I've always been upset at how those of us in the indigenous communities cling to Christianity as some absolving attribute. Land stolen, dignity stolen, labor stolen, and for some reason we seek refuge in a religion that was largely imposed on us.
Prickling at Western formal-wear or music makes sense. They are aesthetic and mostly arbitrary choices. Lamenting the loss of language makes sense to me too.
But there are questions whose answers are not affected by history, choices, or even atrocities. Is a God? What his character? I don't understand why one would reject god to spite a people group, culture, or what-have-you.
On the contrary, my ancestors include a Native American that married a preacher. She clearly had a different perspective on at least that man, his beliefs, and his god.
Shame that this is what usually happens when you gets conquered. You're literally at the mercy of your conquerors.
Why don't conquerors ever treat the people they conquered with respect, and work hard to make their life better? Why do conquerors always make life harder and worst for the people they conquered?
Any perspectives on post WWII Germany and the Marshall Plan? American textbooks teach that honorable conquest was the exact goal of that initiative. Is Germany worse off now? Or Japan? Or South Korea?
This really hit home for me though I don't particularly care for the retelling of history as if it was a movie. I understand the need to give perspective in order to understand the effect that Europe had on Native Americans both in north and south america. I always relate it to an invasive species that out matches the an ecosystem and doesnt curb its hunger because there is no reason to.
I find it particularly poetic how the Chief said with pride "We were the first Christian tribe". Christianity originating from the middle east with the new testimate being under European rule. Has been used countless times in europe to excuse genocide and invasion. Was brought by europeans under a guise of peace mission whom eventually went on to completely ravage two continents. Christianity even today is used to excuse persecution and oppress. Yet despite all of this, knowing it is not native gods and being on the brink of extinction and erasure from memory. He takes pride in the lasting faith in the tribe. And imagining him say those words I think of dedication and love.
Im sensitive about this because I feel like I would be consudered a necessary sacrifice or even entertaining to dominate/exploit. This particular board tends to attract alpha mentalities in the startup industry So Im curious on your thoughts
Christianity, like Islam, and Secular Humanism is fundamentally internationalist, holding itself to be the universal ideal of correctness. Christianity and Islam both came out of, effectively the Roman Empire (in fact both the Mosque and Cathedral were built based on the plans of the same classes of Roman buildings). Secular Humanism is effectively a reinterpretation of Calvinism along atheistic lines.
As far as I can see, however, Orthodox Christianity didn't have the same history in this regard as Western Christianity did. Part of this was that the Eastern Empire lasted a lot longer, and part was that the spread occurred to Kiev and Novogorod under very different circumstances than it did to Denmark or the Franks. But in the West, the promise offered was that the Church (Roman) would help kings solidify power in return for conversion. It was from that promise that eventually the kings secured their independence by means of the reformation. And secular humanism is effectively an effort to banish competition to the state from the public square in this regard so it too is a further development of the same mistake.
That is a very astute observation. Those of us who've seen secular humanist tenets of "rights", being cynically used for all sorts of geopolitical ends, will realize how easy it is to excite folk with such talking points.
People don't realize the dangers of such universalist notions.
Indeed. Worse yet, those alien to this sphere, are not even aware of this lack of understanding - which is probably why it is so destructive, culturally, for colonized peoples.
I would've hoped those in "social sciences" would work to rectify such issues, but in their new garb of post-modernism, they've yet more become the new priesthood.
Indeed. The only reason I can see the other side to this is that I have been married to a woman from a Indonesia for over a decade now. It has been a long process to understand the cultural differences. And I have enjoyed studying anthropology quite a lot.
The one thing that does save things a little bit is that Westerners are usually so out of touch that there really isn't much room for us to do much that doesn't just effectively turn into disengagement. But even that poses real problems. I do my best to help engage in dialog on both sides of very culturally bound issues in order to try to foster some room for dialog through disagreement but getting Westerners in general (and Americans in particular) to accept that an issue like abortion or same-sex marriage is dependent on culture and other cultural institutions (such as how family relates to the economic order) is virtually impossible.
That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.
> That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.
I couldn't agree more; this'd have been okay had US not been so powerful geopolitically, but alas. You'll probably enjoy the tapestry around L. Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" given in "God and Gold".
Looks fascinating. The abstract dovetails on Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State" in interesting ways. Belloc argued that the key to the success of the industrial revolution in the UK was the confiscation of Catholic church lands under Henry VIII because this created destitute masses that could be exploited in the factories. So to Belloc, Protestantism as a political system was the key to understanding the economic problems of Capitalism.
Thinking about Belloc's thesis a bit more, you have a parallel to the Confiscation of the monasteries in the US, and that was the liberation of the slaves. One can think about slave-based agriculture in the Antebellum South as increasingly industrialized (and even increasingly exploitative as a result). And the civil war not only empowered corporations with large military contracts but also in its resolution provided them with destitute masses pushed into the wage labor system. As I usually say, all racial oppression in the US has been economic in both ends and means.
But in both cases, the religious landscape evolved to match the economic landscape. And the ideological landscape quickly followed. In some rural parts of the US it is still possible to have a discussion about common good, even with people one politically disagrees with. But in the cities, it is all about individualism and rights and any questioning of the in-group orthodoxy gets one labeled as "the enemy."
It took me actually living in Indonesia for a number of years to grasp the depth of difference there. And one of the things that is worth repeating often is that when third worlders speak of first world problems, they don't regard these as trivialities. Indonesians and Malaysians don't want to become like Americans and grow old alone. To those in the third world[1], they have already rejected what Americans and British hold to be (paraphrasing Thatcher) without alternative. I now count myself in the same category.
[1] using the term in the original sense, namely countries which reject both Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet/Chinese Communism. I sometimes refer to Sweden as third world for this reason also, though it is far more Capitalist than others.
> Secular Humanism is effectively a reinterpretation of Calvinism along atheistic lines.
Considering that predestination is a central theme of Calvinism, I have a hard time understanding this thought. Removing God from Calvinism doesn't leave one with much at all.
A mechanicistic view is only necessary if God is mostly "hands off". Alternatively, God could be regularly be tweaking things to make sure his plan happens.
And yet Calvin himself rejected such a tweaking view regarding predestination. His argument for predestination was simply that some people are good enough and others aren't, and God knows who is good enough and who isn't.
It's also worth noting that both Thomas Hobbes and JJ Rousseau came from Calvinist circles. So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the Hobbes/Rousseau (and those closely influenced by them, such as those of Locke) are effectively Calvinism as applied to society and clothed in secular rhetoric.
Still, none of those were committed in the doctrine of atheism. Atheism has no doctrine yet you can point to many people who kill today and many in the past who point to their holy texts after they've cut people's heads off, drowned "witches" and otherwise stole life and land in the name of their gods.
A number of atrocities has been made in effort to rid the world of the plague of religion. Call it ateism or what, point is they made a point out of being non-religious and they were extremely cruel and effective.
Now, listen up. I'm not here to attack atheists or non-believers. I only do when they start by proclaiming how religion is the root of all evil.
You are right to partially dismiss this, because the Indians weren't oppressed because of religion. The sense of supremacy responsible, racism and narcissism etc., are rooted way deeper.
However, the points you argue weren't stated as absolute as you make them (using exaggeration as literary device?). On the one hand, "holding itself to be the universal ideal of correctness" is a correct characterization of religions. On the other, your view is partial in favor of religion, while religions as well state that atheism or any other religion is the root of all evil.
Silly counterfactual. A more interesting one would be if Europe had remained firmly Pagan instead of substantially Christianizing in the first millennium AD. In that case, one could imagine that no great religious alliances would oppose the Ummayad and Ottoman caliphates, nor would Byzantium hold out as long as it did... eventually we might be looking at an Islamic colonization of the New World, as the well-regarded Islamic traditions of science and scholarly inquiry ultimately discovered America.
A big question would be whether colonization and conquering would proceed at the same pace without the Spanish efforts, and if not, whether smallpox resistance and the like could have taken root and afforded the native American peoples a better fighting chance. And would the same ethnic groups be represented among the colonists? What slavery practices would we have seen?
Catholics (and especially Jesuits) were given the task of baptizing natives and turning them into Christians. The church often came into conflict with the ruling class over their treatment. Other Christian churches often had the same obligations.
I'm not sure what that has to do with it. Everybody was religious, of course there were religious people on both sides of the "should we murder everybody in sight?" question.
Because of evidence from atheist leaders from the French reign of terror through all communist madmen until today. No religion, not even if you count Hitler religios (dubious claim in the first place I'd say) comes close to Mao and Stalin.
I'd say the Taiping Rebellion was just as bad. When you consider that they didn't have access to the sort of industrialized death that people on your list did, I'd say it was much worse.
Still hard to beat 20th century communist atheists in efficiently killing off their own populations or French revolutionaries in being creatively evil.
I would say that nothing beats the genocide of the Americas for sheer scope, numbers, duration, and cultural loss. All of your examples ended in a decade or two, that lasted centuries.
There is no point in making sweeping generalizations about any sizable human group - humans never behave monolithically. This certainly applies to Christianity and Islam with all their history of sects that have spent half their energy fighting the other sects within the "same" religion. It makes even less sense in the case of "atheism" which encompasses many unrelated belief systems. Many have argued that many of the belief system movements ostensibly related to Marxism went on to commit great evil precisely because they became defacto religions complete with bibles (e.g. red books), prophesy and personality cult "Gods". Somehow no matter whatever humanistic goals belief movements start with, very quickly individuals within the movement are able to increase their own power by emphasizing the need to demonize outsiders/ non-believers and to squelch disagreement.
My intent is not to diminish the genocide of the Americas but....
I don't think you realize how many people Stalin, Mao, Hitler have killed. We all know Hitler had to resort to incineration to get rid of the bodies. Stalin filled mines with the remains of Ukrainians and others. They couldn't dig holes big enough to bury the dead. I have no idea what Mao did with the 50-80 million bodies he had on his hands.
Between just these 3 guys your looking at well over 100 million people and that is not including war dead. Just people being exterminated for various reasons.
So to say that nothing beats the genocide of the Americas is not accurate.
The Nazi movement had Christian influence. Whether it influenced the movement in a malicious way is arguable but Nazism wasn't an entirely secular movement.
And to be intellectually honest, none of those you stated committed atrocities in the doctrine of atheism because it has none. Don't throw atheism under the bus when someone criticizes your religion because atheism is the lack of belief in gods, nothing more.
Listen up: I'm not here to pick on atheists. I do have many friends who are and I think I see many who behave more decently than many religious.
It is only when someone mounts sweeping attacks on all or specific religions, based on things that, -while done in name of said religion-, are not described in the sacred texts of said religion, -then I do use the opportunity to gove a little history lesson.
Because if I and other Christians should feel bad because genocide of X, Y and Z then certainly atheists should feel bad because of the reign of terror, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc.
Or rather; not. None of us should. If we should feel bad about anything it is that we aren't doing more now. That certainly bothers me.
As an atheist, why should I feel bad because someone else also lacked a belief in any particular religion? There's no atheist text to follow, no atheist moral guidelines. It's just an absence of belief in religion - there's no shared base there.
Similarly, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot weren't working off some sort of atheist guidebook; atheism was incidental to their 'religion', which was communism. They didn't spread atheism for atheism's sake, they oppressed religious powers because they were competitors for power.
And as the OP said, Christianity today is still used to persecute and oppress. Catholicism still covers up paedophile priests. There are states in the US where an atheist is barred from holding office. Fake 'faith healers' continuously bilk people out of their money. Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
Yes, there are abusive atheists in modern western democracies, but those atheists are not saying things like "women can't hold positions of power" or "ain't no paedophiles here" or similar to protect their atheism.
You're tired of feeling bad because of the dark corners of your religion? I'm tired of the canard of Stalin/Mao/Pot.
A lot of the confusion here has to do with the lack of regulation around the word "Christian". If a genuine evil person is deluded enough to call himself Christian, does that make Christianity responsible for his deeds? When a Muslim murders a club full of gay people or slits the throat of a Catholic priest, does HN upvote a comment that blames Islam?
> Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
The only thing (arguably) Christian mentioned in this thread is this doctrinal issue because it's the only thing supported by some amount of scripture (though good-faith Christians disagree on this particular issue).
> And as the OP said, Christianity today is still used to persecute and oppress. Catholicism still covers up paedophile priests. There are states in the US where an atheist is barred from holding office. Fake 'faith healers' continuously bilk people out of their money. Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
I defend none of it.
Just be so intellectually honest as to admit that Christianity brought a number of good things and Atheists hasn't been without fault and we can meet in the middle.
As I have mentioned before I don't like religious flamewars on HN.
Thats really what I got out this particular segment. Religion to the individual is more important than the political implications. Theres an argument to be made about what the human mind is more likely to latch on to and what is worth having faith in. But here we see that it is a stronger power than those who try to abuse its name. And that in itself is rather beautiful in my opinion
I know how many those people killed. I don't know why you think I don't.
The absolute numbers may well favor the atheists. But there's only one reason for that: those are who the genocidal maniacs happened to be in the 20th century. The next genocidal maniac will probably blow all of those away, regardless of religious beliefs, simply because of the number of people available to kill, and the technology available with which to kill them.
The world population at the time of the Great Leap Forward was 2.4x larger than at the time of the Taiping Rebellion. It was about 6x larger than at the time of the French Wars of Religion and the early phases of the conquest of the Americas, 10x larger than when the Crusades got started, and 15x larger than when the An Lushan Rebellion killed perhaps 5% of all humans on the planet.
It would have been difficult to kill 100 million people during the conquest of the Americas, because that probably would have required millions of immigrants just to bring the population back up to zero afterwards.
In terms of languages lost, cultures destroyed, peoples wiped out, land permanently lost to conquerers, and duration, the Americas "win" by a huge margin.
By the way, do you know why the Atlantic slave trade got started? It's not because Africans made such good slaves. It's because the conquerers of the Americas kept working their native slaves to death and began to run out of natives.
China's population recovered to the level prior to the Great Leap Forward in a few years. I'm not sure of the USSR's population ever significantly dropped, as it was a sort of slow burn that population growth kept up with. Europe's population recovered to pre-WWII levels in a few years. How long did it take the Native American population to recover to pre-contact levels? It's hard to tell, because the pre-contact civilizations were so devastated that there's no good idea of how many people there were, but it's likely that they still haven't recovered, and may never do so.
Atheists would have been worse because it is not a problem of religion per se. Western Christianity always held out hope that the church could oppose the state (and sometimes did). There is no real room for any competition to the state in a fully atheistic society. That's why Mao and Stalin were so bad. It wasn't because of atheist doctrines (outside of atheistic political doctrines), but there was too much power concentrated in too few hands.
I don't see how that has anything to do with religion. Having multiple opposing powers is happens without religion, and having a single powerful authority happens with religion.
Religion is a social pattern and it connects to other social patterns too.
Also I think it is important to scope that "atheism" is usually a shorthand for "Western, Secular Humanistic Atheism" which is philosophically an off-shoot of Protestantism in general and Calvinism in particular. You get a different set of results when you look at Buddhist Atheists or Hindu Atheists for example (because in neither of these traditions is religion dependent on belief like it is in Christianity).
That's a good point; British "agnostic" "liberals" (incl. notably Mill), often defended the British task of "civilizing the barbarians" the world over.
Absolutely. Abuse of a name that anyone can claim will often attract ambitious people with intentions that dont coincide with what was intended. Jesus is particularly interesting because he practiced love and forgiveness yet people still use his name to justify actions.
Atheism is perhaps the scariest form of this as it often intends to supplant hope with the desires of the state or a leader. When looking at christianity it fractured from Roman Catholic and took forms in what usually best fit fir their specific regions. But the message remained the same and a church likely can be considered a safe haven despite alternative interpretations. With atheism there is no code of ethics abd as a result there is no way to predict their behaviour except with they are likeky to be elitest and insistant.
Counterpoint 1: Christian Crusades. There were seven major ones and a bunch of minor ones. All of them resulted in untold amounts of death and misery, all in the name of religion.
Counterpoint 2: On the side of Islam, there were an equal amount of major wars conducted in the name of religion, both against polytheists but also other monotheists. The Ottoman Empire by itself conquered large parts of three continents in the name of Islam and subjugated tens of millions of people.
Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Pol Pot may have killed a greater number of people at the aggregate, but that's only because the world's population was a lot larger by that point and there were more people to kill. That doesn't mean that religion is somehow a pacifying factor against violence.
The Christian Crusades were primarily a consequence of a complex geopolitical situation, a multi-century of clash of empires (in particular the Ottomans, Ummayads and the Byzantines) across multiple theatres from modern Spain to Jerusalem and beyond.
The real role that Christianity had to play in this clash was as the great unifier for a fractious western Europe wreaked by petty kings squabbling among themselves, turning their violence outward against common geopolitical foes rather than inward against each other. A pagan Europe would still have seen similar wars, it just would have had a harder time unifying to repel the encroachment of the eastern empires.
Subjugating people is bad. Outright genocide of massive proportions is even worse. The common factor here is empires, not religion. The Roman Empire for instance brutally killed many people. The Byzantines killed eg nearly all the Samaritans. The Spanish conquistadors brutally killed and destroyed entire civilizations eg Cortez and the Aztecs (who by the way were an empire themselves). The British and French were slightly less destructive than the Spanish but wound up taking the entire North American continent from the natives, whom they either killed by the sword or disease. Same with the aboriginals in Australia and Maori in New Zealand.
True, religion can play a big part. The Ottomans massacred the Greeks and Armenians, together with some Kurdish help. The Crusaders massacred everyone including Christians and Jews.
With Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot etc. you had a Communist revolution that was basically a mind virus which didn't care about the human population nearly as much as its own propagation. Most people died from the collectivization of farms, however many others died from political repression.
So no, it's not just Islam or religions. It's ideologies and empires.
Look today at how ATHEIST China's government persecutes Falun Gong and carries out extrajudicial killins and torture. That's not in Stalin's time, that was a couple years ago. Are you saying atheist governments can't have a terrible human rights record?
I don't think anyone's saying atheist governments are incapable of committing crimes against humanity. What I was getting at originally was that religion or lack thereof is at best merely a pretext for geopolitical conflict, which you seem to agree with. The original comment I was responding to seems to want to promote the myth that somehow specifically Christian people and nations are somehow more ethical than atheists (and apparently non-Christian as he failed to recognize indigenous religions as such.)
That's a pretty small sample of examples, and they all pretty much could be considered to relate to the same set of beliefs, communism.
So maybe communist ideologies have been used for as bad crimes as religion. But that doesn't prove for all lack of religion. In fact there's another example that proves a great many good to the lack of religion, that of democratic ideologies.
Now if I hypothesize, it seems I see a pattern, any time power is given absolutly to a fixed, non changing group of leaders, whose only mean of overthrowing is through force, it seems to cause atrocious violence. Such as when religion governs, or single ideologies such as communism or fascism governs, or when a single person in the form of a dictator does. Hence why democracy does slightly better.
On that note, ideologies that have as a goal to reign absolutly and supremely, which almost all religion have, and some other non religious ones, like communism and fascism have, then you can probably predict a long term negative impact of society, overshadowing all short terms benefits the ideologies might at first demonstrate.
It's also possible to attribute the harshness of communism to having to overthrow another entrenched great power, that of religion. So it should be considered, would a democratic state transition without atrocities to a communist one? Probably. Similarly, a democratic one would probably transition without atrocities to a religious one also. And this all goes back to having a way to transition that is alternate then simply through force. Any transition from a religious state, or a absolute ideology state, like communism, will require atrocious acts, because such state have no other means of self-adapting or correcting themselves. They're not agile in any way.
I think its fairly interesting that historically the Catholic Church was intertwined with the political system of various European countries.
Yet someone when this comes up, those countries are absolved of all guilt despite the fact it was their armies that were doing the deed, and their citizens who would largely receive the benefits.
Is this because the countries have changed their names? Or perhaps because the system of government has changed from monarchy to something else, thus people think having a new dynasty or new governmental type has broken ties with the old regime?
Stalin tried awful hard - unfortunately the Finns ended up being tenacious enough to forestall the Red invasion. The Poles and Hungarians were not so lucky...
Communism is a form of religion too, IMO. Many fascist leaders have been at the centre of personality cults. When people take on mindsets based on faith rather than evidence, and hold their truth based on feelings rather than facts, they can no longer be reached by reason: they can be capable of great acts and monstrous ones, from unity of purpose and lack of dissent. This is the biggest evil, or our greatest asset in times of great need. Depends on the purpose people are put to when united irrationally. Little to do with God, very much to do with leaders.
