Double standards

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Yet, I believe in the march of reform; that for me is the "real march" of history. There are many expressions of that reform. Nevertheless, Liberty is its ultimate expression. Recorded history is thousands of years old, yet there are people everywhere who still yearn for it - even as we speak. That is a personal viewpoint, but I am not alone in that belief.

 

Chandos,
if one frames it as a constant struggle to better oneself and our societies we'd find much more common ground. There are things that don't need to be reformed because they are worth being preserved, conserved. Reform is a two edged sword, in many senses it can be destructive - that is, you pay a price for the things you want to achieve with reform. The other thing is that an end of history takes for granted universal values that, while I do see them, I don't see universally shared. It appears to be a mostly western point of view, that's also what gives it that self-celebratory ring. I see people here in my quarter every day who refuse the march of reform, refuse our values, refuse our ways. I don't think they're alone in that view. There is a limit to what reform and education can achieve.

But we had that before I hope I have better lined it out here.

 

Ragusa - I believe that those things of which you speak can be framed within the context of Free Will: That which we choose as "better," is because it is a choice that we make of our own free wills; anything else is oppression and tyranny - the enemies of reform and freedom. Still I believe that we have much common ground, since we searching for that which makes us "better" and in that, we can agree that that which we are seeking is on more than just one level. But the choices must still be our own, whether we choose that which works well, or we end up making a mess of it.

 

AMaster, care to expand on that comment? How, exactly, do you believe my 'red glasses' have colored things? Are you criticizing my view of the early Church, or something else?

Chandos, the problem I see with that is two-fold. One, people often choose easier over better, and two, how many people can really agree on either? Easier for me is not likely to be either easier or better for you, and better for me is hit or miss at best.

 

Whether the Church--or later, the churches--were driving things, there were no shortage of Christians wrapping themselves in the Shroud of Turin and committing genocide. Just for starters. The history of Christian peoples is, I'm fairly confident, more blood-soaked than the history of Islamic peoples. Perhaps only because the Christians were the ones who developed industrialized slaughter--er, warfare--but even so.

 

NOG - According to my premise, which focuses on history as essentially the development of the individual, more Freedom is "better" than less. Most anything that increases the individual's ability to master his/her on destiny is "better." But the more freedom and choices we have means the more we have to rely upon what Ragusa mentions: education, knowledge, reason, etc. Otherwise it can be argued that the all the movement towards freedom is meaningless, since it doesn't really improve upon our current condition, or our institutions (which is what, I think, Ragusa is arguing).

 

Ok, for one thing, I never said that Christianity's whole history was free of violence. Far from it, I admitted that it began to increase rapidly when Christianity was accepted as the official religion of the Roman Emperor. I said the beginnings of Christianity were free of the preachings of violence and hatred. Further more, if you believe Christianity invented warfare, or even industrialized warfare, then you're delusional.

Chandos, I'm just looking at history and coming up with an alternate theory. As I see it, history shows us that religions (or at least Abrahamic religions) gaining freedom from persecution leads to a whole slew of internal problems and personal failing in leadership.

 

A: I suppose I did misunderstand your point. My mistake.
B: However, I don't see how you can argue that Christian nations--that is, nations wherein the dominant religion is Christianity--did not develop industrialized warfare. Industrialization occurred in the West. Industrialized warfare came hand-in-hand with industrialization. The West was Christian. Ergo...

 

Ergo a singular society in which Christianity was the dominant religion, but no longer a major driving force in the majority of the nations involved applied new technology to existing principles of warfare. I think it's pretty safe to say that if Islam had conquered Europe, or if the resources and ideas that led to industrialization had been in the Far East instead of Europe and the Medeterranian, industialized warfare would have developed along very similar lines. In other words, Christianity didn't 'invent' industrialized warfare (if you can even call it an invention), humanity did.

Honestly, I think industrialized warfare as a seperate idea from warfare is about as ridiculous as writing on papyrus as a seperate invention from writing.

 

Aye, There's the rub. There is a difference between dominant religion and State Religion. Dominant just means the majority of the people are Christian. State religion means that Christian laws are enforced.

 

Which every nation that developed industrialized warfare was and had. This will probably come as a shock to you Gnarff seeing as all Europeans must be godless commies (and thank hmm, well, god many of us are) but as I mentioned in another threat it was less than a decade ago that the State and Church separated in Sweden and in many European countries it has yet to do so. My point is, that it is more or less just the last 100 years that Christianity has lost influence and even at the advent of WW2 the prime participants were Christian countries, I am going out on a limb and guessing they all had a state church. Sure they were no theocracies but neither did they have a strong tradition of separation of church and state like the US. Europe has imported that separation from the US, not the other way around.

As for the double standards, I guess people see what they want to see.

 

If I remember, Russia had forcibly seperated Church and State after WWI. I wouldn't classify Nazi Germany as Christian either.

 

Nazism was thoroughly pagan. In it's conduct it was not an expression of Christianity but of cold, calculating modernity.

 

I would also like to point out that there is a huge difference between State Religion and a Religiously Driven State. If you look back in the middle ages, you can see what a religiously driven state looks like, with religious beliefs forming many of the governmental policies, with the Pope weilding a massive amount of international authority. At times, the Pope could actually command kings! Even then, though, if you look at the actions, you can see that many of them only reflect an increadibly twisted interpretation of the Bible. In that light, I think it's poor taste to blame Christianity. It's like blaming the Russians for Stalin, or the Jews for Hitler (he was half Jew, after all).

 

More than poor taste, it is historically and logically wrong and utter nonsense.

 

Hitler was most certainly not half Jewish! I completely agree with Rags.

 

For once I didn't intend to blame Christianity and religion. I only intended to point out that most of Europe's countries had a state religion during the World Wars and also that there were not far away from having all other religions banned and persecuted. There was a reason so many people left to the New World after all (there were many but it was a pretty big one).

 

Joacqin, what exactly do you consider the first appearance of industrialized warfare, because I generally think the US played a sizable role in its development.

 

Industrialization, combined with levee en masse, nationalism, and a few other factors, changed warfare. At least in the west. Prior to those developments, warfare was typically significantly more limited in scope.

Compare nearly any western war from the French Revolution on to nearly any western war prior to the FR. There absolutely was a significant change in the scale and intensity of warfare. Yeah, shock battles go back to the Greeks, if not earlier. Shock battle combined with mass production, mass conscription, and mass war? That was new. Even the Romans didn't do that (well, much).

Which, I apparently didn't make clear, was probably a significant factor in Christianity having a higher body count than Islam.

Nonetheless, Christianity almost certainly does have a higher body count than Islam. Moreover, it is simply incorrect to assert that religion--particularly Christianity--was no longer a major factor in western societies from the French Revolution on.