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Friday, April 6 

Too Much For The Comments

Ed, commenting on this post said this about Christianity.
First, I am with you on global warming... but I have to disagree that muslims pose a greater threat to our way of life than the religious right... while the muslims are just as happy killing us of by the multitudes, the christians won't be happy until we are all christians... which to me, I would rather be dead than part of a religious group that has killed MILLIONS more than muslims have.

And as far as the constitution is concerned, you are correct there is no hard and fast paragraph that says, "separation of church and state" but it is a guiding principle of our country. It should not be ignored. I don't care if my government leaders are muslim, christian, hindu, pagan, or hari krishna... they should NOT force their religious views on to the population and should not use their religion to substantiate their actions... it goes against the very tenet of governing a body free from religious influence...

So, i stand by my original argument that christians are worse for the american way of life than muslims.
My reply was getting too lengthly for the comments, so I'm posting it here.

Ed, first I have to accept your figure of "millions killed by Christians" as a fact, which I do not.

According to figures I could dig up, the three largest events of Christian murder were; the Crusades, which killed between 58,000 to 133,000, the Spanish Inquisition, which killed around 32,000, and there were approximately 30,000 witches killed. This brings the total to around 264,000 people killed by "Christianity", although I could argue that point all day. Even if we double that, we're only looking at half a million in all of history.

Meanwhile, over 150,000 Christians are killed world wide every year.

According to University of Hawaii political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel, the total number killed in all of human history is estimated to be about 284,638,000. Of that number, 151,491,000 were killed during the past 100 years.

Communism has killed over 110,000,000, or more than 1/3 of all people ever killed. If you add Nazi Germany and Nationalist China, the number goes up to 141,160,000. Thus, almost 50% of all killings in human history occurred in the last 100 years, and by atheists. There goes that John Lennon dream of utopia where we "imagine no religion".*

Meanwhile, between 1.2 - 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Muslims between 1915-1918, already more than killed by Christianity in all of history.

There were 2.5 million Hindus killed by Muslims in East Pakistan in the 1971 slaughter.

Do we even need to start counting how many were killed by Mohammad's army during the rise of Islam? How about how many Europeans were killed during the Ottoman Empire? How many thousands have been killed by terrorists in the last 30 years? How many Jews were killed by Muslims between 1900-1948 when they were expelled from Arab countries?

Christianity, if it has learned anything throughout history, cannot be spread through coercion. If anything, Christianity spreads much more rapidly when it is outlawed. The church in China dwarfs anything that the U.S. could muster, even with the mega-churches we see today. Loving your neighbor to death is a much better witness than the threat of beheading. Meanwhile, this country was founded mostly by Christians, and has spent most of the last 250 years as a free country precisely because of those Christian principles. If the American way of life were ever to be threatened by Christianity, it would have been much more likely 150 years ago, when everyone learned to read by reading the Bible, prayer was conducted in most classrooms in the country, and the only debate about freedom of religion was which denomination of Christian church you belonged to.

Islam is the single largest threat facing the world today. It will not stop until the entire world is in submission, or it has been beaten. People can complain all they want about the "threat" of Christianity, but one month under Sharia law and even the most far left, Berkley hippy would walk 100 miles to vote George W. back into office.

*I know that the Nazis weren't atheists, but we'll lump them in with the other two for the sake of making this easier to read

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Frank, first let me preface this comment with my utter respect for you as a person and someone who has convictions that are not easily swayed.

That said... Eh, the wonderful thing about the internet is that there are all sorts of statistics, opinions and ideas. Some have merit, some don't. Your math is what I would expect from someone who is both christian and a political conservative.

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/29468 also has numbers. Believable? Who knows. But they have figures that are not exactly painting a rosey picture of the good christian extending the hand of friendship. It was clearly written with an agenda. And we have to beware of statistics compiled by sources with an agenda.

As far as the crusades? During the Crusades (1095 until 1291) European Christians attacked and occupied this Holy land. They oppressed the Muslims, the local Christians and the Jews. These Crusaders killed over 200,000 innocent civilians, mostly non-christians (muslim, pagans, etc).

Spain became part of the Islamic world at the beginning of the eighth century. Under Muslims, Spain became the center of civilization. Although many local Spaniards embraced Islam, Christians and Jews were free in all aspects of their lives. The Muslims respected their religion and institutions. The result was the birth of the first true cosmopolitan culture in the West. As Christian Crusaders of Spain expelled Muslims, civilization that took centuries to build was destroyed. Muslims and Jews were either expelled or forced to convert to Christianity. Millions died as tolerance was replaced by the Spanish Inquisition. A suspected Muslim was to be killed for the smallest act resembling Islamic tradition - such as taking a bath on Friday.

Frank, we can't trust numbers that are compiled with an agenda. It can be argued that one side killed more i suppose, and perhaps I am wrong and christians are on the losing end of that particularly ugly stick. But the ideas you seem to express (and I may once again be misinterpreting), clearly define the problem in the world to day as one between religions and not of people with differing political ideology. There is nothing wrong with islam... there is something wrong with fascism though and whether the fascist wears a turban or carries a bible, we're the worse for it as a society.

And again, as it stands now, right now, here in the US... I stand a much greater chance of having my freedoms curtailed by a christian than I do from a muslim.

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