so are they still going to bash Christianity even though now a MUSLIM is the biggest mass murderer of gay people here in America?
jessica
yes. i'll have great fun bashing both of them. i'll bash the jews, too.
truth
Christians rule. Our LORD is returning and will destroy all of his enemies.
jessica
will he bring his 12 boyfriends with him?
truth
you will find out one day when you stand before him on Judgment Day trembling in fear for your blasphemy.
jessica
actually, i'm counting on somebody going back in time and killing mary before jesus is born.
or. wait. is that a naturalistic explanation for a virgin birth?
truth
Yep, Islam was last. Muhamad added a whole bunch of his own stuff.
jessica
i see. and the other two books are totally legit. just like the book of mormon, i suppose.
Bad Company Gaming
Believe it or not, Christianity actually condemns violence against non-Christians, not that it means they don't view homosexuality as sin, but they do encourage kindness and love for the individual. Of course this won't stop the libtards from doing what they do best, I have a theory on how they are still going bash them after events like this. Either by actually or pretending to acknowledge that islam has violence and tolerance problem, but not without putting christians in the same boat(which is stupid, because there's a HUGE difference between christians protesting gay events and muslims massacring gay events), blaming christian fundamentalist for encouraging anti-gay hate from radical islam, or maybe come up with some bs excuse or logic to defend islam and bash christianity by attempting to "prove" that it has an even worse violence and tolerance problems(again, very stupid).
no
when has a Christian in this day in age committed a massacre killing 50 homosexuals
Bad Company Gaming
Spolier Alert None
jessica
hitler was a christian.
Bad Company Gaming
no he's a fake christian, just as fake as a darwinist who believes in a god.
jessica
well, by that logic, you very well can't claim these people are real muslims.
if these people are muslims, and representative of muslims, then hitler was a christian, and representative of christians; if you reject that hitler is representative of christianity, you must also reject that terrorism is representative of islam.
fwiw, i would be more likely to argue that hitler is a representative christian and isis is also representative of islam, then argue we should tear down all religion. it's not that most christians aren't like hitler so much as it is that most christians don't understand their religion - if they did, they'd act and sound more like hitler. likewise, islam is vile to the core - but most "muslims" don't really practice their faith.
the problem here is the divide and conquer. they want to pit us all against each other. the solution is to reject the division, which also means rejecting religion.
Bad Company Gaming
I would say your right, but you're not, because christianity condemns murder and other unjustified acts of killing or violence. Hitler was using christianity to get to power and keep the Germans from turning on him, he basically made them think that he was a christian, when really he was agnostic (or an insane person who tried to merge two word-views that contradict each other). The reason why the Orlando shooter and ISIS is more likely to be follow the islamic faith than Hitler following the christian faith, is because unlike christainity, islam promotes violence against infidels(non-muslims), there's not one thing in the quran that condemns actions like these, despite muslim leaders saying otherwise, which further supports islam having a violence and tolerance issue in modern world, thus rationalizing the term "radical islam", and while I do agree, this doesn't mean they represent every muslim or that every muslim is at fault, it does mean they represent muslims who share the same or similar views. BTW even if Hitler was religious, he was beaten(in kill count) by atheistic dictator Joseph Stalin, not saying that this proves religion is bad or good, but it does prove that atheists can be just as evil.
Also, did you know Hitler had an muslim friend? Don't believe me? Look it up.
jessica
listen, i didn't bring up hitler to get into a genocidal pissing match. but, do you realize how many deaths fdr is responsible for, too?
the bible, like the koran, tells you to never kill - and then tells you when it's ok to kill. like, for example, if you're an adulterer. or gay.
what you're not really realizing is that christianity and islam are not just sort of the same thing but are actually literally the same thing. think of it like a trilogy. judaism is vol. 1. christianity is vol 2. islam is vol 3.
Tallacus
so I am calling for the Termination of @Zack Ford the author for Think Progress LGBT issues who blamed Christian America for the Massacre in Orlando, I ask anyone who is for truth to join in in the #FireFord campaign for this PoS to issue an apology or resign
jessica
actually, i think it's probably tactical to stand back and watch the christian right and the neo-liberal right tear each other down. i'd recommend that the left should sit this fight out.
Tallacus
the left is perpetuating it with their hatred of Christianity, I am not religious myself but I really see this as wrong so fuck @Zack Ford Think Progress needs to kick his ass out, a journalist has a responsibility to tell the truth, Mr. Ford's hatred of the values that built this country makes him an ally to the enemies that are destroying it
jessica
a debate between christians and neo-liberals over "the values that built this country". hrmmn. well, you both supported slavery.
i'm more interested in discussing the values that can tear down your country, myself.
Tallacus
you had to be living under the rock to be unaware of all these values destroying our nation, from SJW Fascism, to Socialism to anti male, anti constitutional sentiments just to name a few
jessica
i'm not debating your premise, i'm encouraging your projected outcome.
like i say: this is more of a source of entertainment than a political battle that i want to pick a side on. i'd rather just make some popcorn and watch.
i'm going to give you a little bit of a pro-tip about the anti-sjw thing, though.
i'm pretty critical of them, and that might suggest that we're on the same side. but, we're not. see, you think they're evil communists. i think they're confused conservatives. you fear them as tyrants. i just make fun of them, and think they're harmless idiots.
the actual truth, the way i see it, is that if you could sit down with them and have a reasonable discussion, you'd determine that you actually have a lot of common ground. i, on the other hand, am never going to agree with either of you.
from my perspective, you're two sides of the same coin.
Tallacus
oh yeah its all fun to watch and make fun off, until it comes for you
jessica
well, i've taken steps to protect myself, too: i have a rain coat to protect me from their tears.
Tallacus
a rain coat isn't going to protect you, this isn't something you poke fun off at, I am talking about real protection, arming yourself, knowing what is dangerous and to avoid it, and informing others of the great evil we all are facing
jessica
yeah. you know, i'm not really afraid of kids with thin skin. they're just annoying. but, people that want to react with guns are legitimately a little bit unsettling.
Bad Company Gaming
this could be the lgbt's time to get the NRA's good side, arm themselves, and fight back against radical islam.
Tallacus
some are at least the non a feminine ones are taking a stance to protect themselves
jessica
if i was going to pick something to fight here, it would be the continued occupation and bombing of afghanistan. it's time to end america's involvement in overseas wars.
bring the troops home, NOW. i don't want to escalate. i never wanted to fight in the first place.
i'd rather tear the state down to end the war than escalate it. america offers me nothing of value, nothing worth fighting for. see the russian revolution for historical precedent.
Bad Company Gaming
Of all the things I disagree with, I do agree with you on one thing. We need to bring are guys back.
MrAranton
Hitler had the members of the SS swear that they believe in a (singular) god-creator and that atheists are arrogant, delusional and unsuited for their cause. That clearly shows that he was not an atheist and believed in a monotheistic relgion, and there aren't that many around. If Hitler wasn't a christian, do you think he was a muslim, a sikh, a zoroastrian, a Yazidi or dare I even say it: a jew?
jessica
it was actually well understood at the time that the catholic church was a part of the alliance of axis powers. that is, the pope was close to both hitler and mussolini. they helped in rounding up groups for the concentration camps. and, remember: the anti-semitism in nazism was built on top of the anti-semitism in catholicism.
Bad Company Gaming
Well his actions completely contradict his "faith", he even killed christians who opposed him, not only that but he also believed that the ayran (or german) race was, not only superior, but an evolving race while other races are destined to die out (sounds a lot like "survival of the fitness" from darwinism). So my answer is this proves that he's not a christian or an atheist, but an insane person who tried to merge two contradicting world views, it's like as if he's trying to make the wrong puzzle piece fit. Besides if you think christianity is bad just because one of the most evil person claims to be one, then that should mean that atheism and is bad thanks to other murderous leaders like Joseph Stalin(again, killed more than Hitler), Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong.
BTW, just someone criticizes atheists doesn't mean they're religious(not even me), take liberal atheists and feminazis vs conservative and neutral atheists for example.
jessica
you're right about the crazy person part, and it applies equally well to the orlando shooter.
but, i just want to point out that the ideas you're attributing to darwin are not his. true darwinism is better articulated by the mutualism of peter kropotkin; it's not a fundamentally violent worldview. what is a fundamentally violent worldview is capitalism, and what you're (incorrectly) assigning to darwin is actually rooted in the economic writings of nineteenth century liberal capitalists like malthus and spencer. you should be focusing your ire on the right, not on the left.
the protestants were basically right about the catholic church: it was an organization devoted to secular power. and, marx was right to point out that it merely used religion as a tool of control, without bothering to care what it was actually about. that's where your contradiction collapses - the church itself only ever paid lip service to it's beliefs. so, when hitler said he was christian, it meant that he wished to utilize the control mechanisms of the christian social order for his own gains.
but, the reformation was also a failed and co-opted social revolution that produced even more violent institutions than the catholic church. much of nazism can in fact be traced to christian writing, sometimes through the intermediary of nietzsche (who was himself a christian).
further, the real christians were always on the far left of the social spectrum, and it remains that way today. marx basically articulated the line that is attributed to gandhi: i like your christ, but i hate your christians - or, perhaps, i like your christians, but i hate your christianity. an educated christian would see their system reflected in the writings of kropotkin, of russell, of chomsky...
MrAranton
Hitler was not a christian because ... reasons is a "no true scotsman"-argument. You're redifining christianity to somehow not include Hitler. What gives you the authority to do so? But even if I let you off the hook on this one: Hitler had christian accomplices and loads of them. The first international treaty Hitler signed, was with the catholic church. The catholic church also shipped Nazis to South America to help them escape the trials set up by the Allies.
Given the amount of christians killed by christians in conflicts between protetstants and catholics (in my country those fights left a larger percentage of the population dead than both world wars combined), the claim that Hitler wasn't a christian because he killed christians, too is just ridicoulous.
The Nazis did not invent anti-semitism. There was religiously based anti-semitism for centuries before anyone ever heard of Nazis. "The jews killed our saviour, any hatred they face, they brought upon themselves" That's something I was taught when I still was a Christian - and one of the reasons why I didn't want to be one anymore.
The doctrine gulags were established to enforce was communism. That's not the same as atheism.
State Communism as developed in the USSR and their Satellite states is often referred to as a political religion because it functioned a lot like a religion. Actually it's almost a carbon copy of christianity; just replace any reference to god and jesus with a reference to the writings of Karl Marx and Lenin, replace "heaven" and "the kingdom of god" with "The classless society", "hell" with "gulag" and "sin" with "counter-revolutionary thought and/or action" and you're done. The dead of the gulag do not prove the dangers of atheism. They prove the dangers of doctrine-based thinking. And no, even though atheism can be incorporated into larger doctrines, it is not complex and encompassing enough to be considered one itself.
jessica
the state actually literally pushed for the worship of stalin; the cult of personality had an apex of literal emperor worship that looked like something from the roman period. stalin was a tsar, a caesar - a god. the soviets tried to erase this from history under khrushchev and largely succeeded; it's so disturbing that western scholars have even avoided it. but, you can find pictures of icons of stalin on the internet, along with modified christian prayers that replace jesus with stalin in verse. the state distributed these icons and prayers to orthodox christians and expected them to use them to replace their jesus worship with stalin worship.
Bad Company Gaming
Stalinism, in a way, is a parody of christianity, where the worship of god is replaced by worship of man.
First off I'm not redefining christianity, If I was then there wouldn't be anything in the bible that contradicts Hitler's ideas or actions(and before you say something like for example "but Hitler hated gays", let me explain to you the difference between him, westbro baptist chuch, and other christians who disagree with homosexuality. Hitler and westbro hates homosexuals to the core and like islam think they should be put to death, while the other christians believe homosexuality is a sin(religious crime) that can be forgiven, this doesn't mean that they hate gays like Hitler or westbro, they just disagree with them, they dislike the "homo" not the person who is gay, its kinda confusing, but hey at least they view and treat them like humans compared to muslims), the one redefining christianity was, guess who, Hitler himself, to better fit the nazi regime by excusing his racist ideas(something that is contradicted by "all men are created equal" in the bible), liking all humans to animals or sacs of meat, and rejecting the vision of heaven and hell, creation, and suggestive opposition to tyranny(something that was controversial in the roman empire). Hitler used christianity, and faked his faith in order to rise to power and began to use "the no-true-scotsman" fallacy to exclude christians that were against him and turn the "positive christians" against them, according to Goebbels Diaries(one of the leading member of the Nazis) "He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity". Not to forget he was influenced by the occult a big no no for christians. Besides the way you guys use the "no true scotsman" arguement is as bad as the way the left use it to whitewash the attack in orlando and excuse islam, if you think it's rational to hate christianity because Hitler claimed to be one, then it should rational for me to hate atheism because Stalin claimed to be an atheist. Also, I just wanted to clarify something the point about my previous post was that it didn't matter what you're religious view is, you can commit the most awful crime and become the most evil man, regardless of your morals contradicting it or your religion condemning it as "sin" or promoting it as a "righteous act".
jessica
i didn't realize that the declaration of independence was now canonical.
MrAranton
You keep treating christianity as if it were a monolithic block. But there are hundreds if not thousands of denominations, there some communalities that make them christian, but beyond that there are a lot of differences. Because of that almost any statement along the lines "christianity stands for x" or "y is un-christian" is a sweeping and inaccurate generalization.
To understand the religous undertones of Nazi ideology you have to be aware of some peculiarities of language used in German political discourse at the time. Most of them have to do with the somewhat unusual religous landscape of Germany. It is not dominated by a single denomination - like in France or Sweden - but it is nowhere near as fragmented as it is in the U.S. Additionally there has been a lot of bad blood between the denominations - after all the religously fueled conflicts of the 17th century had - in relation to the total population - been more destructive than both World Wars combined. Because of that bad blood - and the "Kulturkampf" of Bismarck era - religious affiliations were downplayed in politics. In the 1920s and 1930s a vast majority of people just would not vote for candidates who openly affiliated himself with another denomination.
Nazi-ideology contains a lot of ideas that have their origin in christianity, but in order to avoid the denominational minefield that Germany was at the time, these ideas were re-phrased in a denominationally neutral fashion and unless you're aware of that, a lot of them sound downright secular. I guess this gets even more prounounced if you're not looking at the original German but any translation of it.
Another thing you've missed: Hitler's mind was quite erratic to begin with, and it got worse over time. You can't pin his position down on anything because for most of them you'll find at some point in his life he held an opposite view. Because of that individual quote don't prove anything about Hitler. Up to 1919 for example there is correnspondance in which he speaks very favourably of Jews. He did develop a fascination with the occult, but then at the time a lot of christians did; that was fad of the time and does turn him into a non-christian. And yes there are statements in which he blames christianity for "dulling" the superior germanic mind; but on the other hand, as soon as his power within the NSDAP was great enough to do so, he kicked out all Neo-Pagans. So apparantly returning to the old germanic beliefs wasn't his goal either...
After the first successes during WW2 the propaganda presented Hitler as a vessel of god's will and the Nazi-ideology as a supplement or clarification on Christianity. The general spin was that Hitler was to lead god's new chosen people into the conquest additional "Lebensraum im Osten" just as Joshua led the Isrealites to conquer the promised land of Kanaan. Go read the book of Joshua, compared to the atrocities that book boasts were commited in the name of god, Hitler was an innocent choir boy. The bible is an awful book that sets a lot of bad examples and can be cherry-picked to justify absolutely every single atrocity Hitler comitted. And because of that as long as christians call the bible holy, they cannot distance themselves from Hitler. And no, Jesus' "love thy neighbour" does not negate that, because filty heathen scum are not neighbours.
Bad Company Gaming
BTW, Friedrich Nietzsche was an agnostic. He may have christian in his early years, but he rejected his religion and became a skeptic of christianity, take his work "death of god" for example. I seem to notice you guys have a problem all acts of violence(including self-defense), makes me ask a question, are you a pacifist? Reason why I'm asking is cause it seems like your logic associates, for example, a guy who kills a creep to defend his daughter's life (and virginity), with a murderous serial-killer like the one in the shooting.
jessica
i don't think nietzsche was ever truly an agnostic or an atheist, i think he was what you call a christian that was struggling with his faith. he framed certain discourses in certain ways that challenged traditional western thiinking, but he never transcended christian thought. you could never understand his writing without a rigorous study in christian philosophy, and in the end his writings don't even make sense outside of a christian discourse. you could think of him as a christian equivalent to job.
i'm not a pacifist. i'm an anarchist. i believe in self-defense. but, i reject state violence. so, i'm in solidarity with somebody stepping in to prevent a crime, but i reject state violence (including "punishment") as an act of criminality, itself. liberals refer to this as the rule of law. i don't want to speak for the other poster.
real atheists don't have much to say about nietzsche that is very nice. it's a collection of false dilemmas and non-debates that only make sense in the context of christianity, itself.
just briefly: i don't think that the collapse of religion necessitates either the collapse of society or the collapse of morality, because (as an atheist) i don't think that society was built on religion, or that morality has anything to do with religion in the first place. this would only be a serious debate to me if i was a christian to begin with. as a non-christian, this is just not a relevant discourse to me.
you consequently have no choice but to place him in the christian discourse, if you want to place him in a discourse at all.
he makes no sense in an atheistic discourse. in fact, he's decidedly ahistorical in an atheistic discourse - about 1000 years out of date.
he kind of makes the classic error of conservatism, in glorifying a past that never existed.
----
Kevin Solway
"Racist religious hate is a problem with any religion", says CNN.
What gives CNN the right to insult Buddhism? They have no idea what they are talking about.
jessica
google search term: rohingya.