Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[smax]

Majored in history, and religion is responsible for many deaths that should not have happened. You however want to make this about Christianity and here you will fail.

Christianity is merely one of many religions that has terrorized and threatened humanity over the years.

I didn't say it was the only one.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre: committed by a rouge group of Mormons and Paiute Indians, 120 died at their hands, the Mormons are not recognized by nearly all Christian groups as Christians.

Just because you don't like their most recent addition to the fairy tale doesn't make them any less religious, and that's what we are talking about here: the need to separate government from religion.

Salem Witch Trials: lasted about one year from 1692 to 1693. 200 were accused of being witches 20 were executed. Minister Cotton Mather and his father Increase Mather president of Harvard called for the spectral evidence to be eliminated from the trials. When the governors wife was to be questioned for witch craft spectral evidence was eliminated from the trials and soon after the trials came to an end. tis was as much a fear thing as a religious one.

That last sentence says it all, although I don't think you realize that religion thrives off of fear and paranoia. Religion and fear are practically inseparable.

You need to bring proof of your allegations that Christians were completely responsible for slavery. I'm sure some Christians participated in slavery, how many of these large plantations were owned by atheist, deist, agnostics and ect. Christians were in the fore front of ending slavery, they were a great part of the underground to get slaves to Canada.

First, let's address your convenient use of the word "completely". What we are looking at is the effect of religion on government. Please try and finally get that. Whether or not other elements contributed to a particular attrocitie is irrelevant to this subject. What is relevant, is the fact that Christianity played a significant and prominent role in various attrocities.

There are literally hundreds of documentations of Christians justifying slavery through scripture. Here are couple of the official acts of Virginia, as an example:

Virginia, 1682 “Act I. It is enacted that all servants [...] which shall be imported into this country either by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslim North Africans], mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Christian [...] and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighboring Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Virginia, 1705 [1]"All servants imported and brought into the Country...who were not Christians in their native Country...shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion...shall be held to be real estate."

Again you need to bring proof of you allegations that Christians were completely responsible for the death of Native Americans. During the early part of this countries history the settlers were just trying to survive and the Indians and settlers were able to get along fine for the most part. The Native Americans were responsible for starting fights as much as the settlers were, it became a war and in war many things go badly wrong. This however does not mean the Christians were responsible, the government made these decisions, remember we have a separation of church and state. These were secular decisions being made.

Wow, a lot to cover here. First, the settlers and the natives did not get along well. Don't be so naive. In the beginning, the settlers were vastly outnumbered by the natives, and were in need of advice and resources. However, the settlers also had superior technology, and in almost all cases, overpowered and enslaved the Natives. That is, until a sufficient amount of development had taken place, and then it became critical to either convert the natives to Christianity or simply kill them off.

"In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians

were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them."

"It may be demanded...Should not Christians have more mercy and

compassion? But...sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.... We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings."


-Puritan divine Cotton Mather

Also, war doesn't justify the attempts to exterminate the natives any more than an individual would be justified to break into your house and kill you because he considered you a threat to his newly acquired occupancy.

I believe I've shown things to the contrary, you're a bigot towards Christianity, your hatred shows through in your ignorance and loathing and you think yourself better than Christians .

I don't know that "better" is the word, but I'm definitely far more objective and inclined to care about the well being on my fellow human beings.

Christianity teaches you to care less about humanity. It's one of the reasons I had to part ways with it.

It just doesn't make sense to me to glorify the unseen and unproven while treating my very own existence, and that of other human beings, as "wretched".

Just because Hitler mentions Jesus name does not make him a Christian,he was no more than a mad man as were most of his closest officers. Why don't you go ask the Jews who were freed from those camps by Christian soldiers who were the real Christians. You are disgracing the Jewish people by making such a statement, as far as I can tell you're not worth Hitler's compassion.

You keep ignoring the most important point: regardless of your feelings about Hitler and his beliefs, the fact is that he used religion time and time again to justify his actions.

And that's the poison that religion offers. It offers justification for just about anything.

You need to remember what the subject matter is here. We aren't in church listening to some carefully selected feel good sermon here. We are dealing with reality. Try and cope with that as long as you care to discuss this matter.

I'm on God's side and so are the millions of Christians in this world, so I'm by no means alone. God has already claimed our victory by the victory Christ won on the cross. So where is your victory sage of the unwise, where is your victory.

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My victory is that I stopped believing all that crap years ago. You can ony hope to achieve the same some day.

Oh, and to address all your other points about evil dictators and their crimes against humanity, in almost every case there was either a religious motivation or justification, or even worse, an individual god complex, which is the worst kind of religion there is.