[Asurai]

Originally Posted by Loy

then come back and try pulling your "I'm so much smarter than the rest of you" attitude.

Alright, really, I just want to know . . . what the fuck are you talking about? I've been accused numerous times of having that sort of attitude, and I have absolutely no idea why. When posting, I've never thought for a moment that I'm smarter than anybody here, and I can assure you that such an assumption has never once entered into my reasonings for what I've written. Really, I want to know: what is it about me that makes me seem arrogant?

And I find your accusing that I pull a "so much smarter than the rest of you" attitude to be, coming from you, highly hypocritical.

As for your reading list--great. Now, do you understand the concepts they were getting at, or do you just quote their works

I understand what I can, and re-read what I do not until I do. Then I reflect, go through all of the logical points again in my head, see if the argument could have gone another way, etc. And by "I reflect..." I of course mean "Asurai reflects..." :wink:

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.

True, but I was referring more to the point that "spiritual" persons -- as the term is commonly understood -- tend to be more optimistic than depressed, and optimistic people tend to be healthier than depressed nihilists.

"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)....

True again; I was merely pointing out the untruth of the argument that "Hitler was a Christian, and look what he did!" (No, before you say anything, I do not deny that Christians have done evil things.)

The "recalling of the old Holy Roman Empire" was, of course and as you said, an attempt to influence the average German peasant. But Hitler and most of his inner party -- we've read different books, I suppose, for I've read that Goebbels and Goering, among others, were also like Hitler (though I very well may be wrong) -- were occultists.

."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?

Oh, it's very easy. Particular when, as you said, the numbers that I used were correct.

I, however, was putting things into context and responding to two persons who seemed to be saying that Christians have perpetrated most of the evil in history -- the fact that the person was shocked that I could support such a group seemed to mean that he believes it to be on par with the Nazis.

Two people implied strongly that religion is inherently evil and immoral; I responded by demonstrating that atheist regimes, too, have committed atrocities. Their original argument was one-sided; my response was one-sided (although I wouldn't call it such, since I admitted that 2000 people died in the SI and that this was an evil act) in that it called attention to the fact that the religion is not alone in committing such atrocities.

Speaking of these persons, by the way:

Originally Posted by DeadHymn

How do you defend the church that wiped out the ENTIRE civilizations of Aztec, Incan, and Mayan native americans?...

Simple. If someone makes untrue, distorted, or biased statements about it, I issue a correction -- such as my pointing out that the Crusades were originally defensive in nature. If someone said that the Nazis killed 60 million Jews, you would, of course, respond by correcting them and saying that the number was only 6 million. By the logic that you used against me, you would be "defending" the Nazis in making that correction.