Lesse if I got this right. Some AC meanders in and out of childhood fantasies involving flying creatures (O Valium, my Valium...), spews pseudo-random rants about vote-counting and influence-peddling, concludes his message with a double obscenity, all the while never once straying within a light-year of the actual topic, and then gets a +5 Insightful??
OK, that's it. No more on-topic posts for me. Now I know where the real karma lies.
OK. Let's cut right to the chase, shall we? You said:
The fact that he was Catholic means that his church had been teaching him for years that the Jews were evil.
and
Uh, dude? Being a racist doesn't mean you're not a religious bigot. Hitler was both.
and
Catholicism was one of the main instigators of the attempted extermination of the Jews.
and
they [the Jews] were *singled out because of their religion*
The fact that there is no evidence to support your theories normally would be fatal enough for your arguments. But you have a much bigger problem: Hitler's own words stand against you. In Mein Kampf Hitler lays out in great detail the nature of the "Jewish problem" and his solution, and also provides a brief autobiographical sketch of the development of his own ideas. Regarding this second point, in chapter three of Mein Kampf, entitled "Political Reflections Arising Out of My Sojourn in Vienna", Hitler discusses in some detail the experiences which shaped his attitudes, particularly vis a vis Jews, which he summarizes as follows:
There, in Vienna, stark reality taught me the truths that now form the fundamental principles of the Party which within the course of five years has grown from modest beginnings to a great mass movement. I do not know what my attitude towards Jewry, Social-Democracy, or rather Marxism in general, to the social problem, etc., would be to-day if I had not acquired a stock of personal beliefs at such an early age, by dint of hard study and under the duress of Fate.
Interestingly one looks high and low in vain for any mention of Catholic (or even religious) influence on that "stock of personal beliefs" Hitler has been describing. To the contrary, when Hitler does occasionally discuss the Catholic Church, he sees it exclusively in political terms, as an institution to be exploited.
Regarding the first point, in all his extensive discussions of the Jews, Hitler almost always views them in exclusively racial terms. The few times he does mention Jewish religion, it is only to denounce it as a subterfuge, a camouflage smoke screen to mask the Jew's true goal. Again, from chapter three:
Thus the Jew has at all times lived in States that have belonged to other races and within the organization of those States he had formed a State of his own, which is, however, hidden behind the mask of a 'religious community'... He can live among other nations and States only as long as he succeeds in persuading them that the Jews are not a distinct people but the representatives of a religious faith who thus constitute a 'religious community',though this be of a peculiar character.
As a matter of fact, however, this is the first of his great falsehoods.
In his discussions of the Christian-Socialist
movement, Hitler had this to say:
The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles. The reason for this mistake gave rise to the second error also.
In the discussion which follows, Hitler makes clear that he believes the great mistake of the Christian-Socialist movement was its reliance on a religiously-motivated anti-Semitism. He then describes why he believed such an approach was doomed to failure:
It was obvious, however, that this kind of anti-Semitism did not upset the Jews very much, simply because it had a purely religious foundation. If the worst came to the worst a few drops of baptismal water would settle the matter, hereupon the Jew could still carry on his business safely and at the same time retain his Jewish nationality.
I.e., to escape religious persecution was simply a matter of popping into the local Church and getting oneself baptized as a Christian. Then, under the guise of this "conversion" the Jew was free to carry on his business while remain a Jew racially.
Far from being religiously anti-Semitic as you claim, Hitler specifically and in the strongest terms denounced religious anti-Semitism, calling it "superficial", "narrow-minded", "shilly-shally", and "ineffective". It was, Hitler said,
anti-Semitic only in outward appearance. And this was worse than if it had made no pretences at all to anti-Semitism; for the pretence gave rise to a false sense of security among people who believed that the enemy had been taken by the ears; but, as a matter of fact, the people themselves were being led by the nose.
The Jew readily adjusted himself to this form of anti-Semitism and found its continuance more profitable to him than its abolition would be.
In contrast to the Christian-Socialist movement stood the other "great" movement of the day, the Pan-German Party. Whereas the Christian-Socialists had correctly grasped the need for a nationalist identity, and yet erred in their religious approach to anti-Semitism, in contrast, Hitler assessed the Pan-German Party in this way:
Its anti-Jewish policy, however, was grounded on a correct perception of the significance of the racial problem and not on religious principles. But it was mistaken in its assessment of facts and adopted the wrong tactics when it made war against one of the religious denominations. [emphasis mine]
Herein, then, lay the bedrock of Hitler's nationalist movement: a fusing of Christian-Socialist nationalism with Pan-German racial anti-Semitism.
[re: Two world wars vs. the Crusades] Congratulations on one of the most impressive pieces of intellectual dishonesty I've seen lately!... military and civilian casualties from all sides... [vs] ONLY military casualties from ONE side of the war. Since I can't find any information on civilian casualties during the Crusades
And you won't, for two probable reasons: first, military casualties are hard enough to estimate, given the meager historical data available to us. Trying to guess civilian numbers would be an exercise in futile speculation. And second because, in all likelihood, civilian casualties were insignificant compared to the military toll. It wasn't until the era of modern warfare that war-waging began to take a significant toll on civilian populations. Thus, even if we had civilian numbers for the Crusades, they're not likely to significantly impact the numbers we've been bandying about.
let's compare military casualties. [WWI/II: 26.5 million; Crusades: 900,000] ? not even CLOSE to your alleged "couple orders of magnitude."
You're right. If we go with your numbers it comes out to more like "an order of magnitude times 3" (is that the same as saying "1.3 orders of magnitude"?). What was I thinking?!
[re: Death by Torture: Inquisitorial minds want to know. Estimates] ranged between 20 and 68 million. (Highball estimate was on a fundie christian website, incidentally. So you can skip your beloved "athiest fanatic" accusations on this one.)
In fact, I've seen estimates as high as 95 million. But fanaticism is fanaticism, be it atheist or Protestant fundamentalist (who, in case you aren't aware, are amongst the most rabid of all anti-Catholics). Either way, you can't mean you seriously give credence to any numbers that not only claim a death-by-Inquisition rate approaching four times that of two world wars combined, but actually exceed the total combined populations of all countries in which the inquisitions were active.
There were, in fact, three separate "inquisitions". The first, established in 1184 in southern France as a response to the Catharist heresy, was known as the Medieval Inquisition; it was phased out as Catharism disappeared. Quite separate was the Roman Inquisition, begun in 1542. It was the least active and most benign of the three variations. Separate again was the famed Spanish Inquisition, started in 1478 (or, as I had already noted, 1480, depending on which source you go with), a state institution used to identify conversos -- Jews and Moors (Muslims) who falsely "converted" to Christianity and secretly practiced their former religion. Its job was also, and more importantly, to clear the good name of many people who were falsely accused as being It was the Spanish Inquisition that had the worst record.
The History Channel occasionally re-airs a 1994 BBC/A&E production called "The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition", which takes a fresh and objective look at the most famous various inquisitions. The BBC production notes that documentary evidence exists for only between 3,000 and 5,000 deaths during the 350- (not 250- as I had previously claimed) year history of the Inquisition. While it is all but certain that more than that died at the hands of the Inquisition, any attempts to fix a number are pure speculation.
Nice little ad hominem attack there. And just because it's you're tired of hearing it doesn't make it false.
"Ad hominem" means "to the man" -- attacking the messenger instead of the message, which I did not do. You are right, however, that just saying it's tired doesn't make it so. Which is why I went on to explain in great detail why it was false.
simply having an atheist instigate it is not enough.... Hitler was Catholic
Whoa. Let's leave the goalposts in one place, shall we? We can't blame atheism for Stalin just because Stalin was atheist; however, World War II was all the pope's fault just because Hitler was Catholic. Yup -- works for me. Not.
the Holocaust had its roots in the 1500 year history of persecution of and hatred towards the Jews by the Christians.
The problem with your little theory is that half the victims of the Holocaust were non-Jews -- and mostly Catholic. In Poland alone three million Catholics were exterminated under the Nazi regime from September, 1939 through the end of the war. For nearly the first two years of its existence, Auschwitz was home exclusively to non-Jews (the first Jew died at Auswchitz in 1942 -- 21 months after it began operation); ultimately, more than 100,000 non-Jews were exterminated at Auswchitz alone.
It is true that nearly six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. It is equally true that more than five million non-Jews lost their lives. The man who, on August 22, 1939, mustered his stormtroopers to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent" was a racist, not a religious bigot.
As far as causation, I mean people who were killed in the name of religion, or whose deaths were a result of religious teachings
Well, which is it? "Killed in the name of religion" is a fairly clear target, but "a result of religious teachings" is way too self-servingly ambiguous to be of practical use, as you proceed to demonstrate.
The two world wars put together still killed less people than the various Crusades did, IIRC.
Sorry, but YDNRC (You Do Not Recall Correctly).
Or, rather, you do not seem to recall at all, at least to judge by the complete lack of effort you make to back up your claims with anything resembling fact or figure.
Numbers for the two world wars are easy enough to come by: the Great War, 8.5 million military and perhaps 6 million civilian; the Second, 55 million; if you throw in the 26 million who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic (which I'm sure you'll think of some way to blame on religion) that swept the world in the aftermath of WWI, the total stands in the vicinity 96 million.
As for the Crusades, numbers are nearly impossible to guess, but the great British historian Wertham estimates the casualties at approximately 1 million. Pitirim Sorokin, on the other hand, estimated that Europeans lost some 435,000 men on all battlefields between 900 and 1450.
Even if we accept Wertham's higher numbers for the Crusades, still the two world wars did not simply kill more people than the Crusades, they exceeded the Crusades by nearly two full orders of magnitude. In fact, while both world wars made Matthew White's list (see here) of "(Possibly) The Ten Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other" (at #8 and #1, respectively), the Crusades aren't even on the scope.
Care to try again?
And as to the "Inquisition", if we presume you mean the Spanish Inquisition (which is the one most of those who don't know any better have in mind), Juan Antonio Llorente, General Secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, estimated that 31,912 people were executed between 1480-1808. Historian Will Durant, on the other hand, lends his weight to much lower numbers, in the vicinity of 2,000 burned between 1480 and 1504, and another 2,000 between 1504 and 1758, for a total of 4,000 burnings during the 254-year span of the Spanish Inquisition, or a rate of less than two a month. I'd be willing to bet more people died from lightning strikes during that same period than from inquisitorial persecutions.
You might also want to more closely examine the rest of White's top ten list (see link, above); of the ten worst atrocities humans have ever committed, according to White, only one (the last one, in fact) could be considered religiously motivated. Stalin alone beats the Thirty Years' War by nearly 3-to-1.
And how many of those deaths was religion a contributing cause of?
I begin to wonder if you even know the meaning of the word "cause".
How many people have died because of religious opposition to research into the treatment of various STDs? How many people died of plagues in Europe because of the Church suppression of knowledge?... How much of the famine over the years has been due to religious opposition to birth control, and encouragement of out-of-control breeding?
Yes, "how many" and "how much", indeed. Tell you what -- when you can provide me with something more than the idle machinations of an overactive imagination, we'll talk. Until then, all you've managed to do is bandy about some wild, half-baked speculations without attempting even a modicum of factual support. As you said yourself, simply saying something don't make it true.
Since it is (or was) impossible to purchase a PC in the US w/o a Microsoft operating system, should not the mere presence of a machine on a corporate desktop be sufficient proof of purchase?
If my company purchases 500 Compaqs -- complete with mandatory MS OS -- then if Microsoft is worried it's not getting its money, it should be auditing Compaq, not me. Put another way, if Microsoft didn't get its greenbacks, it's Compaq's error; why should I have to pay?
A couple of years back I worked for a consulting firm at a large (5000+ seat) customer site, where we were responsible for installation and upgrade of PCs corporation wide. All PCs were on a three-year depreciation rollover, which means the corporation was buying nearly 1700 replacement PCs every year. Every machine came complete with an MS license, at about 50 bucks a pop.
The kicker is that fully one third of the corporation ran OS/2 -- which means the corporation was paying for nearly 600 MS licenses a year it didn't use.
I think we should have demanded to audit Microsoft.
And then two years ago MS had the gall to accuse us of license violations. And worse, they wanted license accounting not just for the more than 5000 current machines, but for all the machines the corp. had purchased over the last seven years -- all the way back to Win3x days -- including machines which had long ago become landfill fodder. Surprisingly, we were actually able to document 70% compliance; not surprisingly, MS then demanded payment for the other 30% (at then-current prices, of course).
Also not surprisingly, we were neither allowed refunds on those 600 unused licenses per year, nor were we allowed to apply them to the deficit.
Religion has caused more deaths than anything else in the entire history of the world.
Any chance you've got an American Atheists card stuffed in your back pocket somewhere? 'cause you spout the party line pretty good. But this line was tired when Ms. O'Hair (wherever she's got to) started spouting it thirty years ago. It's just as meaningless today.
First, of course, is the problem of definition. What do you mean by "religion"? Just the "organized" religions? Any quasi-religious belief system? Throw in theosophy, Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand? And what do you mean by "caused"? Direct causation? Contributing factor? Or just "hanging about in the general vicinity"? And what do you mean by "anything else"? Do you really mean anything else?!
In the twentieth century alone, one might argue that Stalinism (which, last I checked was atheist) has been the one of the leading causes of violent death -- Stalin's purges alone account for at least 20 million bodies, though no one really knows for sure. Throw in Hitler's six million Jews (plus an equal number of other "undesirables"), and the all and sundry other deaths from the two World Wars, and I'm afraid religion has a long way to hoe just to heave itself into the top ten.
And if you really mean anything else, well, we might start comparing deaths from religion (once, that is, we've agreed on definitions; see above) with, say, deaths from cancer, or STDs, or alcohol, or famine and plague.
Are you sure you want to play this game?
Thankfully, most of the rest of the civilized world is moving away from it.
Unless you want to beg the question by defining "civilized world" as "that part of the world which is moving away from religion", I'm afraid this assertion doesn't bear close examination, either. In this very discussion are numerous posts celebrating (or bemoaning) the fact that church attendance in America is on the rise. Where I sit in Asia Buddhism remains vibrant, and hardly a day goes by that doesn't feature a Daoist procession outside my window. Islam continues to be the dominant and unifying factor in the Middle East and throughout large segments of southeast Asia. And worldwide the growth of Christianity continues to outpace the population explosion.
Unless by "civilized world" you meant "America". But there are many (myself included) who are tempted to deny the application of the word "civilized" to any society which practices capital punishment, features children massacring children, and is so brazenly proud of its ghoulish "right to bear arms".
Someday, with any luck, humanity will be free from its plague.
Yep, and we will finally be able to breathe a sigh of relief when we're free of the Salvation Armies, the Red Crosses, the Mother Teresas, and the soup kitchens and drop-in shelters those damnable religious zealots keep trying to foist on us.
I can't remember the last time I've seen an atheist-run soup kitchen, or a Freedom from Religion drop in shelter. When these anti-religious types start putting their money where there mouths are, and start actually doing something to better humankind, rather than simply complaining about the evils of religion, maybe then I'll be a little less sceptical.
Of course, many from each side like to tar the other
Not a bad summary, but curiously you left out the very term which started this discussion: the prejudicial "anti-abortion rights", which occurs liberally throughout the short ABC story.
Try as I might, I fail to understand the preferability of this term over the older "anti-abortion", "pro-choice" and "pro-life" terminology that has been traditionally proferred.
What concerns me here is not so much the direction of the bias (as a non-US resident the whole American abortion debate is of little relevance to me). I am simply disconcerted to see such loaded terminology employed by an article which otherwise styles itself as objective journalism.
Honestly, can anyone give me a good, objective reason for preferring "anti-abortion rights" to the more traditional "anti-abortion" label, flawed as it might be? In addition to being more loaded, it also carries the potential for confusion with the similar-sounding "abortion rights activist" phrase.
I have to disagree here. Claimants to the title "pro-choice" make a valid distinction: the issue is morality on the one hand vs. legality on the other. That is, while abortion may be morally wrong or undesirable, it should non-the-less remain legal.
As an analogy, consider lying. Most people would agree that lying is wrong, yet very few would support laws against spouting falsehoods (aside from the occasional specific, such as lying to a cop, or while under oath). I.e., lying is wrong, but it shouldn't be illegal. Substituting "abortion" for "lying" makes it clear that "anti-abortion" and "pro-choice" are not at all mutually exclusive.
Note: I'm in your camp on the pro-life issue. I simply allow that "pro-choice" does not mean "pro-abortion".
we are no more civilized than we were when the Great Reliions of the world brought us the Crusades, the Inquisitions and the Salem Witch hunts.
Ah, yes. Salem -- that greatest of all shibboleths. Killed -- lessee, what was it? ah, yes -- 18 people. Truly one of history's epic tragedies.
Not that I'm defending it, of course. It just strikes me as odd how often Salem crops up as a litmus test of just how evil Religion is, despite the fact that some of the fiercest contempory opposition to the trials came from the pulpits of the day.
Oh, and just which Inquisition did you have in mind? There were dozens, scattered across Europe and through the centuries and the body count of even the most widespread of them pales next to that of, say, American fast food.
Umm, right. And memory loss causes old age. Hie thee hence to "Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies" and look up "post hoc propter hoc". Passeth not go, collecteth not thy nine and twenty sixpence. Correlation does not prove causation. Never has, never will. Based on your meager evidence, I could as easily conclude that high crime rates cause religion.
Its murder rate per capita is seven times that of France, where active practice of religion is virtually nonexistant.
So is the practice of personal hygiene (trust me -- I lived there for six years). I conclude that frequent showering induces violent crime. But then what of fundamentalist Islamic countries, which have lower murder rates than both France and the U.S?
the liberal centers of secular humanism such as Berkeley and New York City are shooting-free.
Now this statement simply cannot be taken seriously. New York City shooting-free?!
Hell, the school that was shot up in Santee, CA is one mile from the famous Institute for Creation Research.
And probably no more than six blocks from the nearest McDonald's. Keep that in mind next time your kid asks for a Big Mac.
even though if the Ten Commandments were hanging in Columbine the body count would have probably tripled. Teacher-led prayer was taken out of schools in the sixties, kiddo, you're a bit too late to blame school shootings on it.
Lost me here -- the Ten Commandments are responsible for school shootings even though they were removed from the schools nearly forty years ago? Kiddo, methinks you're a bit too late to blame school shootings on the 10Cs.
This stems from the base assumption that we are all inherintly evil, and the evil side of us must be suppressed from an early age
Well, I don't know about inherently evil, but I've always thought the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine was original sin. After all, how many parents have to teach their kids how to be bad?
Maybe you should stop apologizing for a system that clearly doesn't work
It is clear that the American educational system isn't working, but is it really the fault of an "arbitrary and micromanaging schedule imposed by an 'authority' figure"? As one who was raised in the American educational system and is now part of what most Americans would likely consider a rather hyper-authoritarian (not to mention "standardized") one, I'd have to say there's something to be said for it. At the very least, Taiwan consistently outperforms American students in the maths and sciences.
CD sales in Australia increased despite Net piracy.
While Australian CD sales were up 2.9% last year, it's quite possible that number was depressed by online piracy (as the recording industry would have us believe). Who's to say it wouldn't otherwise have risen 6%?
Actually, Mandarin gained ascendency in Asia in the same way English did in the west (and, recently, worldwide) -- by hitching its wagon to the right horse. Or, in this case, dynasty.
Some might argue that English is "linguistically inferior" (though I'm still not sure what that could mean) because it isn't linguistically pure -- being an amalgam of French and German, and retaining features of both. English is also much more difficult for adult speakers to learn than Mandarin.
Recompiling your kernel is easy, if you understand how your distro deals with modules.
Thanks. I know it's easy -- for everyone else. But after poring over HOTWOs (which are NOT suitable for reading by newbies), reading endless "Rebuild Your Kernel in 36 Easy Steps" tutorials, and bugging gurus until I'm blue in the keyboard, I still have a perfect record of zero successful rebuilds.
At least the USA is willing to admit past mistakes and try to correct them
Oh? Such as, say, the shooting down of civilian airliners? Six months after the USSR downed KAL 007 -- after the world have been subjected to endless tirades from the American government about how evil the Soviets were -- the US military goes them one better by downing a civilian airliner flying its normal route over the Gulf. The silence from the American government was deafening, and most Americans bought into their military's lame excuse that the aircraft was flying "threateningly" -- an excuse that bore a remarkable similarity to the Russian protestations about the KAL incident.
Your government also has yet to apologize for Waco, for Wounded Knee, for slavery, for its abominable treatment of native Americans, or even for subjecting the world to Britney Spears.
And if by "China wants to live in the fucking past" you mean the Chinese don't want to live like Americans, then I plead guilty as charged.
It's just that this superiority complex
I say the exact same thing about the Chinese people I know
Well, I guess you've got me there, since I don't personally know any Chinese people in San Francisco. However, in general I suspect I know a few more Chinese people than you do (I can see several hundred outside my window right now:-)). And I'm willing to bet that even Chinese people in San Francisco don't go around claiming to be saving the world from itself in public fora such as/.
And American history includes such wonderful highlights as:
Waco
Kent State
Wounded Knee
Organized slavery
Racial genocide (i.e., native Americans)
Student massacres
Restaurant massacres (i.e., Luby's and McDonalds)
Witch burnings
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And to think, America achieved all this brutality in a mere 230-odd years. It took the Chinese nearly 4,000 years to achieve the same levels of brutality.
Look, I actually like most of the Americans I know. It's just that this superiority complex that seems to infect them gets a little tiring.
I'll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about China's history, but right now it seems like your government is trying to turn the entire populace into slaves
I'll concur -- you know little about Chinese history, or current events, for that matter. If this is really how it seems to you, then you need better sources of information. Maybe even pay us a visit. I extend a standing invitation.
4,000 years later, and you're still killing your students.
It wasn't that long ago that America was doing a little student-killing of its own. I believe I already mentioned Kent State. I believe it, too, was a student-led anti-government demonstration. Of course, these days the American government doesn't really need to bother. It need merely sit back and let the students kill themselves. How this is an improvement over the situation on the mainland I can't fathom.
And we're not throwing stones(missles). We're trying to help.
Perhaps it's time for America to realize the rest of the world doesn't necessarily need -- or even want -- it's help.
And I beg to differ, but America is throwing missiles -- sometimes nuclear ones. To date, America is still the only country in history to have waged nuclear war. And it still categorically refuses to adopt a no "No first use" policy. Hardly instills confidence in the benevolence of the American government.
...when you're dragged out of isolationism... to help save the [free] world
The sheer arrogance of this statement is stupefying. Sheesh! Do Americans really believe this about themselves? I would assume you're referring to the two world wars. I wonder how British readers of Slashdot would react to the notion that, after heroically withstanding the bombardments of Nazi Germany for four years, they owe their freedom solely to late-to-the-party America. After sitting out most of the war, waiting until Germany had nearly exhausted itself battling on three fronts, America suddenly rides up on golden horses to save the day. Wow! What revisionism.
If this is the typical American attitude, you could sure do with a shot of humility. Not to mention a history refresher.
Well, I have to say I quite amazed at how easily you managed to ignore the sustance of my message and bee-line straight to the non-sequiter.
Indeed, many of the ancient writings were copied, copied, and copied again, usually without giving much thought to their content.
Etc. [Redundancies snipped]
All your protestations as to the quality of the education in the Church, or the ignorances of the monastic scriptoria vis-a-vis the content of what they were copying do little to dispute the point that were it not for the scriptoria we would not have these works at all -- or at best would only now be rediscovering them buried deep in ancient ruins. Your evidences regarding lost ancient knowledge only reinforce this point: that which the Church chose to preserve was preserved; that which it chose not to preserve was not preserved. Either way, it was through the sole auspices of the Church that what was preserved was preserved.
Unfortunately, people like this are part of a wave of historical revisionism: "The Dark Ages were not dark"
Well, I don't recall saying the Dark Ages were not dark. Dark they certainly were, though not always so uniformly dark as previous generations of historians would sometimes have us believe. And what little light existed was generally to be found inside the Church.
Since the church was indeed the only place where "education" was allowed, it was the only place where a faint resemblance of knowledge was preserved.
It was not simply the "only place where education was allowed", it was the only entity in the Middle Ages which had the infrastructure to achieve it. Feudal governments of the day were too small, too poor or simply too disinterested or distracted to provide it.
For example, 60% of the documents of the Merowingian dynasty are known to be fakes, usually with the intention to give their creators more privileges or real estate.
You are quite obviously referring to the famous Merovingian forgery known as the Donation of Constantine. I leave as an excercise for the reader whether one document constitutes "60% of the documents of the Merovingian dynasty".
(For our readers, the Merovingian dynasty was an Austro-Frankish empire extending from Clovis I in 451 to the death of Frankish king Chilperic III in 752; it was succeeded by the Carolingian Empire when the pope anointed Pepin the Short in 754 as Emperor Constantine. In return, Constantine allegedly promised to give to the pope those lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from Byzantium. The document which alleges this gift was later proven a forgery.)
Often the actual writings of ancient scientists were overwritten for mere lack of paper
And this proves what, exactly -- other than that parchment was quite expensive? Quite naturally it was reused, when the text written on it had become illegible, or otherwise no longer served its purpose, it was scraped off and the parchment recycled. Your more damning quote -- regarding the "rebaptism" of pagan texts -- is purely speculative on the part of the E.B. article which, even if true, again does not touch the basic premise of my argument. And this hardly touches the question of why the Church would bother to commit that pagan writing to such expensive parchment in the first place, if it so feared and opposed it as you imply.
More interesting than what these monks have preserved is the question what we have lost, a majority of ancient writings...
The speciousness of this argument is astounding. Jim sees burning building. Jim runs into burning building. Jim drags mother and children to safety. Jim is thrown in jail for failing to rescue the father while he was at it. No, the Church did not preserve every ancient writing. It's quite likely the Church didn't even save the majority of ancient writings. The salient fact you seem to ignore, however, is that at the time no one else was even trying.
Correct, Galen's ideas were taken and preserved without ever examining or even extending them. However, most of the knowledge by Galen and Hippocrates was not practically applied but "canonically" interpreted.
In your disdain for the quality of medieval knowledge you rush right past the point, which is that Galen was preserved. Period. Who else besides the Church bothered? In response to that single fact the only feeble response you can offer is, "Yeah, but they didn't understand it."
Reflect for a moment on the amount of time and effort that goes into hand-copying entire volumes of knowledge. The reason the Church bothered to preserve Galen at all was because it recognized the value of Galen's knowledge. Whether any given manuensis understood the contents of what he was copying is entirely irrelevant.
Even the Church, as powerful as it was in the Middle Ages, did not possess unlimited resources. To castigate the Church because it failed to preserve every ancient work; to denegrate the Herculean tasks of monastic scriptoria simply because their scientific understanding doesn't fare well in comparison with modern standards is specious at best, and smacks of petulance.
Instead of castigating the Church for its ignorance
I castigate it for its fear of the truth, which was the reason that the preservation of knowledge was only permitted within church walls...
So tell me, if the Church so feared the truth, why did it preserve it at all, when it was so completely within the Church's power to destroy it? This strikes me as the most ludicrous of your assertions -- that the Church would spend the lives of countless thousands of its monks in the effort to preserve writings which were so allegedly damning to it. Last I checked, the guilty generally are much more interested in destroying evidence than in archiving it.
Every example of ancient scriptoria I can think of -- from the Essenes of Israel to Tibetan Buddhist mendicants -- exerted great effort to preserve the texts of its community not because it feared those texts, but because it valued and respected and loved them. What other rational motive could there be? "Uh-oh. This could put the lie to everything the Church has taught. We'd better preserve it!"? Sorry. I don't buy it.
The church was not only [A] the only place where knowledge was preserved, it was also [B] the center of power!
And? How B is relevant to A, or -- as you seem to imply -- how B mitigates A completely escapes me. That the Church was the center of power -- that is, that the Church was the only unifying entity in a fractured, feudal, mediaeval Europe badly in need of unification -- suddenly becomes a rod with which to beat the Church -- how does that happen?
The abandonment of knowledge "outside monastic walls" was... a direct imposition by the church
Now it's my turn to ROTFL! The abandonment of knowledge in the Dark Ages was a direct result of the disintegration of society in the wake of the dissolution of the Roman Empire at the hands of gothic, visigothic and frankish conquerors. Unless you're next going to try claiming they too were mere pawns in the hands of a papacy intent on throwing a blanket of ignorance, fear and superstition over millions of poor, unguided peasants. Tell me again the Church's motive for doing this?
It is important to keep in mind what I have and have not said: I have not said the Church was wholy pure or virtuous or above reproach. No organization populated by human beings is. I have not said there is no valid criticism of medieaval Catholicism. I have not attempted to justify any of the misdeeds of the Church -- from the crusades, to torture to burnings, to the superstition and ignorance that at times pervaded the highest levels of the Church. I did not say the Church preserved all, or even most of the writings of the ancients. I have not even said the Church's understanding or application or transmission of the knowledge of the ancients was up to snuff by either ancient or modern standards.
Speaking of which, you have compared the level of education in the Church to standards both modern and ancient, and found it lacking in both cases. The only salient comparison, however, is the one you failed to make. That is, how did the educational levels in the Church compare to those outside the Church at the time? Any other comparison is rather like poo-pooing Newton for failing to grasp all the intricacies of quantum physics.
What I have said is simply this: what we possess of ancient knowledge today is due solely to the preservation efforts of the Church. What little of education there was in the Middle Ages was due to the patronage of the Church.
Here is my point again in a nutshell (in case you're tempted again to run off chasing wild fowl): those who attempt to assert the charge against the Church that it is the author of ignorance in the Middle Ages are ignorant (willfully or otherwise) of the exclusive role the Church played in the preservation and transmission of ancient knowledge.
Of course the educated people came from the church, as nobody else was allowed to be educated.
Once again, you blow right past the historical facts in your rush to judgment. I've already mentioned as but one example the grammar schools of Scotland and England, founded and run through the patronage of the Church. Tell me, whom do you think sat in the desks? Priests? Bishops? Popes? Nope. It was the children of those peasants you insist the Church was so interested in keeping in ignorance. Parents would often travel hundreds of miles and leave their children in the care of monks so that they could get the education they couldn't have anywhere else.
You also ignore the great universities of the Middle Ages, all of which were founded by the Church and freely open to all comers. The entire system of higher education the West possesses today was created by the Church. These facts simply cannot be squared with the fictional Church you attempt to pass off as historic reality.
No, the Church was not perfect. No, the education it provided was not always unreproachable. But it was for hundreds of years the sole preserver of ancient knowledge, and the sole force for education in the West, whatever you may think of its relative quality or motivation.
I really don't get it. China kills a bunch of students in Tiannamen, is a ruthless communist dictatorship, and yet the USA has, at every opportunity, sucked up so bad to them.
I do get it. The US government kills a bunch of people at Waco. It's a ruthless, democratic oligarchy, run by immoral, opportunistic capitalists whose only interest is in the linings of their own pockets. No wonder the Chinese goverment is so concerned to protect its citizens from undue American influence.
Of course, I don't really believe that about the US. It's just too bad so few Americans seem to reciprocate.
During that time, the church held a monopoly on the truth -- and the consequence was that most knowledge of ancient times was lost or suppressed, and science stagnated....
Boy do you need a basic history refresher. As you (quite obviously) don't know, it was the Church which preserved scientific knowledge and learning throughout the Middle Ages. Monastic scriptoria churned out copies of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, Homer, Virgil... and Galen, since you mention medical sciences, whose text was the standard medical text for nearly a millenium, and which for many centuries did not exist outside of monastic libraries. Astronomy, mathematics, cartography, botany, medicine, logic and rhetoric -- there isn't a branch of medieval learning which wasn't preserved in and cherished by the Church. Schools? The only schools in existence for nearly a thousand years were in the monastaries and cathedrals of the Catholic Church. All the great universities of Europe -- and many in America -- owe their origins to Church patronage of learning. During some of the darkest periods of Western history the monk was the most highly educated member of society. Den of ignorance? To the contrary, the Church was the great educational force of the medieval ages, at a time when the world outside monastic walls had abandoned the fire of knowledge. Boethius, Cassiodorus, and later the saintly Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin -- these were the great educators of their time, and they were universally children of the Church. From the 9th century Carolingian Revival to the monastic schools in the 11th century, and the cathedral schools and universities in the 12th, to the birth of the modern university -- the West would have had none of these if not for the Christianity.
In the twelfth century the Church conceived and nurtured the Renaissance. In the 16th century so much money was given by the Catholic Church to education in Germany that Martin Luther declared it was impossible for a child to go ignorant under the papacy. Church initiative in Scotland England created a system of grammar schools so ubiquitous it became possible for even the poorest child to receive the benefits of education. In Germany, France and Italy a similar education was to be had with ease, thanks to the generosity of the wealth of the Church.
It was Pope Sylverster II (d. 1003) who introduced Arab astronomy (not to mention Arabic numerals) to the West. It was the monastic schools and scriptoria of Toledo which, in the 12th and 13th centuries, translated Arabic scientific works into Latin. Constantinius of Africanus, John of Seville, Michael Scotus, Archdeacon Domenico Gundisalvi, Adelard of Bath, Gherard, were some of the leadings scholars and translators of the day, and they were all professional members of the Church. All the famous learning centers and universities of the day -- Toledo, Rome, Paris, Avicenna, Sicily, Cologne, Cordova, Granada, Narbonne, Naples, Balogna, Glasgow, Aberdeen -- were creations of the Church, and it was Constantine who organized at Salerno the West's first modern medical school.
The fact is that for nearly a thousand years in the West, scientific knowledge and learning existed nowhere except in monasteries and Church-sponsored centers of education. Instead of castigating the Church for its ignorance, you should be down on your knees in gratitude for what it had preserved when all others had turned their backs. Indeed, the very calendar with which the West marks the passage of history is a gift from the Church.
Ditto for the arts. It is nearly impossible to think of a single medieval artist or work which did not belong to the Church. Michaelangelo, Raphael, Da Vinci, Giotto and Fra Angelico, Aquinas, Milton, Caedmon, Dante, the Sistine Chapel, the cathedrals of Reimes, Chartres, Notre Dame and St. Peter's Basilica -- all were children of the Church. And even those works which were not creations of the Church owe their preservation to the Church. The very languages the West speaks today -- the Romance Languages at least -- owe their modern form to the universality of Latin, the very universality which made Latin the ideal vehicle of education.
The government of the "People's Republic of" China routinely practices censorship, sometimes by such barbaric methods as sending tanks into crowds of peaceful student protestors.
As we all know, the US would never do anything of the kind -- say, at places such as Kent State, Wounded Knee or Waco. Of course, genocide -- of, say, Native Americans -- is right out. Government-approved slavery? Class- and race-biased justice? Fifty thousand hand-gun deaths a year? Student massacres in public schools? Shooting down civilian air flights? Blowing up of federal buildings in Kansas City? Nope. No way. Never happen. Not in "no blood on our hands" America -- the most violent society on earth.
Now those godless, commie Chinese -- hey, you can never tell what pure evil those sub-humans are capable of.
these (Chinese citizens) are the people who really need your help.
Thank you so much for your (highly paternalistic) concern. The problem is America has such a myopic sense of history -- as if the world didn't know how to take care of itself before 1776. But the Chinese were tending their affairs 4,000 years before America appeared on the scene to save the world from itself. And I imagine we'll still be here long after the US has faded to a distant memory.
There was a wise man once long ago who said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Words to live by.
Recompiling a kernel is not a sacred initiation rite for the elite. It's actually very easy
All of you true Linux hackers can just treat this message as an implicit admission of ignorance on my part, but I suspect I'm typical of a large and growing segment of Linux users when I say the above statement is a load of fetid carp.
In the 3+ years I've been running Linux I have never successfully compiled a kernel. Until I gave up permanently about six months ago, I'd tried a half dozen distros, downloaded every piece of documentation I could find, got myself elected president of the official Linux for Idiots Club(TM), and trolled every newsgroup, tech support site and Linux users group I could find. And I still have never successfully completed a recompile. If it's not a failed dependency, it's a missing development tool, a misconfigured make script, inappropriate permissions, a missing header file, a bad symlink or one of a hundred and ten other gotchas that are lurking in some forgotten PID thread specifically to leap to the foreground and spoil any kernel build I get suckered into attempting when I read some statement telling me just how easy a kernel build is.
Felderkarb. I'll just wait for the next Mandrake release, thank you.
On the one hand, I get all humanistic and indignant about the Catholic Church offering this service censored by default, and making moral decisions for their customers.
This strikes me a bit like saying, "I get all indignant about that movie theater choosing which movies I can see, and making moral decisions for their customers." Presumably, their customers are their customers precisely because they like the ISP making those moral choices. Is that not the essence of capitalism?
I am sure many will argue, not incorrectly, that accumulating wealth and influence has always been part of the Church's mission too
Influence, certainly. Any organization ever created seeks to be influential. What would be the point otherwise?
I would dearly love to know, however, where the Church is hiding all this wealth it supposedly has. I've been a member of a lot of Catholic churches in my lifetime, and nearly all of them have struggled just to cover basic operating costs. Priests are paid what many would consider starvation wages. Members of religious organizations takes vows of poverty. Most of the work the Church does is done by volunteers. And the Vatican runs a deficit every year (nearly always has). Yes, there was a brief period during the Middle Ages where the Church accumulated wealth, but those days disappeared centuries ago. Apparently, however, the legend lives on.
Thanks indeed for the long post. I have much to say in reply; unfortunately, I have no time to say it, as I'm heading out for the weekend, so I must leave it unsaid, except to say that we do indeed share many of the same interests. I will look further into your references.
Thanks again for your reply.
Peace,
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Leaving aside for the moment that the discussion was about differences in opinion over human sexuality in general, and whether public facilities should be permitted to facilitate certain aspects of it in specific, let's discuss the treatment of women (by, I suppose, men).
You and I certainly stand shoulder to shoulder in our belief in the fair and just treatment of any member of the human race, regardless of sex, race or social status. This includes, specifically, any behavior which maltreats or abuses women and children (but also includes behavior which does the same to men).
Where we probably diverge is in how we define this. I specifically include pornography and explicitly erotic imagery in this -- whether male or female -- because it objectifies the subject, be it women, men, or, increasingly today, children. In the case of pornography and erotic imagery, the viewing of such conditions the viewer to reduce his ("his" because the consumers of pornography are overwhelmingly male, though the reverse, where it occurs, is equally true) view of the subject to an object for the satisfaction of his sexual cravings. This seems to carry over to his view and treatment of women in general, though often in subtle ways which can be hard to measure.
The essential problem with this is twofold: first, it denies or minimizes the essential humanity of the subject (generally women) in favor of that person's utility as a tool for the pleasure of the viewer. It also is conveniently ignorant of the real nature of the pornography industry -- its abuse of women, the drugs, the crime, and the disease -- which produced the material. This is, fundamentally, an issue of social justice.
Second, it abuses the proper role of human sexuality, reducing it to a mere pleasure pursuit and divorcing it from its intended context. This is the issue of a right understanding of human sexuality proper, and, I suspect, the area where we disagree the most (and where, BTW, I also find myself in fundamental disagreement with modern Western psychology).
My question is: why should I not wish to protect my children from such offensive material? You seem to be simultaneously decrying the objectification of a significant portion of your society and yet defending its legality and the right of children to view it. This strikes me as hypocritical.
Another point of possible disagreement between us on the issue of the sexes is what in America has at times been characterized as the "separate but equal" argument. There is a signicant portion of America which recoils in loathing at the mere suggestion of any distinction between the sexes. I have personally (attempted to) converse with some feminists (admittedly extremists) who all but explicitly stated that the biological differences between men and women are simply a plot by the male half of the race to keep women barefoot and pregnant.
While I grant the extremity of that position, the fact remains that in lesser and more subtle ways, that kind of insanity has permeated American culture, to the point where any suggestion of differences -- physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual -- between the sexes is immediately and automatically suspect as a Victorian hangover of misogynistic religious fundamentalism. And modern Western psychology bears complicity in the fostering of such (in my book, irrational) notions.
I would go so far as to classify such thinking as "insane" (to use your word) itself. It denies a fundamental truth about men and women that has been universally recognized throughout human history. In part, separate social roles have developed in human societies as a utilitarian response to these male-female differences. While I will not deny the complicity of the inherent paternalism of male dominated societies in the development of women's social and domestic roles in those societies, to the point where those roles have been distorted and permuted to serve the dominant segment of that society, the universality of separate roles is a powerful argument against the position that such roles are merely an imposition by male power-holders on disenfranchised women. The denial of such a fundamental truth by significant portions of Western culture is equally "insane" because it, too, perpetuates certain myths about women -- namely that they are fundamentally nothing more than men with longer hair. Such insanity can never foster a true sexual justice because it denies a proper understanding of the natures of women and men.
In short, while we probably agree on the principles -- just and equal treatment of all -- I suspect you will continue to denigrate an authentic Asian approach to this rather laudable goal as "insane" simply because it disagrees with certain presuppositions you hold, however errant those suppositions may be.
Note: I am admittedly presuming a lot about your beliefs based on the reading of exactly two posts. Where I am in error as to your personal beliefs, I apologize. Merely re-read those portions of my post as an address to certain general tendencies in Western society, rather than as a diatribe against anything you believe specifically.
Unfortunately, I will not be here to continue this excellent dialog, as I am leaving for several days to prepare for the Christmas holiday.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, that's it. No more on-topic posts for me. Now I know where the real karma lies.
The fact that he was Catholic means that his church had been teaching him for years that the Jews were evil.
and
Uh, dude? Being a racist doesn't mean you're not a religious bigot. Hitler was both.
and
Catholicism was one of the main instigators of the attempted extermination of the Jews.
and
they [the Jews] were *singled out because of their religion*
The fact that there is no evidence to support your theories normally would be fatal enough for your arguments. But you have a much bigger problem: Hitler's own words stand against you. In Mein Kampf Hitler lays out in great detail the nature of the "Jewish problem" and his solution, and also provides a brief autobiographical sketch of the development of his own ideas. Regarding this second point, in chapter three of Mein Kampf, entitled "Political Reflections Arising Out of My Sojourn in Vienna", Hitler discusses in some detail the experiences which shaped his attitudes, particularly vis a vis Jews, which he summarizes as follows:
Interestingly one looks high and low in vain for any mention of Catholic (or even religious) influence on that "stock of personal beliefs" Hitler has been describing. To the contrary, when Hitler does occasionally discuss the Catholic Church, he sees it exclusively in political terms, as an institution to be exploited.
Regarding the first point, in all his extensive discussions of the Jews, Hitler almost always views them in exclusively racial terms. The few times he does mention Jewish religion, it is only to denounce it as a subterfuge, a camouflage smoke screen to mask the Jew's true goal. Again, from chapter three:
In his discussions of the Christian-Socialist movement, Hitler had this to say:
In the discussion which follows, Hitler makes clear that he believes the great mistake of the Christian-Socialist movement was its reliance on a religiously-motivated anti-Semitism. He then describes why he believed such an approach was doomed to failure:
I.e., to escape religious persecution was simply a matter of popping into the local Church and getting oneself baptized as a Christian. Then, under the guise of this "conversion" the Jew was free to carry on his business while remain a Jew racially.
Far from being religiously anti-Semitic as you claim, Hitler specifically and in the strongest terms denounced religious anti-Semitism, calling it "superficial", "narrow-minded", "shilly-shally", and "ineffective". It was, Hitler said,
In contrast to the Christian-Socialist movement stood the other "great" movement of the day, the Pan-German Party. Whereas the Christian-Socialists had correctly grasped the need for a nationalist identity, and yet erred in their religious approach to anti-Semitism, in contrast, Hitler assessed the Pan-German Party in this way:
Herein, then, lay the bedrock of Hitler's nationalist movement: a fusing of Christian-Socialist nationalism with Pan-German racial anti-Semitism.
[re: Two world wars vs. the Crusades] Congratulations on one of the most impressive pieces of intellectual dishonesty I've seen lately! ... military and civilian casualties from all sides ... [vs] ONLY military casualties from ONE side of the war. Since I can't find any information on civilian casualties during the Crusades
And you won't, for two probable reasons: first, military casualties are hard enough to estimate, given the meager historical data available to us. Trying to guess civilian numbers would be an exercise in futile speculation. And second because, in all likelihood, civilian casualties were insignificant compared to the military toll. It wasn't until the era of modern warfare that war-waging began to take a significant toll on civilian populations. Thus, even if we had civilian numbers for the Crusades, they're not likely to significantly impact the numbers we've been bandying about.
let's compare military casualties. [WWI/II: 26.5 million; Crusades: 900,000] ? not even CLOSE to your alleged "couple orders of magnitude."
You're right. If we go with your numbers it comes out to more like "an order of magnitude times 3" (is that the same as saying "1.3 orders of magnitude"?). What was I thinking?!
[re: Death by Torture: Inquisitorial minds want to know. Estimates] ranged between 20 and 68 million. (Highball estimate was on a fundie christian website, incidentally. So you can skip your beloved "athiest fanatic" accusations on this one.)
In fact, I've seen estimates as high as 95 million. But fanaticism is fanaticism, be it atheist or Protestant fundamentalist (who, in case you aren't aware, are amongst the most rabid of all anti-Catholics). Either way, you can't mean you seriously give credence to any numbers that not only claim a death-by-Inquisition rate approaching four times that of two world wars combined, but actually exceed the total combined populations of all countries in which the inquisitions were active.
There were, in fact, three separate "inquisitions". The first, established in 1184 in southern France as a response to the Catharist heresy, was known as the Medieval Inquisition; it was phased out as Catharism disappeared. Quite separate was the Roman Inquisition, begun in 1542. It was the least active and most benign of the three variations. Separate again was the famed Spanish Inquisition, started in 1478 (or, as I had already noted, 1480, depending on which source you go with), a state institution used to identify conversos -- Jews and Moors (Muslims) who falsely "converted" to Christianity and secretly practiced their former religion. Its job was also, and more importantly, to clear the good name of many people who were falsely accused as being It was the Spanish Inquisition that had the worst record.
The History Channel occasionally re-airs a 1994 BBC/A&E production called "The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition", which takes a fresh and objective look at the most famous various inquisitions. The BBC production notes that documentary evidence exists for only between 3,000 and 5,000 deaths during the 350- (not 250- as I had previously claimed) year history of the Inquisition. While it is all but certain that more than that died at the hands of the Inquisition, any attempts to fix a number are pure speculation.
"Ad hominem" means "to the man" -- attacking the messenger instead of the message, which I did not do. You are right, however, that just saying it's tired doesn't make it so. Which is why I went on to explain in great detail why it was false.
simply having an atheist instigate it is not enough.... Hitler was Catholic
Whoa. Let's leave the goalposts in one place, shall we? We can't blame atheism for Stalin just because Stalin was atheist; however, World War II was all the pope's fault just because Hitler was Catholic. Yup -- works for me. Not.
the Holocaust had its roots in the 1500 year history of persecution of and hatred towards the Jews by the Christians.
The problem with your little theory is that half the victims of the Holocaust were non-Jews -- and mostly Catholic. In Poland alone three million Catholics were exterminated under the Nazi regime from September, 1939 through the end of the war. For nearly the first two years of its existence, Auschwitz was home exclusively to non-Jews (the first Jew died at Auswchitz in 1942 -- 21 months after it began operation); ultimately, more than 100,000 non-Jews were exterminated at Auswchitz alone.
It is true that nearly six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. It is equally true that more than five million non-Jews lost their lives. The man who, on August 22, 1939, mustered his stormtroopers to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent" was a racist, not a religious bigot.
As far as causation, I mean people who were killed in the name of religion, or whose deaths were a result of religious teachings
Well, which is it? "Killed in the name of religion" is a fairly clear target, but "a result of religious teachings" is way too self-servingly ambiguous to be of practical use, as you proceed to demonstrate.
The two world wars put together still killed less people than the various Crusades did, IIRC.
Sorry, but YDNRC (You Do Not Recall Correctly). Or, rather, you do not seem to recall at all, at least to judge by the complete lack of effort you make to back up your claims with anything resembling fact or figure.
Numbers for the two world wars are easy enough to come by: the Great War, 8.5 million military and perhaps 6 million civilian; the Second, 55 million; if you throw in the 26 million who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic (which I'm sure you'll think of some way to blame on religion) that swept the world in the aftermath of WWI, the total stands in the vicinity 96 million.
As for the Crusades, numbers are nearly impossible to guess, but the great British historian Wertham estimates the casualties at approximately 1 million. Pitirim Sorokin, on the other hand, estimated that Europeans lost some 435,000 men on all battlefields between 900 and 1450.
Even if we accept Wertham's higher numbers for the Crusades, still the two world wars did not simply kill more people than the Crusades, they exceeded the Crusades by nearly two full orders of magnitude. In fact, while both world wars made Matthew White's list (see here) of "(Possibly) The Ten Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other" (at #8 and #1, respectively), the Crusades aren't even on the scope.
Care to try again?
And as to the "Inquisition", if we presume you mean the Spanish Inquisition (which is the one most of those who don't know any better have in mind), Juan Antonio Llorente, General Secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, estimated that 31,912 people were executed between 1480-1808. Historian Will Durant, on the other hand, lends his weight to much lower numbers, in the vicinity of 2,000 burned between 1480 and 1504, and another 2,000 between 1504 and 1758, for a total of 4,000 burnings during the 254-year span of the Spanish Inquisition, or a rate of less than two a month. I'd be willing to bet more people died from lightning strikes during that same period than from inquisitorial persecutions.
You might also want to more closely examine the rest of White's top ten list (see link, above); of the ten worst atrocities humans have ever committed, according to White, only one (the last one, in fact) could be considered religiously motivated. Stalin alone beats the Thirty Years' War by nearly 3-to-1.
And how many of those deaths was religion a contributing cause of?
I begin to wonder if you even know the meaning of the word "cause".
How many people have died because of religious opposition to research into the treatment of various STDs? How many people died of plagues in Europe because of the Church suppression of knowledge? ... How much of the famine over the years has been due to religious opposition to birth control, and encouragement of out-of-control breeding?
Yes, "how many" and "how much", indeed. Tell you what -- when you can provide me with something more than the idle machinations of an overactive imagination, we'll talk. Until then, all you've managed to do is bandy about some wild, half-baked speculations without attempting even a modicum of factual support. As you said yourself, simply saying something don't make it true.
If my company purchases 500 Compaqs -- complete with mandatory MS OS -- then if Microsoft is worried it's not getting its money, it should be auditing Compaq, not me. Put another way, if Microsoft didn't get its greenbacks, it's Compaq's error; why should I have to pay?
A couple of years back I worked for a consulting firm at a large (5000+ seat) customer site, where we were responsible for installation and upgrade of PCs corporation wide. All PCs were on a three-year depreciation rollover, which means the corporation was buying nearly 1700 replacement PCs every year. Every machine came complete with an MS license, at about 50 bucks a pop.
The kicker is that fully one third of the corporation ran OS/2 -- which means the corporation was paying for nearly 600 MS licenses a year it didn't use.
I think we should have demanded to audit Microsoft.
And then two years ago MS had the gall to accuse us of license violations. And worse, they wanted license accounting not just for the more than 5000 current machines, but for all the machines the corp. had purchased over the last seven years -- all the way back to Win3x days -- including machines which had long ago become landfill fodder. Surprisingly, we were actually able to document 70% compliance; not surprisingly, MS then demanded payment for the other 30% (at then-current prices, of course).
Also not surprisingly, we were neither allowed refunds on those 600 unused licenses per year, nor were we allowed to apply them to the deficit.
Any chance you've got an American Atheists card stuffed in your back pocket somewhere? 'cause you spout the party line pretty good. But this line was tired when Ms. O'Hair (wherever she's got to) started spouting it thirty years ago. It's just as meaningless today.
First, of course, is the problem of definition. What do you mean by "religion"? Just the "organized" religions? Any quasi-religious belief system? Throw in theosophy, Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand? And what do you mean by "caused"? Direct causation? Contributing factor? Or just "hanging about in the general vicinity"? And what do you mean by "anything else"? Do you really mean anything else?!
In the twentieth century alone, one might argue that Stalinism (which, last I checked was atheist) has been the one of the leading causes of violent death -- Stalin's purges alone account for at least 20 million bodies, though no one really knows for sure. Throw in Hitler's six million Jews (plus an equal number of other "undesirables"), and the all and sundry other deaths from the two World Wars, and I'm afraid religion has a long way to hoe just to heave itself into the top ten.
And if you really mean anything else, well, we might start comparing deaths from religion (once, that is, we've agreed on definitions; see above) with, say, deaths from cancer, or STDs, or alcohol, or famine and plague.
Are you sure you want to play this game?
Thankfully, most of the rest of the civilized world is moving away from it.
Unless you want to beg the question by defining "civilized world" as "that part of the world which is moving away from religion", I'm afraid this assertion doesn't bear close examination, either. In this very discussion are numerous posts celebrating (or bemoaning) the fact that church attendance in America is on the rise. Where I sit in Asia Buddhism remains vibrant, and hardly a day goes by that doesn't feature a Daoist procession outside my window. Islam continues to be the dominant and unifying factor in the Middle East and throughout large segments of southeast Asia. And worldwide the growth of Christianity continues to outpace the population explosion.
Unless by "civilized world" you meant "America". But there are many (myself included) who are tempted to deny the application of the word "civilized" to any society which practices capital punishment, features children massacring children, and is so brazenly proud of its ghoulish "right to bear arms".
Someday, with any luck, humanity will be free from its plague.
Yep, and we will finally be able to breathe a sigh of relief when we're free of the Salvation Armies, the Red Crosses, the Mother Teresas, and the soup kitchens and drop-in shelters those damnable religious zealots keep trying to foist on us.
I can't remember the last time I've seen an atheist-run soup kitchen, or a Freedom from Religion drop in shelter. When these anti-religious types start putting their money where there mouths are, and start actually doing something to better humankind, rather than simply complaining about the evils of religion, maybe then I'll be a little less sceptical.
Not a bad summary, but curiously you left out the very term which started this discussion: the prejudicial "anti-abortion rights", which occurs liberally throughout the short ABC story. Try as I might, I fail to understand the preferability of this term over the older "anti-abortion", "pro-choice" and "pro-life" terminology that has been traditionally proferred.
What concerns me here is not so much the direction of the bias (as a non-US resident the whole American abortion debate is of little relevance to me). I am simply disconcerted to see such loaded terminology employed by an article which otherwise styles itself as objective journalism.
Honestly, can anyone give me a good, objective reason for preferring "anti-abortion rights" to the more traditional "anti-abortion" label, flawed as it might be? In addition to being more loaded, it also carries the potential for confusion with the similar-sounding "abortion rights activist" phrase.
Sorry, you can't be on both sides of the fence.
I have to disagree here. Claimants to the title "pro-choice" make a valid distinction: the issue is morality on the one hand vs. legality on the other. That is, while abortion may be morally wrong or undesirable, it should non-the-less remain legal.
As an analogy, consider lying. Most people would agree that lying is wrong, yet very few would support laws against spouting falsehoods (aside from the occasional specific, such as lying to a cop, or while under oath). I.e., lying is wrong, but it shouldn't be illegal. Substituting "abortion" for "lying" makes it clear that "anti-abortion" and "pro-choice" are not at all mutually exclusive.
Note: I'm in your camp on the pro-life issue. I simply allow that "pro-choice" does not mean "pro-abortion".
Ah, yes. Salem -- that greatest of all shibboleths. Killed -- lessee, what was it? ah, yes -- 18 people. Truly one of history's epic tragedies.
Not that I'm defending it, of course. It just strikes me as odd how often Salem crops up as a litmus test of just how evil Religion is, despite the fact that some of the fiercest contempory opposition to the trials came from the pulpits of the day.
Oh, and just which Inquisition did you have in mind? There were dozens, scattered across Europe and through the centuries and the body count of even the most widespread of them pales next to that of, say, American fast food.
Its murder rate per capita is seven times that of France, where active practice of religion is virtually nonexistant.
So is the practice of personal hygiene (trust me -- I lived there for six years). I conclude that frequent showering induces violent crime. But then what of fundamentalist Islamic countries, which have lower murder rates than both France and the U.S?
the liberal centers of secular humanism such as Berkeley and New York City are shooting-free.
Now this statement simply cannot be taken seriously. New York City shooting-free?!
Hell, the school that was shot up in Santee, CA is one mile from the famous Institute for Creation Research.
And probably no more than six blocks from the nearest McDonald's. Keep that in mind next time your kid asks for a Big Mac.
even though if the Ten Commandments were hanging in Columbine the body count would have probably tripled. Teacher-led prayer was taken out of schools in the sixties, kiddo, you're a bit too late to blame school shootings on it.
Lost me here -- the Ten Commandments are responsible for school shootings even though they were removed from the schools nearly forty years ago? Kiddo, methinks you're a bit too late to blame school shootings on the 10Cs.
Well, I don't know about inherently evil, but I've always thought the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine was original sin. After all, how many parents have to teach their kids how to be bad?
Maybe you should stop apologizing for a system that clearly doesn't work
It is clear that the American educational system isn't working, but is it really the fault of an "arbitrary and micromanaging schedule imposed by an 'authority' figure"? As one who was raised in the American educational system and is now part of what most Americans would likely consider a rather hyper-authoritarian (not to mention "standardized") one, I'd have to say there's something to be said for it. At the very least, Taiwan consistently outperforms American students in the maths and sciences.
While Australian CD sales were up 2.9% last year, it's quite possible that number was depressed by online piracy (as the recording industry would have us believe). Who's to say it wouldn't otherwise have risen 6%?
What's "linguistically inferior"?
Actually, Mandarin gained ascendency in Asia in the same way English did in the west (and, recently, worldwide) -- by hitching its wagon to the right horse. Or, in this case, dynasty.
Some might argue that English is "linguistically inferior" (though I'm still not sure what that could mean) because it isn't linguistically pure -- being an amalgam of French and German, and retaining features of both. English is also much more difficult for adult speakers to learn than Mandarin.
Thanks. I know it's easy -- for everyone else. But after poring over HOTWOs (which are NOT suitable for reading by newbies), reading endless "Rebuild Your Kernel in 36 Easy Steps" tutorials, and bugging gurus until I'm blue in the keyboard, I still have a perfect record of zero successful rebuilds.
Peace
Oh? Such as, say, the shooting down of civilian airliners? Six months after the USSR downed KAL 007 -- after the world have been subjected to endless tirades from the American government about how evil the Soviets were -- the US military goes them one better by downing a civilian airliner flying its normal route over the Gulf. The silence from the American government was deafening, and most Americans bought into their military's lame excuse that the aircraft was flying "threateningly" -- an excuse that bore a remarkable similarity to the Russian protestations about the KAL incident.
Your government also has yet to apologize for Waco, for Wounded Knee, for slavery, for its abominable treatment of native Americans, or even for subjecting the world to Britney Spears.
And if by "China wants to live in the fucking past" you mean the Chinese don't want to live like Americans, then I plead guilty as charged.
It's just that this superiority complex
I say the exact same thing about the Chinese people I know
Well, I guess you've got me there, since I don't personally know any Chinese people in San Francisco. However, in general I suspect I know a few more Chinese people than you do (I can see several hundred outside my window right now :-)). And I'm willing to bet that even Chinese people in San Francisco don't go around claiming to be saving the world from itself in public fora such as /.
(And, BTW, it's spelled "Cantonese".)
Feet binding.
Abandoning baby girls
Peasants are property
And American history includes such wonderful highlights as:
Waco
Kent State
Wounded Knee
Organized slavery
Racial genocide (i.e., native Americans)
Student massacres
Restaurant massacres (i.e., Luby's and McDonalds)
Witch burnings
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And to think, America achieved all this brutality in a mere 230-odd years. It took the Chinese nearly 4,000 years to achieve the same levels of brutality.
Look, I actually like most of the Americans I know. It's just that this superiority complex that seems to infect them gets a little tiring.
I'll concur -- you know little about Chinese history, or current events, for that matter. If this is really how it seems to you, then you need better sources of information. Maybe even pay us a visit. I extend a standing invitation.
4,000 years later, and you're still killing your students.
It wasn't that long ago that America was doing a little student-killing of its own. I believe I already mentioned Kent State. I believe it, too, was a student-led anti-government demonstration. Of course, these days the American government doesn't really need to bother. It need merely sit back and let the students kill themselves. How this is an improvement over the situation on the mainland I can't fathom.
And we're not throwing stones(missles). We're trying to help.
Perhaps it's time for America to realize the rest of the world doesn't necessarily need -- or even want -- it's help.
And I beg to differ, but America is throwing missiles -- sometimes nuclear ones. To date, America is still the only country in history to have waged nuclear war. And it still categorically refuses to adopt a no "No first use" policy. Hardly instills confidence in the benevolence of the American government.
The sheer arrogance of this statement is stupefying. Sheesh! Do Americans really believe this about themselves? I would assume you're referring to the two world wars. I wonder how British readers of Slashdot would react to the notion that, after heroically withstanding the bombardments of Nazi Germany for four years, they owe their freedom solely to late-to-the-party America. After sitting out most of the war, waiting until Germany had nearly exhausted itself battling on three fronts, America suddenly rides up on golden horses to save the day. Wow! What revisionism.
If this is the typical American attitude, you could sure do with a shot of humility. Not to mention a history refresher.
Indeed, many of the ancient writings were copied, copied, and copied again, usually without giving much thought to their content.
Etc. [Redundancies snipped]
All your protestations as to the quality of the education in the Church, or the ignorances of the monastic scriptoria vis-a-vis the content of what they were copying do little to dispute the point that were it not for the scriptoria we would not have these works at all -- or at best would only now be rediscovering them buried deep in ancient ruins. Your evidences regarding lost ancient knowledge only reinforce this point: that which the Church chose to preserve was preserved; that which it chose not to preserve was not preserved. Either way, it was through the sole auspices of the Church that what was preserved was preserved.
Unfortunately, people like this are part of a wave of historical revisionism: "The Dark Ages were not dark"
Well, I don't recall saying the Dark Ages were not dark. Dark they certainly were, though not always so uniformly dark as previous generations of historians would sometimes have us believe. And what little light existed was generally to be found inside the Church.
Since the church was indeed the only place where "education" was allowed, it was the only place where a faint resemblance of knowledge was preserved.
It was not simply the "only place where education was allowed", it was the only entity in the Middle Ages which had the infrastructure to achieve it. Feudal governments of the day were too small, too poor or simply too disinterested or distracted to provide it.
For example, 60% of the documents of the Merowingian dynasty are known to be fakes, usually with the intention to give their creators more privileges or real estate.
You are quite obviously referring to the famous Merovingian forgery known as the Donation of Constantine. I leave as an excercise for the reader whether one document constitutes "60% of the documents of the Merovingian dynasty". (For our readers, the Merovingian dynasty was an Austro-Frankish empire extending from Clovis I in 451 to the death of Frankish king Chilperic III in 752; it was succeeded by the Carolingian Empire when the pope anointed Pepin the Short in 754 as Emperor Constantine. In return, Constantine allegedly promised to give to the pope those lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from Byzantium. The document which alleges this gift was later proven a forgery.)
Often the actual writings of ancient scientists were overwritten for mere lack of paper
And this proves what, exactly -- other than that parchment was quite expensive? Quite naturally it was reused, when the text written on it had become illegible, or otherwise no longer served its purpose, it was scraped off and the parchment recycled. Your more damning quote -- regarding the "rebaptism" of pagan texts -- is purely speculative on the part of the E.B. article which, even if true, again does not touch the basic premise of my argument. And this hardly touches the question of why the Church would bother to commit that pagan writing to such expensive parchment in the first place, if it so feared and opposed it as you imply.
More interesting than what these monks have preserved is the question what we have lost, a majority of ancient writings...
The speciousness of this argument is astounding. Jim sees burning building. Jim runs into burning building. Jim drags mother and children to safety. Jim is thrown in jail for failing to rescue the father while he was at it. No, the Church did not preserve every ancient writing. It's quite likely the Church didn't even save the majority of ancient writings. The salient fact you seem to ignore, however, is that at the time no one else was even trying.
Correct, Galen's ideas were taken and preserved without ever examining or even extending them. However, most of the knowledge by Galen and Hippocrates was not practically applied but "canonically" interpreted.
In your disdain for the quality of medieval knowledge you rush right past the point, which is that Galen was preserved. Period. Who else besides the Church bothered? In response to that single fact the only feeble response you can offer is, "Yeah, but they didn't understand it."
Reflect for a moment on the amount of time and effort that goes into hand-copying entire volumes of knowledge. The reason the Church bothered to preserve Galen at all was because it recognized the value of Galen's knowledge. Whether any given manuensis understood the contents of what he was copying is entirely irrelevant.
Even the Church, as powerful as it was in the Middle Ages, did not possess unlimited resources. To castigate the Church because it failed to preserve every ancient work; to denegrate the Herculean tasks of monastic scriptoria simply because their scientific understanding doesn't fare well in comparison with modern standards is specious at best, and smacks of petulance.
Instead of castigating the Church for its ignorance
I castigate it for its fear of the truth, which was the reason that the preservation of knowledge was only permitted within church walls ...
So tell me, if the Church so feared the truth, why did it preserve it at all, when it was so completely within the Church's power to destroy it? This strikes me as the most ludicrous of your assertions -- that the Church would spend the lives of countless thousands of its monks in the effort to preserve writings which were so allegedly damning to it. Last I checked, the guilty generally are much more interested in destroying evidence than in archiving it.
Every example of ancient scriptoria I can think of -- from the Essenes of Israel to Tibetan Buddhist mendicants -- exerted great effort to preserve the texts of its community not because it feared those texts, but because it valued and respected and loved them. What other rational motive could there be? "Uh-oh. This could put the lie to everything the Church has taught. We'd better preserve it!"? Sorry. I don't buy it.
The church was not only [A] the only place where knowledge was preserved, it was also [B] the center of power!
And? How B is relevant to A, or -- as you seem to imply -- how B mitigates A completely escapes me. That the Church was the center of power -- that is, that the Church was the only unifying entity in a fractured, feudal, mediaeval Europe badly in need of unification -- suddenly becomes a rod with which to beat the Church -- how does that happen?
The abandonment of knowledge "outside monastic walls" was ... a direct imposition by the church
Now it's my turn to ROTFL! The abandonment of knowledge in the Dark Ages was a direct result of the disintegration of society in the wake of the dissolution of the Roman Empire at the hands of gothic, visigothic and frankish conquerors. Unless you're next going to try claiming they too were mere pawns in the hands of a papacy intent on throwing a blanket of ignorance, fear and superstition over millions of poor, unguided peasants. Tell me again the Church's motive for doing this?
It is important to keep in mind what I have and have not said: I have not said the Church was wholy pure or virtuous or above reproach. No organization populated by human beings is. I have not said there is no valid criticism of medieaval Catholicism. I have not attempted to justify any of the misdeeds of the Church -- from the crusades, to torture to burnings, to the superstition and ignorance that at times pervaded the highest levels of the Church. I did not say the Church preserved all, or even most of the writings of the ancients. I have not even said the Church's understanding or application or transmission of the knowledge of the ancients was up to snuff by either ancient or modern standards.
Speaking of which, you have compared the level of education in the Church to standards both modern and ancient, and found it lacking in both cases. The only salient comparison, however, is the one you failed to make. That is, how did the educational levels in the Church compare to those outside the Church at the time? Any other comparison is rather like poo-pooing Newton for failing to grasp all the intricacies of quantum physics.
What I have said is simply this: what we possess of ancient knowledge today is due solely to the preservation efforts of the Church. What little of education there was in the Middle Ages was due to the patronage of the Church.
Here is my point again in a nutshell (in case you're tempted again to run off chasing wild fowl): those who attempt to assert the charge against the Church that it is the author of ignorance in the Middle Ages are ignorant (willfully or otherwise) of the exclusive role the Church played in the preservation and transmission of ancient knowledge.
Of course the educated people came from the church, as nobody else was allowed to be educated.
Once again, you blow right past the historical facts in your rush to judgment. I've already mentioned as but one example the grammar schools of Scotland and England, founded and run through the patronage of the Church. Tell me, whom do you think sat in the desks? Priests? Bishops? Popes? Nope. It was the children of those peasants you insist the Church was so interested in keeping in ignorance. Parents would often travel hundreds of miles and leave their children in the care of monks so that they could get the education they couldn't have anywhere else.
You also ignore the great universities of the Middle Ages, all of which were founded by the Church and freely open to all comers. The entire system of higher education the West possesses today was created by the Church. These facts simply cannot be squared with the fictional Church you attempt to pass off as historic reality.
No, the Church was not perfect. No, the education it provided was not always unreproachable. But it was for hundreds of years the sole preserver of ancient knowledge, and the sole force for education in the West, whatever you may think of its relative quality or motivation.
I do get it. The US government kills a bunch of people at Waco. It's a ruthless, democratic oligarchy, run by immoral, opportunistic capitalists whose only interest is in the linings of their own pockets. No wonder the Chinese goverment is so concerned to protect its citizens from undue American influence.
Of course, I don't really believe that about the US. It's just too bad so few Americans seem to reciprocate.
Boy do you need a basic history refresher. As you (quite obviously) don't know, it was the Church which preserved scientific knowledge and learning throughout the Middle Ages. Monastic scriptoria churned out copies of Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy, Homer, Virgil ... and Galen, since you mention medical sciences, whose text was the standard medical text for nearly a millenium, and which for many centuries did not exist outside of monastic libraries. Astronomy, mathematics, cartography, botany, medicine, logic and rhetoric -- there isn't a branch of medieval learning which wasn't preserved in and cherished by the Church. Schools? The only schools in existence for nearly a thousand years were in the monastaries and cathedrals of the Catholic Church. All the great universities of Europe -- and many in America -- owe their origins to Church patronage of learning. During some of the darkest periods of Western history the monk was the most highly educated member of society. Den of ignorance? To the contrary, the Church was the great educational force of the medieval ages, at a time when the world outside monastic walls had abandoned the fire of knowledge. Boethius, Cassiodorus, and later the saintly Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin -- these were the great educators of their time, and they were universally children of the Church. From the 9th century Carolingian Revival to the monastic schools in the 11th century, and the cathedral schools and universities in the 12th, to the birth of the modern university -- the West would have had none of these if not for the Christianity.
In the twelfth century the Church conceived and nurtured the Renaissance. In the 16th century so much money was given by the Catholic Church to education in Germany that Martin Luther declared it was impossible for a child to go ignorant under the papacy. Church initiative in Scotland England created a system of grammar schools so ubiquitous it became possible for even the poorest child to receive the benefits of education. In Germany, France and Italy a similar education was to be had with ease, thanks to the generosity of the wealth of the Church.
It was Pope Sylverster II (d. 1003) who introduced Arab astronomy (not to mention Arabic numerals) to the West. It was the monastic schools and scriptoria of Toledo which, in the 12th and 13th centuries, translated Arabic scientific works into Latin. Constantinius of Africanus, John of Seville, Michael Scotus, Archdeacon Domenico Gundisalvi, Adelard of Bath, Gherard, were some of the leadings scholars and translators of the day, and they were all professional members of the Church. All the famous learning centers and universities of the day -- Toledo, Rome, Paris, Avicenna, Sicily, Cologne, Cordova, Granada, Narbonne, Naples, Balogna, Glasgow, Aberdeen -- were creations of the Church, and it was Constantine who organized at Salerno the West's first modern medical school.
The fact is that for nearly a thousand years in the West, scientific knowledge and learning existed nowhere except in monasteries and Church-sponsored centers of education. Instead of castigating the Church for its ignorance, you should be down on your knees in gratitude for what it had preserved when all others had turned their backs. Indeed, the very calendar with which the West marks the passage of history is a gift from the Church.
Ditto for the arts. It is nearly impossible to think of a single medieval artist or work which did not belong to the Church. Michaelangelo, Raphael, Da Vinci, Giotto and Fra Angelico, Aquinas, Milton, Caedmon, Dante, the Sistine Chapel, the cathedrals of Reimes, Chartres, Notre Dame and St. Peter's Basilica -- all were children of the Church. And even those works which were not creations of the Church owe their preservation to the Church. The very languages the West speaks today -- the Romance Languages at least -- owe their modern form to the universality of Latin, the very universality which made Latin the ideal vehicle of education.
As we all know, the US would never do anything of the kind -- say, at places such as Kent State, Wounded Knee or Waco. Of course, genocide -- of, say, Native Americans -- is right out. Government-approved slavery? Class- and race-biased justice? Fifty thousand hand-gun deaths a year? Student massacres in public schools? Shooting down civilian air flights? Blowing up of federal buildings in Kansas City? Nope. No way. Never happen. Not in "no blood on our hands" America -- the most violent society on earth.
Now those godless, commie Chinese -- hey, you can never tell what pure evil those sub-humans are capable of.
these (Chinese citizens) are the people who really need your help.
Thank you so much for your (highly paternalistic) concern. The problem is America has such a myopic sense of history -- as if the world didn't know how to take care of itself before 1776. But the Chinese were tending their affairs 4,000 years before America appeared on the scene to save the world from itself. And I imagine we'll still be here long after the US has faded to a distant memory.
There was a wise man once long ago who said, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Words to live by.
All of you true Linux hackers can just treat this message as an implicit admission of ignorance on my part, but I suspect I'm typical of a large and growing segment of Linux users when I say the above statement is a load of fetid carp.
In the 3+ years I've been running Linux I have never successfully compiled a kernel. Until I gave up permanently about six months ago, I'd tried a half dozen distros, downloaded every piece of documentation I could find, got myself elected president of the official Linux for Idiots Club(TM), and trolled every newsgroup, tech support site and Linux users group I could find. And I still have never successfully completed a recompile. If it's not a failed dependency, it's a missing development tool, a misconfigured make script, inappropriate permissions, a missing header file, a bad symlink or one of a hundred and ten other gotchas that are lurking in some forgotten PID thread specifically to leap to the foreground and spoil any kernel build I get suckered into attempting when I read some statement telling me just how easy a kernel build is.
Felderkarb. I'll just wait for the next Mandrake release, thank you.
This strikes me a bit like saying, "I get all indignant about that movie theater choosing which movies I can see, and making moral decisions for their customers." Presumably, their customers are their customers precisely because they like the ISP making those moral choices. Is that not the essence of capitalism?
I am sure many will argue, not incorrectly, that accumulating wealth and influence has always been part of the Church's mission too
Influence, certainly. Any organization ever created seeks to be influential. What would be the point otherwise?
I would dearly love to know, however, where the Church is hiding all this wealth it supposedly has. I've been a member of a lot of Catholic churches in my lifetime, and nearly all of them have struggled just to cover basic operating costs. Priests are paid what many would consider starvation wages. Members of religious organizations takes vows of poverty. Most of the work the Church does is done by volunteers. And the Vatican runs a deficit every year (nearly always has). Yes, there was a brief period during the Middle Ages where the Church accumulated wealth, but those days disappeared centuries ago. Apparently, however, the legend lives on.
Thanks indeed for the long post. I have much to say in reply; unfortunately, I have no time to say it, as I'm heading out for the weekend, so I must leave it unsaid, except to say that we do indeed share many of the same interests. I will look further into your references. Thanks again for your reply. Peace, Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Leaving aside for the moment that the discussion was about differences in opinion over human sexuality in general, and whether public facilities should be permitted to facilitate certain aspects of it in specific, let's discuss the treatment of women (by, I suppose, men).
You and I certainly stand shoulder to shoulder in our belief in the fair and just treatment of any member of the human race, regardless of sex, race or social status. This includes, specifically, any behavior which maltreats or abuses women and children (but also includes behavior which does the same to men).
Where we probably diverge is in how we define this. I specifically include pornography and explicitly erotic imagery in this -- whether male or female -- because it objectifies the subject, be it women, men, or, increasingly today, children. In the case of pornography and erotic imagery, the viewing of such conditions the viewer to reduce his ("his" because the consumers of pornography are overwhelmingly male, though the reverse, where it occurs, is equally true) view of the subject to an object for the satisfaction of his sexual cravings. This seems to carry over to his view and treatment of women in general, though often in subtle ways which can be hard to measure.
The essential problem with this is twofold: first, it denies or minimizes the essential humanity of the subject (generally women) in favor of that person's utility as a tool for the pleasure of the viewer. It also is conveniently ignorant of the real nature of the pornography industry -- its abuse of women, the drugs, the crime, and the disease -- which produced the material. This is, fundamentally, an issue of social justice. Second, it abuses the proper role of human sexuality, reducing it to a mere pleasure pursuit and divorcing it from its intended context. This is the issue of a right understanding of human sexuality proper, and, I suspect, the area where we disagree the most (and where, BTW, I also find myself in fundamental disagreement with modern Western psychology).
My question is: why should I not wish to protect my children from such offensive material? You seem to be simultaneously decrying the objectification of a significant portion of your society and yet defending its legality and the right of children to view it. This strikes me as hypocritical.
Another point of possible disagreement between us on the issue of the sexes is what in America has at times been characterized as the "separate but equal" argument. There is a signicant portion of America which recoils in loathing at the mere suggestion of any distinction between the sexes. I have personally (attempted to) converse with some feminists (admittedly extremists) who all but explicitly stated that the biological differences between men and women are simply a plot by the male half of the race to keep women barefoot and pregnant.
While I grant the extremity of that position, the fact remains that in lesser and more subtle ways, that kind of insanity has permeated American culture, to the point where any suggestion of differences -- physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual -- between the sexes is immediately and automatically suspect as a Victorian hangover of misogynistic religious fundamentalism. And modern Western psychology bears complicity in the fostering of such (in my book, irrational) notions.
I would go so far as to classify such thinking as "insane" (to use your word) itself. It denies a fundamental truth about men and women that has been universally recognized throughout human history. In part, separate social roles have developed in human societies as a utilitarian response to these male-female differences. While I will not deny the complicity of the inherent paternalism of male dominated societies in the development of women's social and domestic roles in those societies, to the point where those roles have been distorted and permuted to serve the dominant segment of that society, the universality of separate roles is a powerful argument against the position that such roles are merely an imposition by male power-holders on disenfranchised women. The denial of such a fundamental truth by significant portions of Western culture is equally "insane" because it, too, perpetuates certain myths about women -- namely that they are fundamentally nothing more than men with longer hair. Such insanity can never foster a true sexual justice because it denies a proper understanding of the natures of women and men.
In short, while we probably agree on the principles -- just and equal treatment of all -- I suspect you will continue to denigrate an authentic Asian approach to this rather laudable goal as "insane" simply because it disagrees with certain presuppositions you hold, however errant those suppositions may be.
Note: I am admittedly presuming a lot about your beliefs based on the reading of exactly two posts. Where I am in error as to your personal beliefs, I apologize. Merely re-read those portions of my post as an address to certain general tendencies in Western society, rather than as a diatribe against anything you believe specifically.
Unfortunately, I will not be here to continue this excellent dialog, as I am leaving for several days to prepare for the Christmas holiday.
Peace,