IntenseDebate - Notimefortrivia

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - Does the Christian God... · 0 replies · +2 points

If there were truly a Christian God I would certainly hope that It did suffer. I am still not over the flooding of the earth and killing almost every man, woman and child and all the animals except two of each species.
The Christian God has put ludicrous conditions on Its human play things. Mumble the right words, give up reason for absurdities and It won't burn you in hell for ever and ever.
I hope the Christian God, were it real, suffered a long, long time and then died. Painfully.

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - Left Wing Hate Speech · 0 replies · 0 points

There is a distinct difference between emotionally charged speech, misuse of words and hyperbole compared to "hate speech."
To compare the rhetoric from pundits and politicians on the left to that of those on the right is far from apples to apples.
The level of vitirol, viscousness and hateful rhetoric that regularly comes from the right and its proxies on talk radio, Fox News and the blogosphere has no equivelance coming from the left. Also, a lot of what is spewed by the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, Ingraham etc. is echoed by Congressmen and Senators in the GOP.
The regular demonizing of Democrats and "liberals" as enemies of the state, traitors, undermining "American values" and so forth is not limited to a fringe group of bloggers on the right but the daily fair of Republican politicians and their echo chamber in the various media.
The left is willing to debate the opposition, the right wants to eliminate it.

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - The Ken Burns Series o... · 0 replies · 0 points

I have visited and hiked many of the state and national parks out west. I have some great memories from Glacier Park in Montana all the way down to Big Bend National Park in Texas.
I saw a report not long ago that the farthest you can ever be away from a McDonalds in the United States is something like 140 miles. That was a very depressing statistic. It won't be long before we have McParks and have to stay on the McTrails.
I suggest getting out to these special places before they have become over run with McTourists that only want to see them from their buses. And they pave too many roads to give them views of them all.

14 years ago @ News From Antiwar.com - Japan Threatening to O... · 0 replies · +4 points

Chalmers Johnson has pointed out well in his book "Blowback" the problems with our occupation of Okinawa in regard U.S. troop's abuses of the local population, noise and other pollution, control of large tracts of land that is not accesable to the people and the fact that our presence there is just not needed for any realistic military strategic purpose.
The people of Okinawa have had little say about our presence there. It is time that we leave and use those resources more productively in other areas.

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - Why Atheists Can'... · 2 replies · +2 points

Aedus,

A very good stereotype of "I don't care what the facts are. Don't confuse me with logic, my mind is made up."

Stalin did not kill with atheism as his motivation. You may as well say that he killed so many because he didn't believe in pink unicorns. Or that since he didn't collect stamps he had a hobby.

The Crusades were about religious persecution, murder, and torture as a direct manisfestation of belief in (a Christian/Islamic) God. Those actions weren't the by product of people that didn't weave silk so all people that wove silk and killed are guilty of the same thing.

But be impressed with your postion. I doubt if anyone else is. Circular logic is not what it used to be.

14 years ago @ Big Hollywood - 'HELP!' · 0 replies · +1 points

If prayer is all it takes then why are we spendiing hundreds of billions of dollars on the military. Why don't we all just take a knee and mumble to our invisible friend instead? You quote bronze age texts written by primitves that believed their God loved the smell of burning flesh. Oh, and what happended to them? The Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans invaded them, and eventually their temple was destroyed and they were scattered to the four winds. I guess they just didn't pray hard enough to Yaweh.

Do you think if Jesus were here he would actually be a Republican? Heal the sick, care for the infirm, spread peace and good will? Those are not Republican traits. In fact it seems to be what they are against.

14 years ago @ Big Hollywood - 'HELP!' · 0 replies · +1 points

What a crock of bovine feces. We were attacked during those eight years of that "excellent" Bush, Cheney, etc. leadership. The Taliban have regrouped and are kicking our butts in Afghanistan. Our citiznes are struggling to survive after the "excellent' eight years of leadership that allowed the financial meltdown to occur while those leaders were spying on us without warrants, torturing people, denying habeus corpus to U.S. citizens and kidnapping people and putting them in secret jails around the world.

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - Why Atheists Can'... · 0 replies · +2 points

And finally....

So many lessons can be learned that one could ask, where do I begin? Belief that your God and faith is superior led many good men to do many bad things and suffer great consequences. The belief that the ends justifies the means and that human life and decency mean nothing are the roots of many of todays hard feelings in the Middle East. When GW Bush used the term Crusade in talking about retribution for 9/11 it set the Arab world on edge and the tension meter pegged to the extreme. The actions of a thousand years ago still resonate today. The same foolish motivations that governed many people then do so now.

There are many lessons in history but the one that stands out is, as Huxley said, the lesson of history is that man never learns the lessons of history.

Or...those of us who have learned the lessons of history are doomed to watch fools repeat them.

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - Why Atheists Can'... · 0 replies · +1 points

Sorry, long winded and need to post in segments:

Third, the many Crusades actually stiffled learning and understanding and kept the Western world in ignorance and illiteracy as "impious" literature was destroyed and vast quantities of hard earned knowledge disappeared until rediscovered or relearned later. Much of it Arab or Muslim in orign.

We see that the first Crusade was actually called for because Christian leaders in Europe could not quit killing, fighting and taking other Christian leaders territories and it was a device to focus their destructive energies on targets other than themselves.. The many Crusades were all different with unique circumstances and motivations. Their successes were always subjective after the first one when Christians took Jerusalem. Most following Crusades were in fact self destructive to the interests of Europeans and Christianity itself.

14 years ago @ Atheist Revolution - Why Atheists Can'... · 0 replies · +1 points

This is an interesting subject. I have been studying the Crusades for several years. It is good to understand that there were many Crusades and not all were against Muslims. There were quite a few Crusades agianst Christians as in the FourthCrusade when Western Christians attacked and slaughtered Eastern Christians when they sacked Constantanople. There was also the Albigensian Crusade where tens of thousands of Christtans were killed to get rid of a relatively few "heretics' known as Cathars and so forth.

It is instructive today because history has taught us many of what should be valuable lessons. First is that your belief does not necessarily give one victory. Look to the Battle of Hattin when the Christians went out against Saladin with the "One True Cross" in the lead and had their asses handed to them by Muslims and their cross taken and turned into a step in front of a mosque.

Second, no matter how noble the Crusade, they all devolved into struggles for power, wealth, fame and so forth. Many led to subsequent battles of Christian v Christian as new territiories in the "Holy Land" were squabled and fought over by various Crusader leaders.

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