PBS:Freud and his wishful thinking

[Buzz Dixon]

What about the Christian nation that put jews in death camps? What about all the other history of the world, where Christians killed more people and fought more than anyone else? What about the spanish inquisition?

Does the fact that all of these things happened have any relevance whatsoever to the truth or worthiness of Christianity or atheism? What exactly is the point of this diatribe?

(1) Nazi Germany was not a Christian nation. Yes, Germany had many Christian believers, but the Nazis themselves pretty much derided Christianity and had various mystical occult organizations such as the Thule society and were attempting to revive some form of ritualistic Nordic religion.
(2) The Communists were resposible for the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century, which puts them w-a-a-a-a-a-a-y at the top of the list of murderous ideologies. Last time I checked they were decidedly anti-Christian.
(3) Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!! Oops, sorry, started channeling Monty Python for a moment. The Spanish Inquisition was ineptly and greedily run, but it was nowhere near the horror that English propagandists made it out to be.

There's a book that just came out recently on the Office of the Inqquisition that debunks most of the myths surrounding it. I forget the title and I lost the article I'd downloaded on it when my disc crashed, but I remember these key points:

(A) No Inquisitor ever put anyone to death. The Catholic Church never had the authority to sentence anyone to death, nor has the Catholic Church ever advocated capital punishment.
(B) Local civil authorites, who derived their authority from what they perceived as the "divine" right of kings, did execute heretics, etc., since they viewed challenges to theological hegemony as tantamount to treason. Ditto witches; the Catholic church never ordered any executed, those were all the acts of civil authorities.
(C) If accused of heresy by a civil authority, many (if not most) of the accused tried to get the case transfered to the Office of the Inquisition. If the civil authorities found you guilty of heresy they would execute you, but the Office of the Inquisition would aloow you to repent and return to the church, thereby negating any charges the civil authorities might have against you.
(D) The Office of the Inqusition in general and the Spanish Inquisition in particular got slimed by the English during the period of the Spanish Armada. This was to both bolster the morale of the English citizenry and to weaken Spain's standing in the royal courts of Europe.

 

[Buzz Dixon]

Freud's #1 problem was that he was intellectually dishonest and/or lacked courage. He kept encountering female patients who claimed to have been molested by relatives and decided they must be hysterical and suffering from penis envy.

The thought that they might actually be suffering from molestation was anathema to him.

 

[radorth]

well, if atheists kill another couple of billion people maybe we could catch up with you christians.

but the point you are avoiding is pretty simple.

atheism is not a set of morals, but your bible does indeed have a set of morals that actually specifies murdering people for some pretty inane stuff* like working on the sabbath.

Not that we have any records of any numbers like atheist atrocities.

now, secular humanism has more of a moral code and if you could point to a single secular humanist that has committed genocide the way the christians did in the new world, by all means do so.

I'm sure Stalin thought he was a great humanist, fighting evil for the sake of his belioved brethren. And nobody doubts he was secular. "Secular humanist" is a late invention which virtually all secualr liberals apply to themselves at one point or another, so I suspect Stalin would have imagined himself as such.

Here's a thought: No Christian on record has ever even been angry with anyone. In fact you be angry and meet Christ's standards. So if you are going to use morals as the yardstick, then I can say there are less than 10 Christians in the world, you lose the argument by definition.

Being a Christian has nothing to do with morals. In fact only hopeless sinners can ever hope to be called Christians by Christ. Your definitions, and the meaning of them is of course chosen by you but some of us might beg to differ. You might as well say a moral and extant God would save only secular humanists because they are far more moral. But of course then all you would be proving is that you are far less gracious and forgiving than God. Right?

Rad

 

[Norseman]

Excuse me. Stalin and Mao, two atheists, killed, murdered, starved or worked to death more people than all the wars of all religious people in history- many hundreds of times those killed by medieval "Christians" who by the way were totally ignorant of the New Testament.

Just for ye inept at math: The population in medieval times was greatly less than in the time of Stalin and Mao. Even if christians back then had killed off the entire global population (theoretically of course, since if they did we wouldn't be chatting about this) they would have killed fewer people simply because there weren't enough people to kill. Similarily, if we spent a few billion dollars on executions yearly, about 2 centuries ago that would have been a hell of a lot more than it is today.

You might consider visiting http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5195/victims.html to get the total church kills and dates for each of them. Then if you get your hands on a population/time graph, you can map out a comparison between damage done by atheists and damage done by christians.