Yeah, the sort of simplistic nonsense that one expects from any and every one who associates with the one-dimensional dimwits that congregate around the Public Christianity propaganda machine.

Meanwhile this one stark image tells us how Christian-ISM as a would be world conquering power-and-control-seeking IDEOLOGY really came to dominate the entire world - the applied politics of Constantine's famous sword. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html

Never mind too that never-ending warfare was the norm throughout Christian Europe prior to say the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of atheistic inspired political movements. All of the slaughters were done/justified with appeals to the christian "god" and "jesus".

Never mind too, that Jesus was always and only a Jew and was never ever in any sense a Christian, nor did he found the religion about him - aka Christian-ISM.

Am I the only one having trouble accessing this article?

Cheers,

Tony

Just click on ALL, Tony.
However, none of the various religious/politics/race arguments hold water. They however, may well be part of the problems under examination?
Conversely, it is ignorance and fear, (fear of difference) that is behind almost every act of bastardy, if you exclude out and out insanity, or the psychosis of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Armin, etc/etc.
Perhaps we just need to subject every would be, if he/she could be political/religious/corporate leader to a thorough and entirely mandatory, triple psychological profiling/examination, as a prelude to their acceptance as a potential candidate?
To see if they can pass the standard clinical test for psychosis, or that which reveals the corporate psychopath!
Surely it is the psychotic manifesting as the all knowing mystic or Messiah, charismatic, supremely confident, self assured, idea stealing, blame shifting, history revising, never wrong leader, that is central to all the refereed to problems.
Ideally, we need the latter as our soldiers, who perform at their best, in the battle field following orders.
The only problem we have, what do we do with the poor bastards when they finally if ever, come home?
Rhrosty.

"Jesus, who instructed his followers to make disciples of all nations, taught that the interests of Christianity were not to be promoted by violence."

Cherry-picking again?

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.Matthew 10:34"

"I came to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were already kindled! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.Luke 12:49-51"

"And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing. Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. Luke 22:35-38"

I wonder how much of the success of Christianity is due to having a holy book so full of contradictions that you can read it to mean anything you want.

This would seemingly be one of those pieces of great profundity which entails no prolixity of needless verbiage, without which we are all much better off nae doot. It's a bit like that play by whoever-it-was, in which the audience watches two loons sitting there with nary a skerrick nor spittle of twaddle e'er spaken atween 'em. Irish o'course, what else. You project onto it your inward blather and thus are all cathartised if there be such a word, which there ain't. It reminds one of Monkey, in the Chinese classic of that name by Wu Cheng 'en. He went from being called just plain old "Monkey", to "Handsome Monkey King", to "Great Sage, Equal of Heaven" until finally he was ushered into the presence of the Lord Buddha himself and received his name in religion, which was "Aware of Vacuity".

Daffy did his bit, dismissed with a link the credulity of the Christian, or Christianist, faith, to which I would only add that a perusal or scrutiny of the Gospels showeth that, not only did Jesus never refer to himself as "God", but he never referred to himself as the "son of God" neither - if the Gospels are to be believed. But alas the link led me to no more than "this webpage is not available" so Daffy's message was a bit inscrutable too, which being on theme, was perhaps intended?

Tony simply bounced off but we think no less of him for that.

However Stephen Liggins did leave us this little hint in the subtitle as to what the title may have intended to import, given the expatiation for which the world waits with tongue hanging out.

"Of course, religion is not the only cause to have been promoted through the use, or threatened use, of force. There is politics."

To which the assembled masses of the world cry in liturgical-like response with one slavering voice, only:
"True."

“Just click on ALL, Tony.”

O-oh. *Now* I get it.

I can’t see why everyone is chucking off at this article. Seems to me to be perfectly true.

“It has to be acknowledged that after Christianity merged with power and government in the fourth century, and in later years, violence and coercion came to play a role among those who claimed allegiance …”

Well it wasn’t so much “after” as pretty much “the instant” Christianity got the power to become the established religion, it banned all other religions.

Certainly the history of the church is a history of religious intolerance in a way that was unknown to the polytheistic communities of the ancient world. It was this inflexible rejection of other faiths which was the reason why the ancient Romans considered the Jews and Christians to be religious perverts.

According to Gibbon, this characteristic of the Christians, of hotly disputing over these fine points of metaphysical theory that are ultimately unknowable, was a distinguishing characteristic of Christianity.

But Stephen’s point is perfectly valid. While Christianity has often and long been involved in violence and threats, on the other hand, Christians have often and long stood against it too.

The evolutionary explanation of the phenomenon of religion is that it comprises false beliefs which tend on average to promote relative reproductive success in its propagators. Why false? Because “the best deception is self-deception.” Our anti-cheating programs would detect arrant liars. Genuinely-held false beliefs, which just happen to promote relative reproductive success, pass under our anti-cheating radar.

Religion may or may not be violence-based. But politics is *intrinsically and always* involved in the use and advocacy of force and threats, in the very nature of the State as a legal monopoly of the use of force and threats.

The irony of the modern statists' disdain of religion is that their own views are just exactly the same old mediaeval belief in a morally superior super-corporation, capable of suspending nature’s limitations in our favour, only with the violent irrationality and uncritical worship projected onto the State instead of the church.