I did not give you that O.
Tell you what, I'll keep quiet as long as religious subjects aren't brought up.
Such as putting down Kim Davis heroism.
There was once someone who called Christianity a dangerous religion.
I responded by stating how much I wanted to cut people's heads off.
Later I found the whole thing deleted.
I thought it all pretty fumy.

Your statement that anyone is "gunning for you" and threatening "freedom of speech" is false. Knock off the repetitive, obnoxious religious proselytizing. It has no place here. This is an Ayn Rand forum.

Reading ancient screeds like the Bible as sacred text is not an objective source of knowledge. The Renaissance leading to the Enlightenment advocated reason and individualism, rejecting mysticism; they were not an alternative dogma to Catholicism based on the Bible.

The "printing press" was not the source of better ideas. Ideas are written and printed to be disseminated, the printing does not create the thought and the progress in thought did not come from the Bible. The attempt to deny the nature of the Enlightenment and the role of ideas in the evolution of western civilization is an anti-intellectual, a-historical, a-philosophical attempt to rationalize and promote religion as the foundation of this country. It was not.

I'm sure this purely philosophical view will be of great comfort those who WILL be killed by the few radicals who take advantage (I'm sure O will make this happen). If history is any teacher I'm sure the ratio will exceed between 10-50 (American lives lost) to 1 (wolf in sheep's clothing). Mark these words.

Paranoid, not at all. There are too many who want us dead for who we are and what we believe and some among us cannot acknowledge a lethal enemy because of rose colored glasses, aka philosophical blinders.
https://youtu.be/Wt9bMYcmUFg

Paranoid ramblings. Refugees are escaping from a war-torn land, seeking safety and freedom. It was not refugees who attacked Paris. And there would be no refugees if the U.S. had not messed up their countries. It's time to reread Emma Lazarus' poem, "The New Colossus", inscribed on the Statue of Liberty (ironically, a gift from France). The salient excerpt:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Giving refugees sanctuary is the least we can do, to say nothing of reparations that can never make up for the damage we've done. No amount of demonizing and rationalizing can justify the millions of deaths and displacements U.S. foreign policy and preemptive wars have caused.

Oops, you now have a "2."

I speak when spoken to when such things are brought up.
.

No one is "gunning" for you. Religious proselytizing is obnoxiously inappropriate for this forum. This is a private forum established for the purpose of spreading understanding of Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason an egoism. It is not for 'courage of obnoxiousness' by a Jehovah's Witness mentality antagonistic to reason. This has nothing to do with "freedom of speech". There are many place you can go to push your religion.

The historical record is very clear that Islam was an offshoot of the same mid east religious progression. Philosophically, the root is the same faith in place of reason, and all varieties throughout history have caused brutality. Faith leads to force.

The dominance of the Church was overthrown by Enlightenment thinkers emphasizing reason and individualism from the end of the 17th century and through the 18th. It did not happen because of the printing press and the Bible, which hypothesis is an anti-intellectual dismissal of the role of ideas in the course of a culture. There was a long process from when Aristotle was re-introduced into western civilization and emphasized by Aquinas in his philosophy but not theology, then gradually spread through the beginnings of the 'rebirth' -- the Renaissance -- and into the Enlightenment, which most certainly was not based on the Bible and its primitive mysticism only freed of control by one sect. These 'other ideas' of individualism and reason were not present in the earlier times of the Dark Ages dominated by Christianity.

Primitive religions have continued to dominate in many areas of the world despite widespread 'printing'. In America, those who profess religion are much more mixed, paying lip service to a corrupt mysticism but not taking it seriously in their ordinary lives.

But you are right that the religious leaders of the third world are not going to accept modern Enlightenment ideas and pass them along, just as the evangelist zealots in this country will not. Their corrupt and false primitive ideas will fade only when better ideas are spread. Without better ideas than the current Pragmatism and the counter Enlightenment, to say nothing of the remnants of religion, cell phones and the web have nothing to spread.

There is one major discrepancy, however, between Islam and most other major religions: the willingness to use coercion to promulgate one's belief. Christianity specifically eschews such, as do Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and many others. To Islam, coercion is merely a tool for the advancement of the faith. That is why I consider it far more dangerous and downright evil than any other religion.

Actually, what happened is that the printing press together with the translation of the Bible into English allowed many Catholics to read what had only heretofore been preached to them. More importantly, however, was that when they read, they discovered that many points of Catholic theology disagreed with the verbatim doctrine of the Bible. Such was the beginning of the Protestants: they were those who read and compared the teachings of the Catholic church to the Bible and found discrepancies that could only be characteristic of apostasy from the true Church of Christ. When the hold on the Western World by the Catholic Church was jarred by these events, it enabled scientists to think more freely and examine things from an objective standpoint rather than having everything filtered through the lens of approval of the Catholic Church.

Can't wrap my mind around that one...

Yes.

Suppose tens of millions of Christians, let's say in communities in former Soviet states, wanted to enforce those medieval rules brutally. Suppose tens of thousands of them actually worked with a KKK-like org supposedly based on Christianity to commit organized murder of anyone who didn't agree with them. This hypothetical situation is true for Islam but not for Christianity. If Christian militants like this did appear, though, I don't think it would be true to say Christianity needs to accept modernity.

My crude understanding of the Renaissance (how we got to modernity) is that it's not that we were in the Dark Ages for centuries until the Christian religion declared we would stop the brutal religious fighting. My understanding is that the printing press became common, people urbanized and learned to read, and that led people to discover other ideas besides religion. If I am right about that, religion cannot make its extremists accept modernity. People of the world have to accept modernity and put the extremists in jail. I don't see that as flowing downward from religious leaders. Rather I see it as inevitable if people just interact with one another. Because secular gov't and liberty give us jobs, free-time, cell phones, etc. Religious extremism just brings death.

There is a certain degree of parallel. The Mosaic laws, for instance, spell out death by stoning for apostasy just as the Koran does.

The difference is that it's been hundreds of years since anybody tried to enforce that part of Mosaic law. Christianity went through 300+ years of Reformation. The fact that they lost a whole series of wars against Islam may have something to do with that. So today, Christians are relatively good neighbors.

It's time for this to happen to Islam.

I consider this rather humorous, and bravo to the Catholics for not doing more than protesting it. From many years in a Catholic school: Most of the recent (late Medieval on) depictions of Jesus make him look just like this: An effeminate nominally make person with long hair and ethereal features.

I can see where they got this idea.

Jan

Guess that's how the 'transgender' community gets their kicks...Picking on things of value to others. Not much different than islamist in that respect. But your right...we nor Christians won't bitch about it.

they can do whatever they want, of course, but it's not
a winning ploy in my opinion. -- j
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Herb7734: time for a definition:

"re·lig·ion (r¹-l¹j“…n) n. Abbr. rel., relig. 1.a. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe. b. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship. 2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order. 3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader. 4. A cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."

Islam easily fits the definition of a religion. No need to separate it from other religions as though the others are true religions and that Islam does not fit the definition. Some religions have become less blood thirsty than Islam over the centuries but all try to control people sometimes to the good but introducing inhibitions on thought processes is not without harm to the individuals and their social interactions.

I've been preached to both by Unitarians and those who believe in the Trinity.
There are denominations galore
With so much diverse theology to explore~
So I just believe Jesus is the Door.
I also did not know it
That I am also a poet.
LOL! Dino just made a worn out funny.
Wonder if ecw will come gunning for me again.
Well, I did not start the religious topic that is AJ's post. The one this here. So there!
I'm not going to sit on my hands when someone wants to talk about Kim David either.
It's called "courage of convictions."
It's also called freedom of speech.