Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "The Rubin Report"
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"Murder rate: White America, like most Christian countries in the
Americas, Africa and Eastern Europe, is markedly more violent than most
of the Middle East (murders per 100,000 population):"
The killing of converts, infidels, homosexuals, heretics (including Muslims you disagree with) and other religious executions such as "honor killings" are not registered in Islamic countries as murders. Even so here are the Islamic nations which OFFICIALLY rank higher than the US in per capita murders, according to UN:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Rank Country
2 Comoros
3 Djibouti
15 Somalia
24 Chad
30 Algeria
31 Egypt
32 Libya
33 Morocco
34 Sudan
35 Tunisia
42 Burkina Faso
45 Gambia
47 Guinea
50 Mali
51 Mauritania
52 Niger
54 Senegal
55 Sierra Leone
The United States is ranked 92nd in this list. And the most Christian part of the US, the bible belt and rural portions as opposed to the cities, is the part with the least murders. And there are very few "Christian countries in the Americas" ranked in this list above those I have listed. A lot of the African Christian countries have a problem with violence from the muslim minority, in fact it is becoming a notable problem in the West.
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@scalesofleviathan9697 By that standard Communism AS PRACTICED is right wing. The most hierarchical and despotic states in the world are either communist or Islamic. What is the point of obsessing over minor differences nobody cares about and pretending they represent "OPPOSITE" ends of a meaningful political "spectrum"? (Other than obscuring the central issues) "A difference that MAKES no difference IS no difference." Both commies and Nazis will:
Divide the public and foster hate along class/religious/gender/class lines
Segregate
Central plan the economy
Nationalize the press
End freedom of speech
Confiscate weapons
Persecute all non state sponsored religions
End all civil rights, including the rights enumerated in the US Constitution (and the Magna Carta).
Evict innocent citizens from their homes
Mobilize the apparatus of law and tax enforcement against their political enemies
Slander, imprison, and murder their political enemies
Eliminate or absorb all public organizations
Replace commercial entertainment media with a boring stream of propaganda.
The minor, insignificant differences between communism and Nazism are only important to communists and Nazis, not to anybody who loves freedom. You won't distract us from our fight for freedom with your internal socialist squabble over who should be our master.
"He is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind."-J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"
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Don't like dualism? Well you can't throw out consciousness: We all experience consciousness in a mode that makes its denial meaningless. And materialism can't account for it. There is nothing in materialism that allows for consciousness even as an epiphenomenon. The notion that consciousness arises from matter is a category error. Not a simple error, like 2+2=5, but a category error, like 2+2=blue. You can do sums on integers till the sun goes nova and your answer will always be an integer. Someday, Lord willing, I will write a book on this.
So, being a skeptic about the immaterial consciousness is to hold a world view that excludes, well, YOU! The only option for rejecting dualism is to reject MATTER as a fundamental reality on par with mind. This can be thought of as a variation on the simulation hypothesis, where our world is a sim running not on a computer, but in a MIND. This obviates any supposed interaction problems. Note, that I don't have any problem with mind/matter dualism, myself. But if you do, this is the only viable alternative. A more complete response to materialism is in my post on the +Bill Smith thread below.
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+Albert Rogers
Attempting to imply that Hitler was a Christian in the face of overwhelming documentation to the contrary, AR spins:
"Hitler was a baptised Catholic," Technically incorrect as written, you could have said "Hitler was baptised as a Catholic." and been technically correct while glossing over the fact that Catholic families baptize infants and thus Hitler had no say in that matter. Hitler was a heathen who had been baptized Catholic.
"nor confessedly apostate." He was not quite publicly apostate for political reasons, he did expressly and unequivocally disavow and deny Christianity. This is well documented. (Unless you say he was never a Christian in the first place, and thus could not be an apostate, but a heathen.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler
"He behaved exactly like the worst of the Christian Far Wrong in this country, and the worst promoters of Jihad in Islam. "
Certainly he expressed some admiration for Islam. The moral equating of traditional Christianity and Jihad is a frequent slander of the "new atheists". The center of religious and political freedom is the regional and cultural entity currently called "the west". It used to be called Christendom. It will be interesting to see how long the freedom can outlast the cause. Unfortunately, to live in interesting times is a curse.
"You are NOT entitled to call all bad behaviour Atheism, especially in the cases where the individual believes he is God."
In this sentence he forbids me license to do to his folks exactly what he did to mine in the previous sentence. But it is a straw man. I was not calling bad behavior atheism. I was pointing out that the attribution of National Socialism to Christianity was diametrically false. Calling bad behavior atheism is not the same as noting the bad behavior of atheist institutions. To be fair, I may mention that while certainly irreconcilably hostile to Christianity, Hitler never expressly avowed atheism. And he criticized atheism as a cypher for communism. It is hard to pin this snake down, because he was an inveterate liar. The only thing we can be certain of is that he was not was a Christian, because if somebody says he is not a Christian, he is not a Christian. (Matt 10:33 "But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.")
"Nor may you criticize Eugenics, the belief that it would be better if we could breed from less useless and obnoxious people (A very difficult thing to define, which is why intelligent people have abandoned it) with the belief that one's own supposed race is superior to all others"
Dude, I don't need license from you to criticize eugenics, or anything else. Eugenics is discredited completely enough that to criticize it is to beat a dead horse. It is not so much intelligent people as socially or morally sensitive people who have abandoned it. Wags say, "The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name", but, of course, eugenics got a bad name by being practiced and found immoral in practice, not only by the Nazis, but as practiced by such local lights as The American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League the latter of which sponsored and proposed for law the "American Baby Code":
http://www.abortionfacts.com/learn-inc/the-american-baby-code
As this forthright expression of timeless Democrat party ideals turned out to not be as popular as they expected, they changed their name from "The American Birth Control League" to "Planned Parenthood", changing their rhetoric, while maintaining the same goals and methods.
As for the belief that one's race is superior, the notion "the fact that we conquered you is scientific proof that we are the fittest and are actively improving the human race" is as Darwinian as falsified embryo drawings.
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+hcheyne
starts the thread:
"He does realise that the US has had 2 end time evangelicals with their finger on the button.?"
One presumes this is a response to Harris:
[nuclear deterrence by mutual assured destruction"falls apart once you admit to yourself that it's possible that truly suicidal religious maniacs can get their hands on these weapons. So all I was calling for is our awareness that that really is a game changer. And we have to avoid that at all cost."
hcheyne's reply does not really resolve into anything like a point. If he is trying to challenge Harris' logic he might well mean "Two truly suicidal religious maniacs had access to nuclear weapons and nothing happened." The two obvious responses are:
1. End time evangelicals are not truly suicidal religious maniacs
2. If they had been, nuclear war would have resulted, obviously.
+mage davee (a response to thread opener, not a response to above remarks)
" That's really problem with Sam Harris arguments, he treats Islam as if it's a special kind of crazy, then really the Abrahamic faiths are all basically the same."
"...They all preach violence,.."
Violence is pretty much a given on the Earth. As we are placed, violence is necessarily right in one situation and wrong in another. Pacifism is immoral.
" they all have crazy beliefs that have to do with end of world and paradise..."
Ony one of them says that dying in the process of killing infidels is a ticket to paridise, which is the crux of Harris' argument.
"and they are all used justify violence and oppression...."
Everything is used to justify violence and oppression.
"The only difference is in America is you are much more likely to have this happen to you by Christian then by a Muslim, "
I presume that the "this" in the above sentence is violence and oppression. Blatant lie.
According to the Religious Landscape Survey, about 70% of residents of US identify as Christian, about 1% identify as Muslim. Are you 70 times more likely in the US to be killed or persecuted by a Christian than an Muslim? Nowhere near. You certainly are not 70 times more likely to be persecuted by a Christian motivated by his faith than a Muslim motivated by his. And I can't imagine you hope to fool anyone into believing you are.
" in fact the Christian in this country hold quite bit of political power..."
That's why we are the freest nation on the face of the Earth. The nations founded on atheist principles are no more free than those founded on Islam.
"and have used their religion for justification for war."
Lets see, United States wars:
Revolutionary War - "Chester" - check
War of 1812 - "The Star Spangled Banner" - check
Civil War - "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - check
World War 2 - "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" - check
Well, congratulations on managing to construct a sentence, or at least a clause, that wasn't purely bogus. I'm sure it was accidental. But these are the only major wars which Christianity weighed in on to any great extent, and it remains to be shown that this was a bad thing.
"...in the US or Europe, almost none of the terrorist attacks are from Muslims, in the US they only account for 6%, and less then 2% in Europe. The majority of attacks come Christian groups."
This is utterly absurd. It is true that many of the governments of the west seem reluctant to attribute the acts of Islamic jihad to Islamic jihad, so that might skew the official figures somewhat. But since 9-11, you can't seriously claim that Christians have committed acts of terrorism in anything like the same numbers, even if you throw out 9-11 itself. Or, you can claim it, but you can't back it up.
"The problem is paradise and martyrdom are not Islamic ideas, but rather borrowed ideas from Christianity and Judaism."
Islam's innovation is to connect paradise and martyrdom with killing infidels.
" You know who isn't blowing himself up, the guy who has food shelter, security, and stability."
Mostly not, no: he is funding and facilitating those who do. Bin Ladin was rich. The sheiks funding wahabist teachers in western mosques are rich. Saddam Hussein who enriched the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel was rich. There is provision for this in the Koran. Contribution to jihad can be of wealth. If you are wealthy this is ideal. Cheaper to fund than to die. Islam gives the poor fewer options.
mage davee then goes off on an historical tangent about the KKK. Well, to understand historical phenomena you need a little history. After the Civil War, there was an insurgency against the occupation called the Ku Klux Klan. It was suppressed by the occupation forces and reconstruction government law enforcement. When reconstruction ended the KKK was resurrected as the terrorist arm of the Democrat party. The depredations of the Klan mostly enjoyed de facto immunity because the local governments were controlled by Democrats. As the south became Republican, the Klan lost simultaneously their popular support and their immunity. The part of this story which has the most direct connection to Christianity is the fact that the victorious opposition was led by (Christian) reverend and lifelong Republican Martin Luther King, Jr. (Do you notice a subtle difference between Christian and Islamic notions of martyrdom?) But, there were Christians (and atheists, and Jews, and everybody else) on both sides. There is no objective reason to attribute KKK to Christianity particularly. As I stated above EVERYTHING has been used to justify oppression.
" the regions where extremism exist are regions that West through Colonial and Cold War policies have exploited,"
like India, the Philippines, Hong Kong?
"Your statement clearly shows that you not only ignorant of the koran, you are also ignorant of the bible. Neither rewards murder with heaven. Both books instruct their followers to kill non believers."
Some places in the Old Testament ordered certain Jews to kill certain others. Nowhere in the Bible or any Jewish authoritative religious work are believers in general encouraged to kill unbelievers in general. This is specifically enjoined in the Koran. You either have not read the books yourself or are deliberately trying to bluff, gambling on the ignorance of the reader. In general Christains and Jews are not as ignorant of their scriptures, or nowadays even of the Koran, as you hope.
"FYI. End time Evangelicals keep trying to have a war in the middle east because they want to trigger end times so they can ascend to heaven. So you could not be more wrong."
No, we don't. And you have not a scrap of evidence that indicates we do. Evangelicals do not believe that we can precipitate the apocalypse. Nor do we believe that if we killed people trying to do so, God would reward us for it.
"10 years ago a Christian leader called for a Crusade(which basically means Jihad, except that Jihad doesn't usually mean war) against Iraq for weapons of mass Destruction. After 10 years of war, we leave the war zone with no Infrastructure a wrecked economy, over million civilians dead, and we didn't find one single WMD, and you think it's their religion is the reason they are applauding?"
The policy adopted after 9-11, and generally accepted in the west, was to take military action against state sponsors of terror. That was the main case W made for the Iraq war, and Saddam was guilty. Evidence was found for this after the war. The terrorist training camps were found. Abul Abbas was found retiring in short term comfort there. Since this did not fit the narrative of W's political detractors, emphasis was placed on the small part of the speech that was not confirmed. JWB also said in that speech that British Intelligence reported that Iraq was negotiating with an African nation to obtain yellow cake uranium. No evidence of an active nuclear program was found in Iraq. This does not make the British report false, nor does it make nuclear deproliferation the reason for the war.
"You are living in a time and location vacuum. Reagan and the Bushes ordered the death of far more Muslims than every Muslim terrorist or military act against Christian in the last 30 years. Terrorism is not just when it happens to you."
You are living in a time and location vacuum. More Muslims killed than westerners does not mean that the west started the war. It just means we are winning.
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"It was the British that destabilised the region by gifting the Jews Israel."
The British recognized Israeli national sovereignty over the land the Arabs privately sold them (planning and later trying to murder them and steal it back). The Arabs have repeatedly rejected any peace settlement, including two state solutions.
"It was the US that further destabilised the region by toppling moderate secular governments in Iraq, Iran and Syria so they could control oil prices and fight the Russians, and it was the Americans, and the British again that empowered the radical extremist, by training the Mujaheddin and the Taliban, and favouring Wa Hadist [sic] states like Saudi Arabia."
An ally of the Soviet Union was by definition not a moderate secular government, and fighting the Soviets was a matter of survival, for Islam as much as for us.
"As far as I am concerned all fundamentalists are prone to ideological violence."
The word fundamentalist was originally coined by certain evangelical denominations but was later extended to certain Islamic groups by "progressives" in a tendentious attempt to equate the dissimilar and discredit the former. It is not a term Islam uses itself, but a western notion applied to serve western political ends. Your prejudice against Christians has been amply demonstrated, but poorly justified.
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"Conservatism" in current US parlance is a broad term covering many ideas which are at least partly independent of another: religious freedom, moral retrenchment, strong defense, fiscal responsibility, limited government, civil rights, libertarian ideas. Some of these are partly in tension with one another. Mr. Rubin, before striking out on his own, was part of the Young Turks network. He left that connection, and modern leftism, over what he saw as oppressive authoritarianism and tendentious obscurantism on the part of the side he had called his own. He at first was trying to restrain the excesses of the left from within, but he said something like, "Increasingly I find that defending my classical liberal values is regarded as a conservative position." He still is not quite comfortable with calling himself a conservative. Between him and his guests, you should be able to glean a good notion of what conservatism is about. Another source would be Praeger University, here on U-tube, providing 5 minute introductions to conservative views on various subjects.
Conservatives are eager to talk to him, because he will conduct a civil conversation with his guests based on reason, even those with whom he disagrees. Leftist won't for some reason (I would suppose the same reason).
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+Albert Rogers
"The relative harmlessness of Christianity is solely dependent upon the
proportion of "believers" who don't believe all the stuff in the Bible."
The freedoms you enjoy are mostly a result of believers, simply. Now you can deny this and double down on your disinformation, but I can document everything I say, so save us all some time and yourself some embarrassment. The realm of the freedoms you take for granted is currently called the west. It used to be called Christendom. Christianity having been rejected, it is now degenerating. We don't have to guess what would form a society based on atheism would take, we have prime historical examples: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Bloc, and the remnants of that train wreck like Communist China, N Korea, and Cuba all serve as experimental data.
"If getting a virgin pregnant isn't rape, what is it?"
You apparently don't know what virginity or rape are, this sentence makes no sense.
"If Jesus of Galilee existed"
It is the firm consensus of historians that he did. If you don't even know that then you don't know anything about the first century worth listening to.
The book of Acts has a couple being slain for lying to a prophet about what they gave. Peter's words to Ananias makes it clear he was under no compulsion, so his lie was as petty as it was vile. Ch 5:
4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.
"But far worse, the very first book of the Bible has God destroying an
entire city for being full of homosexuals and people who didn't 'believe
in Him'."
If you read the passage of the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, you knew that Sodom was full of rapists and other criminal violence. You read rape where it is absent and ignore it where it is present. The passage does not reference their religion, as you implied.
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No, Pat, Germany was largely post Christian already, but the religious
affiliation of the populace is irrelevant in a dictatorship. I said the
Nazi state was founded on atheistic principles by atheistic leaders, a
chief driver of the policies of the Nazis was eugenics, a scientific
program for the propagation of a healthy race. Both the open policies
and the internal plans of the Nazi regime were hostile to Christianity.
As for Hitler himself:
"I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie," Hitler confessed (audio transcribed in Hitler's Table Talk [1941-44]).
"It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a
man who made concessions in this field [to be labeled a Christian]."Did
Adolf Hitler ever call himself a Christian? Certainly. He did so, and
as he would later admit, for the singular purpose of disseminating
political propaganda."To whom should propaganda be addressed?" he
wrote. "It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. ...
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be
convinced that the fact is real."
Hitler used the convenient fact that the Lutheran Church was the established Church of Germany to impose his own officials and sensor the sermons, and he outlawed may other denominations outright.Opposition to this course and opposition to Hitler's early measures against the Jews was concentrated in the Confessing Church, which was the body of Lutheran congregations and pastors unwilling to cooperate with the co-opting of the Church for Hitler's ends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/weekinreview/word-for-word-case-against-nazis-hitler-s-forces-planned-destroy-german.html
The most prominent figure in the Confessing Church was Deitrich Bonhoeffer, who in addition to his work with the Confessing Church, personally helped Jews escape Germany during the war and was executed just before the end of the war in Europe for his part in the plan to assassinate Hitler.
For Christians helping Jews escape Europe, see your local holocaust museum.
For a bio of Bonhoeffer, with an emphasis on his activities with the Confessing Church, see Eric Metaxas' _Bonhoeffer_,
For a specific account of Christians smuggling Jews out of the Holocaust, see Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding _Place_.
Many of the soldiers in the regular army were Christians, but no Christians were allowed in the SS, and the Hitler Youth were required to sever all ties with the Church. The Nazi regime was one of atheist leaders riding an atheist ideology, to atheist, and even specifically anti-theist ends. That is what I claimed, and the substance of that claim is well documented. Calling the truth dumb won't make it go away.
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There is nothing in physics that allows for the production of a subjective observer. In a purely physical universe, consciousness would never arise. The notion that it does is a category error. Not a simple error, like 2+2=5, but a category error, like 2+2=blue. You can do sums on integers till the sun goes nova and your answer will always be an integer, not a color.
"But muh materialism."
The base of materialism has always been a special pleading thing against the supernatural. "I have this rule that I just made up that says nothing outside space/time/matter can influence it (in most variants because nothing outside it existed)." Materialism is dead. Big bang cosmology killed it.
No explaination can be offered for why something exists rather than nothing. Yet, this should not give us pause because SOMETHING DOES EXIST. If in the link of causality there was ever a node where NOTHING EXISTED, then of course, nothing would exist forever thereafter. Anything which BEGINS to exist must be caused by something else. It follows that any account of origin must either have an infinite regression, or a closed loop, or a ground of being.
Most theists claimed that God was outside of time, and ground of being. The Atheists of the Victorian era countered Matter was eternally pre-existant, thus did not begin, thus required no agent of origin. They claimed Matter was Ground of Being.
But starting in 1924, Edwin Hubble painstakingly developed a series of distance indicators to galaxies. This allowed him to estimate distances to galaxies whose redshifts had already been measured, mostly by Slipher. In 1929 Hubble discovered a correlation between distance and recession velocity—now known as Hubble's law. Lemaître had already shown that this was expected, given the cosmological principle. In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the competing steady state theory. The rub is that Big Bang means that matter had a beginning, and thus cannot be ground of being. This undercuts the logical underpinnings of atheism/materialism.
Materialist dogma is that nothing outside space/time/matter can exist or affect it. Big bang cosmology proves that something outside it does exist and did affect it. Materialism was never compatible with consciousness. Now it is not compatible with known cosmology. Materialism is dead.
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