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Post by mouse on Aug 4, 2009 7:58:38 GMT
[ Christians started the crusades. ? perhaps the reason they started the crusade should be mentioned The First Crusade began on November 27, 1095, with a proclamation from Pope Urban II delivered to clergy and lay folk who had gathered in a field in Clermont, central France. His topic: an appeal for help that he had received from the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Comnenus. There are no records of exactly what Urban said, but it seems he began with a general denouncement of the continual warfare which plagued the Europe of his day. He then described in lurid detail the attacks of the Turks upon the Christian Byzantine Empire, and begged the soldiers present to travel to the east to attack the Muslims, rather than their fellow Christians. As a further encouragement Urban offered them a Papal Indulgence, which promised the immediate remission of all sins of any who participated in the expedition. Excerpt from one version of Pope Urban's speech 'For your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and conquered the territory of Romania as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont. They have occupied more and more lands of those Christians and have overcome them in seven battles ... On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. From Fulcher of Chartres, History of the Expedition to Jerusalem interestingly it took 600 YRS for constantinple to fall to islam ..600 yrs shows a certain determination on the part of the attacker
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Post by mouse on Aug 4, 2009 8:05:00 GMT
and on slavery..while remembering the abolition of slavery was powered by christians
Western Christianity saw matters differently. Its spread through western Europe was accompanied by calls for an end to chattel slavery. Saint Bathilde, the wife of the seventh-century Frankish king Clovis, was canonized, in part, for her efforts to free slaves and end the slave trade.
The result of hers and similar efforts was that, by the eleventh century, slavery had been effectively abolished in western Europe. The lone exceptions were areas under pagan or Muslim control. By the time Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica in the thirteenth century, slavery was a thing of the distant past. That's why Aquinas paid little attention to the subject, devoting himself instead to the issue of serfdom, which he considered "repugnant."
So, why did slavery make a comeback in the Americas? As historian Rodney Stark writes in For the Glory of God, the problem was that people stopped listening. The distance between the Americas and western Europe, coupled with the rise of nation-states and commercial interests, meant that Christian teaching about the evils of chattel slavery was less likely to be heeded.
The failure to obey this teaching doesn't change the fact that, according to Stark, the "moral predisposition" to oppose slavery was unique to Western Christianity. It certainly didn't exist in the Islamic world, where legal slavery existed until 1981 and where informal slavery still exists.
This "moral predisposition" was why the second successful abolitionist wave in the beginning of the nineteenth century was led by William Wilberforce and other Christian politicians. And in this country the abolitionist campaign which brought about an end to slavery was led by Christians as well.
What Stark calls the "moral potential for an antislavery conclusion" lay uniquely within Christian thought. Despite the Bible's apparent acknowledgment of slavery, what the Bible taught us about God and man led Christians to conclude that the holding of another man or woman in bondage was a sin. This religious appeal is why the people of Britain taxed themselves to abolish slavery in the West Indies.
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Post by Liberator on Aug 4, 2009 12:52:02 GMT
Constantinople did not fall to 'Islam'. It fell to Turkish converts to Islam along with the Baghdad Caliphate, Egypt and Iran - though to a different horde of Turks later considered for a Crusade alliance to regain Constantinople. When the Crusaders did for a time recover part of the eastern Mediterranean and associated islands from Sicily east, they kept it to themselves instead of handing back to the Emperor. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade busied itself conquering Orthodox Constantinople at the instigation of Venice.
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Post by mouse on Aug 4, 2009 14:27:06 GMT
eh it fell to islam..converts nothwithstanding and converts to islam are islam....else st sophias would have remained one of the greatest cathederals of christendom...and the arabs and anatolians had been trying to over run for 600 yrs all well documented constantinople fell to mehemt in 15 43 or there abouts..15 some thing....the population of women and children gathered up to be sold as slaves..fighting men of good families held for ransome..the old given the chop[would suit random voice]..priests and nuns rapes and relics destroyed etc etc all the usual stuff eye witness acounts and the acounts of muslim chroniclers mehmet turned st sophias into a mosque...
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Post by riotgrrl on Aug 4, 2009 20:23:03 GMT
Good to see we're all keeping up with current events.
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Post by mouse on Aug 4, 2009 22:05:23 GMT
Good to see we're all keeping up with current events. those who fail to learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat them
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Post by Liberator on Aug 5, 2009 1:19:35 GMT
eh it fell to islam..converts nothwithstanding and converts to islam are islam....else st sophias would have remained one of the greatest cathederals of christendom...and the arabs and anatolians had been trying to over run for 600 yrs all well documented constantinople fell to mehemt in 15 43 or there abouts..15 some thing....the population of women and children gathered up to be sold as slaves..fighting men of good families held for ransome..the old given the chop[would suit random voice]..priests and nuns rapes and relics destroyed etc etc all the usual stuff eye witness acounts and the acounts of muslim chroniclers mehmet turned st sophias into a mosque... You seem incapable of distinquishing nations and peoples from their religion. If that is what you want, then in 1204 Constantinople fell to Christianity that like its earlier conquest of Jerusalem stole, raped and slaughtered all that it could find and glorified that The streets ran ankle deep in blood for three days. The Muslim Caliphate fell to Muslim invasion. In 1020 and 1066, England was conquered by Christian invaders. From 1492 Christians spread ruthless domination throughout the Americas, India and Africa. Why do you recognise Christians as acting for their various tribal/national identities but group Muslims of all national origin as if acting for their religion? How about the Turk-Mongol-Huns who did not convert to Islam or Christianity and conquered China and Russia and India? How about those great bastions of Christianity Tsar Ivan IV The Terrible and Voivode Vlad III Draculea? Nice people weren't they? Because they were not Muslim.
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Post by mouse on Aug 5, 2009 8:41:15 GMT
""You seem incapable of distinquishing nations and peoples from their religion.""" and YOU seem incapable of understanding the difference between islam and other religions... political islam is still islam....which is why its called political islam...and why every aspect of life is covered..islam is islam...one unit..one beliefe and yes even all the 72 are still islam[some more relaxed than others ie the ishmalies for eg
when some thing is done in the name of religion then that religion is to blame ie the crusades were done in the name of christianity and islam...therefore christianity and islam were both culpable... muslim invasions were done in the name of islam not in the name of nations....and that is the difference.... dont blame me because islam sees its self as one unit one ummah..dont blame non muslims because non muslims have to pay jizzyah to islam..not you will notice to any nation state but to islam and which ever caliph happens to be in charge right through islamic history jizzyah has been paid..booty has been proportioned out with 5% going to the caphilate and slaves have been taken with the caphilate taking its full allowence..it was to the caphilate that males were taken to be trained as soldiers of the islamic army not nation states..not individuals but the caphilate be it bagdad..or ottoman one head quarters..one ummah
1066 was NOT done in the name of religion but in the name of william the bastard same goes for ivan..vlad just as the mongols were the dream of ghengis and not religion
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Post by Liberator on Aug 5, 2009 17:44:10 GMT
Mouse, that is a pack of rubbish. How does one Muslim people conquering another amount to 'political Islam' centuries before the term was invented while one Christian country conquering another is not 'political Christianity'? How do exatly the same people continuing exactly the same expansion turn into conquest 'for Islam' because during that expansion over Muslims some of them converted to Islam? What about the Turks who converted to Christianity and those who did not convert at all? They were all Turks.
You are making it up in the same way as every little uprising used to be called the threat of World Communism when it was about entirely local issues. If you can't see how your prejudice causes you to apply entirely different standards and wording to exactly the same behaviours depending on who did them, I hope others can.
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Post by mouse on Aug 5, 2009 21:41:31 GMT
but it hasnt been one group of muslims conquering another group of muslims has it...political islam is simply an updated name for islamic governence under islamic law under the umbrella of the ummah via the caphilate be it bagdad or ottoman etc etc the main shiite or sunni both acept the basic precepts of the 5 pillars as do the other 70...and all acept sharia..mohammed..the koran and the hadiths..they may argue small matters but islam remains the main focus and where things have been slack then it has been adressed ie the brief flowering of spain..but the liberals and the thinkers were defeated by the ""pure""and fundemental thinking islam is not like any other religion....it never has been and its a mistake to think it is...islam means and demands submission...submission to allah and the clerics will enforce all the rules as they have been doing for the last 1400yrs and as they are trying to do increasingly in todays world
""while one Christian country conquering another is not 'political Christianity'? """actually no its not....and i think you realise quite fully that its not..different aims..different reasons
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Post by Liberator on Aug 5, 2009 22:06:43 GMT
So Muslim convert Turks conquering Muslim Arabs and Iranians were not one group of Muslims conquering another according to you? So Muslims agree on basics of the faith. What do you expect? Christians agree on basics of the faith to a much closer extent and with a much longer history of fighting each other over minutiae. That's what following a religion means.
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Post by Big Lin on Aug 5, 2009 22:12:08 GMT
I basically agree with you, Ratarsed.
On the other hand, your last sentence is wrong if it means what it SEEMS to - that 'following a religion' means persecuting non-believers because to me that's a perversion of the faith and not the faith itself.
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Post by Liberator on Aug 6, 2009 0:16:23 GMT
No, not persecuting; agreeing on basic principles. I agree that there is a problem but there's a problem in the opposite direction too. There must come a point where any religion says it just can't accept that interpretation. The problem with Islam is that it is very weak there, so if you can make your version stand up as within possible interpretation, there is no overall authority to rule you over the edge. Jews the same, but have never had the power since ancient times for it to matter, though extremes of ultra-orthodox men are causing a problem in Israeli commitement to supporting them (but not their wife and children) as perpetual religious students.
Christianity has a history the other way round, where agreeing the nature of Jesus and The Christ and whether they were even the same thing has taken precedence over interpretations of any message. However much they disagree, the Pope, Ian Paisley, the Patriarch of Moscow, any gay-hating, gun-toting, televangelist all belong to the same interpretation of 'Jesus Christ' as 'Perfect God and Perfect Man'. You need to look a long way to find as much difference as you would between liberal Sufism and 19th century Wahhabi Arab-nationalist Islam.
Jehovah's Witnesses fall outside by saying Jesus was the Archangel Michael (I think - the Arian position anyway, he was not divine enough). The 'Oriental Orthodox' churches (the most ancient) don't think him human enough, and they absorbed the Nestorians who seem to imagine him sort of schizophrenically both human and divine but not at the same time, like maybe human mind but divine conscience. Then there's the Mormons whose 'heresy' is really adding a whole American fantasy to both Testaments.
I think that, to mean anything, a religion must be able to say that, for instance, it is not 'Christian' to crucify willing victims as sacrifices like Jesus. It can't accept absolutely anything. But it must not be too exclusive either and proclaim only what the High Command decrees as acceptable.
The Roman church and its attitude to the Bible is a good example. It used Latin and translated the Bible into Latin from Greek because that was the common western language so everybody could understand it. There were Gospels in Anglo-Saxon and in Gothic - it's about the only knowledge we have of the East Gothic language. But by the Middle Ages when Latin was equivalent to Mathematical Calculus, it was death to translate it. It has changed completely from Latin as the inclusive to Latin as exclusive.
The same applies to a lot of Muslim and Christian fundamentalists. They know selected bits of Scripture that suit their case, their followers do not understand the original language and they take it in an interpretation to suit themselves. 'Puritans' have always been with all religions but it is 'interesting' that the most extreme Muslims like the Taliban do not speak even modern Arabic, the most extreme Christian fungusmentalists cling to the King James Bible though some words have changed their significance in 400 years. There are even websites to show how the Hebrew and Septuagint Greek OT were manipulated by Satan to disagree when the James disagrees with them. That has an ancient precedent, that when faced with how much Christianity agreed with [pagan] tradition, that was because Satan knew what was coming and got in first to create a false imitation in advance. (Reads like Terry Pratchett!)
I'm not one that thinks they just changed the names, or that 'they' switched between two utterly incompatible 'religions'. I think much more, that there were rigid extremists then and always, but most people understood a development that had been on their minds and their traditional religion could not provide.
At one extreme you have a Pope and his council legislating on Right Thinking. At the other you have Muslim reliance on The Book and your entitlement to understand The Book better than others. Somewhere else you have the Dalai Lama smiliing that it's all in your mind anyway. Maybe, but Tibetan Buddhism has its own version of the Spanish Inquisition as vicious as anything Christian or Muslim.
The reality is, if you tell human beings to respect and care for each other, they will spend their time looking for ways to persecute each other for not doing so in the right way.
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Post by Big Lin on Aug 6, 2009 1:02:03 GMT
Thanks for the clarification. I see what you're saying and it wasn't quite clear before.
The only thing I'd say is that what you are talking about is NOT unique to religion.
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao were as fanatical as ANY Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, or Buddhist.
Does anyone seriously believe that Robert Mugabe pays any more than lip service to the Catholicism he CLAIMS to believe in?
Does anyone seriously believe that the Ku Klux Klan's version of Christianity has anything to do with the real thing?
There have been MANY non-religious people - apart from the four I've mentioned already, you could add the likes of Bakunin, of Lenin, of Ceausescu, of Franjo Tudjman - oh, the list goes on.
The problem is NOT that people believe in religion - the PROBLEM is FANATICISM - whether it's Marxist fundamentalists (God, I've met quite a few of them at uni and they're about as gullible as the Hare Krishna mob!), the Falung Gong, obeah and santeria disciples, and so on.
As Yeats said, 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.'
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Post by Liberator on Aug 6, 2009 1:12:36 GMT
Dead right. They always shirk their own responsibility onto their creed. Even Marx was looking to a 'Millenium' that he got from Christian ideals. I think it's Frank Herbert changes the old addage that power corrupts to what I think much more correct, Power attracts the corupt, absolute power attracts the absolutely corrupt. I have my personal arguments with Judaeism-Islam (one of them in the Gnostic Gospels, that the Disciples asked Jesus the value of circumcision and he told them that if God wanted it, he would have arranged for men to be born without a foreskin - in other words, ritual is tosh, understanding is everything).
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Post by ♫anna♫ on Aug 6, 2009 5:35:17 GMT
Dead right. They always shirk their own responsibility onto their creed. Even Marx was looking to a 'Millenium' that he got from Christian ideals. I think it's Frank Herbert changes the old addage that power corrupts to what I think much more correct, Power attracts the corupt, absolute power attracts the absolutely corrupt. I have my personal arguments with Judaeism-Islam (one of them in the Gnostic Gospels, that the Disciples asked Jesus the value of circumcision and he told them that if God wanted it, he would have arranged for men to be born without a foreskin - in other words, ritual is tosh, understanding is everything). "Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely!" If any one of us truly had absolute power to "rule a nation" i'm sure it wouldn't be easy to follow that razor's edge between dictatorship and anarchy and come out looking like a Saint!
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Post by mouse on Aug 6, 2009 9:23:12 GMT
So Muslim convert Turks conquering Muslim Arabs and Iranians were not one group of Muslims conquering another according to you? So Muslims agree on basics of the faith. What do you expect? Christians agree on basics of the faith to a much closer extent and with a much longer history of fighting each other over minutiae. That's what following a religion means. actually that is not what religion means...far from it there is the basic premise of each religion....then there is all the man imput guff the whole sunni shia caboodle is based on mans interpretation and hussains death just as the catholic prod is based on mans imput but just as catholic /prod/babtist/jehovas witness/methodists all have the same base..but are/were happy to fight on detail so does islam...its just slight variations that are different and in that christianity and judaism are older than islam so of course they will have a longer history....of fighting over interpretation of the ""one true faith"" """Jesus the value of circumcision and he told them that if God wanted it, he would have arranged for men to be born without a foreskin -"""" just as mohamed was asked about female circumsion and he replyed ""a small cut""
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Post by mouse on Aug 6, 2009 11:09:12 GMT
the evil that men do lives after them...the good is oft interred with their bones.....
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Post by lonewolf on Aug 11, 2009 23:35:13 GMT
So Muslim convert Turks conquering Muslim Arabs and Iranians were not one group of Muslims conquering another according to you? So Muslims agree on basics of the faith. What do you expect? Christians agree on basics of the faith to a much closer extent and with a much longer history of fighting each other over minutiae. That's what following a religion means. No it doesn’t! War is always a struggle between armed political units and is never truly religious in nature. Even the Crusades, though motivated by the Western Christian hierarchy, were not religious in nature. The symbiosis of war and politics forms its own thought-category, independent of other ways of thinking, so no war could possibly be carried on for a purely non-political motive. In fact, the moment a religion has its members go to war it becomes a political unit and ceases to be a religion
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Post by Liberator on Aug 12, 2009 1:26:02 GMT
I agree. So take that up with Mouse who is certain that the Turkish Muslim conquest of the Muslim and Orthodox Christian Middle East is a matter of Muslim, not Turkish, expansion, while the Crusader attacks on the Muslim and Orthodox Christian Middle East are examples of Chirsit liberation from Muslim supremacy. Given the state of Islam and Christendom at the time, we can guess that the failure of Islam to conquer Europe spared us som e500 years at least of civilisation.
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