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How wonderful... - Page 2

post #51 of 57
11/25/02 at 7:45pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Jacob Singer:
Shouldn't religion be above the secular world when it comes to murdering your fellow man?
Power hungry people hide behind the Church in order to satisfy their lust for power. Pure and simple. There's no religion there, just the will to power.

Sad, but true.

Why are people so willing to overlook The State as being the cause of death and destruction throughout human history and fallaciously turn to The Church as being the cause of death?

The true cause of death, murder, destruction? Power.
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post #52 of 57
11/25/02 at 7:52pm
Just for the record, in the other thread I started I brought up a story about Muslims stabbing, burning and bludgeoning Christians over a freakin' beauty pageant.

How that devolved into an argument about who has the higher body count, the State or the Church, is beyond me.
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post #53 of 57
11/25/02 at 8:14pm
Thread Starter 
Well, there's always one in the crowd who uses the old talking point "...there have been more wars fought and more people killed in the name of religion..."

So there are times when I feel the best thing to do is to attempt to clear up this fallacy with hard fact. Fact is, more have been killed by The State since Rome. The only bigger killer than The State would be old age.

Empires the World over have been driven by other considerations but have admittedly motivated their followers by convincing the sheep that "God" was on their side...blah blah blah...

Yet the reason for war was/is conquest, resources, real estate. Not because someone called their God a poopy-head. Actually very few wars have been fought because someone's religious sensibilities were challenged.
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post #54 of 57
11/25/02 at 8:17pm
Well said.
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post #55 of 57
11/25/02 at 8:47pm
I especially like the usage of poopy-head.
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post #56 of 57
11/27/02 at 9:20am
Quote:
Kronos clothes his house elf:
I said MORE PEOPLE have been killed by The State, not "more religious people".

And...
Quote:
...unless the killing is done by an entirely atheist state...
Stalin=atheist
20,000,000 humans dead basically at his hands...of varying religious/non-religious backgrounds.
Well, not only is that simplifying things drastically, but the 20 million figure is also not set in stone. The number who were executed by the state during the Terror is probably between 1-2 million, with many millions of others dying from starvation or imprisonment in Siberia. Stalin was unquestionably a monster, but was he really worse than Hitler?

Remember, the early Soviet Union was a vast, unstable revolutionary state surrounded on all sides by enemies and "counter-revolutionary" elements; being forced by Stalin into a chaotic transition from its previous primarily agricultural base to an industrial society and military superpower. Even if Stalin had been a nice guy, his plan would've caused suffering--it was an inevitable consequence of living in the post-revolutionary state. That Stalin was in fact a power-hungy monster exacerbated an inevitably ugly situation.

Meanwhile, it pays to remember that Hitler's troops themselves also killed well over 20 million Russians--and that Stalin's military played a crucial role in the German defeat.
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post #57 of 57
11/27/02 at 2:11pm
Thread Starter 
Yet both killed in the name of the State.

Whether you kill by a bullet to the head in the basement of the Kremlin or you purposely and deliberately starve your people or you sentence your people to basically die in Siberia, you're still a monster. 20 million of your own citizens die deliberately under your watch...that's evil.

And nary a prayer or invocation of God in any of this.
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