There are thousands and thousands and thousands of radical Muslims and I can't think of many Radical Christians.. Eric Rudolph comes to mind .. Ted Kozynski wasn't a Christian but he was a radical Godless lefty.. Tim McVeigh wasn't a Christian but he was a pshycho.

there's a lot of one, and not a lot of the other.

Like, if you had a lot of apples in one box, and not many in the other, the apples in one box would be cubes, and in the other, they would be roundies, all because of the boxes, right?!  

Just like, having a lot of brains, instead of having almost no brains at all.

All you have to do to find radical Christians is look down a few threads to find the one about the Christian nut jobs at the Westboro Baptist Church and they're not alone.  BTW, McVeigh was a Christian; he was a Catholic.

Some people are just able to use what brains they have..and some other people thing round is square.
To answer your question about the apples all of them would be roundies..

Tp put it a perspective you might understand,,,Say someone owns two warehouses full of apples all of them close to round but from different farms..One warehouse of apples picked up a fungus from somewhere and it was contaminating the other apples quickly...
The other warehouse also had a fungus problem but only about one apple out of every ten thousand bushels was bad .
To keep from losing all the apples in the first warehouse the company manager sends a team of pickers in to go through all the apples and discard all the rotten apples.
The manager sends the second warehouse bushels of apples out on delivery trucks as it would be very difficult to find a few bad apples in thousands of bushels.

When I think of radical Christians I am thinking of destructive radicals not lefty radical Christians like the Westboro church...lets not get off the subject of chopping off heads radical Muslims and the comparison to radical Christians .. I can only scoff at your meritless denials.

but this entire fucking country was built by a buch of christians who wiped out the indegenous population in the name of their christian god.

Don't we have short memories? It's not just this country, our entire hemisphere was colonized by invading christians who wiped out millions of heathen savages, and forced them to accept christ at the point of a gun. If that's considered main stream? I'd hate to see what you consider radical.

I would argue historically the number of deaths by radical christians is FAR greater than the number of deaths caused by muslims.


Christians and christianity is the reason the world is in the shape it is now.  You can thank them for this.

IEDs might..

Yeah, but it's those christian crusaders and the imperialistic doctrines of christian nations that have led us to this point.

We have armed those muslims to the teeth.  We shouldn't be surprised this is happening.  Our good christian leaders caused it.  

I also don't understand the holier than thou attitude people in this country have.  So our society has evovled faster towards civility, wow, we did it by killing every Indian we could find.  If the muslims had done what christians did, we'd be the idiots attacking their way of life.

you completely dismiss the geoploitical necessity of counterbalancing the USSR/China.

Granted, to some extent the ME has been the man in the middle but to the same extent, they've played it that way.

do you deny an iran, china, ussr, axis?

what excatly do you think Afghanastan 1980 was all about?

we suspect that religion has been an ex post facto rationalization for doing what they were going to anyway.

Think of it as introducing a culture that exploits the available resources more productively.

You might make a case that the organized church and state were joined at the head in Latin America.  Not so much in north america, where religious shit stayed farther away from the direct exercise of political power.  Well, so far.

Until the mid 19th century,  western weaponry wasn't that much more clearly superior to native weaponry.  It was the social organization that made the Anglo's march so relentless.

religion - it's whether that ideology controls their view of the world and appropriate actions.

Regardless of religion, many politicians are basically bean-counters, ie, they look at a situation, rather than trusting in some sort of faith.  I would describe the Chinese cultural revolution as such an ideological or religious exercise, and it got the usual results - a fucking mess.

If you consider the wackos from Westboro to be liberals then you really need some professional help.

consider Fred Phelps a Radical Christian only goes to show how far over the deep end you are.

is not so much their ideology, as their economic circumstances.

Of course all this generalizing BS is useless anyway, because the real question is the way and extent the ideology influences the politics more than economics does (ie a secular view) and that changes from moment to moment in every different location.  

IOW, the difference between Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden is that Robertson lives in a world where money, lawyers and advertising are the weapons of choice, while bin laden lives in a world where WMDs are the weapons of choice.  Both are prone to make their choices by pulling hairs out of their asses, while the bill-payers are almost always more pragmatic.

My suspicion is that to the degree the west tries to fight on the terrorist's battlefield, we will get our ass handed to us, and it would be smarter to choose our own battlefield.  I am of a mixed mind whether the GOP understands this and uses it to control the country, or is just plain fucking stupid as a box of rocks.  Ironically, it can be both.

so much as he's just delusional.  He's got various & assorted hallucinations ricocheting around in there.

blow them into glowing dust!

Pretty cool, eh?

Not really true. The 9/11 hijackers were all educated and from well to do families while Bin Laden came from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia.

American settlers didn't set out to kill every Indian could find.  

The settlers & natives were organized differently & used & organized the land & resources differently.   Facially, it was easy to act as if there was room for both, but of course there were conflicts, and when the shooting started, guess who was around when the smoke cleared?  Not that a musket is a better weapon in the forest than a bow, but that the underlying social order was more productive & persistent.  It was easy for settlers to conceive & build fortifications, the natives couldn't.

More natives were displaced by resource denial (ie settling land, killing buffalo) than by outright killing.

And they didn't do it in the name of a church.  They did it to settle a land they regarded as largely unused, and were just using more efficiently.  Yeah, there were different patterns other places, where church missions were the outposts of eg the Spanish.

If you're a stone age hunter-gatherer encountering an agricultural civilization on the verge of industrialization, you better get with the program.  Ma Nature doesn't care about ethics - you snooze, you lose.

It's really pointless to complain about the ethics of one civilization displacing another - it's always happened, and it will continue.  

We are seeing it today, in the west vs. the facially islamic 3rd world.  It would happen faster and more peaceably if the Bush constituency had more faith in commerce and accounting, and weren't so easily frightened.

On reflection, let me add about why the Bush approach works in domestic politics:  what do you do when your GF panics?  You indulge her, because it's the easiest way to solve the problem.  After a while, she learns that panic is the easiest way to get her way.   While the panic of the Bush constituency may be real, there are leaders who understand this is the best way to manipulate and even parasitize the nation, eg thru cheating ass defense contracts feeding their contributors, and sucking off the taxpayers and rubes.  

-- Modified on 11/2/2007 7:13:48 AM

as I see it, their skills background and origin have almost nothing to do with the culture and society they operate in.

Pat Robertson uses the media and tools of business, not because of his ethics, but because it works best in his environment.  Bin laden uses bombs because that works best for his purposes, in his environment.  

Or so he thinks.  IMHO, Bush's willingness to engage him on his battlefield is only a temporary victory for bin Laden.  In the longer term, it seems to me that the western pattern will prevail simply because of economics.

numbers, ie quantity.   You have not explained how the quantity affects the quality - normally people presume it doesn't.

To say nothing of the fact that you haven't supported your assertion except to say that you "know" thousands of muslims (prove that please) but no Xtians - without so much as defining either.  How do you know any of this?  You're making broad and even contradictory assumptions, and just expecting everybody is going to agree.

So your assertion isn't serious enough to respond except by mockery.   Sorry.

I look and look and yet is hard to find Christians in this day and age going around chopping off heads and killing women and children for the Chritian cause..Its 2007 not 15 16 17 or 1800..The Christian  part of the World seems to be in fairly good shape compared to the rest of the World..

How about murdering doctors in the name of saving life? Or do you consider that some kind of warped justice? I don't recall seeing anyone but over the top christian nut jobs blowing up abortion clinics.

"numbers, ie quantity.   You have not explained how the quantity affects the quality - normally people presume it doesn't.

To say nothing of the fact that you haven't supported your assertion except to say that you "know" thousands of muslims (prove that please) but no Xtians - without so much as defining either.  How do you know any of this?  You're making broad and even contradictory assumptions, and just expecting everybody is going to agree.

So your assertion isn't serious enough to respond except by mockery.   Sorry."


 Sorry just got back on this thread.. Quantity does affect the quality.People assume a lot of things that are not true just because someone told them so.Look back in history and see how many times the scholars of the times were WRONG..How do I know there are not many Christains chopping off heads or killing innocents? Because it would be big news if they were..sure you can find a Handful of nut cases like Eric Rudolph who call themselves Christians but the Erics are very rare..Ok lets take just the Taliban in Afghanistan or the stonings of women in Iran as your numbers game...google it yourself and if you admit you can't find it I will give you some links..I don't like to post links because it makes me feel like I am talking to stupid people and a lot of links are not true.. With a little patience you too are capable of finding the truth on your own..
 

reality has a well known liberal bias, and you ain't taking any chances.

I know, if I was half drunk & all ignorant, I might be able to pull shit right out of my ass just like you.   But I'm not and I can't.  Sorry.