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Store owner allegedly killed over hanging Pride flag in Lake Arrowhead (California) - Shooter killed by police
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<blockquote data-quote="dzheremi" data-source="post: 77346882" data-attributes="member: 357536"><p>The issue with making negative arguments from numbers is that there will always be something that you want societies to be open to that is just as unpopular around the world as the thing that you are arguing is too numerically insignificant to warrant mention in your own society. For instance, there are approximately 40 countries in the world today (you can see the list and order it by % of adherents <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_by_country" target="_blank">at Wiki</a>) where adherents of Protestant Christianity make up less than 1% of the total population. Would it therefore be appropriate, in those cases, for someone to say "The idea that people in a given society should be exposed to Christianity when so few in it practice my preferred form is transparently nonsensical?", or does that suddenly seem like not such a great argument to make? [NB: Including those that are at 1% even would add 8 or 9 more countries to the list: Bulgaria, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mali, Qatar, Spain, Vietnam, and potentially Yemen ("approximately 1%")].</p><p></p><p>Besides, arguing that there are too few people in category X to warrant other people knowing about them seems like a stance you shouldn't want to take when your own group is rapidly falling in number. I'm sure most of the people who are still Christians in places like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Turkey and elsewhere descend from people who likely could not have foreseen their communities being at such low levels as they are today relative to the majority religion of those areas. Sometimes the collapse is fairly swift and complete due to various catastrophes (e.g., Christianity in Yemen was snuffed out not by the Muslims, but largely by pre-Islamic Himyarites, who had converted from Semitic polytheism to Judaism by the last decade of the 4th century), while at other times it takes centuries longer than we usually imagine it did (e.g., according to the 12th century list of Syriac dioceses maintained by HH Michael Rabo/Michael the Syrian, there were native Christians in what is now Afghanistan until his day, with the Syriac Orthodox dioceses of Herat and Aprah/Farah lasting until the 9th century, when the people embraced Nestorianism, which was always numerically much stronger in the Persian Empire than Orthodoxy was; the very last Christians of any kind to live natively in Afghanistan were apparently a small community of Armenian merchants present there in approximately the 17th century; just as a reminder, Afghanistan's Islamicization took place in fits and starts from the original Arab Muslim conquests of Sassanid Persia in the 640s until the 12th century, under the Ghaznavids). Either way, it does happen, since Christianity was not exactly designed to make the world love it.</p><p></p><p>It was not so long ago on the historical timeline of a 2,000 year old religion that 0% of what is now the United States was Christian. It's not like it's somehow not possible that things could return to that state of affairs, and when/if that happens, will pointing out that people 'were gay' around children somehow do anything to change that?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="dzheremi, post: 77346882, member: 357536"] The issue with making negative arguments from numbers is that there will always be something that you want societies to be open to that is just as unpopular around the world as the thing that you are arguing is too numerically insignificant to warrant mention in your own society. For instance, there are approximately 40 countries in the world today (you can see the list and order it by % of adherents [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_by_country']at Wiki[/URL]) where adherents of Protestant Christianity make up less than 1% of the total population. Would it therefore be appropriate, in those cases, for someone to say "The idea that people in a given society should be exposed to Christianity when so few in it practice my preferred form is transparently nonsensical?", or does that suddenly seem like not such a great argument to make? [NB: Including those that are at 1% even would add 8 or 9 more countries to the list: Bulgaria, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mali, Qatar, Spain, Vietnam, and potentially Yemen ("approximately 1%")]. Besides, arguing that there are too few people in category X to warrant other people knowing about them seems like a stance you shouldn't want to take when your own group is rapidly falling in number. I'm sure most of the people who are still Christians in places like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Turkey and elsewhere descend from people who likely could not have foreseen their communities being at such low levels as they are today relative to the majority religion of those areas. Sometimes the collapse is fairly swift and complete due to various catastrophes (e.g., Christianity in Yemen was snuffed out not by the Muslims, but largely by pre-Islamic Himyarites, who had converted from Semitic polytheism to Judaism by the last decade of the 4th century), while at other times it takes centuries longer than we usually imagine it did (e.g., according to the 12th century list of Syriac dioceses maintained by HH Michael Rabo/Michael the Syrian, there were native Christians in what is now Afghanistan until his day, with the Syriac Orthodox dioceses of Herat and Aprah/Farah lasting until the 9th century, when the people embraced Nestorianism, which was always numerically much stronger in the Persian Empire than Orthodoxy was; the very last Christians of any kind to live natively in Afghanistan were apparently a small community of Armenian merchants present there in approximately the 17th century; just as a reminder, Afghanistan's Islamicization took place in fits and starts from the original Arab Muslim conquests of Sassanid Persia in the 640s until the 12th century, under the Ghaznavids). Either way, it does happen, since Christianity was not exactly designed to make the world love it. It was not so long ago on the historical timeline of a 2,000 year old religion that 0% of what is now the United States was Christian. It's not like it's somehow not possible that things could return to that state of affairs, and when/if that happens, will pointing out that people 'were gay' around children somehow do anything to change that? [/QUOTE]
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