The Gaming Den

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

- Solzhenitsyn

EDIT: didn't put name of quoted

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" -Me

Way to fuck the screen, Kaelik.

Also, there's this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2 ... -morality/

Maj wrote:Way to fuck the screen, Kaelik.

Also, there's this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2 ... -morality/

Because that totally explains why some of the most brutal regimes in history have been atheist.

Like, the French Revolution, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany...

AndreiChekov wrote: Nazi Germany...

No. Scroll down to the section on atheism specifically.

Shady314 wrote:

AndreiChekov wrote: Nazi Germany...

No. Scroll down to the section on atheism specifically.

And if you scroll just past that it talks about "a kind of political religion."

Which has the same effect as moving away from Christianity.

The entire culture of the Western world, the freedom of speech, tolerance for others is, being kind, and loving peace is developed from Christianity. And, you can point at the mistakes that Christianity has made and try to tell me I am wrong that way, but the crusades, and the inquisition were mistakes. On the whole, Christianity has had a positive effect on the world, and a more positive effect than any other religion.

Goddamn, how did I not notice you were raised on a lead paint chip diet until this weekend?


The French Revolution was not a regime, it was a Revolution. Right there in the fuckin name.

Nazi Germany was its own flavor of fuckeduppedness. Calling it an atheist regime is just identifying yourself as a moron. The Nazi's banned atheist organizations, didn't allow atheists into the SS, made speeches about having stamped out atheism. Nazi Germany by and large had cooky religious underpinnings. Atheists don't have a hard-on for killing Jewish people, that's the other Abrahamic religions.

Even if I granted you Soviet Russia, you're only 1 for 3. Whether a secular government is brutal typically has fuck all to do with their religion and more to do with their political system.

The rural populace of western France suffered greatly at the hands of the Jacobin zealots who took control of the country in 1793. In fact, it is French historian Secher's (Juifs et Vendeens) contention that the merciless Committee of Public Safety initiated a deliberate genocidal policy of extermination that eliminated over 14 percent of the population and 18 percent of the dwellings in the pastoral region commonly known as the Vend e. It was in March 1793 that the pious Vendean peasantry rose up against the enforcement of anticlerical edicts issued by the convention. After initial successes, the rebellion was crushed. Secher belongs to a school of French historians who view the French Revolution as the godfather of the harsh leftist regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and his work is a major contribution to this point of view. Through an exhaustive examination of obscure departmental archives and private parish records, Secher certainly proves that the French Reign of Terror was not restricted to the streets of Paris. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-frenc ... ctInfoTabs

This then led to Napoleon who went about trying to conquer the world to force his ideals on others.

Do you understand the political situation of France before their civil war cum revolution? The ruling monarchy was closely allied with the catholic church. The church in fact was the largest land-owning group in France. So yes, people were rebelling against their landlords who happened to be on team Jesus.

People on the Royalty and Team Jesus' side got executed while the people overthrew their oppressors. They murdered a lot of them. Each side of their civil war was executing people for treason, with the rebels being far more effective. It was messy, terrible and executions or deaths in prison accounted maybe 10% of the deaths.

All in all, less people died during the Revolution than say, during the French Wars of Religion in the 1500's (leading my Huguenot ancestors to flee France).

I'm baffled why you segue to Napoleon. Yes, more people died in his wars, but he was not an atheist overlord. He brought back nobles who had been driven out, and he made moves to establish greater freedom of religion. That runs counter to your... whatever it was you are trying to argue for.


And dammit Kaelik. Break your Ha's. There's no way you didn't gasp for breath somewhere in there.

AndreiChekov wrote:The entire culture of the Western world, the freedom of speech, tolerance for others is, being kind, and loving peace is developed from Christianity. And, you can point at the mistakes that Christianity has made and try to tell me I am wrong that way, but the crusades, and the inquisition were mistakes. On the whole, Christianity has had a positive effect on the world, and a more positive effect than any other religion.

Oh, the inquisition and the Crusades are small fry compared to the truly insane amount of deaths inflicted by Christians on each other due to minor doctrinal differences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion

"The French Wars of Religion (1562–98) is the name of a period of civil infighting and military operations, primarily fought between French Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots).

...

Between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000 people were killed as a result of war, famine and disease"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

"The Thirty Years' War was a series of wars in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. It was one of the longest, most destructive conflicts in European history.

Initially a war between Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire..."

Christian love and tolerance rarely seems to extend to those people that insist on worshipping God in a slightly different way...

AndreiChekov wrote:The entire culture of the Western world, the freedom of speech, tolerance for others is, being kind, and loving peace is developed from Christianity.

I actually completely missed this.

It is, of course, abso-fucking-lutely bullshit. Religion did not bring us freedom of speech. When the invention of the printing press broke the Catholic Church's effective monopoly on the printing of books, the Pope responded with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. No, that's not something out of WH40K; it's a list of "heretical" books that your local government, at the behest of the church, would sometimes fucking kill you for printing. Or reading. Or having been the one to write. Freedom of speech exists as a concept in the modern world specifically because a coalition of anticlericals and atheists stood up to the Catholic Church and told it to go fuck itself for several hundred years. Many of them died doing so, and many more lived their lives in impoverished exile.

If you actually go back through European history, the likelihood that you would be stabbed in the face for badmouthing the powers-that-be correlates pretty fucking well with the aforementioned powers being the Catholic Church. For the most part Greek governments and Roman emperors didn't give a whole lot of shits, and you could openly mock them for any fucking reason whatsoever. But the Catholic Church had a zero tolerance policy for dissent right up until... well, a bunch of dirty French radicals started fighting back and winning. You know, that French Revolution thing you were bitching about.

If, as it seems you're doing, you ignore bad stuff that the Christian/Catholic rulers by labelling them "mistakes" but don't apply the same rule for atheist rulers then yes, christian/catholic rulers are better.

But it's a pretty biased way to compare things.

FBMF missed one of my posts when he split this discussion from the Quotes thread, so I'm saving him some trouble. This post was technically before my other post in this thread, but it doesn't really matter.

Nazi Germany was in no way atheist. It was a secular party with christians, atheists, deists, and even fucking pagans calling the shots. The country as a whole was overwhelmingly Christian. In private, Hitler was deeply anticlerical and opposed to letting the church have any say in secular matters; whether or not he was opposed principally to belief in a higher power is an open question, and one Hitler himself likely hadn't decided the answer to. In public, Hitler trashtalked the church for not being Christian enough and openly condemned atheism and atheist organizations to drum up support from his Christian followers.

Also, holding up the French Revolution as a brutally anti-Christian regime is... well, it's a half-true simplification of an incredibly complex event. The fact is that the Catholic Church of the time was deeply unpopular even among Catholics and their rural priests! The church had developed an aristocratic overclass to whom most of the church's revenue (revenue they earned from mandatory tithes and the privilege of land ownership) went to, and they spent that money on the era's equivalent of blackjack and hookers, living wildly affluent and completely decadent lifestyles at the expense of the unwashed masses toiling far from their luxurious homes. It was not a bunch of dirty Atheists out to murder Christians. It was a bunch of Christians, Atheists, et al out to strip power from and/or murder their obscenely wealthy rulers - some of whom happened to be the high-ranking members of the Catholic Church. And those obscenely wealthy rulers were also pretty interested in murdering their uppity peasants.

It wasn't until pretty late in the Revolution that it went radically anti-Christian (no, stripping the Catholic Church of its right to other people's money was not "radical") and you started seeing the execution of low-ranking rural priests who wouldn't swear loyalty to the government and the total forbiddance of public worship and a bunch of other shit. Which Napoleon immediately put a stop to when he seized power, so I have no idea why the fuck you're talking about Napoleon like his plan was to conquer the world in the name of atheism. Presumably because you're an idiot? Whatever.

Also, worth pointing out that the notion that the French Revolution is one of the most brutal regimes in history is absurd. The French Revolution is small fries compared to things to either side of it.

AndreiChekov wrote:The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

- Solzhenitsyn

EDIT: didn't put name of quoted

Solzhenitsyn was a really weird guy, and his views are defined by his absolute, burning hatred of everything USSR-related, and romantisation of everything anti-soviet. Religion and monarchy are by definition Good because Stalin is against them and Stalin is Satan incarnate.

Afore I update my ignore list, I'm gonna leave this here:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2 ... -morality/

Josh_Kablack wrote:Afore I update my ignore list, I'm gonna leave this here:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2 ... -morality/

Maj beat you to it a few posts back. Anyhow, my favorite part of that article is:

He also doesn’t expect his work to have much impact on the wider American public, particularly evangelical Christians who ignore facts. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did – they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools,” he says. “These people will say, ‘Oh that’s the evil scientists again’.”

Game On,
fbmf

fbmf wrote:

Josh_Kablack wrote:Afore I update my ignore list, I'm gonna leave this here:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2 ... -morality/

Maj beat you to it a few posts back. Anyhow, my favorite part of that article is:

He also doesn’t expect his work to have much impact on the wider American public, particularly evangelical Christians who ignore facts. “My guess is they’re just going to deny what I did – they don’t want science, they don’t believe in evolution, they don’t want Darwin to be taught in schools,” he says. “These people will say, ‘Oh that’s the evil scientists again’.”

Game On,
fbmf

And I beat her to it a few days prior in the non politico news thread. =-p

Er, non-US I mean. Damn motherfucking memory.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Afore I update my ignore list, I'm gonna leave this here:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2 ... -morality/

Mother fucker it's the second fucking post. lrn 2 red.

Hitler was a Christian. Specifically, he was a Catholic. He was raised a Catholic, he invited the pope to his fucking birthdays, he always said he was a Catholic. You can make the argument that he didn't die a Catholic, because he committed suicide, but he was demonstrably a Catholic up until that point.

Anyone who says that the Nazis were an atheist movement has their head completely up their ass. The Nazis were a conservative Christian movement. They fucking said so at the time.



Now there were various Nazis who were non-believers or Wotanists or whatever the fuck, but Hitler was a Christian. The vast majority of boots on the ground and hands on the pens were Christian. If you think that the Nazis were anti-Christian, you are wrong. If you think that the Nazis were pro-Atheism, you are wrong. If you think that Nazis were anything other than aggressively pro-Christianity, you are just completely wrong.

A bad man belonging to one religious affiliation or another doesn't actually prove anything of course. The vast majority of people have a religious identity whether they are doctors or serial killers. Pointing to the religious affiliation of one person who happens to be good or bad in order to generalize is a terrible argument. But on top of that, the premise that Hitler was anything other than extremely Christian is also totally wrong.

-Username17

World War 1, Frank. Not 2. Solzhenitsyn was supporting nazist regimes explaining his ideology with "Communism is the worst possible thing ever so everyone who fights it is good" (not an actual quote).

Longes wrote:World War 1, Frank. Not 2.

AndreiChekov wrote:
Because that totally explains why some of the most brutal regimes in history have been atheist.

Like, the French Revolution, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany...

Ah. Missed that. My bad.

Sun Yatsen blames WW1 on the history of imperialism coming back to nip Europe in the bottom.

I think Andrei just crowdsourced his latest term paper.

AndreiChekov wrote:The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

- Solzhenitsyn

EDIT: didn't put name of quoted