Reply to an Anti-Christian Blaming Christians for the World's Troubled History

I enjoyed reading general history for a few decades along with philosophy. The ancient world was certainly tough, so much so that many moderns can’t understand it. Life was short; no treatment for cancer, appendicitis etc. At Gettysburg examination of skulls showed that 90 percent of the soldiers had abscessed teeth. A Philistine site excavation showed that a huge percent of people had died of head wounds and it wasn’t a battlefield.

Mercy killings for disease and bad law enforcement was a way of life. One needs to be specific about particular historical events and issues if one wants to have good understanding. Modern history videos make learning easier. Charles Martel at Tours Zheng H, Shaka Zulu, Marius and Pizzaro are a few salient leaders to consider.

When I scored 99 percent ranks on CLEP college history exams I had prepped reading for years and travelling to Europe to look around. Many people don’t understand history more than superficially. Most of those warriors would have died of natural cause by the age of 40. As late as the First World War 16,000 soldiers died from infected blisters and blood poisoning. I had a red streak going up my leg from an infected blister at air assault school I got that fixed in Seattle with antibiotics before visiting Berlin in winter of 1987. The international monetary fund net there later before the fall of the wall. It was always about money, land and power.

Writing about history can require volumes. I wrote a few million words on contemporary events and often, in the first twenty books, wrote about ancient history to 1648. I wouldn’t agree with your ideas regarding European or American history, yet am aware that millions have died in cultural encounters- in the past usual amongst illiterate people. They were often fighting for land and political power rather than theological differences even though leaders had expressed allegiance to this faith or that.

The present war in Ukraine is a case in point; there are sectarian differences between the belligerents yet the war is over land and political power. Educated Western leaders should have known better yet acted dumb and dumber since the Clinton administration. Conflicts can be massive and out of scale to initial causes.

When Turks wanted to capture Constantinople they catapulted plague infested rats over the walls to kill the people inside the city. They probably hadn’t intended to kill 2/3rds of the population of Europe. When Spanish and Portuguese explorers first visited South America they might not have known that European viruses would erase a civilization up the Amazon within 20 years. Exploration of the new world was prompted by curiosity, as search for knowledge, new routes, land and power yet not primarily by religion. Spain sought gold and found it. 1492 was the year Spain expelled the last Muslim invaders from Iberia and sent Columbus over the ocean.

Humans have original sin and their political works often have reflected that in conflicts. Some would like to deny the existence of God in an effort; a futile one, to acquire themselves. Only through the blood of The Lord can a human be saved from that guilt

And lblame for the Inquisition...

The State executed or imprisoned captives for The Inquisition in accordance with local laws. The Catholic Church examined them to determine if they were Catholics or had foreign allegiance as some kind of heretic. US social median comprised predominantly of Democrats, atheists and wokistry purged conservatives and Christians from social media as best they could as heretics to Democrat Party political goals with less violent means since the Obama administration.The Inquisition was probably a motivation for the separation of church and state centuries later in the US Constitution by Protestant founders.

People need to learn from history and improve upon it. Protestants were also purged in the era. You might read Foxxe’s Book of Martyrs to learn of The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and other events. The Habsburgs were trying to retain control of Europe and the Church was resisting reform from Protestants even as Mongol and Muslim invasions were being repulsed from attacks on Europe and Christiandom.

Illiterate peasants and opportunistic leaders often couldn’t discern the differences between theological points in Latin edition books they had never read and the sword points of foreign invaders; that is the peasants being killed by invaders with different religious beliefs were killed by swords rather than ideas. Spanish conquistadors had 500 years of war in their own country for practice getting rid of Muslim invaders as the inquisition commenced. Intolerance of foreign allegiance was realistic politics of that time.

 People have original sin and only slowly discern the way of Jesus as far as numbers go... if they are blessed. Humanity is somewhat crude regarding environmental economics and Christian ethics including many of those affiliated with religion. Society in history is a work in progress.

The Origin of Religions

There is a difference between religion, God and mankind’s relationship with Him. Having lost their relationship with the one true God, mankind tended toward paganism as a kind of physics to explain existential phenomena like thunder (thor), war (mars), and misc things. Romans had a god to explain anything. So did other societies.

I believe that the term religion shares an etymology with allegiance at some point. Minions easily become allegiant to an idea or organizing principle with power. Politics can become a religion- maybe woke qualifies as a temporary disposable religion of shared rem.

Philistines had myriad false gods though animism was prior to bigger false gods. Shinto had spirit gates- tori where spirits could land, Romans had Janus the door goddess.

At Mecca there were many pagan faiths and Muhammad’s father was the Keeper of the Kabba. When he lost his job and was purged his son syncretized Judaism and Christianity into a religion and conquered Mecca purging his late Dad’s enemies and paganism for necessarily intolerant monotheism with himself as speaker of the monotheistic diety. Christ is the only way to God, for he is God.

Voltaire believed in God yet thought he has a non-interventionist policy for the fallen . Voltaire thought people should fix things themselves. Perhaps that includes a balanced government budget. He said; ""If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him" ('Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer')."

I researched this years ago before A.I. I asked ChatGPT to simplify the issue. it wrote; "Yes, the words allegiance and religion do share a distant etymological connection, though they refer to different concepts today.

Allegiance:

The word allegiance comes from the Old French ligeance (which means "loyalty" or "fidelity"), derived from the medieval Latin ligantia, meaning "the state of being bound." The Latin root is ligare, meaning "to bind" or "to tie." The term originally referred to the bond or duty of a vassal to a lord in feudal times.

Religion:

The word religion comes from the Latin religio, which has an uncertain exact meaning but is often associated with the concept of "reverence" or "obligation to the divine." It's generally thought to derive from the verb religare, meaning "to bind" or "to tie," which is also the root of allegiance. The idea is that religion involves a bond or tie to a higher power, much like allegiance involves a bond to a sovereign or ruler."

 Individuals and societies adapt to environmental challenges, sometimes rightly and other times not. If they were all in one homogenous empirical experience of living in my opinion the results for afterlife fate would still differ from one soul to the next. For example, if the entire population lived in a repressive totalitarian social environment for a century and atheism was the official doctrine some would be saved even if most went to hell. People are saved through grace- God selects the elect.

Strength of a State

One might want to define strength for this context and decide if it is in comparison to other states. Law is just one element of a state.  Type and effectiveness of government, economic system, environmental management, education, military, non-governmental organization quality and quantity and relationships with other states are a few of the many elements determining the strength of a state.

 Law is not a two-dimensional governor and ruler. Law is an arbiter and enforcer of social boundaries necessary to let individuals be self-determining. It can also be used to stop individual self-determination as in totalitarian states.

Logic is a discipline and tool for reasoning. Classical and symbolic logic are useful. Star Trek's Spock logic brought a lot of people to a warped notion of what it is. Emotion is non-rational though not necessarily bad. Children excel at emotion before reason. I think what is useful for mitigating the environment crisis is education and intelligence in the masses to get understanding for political support.

The mass extinction of the Anthropocene era eliminates most life eventually. It is an event of global habitat decline for life including humans. Chemicals and micro plastics in water, global heating, oceanic acidification... there are so many growing environmental challenges most leadership disregards that some people like Jacque Cousteau and James Lovelock said some years ago that humanity has just about 200 years left before civilization collapses and after that perhaps all human life.

Economic competition demands evaluation of others. Comparing abilities of others is as basic as private property in a capitalist economic system. Christian ethics are less judgemental, yet even sports requires evaluating competition. In a job app for example, people present the best appearance they can. Then a personnel manager compares resumes and hires the most suitable person. A more inclusive economic system could be made with less rigorous comparisons perhaps if broader social goals were common and any body could fill the role.

A Few Points on Cosmology

God is eternal and Earth is temporal. Two-dimensional waves embedded in the Higgs field get an apparent 3rd dimension. Matter is made of fermions and force carrying particles like photons are bosons. Space-time itself may be the source of gravity. Temporality and thermodynamics… Nothing that is matter is eternal. All of the dispersion of the original unified field in it’s sundry forms changes. Information may be eternal though, in some way…Shannon entropy or otherwise with God.

 God is eternal and Earth is temporal. Two-dimensional waves embedded in the Higgs field get an apparent 3rd dimension. Matter is made of fermions and force carrying particles like photons are bosons. Space-time itself may be the source of gravity. Temporality and thermodynamics… Nothing that is matter is eternal. All of the dispersion of the original unified field in it’s sundry forms changes. Information may be eternal though, in some way…Shannon entropy or otherwise with God.

Why suffering exists? The coefficient of adversity is natural being alive. It varies in quality and quantity. Adam and Eve had zero adversity before the devil led them woke.

I lean toward Augustine's belief that human nature is totally depraved.God is perfect. Fallen mankind in a thermodynamic world/universe has an opportunity to be saved and that's what matters. If man lived forever without Christ they would create hell for others. Death limits the ability of mankind to do evil into others. There are acts of kindness sometimes. Those are phenomenal.  The Universe physically presents a coefficient of adversity. People working together sometimes can overcome challenges so perhaps humanity learns something about caring for other before they go to hell or heaven as the case may be.

 Bishop Berkeley's Idealism does not postulate that individuals create their own reality, just that the experience of reality could be like an illusion, or a holographic appearance created by God. For Berkeley, the individual views the world as did Sartre in Being and Nothingness.

The Energy of Space-time?

People are part of space-time. They do not possess it. Humans are privileged or, alternatively penalized to experience time.

Energy may be a measure, yet it can refer to mass changing form;  E = m c2 as in radiation from uranium for example. Semantics for non- scientific lexicons can make practical discussions difficult. People sometimes call electrons flowing in a wire ‘energy’.

Fields exist, and the Higgs field exist with two dimension particle-waves slowing and entangled in it seeming to have a third dimension, so energy measurements are contingent selections of the relationships of apparent yet not actual energy?

I don’t know if the total quantity of energy in the Higgs Field ever changes due to the conservation of energy. Gravity may be a space-time curvature attribute or a residual of the unified field, while the strong force, electroweak and Higgs field are in some way joint progenitors of the quark era? One might wonder if quarks are energy, or strings and if there isn’t some kind of solipsistic barrier physically at some level of reduction to fundamental substance-matter-energy.

Mass is the amount of matter of an object. Energy is the amount of work it can do. Quarks are classified as fermions with half not zero spin. In some ways they seem like circular descriptions for noumena at the core of matter. It's hard to regard a field of massless particless as matter- like photons carrying force in an eng field  

Quarks are fermions. Mass, like energy, is also a measurement. Photons have zero mass and are classed as bosons because they carry force. Apparently matter is the only 'substance'. Gluons and quarks are classed as fermions because they build matter. Fields existed prior to gluons and quarks. Those fermions put on mass in the Higgs field. I believe the interaction of two-dimensional particle-waves in the Higgs field including photons with their 'timelessness' is interesting to consider.

I believe some would like to regard space-time to be the source of everything in-itself that in various phases emits or allows divisions of packets of virtual energy to become temporally existent independently leading to universes with ‘mass’. I cannot say where all that space-time in-itself evolved to…probably nowhere I think of a soul as information. God backs up that data perhaps…ssds haven’t enough storage capacity

About Christ in Collossians 1- "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

18 And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. 19  For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell."

God always existed, yet the universe has time and had a beginning.

Shanghai had Troubles Prior to the Revolution

Etymologically instinct means an impulse toward something. People tend toward acceptance  of select word paradigms as nouns and facts in-themselves a bit too readily. Such descriptions are nominal.

Learned behaviors are sometimes described as instinct or second nature. An SAS operator may shoot a thousand head shots a day on the range (maybe) at proper targets until the right response to stimuli is instinctive, yet self-defense is itself somewhat ‘instinctive’ in a more natural example of the common understanding.

On compassion vs degradation in social history. Is there a cause for optimism philosophically?

Hobbes’ main idea in The Leviathan was the absolute power of the king. He was the brain and the people the body of the state. Life was nasty, brutish and short in his day. Camus’ The Plague has a lot of nastiness in it. The Stranger has the protagonist vomiting on a beach. Camus died in a car accident at a fairly young age. Frankl’s logo therapy was a response to the complete degradation and loss of humanity experienced by inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The only mass philosophy that easily comes to mind that killed millions is communism. Capitalism is more an economic system than philosophy, though basic greed and the will for political power plus minions are the main causes of war.

People can invent their own opponents in politics these days, ignore existential challenges and destroy social well being in the blundered quest for power. Philosophical works sometimes should be understood in their historical context. Would one for instance use The Prince as a role model for poly sci students today?

Communism worked as a revolutionary philosophy because millions of poor people were oppressed by royalty with most of the wealth. China today is better off than they would be if the Imperials had persisted.

If Democrat Presidents hadn’t taken all of Ukraine from Russia and expanded NATO Eastward Russia would be an ally and China more democratic in the political philosophy sense. The poor suffer more than the rich and around the world haven’t got free universal health care  That’s a political rather than a philosophical problem

Instincts and Nominalism

Etymologically instinct means an impulse toward something. People tend toward acceptance  of select word paradigms as nouns and facts in-themselves a bit too readily. Such descriptions are nominal.

Learned behaviors are sometimes described as instinct or second nature. An SAS operator may shoot a thousand head shots a day on the range (maybe) at proper targets until the right response to stimuli is instinctive, yet self-defense is itself somewhat ‘instinctive’ in a more natural example of the common understanding.

On compassion vs degradation in social history. Is there a cause for optimism philosophically?

Hobbes’ main idea in The Leviathan was the absolute power of the king. He was the brain and the people the body of the state. Life was nasty, brutish and short in his day. Camus’ The Plague has a lot of nastiness in it. The Stranger has the protagonist vomiting on a beach. Camus died in a car accident at a fairly young age. Frankl’s logo therapy was a response to the complete degradation and loss of humanity experienced by inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The only mass philosophy that easily comes to mind that killed millions is communism. Capitalism is more an economic system than philosophy, though basic greed and the will for political power plus minions are the main causes of war.

People can invent their own opponents in politics these days, ignore existential challenges and destroy social well being in the blundered quest for power. Philosophical works sometimes should be understood in their historical context. Would one for instance use The Prince as a role model for poly sci students today?

Communism worked as a revolutionary philosophy because millions of poor people were oppressed by royalty with most of the wealth. China today is better off than they would be if the Imperials had persisted.

If Democrat Presidents hadn’t taken all of Ukraine from Russia and expanded NATO Eastward Russia would be an ally and China more democratic in the political philosophy sense. The poor suffer more than the rich and around the world haven’t got free universal health care  That’s a political rather than a philosophical problem

I suppose NDE means near death experiences. I wondered if sometimes God edits reality a little to keep some people alive where they would have died, and they aren't much aware of the edit though they may be thankful for remaining alive.

Don't know about theoretical sentient beings. They may have different views on death.

Conditioning like learning languages is a social context...filtering that out would leave one imbecilic I would think. Behavior is partly learned from experience and that too conditions. Filter out that placing your hand on a hot stove burns.

Evidence and Beliefs

One may believe facts and/or things evident. Power is however a relationship to things other than itself. One perceives relationships about things, not about noumenon. That need be an inference.

Then of course one may want to consult Socrates’ ideas in The Meno.

Is God in and without the Universe?He is non- contingent Being. Consider the relationship of a programmer to a program running. The programmer is outside the program because it is his ossified praxis, so his thought values are in it. If programs were live and written by thought interfaced with code the relation would be more challenging to delineate. Maybe a creative AI will model that paradigm eventually, if not presently.

Exist etymologically means to come into being, such as a Universe or Multiverse Alternatively God is eternal and always is.

Exist etymologically means to come into being. Alternatively God is eternal and always is.

Goldfish Cosmology

A goldfish in a tank universe hasn't awareness of physics beyond the horizons of the tank. It hasn't faith in a creator and doesn't believe in metaphysic's speculation about aether beyond the observable horizon or that extra dimensions exist. It's water medium is made of entangled loopy strings that synthesize the material it breathes.

 It reflects sometimes late at night on the origin of the universe tank. It's best guess is that loopy strings oozed as virtual particles from nothingness ( a controversial concept) and were drawn together by gravity, becoming entangled, infinitely concentrated and made into mash at a singularity that broke apart faster than light evolving a universal medium of water and little delicious seahorses to eat. Then the fish has a shot of bourbon before floating off to sleep.

Democracy, Corporatocracy and Republics

Corporatocracy does develop hybrid forms in different circumstances. There is also plutocracy

There are real issues that voters care about Mass illegal immigration was one this time. Voters cast ballots for candidates agreeing with their will. Of course one might like better candidates however the people might get what they deserve. The rare, smart, well balanced candidate with great ideas never makes it through the filters of common averageness that dominate American style democracy.

I should mention the R word (republic). The demos is represented by elected individuals. Direct, live voting on all political issues of a nation doesn't exist anywhere. Some few people would be needed to make issues for people to vote on and they would probably need to be elected. Pure democracy might work in small groups, yet for nations it would need to be reactionary rather than creative, because advancing in new directions would not arise spontaneously as referenda on election ballots.