From: Adam 

Ellen K. wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 07:16:53 +0000, Adam
> <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the field.near the
bridge"> wrote in
> message :
>
>
>>Ellen K. wrote:
>>
>>>While what you write about Christians is true, they stopped killing
>>>people who disagreed with their religious beliefs several hundred years
>>>ago.  Muslims are doing it today.
>>>
>>
>>What total crap. Sorry but that is. You are living in land which was
>>once "owned" by "heathen savages" who had no
title to the land in part
>>because they weren't "Christian" & thus were fair
game for extermination.
>
>
> I'm glad that you at least didn't blame this on me, since none of my
> ancestors were even here at that time.
>

Indeed.

> The true motive of taking over the land of the indigenous people was not
> Christianity, it was adventurism.  If the aim was to have a Christian
> country, treating the indigenous people with love to demonstrate the
> value of Christianity so that they would decide it was a better religion
> would have been the way to go.  Attributing it to Christianity as you
> indicate in the next paragraph was certainly wrong.
>


Nope. The idea was the basic one that Christians were special & others
were not really human. Heathen savages for example had no property rights
which would only apply to good christians.

You are correct that it owed nothing to christianity per se but it does
apply to "christians" as a group of people. However the same goes
for Catholics & the inquisition etc. Religion as a way to group people
has been often an excuse to completely disregard the actual message of that
religion.

e.g. are the Jews a people or are the Israelis & as such is it OK to
equate the actions of Israelis with Jews per se. One group (the Israelis)
defintely use "Jewishness" as a reason for their actions however
the converse is not necessarily true.


>>1860'es especially saw a whole range of "they must make way for good
>>christian people" statements & actions.
>>
>>& German soldiers used to wander about with "Gott mit
uns" on their belt
>>& to a degree a large part of the last attempt at killing the non
>>Christians in europe was directly built upon the attempts before that.
>>Same targets, same rationale but just mixed up with race as well as
>>religion as religion was a declining force where race was a rising one.
>>
>
> While the Christian ideology taught for years ("The Jews killed our
> god") played a big part in enabling Nazi activities of racial
> extermination appear acceptable, the Nazi ideology itself was explicitly
> anti-Christian.
>

It was explicity secular (much like Communism).


> Other Nazi policies such as "euthanasia" of mentally or physically
> handicapped individuals don't seem to me to have any basis in Christian
> doctrine.
>

Indeed. But then nor does wholesale massacre etc of a native population
& yet that was used as an excuse in both South & North America by the
Catholic Spanish & the Protestant English/Scots (& their descendants).

>>>Not only that, Muslims are even killing other Muslims in the name of
>>>Islam, for example the suicide bombing of an Islamic wedding in Jordan
>>>the other day.  Gee, how brave and hero-like, to kill a bunch of people
>>>at a wedding.
>>>
>>
>
>>Bit like your pilots you mean? How heroic is it to kill people at a
>>wedding from 30,000 feet?
>
>
> You don't see a moral difference in specifically targeting a wedding?
>

Dropping a 1 ton bomb on an apartment block to kill one person. Is that the same?



>
>>Have you ever considered that just coz someone says he is doing
>>something in the name of a religion, it does not make it so?
>>
>>Was Rabin's killer a good Jew doing the lord's work?
>
>
> No, his action was contrary to Jewish religious law.
>

But he was a jew carrying out what he thought was an action required by his
jewishness to prevent someone giving away land which god had given to the
jews so surely he was correct in his actions?


Adam

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