Hammas vs. Fatah

[general counsel]

Any thoughts on the recent election results?

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general counsel

[Fat Pang]

GC, you are getting prolific sir.

Yes, just shows how lack of progress can move people to extremes.

[general counsel]

Or the impact of absolute abject poverty without hope. In the category of accident waiting to happen, the situation continues to deteriorate further as a veritable powder keg.

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general counsel

[AvengerRam]

It goes to show that Democracy, while important, is not a cure-all for an under-educated and poor society.

Hamas will doom the Palestinians to years of continued status as an unworthy partner in any meaningful peace process.

[r8rh8rmike]

Obviously, peace is in no way, shape or form part of what drives Hamas or the majority of Palestinians. Hatred rules the Middle East.

[general counsel]

True since the dawn of time my friend. As we all know too well, more humans have been killed in the name of god than anything else. If lord forbid the world ever blows itself up, better than even money that religion is at the root of the dispute and that the middle east is in the thick of it.

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general counsel

[cowboyhater]

In the last century more people were executed by atheistic Communism (30 million or so by Stalin, 65 million or so by Mao, millions more by Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mengistu etc.) and anti-Christian nazism than by all of the wars in all of the other centuries put together since the beginning of history. WWI also was responsible for the death of many millions, and I have never known that to be characterized as a religious war.

Even if your statement were true, it would no more mean that religion caused wars than to say the existence of national boundaries or private property caused wars, since so many wars were simply over land acquisition.

[general counsel]

I think ideology rather than religion might be a better way to say it. i view all forms of religion as ideologies, as are political philosophies. in that sense, i dont distinguish between religions (ie christianity, judiasm, hindu, muslim, etc) and political systems (ie communism, socialism, facsism). Hitler sure didnt kill 6 million jews just over land and stalin wasnt responsible for the death of millions of russians over whose land he already had complete control just to get their property. I appreciate that property is part of it, but a lot of it to me comes down to lack of tolerance for the views of others.

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general counsel

[psycho9985]

I spent 2 years in Germany in the Air Force and It seemed to me that one of the great motivating factors for Germanys many attempts at conquest was trying to conquer land that gets some sunshine.

[cowboyhater]

Hitler sure didnt kill 6 million jews just over land and stalin wasnt responsible for the death of millions of russians over whose land he already had complete control just to get their property.

Hitler was first, last and always obsessed with race, and the Jews in a racial way, not a religious one. He wasn't to big on priests or Christian Poles either. (I know one Ukrainian Catholic woman [now in her 90's] who had the misfortune of having been in both a Nazi AND a Stalin camp.) Hitler himself in his adulthood practiced the occult.

Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians and executed millions of real and imagined political enemies to maintain his control over the territory. When I mentioned land, I was thinking more of the classic tanks into Poland kind of move. When you war against the people within your territory, it is to maintain political control, in Stalin's case, through government organized Terror.

[Fat Pang]

I don't know, I have a lot of symapthy for the viewpoint that religion has killed more people than any other human interest over the course of human history.

When we think of wars, we tend to think in terms of the nation state. This is natural, as the evolution of the nation state as we know it was based on it's ability to fight war more efficiently than the version's of statehood that came before it.

War's are declared (or not), they have a beginning and an end (with the exception of Korea), they have stated policy objectives (ordinarily land), and they embody a national will.

Conflicts of religion, rarely manifest themselves in this way as they are ordinarily 'dirty wars', wars that happen within states, wars where there are no true body counts kept, where no-one keeps score, where the only policy objective is to make people think like you (and how do you do that).

The inquisition, with it's auto da fe , the reformation and dynastic squabbles of the Tudor's and the stuarts, the Cathar rebellions in France, Palestine, the Shiite/Sunni schism in Islam, the communist repression of religion in Russia/North Korea and China (What could be more religious in character than murder committed to quash religion), the chinese repression of Buddhist practice in Tibet, the Hindu/Islam slaughter during partition of India and Pakistan where over a million people died.

All of these are religious conflicts many of which are unresolved. After all, how sure can you be that someone thinks the same way as you?

As for Hitler, the symbol of his regime is an inverted swastika. The swastika embodies the perfection of Buddhist practice, the perfection of mind. An inverted swatika actually means nothing but I think it was intended to mean the opposite, that is imperfection and perversion.

[coy bacon]

True since the dawn of time my friend. As we all know too well, more humans have been killed in the name of god than anything else. If lord forbid the world ever blows itself up, better than even money that religion is at the root of the dispute and that the middle east is in the thick of it.

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general counsel

You're completely wrong GC. Most of the killings have been done for non-religious reasons. Mao's 50 million, Stalin's 25 million, Hitler's 12 million were not religious.

That's just another anti-religious myth.

On the other hand, the religious people have done a heck of a lot of killing. Christians of certain periods have behaved as barbaric as anything we've seen during the last century. The Israelites wiped out men, women, and babies in Canaan, and a wide trail of blood followed the early Muslims on their jihadic crusades.

[general counsel]

i respect your view, but i think you would have a tough time convincing me that hitler didnt kill 6 million jews because they were jewish and only because they were jewish. thus, religion sure had something to do with it. The crusades were sure about religion. When someone blows up something "in the name of allah" that is sure about religion.

To repeat my earlier post, i should have said ideology rather than religion per se.

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general counsel

[Fat Pang]

i respect your view, but i think you would have a tough time convincing me that hitler didnt kill 6 million jews because they were jewish and only because they were jewish. thus, religion sure had something to do with it. The crusades were sure about religion. When someone blows up something "in the name of allah" that is sure about religion.

To repeat my earlier post, i should have said ideology rather than religion per se.

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general counsel

I think it's applicable to say religion rather than ideology. Two different things to me.

[coy bacon]

A very important point about Hitler. He killed some 12 million. In the rhetoric about the "6 Million Jews", lets not forget the millions of other non-Jewish European, Ukranian, Russian, peoples he had murdered.

GC,
You're original argument was:
"True since the dawn of time my friend. As we all know too well, more humans have been killed in the name of god than anything else. "

You cannot say that Hitler murdered the Jews in the name of religion or God. He murdered them because he saw them as a threat to his society, and as the cause of their problems.

The amount of people who died in the crusades that stretched over hundreds of years is tiny compared to the number of people who died in WW2. The armies back then did not have the killing power of today's armies.

******

I will add one important thought....

It is now possible for radical Muslims to obtain nuclear weapons. And if they intend to use them, it may well be that religion could be the cause for the most violent deaths in the world's history.