Dagery wrote:
Jubbergun wrote:
Dagery wrote:
2. Are you trying to say that I'm being smug? Because I'm not being smug, I'm being right.
That sentence is the very essence of smug, old chap.
While being confident in correctness is the definition of smug, the only time I ever hear anyone call another person smug is when they've clearly lost an argument and must resort to criticizing the latter's delivery of the facts. Being correct in a given situation shouldn't carry a negative connotation.
Actually, the definition you're looking for here is "
highly self-satisfied." What we're discussing here is the existence of God, which is neither provable nor unprovable, making the conversation entirely subjective. To make the assumption that you can be "right" about the subjective is asinine, and the demonstration of irony after the fact in your smugly denying you'd not been smug was so deliciously amusing that I wanted to assume you'd done it on purpose because it was a joke that was too good to pass up. You cling to the idea that you're "right" just as tightly as any of the people you're mocking...and with just as little, or as much, if you prefer, evidence. Your response(s) are the equivalent of the self-righteous Christians telling someone they're going to hell.
Dagery wrote:
Quote:
Please provide an example of the "vice-versa" that you speak of that has occurred in your lifetime.
Your Pal,
Jubber
As far as the "vice-versa" situation goes, why should it have to limit itself to my lifetime?
The Crusades were merely an attempt to convert the Muslims and East Orthodox Church while plundering the settlements of the eastern Mediterranean and extending the reach of Catholicism even further into the territory of the Islamic caliphates. The Catholic church suppressed the ideas of Renaissance scholars (mostly in Italy and France) in order to limit the skepticism of the masses which no doubt would have questioned their faith and broken away from the church. The Spanish Inquisition speaks for itself. The Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the Americas forcibly converted the native peoples to Catholicism on pain of genocide. Hell, they still ended up killing off most of them even if they
did convert.
I'll tell you why you have to limit it to your lifetime, and that's simply because you demonstrate, by your choice of the "sins" of religion, how skewed your view of history is.
Your contentions about the Crusades ignores Muslim advances into Europe which didn't end until the late 1600s, when the Ottoman empire was finally turned out of the continent starting with a battle in Vienna. The conflicts between the Christian nations of Europe and the various Muslim invaders that infiltrated the eastern parts of the continent were more wars of culture and self-determination (at a national level) than wars of religion. Your unsophisticated view merely asserts that Christians were terrible invaders looting and pillaging the Holy Lands, a view you can only arrive at by being completely ignorant of history in Muslim incursions, especially in Spain, into Europe. Religion at the time was a unifying force that allowed European leaders with disparate interests to come together under a common cause to repel an assault on their nations/cultures. The Spanish Inquisition was a direct result of the expulsion of foreign influences and renewed commitment to a common Spanish culture during the Reconquista, a series of events that would not have occurred without the incursion of foreign powers of a differing religion...yet Christianity is the sole cause in your view. Your myopic examination of history, or more likely your sad regurgitation of things you've heard from others, doesn't account for any of the other contributing factors.
Your equally delusional views about Christianity, or more specifically the Roman Catholic Church, and science focus on a singular point in history, and like your view of the Crusades, lacks any nuance because it ignores any facet of the subject that doesn't justify your ire. You overlook the intervening hundreds of years between then and now as the church has adjusted to the revolutionary ideas that scientific inquiry represented. According to the interwebs, the Catechism of the Catholic Church now says, "
Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." You're discussing the subject as if nothing has happened since Copernicus...grow up.
Dagery wrote:
There are numerous examples in the last three hundred years if you'd like me to list those as well.
Yet you don't, we're treated to the same stale bits about Crusades and the Renaissance that are tired staples of the debate.
Dagery wrote:
Still, what could possibly give Christians the notion that they're the ones who are right without taking into account the (often equally gnostic) superstitious beliefs of their contemporaries?
The only one here proclaiming that they're "right," is you. Faith is certainty with a lack of (or without) evidence, though I can't believe that you'd fault anyone for that considering it appears to be a concept you're adept at practicing yourself.
Dagery wrote:
Oh, that's right. Ignorance and a desire to return to the Middle Ages, where religious officials reigned supreme in lieu of the scientifically-minded.
Let's not make the assumption that the "scientifically-minded" are somehow immune to the rigors of orthodoxy, nor are they any less fallible, more humane, or more tolerant than their religious predecessors. We need only look to the last century to see that countries with governments founded in a philosophy that was specifically atheist were no better than their predecessors from less enlightened ages...who at least had the excuse of being from a less enlightened age. You're blaming religion for the failings of men, when it becomes abundantly clear that those failings do not disappear in the absence of religion.
Your Pal,
Jubber
