3 ms·
Counterpoint 1: Christian Crusades. There were seven major ones and a bunch of minor ones. All of them resulted in untold amounts of death and misery, all in th
by enraged_camel 10y ago
Counterpoint 1: Christian Crusades. There were seven major ones and a bunch of minor ones. All of them resulted in untold amounts of death and misery, all in the name of religion.
Counterpoint 2: On the side of Islam, there were an equal amount of major wars conducted in the name of religion, both against polytheists but also other monotheists. The Ottoman Empire by itself conquered large parts of three continents in the name of Islam and subjugated tens of millions of people.
Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Pol Pot may have killed a greater number of people at the aggregate, but that's only because the world's population was a lot larger by that point and there were more people to kill. That doesn't mean that religion is somehow a pacifying factor against violence.
- EGreg 10y agoSubjugating people is bad. Outright genocide of massive proportions is even worse. The common factor here is empires, not religion. The Roman Empire for instance brutally killed many people. The Byzantines killed eg nearly all the Samaritans. The Spanish conquistadors brutally killed and destroyed entire civilizations eg Cortez and the Aztecs (who by the way were an empire themselves). The British and French were slightly less destructive than the Spanish but wound up taking the entire North American continent from the natives, whom they either killed by the sword or disease. Same with the aboriginals in Australia and Maori in New Zealand. True, religion can play a big part. The Ottomans massacred the Greeks and Armenians, together with some Kurdish help. The Crusaders massacred everyone including Christians and Jews. With Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot etc. you had a Communist revolution that was basically a mind virus which didn't care about the human population nearly as much as its own propagation. Most people died from the collectivization of farms, however many others died from political repression. So no, it's not just Islam or religions. It's ideologies and empires. Look today at how ATHEIST China's government persecutes Falun Gong and carries out extrajudicial killins and torture. That's not in Stalin's time, that was a couple years ago. Are you saying atheist governments can't have a terrible human rights record?
- vacri 10y agoThe Maori in New Zealand fought the English to a standstill, and forced them into a treaty which still stands today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi
- EGreg 10y agoThanks! You learn something new every day.
- karmajunkie 10y agoI don't think anyone's saying atheist governments are incapable of committing crimes against humanity. What I was getting at originally was that religion or lack thereof is at best merely a pretext for geopolitical conflict, which you seem to agree with. The original comment I was responding to seems to want to promote the myth that somehow specifically Christian people and nations are somehow more ethical than atheists (and apparently non-Christian as he failed to recognize indigenous religions as such.)
- fennecfoxen 10y agoThe Christian Crusades were primarily a consequence of a complex geopolitical situation, a multi-century of clash of empires (in particular the Ottomans, Ummayads and the Byzantines) across multiple theatres from modern Spain to Jerusalem and beyond. The real role that Christianity had to play in this clash was as the great unifier for a fractious western Europe wreaked by petty kings squabbling among themselves, turning their violence outward against common geopolitical foes rather than inward against each other. A pagan Europe would still have seen similar wars, it just would have had a harder time unifying to repel the encroachment of the eastern empires.