Massive Terract campaign in India

[Asher]

Originally posted by TCO


You're a ****ing moron. We have the First Amendment. No established Church.

The last time I checked, your country was legislating Christian morals as the law of the land, have only ever had Christian Presidents who openly and repeatedly say things such as "God bless ______", have currency with "God" written on it, and in your pledge of allegiance also clearly mentions your country is "under God".

The separation of church and state is in theory, not in practice. It's a de facto theocracy.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're probably just used to it.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Asher

Was it as common as "gay" is an insult today?

Oh, much more so. The word was 'queer' back then.

Even if it was, doesn't mean we deserve the right to displace others to form our own country.

Gays aren't exactly an ethnic group. Where would their traditional homeland be?

There are lots of desolate places they can move to, places with less conflict and less neighbors that hate them.

You mean like Antartica, 'cause I can't think of any other place on the globe that's unclaimed. To take a couple million people out to Antartica and drop them would be what? Genocide? Admit it Asher, you're just as bad as the Nazis, or for that matter the hundreds of millions of non-Nazi anti-semites who populated Europe in the 1940's.

The decision to put Israel where it is only serves as an engine of death and destruction right now.

Yet it may have saved the lives millions of Jews who would have been finished off by our European friends in post-War Europe.

And even if it WAS in the past, it's NOT now. That's why I don't understand why secular people would choose to live in that country. They can move to virtually any western country and live happily. One that is not in a state of war all the time and under terrorist threat. One without mandatory military service. One without pervasive religious influence on your life...

Actually they can't just move to any western country and be happy. Most of them have quotas, just like the US does. Many Jews felt persecuted in Soviet Russia. When Israel became an 'enemy' Jews in the Soviet Union found it increasingly difficult to find jobs and increasingly easy to wind up in prison. When the Soviet Union fell many of them left while the leaving was good, and Israel was the one country willing to accept them without quotas or restrictions.

Besides Asher, you and I are both living on someone else's land aren't we? Our governments simply had the foresight to eradicate more than 90% of the Native American population.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
You confuse actual religion with traditional religious rites that are cultural folklore.

Nope. You just don't comprehend how pervasive Judaism is in your culture, you seem to think they're separate. They're not completely. You know what the easiest way is to tell? Just answer these questions:

What do you call someone who is an ethnic Jew? Let the answer to this be "A".
What do you call someone who practices Judaism? Let the answer to this be "B".

Does A = B?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Oh, much more so.

I call bull****, there's no ****ing way "Jew" was used more as an insult than "gay" is today. I take it you've never actually spent time with children inside a highschool. It's probably the second most common word after "the".

I didn't read the rest since it didn't format properly when I quoted it, it was all one big mess of text and it's not text I care to read if it's anything like the first line of bull**** you wrote.

BTW, it was the Americans that "eradicated" the Natives. Not Canada. We just stole them from their parents and put them in Christian schools and tried to make them good little Christians (again, religion being ****ing evil as it is).

[Sirotnikov]

I call bull****, there's no ****ing way "Jew" was used more as an insult than "gay" is today. I take it you've never actually spent time with children inside a highschool. It's probably the second most common word after "the".

And you never spent time in europe in the early 20th century.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov

And you never spent time in europe in the early 20th century.

Incidentally, neither did you..

[GePap]

For most reasonable individuals, the biggest problem with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that both have legitimate grievences and thus wallow in victimhood, making a resolution difficult, since neither group is obviously wrong.

[TCO]

Solomon's solution? Cut each Jew and Pal in half?

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov

This concept is practically irrelevant to Europe or the Middle EAst, or Asia. A multi-ethnic, multi-cultural concept couldn't possibly work for a long term.

China was/is a multiethnic and multireligious country in Asia which did work though they worked hard and were successful at assimilating other groups into the dominant Han group. Rome also was largely successful though unlike China it crashed and burned but never the less was successful enough to assimilate enough Gauls, Iberian, and Romanians so that the Latin Language/culture group survives to this day in places like Iberia, France, and Romania which are all far outside of the original Italian homeland of the Latin people.

If Europeans hadn't shown up and cut the independent development of Andean America short then the Incas would likely have created one monoculture out of numerous other cultures. The Aztecs were also in the process of doing the same. Mesopotamia did the same in the middle east while the Hellenic period turned lots of non-ethnic Greeks into Greek speaking and behaving peoples as far east as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The idea of a "people" being multiethnic but sharing a culture and language aren't so very outside the norm even before the European conquests of the New World when multiethnic identity became the norm for 1/3 of the world's land mass.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by TCO
Solomon's solution? Cut each Jew and Pal in half?

Make all the Jewish boys do the nasty with Palestinian girls and make all the Palestinian boys do the nasty with Jewish girls?

[TCO]

I wonder how long the situation is tenable there. It does seem like sort of an outpost of Judiasm in an inhospitable region.

[GePap]

The conflict is ethnic and nationalistic at its core, not religious. The problem is the idea that state borders should be drawn around ethnic groups, and that soverignty comes from being ruled by "someone like me." Over time the religious connotations have been gaining, with the growth of political Islam and the increasing power of orthodox religion within Israeli politics. Meaning that the ability to solve the issue without some real bloodshed (something far worse than what they have already seen) is going to decrease in time, not increase.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov


but let's go back to the original issue:

Our original discussion was whether Islam is currently more prone to violence than other religions.

I explained why Islam is currently more prone to violence than other religions.

You countered that Judaism (the religion) is currently responsible for bloodshed and violence. I explained that the religion itself has nothing to do with it, and that the people who you say hold responsible for bloodshed and violence, were mostly secular and even a-religious

I find your analysis of Islam lacking.

I don't agree with the notion that Christianity has somehow "grown up", because that seems to imply that a religioun should over time become more liberal. That makes no sense if religion is based on some fundamental truths that are never changing.

Christianity has a very distinct nature from Islam. More important that the different underlying messages of Jesus and Mohammed are the fact that Christianity was a religion made up by many people (Paul is as important to Christianity and its rise as Jesus), and that most of the large theological advancements came while Christianity was an underground cult out of favor with those in power. Christianity grew up as an outsiders cult, one in which internal reflection and prayer was key. With such a religion, the ability to seperate temporal power from spiritual power is possible. While for most of Christianity's history it was a religion propagated and spread by those with temporal powers, it never lost that core of being a faith which valued one keeping their faith personal, and accepting a separation of faith and power.

Islam grew up in power and its big theological developments happend while it was the religion of those holding temporal power. In the end, it is far more difficult for Islam to accept the idea that the temporal and spiritual realms are seperate. That is what men like Qutb saw, what drove their critique of modernity. You can be a good Christian without ever going to church because all that really matters in internal faith. Being a muslim is accepting one as subordinate to an absolute universal power - a good Muslim must participate in basic rituals. He must accept himself as part of a community.

For that reason, Islam becomes a viable POLITICAL force, one to replace what people percieve as the failed politics of the West, of those that seek to impose a wall between the soul and the body. Islam as a modern political force has become an inspiration for violence, though it is still far behind Nationalism, Colonialism, Fascism, or Communism, as a cause for mass murder.

And on a side note, Judaism is far more similar to Islam than Christianity, which is why Jews and Muslims got along so much better with each other than either group got along with Christians until the last 150 years. Judaism of course was forced to develop as a religion seperated from power itself. It will be interesting to see the rise of Judaism as a political force now that it has again become a political alternative.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Asher

I call bull****, there's no ****ing way "Jew" was used more as an insult than "gay" is today. I take it you've never actually spent time with children inside a highschool. It's probably the second most common word after "the".

BS right back at cha big boy. The word 'gay' didn't come to mean homosexual widely in the US until the late 1960's, by which time I was out of high school. During my time in high school the "N" word was probably the most commonly used slur, with "queer" and "Jew" pretty evenly mixed.

I didn't read the rest since it didn't format properly when I quoted it, it was all one big mess of text and it's not text I care to read if it's anything like the first line of bull**** you wrote.

BTW, it was the Americans that "eradicated" the Natives. Not Canada. We just stole them from their parents and put them in Christian schools and tried to make them good little Christians (again, religion being ****ing evil as it is).

Ummmmm......... I'm fairly certain that Canada fought a couple of wars against various Native American tribes in the 19th century. Canada ( and the Hudson Bay Company ) also had a nice history of playing one tribe against another. Why get your hands dirty wiping out the natives when you can get the tribes to do it for you?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Ummmmm......... I'm fairly certain that Canada fought a couple of wars against various Native American tribes in the 19th century. Canada ( and the Hudson Bay Company ) also had a nice history of playing one tribe against another. Why get your hands dirty wiping out the natives when you can get the tribes to do it for you?

Do elaborate, because I'm fairly certain you do not remember.

Canada/Britain did some terrible things to the natives, but they never did have wars with them or incite wars between tribes (to my knowledge, feel free to cite if you do know of some): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Nations