henry?

General question:

Why do Christians purport Scripture to be fact when it is nothing more than a written account from people who would have been completely devoted to the man they revere as their saviour?
Surely the gospels etc would be subject to the same bias as Soviet Propaganda? Yet this is all taken with a pinch of salt...
"Any lie told enough becomes truth" - Lenin


Any ideas?

mountainman

AUTHORITARIANISM

When Constantine created the christian propaganda he enforced its acceptance by the pagans with a very big stick. He hit the world so hard with his authority, that it is still recovering.


Best wishes,



Pete Brown
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes

RareBird

Why do we call Michaelangelo an artist when he was basically a paid propagandist for the church? Oh wait, I know--because he had the balls to make God and Adam members of NAMBLA right over their unwitting noses.

Toto

Not all Christians do this. But there are Christians who think that they need to justify Christianity to secularists in terms that secularists and materialists can understand, and perhaps make a few converts.

Roger Pearse

Isn't this an "ad hominem argument", tho?

NB: a lot of people think 'ad hominem' means 'being rude' -- it doesn't. It means an argument of the type "you only say that because you are a dirty Jew/Christian/atheist/Tory/Socialist/..."

All the best,

Roger Pearse

henry?

what do you mean by the "ad hominum" question?
Please explain further? Only I don't see its relevance

PhilosopherJay

Hi Henry?,

Could you please cite where and when Lenin said this. I see it cited on many websites, but I cannot find the source of this quote.

I went to the website Lenin Quotes which claims to be The only authentic, sourced list of quotes by Lenin on the Internet. It lists over 100 quotes by Lenin but not this one.

It does list this quote:

The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions.

Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)


on this website, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/index.htm you will find 3,994 documents of a potential 4,500 written by Lenin. Please let me know when you find it.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

P.S., I did find this by Lenin, which may be the source of the quote. It is from an article called "A Partnership of Lies":

A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that “something may stick”.

“Lenin makes a great noise in the Kshesinskaya mansion,” writes Rech. “Lenin addresses a meeting from the roof of the Modern,” a number of newspapers report.

All this is untrue. Lenin was not present at the Modern meeting. Lenin made no noise at all; he delivered only one report to a gathering of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks[See: April Theses],[1] and published a number of short articles in the small newspaper Pravda.

It is the capitalists and the capitalist press who are making a great noise, who are trying to shout down the truth, to prevent it from being heard, to drown it in a torrent of invective and shouts, to prevent an earnest elucidation of the facts.

Jeffrey Gibson

So were the works of Plato with respect to Socrates. So what?

And do you know for a fact that all Christians do what you say they do?

Jeffrey

Anaximanchild

There's a little more to it than that ... an ad hominem argument is when you say "you are a dirty Jew/Christian/atheist/Tory/Socialist/... and so your claim must be false". You attack the person instead of the claim.

Baalazel

Words are powerful things. Those which explain existence and your place in it, which give that existence meaning, and which give purpose to that meaning are powerful indeed. You, and the rest of us, Theists and Atheists alike need a deeper understanding of language and how it shapes our thoughts and our lives. What propaganda do you adhere to?

Baal