Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
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Post by Jason on Oct 21, 2007 11:51:07 GMT -4
"The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and witch hunts together make up less than 1% of the murders that have occurred during modern atheist regimes like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.” -Dinesh D’Souza What's so Great About Christianity
Only nations which have a solid Christian foundation (in Europe, the Americas, and Australia) guarantee free speech and freedom of religion. These are also the source regions for theories of tolerance, human rights, and democracy.
Coincidence?
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Oct 21, 2007 12:46:35 GMT -4
While you folks are struggling with Jason's question, I have another:
Is looks like we universally agree that morality is not universal, that is, that there is no one-size-fits-all here that applies equally to everybody. Can I count on you all, then, to vote with me against any proposal to implement Universal Health Care because it imposes upon you something you should voluntarily decide and handle yourself?
I'm libertarian in that I think the function of government should be to maximize personal freedom. I don't think the government is justified in imposing Social Security on everybody either. How you decide to invest in your retirement, if you even do it at all, should be up to you.
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Post by gillianren on Oct 21, 2007 16:20:36 GMT -4
Having just been approved after three years for disability, I am understandably not going to vote against anything to do with taking away my benefits. I am also a passionate believer that everyone should have access to health care no matter their income, and not just because I'm a poor person with a lot of health care problems.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 21, 2007 16:24:23 GMT -4
How many times do we need to repeat that Hitler was no atheist?
Coincidence? Quite possibly: there have been times in history when islam was more tolerant than it is today and much more so than contemporary christianity. Who is to say what would have happened had historical contingencies turned out differently. Maybe the rise of freethought an the increase in prosperity and population that occurred as reliance on authority and tradition were replaced by direct observation and scientific exploration of the world are purely coincidental too.
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reynoldbot
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A paper-white mask of evil.
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Post by reynoldbot on Oct 22, 2007 1:26:58 GMT -4
"The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and witch hunts together make up less than 1% of the murders that have occurred during modern atheist regimes like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.” -Dinesh D’Souza What's so Great About ChristianityOnly nations which have a solid Christian foundation (in Europe, the Americas, and Australia) guarantee free speech and freedom of religion. These are also the source regions for theories of tolerance, human rights, and democracy. Coincidence? This is pretty low for you, Jason. You should know better than to make blanket statements like that.
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Post by gillianren on Oct 22, 2007 3:25:26 GMT -4
I'd also like to ask if that figure takes into account differing populations--ie, there were fewer people around to be killed during the Inquisition than in atheist totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. (And, again, Hitler was not an atheist; the Nazi regime also had a solid Christian foundation.)
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 22, 2007 6:13:04 GMT -4
It almost certainly doesn't: if the Inquisition had killed as many as the SS, they'd have effectively de-populated Europe. They also lacked the technology: it was poison gas that facilitated the industrial scale of Nazi horror. (Even then it could have been worse: when the Red Army captured Auschwitz, the Soviet Union estimated the death toll based on the theoretical throughput capacity of the crematoria for the time of their existence, and came up with a number over four times that currently accepted.)
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Oct 22, 2007 8:27:30 GMT -4
This is pretty low for you, Jason. You should know better than to make blanket statements like that.
Jason's question does get you to consider if a given outcome is the result of a particular moral framework. It goes directly to the matter of whether morality is merely personal opinion and whether the goodness or badness of a morality is observable in any sense.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Oct 22, 2007 11:14:54 GMT -4
Can I count on you all, then, to vote with me against any proposal to implement Universal Health Care because it imposes upon you something you should voluntarily decide and handle yourself? I will vote against universal health care because I've seen how it works in Europe (or at least how it worked in the early '90s in Holland). And I don't think we can afford it. The moral issue of value in self reliance is almost secondary to those considerations.
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Jason
Pluto
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Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Oct 22, 2007 11:22:03 GMT -4
How many times do we need to repeat that Hitler was no atheist? His public face was Christian, but only as long as he needed it to be. And Stalin and Mao were atheists. So contemporary Christianity wants to tax non-believers? Islamic tolerance through most of history was basically "you can live in our society as long as you are content with second-class status." Muslims who went apostate were executed, and forced conversion to Islam occasionally occurred.
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Jason
Pluto
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Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Oct 22, 2007 11:23:29 GMT -4
This is pretty low for you, Jason. You should know better than to make blanket statements like that. Well first of all I'm paraphrasing someone else. Second, give us an example of a non-Christian nation that protects freedom of religion and speech as well as the Christian nations do.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Oct 22, 2007 11:38:41 GMT -4
I'd also like to ask if that figure takes into account differing populations--ie, there were fewer people around to be killed during the Inquisition than in atheist totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. (And, again, Hitler was not an atheist; the Nazi regime also had a solid Christian foundation.) So look at precentages of the population killed by the various incidents. I would guess that if you look at percentage of a population killed per year you'll find Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge at the top of the list, not the inquisition. In any case, if the point being made is "the amount of suffering caused" then real numbers of people killed, tortured, and imprisoned is the way to measure it, without taking into account population or technology. Killing 40 million people by starvation in Mao's "Great Leap Forward" without question caused more people to suffer than the one-and-a-half million deaths caused by all of the Crusades.
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Oct 22, 2007 11:39:51 GMT -4
Having just been approved after three years for disability, I am understandably not going to vote against anything to do with taking away my benefits. I am also a passionate believer that everyone should have access to health care no matter their income, and not just because I'm a poor person with a lot of health care problems
Thanks, Gillian. That is a perfect post for our purposes here. The emotional pressure to care for our dear, beloved Gillian will be strong.
For those that argue that morality is subjective, is it inconsistent to argue both that morality is subjective and that everybody should be forced into a universal health care system?
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Post by wdmundt on Oct 22, 2007 14:25:17 GMT -4
I don't see why. I personally believe that the society I live in will be healthier if everyone has the same access to health care. I believe children should be given special protection, as they can't choose their parents. Those are subjective reasons that go hand in hand with my subjective view of morality.
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Post by gillianren on Oct 22, 2007 15:50:55 GMT -4
Let's also not forget that epidemics tend to start their spread in communities without access to health care before spreading to those who do. It is in society's best interests to keep even poor people healthy.
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