Chili

Not only are they 'heavy duty light weight consumers' but they also want to transform this 'old earth' into a new one by cleaning up the people that do not match their image of God's holy people. I see it as another reform on the side of error that helps in the decline of our civilization.

Corwin

This is what's being referred to here.

From that article:

Yes, we really do have to deal with these fruitcakes.

Vorkosigan

Your first point and second point are contradictory. The Reich Christians believe that they can trash the world because Jesus will save them. Their brand of Christianity has a definite effect on their environmental ethics.

"There's no god" does not entail misanthropy or philoanthropy. It entails nothing else. For that, one needs a set of values. These values could be anything, from humanist to buddhist to communist, or any belief that is compatible with atheism. Atheism itself contains no set of values, it is just a single statement. As for your second point, that is manifest nonsense, as Christians never acted as stewards of Creation until the environmental movement became potent.

No, I don't. As I have already pointed out, your brand of logic contains serious flaws and misunderstandings of atheism.

Vorkosigan

Maurice

Which evidence? Opinion is not an evidence.
And there is at least one other possibility with no HJ and no MJ.
Scholars are seeing only what they want to see.

Maurice

Because "they" do not like lies. Isn't it a very good reason?

Lafcadio

As I'm talking about two different issues, maybe you'd be so kind to point out a contradiction and show that you actually read and understood what I wrote. Meanwhile I can be only puzzled by your reply.

So if I make an organization of heroine selling and lesbian killing and call it "Christian Mob Inc." my organization will be regarded as christian?

Oh, strawman I didn't say "it entails", i say the word "can afford" - An atheist is allowed by his morality to be a misanthrope. A christian is not.

Any statement regarding human beliefs divides some of the elements in two: in things that are, and things that aren't. If it can't make that division, is no longer a statement.
Now if any of these things regard human beliefs, then it will have consequence in the morality.

I didn't say they acted as stewards (strawman, again!), but they always kept that regard about the godly origin of everything. This translated in a world where are enviromental movements (like ours today) puts them in the opposite position you blamed them at first.


You've pointed out and I've counterpointed Meanwhile your brand of logic shows malevolence and stubborness.
I can always check your inferences with other premises to test their validity. My form of speech "you must agree that" was pretty much anticipating a sane and cooperative approval.

Vorkosigan

<shrug>

How would I know? And in any case how would that be different from the Catholic Church prior to its loss of temporal power? How is that different from the missionary organizations that have long cooperated with US intelligence agencies overseas, supported authoritarian governments, and campaigned against progressive policies at home?

That depends on how you interpret "Christian morality." Slaveowners and witch-burners, homophobes and crusaders, never had any trouble reconciling God and death, indeed they seem to think they are the same thing. Many of us outsiders consider Christian morality to be sheer worship of power, and deeply human-hating. Let us say rather that a Christian can find anything in his "morality" that he wants to find, as the Lutheran Churches did when they enthusiastically rolled over for Hitler, or the Methodists who still whitewash Chiang Kai-shek, or the evangelicals who work hand-in-glove with US intelligence agencies in South America, and so forth.

In other words, what you said was essentially meaningless, since it did not entail any action on the part of Christians to care for nature, which they certainly did not.

Lafcadio, you are obviously ill-informed as to the nature of Christianity in the United States. I understand you are not American. But links have already been provided, and the opposition of right-wing Christianity to the environmental movement is well-documented, although it is true in recent years, even the evangelical movement is starting to come around to environmentalism, as they re-interpret their Bible to align themselves with the secular world on this issue. However, on the whole, conservative religious groups remain opposed to caring for the evironment, at least in the US. So I am at a loss to understand why you are still pursuing this line of argument. Here's a good indymedia article on the issue

http://www.nypress.com/17/50/news&columns/feature.cfm

• But try to find any mention of the melting ice caps or the planet's quickening extinction rate, and ye shall seek in vain. In the world of the Christian Right, concern for the environment is still an atheistic socialist plot to bankrupt godly American industry; it has no place in the fight for the health and soul of the nation. Given that the Christian Right is foundational to the current Republican coalition, this isn't surprising. The party of George W. Bush is now preparing for what it expects to be a devastating blitzkrieg against what remains of the regulatory controls clamped on industry in the last century. Today's GOP has no use for the party philosophy that led Teddy Roosevelt to declare, "[S]hort of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendents than it is for us..."
  
  With everyone focused on a few spots on the Supreme Court, over a third of the Environmental Protection Agency's staff will become eligible for retirement during the next four years. Future Bush appointees will dismantle the agency from the inside while a Republican Congress hacks away from the outside, teamwork that could very well result in the disappearance of the EPA as we know it by 2008. If this happens, there will simply be nothing left to save; the rebuilding will have to begin from scratch.

My nation, and the whole world, is terribly, terribly, threatened by these mindless dwarfs of religious facism.

You got a sane response. I'm sorry it wasn't to your liking.

Vorkosigan

Lafcadio

It's different by its representativity in the christian world. Catholic church was representative at that time as being one of the two big christian churches existing at that time.

If all it's so relative, then how is christianity to blame for anything? Is no longer to blame but any -ism or -ity. An atheist as well can reach by ways of morality to slave posession, homophoby, crusading against -isms or -ists he hates.

Nietzsche thought so otherwise

Above you asked me how can some christian reconcile god and death. If christian morality is so human-hating, why do you wonder about that? It must be written in NT somewhere "Hate thy neighbour and kill him!"

Just came into my mind. Have you asked/questioned/analyzed if those you accuse acted in the boundaries of their christian morality or another morality? Because when you talk about politics at a certain level it's the action of some individuals and not of a whole community.

I see that you constantly resort to fallacies to make an argument here

Strawman again. I didn't said they acted in some way, I said that they didn't (morally) act in the way you insinuated.

You're obviously fallacious here as well, as I didn't issued the Christianity in the US, and more, I asked you precisely how the right-wing Christian extremist act to threaten the enviroment.
OTOH, X-ianity in the US is not X-ianity world wide. Some movements of X-ianity in the US is not the X-ianity from US. Christian are not blondes because the two right-wing X-ians from neighbourhood are and telling that you hate christianity because their followers are blondes will be an affirmation I will debate.

Emphasis mine.
I will give you a counter-example. In eastern Europe until 15 years ago, there was a communist block formed by Soviet Union and its satelites. Most governments preached a doctrine based on atheism (and on many other things). They were a threat to enviroment (big scale useless megalomanic industry and urbanization) and a threat to so many things (not sure if this is the place to talk about the faults of some communist regimes).
Am I entitled to call atheistm as threat to enviroment, civil rights, etc. because I know forms of extremist atheism, political atheism that led to such things?

Then I will reissue your response to see where I fail to understand (like). After your saying, I cannot take an inference you consider true like "Christianity is A because B" and replace Christianity with another noun which obeys the factual description from B. Why?

Jack the Bodiless

Communism was not "a doctrine based on atheism", so your argument fails.

Bede

Lafcadio,

You are wasting your time. These guys are every bit as fundamentalist as the tiny minority of Christians they wrongly think is taking over America. You will have no success trying to start a reasoned discussion here on issues that touch their faith.

But it is quite fun rattling the bars and watching them all snarl back. :Cheeky:

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason