Damir: >all belief systems - certainly including theist ones - are >useful as meanst of control. materialism, communism, >nihilism - systems of beliefs generally associated with >atheists - are also great systems of control. I disagree with your "all" word that opens your paragraph, but the substance of that paragraph is right on IMO. I will word it another way..."ANY belief system that places requirements higher than than the individual on the individual becomes a great system of control." Be it communism or theism or rampant nationalism, this 'allegiance' to some higher power leads to ugly things. JB
So what. Thank you for correcting our grammatical errors; unfortunately the holy crusades still happened. What is your argument? Being a lawer you should understand the difference between literal meaning and general meaning. Who would be stupid enough, other than the catholics, to refer to a catholic encyclopedia for an accurate telling of history. The Catholic church can't even handle the prolific child molestation problem.
Man let us stick to the point and read what the other people write. I am not arguing what the motivation for the Crusades really was. The point is damir was arguing atrocities are commited for political reasons. AXE said the Catholics admited it was for Christendom. I pointed out that axe's quote supports damir. Everyone so far has either missed the point of the argument, missed the definition of christendom, mis represented my motivation.
Jem: >How could they justify that in light of Christs >teachings in the bible. Well, some believe in the Holy Trinity and that the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost actually act and believe as one in many a sense. With such a belief it is EASY to take the entire Word of God (bible) as a whole rather than just the few chapters in the middle which speak of the Son's life and earthly teachings. Taken in entirety from Genesis to Revelations that Trinity is a pretty bad ass, brutal and revengeful bunch. Perhaps that is how they justified it. JB
Sorry, I hadn't read damir's post. According to the histories which I've read, the crusades were fought under the premise of god is right, but there also were political motivations under the veil of righteousness that contributed to the crusading.
AGAIN I STATE: If we cant correctly claim that the CRUSADES were religiously motived, then there have been **NO** religiously motivated wars in the history of man kind. An obvious untruth. You can spin and twist all you like, but you cant ignore the obvious. All we need is LAWYERS like jem to tell us why OJ is innocent and why the Crusades were not religiously motivated...LAMOOOO peace axeman
Stalin and Mao killed huge amounts of people not because the people were religious. But even if they had killed those people because the people were religious, the amount killed doesn't compare to the amount killed during the last 20 centuries of killing under the name of god.
True.... compared to "all time", given that over 90% of the worlds population is religious, its a simple fact that the millions/billions slaughtered died at the hands of theists. But did you hear the latest about the Crusades??? Supposedly, they were not religiously motivated! LMAOOOO peace axeman
i'm beginning to understand why people around here dislike you so much: you are incapable of basic reading comprehension, never mind critical thinking. enjoy the rest of the day!
exactly. and the fact that atheism isn't on the list of suspects isn't because atheists are less brutal, it's because atheism is not a belief system. there are belief systems that incorporate atheism as a tenet - and many of them are exceptionally brutal - but atheism on its own is not sufficient to define a system.