csteele

Actually Churchill was not entirely wrong. For some Jews the Bolshevik revolution was payback time for the pogroms that the Czar's Cheka initiated.

In fairness I don't think most of the early Bolsheviks foresaw how the Bolshevik revolution was going to turn into a monster.

I am afraid such is the fate of most revolutions. The French kings and aristocracy were execrable; but were Robespierre and Danton an improvement?

Rhodesia's White Supremacist regime is replaced by Robert Mugabe.

Is Iran better of today than it was under the Shah?

I think we should have a thread on the efficacy of revolutions in bringing about benign change.

In South Africa the transition away from Apartheid was relatively peaceful. It remains to be seen what the successor to the Apartheid regime will make of South Africa but, behind the hype, the omens are at best mixed.

By coincidence I saw this after completing my last post:

It is about South Africa and the transition away from Apartheid. Do read it.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112333

Let it be understood that Thabo Mbeki was a wannabe Robert Mugabe. However the rest of the ANC tossed him aside.

Mbeki's refusal to face the facts about HIV probably caused more misery and premature death than 50 years of Apartheid.

As I said, sometimes all that happens is that a bad regime is replaced by one that's worse. However, in the case of South Africa I'm still hopeful that will not be the case.

Steven says: “As I have said ad nauseam, the danger stems not from Islam but the appeasement of Islam.”

I say: Hear, hear!

Comments like: “all the Islamic countries were colonies of the imperialist European Christian nations. Those nations colonised and ruled with brutality and arrogance. Part of Islam's anger is the remembrance of that. Those hurts last for a long time.”

Do not add balance, they serve mainly to affirmed the one-eyed,see no Islamic-crimes hear no Islamic-crimes view of some of our Fellow Humans.

While nowadays few Westerners can escape being confronted by the worst aspects of the imperialism and colonialism, or Christianity’s checkered past.Few Muslims seem to be aware of –or even care to know that Islam and its host societies have had a similar or worse past --- it just isn’t halal, apparently.
(you see Grateful , because he started hearing a few home truths he didn’t like , has now run off back to his village)

And it’s this one dimensional view of history and current affairs which more than anything else feeds jihadism & other forms of Muslim non-Muslim antagonism.
TBC

David may for his own personal reasons be fixated on the holocaust and the Hitler–Christianity bind.But Hitler for all his ambitions and crimes didn’t in the end prevail --what is there left of the Third Reich today?

Islam on the overhand has imposed itself far and wide, and has kept its spoils ---have a read of the below:

This is V.S Naipaul talking through one of his characters in Magic Seed [ ps 43-44]
“We are in one of the saddest places in the world. Twenty times sadder that what you saw in Africa. In Africa the colonial past would have been there for you to see. Here you can’t begin to understand the past , and when you get to know it you wish you didn’t…We are on the site of the last great Indian kingdom . and it was the site of a catastrophe. Four hundred years ago the Muslim invaders ganged up on it and destroyed it…They levelled the capital city …They killed the priests and the philosophers , the artisans , the architects and the scholars. They knew what they were doing . They were cutting off the head . The only people they left were the serfs in the villages and they parcelled then out among themselves . This military defeat was terrible . You cannot understand the degree to which the victors won and the losers lost, Hitler would have called it a war of annihilation , a war without limits and restraint, and this one succeeded to a remarkable degree"

mjpb,

<<You seem to be referring to blind faith.>>

Faith IS blind. We’d call it “knowledge” otherwise. Faith is hope and desire mistaken for knowledge.

<<To avoid repetion have you got a link where you addressed the standard lines of proof that Boazy has put forward?>>

I’m not sure which “standard lines of proof “ you’re talking about, sorry. Could you point out exactly which ones they are?

<<I'll look into it.>>

You’ll look into it? What do you not yet understand?!

Is it possible to respond to a claim that has not been yet made?

Theism is the claim; atheism is a response to that claim. Even though some forms of atheism contain a claim, it is a counter claim serving as a response to the original claim.

Did theism originate because someone at some point in history - just out of the blue - claimed that no gods exist? And if so, how would the soon-to-be-theists know what the atheist was taking about when he/she first made the claim? Did they consult the atheist as to what it is they need to start believing in, in order to give a negative response the claim?

<<Can you expand further?>>

I’m glad you asked.

By “practical knowledge”, I mean that which we can know (yes, ‘know’, not just ‘believe’) because of the practical experiences in our day-to-day lives. A simple example is the fact that we avoid touching the stove plate while it’s on because we know from our experiences that hot stove plates burn.

You asked: “How do you know that divine revelation hasn't created any real knowledge about reality?” So given what I’ve said above, I could ask how you know it has. What knowledge (again, ‘knowledge’, not just ‘belief’) have you acquired that enables you to conclude otherwise? Have you ever received a phone call from god letting you in on what he has in store for you?

Oh I know, I know... god doesn’t work that way. No, he only ever seems to work in ways that can be better explained by more rational means.

Continued...

...Continued

As a side note though, if divine revelation HAD created any real knowledge about reality, we’d all know about it. Again - ‘knowledge’, not ‘belief’. Theists confuse these two so often.

I’ll give you a lengthier example using religion...

Many Christians claim that the Gospels are reliable because Paul risked his life in writing them, and what crazy man would do that if he really didn’t believe what he was writing?

There are a couple of conclusions that can be drawn here:

1. Paul was telling the truth and Jesus did actually exist and perform all those miracles;

2. Jesus never existed - or at least never existed as the bible claims he did - and there is a perfectly rational explanation for why he wrote what he wrote - even if it’s just: He was a madman.

Now unless you witness the odd verifiable miracle from time-to-time, based any sort of practical knowledge you’d have to conclude that 2 was far more likely.

In fact, you could go on forever with different possibilities for why Paul wrote what he wrote, and so long as the supernatural isn’t invoked, they would always be more rationally sound than 1 because we have never had any verified accounts of supernatural occurrences.

I’ll give you another example...

One of the points Lee Strobels uses to argue for the reliability of the scriptures, is the fact that it was written that women discovered the empty tomb of Jesus. Stobels’ point is that, if someone were lying and they wanted to fool people, why would it be written that women discovered the empty tomb considering women were thought of as second-class citizens back then and their testimony wasn’t considered as reliable?

Again, we have two possibilities:

1. The scriptures were recorded accurately and women really did find the tomb empty;

2. The author had an ulterior motive or it just slipped his mind.

There is no rational reason to believe 1 is the case because none of our practical experiences would suggest that a guy just got up and walked out of his tomb.