[Loy]

Asurai, asurai, asurai....why, oh why do I have to go through basic education with you....

OK, when you asked for examples, I'm assuming you meant examples of your misconstruing facts to further your agenda. OK.

1."2000 people died in the Spanish Inquisition, and slightly less than 20 at Salem. Compare those numbers to the number killed by atheistic communists in this century alone -- in excess of 100 million.".....while the numbers are correct, what you are doing here is lumping a whole slew of different groups (anybody whose beliefs were partially influenced by Marx because, let's face it, Marxism as posited by Marx would never work in this world because people just aren't that altruistic on the whole) and combining their crimes to paint the crimes commited by those whose beliefs were influenced by Christ (again, an idealism that's been fractured because, let's face it, people just aren't THAT altruistic on the whole) as being lesser. Let's flip the tables here...."Christians have killed upwards to billions of people in comparison to the 6 that the Weatherman killed, or the little less than 500,000 that were thought to be killed during the Cultural Revolution"...see how easy it is?

2."Hitler was not a christian"-again, while technically true, it discounts the fact that something as massive as, say, the extermination of an entire group of people numbering in the millions requires more than one person. Just at the top of the echelon we have- Max Amann, Herman Goering, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolph Hess, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Albert Speer, and Otto Dietrich (all of whom were Christian/Protestant). You're also trying to lessen the fact that Germany was a mostly christian nation (I'm not sure if you've heard of this guy named Martin Luther, but he started this thing called the Reformation, which led to the split in the Catholic church that created Protestantism....he happened to be German. And his influence stuck around for a long time there....up to today). See, the Nazi's knew this, and thus worked their propaganda in a way to appeal to this aspect of their cultural make-up (hell, "Third Reich" was a deliberate "calling back" to the Holy Roman Empire, which happened to be Christian, in case you didn't know).

3."spiritual persons tend to live longer and healthier, after all"-Hmmm.....this is interesting. See, "spirituality" is one of those conepts which can be easilly redefined by somebody else. For example, most people wouldn't look at somebody who believed that the world laid on the back of a turtle as "spiritual" as much as "nutty"....and if when you say "spiritual" you mean "evangelical", I'd also like to point out that "evangelicals" have less smokers, less drinkers, less...umm..."sexually free" people, and less binge eaters than non-evangelicals. It could easilly be argued that it's healthier living, and not their spirituality, that gives these people longer lifespans. Now, one could also say that it's spirituality that gives these people the strength to avoid temptation (AA and NA, for example), but it still has no direct influence on their health.

4."The "as badly as Jews" was an exagerration, but it is documented history that Hitler oppressed Catholics in Germany."-yes, the Nazi's oppresed Catholics...the Catholics that were part of the opposition. See, it wasn't the fact that they were Catholic that got them into tangles with the Nazi's, but the fact that they were actively anti-nazi. The groups that were targeted were jews, communists, slavs, roms (aka "gypsies"), homos, sope fiends, labor unionists, cripples, retards, inferms, intellectuals, and artists....no "Catholic" there.

If you'd like, I can pull up other threads and deconstruct them in a similar fashion.

As for your reading list-great. Now, do you understand the concepts they were getting at, or do you just quote their works whenever a line seems to further your argument? And I loved your little baiting trick..."Your favorite philosophers are probably psychotic"....cute, in that pissed off teenager kind of way. I just wanna pinch your cheeks and say "oooh, how DARLING!" in a high pitched fey squeal.

Now, I could give a basic psychological breakdown of all the people you listed (enlightenment thinkers-closet homosexuals, Plato-pedophile, Rousseau-phobia of modernity, etc), but then you might stop reading their works for fear of "supporting degenerates" (or some similar nonsense), and I only like dissuading people from reading something if it's badly written.

However, if you really wanna know my favorite philosopher, his name happens to be Loy. See, whilst Loy's read a bit, he doesn't just soak up information, but questions that information to gain a better grasp of understanding all the intricacies and ironies contained within the information, and uses that understanding to question his own way of looking at things. See, Loy knows that nobody (including himself) has all the answers, but he understands that his view of the world is what he's got to work with, and that he has to be honest to himself in all things, and that following anybody else blindly is a fools game. Maybe not the greatest philosopher of all time, but he's the one I tend to follow.

(note to the board-I normally hate people speaking about themselves in the third person, but it happens to be funnier this way. Sorry if it offends)

As I suggested a few paragraphs back, knowing the basics means just that-you have the building blocks. As far as philosophy and theology are concerned, BFD. That's like saying that you're ready to tackle cosmology because you know your multiplication table. Read up some more, let the meaning of what you're reading sink in, question your understanding of said meaning until you get a full understanding of it, then come back and try pulling your "I'm so much smarter than the rest of you" attitude. It works much better when your argument can't be so easilly disassembled.

(be thankful I didn't bring up your recontextualisation of history. However, if you'd like, I can print up everything you've posted in regards to history and pass it around a few history professors. They might get as big of a kick out of it as I have).