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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (8797)	3/16/2001 10:12:29 AM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

<<For every person who used religion as an excuse for self- aggrandizement, there were probably a hundred or more motivated to acts of charity, teaching the poor, running hospitals, opening orphanages, starting soup kitchens. >> You there endorsed a particular intuitive ratio of "goodness" versus its opposite -- though you have switched from religious "persons" to religious "establishments." Your statement that you consider evil acts associated with "religious establishments" "not worth much speculation" somehow doesn't surprise me. I myself do not dismiss such associations so casually. They speak. Religious anti-semitism "not nearly as virulent as the pseudo-scientific racialism that supported Nazi doctrine?" There were hundreds of thousands of Jews killed in pogroms organized by Christians in the years before Nazism flowered. The obvious point is that Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi racialism were lethally perfect for each other, and that Christian beliefs served not as a brake on the murderous lunacy of the Nazis, but, overall, as an accelerant. You do an interesting thing throughout your argument. You conveniently define the "pious" as those who behave in a way not now embarrassing to the religion (though they didn't stop the evil), and the impious as those who now embarrass it. If you'd asked the ones who killed, or participated in the killing of, the Jews, if they were Christians, they'd have said yes. And they had their Bibles to quote. Millions of Christians colluded in the murders. Hundreds hid Jews. <<Scripture acknowledged slavery, and tried to make it more humane. It did not cause such a widespread human practice.>> "Acknowledged" it? Acknowledgment = sanction, clearly, and has been used by Christians in that way. And you want "scripture" to get credit for trying "to make it more humane." Hilarious. Face it: Scripture sanctioned slavery and Jew-hatred.

To: Neocon who wrote (8797)	3/16/2001 10:17:40 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

P.S. And hey, they keep doing it, these Christians -- Apartheid in South Africa was explicitly justified by readings of the Bible as expounded in the Dutch Reformed Church, in effect the State Church of that regime. Once again, little by little, a tiny minority of communicants got a different message. Until very late in the game they were persecuted by their mother church. You simply can't cleanse a religion's history by defining everyone who didn't follow the wonderful Golden Rule as non-Christian, though I understand why you would want to.

To: Neocon who wrote (8797)	3/16/2001 10:36:02 AM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

Another P.S.: The conquest of the Americas is saturated with religious motivations at every level. In North America, it was the obdurate disinterest of the original inhabitants in converting to the Christian religion that led the religious spokesmodels of that period to conclude that they had no souls, therefore were demonic, and thus could be exterminated with a guiltless heart. Religious fantasies, in addition to lust for gain, guided Columbus, in his first essays at genocide, and they continued to play a commanding role among the enslavers and destroyers who conquered the Southern Hemisphere for Jesus. It is true that, late in the day, in tune with the awakening of humane values proceeding from the Enlightenment, groups within the master religion drew back from slavery (calling, for the most part, for its modification, not its abolition.) I'll tell you what's not worth speculating about: what percentage of this behavior was primarily religious, and what percentage was only secondarily religious, serving as rationalization. The reason it isn't, is that it doesn't really matter to the victims; and it was allowed; and try as you might, you can't "disappear" the association by defining all the bad guys, the vast numbers of them, as not what they thought they were. But now that I think of it, I'm sure there must have been many atrocities carried out for purely religious motives. For example, the bonfires of the sacred and irreplaceable codices of the Aztecs and other indigenes lit personally by the padres. That's just one that comes to mind.