongering, if not more so, than the Muslims, and that singling out one half of the equation is historically irresponsible.
There is good and bad in revisionism. However where it is done with an agenda in view, it can lead to appalling distortions of the truth.I like much of what you said about the ethics of revisionist history. Unfortunately, this point I am fixing on undoes all the good of the rest of the post.
No I am not, I am of European decent, I am no nazi. I just have a greater respect for European history than all others save China, who actually have had civilization for many thousands of years. Unlike cannibals who are put upon pedestals.....jlujan69 said:Rooster, you indicated "Christian" as your religion. By chance, are you Christian Identity?
Am I? The point I was making is that it is completely errant to lump in all Muslims into a single mold, just as it is completely errant to lump all Christian nations into a single stereotype.I think you are failing to see the wood for the trees here.
And yet we have pseudo-democracies in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia. We have India, the largest democracy on earth, with a distinct Islamic minority. Again, you are making gross generalizations because you see the fundamentalist bent of Iran, and you assume the rest of the Muslim world is full of the same kind of nutjobs. Pakistan, for instance, under your definition, should have never assisted the US in 2002 by allowing American forces to enter to get to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia should have long ago let us starve from oil deprivation, would they not have the duty to make the petroleum-gorging infidels suffer?1) Islam is a religion with no concept of "separation of church and state". In Islam, the state is formed by the religion and exists to enforce the laws of Islam. This estabishes the same culture and the same framework of laws in all Islamic states. All are under the same duty to make war on Infidels and to unite against them.
Through the majority of its history the bulk of the Christian world (Europe) had been united under one ruler (the Pope). From the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation--roughly from 500 to 1500 anno domini--all kings bowed to the power of the Pope, and his rule met little resistance. Until Henry VIII came along in the 16th century, no monarch had the nad to challenge the Pope's authority. Kings sought his favor, kings fought to defend Christendom under his authority, and kings were manipulated according to his whims.2) Through most of its history the bulk of the Islamic world has been united in ONE STATE, unlike the Christian world.
Never said they weren't. They aren't Arab, though.The Turks were muslim in 1070
The Crusades were a pre-emptive strike initiated by a ruler who took a localized threat out of context and used it to stir up the zeal of his followers to initiate a larger series of wars. Substitute "war in Iraq" for "Crusades" and I think they are pretty much the same.The Turkish Muslim invasion of Anatolia existed all right. Very different from the non-existent WMD.
I never said there wasn't a problem with Islam having a violent nature. What you are ignoring is that the Christian world has just as violent a history. My point from the start is that though the Turks and the Arabs are both Islamic, it is dangerously wrong to lump them into the same mold.I think that the fact has to be faced that there is a problem with Islam, and always has been. It is no accident that most of the inter-faith conflicts in the world today involve Muslims:
Chechnya, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Israel, Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, India, Kashmir, The Philippines, Somalia, Burma... Why can't Muslims peacefully co-exist with other religions unless they are dominating them?
I don't remember Constantine, upon conversion, apologizing to the Jews and offering them back their homeland. And when did the Jews ever live in peace with its neighbors, ever? EVER?Pagan Rome crucified Jesus and dispersed the Jews. Christianity spread by conversion and evangelisation. The christians were living at peace throughout the Eastern meditteranean until the Invasions came.
Does it really matter? Iraq was a nation with a secular ruler. So is Turkey and India and Indonesia, yet you lump them all together. You prove my point, that Westerners like to lump all Islamic nations and races together and paint them with the same broad warmongering brush, but when the shoe is on the other foot, you get defensive.None of this has anything to do with the Christians of Egypt being overrun in 650 AD in an unprovoked invasion. Napoleon and the western interventions in the 20th Century were largely SECULAR.
Of course you won't see anything when you put your hands over your eyes and refuse to look at it for what it is. Of course you will not acknowledge relevance if it shreds your point of view. I know what your point is. I wish you would acknowledge mine.I don't see the relevance.
Fighting back against the Nazis, no, the Dutch and Belgians would not be wrong at all. But after driving the Nazis out, if they went out and demanded they all give up their religious affiliations for theirs, if they systematically sought to wipe out all Germans living in their lands and used torture to get confessions out of them, if they rounded up all Germans and put them in concentration camps, then yes, I would think they are just as bad.But your argument is rather like blaming the Dutch, belgians and French for fighting back against the Nazi occupiers of their countries, and saying this proves they were as bad as each other!
I beg to differ. The persecution of the Jews from the Dark Ages to today involved a definite general pattern of nominal acceptance, then once their population grew in a particular locale, they were purged. Occasionally you would have Crusades and Inquisitions and the Black Death and Holocaust where the entire fury of the Christian world, all the penned-up hate against the Jews, would rear its ugly head.I think you have been reading inaccurate histories here.
1) Sporadic attacks on jews in Christian lands indeed took place, for the same reasons attacks on minorities take place in nearly all cultures throughout the world up to the present day. Even in the Crusades, these were not systematic, and the Church generally tried to protect jews from hostile mobs. In terms of the over-all population of Jews, the assaults were nasty but marginal, and this is borne out by the fact that very large Jewish communities survived and prospered throughout Europe.
It is further proof that Christians crusaded for reasons other than defense, as you would like to claim. I think it is relevant to the matter that collectively, the Christian world is just as violent throughout history as the Islamic world.2) The Albigensian Crusade is a separate matter, which is a discussion on its own. leave it to be said that the term Genocide is completely unjustified in referring to what became virtually a North-South civil war in France.
That is wrong on so many levels. The Ottoman Turks and the Arab caliphates were separate entities. Muslims in Indonesia were separate entites. The soon-to-be Muslim Albanians were separate entites from the Arabs. Muslims in western China. Siberia. India. Burma. They were all separate entities politically, racially, linguistically, and culturally. The only thing that tenuously held them together was Islam. Just like Christianity only tenuously held Poland, Russia, Sweden, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the rest together.But the Turks and Arabs functioned as one under the Sultanate from the 1450s on. They were not separate nations. The Arabs became generally loyal subjects of the Turkish elite.
The Christians invaded what was Muslim land in 1096 and on several separate occasions thereafter. Under Peter the Great, a Christian king, Russia sought to overtake Muslim lands in central Asia--this began circa 1700 and continued under Catherine the Great. Are we to assume that the Christians were merely "halted and partially reversed" in the years between the Crusades and Peter?There was a big break after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia in 1070 AD. This was the period of the Crusades, when Muslim advance nto Christian Lands was halted and partially reversed.
It's about time you acknowledged the Turks as a separate entity from the Arabs. That is all I wanted.IN 1300, the Crusading zeal had abated, and the Turks were able to take up the offensive again in Eastern Europe.
I think it is more than just SOME. It goes back to America's Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was fated to rule the continent, no matter who stood in its way. As such, it takes such a belief for God-fearing people to think the only good Indian is a dead Indian.I'd have to say that hundreds of native American cultures were indeed wiped out. It may have been aided by disease. But some of the settlers actions were indeed genocidal.
Napoleon was merely reacting in 1798? Peter the Great was merely reacting? The British were merely reacting when they carved up the old Ottoman Empire? The US was merely reacting when they imposed the Shah in Iran in 1954, more or less sowing the seems for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism?However this does not alter the point that for the vast majority of the period 600AD - 1700 AD Muslims were the consistent aggressors against Christianity, and Christians merely reacted to this, mostly defensively.
Again, you are trying to split hairs, which is what I condemned you for. I don't think there was anything Christian about the Nazis. I don't think there is anything Islamic in the modern terrorism cycle. But if you are going to paint an entire religion based on the shenanigans of a few nutbars, be prepared to have Christianity painted in the same light.The nazis were not Christians. they despised Christianity. Christians had to renounce their allegiance before taking rank in the SS. The Million ROMANI killed, were virtually all Christians.
Two points I have for this, but you seem to dodge them for whatever reason:No. I would say that evidence shows clearly that the Muslims were the initial and the constant aggressors from 600 AD to the Crusades, and from the Crusades to 1700, when Europe finally gained a huge technological advantage. Like other peoples, Christians were involved in wars. However Islam grew primarily by conquest, and Christian lands were the prime target. The Koran makes fighting the "infidels" a duty on all Muslims, while the Bible places no such duty of conquest on Christians. That is a historical fact. The crusades were defensive in that they were a response to continued Muslim assaults on Christian lands.
Agreed. My agenda all along has been to not conveniently lump all Islamic peoples into a certain set of stereotypes, and that when the shoe is on the other foot, Christians don't seem to like it very much either. My agenda has been that Christian history is just as bloody as any other history on earth, including Islamic. Your agenda appears to be to lump all Muslims together and call them all warmongers, to demonize Muslims for waging war but exonerating Christians for the same, and to ignore your very logic when someone calls you out on it. We all have an agenda.There is good and bad in revisionism. However where it is done with an agenda in view, it can lead to appalling distortions of the truth.
oldrooster said:No I am not, I am of European decent, I am no nazi. I just have a greater respect for European history than all others save China, who actually have had civilization for many thousands of years. Unlike cannibals who are put upon pedestals.....
The point I am trying to make is that there IS an underlying dynamic that on this issue DOES link most Muslims. You seem to find the very suggestion that Muslims, as muslims, have a different world-outlook to be offensive. And you seem to be of the opinion that I should not even be making this argument. But I am arguing that this is an important reality that has to be acknowledged and dealt with, otherwise some form of new religious conflict is more likely.Russebby said:The point I was making is that it is completely errant to lump in all Muslims into a single mold, just as it is completely errant to lump all Christian nations into a single stereotype. My point from the start is that it is wrong to lump Turks and Arabs together.
Islamic countries have been the most resistant to democracy. Only Turkey has kept anything resembling democracy going for more than ten years or so. Egypt, Indonesia and Algeria could not be considered democracies in western terms, with "strong men" in control, and with bloody battles with Islamic fundamentalists. Forty years ago there were 2,000,000 christians in Algeria. Now there are 2,000, living in fear most of the time. Even Turkey fails to acknowledge the massacre of 2 million Armenians, still illegally occupies northern Cyprus, and has ethnically cleansed most other Christians from all of Turkey but Istanbul.And yet we have pseudo-democracies in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia. We have India, the largest democracy on earth, with a distinct Islamic minority. Again, you are making gross generalizations because you see the fundamentalist bent of Iran, and you assume the rest of the Muslim world is full of the same kind of nutjobs. Pakistan, for instance, under your definition, should have never assisted the US in 2002 by allowing American forces to enter to get to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia should have long ago let us starve from oil deprivation, would they not have the duty to make the petroleum-gorging infidels suffer?
America bases many of its laws on Christian principles. It doesn't apply mosaic law to the letter, which is what Islam tries to do. In Islamic countries you can be killed for converting to Christianity or "defaming" Islam. I don't think this happens in the US.The US allegedly is a Christian nation, and if you talk to most, they believe our basic set of values and laws stem from Mosaic law. How is America, therefore, fundamentally different in terms of personal outlook?
No. No. No. You don't think you're getting away with that, do you?Through the majority of its history the bulk of the Christian world (Europe) had been united under one ruler (the Pope). From the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation--roughly from 500 to 1500 anno domini--all kings bowed to the power of the Pope, and his rule met little resistance. Until Henry VIII came along in the 16th century, no monarch had the nad to challenge the Pope's authority. Kings sought his favor, kings fought to defend Christendom under his authority, and kings were manipulated according to his whims.
The Turks were originally separate, but from 1516 they conquered the Arab caliphates and became rulers of virtually all the Arab lands. There was not one racial entity, but there was one state and one law, which covered most of the Muslim world.The Turks have always been a separate entity from the rest of the Islamic world, acting within its own agenda, maintaining the same religion as the rest of the Islamic world, but little else. Arabs are but one racial entity within the Islamic world--you have Turks, Kurds, Africans of all varieties, Indians of all varieties, Asians, Europeans. Each have had a separate history. The Muslims of western China have had a separate course from the ones of Albania or Bangladesh or Morocco. You can talk about the superficial borders created after the end of WWI, but one can hardly call the entire Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia, as one homogenous entity, completely unanimous in all thought.
Christianity never attempted to kill all jews. What you seem to have misunderstood about my point is that the difference between Islam and Christianity, is that in Islam, conquest is a duty in Christianity it is something that goes against the basics of the faith. This is a big difference. In Christian lands such acts as you describe are eventually criticised and condemned. In Islam massacres were often celebrated.In 1100 you had German and French Crusaders pouring across the Rhineland slaughtering Jews. By your logic, it would fine to just call them all Christian and them label Christianity as a religion with a warmongering bent to kill all Jews. I find this offensive, personally. Anyone who has read the Gospels would know there is nothing in it to validate war, and yet here are the Christians, from Constantinople to today, constantly at war with one another or with others, enslaving some and eradicating others. Seems to me, under your logic, Christianity is pretty disgusting.
The crusades were more comparable to the first gulf War, when Kuwait was invaded, and an alliance of different countries came to Kuwait's aid.The Crusades were a pre-emptive strike initiated by a ruler who took a localized threat out of context and used it to stir up the zeal of his followers to initiate a larger series of wars. Substitute "war in Iraq" for "Crusades" and I think they are pretty much the same.
Without the Crusades, Constantinople would probably have fallen 300 years earlier.BTW--Constantinople did not finally fall to the Turks until 1453--some pre-emptive strike, almost four hundred years.
No. The original argument was from a statement that the Christians launched unprovoked attacks on Islam in the Crusades. I have been pointing out that the Christian reaction was a response to muslim aggression, and a muslim determination to conquer Christendom. I never said that Christians were perfect non-violent paragons. My point is that revisionist historians try to paint a picture that is the reverse of the truth, namely uncouth, murderous Christians descending unprovoked on cultured, tolerant muslims. That was never the case.I never said there wasn't a problem with Islam having a violent nature. What you are ignoring is that the Christian world has just as violent a history.
No. It is far more complex than this. There has been a long history of bloodshed there in which the Serbs suffered as much, if not more than any. Why did the Muslims want to break away from multi-ethnic, tolerant Yugoslavia, starting the conflict? Because they wanted a muslim-dominated state. The same applies in Chechnya. The muslim religion demands they live in a state ruled by Islam.I take exception to a couple on your list. The genocidal warfare in the former Yugoslavia has happened because of the Slavic Serbia wanting to cleanse the region of undesirables. Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo have been the victim, not the prepetrator in this.
Again. I didn't say, Islam is the only creator of violence in the world. That would be silly. What I said was that Islam always seems to be in conflict with neighbouring religions. The list I gave includes Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and others who find themselves facing conflict with Islam.Rwanda saw the most gruesome genocide since WWII--where is the Islamic bent there? How about the problems with North Korea? Rebels in Guatemala? Potential civil war in Venezuela? A potential end to the cease-fire between the UK and the IRA?
But what if one of the children is nearly always "starting it"?Christians and Muslims have been feuding with each other. Plain and simple. You might think that, because the Muslims started this whole thing in the 8th century, they are therefore worse, but I disagree. Wholeheartedly. When your kids get in a fight that you have to break up, you get a lot of fingerpointing as to which one started it, but in the end they both are in trouble by Dad. That is how I see this entire topic--two segments of God's children bickering until Dad gets home. Both in my mind are incredible guilty.
The Muslims weren't killed, or put in concentration camps. They were given the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving for North Africa. Those who pretended to convert and accepted baptism while actually remaining Muslim were indeed persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition was a) A State institution of the Spanish Crown, and b) Only allowed to investigate Christians. So a muslim who stayed Muslim could not be touched by them.Fighting back against the Nazis, no, the Dutch and Belgians would not be wrong at all. But after driving the Nazis out, if they went out and demanded they all give up their religious affiliations for theirs, if they systematically sought to wipe out all Germans living in their lands and used torture to get confessions out of them, if they rounded up all Germans and put them in concentration camps, then yes, I would think they are just as bad.
And that is basically what the Catholics did in Spain--they not only moved the Muslims off the peninsula, they used medieval torture to either convert the rest of kill them.
My point is that certain "Christians" may have killed Jews and others in history. Yes. And that was appalling. But this went against the tenets of Christianity. Even at the time, people condemned it and knew it was wrong. Under Islam, however, the prophet himself massacred tribes of Jews and Christians. Massacres were a regular instrument of state control under the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the genocide of the Armenians, and these acts are rarely apologised for because they do have a precedent in Islamic religion.As for "in terms of the overall population", I always find it disgusting when people say ONLY 2000 Jews were slaughtered in Geneva on a certain date or that ONLY 30,000 Jews were killed in a particular country in a particular year. I am sure you would find it offensive to say ONLY 3000 people died when the World Trade Center imploded, wouldn't you? I mean, using your own words, in terms of over-all population, the assaults were nasty but marginal, and this is borne out by the fact that 99.99% of the American population was not killed on 9/11.
I was not trying to avoid a point. It was just a stretch, bringing a topic like the Albigensian crusade into this. As I said, the Albigensian crusade is an issue complex enough to deserve a discussion on its own. The Albigensians had abandoned Christianity and had killed a papal legate. This was seen as initiating violence, peaceful methods of dealing with them having failed. A crusade was called, which rapidly developed into a civil war, with the King of France and Northern knights anxious to gain control of southern France. It proves that christians fought people who tried to take over lands traditionally belonging to Christianity, but it doesn't demonstrate Christians attacking Muslims unprovoked, or even in areas that had not originally been Christian.The last sentence I find inherently offensive because you are trying so hard to blow off what was a pretty valid point. The Albigensians were more or less isolated from the rest of Europe. It is through the virtue of ethnic cleaning and religious zeal that Christians sought to destroy them. Nothing else. The Albigensians did not wage any major campaign against Rome or Paris, they posed no threat to anyone except that they were a religious minority on a continent seeking to achieve religious purity. Their only fault was to exist.
I tend to believe that Christianity has had a beneficial effect on how nations and people have behaved through history. You may gasp at this and recall all the terrible crimes committed by Christians through the past two thousand years. However, the teachings of Jesus are what have allowed us to see these things as wrong, and have given people guidance and strength to fight against them, and to shout "hypocricy" when so-called Christians have done these things.But part of the reason why, in this day and age, people tend to reject Jesus is because of all the other garbage within Christianity. Jesus promoted peace and goodwill to one another, yet Christianity has used scripture from the OT and the Pauline letters to justify slavery and war. There are contradictions in this, glaring and bright, and these contradictions people see as hypocrisies and just shuck it all. I admit that for a while I too was disenchanted with the religion of Christ because what evangelists and churches and centuries of history were telling me seemed to have nothing to do with Jesus in and of Himself. Once I learned the hard way that I could and should seek my own path, I started reading the Gospels in a new light, separate from everything else associated with Him.
I can name many in Africa, and many in South and Central America that practiced human sacrafice.....The Africans have gone out on a limb to claim much that isn't theirs. The revisionists make out North America to be paradise before Columbus came, both out and out lies.Brimshack said:Could you please identify three cannibal societies, and explain just hown anyone here has put them up on a pedastal?
Depends what you mean by paradise.oldrooster said:I can name many in Africa, and many in South and Central America that practiced human sacrafice.....The Africans have gone out on a limb to claim much that isn't theirs. The revisionists make out North America to be paradise before Columbus came, both out and out lies.
oldrooster said:I can name many in Africa, and many in South and Central America that practiced human sacrafice.....The Africans have gone out on a limb to claim much that isn't theirs. The revisionists make out North America to be paradise before Columbus came, both out and out lies.
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