X-Message-Number: 17741 From: "Dani Kollin" <> Subject: Re: Kennita, John and Charles Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 16:35:06 -0700 From Kennita: Reminder to everyone: a personal rule that if you write anything while you're angry you go get a drink of water, etc. before rereading it and hitting Send can serve as a prophylactic against mistakes of this kind. -- me: Amen. John: I apologise to Mr Kollin if he has found my message offensive, but I hope that he is satisfied with my acceptance of "some" and additional explanation. me: Absolutely. Charles: First this is rather a poor argument since the members of any religion (with the probable exception of Buddhism) will tend to claim that they are ethically guided and hence less likely to act unethically than their atheist counterparts. If this were true, one should expect to find no religious wars at all Me: That's a conclusion you've drawn Charles. It is in fact not a conclusion drawn by Judaism (I can't speak for all religions). Being ethically motivated does not in any way mitigate the unfortunate fact that war has been and will continue to be a constant in the lives of both the secular and religious. Charles: , and barbaric conflict should be purely an atheistic occupation. To say that religious people have had ugly wars, but so have atheists, is to say that the whole idea of religious guidance is a total failure. Me: If we were to go by your assumption above, yes. However I dont' agree with your assumption. Charles: Second, I think you will find, if you add up the body count, that the total from wars in which the aggressor invoked "God's blessing" is higher than from other conflicts; Me: Ok. Lets. Since the Renaissance, or the birth of the modern age I think you'll find that Secular deaths have greatly outnumbered religious based deaths. Now if you want you can even throw in the Crusades, though that had more to do with trade routes and access to eastern wealth which in the 250 or so years it went on caused 300,000 deaths tops. Ok, For religious death: The Inquisition: 50,000 or so. both Spanish and Papal Russian Pogroms, (both Russian and Polish, same empire) About 300,000 to 400,000 Isalmic terrorism 200,000 (including starvation due to radical religious based policies, ie Taleban) Possibly the one million Armenians murdered by the Turks in WW I. But many argue that was much more secular/nationalistic in nature. O.K, for Secular death: Communist China: Most experts agree that Mao toasted between 40 to 50 million during his reign of terror, most of that in the Great Cultural Revolution of 66-76. Stalin and Co: 40 million, including seven million in one winter alone, in the Ukraine Pol Pot: two million. When one thinks that this was 1/3 of the country and he did this in about six years I think it shows the sheer abiltiy of secular death to really get behind this genocide thing. Adolph Hitler: This is a tough one. Now you could simply say that he "only" killed the 11 million in the camps, However you could also credibly argue that he and his ideology killed all those dead in WW II. So if you add the Russians, the allies, partisans killed etc. We are over forty million. Japaneses Militarism: Between '31 and '45 they did kill over ten million Asians,(You do not want me to get started on Unit 731). The French Terror: 50,000. 1791. Hardly seems worth mentioning. But this was the first time wholesale civilian killing for secular reasons, really became popular. Of course what the French did badly others really perfected. This list is hardly exhaustive and the Muslims can always nuke a few cities. But even if Islamic terrorism were to destroy the five largest cities in the United States it would not equal what the secular "isms" have managed to do to date. For true detail just look up the numbers yourself. The whole miserable story is there. G-d help us. Charles: and religious conflicts are notoriously vicious (e.g. Spanish Inquisition) since any behavior is supposedly excused by the Creator, and the participants are encouraged to take extreme measures because they probably believe in an afterlife. Me: See "Don't get me started on on Unit 731" above. Charles: One could argue reasonably that people doing these things were misinterpreting their holy guide books. However, if a guide book is so easily misinterpreted, I regard it as badly written and dangerous. The US Constitution is a model of clarity by comparison. Me: Timothy McVeigh certainly thought so. Charles: The only religious group I trust (again, apart from Buddhists) is the Quakers. Their record is pretty much unimpeachable, because of their refusal to interfere in other people's business. This almost puts them on a par with the libertarians. However, the relative unpopularity of Quakerism suggests to me that religions are more successful when they do in fact have a record of gross interference with competing faiths. Me: That's quite a condemnation Charles. I personally feel that religions are more successful when they preach the virtues of ethical monotheism (with words rather than swords). Christianity for one has, I believe done far more good for humanity than bad. But now we're into the the notion of where morals and ethics are derived from and you only need venture into the archives to see my long and terrific dialogue I had with John de Rivaz on the topic. Sincerly, Dani Kollin ___________________________________________________________________________ Visit http://www.visto.com. Find out how companies are linking mobile users to the enterprise with Visto. 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