In the 15th Century every early exploration of any note was government sponsored to some degree.
Although, it is important to note that at that time, there was a fuzzier line between the "government" and the people who had capital to send voyages. Queen Isabella provided money of her own for the voyage, as opposed to money raised directly in a tax and budgeted for the exploration.
However, as Queen, her jewels and her personal wealth were effectively derived from her position as a ruler.
Prince Henry the Navigator was in a similar position. He was rich, but mostly rich because he was a royal who had estates and money derived from his position related to the government.
There was no commercial interest, or any individual ship which was involved in the exploration of the Americas at that time.
You would likely have been better off discussing the Viking voyages, which is more of a scenario where voyages of relatively small ships fitted out for trade and raiding eventually got to North America.
War games are a common event for military organizations. Despite the fact that Able Archer was particularly aggressive, it did not result in anything but a build up of forces within NATO's own territory or International airspace or waters. If the Soviets had launched a preemptive strike under those circumstances, even if they had understandable fears, it would still be an aggressive action on *their* part. They would still have pulled the trigger.
Although I don't want to understate the problematic use of brinkmanship in the Cold War, I want to be clear that running an exercise is not the same thing as actually launching an attack. If the Soviets really came under attack, they would still have likely had more then enough time to retaliate with a substantial portion of their strategic missile forces. The very fact that they did not understand this underscores the paranoia the Soviet state operated under.
Now, if the Able Archer participants had something like having a bomber or two accidentally stray over the border, then you have something more like an act of war. And that is one place where having such exercises can be very dangerous. A small scale accident can be mistaken for something it is not. Without the exercise, the bomber either would have gotten out ASAP, or at the very worst, been shot down, but without the build-up, that is as far as it would go. With the exercise, a stray bomber could cause a war.
Just remember that you want the farthest decontamination pod on the left when you enter the vault. It uh... decontaminates... you better than the others.
More to the point, the Russian pilot was probably not expecting the attack until he got a missile launch warning. I'd imagine that the fighters were lighting him up with their FC radars every time they came out to intercept.
And no, Russian planes are not shitty, but this is a Su-24. That model first flew in the late 1960s, which actually makes the model somewhat older than the F-16s Turkey has.
I agree. Turkey cares more about keeping the Kurds down than about ISIS. It is thinking like this which historically can groups like ISIS the breaks they need to become a real threat.
For the record, I do think ISIS will get squashed or fade out, but the longer that something like that festers, the longer it has to influence Muslims around the world to radicalize. Unless decisively dealt with, the ideology and the aftereffects tend to leave openings for follow-on movements, just like ISIS came out of al-Qaeda and the Baathists.
In many ways, it feels like the right thing to do is to split up Iraq, but an Iraqi derived Kurdistan means that Turkey would have to deal with its own Kurds, and a completely Shiite dominated area will likely ally with or even join Iran. In that sense, it feels like a no-win situation because the most stable state of the region is one where you're empowering the troublemakers and enemies.
Except I don't see the CIA being interested in destabilizing Egypt and getting Mubarak overthrown. Egypt has been a good ally of the US. I would be willing to believe the other operations were possible, while in the case of Syria, it happened to fail miserably.
On the other hand, the chances of the CIA being involved in a secret overthrow plan seems rather remote under an Obama administration and too subtle for the Bush administration. Obama mostly failed in Syria because he did far too little to actually try and take advantage of the unrest, and that does not seem to jibe with an covert program to overthrow Assad.
I agree. I thought the school administration and the police were pretty dumb in this case, and I'd even have supported a minor lawsuit for some expenses related to moving schools and some punitive damages to prevent idiocy in the future, but fifteen million is ridiculous.
Anakin's fall was also completely forgettable. You never really got any feeling from what happened that anything that happened was enough for him to be willing to sell out the Jedi, it just seemed like he was a whiner who didn't get what he wanted. And suddenly he's a murderous bad ass. When he marched into the Jedi temple, it was like they added a new character who just happened to look like Anakin Skywalker because you couldn't see how the two of them were at all related.
Admittedly, all the pieces were there. His mother being killed, the forbidden love interest who was also threatened, being denied the title of Master, Palpatine's manipulation of Anakin's ego.
The problem was that those things just sat there like limp dishrags. It was like they had to check some boxes off on the plot so Anakin could get around to turning into a monster. The dialogue and acting for Anakin's part was absolutely critical, and on both accounts Lucas dropped the ball hard. Hayden Christensen was more wooden than a stack of 2x4s, but it isn't clear to me if that is just him or it was Lucas' direction (or both).
If someone who could actually write dialogue and narrative could re-do the prequels, you could almost keep most of the major plot points and make them 100x better just by changing the dialogue and narrative. And if they got an actor who could give off the sense of that slowly building rage, you'd have a winner.
Really, if anyone needs this sort of precision, they shouldn't be using calendar dates and times, they should be using epoch seconds or milliseconds. Then you can map calendar artifacts to a particular second all you want.
Designate Jan 1 00:00 of each year as some specific second value and jitter to it. Or better, set certain dates of the year to less than a second and jitter to those.
Presumably that can and does happen, although most are not scams, just poorly run or run into unforeseen difficulties.
Kickstarter is about backing projects, and when those projects are advanced, like this concept, the project can fail due to either technical difficulties or inability to cost effectively manufacture the objects.
So, realistically, while most people would prefer to invest in projects that will produce a result, there is a substantial difference between a Kickstarter for something like a board game, which is relatively easy to publish, compared to an advanced drone, which is not easy to build, and the manufacturing process has to be built from the ground up.
People who get into Kickstarter projects expecting a product at the end are advised to have some understanding of the relative difficulties involved of the project they are supporting and then not support it if it is too speculative.
In this case, the project was sort of speculative. They were asking for 120,000 to get started, and they got two million. While that improved their ability to work on the project, it caused expectations to rise, and probably caused the team to make the mistake of increasing the scope of their project beyond their comfort zone.
Ramifications: Because terrorists were able to steal the password to your hibernation pods, they were able to steal your baby and kill your spouse. Now, because of that, you need to go on a rip roaring rampage of revenge through a post-apocalyptic wasteland to get your baby back.
We can fix this for you remotely, we just need you to give us the Administrator passwords to your Windows hosts and your social security number so we can verify your identity. Don't worry, I'll hold the line while you get this information.
Its not really racism, it's mostly that no one feels invested in it unless it happens to them. Sure, they may think to themselves, "let the brown people blow each other up," but what they are really saying is, "no bombings here, not my problem."
That way they will effectively pissed off 80-90% of the worlds population against them.
That's exactly what they want. You think that is a suicidal tactic, but they believe God is on their side. They're trying to act to bring about the apocalypse. Why would they want any enemy to feel safe?
They believe that the little quagmire they have in Syria and Iraq will allow them to draw their enemies into a battle that they can't win.
The truth is, they may be right, especially if our answer is to keep bombing them without challenging their hold on the ground. You can't win a war without infantry. It doesn't have to be *our* infantry, but it seems that the fighters that are there have not been up to the task so far.
Yes, many religious people are conservative, but I have yet to see where God has made a pronouncement on AGW. In fact, the Catholic Church seems pretty accepting of the possibility that it is happening.
The real problem is that they feel that this is a political issue, not a scientific one because the science is hard to grasp and easy to misrepresent. At the same time, they feel that a crisis is being rammed down their throat in order to push an agenda which increases government regulation and oversight over what people are doing.
To most people, these pronouncements on AGW are effectively taken on faith, not investigation. Yes, you can read lots of peer reviewed papers, but all that says is that some other scientist agrees with the author. If that produces something tangible like a cell phone, these people will eat that stuff up. If all it does is produce calls for a policy agenda that they don't like, you don't have to believe anything religious about it to be suspicious about it.
That's why people keep trying to point at this or that weather system as "proof" or "refutation", even though climate change is going to be much more complicated than a simple hot or cold spell. They don't understand the science, and they are less inclined to go along with it unless they can somehow touch it.
I certainly do not have a day to day view of it, having never lived as one, and having no desire to do so. I know that many people lived like that successfully and it was certainly much better than the alternative for those who had no other choice.
However, unless the reality of the situation is actually substantially different than my understanding of what the facts are, then I don't know that there is anything above that is not actually true. Subjugated people can be quite content, but still be aware of their subjugation and status.
Hell, this is a step backward in the sense that tabletop playing is actually social. I'm perfectly happy playing video games at home by myself, but if I'm going to play a tabletop, I want to actually go somewhere and hang out.
Granted, this may make it a little easier to actually find a group. They can be hard to come by sometimes.
They are definitely evil, but they are also mostly sincere. We just need to understand that sincerity does not equate to "good".
I think Westerners are too used to having insincere people around them, so they assume everyone else is just an insincere criminal trying to justify their crimes. But this is also why we have trouble understanding why young people in the West would go to Syria and join them.
Those kids see people who are "doing something". They're seeing actual sincerity and it is affecting them. Not being used to that from the West, it confuses them into thinking that these guys are righteous and that allows those leaders to convince them that they need to do what it takes to sacrifice for a better world, the House of Peace.
They believe that drawing the West into a war with them will herald the end of the world and the victory of Islam and a return to when the Caliphate was on top of the world.
This doesn't mean that we stop fighting them. It just means that we can't be laughing at people like McCain, for instance, who indicated truthfully in his campaign that we needed to stay in Iraq as long as it takes. Sincere people won't be stopped by some drones. They will only be stopped by killing or neutralizing enough of them that the remainder loses faith and disperses on their own.
I don't want to go fight a war. I'd very much prefer to keep our soldiers out of harm's way, but I look at these terrorists attacking unarmed people in rock concerts, and if someone has to be shot at, I want it to be a soldier who has body armor, a rifle, some grenades and air support. And if we do go to war, the war needs to be "all in". War is hell, and you don't make it any better by dragging it out over 20 years out of a mistaken sense of mercy.
Compared to other less tolerant Christian and Islamic areas, that is true. The Ottomans were a fairly tolerant sort, and Islam is a religion based in its roots on conquest, which had the side effect of ensuring it had very specific rules that deal with the treatment of the conquered peoples.
However, it is important to point out that these communities were considered apart from Muslims and there was a tax and other restrictions on them. This is pretty much the same scenario that Jews would have lived under in the West when the anti-semitic feeling was in a low intensity period.
Further, the scenario was very much one where you were heavily encouraged to become a Muslim. And you can forget about proselytizing or any conversion to your religion from the dominant state religion. That would get you killed.
And finally, this treatment is generally only extended to People of the Book (Christians and Jews). Actual pagans are usually required to convert or die, although this did not always happen in places like India for rather practical reasons. Your religion was meant to wither on the vine and die, some were just accorded a little more respect than others.
Now, compared to being burned at the stake or being the subject of a progrom, those inequities seem like a mere inconvenience. And there were groups like the Greeks who actually did quite well due to their high level of education and could become rather rich in the merchant business and even as princes of client states in the Balkans. The Ottoman vilayet system was remarkably tolerant for an intolerant age, especially for Jews.
Nevertheless, you were most definitely a second class citizen in a manner in which would be intolerable in a Western society today unless you were a Muslim. And that tolerance was extended as a means of pacifying a large, multi-ethnic empire in a manner that many Muslims today might not subscribe to. Bear in mind, the Ottoman empire really wasn't conquered, it rotted from the inside out. Many Muslim thinkers would view the Ottoman empire as a failure. This is why your ISIS types are looking at the early Arab caliphate for inspiration.
I'd have to agree. I'm not enthusiastic about any provider, but compared to Comcast and Time Warner, the few problems that come up with Cox barely register with me. They may be making a tidy profit and have mediocre service at best, but they don't seem to be actively evil like the others.
In the 12th Century in Europe, it was overwhelmingly accepted that God is real, the Pope got to tell Kings what to do and regular old people would clamor for you to be burned/imprisoned/disputed if you were an atheist. If you had lived at that time, you could have defined yourself as being delusional because your definition is based on conventional wisdom, which shifts over time based on sentiment.
You can also discuss religion in rational argument all you like. You are confusing scientific method with reason, which it is not. Many, if not most religions can be discussed logically, you can ascertain certain facts, and new information can be brought into discussions which might change practices (an all too frequent occurrence). These discussions merely proceed from starting points which you do not share, for instance, the content and validity of certain revelations and the existence of deities.
As for Sweden and Denmark, I feel your reading of the statistics is misleading in a couple of ways.
First, while few in those countries indicate a Christian belief system, most of them believe in some sort of supernatural or spiritual existence. This is mostly agnostic, not atheistic. And not to split hairs, but it has also been suggested that most just respond in that manner because religion as an institution is not important to them, without suggesting anything about strict atheism.
Moreover, those countries, as indeed pretty much all of Scandinavia, are small, ethnically homogeneous, and geo-politically neutral places. Take Denmark, for instance. Population: 5,580,516. 89.6% of the population is of Danish descent. Of the rest of the immigrants, 34% of those are from Western Europe. Where Denmark does show crime issues is with the immigrant populations, which are mercifully small percentage wise, but completely outsize in the percentage of crime that is produced.
If you put the roiling mass of immigration and racial division and just the sheer size of the US (for example) against those countries, it's not really a particularly good comparison. I can find some nice places in the US that have similar sizes and characteristics too. We have cities with a similar population to Denmark. If you're suggesting that calm places where everyone resembles one another are doing well, I might agree, but I probably wouldn't start with their putative atheism.
But even if we accept your point at face value, you still can't No True Scotsman your way out of the various genocidal atheistic regimes of the 20th Century. There are also some very nice Christian places to live too, but I doubt you'd allow me to suggest that because I can find a nice Christian place to live, that the Inquisition or Crusades were just aberrations or "not really Christianity", because the people who make similar arguments as you do not distinguish the two. This is why I said, and history backs me up, that atheism has provided no relief from the burdens that some atheists suggest that religion has put upon us.
I personally feel that we're just as likely to find a better future by following the actual tenants of Christianity as we are by following a scientific, secular path into the future. As much as I love science and our advancements in technology, I don't actually see a better world coming about because of that alone.
their membership was overwhelmingly Christian, and they were supported by both the Catholic and the protestant churches.
My next door neighbor hasn't been to church since his first communion, and he quotes Buddhist texts and thinks that Jesus was not particularly divine, but that he was sort of a cool guy, you know, if he existed. To you, however, because he was slightly brought up as a Catholic, he's now as Catholic as the Pope and the College of Cardinals.
Let's be clear, if there is overlap between Christianity and Nazi doctrine, it's probably a coincidence.
And communism is little more than a religion without a deity.
So, Communism was an atheistic religion? I have to admit, that is amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 15th Century every early exploration of any note was government sponsored to some degree.
Although, it is important to note that at that time, there was a fuzzier line between the "government" and the people who had capital to send voyages. Queen Isabella provided money of her own for the voyage, as opposed to money raised directly in a tax and budgeted for the exploration.
However, as Queen, her jewels and her personal wealth were effectively derived from her position as a ruler.
Prince Henry the Navigator was in a similar position. He was rich, but mostly rich because he was a royal who had estates and money derived from his position related to the government.
There was no commercial interest, or any individual ship which was involved in the exploration of the Americas at that time.
You would likely have been better off discussing the Viking voyages, which is more of a scenario where voyages of relatively small ships fitted out for trade and raiding eventually got to North America.
War games are a common event for military organizations. Despite the fact that Able Archer was particularly aggressive, it did not result in anything but a build up of forces within NATO's own territory or International airspace or waters. If the Soviets had launched a preemptive strike under those circumstances, even if they had understandable fears, it would still be an aggressive action on *their* part. They would still have pulled the trigger.
Although I don't want to understate the problematic use of brinkmanship in the Cold War, I want to be clear that running an exercise is not the same thing as actually launching an attack. If the Soviets really came under attack, they would still have likely had more then enough time to retaliate with a substantial portion of their strategic missile forces. The very fact that they did not understand this underscores the paranoia the Soviet state operated under.
Now, if the Able Archer participants had something like having a bomber or two accidentally stray over the border, then you have something more like an act of war. And that is one place where having such exercises can be very dangerous. A small scale accident can be mistaken for something it is not. Without the exercise, the bomber either would have gotten out ASAP, or at the very worst, been shot down, but without the build-up, that is as far as it would go. With the exercise, a stray bomber could cause a war.
Just remember that you want the farthest decontamination pod on the left when you enter the vault. It uh... decontaminates... you better than the others.
More to the point, the Russian pilot was probably not expecting the attack until he got a missile launch warning. I'd imagine that the fighters were lighting him up with their FC radars every time they came out to intercept.
And no, Russian planes are not shitty, but this is a Su-24. That model first flew in the late 1960s, which actually makes the model somewhat older than the F-16s Turkey has.
I agree. Turkey cares more about keeping the Kurds down than about ISIS. It is thinking like this which historically can groups like ISIS the breaks they need to become a real threat.
For the record, I do think ISIS will get squashed or fade out, but the longer that something like that festers, the longer it has to influence Muslims around the world to radicalize. Unless decisively dealt with, the ideology and the aftereffects tend to leave openings for follow-on movements, just like ISIS came out of al-Qaeda and the Baathists.
In many ways, it feels like the right thing to do is to split up Iraq, but an Iraqi derived Kurdistan means that Turkey would have to deal with its own Kurds, and a completely Shiite dominated area will likely ally with or even join Iran. In that sense, it feels like a no-win situation because the most stable state of the region is one where you're empowering the troublemakers and enemies.
Except I don't see the CIA being interested in destabilizing Egypt and getting Mubarak overthrown. Egypt has been a good ally of the US. I would be willing to believe the other operations were possible, while in the case of Syria, it happened to fail miserably.
On the other hand, the chances of the CIA being involved in a secret overthrow plan seems rather remote under an Obama administration and too subtle for the Bush administration. Obama mostly failed in Syria because he did far too little to actually try and take advantage of the unrest, and that does not seem to jibe with an covert program to overthrow Assad.
I agree. I thought the school administration and the police were pretty dumb in this case, and I'd even have supported a minor lawsuit for some expenses related to moving schools and some punitive damages to prevent idiocy in the future, but fifteen million is ridiculous.
Anakin's fall was also completely forgettable. You never really got any feeling from what happened that anything that happened was enough for him to be willing to sell out the Jedi, it just seemed like he was a whiner who didn't get what he wanted. And suddenly he's a murderous bad ass. When he marched into the Jedi temple, it was like they added a new character who just happened to look like Anakin Skywalker because you couldn't see how the two of them were at all related.
Admittedly, all the pieces were there. His mother being killed, the forbidden love interest who was also threatened, being denied the title of Master, Palpatine's manipulation of Anakin's ego.
The problem was that those things just sat there like limp dishrags. It was like they had to check some boxes off on the plot so Anakin could get around to turning into a monster. The dialogue and acting for Anakin's part was absolutely critical, and on both accounts Lucas dropped the ball hard. Hayden Christensen was more wooden than a stack of 2x4s, but it isn't clear to me if that is just him or it was Lucas' direction (or both).
If someone who could actually write dialogue and narrative could re-do the prequels, you could almost keep most of the major plot points and make them 100x better just by changing the dialogue and narrative. And if they got an actor who could give off the sense of that slowly building rage, you'd have a winner.
Really, if anyone needs this sort of precision, they shouldn't be using calendar dates and times, they should be using epoch seconds or milliseconds. Then you can map calendar artifacts to a particular second all you want.
Designate Jan 1 00:00 of each year as some specific second value and jitter to it. Or better, set certain dates of the year to less than a second and jitter to those.
Presumably that can and does happen, although most are not scams, just poorly run or run into unforeseen difficulties.
Kickstarter is about backing projects, and when those projects are advanced, like this concept, the project can fail due to either technical difficulties or inability to cost effectively manufacture the objects.
So, realistically, while most people would prefer to invest in projects that will produce a result, there is a substantial difference between a Kickstarter for something like a board game, which is relatively easy to publish, compared to an advanced drone, which is not easy to build, and the manufacturing process has to be built from the ground up.
People who get into Kickstarter projects expecting a product at the end are advised to have some understanding of the relative difficulties involved of the project they are supporting and then not support it if it is too speculative.
In this case, the project was sort of speculative. They were asking for 120,000 to get started, and they got two million. While that improved their ability to work on the project, it caused expectations to rise, and probably caused the team to make the mistake of increasing the scope of their project beyond their comfort zone.
Bad physical security, poor password security
Ramifications: Because terrorists were able to steal the password to your hibernation pods, they were able to steal your baby and kill your spouse. Now, because of that, you need to go on a rip roaring rampage of revenge through a post-apocalyptic wasteland to get your baby back.
We can fix this for you remotely, we just need you to give us the Administrator passwords to your Windows hosts and your social security number so we can verify your identity. Don't worry, I'll hold the line while you get this information.
That's fine, assuming that they're priced appropriately for their storage capacity.
Its not really racism, it's mostly that no one feels invested in it unless it happens to them. Sure, they may think to themselves, "let the brown people blow each other up," but what they are really saying is, "no bombings here, not my problem."
That way they will effectively pissed off 80-90% of the worlds population against them.
That's exactly what they want. You think that is a suicidal tactic, but they believe God is on their side. They're trying to act to bring about the apocalypse. Why would they want any enemy to feel safe?
They believe that the little quagmire they have in Syria and Iraq will allow them to draw their enemies into a battle that they can't win.
The truth is, they may be right, especially if our answer is to keep bombing them without challenging their hold on the ground. You can't win a war without infantry. It doesn't have to be *our* infantry, but it seems that the fighters that are there have not been up to the task so far.
I think that is mostly incorrect.
Yes, many religious people are conservative, but I have yet to see where God has made a pronouncement on AGW. In fact, the Catholic Church seems pretty accepting of the possibility that it is happening.
The real problem is that they feel that this is a political issue, not a scientific one because the science is hard to grasp and easy to misrepresent. At the same time, they feel that a crisis is being rammed down their throat in order to push an agenda which increases government regulation and oversight over what people are doing.
To most people, these pronouncements on AGW are effectively taken on faith, not investigation. Yes, you can read lots of peer reviewed papers, but all that says is that some other scientist agrees with the author. If that produces something tangible like a cell phone, these people will eat that stuff up. If all it does is produce calls for a policy agenda that they don't like, you don't have to believe anything religious about it to be suspicious about it.
That's why people keep trying to point at this or that weather system as "proof" or "refutation", even though climate change is going to be much more complicated than a simple hot or cold spell. They don't understand the science, and they are less inclined to go along with it unless they can somehow touch it.
I certainly do not have a day to day view of it, having never lived as one, and having no desire to do so. I know that many people lived like that successfully and it was certainly much better than the alternative for those who had no other choice.
However, unless the reality of the situation is actually substantially different than my understanding of what the facts are, then I don't know that there is anything above that is not actually true. Subjugated people can be quite content, but still be aware of their subjugation and status.
Hell, this is a step backward in the sense that tabletop playing is actually social. I'm perfectly happy playing video games at home by myself, but if I'm going to play a tabletop, I want to actually go somewhere and hang out.
Granted, this may make it a little easier to actually find a group. They can be hard to come by sometimes.
They are definitely evil, but they are also mostly sincere. We just need to understand that sincerity does not equate to "good".
I think Westerners are too used to having insincere people around them, so they assume everyone else is just an insincere criminal trying to justify their crimes. But this is also why we have trouble understanding why young people in the West would go to Syria and join them.
Those kids see people who are "doing something". They're seeing actual sincerity and it is affecting them. Not being used to that from the West, it confuses them into thinking that these guys are righteous and that allows those leaders to convince them that they need to do what it takes to sacrifice for a better world, the House of Peace.
They believe that drawing the West into a war with them will herald the end of the world and the victory of Islam and a return to when the Caliphate was on top of the world.
This doesn't mean that we stop fighting them. It just means that we can't be laughing at people like McCain, for instance, who indicated truthfully in his campaign that we needed to stay in Iraq as long as it takes. Sincere people won't be stopped by some drones. They will only be stopped by killing or neutralizing enough of them that the remainder loses faith and disperses on their own.
I don't want to go fight a war. I'd very much prefer to keep our soldiers out of harm's way, but I look at these terrorists attacking unarmed people in rock concerts, and if someone has to be shot at, I want it to be a soldier who has body armor, a rifle, some grenades and air support. And if we do go to war, the war needs to be "all in". War is hell, and you don't make it any better by dragging it out over 20 years out of a mistaken sense of mercy.
Compared to other less tolerant Christian and Islamic areas, that is true. The Ottomans were a fairly tolerant sort, and Islam is a religion based in its roots on conquest, which had the side effect of ensuring it had very specific rules that deal with the treatment of the conquered peoples.
However, it is important to point out that these communities were considered apart from Muslims and there was a tax and other restrictions on them. This is pretty much the same scenario that Jews would have lived under in the West when the anti-semitic feeling was in a low intensity period.
Further, the scenario was very much one where you were heavily encouraged to become a Muslim. And you can forget about proselytizing or any conversion to your religion from the dominant state religion. That would get you killed.
And finally, this treatment is generally only extended to People of the Book (Christians and Jews). Actual pagans are usually required to convert or die, although this did not always happen in places like India for rather practical reasons. Your religion was meant to wither on the vine and die, some were just accorded a little more respect than others.
Now, compared to being burned at the stake or being the subject of a progrom, those inequities seem like a mere inconvenience. And there were groups like the Greeks who actually did quite well due to their high level of education and could become rather rich in the merchant business and even as princes of client states in the Balkans. The Ottoman vilayet system was remarkably tolerant for an intolerant age, especially for Jews.
Nevertheless, you were most definitely a second class citizen in a manner in which would be intolerable in a Western society today unless you were a Muslim. And that tolerance was extended as a means of pacifying a large, multi-ethnic empire in a manner that many Muslims today might not subscribe to. Bear in mind, the Ottoman empire really wasn't conquered, it rotted from the inside out. Many Muslim thinkers would view the Ottoman empire as a failure. This is why your ISIS types are looking at the early Arab caliphate for inspiration.
I'd have to agree. I'm not enthusiastic about any provider, but compared to Comcast and Time Warner, the few problems that come up with Cox barely register with me. They may be making a tidy profit and have mediocre service at best, but they don't seem to be actively evil like the others.
Yes.
Garbage in, garbage out.
In the 12th Century in Europe, it was overwhelmingly accepted that God is real, the Pope got to tell Kings what to do and regular old people would clamor for you to be burned/imprisoned/disputed if you were an atheist. If you had lived at that time, you could have defined yourself as being delusional because your definition is based on conventional wisdom, which shifts over time based on sentiment.
You can also discuss religion in rational argument all you like. You are confusing scientific method with reason, which it is not. Many, if not most religions can be discussed logically, you can ascertain certain facts, and new information can be brought into discussions which might change practices (an all too frequent occurrence). These discussions merely proceed from starting points which you do not share, for instance, the content and validity of certain revelations and the existence of deities.
As for Sweden and Denmark, I feel your reading of the statistics is misleading in a couple of ways.
First, while few in those countries indicate a Christian belief system, most of them believe in some sort of supernatural or spiritual existence. This is mostly agnostic, not atheistic. And not to split hairs, but it has also been suggested that most just respond in that manner because religion as an institution is not important to them, without suggesting anything about strict atheism.
Moreover, those countries, as indeed pretty much all of Scandinavia, are small, ethnically homogeneous, and geo-politically neutral places. Take Denmark, for instance. Population: 5,580,516. 89.6% of the population is of Danish descent. Of the rest of the immigrants, 34% of those are from Western Europe. Where Denmark does show crime issues is with the immigrant populations, which are mercifully small percentage wise, but completely outsize in the percentage of crime that is produced.
If you put the roiling mass of immigration and racial division and just the sheer size of the US (for example) against those countries, it's not really a particularly good comparison. I can find some nice places in the US that have similar sizes and characteristics too. We have cities with a similar population to Denmark. If you're suggesting that calm places where everyone resembles one another are doing well, I might agree, but I probably wouldn't start with their putative atheism.
But even if we accept your point at face value, you still can't No True Scotsman your way out of the various genocidal atheistic regimes of the 20th Century. There are also some very nice Christian places to live too, but I doubt you'd allow me to suggest that because I can find a nice Christian place to live, that the Inquisition or Crusades were just aberrations or "not really Christianity", because the people who make similar arguments as you do not distinguish the two. This is why I said, and history backs me up, that atheism has provided no relief from the burdens that some atheists suggest that religion has put upon us.
I personally feel that we're just as likely to find a better future by following the actual tenants of Christianity as we are by following a scientific, secular path into the future. As much as I love science and our advancements in technology, I don't actually see a better world coming about because of that alone.
You also wouldn't correct Miles Davis for not having proper embouchure or Van Gogh for having rough brush strokes.
Miles Davis maybe, but Van Gogh... that motherfucker takes ears. I just say, "Yes, sir, very nice brush stroke, sir."
The Nazis were explicitly Christian,
Demonstrably false.
their membership was overwhelmingly Christian, and they were supported by both the Catholic and the protestant churches.
My next door neighbor hasn't been to church since his first communion, and he quotes Buddhist texts and thinks that Jesus was not particularly divine, but that he was sort of a cool guy, you know, if he existed. To you, however, because he was slightly brought up as a Catholic, he's now as Catholic as the Pope and the College of Cardinals.
Let's be clear, if there is overlap between Christianity and Nazi doctrine, it's probably a coincidence.
And communism is little more than a religion without a deity.
So, Communism was an atheistic religion? I have to admit, that is amusing.