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@brendan
“No other culture has ever had this urge to subjugate on such a scale.”
Urge following opportunity. But certainly the West has been a poor winner, making the subjugation unlikely to last wherever the natives have managed to survive it.

Er…none taken. I wasn’t, incidentally, trying to suggest in anyway that Christianity was a ‘limitless evil’. I’m perfectly aware that there are good and bad Christians, and that much of our ‘secular’ thought had Christian antecedents. But it also had many non-Christian antecedents too. ‘Our’ democracies for example, draw on the republican/democratic traditions of Greece and Rome….not Christian traditions (this is complicated by the fact that Christianity as well drew much from Greece and Rome, but the pagan traditions came first). But our democratic tradition ALSO owes much to China (for example, the idea of a bureaucracy, and the idea of an egalitarian education system, entrance to which is by written exams…both Chinese ideas). It also owes much to Islamic ideas (for example the idea of EMPIRICAL science (not theoretical) is an Islamic invention).

In terms of political practice Islam is probably as bad as Christianity. But what makes Christianity unique is that the Imperialist impulse (at least since Constantine) seems to be far more ingrained in it than in either Islam or the Chinese traditions. Islam formed an empire: so did China. But these were both spatially contiguous. What was unique about the Europeans was the range of their Empires: they got on their boats and conquered all of Australasia, all of North, South and Central American, all of the Indian sub-continuent, all of China, almost all of Africa. No other culture has ever had this urge to subjugate on such a scale. (and the death tolls that resulted, not all of which, of course, were the Christian’s fault, were astronomical).

Islamic and Chinese maritime technology was infinitely superior to European, and they ‘discovered’ almost as much, but they stayed to trade and create trading routes, not, generally, to conquer.

And this urge to conquer was completely bound up with the Christian urge to ‘spread the word of God’, as well as to divide the world up into ‘Christendom’ and the ‘heathens’ or ‘barbarians’ (a bad habit the Christians took over from the Romans, who took it from the Greeks).

And they are still at it. It strikes me as incredible, literally unbelievable, that so many people can’t see what is in front of their eyes: the role of religion in this conflict. It is not in any sense a coincidence that George Bush and Tony Blair are Christians, or that Bush called this ‘a crusade’ nor that Blair has spoken in praise of the British Empire. If we were to go back 100 years and bring back some of the ‘great’ British Christian imperialists, they would see immediately what was going on in Iraq, and would be far less likely to be baffled by gibberish about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and similar nonsense.

This is nothing more than the old right wing ‘darkies aren’t ready for democracy yet’, in new ‘politically correct’ and ‘culturally sensitive’ clothing. The twist this time is that they might be allowed to have democracy if this is imposed on them by the ‘West’ and if, of course, their choices and options are firmly controlled by more ‘advanced’ civilisations (i.e. us). So ‘democracy’ is allowable in Iraq because if the fuzzy wuzzies vote in the wrong people we can shoot them to show them the error of their ways. But it is not allowable in Palestine, because yada yada yada.

‘Does Brendan really think American Christians are just waiting for an opportunity to start force-feeding their (cooked) unsaved neighbours to one another, LRA-style?’

No I think extremist right wing Christians have a long term game plan to turn America into a theocracy, becuase they do, and they have said so, often. If you choose not to listen, your look out. People thought Hitler was a joke in the ‘20s too.

Incidentally, I realise that I have been mistaken about everything my entire life. I always thought that democracy came from the struggle AGAINST Christianity, in Rwanda, in the South American terror states, in Nazi Germay, in Franco’s Spain, just like I always thought that (for example) Galileo had to fight AGAINST Christianity to achieve what he achieved. But now I realise my mistake: apparently ‘I’ only exist because of Western Christendom, and I should genuflect towards religion every time I want to express atheistical opinions, or something.

Remember Lurker, LGF and Fox news are the only REAL news. All the rest of the media are controlled by Muslims and Communists. Whatever you do don’t listen or they might contaminate your precious bodily fluids.

It’s hard to evolve when you’re the one being killed; much easier when you’re the one who does the killing.

That’s normally how the evolution thing works, that’s the nature of it.

I don’t get it; why is comparing religions supposed to make Christianity look worse than Islam or Judaism?
The body count does not impress me. At all. Islam had less of an impact for good or ill. Judaism too.
They may have killed fewer people. They also totally failed to evolve into modern secular societies on their own.
A good or even bog-standard liberal might be expected to recognize that absent Western Christendom, he would not exist.
I’m an Atheist but don’t see why I should hate particularly (that is, more than other religions) the one religion linked to the creation of the modern, Western world.
Is this some American thing a European can’t understand?

P.S.
Does Brendan really think American Christians are just waiting for an opportunity to start force-feeding their (cooked) unsaved neighbours to one another, LRA-style?
Hasn’t he heard of the Liberian civil war? Or the Congo?

‘Belarus is considered to be the one former Soviet republic that still retains the major repressive characteristics of the old USSR, including its state security apparatus, the KGB, whose name it never bothered to change. Under the dictatorship of President Alexander Lukashenko, it is Europe’s worst religious oppressor, and, as of November 16, it has the most repressive religious law in Europe…

Shea commented that Lukashenko seeks power, money and cultural identity in Russia. He has turned the country’s back on liberalization and the West and has staked his legitimacy on Russian Orthodoxy. He favors the Russian Orthodox Church, which he has declared to be the “fundamental basis” of Belarus, while repressing all other religions.

Even before the new law, the government and KGB interfered in the life of all religious organizations except the Orthodox Church: In August a new Autocephalic Orthodox Church was bulldozed. Baptists have been fined for singing hymns; Hindus for meditating. Most of the larger Protestant churches have had to suspend public services because they are prevented from renting or owning property. The state television broadcast a program accusing Protestant groups of human sacrifice. The government press called for the banning of Roman Catholicism. A government-printing house published the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and other anti-Semitic tracts, while synagogues and other property were burned or vandalized. Last year, the military press listed 74 “destructive sects” including the Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses. Under the new law, many congregations will be banned. ’

http://freedomhouse.org/religion/publications/newsletters/2002/Sept-Oct/newsletter_2002-Sep-4.htm

Incidentally, outside Planet Strange Right Wing America, plenty of countries hassle Muslims. The most ‘unfree’ country in the world in terms of being able to practice your own religion (including Islam) is China, also the most populous. And popular wingnut whipping boy Robert Mugabe is a staunch Roman Catholic.

Could you please name one Christian country today, where conversion to any other faith is a punishable offence?
Or where religious heretics would be treated the way most Islamic states treat groups like the Baha’i and the Ahmadiya?
(As in, a Baha’i is no longer a Muslim and his wife is forced to divorce him – that’s secular Egypt for you.)
Islam has some serious issues with modernity and secularism that Christianity does not have.
Christianity came to existence in a big, mean pagan empire called Rome, and any nonsense would have got a despised minority all up on a cross.
Hence, render unto Caesar what’s his is (or should be) quite unproblematic to even the most devout Christians.
Islam was the ideology of a great empire where politics and religion were one and their main expression were wars of conquest. A very, very different starting point.

I thought ‘here’ it’s quite the opposite: ‘they’ are ‘the base’ of the ruling party (unlike, say, in Egypt), and they require ‘red meat’ to be thrown to them on a regular basis and they get it.