Vatican exposures: Catholic ATS members? What say you?

reply to post by EricD

You don't happen to have any proof or sources for that statement, do you?

Yep.
Read the posts in the thread. "History" is one of my favorite, and most well-studied topics. Sadly, most "history" is written by the victors, and not represented in "mainstream" history books.

Accusation fail.

Originally posted by the2ofusr1
reply to post by wildtimes

 

From my own understanding of the Catholic Church ...Most if not all parishioners are told they are saved because they were baptized when they were babies ..They are also told not to read and study the bible because they are unable to understand what it says ...The only Catholics that I know who are saved are X/Catholics , Once they find true salvation they usually find it hard to stay and then move on ....peace

Well, then you need to meet more Catholics. Your understanding of Catholicism is flawed to say the least. Catholics are exhorted to read the Bible. Continuously. As a matter of fact, the most common religious gift for Catholic children is either a rosary or the Bible.

Eric

Originally posted by wildtimes
reply to post by EricD

 

You don't happen to have any proof or sources for that statement, do you?

Yep.
Read the posts in the thread. "History" is one of my favorite, and most well-studied topics. Sadly, most "history" is written by the victors, and not represented in "mainstream" history books.

Accusation fail.

Great. Then why don't you do me a favor and list here how many lives were ruined or ended by the Catholic Church and how many were ruined or killed from wars?

Even if you add in somewhat spurious connections like deaths due to western imperialism, you still don't approach the amount of lives ruined or ended by wars.

Eric

reply to post by EricD

Great. Then why don't you do me a favor and list here how many lives were ruined or ended by the Catholic Church and how many were ruined or killed from wars?

sigh.
Eric, okay fine, I'll re-post the source I posted earlier. Beyond that, it's up to you to study history. HISTORY.

You wanted sources for evidence of how many people have been harmed.
Here you go: This article is a bulleted, outlined list of the numbers of people slaughtered by decree, followed by a bibliography of sources (quite lengthy), and a video (which I have not yet watched, but will) featuring a 22-year veteran priest. The question the article is presented to answer is this:

How many people have died in the name of Christ, Christianity and Catholicism?

A straightforward question. Following is the link to the article and a disclaimer to its limitations:

VICTIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH by Kelsos
Listed are only events that solely occurred on command of church authorities or were committed in the name of Christianity. (List incomplete)

I find it extraordinary that you are unaware of these atrocities, or the ongoing allegations against the Roman Catholic Church. There you go.

Originally posted by wildtimes

I find it extraordinary that you are unaware of these atrocities, or the ongoing allegations against the Roman Catholic Church. There you go.

I don't know why you believe that I am unaware of these claims or ongoing allegations against the Church. Is this a straw man?

I didn't realize that that link was your source. You may want to go back and reread it.

A few points:

1) Some of the claims are very questionable.

2) Some of the items mentioned were not from the Catholic Church (such as actions taken by Protestants and Anglicans.

3) Even if you accept everything stated from your source as being 100% accurate and even if you include actions taken by Protestants and Anglicans and then if you include the destruction of EVERY person living in North America prior to Columbus you still don't come close to the amount of deaths and lives ruined by war in the 20th century alone!


Eric

reply to post by EricD

Even if you accept everything stated from your source as being 100% accurate and even if you include actions taken by Protestants and Anglicans and then if you include the destruction of EVERY person living in North America prior to Columbus you still don't come close to the amount of deaths and lives ruined by war in the 20th century alone!

SO WHAT?
What do the numbers matter? What wars in the 20th century were not instigated by religious and social hostility??!!

Do you SUPPORT WAR?

WHAT THE HELL is your point?
We need to stop killing each other. Period. STOP killing each other.
I don't give a rat's ass about the numbers comparatively! I KNOW that dogma and superior attitudes are the problem.
I also protest the annihilation of the natives of the Americas, WHICH was propagated by European "Christians".

I'm sick of it.
Literally, heart-sick.
10s, possibly as many as 50 million, were killed in the "Christian" name.....

If you want to deny that, and argue against the FACTS, that's your business.
I will never deny it. I will also ALWAYS argue for peace.

Originally posted by wildtimes
SO WHAT?
What do the numbers matter? What wars in the 20th century were not instigated by religious and social hostility??!!

Do you SUPPORT WAR?

WHAT THE HELL is your point?
We need to stop killing each other. Period. STOP killing each other.
I don't give a rat's ass about the numbers comparatively!

If you want to deny that, and argue against the FACTS, that's your business.
I will never deny it. I will also ALWAYS argue for peace.

Wow. That's a very surprising response, seeing as how you thought that the numbers mattered when you made the original statement (that we now know is false).

First off, the credo of this forum is Deny Ignorance. That's one of the reasons why the numbers matter. Another reason is that if you actually look at the numbers, you will see a decline in the amount of wars and death caused by Christianity as a relation to total population. That may point to an evolution of the entity as a whole or to the hierarchy. Making this claim also minimizes the impact of wars started and lives ruined by other influences, such as communism and socialism. I haven't checked the figures, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the Black Book of Communism lists more deaths due to communism than you will find assigned in your source to Catholicism.

The claim was yours. Not mine. Now you seem angered that someone points out that the claim was false. Maybe a simple 'I was engaging in hyperbole for dramatic affect, no big deal' would have sufficed.

Lastly, you are again attempting a straw man by asking if I support war. Whether or not I 'support war' is moot. If you are curious, with very few exceptions, I don't support war.

Eric

Originally posted by EricD

Wow. That's a very surprising response, seeing as how you thought that the numbers mattered when you made the original statement (that we now know is false).

Point of order. we do not know the numbers to be false. We know them to be contested, without a concurrent presentation of evidence, but with the contestor insisting that the other side present evidence, while at the same time presenting no evidence of his own to support his counter claim.

First off, the credo of this forum is Deny Ignorance.

Indeed, it is. Such denial is most often accompanied by evidence to promote education, which is the only proper way to deny ignorance - through education. Wildtimes has presented her evidence. Where is yours? In it's absence, the original evidence stands.

I haven't checked the figures,

No, you really haven't. I expect you'll cure that shortly.

Originally posted by nenothtu


Indeed, it is. Such denial is most often accompanied by evidence to promote education, which is the only proper way to deny ignorance - through education. Wildtimes has presented her evidence. Where is yours? In it's absence, the original evidence stands.

Here ya go.


Congo Free States 8 million (but four of the 12 years were prior to 1900)

WWI 15 million

Russian Civil War 9 million (if you include Stalin's purgings, 29 million)

WWII 66 million

Mao's Revolution 40 million

There were 18 other wars with between 1 and 5 million killed in each

Source: necrometrics.com

Further: www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/deathswarsconflictsjune52006.pdf

Way, way more than the total of all deaths in the link from the OP.

Let me know if you'd like more links.

Eric

reply to post by EricD
I was basing what I said on visits to my cousins who were Catholic ..I went to their house every weekend and came in contact with Catholics quite often ...And I did say in my post the Catholic Church ...I have a few friends that are Catholic and I can tell you that they are every day normal people ..I dont bother asking them questions about the Bible anymore because they never read it and dont read it ..That is a fact ..peace

reply to post by EricD


You know what, Eric?
I don't care what you think about my choice of language or my education. You don't know anything about me, and I suspect you are truly unaware of much of the history of mankind.

For you to come on here and somehow justify the Catholic Church's destruction of 10s of millions of lives by pointing out that in the last century many millions also died is ridiculous. Do you think that you can "gloss over" those horrors, which are HISTORY, by simply pointing out other atrocities?

Do you actually justify the Church's ongoing corruption by pointing out that other corruption is going on as well?

Forty millions wrongs don't make a right, no matter how much you want to play the Catholic defender.

I also don't care about the now-popular terms "red herring" and "straw man" describing argument techniques that pseudo-intellectuals fling about just to prove they've heard of them. If you want to be a semantic debater, go be one.

I want world peace. I want people to stop killing each other. I want the Abrahamic religions to get their crap together and stop slaughtering each other and innocent people. It is asinine. I want the Chinese to leave the Tibetans alone.

Catholicism was born in Rome. Christ was trying to unify the houses of Israel. He never said anything about the entire population of the planet. It was Paul who decided to try to cross ethnic boundaries. Muhammad actually tried to unify everyone of the Abrahamic traditions under one god. For milennia before Jesus was born, the pagan world did business together in non-zero-sum relationships based on TOLERANCE.

"Oh, okay, you worship Ba'al? Put a shrine over there. We worship El. Cool? Thanks. Welcome aboard." In fact in ancient Mecca there were statues or shrines of dozens of different deities. Everybody's god was welcome to join in. Everyone prospered, and everyone got benefits, until some arsehole decided he was done cooperating and wanted more than the rest and he wasn't going to accept the way other people worshipped.

Perhaps you are incapable of understanding how immaterial your argument is. You are pointing out continuing horrors, acts of brutality, to somehow exonerate prior acts of brutality? I think you are just trying to cause a distraction.

I've never killed ANYONE. I've never ordered anyone killed either. Greed and territory are the reasons for war. Capitalism. Tyranny. Empire. Control. Seizure by force of what belongs to others. Bullyiing and vilifying other peoples when they have something that is coveted. Servitude by torture, destruction, violence, ignorance, and selfishness.

What the world must do, if we are to survive as a race, is establish win-win relationships by trying to understand other peoples' points of view, and accepting their validity, and working toward compromise and global equality. There is plenty to go around. People need to SHARE and BE NICE.

If you think you have prevailed here, you are sorely mistaken. You have entirely missed the point and also tried to twist it into a ludicrous backward game of who's done worse things than whom, and who deserved what. War is NEVER the answer. Neither is capitalist excess or empire or oligarchy or tyranny or dictatorship or slavery. Ever. And if it keeps up, we are all DOOMED.

reply to post by EricD


Fair enough. you've established that it's perfectly OK for Catholics to get their murders in, too, because everyone else kills as well. Fine. I'm sure their killings are OK because God said so the same as the Muslims killing are OK because Alllah said so.

Now what?

Originally posted by the2ofusr1
reply to post by EricD

 

I was basing what I said on visits to my cousins who were Catholic ..I went to their house every weekend and came in contact with Catholics quite often ...And I did say in my post the Catholic Church ...I have a few friends that are Catholic and I can tell you that they are every day normal people ..I dont bother asking them questions about the Bible anymore because they never read it and dont read it ..That is a fact ..peace

edit on 22-3-2012 by the2ofusr1 because: (no reason given)

The whole Protestant Reformation came about because Catholic lay people were not allowed to read the Bible. Martin Luther saw the injustice and lunacy of that, as well as the Catholic insistence that some priest be an intermediary between man and God (in contravention to what the Bible itself has to say), and did something about it. He was a priest at the beginning of that Reformation. He was a hunted man before all was said and done.

Access of lay people to the Bible was the impetus for the Reformation, but then after people discovered an ability to question, a plethora of other Catholic abuses came to light, and the Reformation was on in earnest.

Several years later, the Catholic church decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and approved a Catholic Bible (Douay-Rheims version) to be translated from the Latin Vulgate. They approved that version as competition for the Protestant Geneva Bible for Catholics to read as they would, but didn't really much encourage the reading of it, since the official position was still that lay people were incapable of understanding it without a priest to explain it to them. The approval of the Doauy-Rheims in English was a lot like locking the dungeon door after the captives had already escaped.

I've got a couple copies of Catholic bibles. The main differences between them and Protestant Bibles are translational errors of detail that have crept in via the longer routs from Aramaic to English that the Latin Vulgate translation (which itself came from the Greek Septuagint) introduced, and the inclusion of Apocryphal books within the regular canon. In contrast, the Protestants went back to the original languages and translated directly from them, using the Septuagint as more of a reference than a source, and the Protestants collected the Apocryphal books into one place (usually between the Old and New testaments, sometimes in a separate volume), rather than salting them throughout the approved canon as if they held the same authority.

Most Protestants don't even know the significance of the Apocryphal books, giving them too little significance, and most Catholics give the Apocrypha too much significance. It's a very rare reader of the King James Bible indeed that even realizes there IS a King James Apocrypha.

So any how, the Catholics were actively discouraged from reading the Bible for most of their existence (since the formation of the Catholic religion by Constantine in the 4th century), then rather than get rolled over by the Protestant tide (16th century), they approved their own version of it for laymen, but didn't encourage reading in it without an intermediary priest, and I think now - since the early to mid 1990's or so, they are more or less encouraged to read it as long as it has an imprimatur in the front of it authorizing that version to be read by Catholics. I believe the Douay-Rheims and the Vulgate are still the main Catholic versions, but I know there has been at least one version of "The Living Bible" (a paraphrase rather than a translation) that has received an imprimatur.

reply to post by nenothtu
Thanks for reply and the info ...I am also of the suspicion as to the Jesuits function in all of this..It seems to me reading some of their statements that they had also secertly crept into the prostantant reformation ..I think the book of Revelation alludes to that where the whore riding the beast says 'I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.' Rev. 18:7 ... any how take care ..peace

reply to post by nenothtu



You're one of my heroes, neno.

Hey, Eric.....YEAH. What he said. boo ya.

Some of us know quite a bit more than you give us credit for, and arguably more than you know. So... stick that in your back pocket. (And get off your high horse while you're at it).

Originally posted by the2ofusr1
reply to post by nenothtu

 

Thanks for reply and the info ...I am also of the suspicion as to the Jesuits function in all of this..It seems to me reading some of their statements that they had also secertly crept into the prostantant reformation ..I think the book of Revelation alludes to that where the whore riding the beast says 'I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.' Rev. 18:7 ... any how take care ..peace

I believe the Jesuits are mostly as harmless as the rest of Catholicism - no more, and no less - but that there are certain individuals and factions within the Jesuits that are very dangerous indeed.

As far as their infiltration of the Reformation goes, that's very likely. I believe, however, that they have made certain inroads into certain denominations, and other denominations they have been unable to penetrate. It's up to any individual to sort out their own criteria for where they think that may have happened.

In the end, it's up to each individual to decide for themselves what they believe, at the urging of that small, still voice inside - not at the urgings of external, screaming, torch wielding mobs insisting that their way is the right way for every one.

We may be right, and we may be wrong, but in the end it is us as an individual who will pay the price or reap the reward, so it's a matter of what our own consciences dictate that we follow, not what some external individual is railing about and insisting that we follow. They may be right, and we may pay the price for ignoring it - or they may be wrong, and leading us down the primrose path straight into the jaws of hell, the grave, or just oblivion.

Originally posted by nenothtu

Fair enough. you've established that it's perfectly OK for Catholics to get their murders in, too, because everyone else kills as well. Fine. I'm sure their killings are OK because God said so the same as the Muslims killing are OK because Alllah said so.

Now what?

That is ridiculous and offensive and I'm not being flippant when I say that.

I have never attempted to justify any heinous actions taken by the Church or members of the RC hierarchy. Ever. Go back through my post history and take a look.

The OP made a claim that was clearly false about the Church. I pointed that out. I was assailed for doing so. Now you are accusing me of using other deaths to justify killings by or involving Catholics?

You asked me to back up my claim and I did. Now I'm asking you to back up yours.

Again, the OP made a false claim. I pointed that out. At no time did I attempt (nor would I) to use some form of moral relativism or equivocation to justify actions taken by the Church or its members.

Eric

Originally posted by wildtimes

For you to come on here and somehow justify the Catholic Church's destruction of 10s of millions of lives by pointing out that in the last century many millions also died is ridiculous. Do you think that you can "gloss over" those horrors, which are HISTORY, by simply pointing out other atrocities?

What on earth are you talking about? I NEVER tried to justify any actions taken by the Church in regards to historical atrocities.

YOU are the person that was using the argument of religious atrocities as compared to deaths by war. NOT ME.

You made a statement that was factually incorrect. I pointed it out. End of story. Or at least it should have been.

My pointing out your error does not make me an apologist for witch burnings, the crusades, the inquisition or anything else.


Eric

Originally posted by wildtimes

I also don't care about the now-popular terms "red herring" and "straw man" describing argument techniques that pseudo-intellectuals fling about just to prove they've heard of them. If you want to be a semantic debater, go be one.

This is getting more idiotic by the minute.

You are accusing me of being a 'semantic debater' when you ascribe motives and arguments to me that aren't mine.

Eric

reply to post by EricD

You made a statement that was factually incorrect. I pointed it out. End of story. Or at least it should have been.
My pointing out your error does not make me an apologist for witch burnings, the crusades, the inquisition or anything else.

I presume you are referring to this statement in the OP: The Roman Catholic Church has ruined or ended more lives than all wars put together.
And that causes you to embark on a rampage that seeks to "disprove" the entire premise of the complaint?
As I said, what difference does it make how many wrongs were committed, by religious zealotry or war or whatever you want to "count"?

So, what is your point? Just to take up space on this thread (which points out atrocities) so you can nitpick the OP? Why bother? It doesn't negate any of the atrocities committed for any reason.

If you are concerned about your "image" of being antagonistic (which predictable outcome you are now calling ridiculous) , perhaps you should be a bit more cooperative while you are "correcting"......no, sorry...."pointing out errors" . It's your approach that molded the impression you made. Figure it out.