The native Americans are one pretty good example.
Christian fundamentalists think they know better than you. And will kill anyone who refuses to become one of them.
Muslim fundamentalists KNOW they're better than you and will kill you because you aren't one of them.
Jewish fundamentalists don't want anything to do with anyone else, and are biding their time while the Christians and Muslims wipe each other out.
L'Chaim!
Well, that is fine, bide your time Doc, but what are you going to do about us Redneck Irish? We aren't going away.
I don't know if you're going anywhere, but you are just as likely to blow yourself up as the Muslim wack'os
Doc,you forgot the Hindus and the Buddhists, I don't know much about the Hindus, but the Buddhists just want to sit on their mountain top and be left the fuck alone. I imagine they and the jews will still be around when the rest of humanity has wiped themselves out.
from you Harry.
a religous fanatic with a bomb, or a drunk with a bomb? Sorry Harry, I just couldn't resist.
""Christian fundamentalists think they know better than you. And will kill anyone who refuses to become one of them.""
why don't you provide a couple of examples...
The native Americans are one pretty good example.
how so?
indians were not killed because they "failed to convert"
and most were k8illed by US calvary, not jesus freaks.
perhaps the horse was the predesessor to the ten speed...
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-- Modified on 11/2/2007 8:52:37 AM
starvation, exhaustion, etc - though the cavalry were the enforcers of this.
I agree, jesus didn't have a big role in killing injuns in norteamerica.
Now at the hands of the Spanish, the padres were the front line, ran the missions, and went hand in glove with the conquistadors.
But it's also worth noting that in the US, the injuns wound up on reservations, where their numbers today seem to exceed their numbers in the 18th & 19th centuries; and in fact, some of them are doing pretty well exploiting their legal niche that allows casinos. I would bet the average reservation income is well above the federal poverty levels.
OTOH, the Messicans shoved their injuns onto haciendas, where they pretty much languish today. The Messicans are kinda feudal social structure, overlaid with a couple superficial revolutions, marxist class resentment (with good cause), and some globalization.
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for some reason, many otherwise intelligent folks (xians included)can't differentiate between christ's teachings and "under the guise of"
is there any doubt the big box churchs of today are driven by "under the guise"?
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and they can profit massively though indirectly through controlling votes & viewpoints. Look at the big spaces that even the weakest startup churches lease, and think about the money involved, and the percentage of time they are used. This is BIG business.
Organized religion is an incredible interactive entertainment business that ties directly to politics. See for example if you can find sales figures on Tim De LaHaye's "Left Behind" series. Infuckingcredible.
IMHO, when faith depends on what the neighbors think, it's politics, not religion.
verdad...the further the church gets from the point of service, the greater likelihood of corruption.
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Jesus is big business, so is Allah etc. Some take profit in terms of $$$, others in power over the sheep. All profit in some way and few give a rats ass about the teachings of whatever deity they pretend exists.
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to compare themselves to, and hold out as prima facia evidence of that which they hope not to be true....
they are driven by fear,
and it's fear that drives the hate
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How do you hate something that doesn't exist?
ie, assumption without (reasonable) evidence. So a commie may act on irrational faith as much as any other religion.
So when you are talking to a person who is acting from irrational faith, you are wasting your breath.
OTOH, lots of people call themslves Party members, Baptists, or muslims just to fit in - the question is how much are they going to act as pragmatically, according to observed evidence, as an accountant.
Now if you get somebody who thinks they are being oppressed by a True Believer, it's common enough for them to kick back. The question there is how reasonable their perception is.
Most people really don't give a shit about religion. It's way outside their life, it's an acadmeic thing, they really do not guide their lives by any religion EVEN if their name is Jimmy Fucking Swaggart. Most people are Apatheists, ie really don't give a shit. They just use the religion thing as a way to beat people who aren't like them.
operating at the behest of other "jesus freaks"
In all fairness, the indians were killed off more for their land than for their resistance to chritianity, but it was a lot easier to kill "heathen savages" than to kill good "god fearing" christians.
i think you're overboard on the jesus angle, it was more of a landgrab. jmo
Yes it was a land grab, done by christians in the name of their lord.
If the indeginous population were white christians, the invading europeans would have found another excuse to steal their land, but the fact that they were not made it so much easier to claim they were civilizing the "godless savages".
us in the Mexican war.
What people never seem to understand is the powerful impulse to miscegenation. Every war we get into, the most predictable result is war brides, with the attendant race mongrelization and tons of resulting cute babes (for you dense fucks, I am advocating mongrelization here).
So for my money, we might have just stayed in mexico, fucked the locals, bought up all the beaches, and see how much ahead we would have been?
the American settlers were a mix of religious practices, and all did the same thing anyway. IOW, religion was there, but really collateral.
Land grabs: the native hunter-gatherers dealt with land as we do easements. Territories were collective with loose borders. So it wasn't much skin off their nose when a few settlers landed at Jamestown or Plymouth - conflicts only arose when the natives got pushed right off the land.
Likewise, the settlers saw this as open land, and didn't see the harm. Sure, regarding the natives as stone age heathen made it easier to justify. In fact, they were stone age. Heathen is a matter of opinion, I suppose. The Normans and Cromwell and Brits right up to the 80s certainly regarded the Irish as barbarian, and who am I to argue?
So what you have is 2 civilizations colliding, and one is using the resource more intensively, and is only a few years from machine guns - while the other didn't even have horses until the Spanish re-introduced them.
The result is pretty much as inevitable as gentrification in any burg, and while it was pretty messy, I don't know that it's useful to talk about ethics of it, any more than you want to talk about the ethics of hamburger. Shit happens, and we've really been a lesser offender until recently. I dunno how much we can say that after say Nisour Square events.
As an example, look what the Zulus did to the adjacent tribes - let alone the pygmies - before the Brits stopped them and superimposed their own regime. Look at any number of other methodical mass murders throughout history. Wounded Knee and indian reservations don't begin to compare to the Nazi or communist camps, IMO.
Pol Pot
Idi Amin
Slobodan Milosevic
Saddam Hussein
and others.... Man-kind is not. left to our own devices... quite often we see madmen rise to power - and that is the continual fear...
So - are we so bad.... we live in a society that at least tries to correct itself.... and is that so bad?
do you have an estimation as to how long we'll be hearing Zulu analogies....?
just asking
lol
South Africa is much more complex than most people realize.
The Dutch Boers were actually there about a century before the Zulus, who separated as a tribe only around 1700, a century before Shaka. The west coast was originally populated by the stone age pygmies & Hottentots, who were several notches down the food chain from the iron age bantu (including the zulu). And of course there were many Indians imported during the 19th century, after the Brits made their appearance.
So when you tell a Boer that he needs to make way for a Zulu because it's their land, you can see how he might get ruffled. Not only did they fight off Bantu, but also Brits, and they're some pretty mean SOBs.
But the Zulu did sort of fuck themselves in RSA because they were the top dogs among the Bantu, and ate 1st among the Bantu, and their leaders didn't want to rock the boat, and usually supported the apartheid govt against the ANC. Well, guess who's top dog now? South Africans tell me that at the street level, crime is incredibly high, but I suspect that's by western standards. Crime is also pretty damn high in Nairobi, and *anything* goes* in many African states. It's just that we assume a certain commercial level that can't function unless street crime stays down.
I suspect every society makes its own arrangements, and it's much easier to criticize than put ourselves in anybody else's shoes. Even here today, Americans make all sorts of distinctions on race (as many for as against) and most cultures just seem to assume racial distinctions - I've spoken to several East African refugees who credibly described serious discrimination in Sweden. And when you have a close correlation of any race with economic skills, well, you can see lots of baggage comes along.
And for the same reason, I'm reluctant to 2nd guess the way the Israelis handle the Pallies, because I'm not local, and I don't want to be. Nor do I want to make my neighbors' problems into mine, let along go around the world to find a fight. Shit, I can go down the street if I want a fight.
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armed with poison tipped trombones...
cunning,
those zulus.
1 - The underpinning belief of Christian fundamentalism holds that when the Messiah comes, 144,000 Jews, 12000 from each of the 12 tribes, will convert to christianity, with the remainder to be killed and burn forever in Hell.
Or something close to that.
2 - The Crusades - if this wasn't blatant Christian Fundamentalism at its worst, I don't know what was. How mahy millions of people were killed in the name of JEEEEEZUZZZ!!! ???
There's a couple examples. Want more?
but of course we're not dealing with rational people when we talk about "My God is better than your God".
Sheesh, supposedly grown people killing each other over whose fairy tale is true. The one thing that is for sure, since at most only one belief can be correct, either there is no true religion (my pick) or there are many billions of people who have picked the wrong one.
i was just making sure you were not maiking the mistake of defining the middle by describing the edges...like bigots do.
ie, all xians believe xyz, all muslims cutr off heads, all jews horde money,,,like that
take one Jewish kid... and all the bullys pick on him and beat him up...
Take on Arab kid... and he will kill you or beat you to a pulp...
But....
Fight the Israeli army? you loose....
Fight a Muslim army? you win....