• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Ed Please tell me why you kill

baron said:
You made the claim, it's up to you to back it up. You said that his Christian religion drove him to kill ten million people. I wasn't going to embarrass you by asking you for evidence, just like I wasn't going to embarrass you by requesting your justification that the Troubles were a religious conflict, but seeing you can't let it lie, let's see it.
Click to expand...
I want to make it clear, speaking for myself, that I accept that the Troubles were indeed a religious conflict. I am stating that they were not a doctrinal conflict. And they had a political base; they were thus brought to an end through political arrangements, not by the suppression or modification of religious doctrine in any shape or form.
 
MikeG said:
Another straightforward lie. I did not. Do feel free to quote my actual words rather than misrepresenting them.



Oh, this is habitual, isn't it. No, your logic is appalling. 2015 and 2016 are only some of the years that are covered by the phrase "over the years". You have chosen to focus on them because it suits your agenda. It is neither the agenda in the OP, nor anyone else's here, to focus on those two years, but neither is it anyone's claim that they are excluded. The only stuff which has been removed from the OP is copypasta from Wiki, so the OP's wording is unchanged. Do feel free to quote it's focus on those two years.
Click to expand...

It's more logical to assume that 'over the years' with quoted years of 2015 and 2016 means 'recent history' rather than hundreds of years in the past with the current epoch being excluded.
 
Craig B said:
I want to make it clear, speaking for myself, that I accept that the Troubles were indeed a religious conflict. I am stating that they were not a doctrinal conflict. And they had a political base; they were thus brought to an end through political arrangements, not by the suppression or modification of religious doctrine in any shape or form.
Click to expand...

They weren't a religious conflict any more than the UK bombing Libya was a religious conflict. Religious observance was only ever used as a sectarian marker, it had no causal impact.
 
baron said:
They weren't a religious conflict any more than the UK bombing Libya was a religious conflict. Religious observance was only ever used as a sectarian marker, it had no causal impact.
Click to expand...
The content of religious doctrine had no impact. Religious observance is only ever a "sectarian marker", but in most circumstances it occasions no violence. In N Ireland it did.
 
Wiki

Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorized his claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions. He ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publique for his personal enrichment. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium.

Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labour from the natives to harvest and process rubber. Under his regime millions of the Congolese people died; modern estimates range from 2 to 15 million, with a consensus growing around 10 million.
Click to expand...

Adam Hochschild devotes a chapter of his book King Leopold's Ghost to the problem of estimating the death toll. He cites several recent lines of investigation, by anthropologist Jan Vansina and others, that examine local sources (police records, religious records, oral traditions, genealogies, personal diaries, and "many others"), which generally agree with the assessment of the 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the population perished during the Free State period. Hochshild points out that since the first official census by the Belgian authorities in 1924 put the population at about 10 million, these various approaches suggest a rough estimate of a total of 10 million dead
Click to expand...

So, that supports my figure of 10 million. What else did you whitter on about? Oh, yes, justifying it in the name of christianity. Let's see:

Try the excellent "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild. I'd lend you my own copy, but all my books are in storage at the moment. Anyway, here is an excerpt from Wiki:

He then establishes a system of forced labour that keeps the people of the Congo basin in a condition of slavery, collecting ivory and rubber under brutal conditions, which he used to finance his palaces, while claiming he was bringing Christianity to the natives.
Click to expand...
 
Humans have always used religious concepts to control the masses. Look at the Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation for Christian examples of genocide in the name of religion.
 
baron said:
It's more logical to assume that 'over the years' with quoted years of 2015 and 2016 means 'recent history' rather than hundreds of years in the past with the current epoch being excluded.
Click to expand...

Which isn't what you said of course (nor what the OP said), but now that you've got away from your fixation with 2015 and 2016, is the genocide in Yugoslavia recent enough and religious enough for you?

No, I thought not.
 
Craig B said:
The content of religious doctrine had no impact. Religious observance is only ever a "sectarian marker", but in most circumstances it occasions no violence. In N Ireland it did.
Click to expand...

It was not the cause of violence. It was sometimes used essentially identify to which side a person belonged, being that the religious / sectarian correlation was so clear-cut, but that's all.
 
MikeG said:
Wiki

So, that supports my figure of 10 million.

What else did you whitter on about? Oh, yes, justifying it in the name of christianity. Let's see:

Try the excellent "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild. I'd lend you my own copy, but all my books are in storage at the moment. Anyway, here is an excerpt from Wiki:

He then establishes a system of forced labour that keeps the people of the Congo basin in a condition of slavery, collecting ivory and rubber under brutal conditions, which he used to finance his palaces, while claiming he was bringing Christianity to the natives.
Click to expand...

Yeah, kind of exactly what I just said. So his actual motivation was not Christianity, was it? You've just said as much. It was money and power, like I stated. Allow me to remind you of the topic of conversation; from the first line of the OP:

Orion said:
Over the years religious ideologies have been the underlying motive for killing thousands of people across the world.
Click to expand...

So your example is completely irrelevant. You picked someone whose underlying motive was money and pretended it was his Christian faith. And you assumed I'd simply accept that because of your self-proclaimed expertise in the matter. Sorry, it doesn't work like that.

Look, why not simply bring up the Crusades? It's a tried and trusted fall-back position for people who are absolutely dead set on exonerating Islam from its horrific history and placing every other religion in a bad light. Go on, say it, before you drop any more clangers..

Errrrrrrrr, what about the Crusades?
 
The claim that the Northern Ireland Troubles were only because of religion is just as false as the claim that they were nothing whatsoever to do with religion.

Like it or not, it was both a religious and a political strife. Nothing is black and white.
 
baron said:
It was not the cause of violence. It was sometimes used essentially identify to which side a person belonged, being that the religious / sectarian correlation was so clear-cut, but that's all.
Click to expand...
If that is the case generally, then the OP in seeking doctrinal explanations of political-religious violence is as mistaken as were earlier anti-Catholic thinkers who denied civc rights to adherents of that denomination on the grounds
of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics (doctrines such as those stating that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in the realm).​
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom. In reality these doctrines are either spurious or irrelevant. In 1829 Catholics were emancipated, and these Papist plots and murders of Protestant monarchs never occurred in the U.K.
 
arthwollipot said:
The claim that the Northern Ireland Troubles were only because of religion is just as false as the claim that they were nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
Click to expand...

Religion played no causal factor. There was a connection with religion in terms of correlation, as I've said, but it was not a dispute having its origins in religion.

Wiki
The conflict was primarily political and nationalistic, fuelled by historical events.[27] It also had an ethnic or sectarian dimension,[28] although it was not a religious conflict.[11][29]
Click to expand...

BBC History
The second misconception is that the conflict is about religion, republicans being Catholic and loyalists being Protestant. It is not religion that lies at the root of the Troubles. The conflict in Ireland is about national identity and territory and not about being Catholic or Protestant. Unlike Al Qaeda, religion is not what drives the paramilitaries.
Click to expand...
 
Craig B said:
If that is the case generally, then the OP in seeking doctrinal explanations of political-religious violence is as mistaken as were earlier anti-Catholic thinkers who denied civc rights to adherents of that denomination on the grounds
of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics (doctrines such as those stating that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in the realm).​
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom. In reality these doctrines are either spurious or irrelevant. In 1829 Catholics were emancipated, and these Papist plots and murders of Protestant monarchs never occurred in the U.K.
Click to expand...

I don't know what the OP is seeking as he hasn't been back. Maybe he can return and explain what he's after.
 
jaydeehess said:
There must be a reason why you are limiting yourself to the last two years.
Click to expand...

There is. And if you read the thread you'd know what it was. But I'm happy to expand that to 10 years, or 20 years, or 100 years. But you know what I think? I think you want to discuss the Crusades.
 
The second misconception is that the conflict is about religion, republicans being Catholic and loyalists being Protestant. It is not religion that lies at the root of the Troubles. The conflict in Ireland is about national identity and territory and not about being Catholic or Protestant. Unlike Al Qaeda, religion is not what drives the paramilitaries.​
I beg leave to dissent from the view that "being Protestant" has no influence on the thinking or actions of members of the Orange Order.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom