[Vision2020] Christ is Our Commander-in-Chief or not!

[heirdoug at netscape.net]

Dear Lounge Lizard,

You are correct that most all of what Nick Gier writes is of no impact 
on the community as a whole. As a matter of fact very few people ever 
read his twaddle. If it weren't for Blind 2020 "Teach" wouldn't have 
any thing to do. But it is not what he writes but what he taught over 
the past 35 years that has grave consequences!

What I did find out by reading the latest installment (yes I forced my 
self to actually look at the words that he put together) is that he 
left out some pretty substantial numbers of deaths from the recent 
world history.

Maybe with the following statistics Nick can expand the pages of his 
new work to over 65 pages:

The number of allied soldiers killed in the D-Day invasion (53,714) is 
the same number as were killed in the world in the past 9 hours by 
abortion.

In the first year of the Iraq war we lost 589 brave men and women. That 
is the same number as were destroyed in the last 6 min.

In the past 34 years, about the time that Nick Gier started his 
venerated career as a "Professional Philosopher", 44,388,860 living 
innocent babies had their lives snuffed out by abortion. Maybe some of 
the mothers who were deceived into believing they were doing the right 
thing were former students of Nick's, cheered on by his continual 
droning that what they were carrying was not a real person, YET! Just 
one fine example of his past teaching. I'm sure that can still find it 
at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier!

Way to go teach. Please be our guest to continue the madness!

Doug Farris (So there is no confusion as to who wrote this.)






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Why is it relevant with regard to HOW MANY individuals were killed by 
such-and-such people of a certain faith. Isn't it the simple act of 
killing and the reason behind the killing that is of importance? 
Keeping scorecards of "number killed" by "faith/belief structure" seems 
a bit sophomoric if the ultimate issue is to address the REASON behind 
the killing. Is one faith more evil or despicable because it killed 
2,000 more than another for the exact same reason?

Furthermore, what does Gier's post really have to do with the stated 
objective of Vision 2020: "Moscow Vision 2020 is an informal, 
multi-partisan group of Moscow residents formed in 1993 to encourage 
more public information and debate about the future of Moscow and Latah 
County." I fail to comprehend where Gier's post, as well as many other 
posted here, has any connection with Moscow or Latah County. It appears 
that several posters use the board as a soapbox to spout off their own 
partisan or religious beliefs, or, in this case, to develop a thesis, 
without connecting how their post relates to Moscow's or Latah County's 
future.

nickgier at adelphia.net wrote: Good Morning:

I would like to thank Gary Crabtree for the inspiration for this week's 
KRFP radio commentary.

Nick Gier

CHRIST IS OUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF:
RELATIVE VIOLENCE IN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY

I'm writing a book on the origins of religious violence and my thesis 
is that there has been far more religiously motivated violence in the 
Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—than the Asian 
religions. Draft chapters can be viewed at 
www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/orv.htm.

A person on our local list-serve Vision2020 had this to say about 
relative violence in Islam and Christianity:

"Up to the eleventh century Islam had a sizable lead. From 1095 to 1291 
the Church picked up the pace and nosed ahead. It was neck and neck 
till 1834 and the end of the Spanish Inquisition. After that Allah's 
chosen made it no contest."

There are more than a few problems with this summary history.

Islam could not possibly have had any sort of lead before the 11th 
Century because Christianity had a very good head start. Under 
Theodosius I, being a pagan was a capital crime, and even Christians 
were arrested if they practiced even the most minor of pagan practices.

On December 25, 390, Theodosius ordered the slaughter of 7,000 pagans 
in Thessalonica. The British historian Hugh Trevor Roper called 
Theodosius "the first Spanish Inquisitor," and "the Christian monarch 
who introduced the world to religious totalitarianism."

Bishop Ambrose, who baptized St. Augustine, made Theodosius do penance 
for the atrocities at Thessalonica, but he still proclaimed that 
"Christ was now at the head of the [Roman] legions."

This reminds me of the sign outside a fundamentalist church in L.A., 
right after the invasion of Iraq: "Christ is our Commander-in-Chief." 
I'm assuming that our born-again president would have to agree with 
this demotion.

Under Muslim rule Jews and Christians were generally asked to offer a 
special tax, not their heads. The slaughter of 4,000 Jews in Muslim 
Granada in 1066 was the exception rather than the rule, and Jews 
generally had much better lives in Muslim Spain than anywhere else in 
Christian Europe.

In 1099, men, women, and children were slaughtered indiscriminately 
when Christian forces captured Jerusalem. An eyewitness reported that 
the Crusaders "rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. 
Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place 
should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had 
suffered so long from their blasphemies."

When Saladin retook the city in 1187, Christians were only required to 
pay a ransom and then free to return home. Some of Saladin's officers 
paid for those who could not afford it, and about 7,000 others were 
sold into slavery.

In Muslim India Buddhist and Hindus were, incredibly enough, declared 
"People of the Book," and the tax on non-Muslims was only sporadically 
enforced and even more infrequently collected.

Most of the ancestors of Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh (especially 
here), India, Indonesia, and Malaysia freely converted to Islam. Areas 
in India where forced conversions were attempted are now the places 
where one finds the fewest Muslims per capita.

Some Mughal emperors ordered the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist 
temples, but local resistance and intimidated Mughal functionaries 
meant that relatively few temples were liquidated. Early Christian 
emperors were much more successful in destroying pagan temples, 
including the one in Alexandria that housed the finest library in the 
ancient world.

Curiously, the Vision2020 post above ended Christian atrocities in 
1834, but during the Taiping Rebellion, Chinese Christian armies were 
responsible for killing 10-20 million people between 1852-1864. I would 
hazard a guess that more Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian temples were 
destroyed by the Taipings in 12 years than 600 years of Muslim rule in 
India.

Some have claimed that the Taipings were not really Christians, but 
that is simply not the case. They took great pains to eliminate Chinese 
religious influences; they enforced the 10 Commandments at the point of 
a sword; and they followed the Bible very carefully, including the 
prophecies in the Book of Revelation.

Short of Osama bin Laden getting several nukes and using them,
militant Muslims have a long way to go to match the historical 
Christian kill rate.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 
31 years. See his columns as the Palouse Pundit at www.NickGier.com.


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