| Wojtas said: Truth? What truth? You're right that christianity was radical, it slaughtered so many people during the past 1500 years that even WW2 casualties pale in comparison. |
Christianity doesn't kill people. Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
Competition and intolerance are usually the motivations and it isn't fair to just blame Christianity on that front. The human mind conceptualizes the world and all things in it through labeling and grouping. This allows an efficient mechanism for memory and problem solving. Unfortunately, it also allows for placing preference orders on specific groupings. Thus, we get things like chemistry, physics and social sciences as well as bigotry, racism, and the like.
People tend to get encultrated inside of their large group (society), medium group (social group), and small group (family) and function well inside of those groups but intra-group dynamics can cause problems because the ideology of different groups don't always mesh. This leads to competition for resources which can lead to anything from new ideas and progress or to wholesale slaughter of rival competition.
Anthropologically speaking, violence is often a function of group dynamics where two subcultures have differences that cannot be fixed through compromise or where individuals aren't able to be properly enculturated. Though, there is still other mechanisms that allow for individual agency and choice.
The long and short of it is that blaming one specific belief group isn't useful, because the underlying mechanisms are there for all groups. It's just a contigent historical fact that Christians have been in a position to be recognized for persecution and killings...it could have been any group, really.
"Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not true by definition; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen." - Stephen Jay Gould
Systems I currently own (in order of preference): PS2, SNES, Gamecube, Xbox 360, Genesis, Nintendo DS, PSX, XBOX, Wii, PS3, Atari 5200, Turbo-Grafx 16, NES, Gameboy, Game Gear, 32X.
