Christians created Freedom of Speech; Atheists caused WW1

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Wed Nov 11, 2015 3:54 pm

This entire thread:

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Wed Nov 11, 2015 11:58 pm

No one actually took the moral standards of Christianity seriously - tradition and common sense substituted a heavily nerfed version for people to follow - and it's only the post-Christian world that's trying to put them into practice, because all of the substituted standards got thrown out along with the religion.

That is a substantial part of why Europe is now dying - it's putting into practice a system of morality that itself explicitly states is not suited to existing in the real world.

We've know what European civilization is like when it's overtly Christian. The conquest of the New World is a fantastic example. It sucks.

angelfromanotherpin · Thu Nov 12, 2015 12:06 am

It's times like this that I wonder what the weather is like in OS's reality.

vagrant · Post by **vagrant** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 4:00 am

What the fuck, since when the Den become a refuge for neo-reactionary stragglers? Are we gonna start hearing about the Cathedral and the Catholic Church as the moral foundation of the West again too? Maybe quotes from Mencius Moldbug? Good fucking god

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 10:09 pm

The CC being the West's moral foundation would explain a lot: corrupt, exhausted, and increasingly ignored.

AndreiChekov · Post by **AndreiChekov** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 4:54 am

Okay, impression of the Nazis was wrong.

However, napoleon only accepted christians because he needed a united country. before that thousands of peasants in the vendee were killed because they wanted to be chrisitian, and the immediate government of the revolution made that illegal, and ran campaigns to exterminate them. That isn't rural priests, that is everyday bobs.

And, I take back what I said about the Crusades and the Inquisition. Not mistakes. The Spanish inquisition was a movement of the king and he was opposing the pope. That was a political movement, and in Spain, people would want to be taken by the church's inquisition rather than the king's.

The crusades were a necessary war, as a major pushback against the warring Islamic states. A small minority of them were mistakes, namely, the 4th, and the latvian crusades.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 5:43 am

The First Crusade was an insane clusterfuck where they went haring off to attack completely the wrong target and bypassed most of Anatolia.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 6:13 am

AndreiChekov wrote:The crusades were a necessary war, as a major pushback against the warring Islamic states.

I repeat my first post in this thread.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 7:07 am

AndreiChekov wrote:And, I take back what I said about the Crusades and the Inquisition. Not mistakes. The Spanish inquisition was a movement of the king and he was opposing the pope. That was a political movement, and in Spain, people would want to be taken by the church's inquisition rather than the king's.

I've heard this utterly made up "the catholic church had nothing to do with the Spanish inquisition" bullshit somewhere before well. Deep in that somewhere.

Unless you are Tzor returned in secret shame then it must be an odd meme circulating among crazy religious people but it's flat out fucking insane.

Aside from you know, the whole crazy idea of a religious crusade executed by Catholics, including the upper most ranks of the Catholic leadership, for the benefit of Catholics, to make sure everyone else were definitely either Catholic or dead was somehow NOTHING TO DO WITH CATHOLICS you might you know oh, hope there was some tiny bit of bullshit "technically correct but really flat out wrong" going on as a saving grace for the... odd... belief that the Spanish Inquisition was a "king thing".

But it takes god damn five seconds on wikipedia to tell you that the whole thing started when an Arch Bishop and a Dominican Friar convinced the Queen of Spain that people were still being secret jews and stuff after being converted at sword point earlier in her conquest of the nation (during a HOLY WAR called the "Reconquista" supported and encouraged by... the pope). And it took her LESS THAN one fucking year to get written permission from the pope[/i] to start her own local franchise inquisition... of appointed Catholic fucking priests.

Though to be fair there WAS a King involved because you know, the whole famous Isabella and and Ferdinand "dual monarchy" thing they had going which you might actually know about already if you knew dick about that period of Spanish history.

Now in the end you can have your little argument about what the pope really thought about it and who was more enthusiastic about prosecuting what. But it was a motherfucking Catholic thing proposed and demanded by Catholic priests, ordered by Catholic monarchs, executed by Catholics, for the cause of Catholicism and FUCKING APPROVED BY THE POPE TWO YEARS BEFORE THEY EVEN APPOINTED THE FIRST INQUISITORS.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 7:28 am

AndreiChekov wrote:However, napoleon only accepted christians because he needed a united country. before that thousands of peasants in the vendee were killed because they wanted to be chrisitian, and the immediate government of the revolution made that illegal, and ran campaigns to exterminate them. That isn't rural priests, that is everyday bobs.

Fun fact: Robespierre was a deist, was publicly critical of atheism, pushed to have the government openly acknowledge the existence of a supreme being, and ultimately sent the leaders of the French Revolution's atheist faction to the guillotine.

The Jacobins murdered a fuckton of people. The vast majority of the victims were ordinary people accused of not being quite gung-ho enough about the current leading faction. They were officially (yes, really, officially) about intimidating rival political factions. The fact is that for all intents and purposes, France was still almost completely fucking Christian and murdering people for being Christian simply was not on the table, so instead they just murdered people from dissenting political factions or murdered people at random with the implicit message that "this could be you if you get uppity." Christian academics love to slap the persecution narrative on everything that even remotely involves them, but the fact is that the murders of clergy and religious political dissenters are actually pretty fucking small compared to the murder of people who said things along the lines of "man, this is a fuckton of executions. I'm not sure how I feel about this."

AndreiChekov wrote:The Spanish inquisition was a movement of the king and he was opposing the pope. That was a political movement, and in Spain, people would want to be taken by the church's inquisition rather than the king's.

Zero people are interested in your no true scotsman bullshit. You have exactly no authority to define Christianity to exclude all the Christian movements you think were "too mean". The Spanish Inquisition involved a bunch of Catholics killing a bunch of non-Catholics or people suspected of being not-quite-Catholic enough in the name of Catholicism for the purposes of creating social stability for a Catholic regime.

AndreiChekov wrote:The crusades were a necessary war, as a major pushback against the warring Islamic states. A small minority of them were mistakes, namely, the 4th, and the latvian crusades.

HAHAHAHAHA

First Crusade
Byzantine Empire: "Hey, Pope, so we've been in a war with these Turko-Persian Muslims for like, fifty years, and things aren't going so hot at the moment. Think you could pull some soldiers out of that funny hat of your's?"

Pope: "Sure, we'll help you retake Jerusalem."

Byzantine Empire: "Oh, no, we're not even fighting over Jerusalem. We lost Jerusalem like four centuries ago to a completely different group of Muslims. Jerusalem is way beyond the chunks of land we are fighting over, and it is basically completely Muslim right now."

Pope: "Sure, we'll help you retake Jerusalem."

Second Crusade
Byzantine Empire: "So, uhh, the County of Edessa is gone. I can't say I'm surprised. It was pretty absurd to think that was defensible. Or even worth defending, to be honest."

Pope: "Alright, let's get everyone together and retake Damascus."

Byzantine Empire: "Um, Damascus wasn't in the County of Edessa. Muslims have ruled Damascus for some six hundred years. Damascus is one of the few neighbors we have which actually seems to like having us there. Sort of. It's complicated, but it's the best we've got."

Pope: "Alright, let's get everyone together and retake Damascus."

Byzantine Empire: "Why do I even fucking hang out with you?"

*To be fair, the Pope had nothing to do with the decision to target Damascus - a liberty taken for comedic flair. Also the Byzantine Empire is of diminishing relevance at this point, but whatever.

[/b]
Seeing a pattern here? The Crusades are a lot more "brown people all look alike and everything is our's anyway, God said so" than they are a legitimate series of wars with legitimate grievances. Most of the areas that people associate with the early Crusades were solidly Muslim and had somewhere between "barely anything" and "fuck-all" to do with the Muslim incursions to begin with. That the Crusades targeted them was pretty blatant aggression dressed up in religious justifications.

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 7:57 am

The First Crusades professed purpose was to secure the pilgrimage routes. At that it was a short term success, long term failure. It wasn't aimed at any islamic states pressing against Europe. The Second & Third tried to secure the territory gained by the First.

How were the crusades necessary again?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 7:59 am

Oh dear. AndreiChekov, it's rather obvious that you don't know what you're talking about at all, and that you're getting a list of talking points off some conservative Christian rant page. Don't do that. Firstly, because they don't know what they are talking about earlier, and secondly the only thing they prime you for is the "Gish Gallop." That's where you make a lot of claims in a row and it's too much fucking work to refute all of them. This is not a good argument style.

The problem you have is that every one of your original points was and is completely wrong. You don't have the first clue about what you're talking about, and the people who wrote your talking points are either likewise ignorant or deliberately deceiving you. I don't even care which it is. However, because you're Gish Galloping, I can't take you to task for every clueless thing you said, because this post would be too long.

However, like the "Nazis were anti-Christian" meme that you ate hook line and sinker despite it being the literal opposite of the truth, your "the Crusades were a good thing" meme is really something you can't repeat without looking like a fool. You really really don't want to go there. The rabbit hole is really quite deep.

For starters: the Crusaders attacked the wrong cities and massacred other Christians when they successfully stormed settlements. Even if you accept the barbarous and insane premise that it's worth traveling to a distant land and killing large numbers of people over whether the rulers of said distant land go pray in a church or a mosque - the Crusaders were still bad guys. Even if you accept their premise that Christian lives matter and Muslim lives don't, the Crusaders were still bad guys. Because they also slaughtered other Christians and took their stuff.

But the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. Way deeper. See, at the time Europe was the worst place in the world. Book burning, mass starvation, slavery, cannibalism, the works. The Jizya is a crime against humanity, but it's nowhere near the level of "mass executions" alternative the Christian kingdoms offered in its plaCE.

Europe didn't get its act together for centuries after the Crusades. Remember that the first slaves in the British colonies of the Americas weren't even Black people but Irish people. Basic European values we take for granted like "don't enslave people" and even "don't eat people" are Revolutionary values. From the Enlightenment. Pre-Enlightenment Europe was a ghastly hellscape, and any sane impartial observer would root for them to lose against literally any of the world's empires of the period. Including the Aztecs.

Supporting the Crusades as being a good thing or even just "not a terrible thing" makes you a laughingstock. It's obvious that you have no idea what you're talking about, and every time you say anything on this subject you just drive that point home.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 4:17 pm

Ugh. These sorts of arguments always seem to take the form of:

"Christians as a group are responsible for good things. Non-Christians are responsible for bad things. Any time a Christian group did something bad, it was really someone else. Any time it's irrefutable that a Christian group did something bad, they just fell short of the standard of Almighty God, the source of all morality. Any time non-Christian groups do bad things, it further proves that they are immoral."

This horseshit, of course, presupposes both that

1) Almighty God really is the source of morality, and
2) Almighty God actually exists.

Good luck proving either, let along both of those. Until then, you're left with a bunch of special pleading about why Christians are better than non-Christians, when they demonstrably aren't.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 4:35 pm

DSMatticus wrote: Most of the areas that people associate with the early Crusades were solidly Muslim and had somewhere between "barely anything" and "fuck-all" to do with the Muslim incursions to begin with. That the Crusades targeted them was pretty blatant aggression dressed up in religious justifications.

I'm not sure if that statement is accurate. Recentish scholarship like Asbridge claims that the religious fervor espoused by many Catholics was probably genuine, at least for the early Crusades. Pope Urban probably actually thought that launching a crusade would save the souls of his flock, for example. The "material motivation trumps spiritual motivation" narrative was more popular fifty years ago but is no longer held as being accurate. By the time of the Fourth Crusade, you definitely have people trying to utilize Crusades for explicitly material purposes, but that idea took time to develop.

Obvious caveat so Andrei doesn't think I'm trying to help him out or whatever: Even if the Crusaders' motivation was "pure", it in no way excuses their actions, which were (at the very least) as bad as other wars of the era, and possibly worse.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 6:39 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Ugh. These sorts of arguments always seem to take the form of:

"Christians as a group are responsible for good things. Non-Christians are responsible for bad things. Any time a Christian group did something bad, it was really someone else. Any time it's irrefutable that a Christian group did something bad, they just fell short of the standard of Almighty God, the source of all morality. Any time non-Christian groups do bad things, it further proves that they are immoral."

This horseshit, of course, presupposes both that

1) Almighty God really is the source of morality, and
2) Almighty God actually exists.

Good luck proving either, let along both of those. Until then, you're left with a bunch of special pleading about why Christians are better than non-Christians, when they demonstrably aren't.

Not least because 1) is literally impossible - even if YHVH both exists and follows the definition of Absolute Good, either Absolute Good exists outside YHVH and can therefore be found without reference to YHVH, or Absolute Good is wholly defined by YHVH and therefore is entirely arbitrary.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Nov 16, 2015 9:02 pm

Omegonthesane wrote: Not least because 1) is literally impossible - even if YHVH both exists and follows the definition of Absolute Good, either Absolute Good exists outside YHVH and can therefore be found without reference to YHVH, or Absolute Good is wholly defined by YHVH and therefore is entirely arbitrary.

I agree the paradigm is stupid, but there are plenty of apologists who declare God "morally perfect" and then assume anything he does is what's "good". Of course you could use the word "wargarble" and get just as much sense once you've mangled the word "good" that much, but that's beside the point.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 2:37 am

RobbyPants wrote:and then assume anything he does is what's "good".

Like murdering kids for taunting bald people. They could at least read their own fucking story books from which to derive their axiomatic truths of objective good and evil.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 9:26 am

Supposedly that story has been bowdlerized into unrecognizability by the telephone game of repeated translations. Which isn't to say that YHWH doesn't say or do plenty of indefensible shit, because he absolutely does.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 10:17 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Oh dear. AndreiChekov, it's rather obvious that you don't know what you're talking about at all, and that you're getting a list of talking points off some conservative Christian rant page. Don't do that. Firstly, because they don't know what they are talking about earlier, and secondly the only thing they prime you for is the "Gish Gallop." That's where you make a lot of claims in a row and it's too much fucking work to refute all of them. This is not a good argument style.

The problem you have is that every one of your original points was and is completely wrong. You don't have the first clue about what you're talking about, and the people who wrote your talking points are either likewise ignorant or deliberately deceiving you. I don't even care which it is. However, because you're Gish Galloping, I can't take you to task for every clueless thing you said, because this post would be too long.

However, like the "Nazis were anti-Christian" meme that you ate hook line and sinker despite it being the literal opposite of the truth, your "the Crusades were a good thing" meme is really something you can't repeat without looking like a fool. You really really don't want to go there. The rabbit hole is really quite deep.

For starters: the Crusaders attacked the wrong cities and massacred other Christians when they successfully stormed settlements. Even if you accept the barbarous and insane premise that it's worth traveling to a distant land and killing large numbers of people over whether the rulers of said distant land go pray in a church or a mosque - the Crusaders were still bad guys. Even if you accept their premise that Christian lives matter and Muslim lives don't, the Crusaders were still bad guys. Because they also slaughtered other Christians and took their stuff.

But the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. Way deeper. See, at the time Europe was the worst place in the world. Book burning, mass starvation, slavery, cannibalism, the works. The Jizya is a crime against humanity, but it's nowhere near the level of "mass executions" alternative the Christian kingdoms offered in its plaCE.

Europe didn't get its act together for centuries after the Crusades. Remember that the first slaves in the British colonies of the Americas weren't even Black people but Irish people. Basic European values we take for granted like "don't enslave people" and even "don't eat people" are Revolutionary values. From the Enlightenment. Pre-Enlightenment Europe was a ghastly hellscape, and any sane impartial observer would root for them to lose against literally any of the world's empires of the period. Including the Aztecs.

Supporting the Crusades as being a good thing or even just "not a terrible thing" makes you a laughingstock. It's obvious that you have no idea what you're talking about, and every time you say anything on this subject you just drive that point home.

-Username17

In general, what are some good sources on the hellscape of dark ages Europe, as I've been getting into more arguments about that stuff lately

Almaz · Post by **Almaz** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 10:40 am

I'm struggling to imagine what kind of excuses Andrei would offer for the Holy Roman Empire, given that Andrei seems to consider politics and religion immiscible. How would they respond to a king who was awarded a crown by the Pope? Mostly, for, y'know, killing a lot of people and taking their stuff, too.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 10:58 am

@OgreBattle: Many historians who study the dark ages generally like to insist on the fact that they were not "dark" ages and were generally speaking pretty okay. Not sure why nor if they're right, but I've heard this many times from people who are supposed to know the topic, so it might not be completely untrue.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 11:35 am

While I don't have any recommended reading, you need to remember that the Middle Ages are a period of history a thousand years long featuring a continent that is often only culturally and politically unified by the barest of threads. There is no single big picture you can look at it and say "this is how it was." But the most common problem you're going to run into trying to talk about the Middle Ages is that people are going to point to the Late Middle Ages and say, "see? Things weren't so bad." The Late Middle Ages are the two hundred years at the end of this thousand year long period. That's a fifth. And there are a lot of interesting things that happened during the Late Middle Ages that are not really debated by modern scholars that tell you why it was so "good" by comparison:

1) Famines and plagues cut the population way the fuck down. Because fields do not produce twice as many crops when you throw twice as many people at them, everyone dying actually makes it easier for Europe to feed itself. You see a lot of people leaving the fields to specialize in advanced trades, and the result is a society that is overall a lot wealthier than the one that came before, because specialization is magic.

2) The Catholic Church is losing control over the brand from which they draw their political authority. Not only does the splintering of Christianity into a bunch of bickering factions weaken the Catholic Church directly, it also creates room for areligious secular movements to grow in the cracks like little pre-enlightenment weeds.

3) When you slap 1 and 2 together, what you end up with is a healthy, wealthy middle class who are having anti-establishment thoughts and not getting their heads chopped off. Well, not always. And there are enough of these people - and they are together scary enough - that they are able to kind-of-sort-of make the Powers-That-Be not be total unilateral dicks about everything all the time. Eventually. Again, this is the start of the road to the enlightenment, but we're not there yet. The Catholic Church is still fucking killing people for "heretical" writings well into the renaissance (if anything, the invention of the printing press makes them step up their game), but this is where it all begins.

So, yeah. There is no reason to think that the Late Middle Ages look anything like the 800 years before them, and you should be careful to not let people use them as a comparison point.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 1:48 pm

Koumei wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:and then assume anything he does is what's "good".
Like murdering kids for taunting bald people. They could at least read their own fucking story books from which to derive their axiomatic truths of objective good and evil.

Oh, they do. If you ever want to learn something about someone, get them to justify the flood myth and the drowning of children when YHWH was mad at their parents. There are plenty of apologetics on the matter, each creepier than the last.

The short end is basically, the rules apply to us and not him. Of course, given that, there's no reason to trust YHWH, so, there's that.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 1:56 pm

DSMatticus wrote:1) Famines and plagues cut the population way the fuck down. Because fields do not produce twice as many crops when you throw twice as many people at them, everyone dying actually makes it easier for Europe to feed itself.

I was doing research the other day and saw mention that wages increased remarkably after the black death and quality of life improved for a lot of people. I have a brilliant plan for improving the world now!

laughingmadscientist.gif

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 2:16 pm

Koumei wrote:
DSMatticus wrote:1) Famines and plagues cut the population way the fuck down. Because fields do not produce twice as many crops when you throw twice as many people at them, everyone dying actually makes it easier for Europe to feed itself.
I was doing research the other day and saw mention that wages increased remarkably after the black death and quality of life improved for a lot of people. I have a brilliant plan for improving the world now!

laughingmadscientist.gif

Note for the spooks reading this: don't let Koumei anywhere near WMDs.