White Supremacy and Christianity

[Augustus]

I think the underlying rationale is and always was economic. Being able to make money and profit off the backs of others is evil and despicable, but not necessarily idiotic. It's diabolical.

I think you are overestimating the degree to which humans are driven purely by rational concerns. We are coalition animals and this identity is as much about who we are not as about who we are.

Money can certainly be a motivator for such behaviour, but humans will often hold on to aspects of identity or prejudices even when doing so is counterproductive to their own material interests.

 

[Epic Beard Man]

Maybe you should study history also. The affect on society this teaching had was far reaching. I have left enough material in the previous post to demonstrate this. That a mixture of Christian Evolutionary teaching happened in these times seem indicated. That the results were horrific is obvious.

Since when has evolution been about morality? It has always been about the survival of the fittest - telling us that at times, stepping on the animal, the untermensch, is quite alright in this worldview.

The bold I get, but this is a nationalistic view of imperialism. How does this relate to evolution? As mentioned bore no country or empire was destined based on "evolution." If you look at the story of Genghis Khan this is quite evident. He was a charismatic leader who rallied all of Mongolia. He was a slave and was freed and somehow with the help of powerful warlord elders, unified all of Mongolia. This is the zeitgeist, not evolution.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

also, the subhuman concept,

Dehumanizing people has been a very long tradition of humans. They've even quoted the Bible and Tanakh to do so.

Frankly, I brought out a lot, and you lot who began by disliking my initial post has provided squat.

You brought out a lot of rambling that doesn't prove any of your points. You scarcely even tied your claims in to Darwin's works.

Evolution is not a moral belief system

Only someone who is grossly and severely wrong about evolution and failing to understand it would think it is.

 

[Grandliseur]

All of these ideas predate evolutionary theories though.

Nonsense! You did not read the German reasons for their deeds in Africa. Go study and leave me alone. I am finished with this thread.

"Kaunatjike is a calm man, but there’s a controlled anger in his voice as he explains. While German settlers forced indigenous tribes farther into the interior of South West Africa, German researchers treated Africans as mere test subjects. Papers published in German medical journals used skull measurements to justify calling Africans Untermenschen—subhumans. “Skeletons were brought here,” says Kaunatjike. “Graves were robbed.”

If these tactics sound chillingly familiar, that’s because they were also used in Nazi Germany. The connections don’t end there. One scientist who studied race in Namibia was a professor of Josef Mengele—the infamous “Angel of Death” who conducted experiments on Jews in Auschwitz. Heinrich Goering, the father of Hitler’s right-hand man, was colonial governor of German South-West Africa.

The relationship between Germany’s colonial history and its Nazi history is still a matter of debate. (For example, the historians Isabel Hull and Birthe Kundrus have questioned the term genocide and the links between between Nazism and mass violence in Africa.) But Kaunatjike believes that past is prologue, and that Germany’s actions in South-West Africa can’t be disentangled from its actions during World War II. “What they did in Namibia, they did with Jews,” says Kaunatjike. “It’s the same, parallel history.”"


Read more: A Brutal Genocide in Colonial Africa Finally Gets its Deserved Recognition | History | Smithsonian
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It is the same dogma of subhuman, subhuman as in not quite human, the evolutionary doctrine for sure.

I am not answering any more posts on this. Go do your own studies on why people felt that the indigenous peoples in Australia, America, Africa, Asia were felt to be not quite as good as us Westerners. It sure was not the Christian teaching from the Bible that tells us that all came from one single ancestor pair and that all stand equal before God.

 

[Stevicus]

I think you are overestimating the degree to which humans are driven purely by rational concerns. We are coalition animals and this identity is as much about who we are not as about who we are.

Money can certainly be a motivator for such behaviour, but humans will often hold on to aspects of identity or prejudices even when doing so is counterproductive to their own material interests.

I would still maintain that there's still an economic motivation underlying such actions.

That is, one tribe is starving and sees that the neighboring tribe has food, so they decide to attack, loot, and plunder the other tribe. Identifying as part of a tribe may be one thing, but it's usually something else that triggers that same identity into hatred and bigotry.

The KKK arose out of the economic devastation and deprivation faced by the Postbellum South. Germany before Hitler also faced severe economic difficulties, with people having to have wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread. When large numbers of people are desperate and hungry, they're far more susceptible to agitators trying to foment hatred and bigotry.

Conversely, when the economy is doing better and people are living better, hatred is directly challenged and tends to subside, which is why the U.S. didn't really start to reform until the post-WW2 era when we experienced an enormous economic boom and elevation of our standard of living. Once people started living better with greater wealth and resources, the KKK declined in power, the Jim Crow laws were eliminated, and racism was openly challenged and rejected by the majority of people.

 

[Augustus]

Go do your own studies on why people felt that the indigenous peoples in Australia, America, Africa, Asia were felt to be not quite as good as us Westerners.

If you want to understand the issue of scientific racialism, you need to go back to before Darwin.

It is a basic fact that scientific racialism dates back to the Enlightenment, to 18th C figures such as Kant. This obviously makes it predate Darwinian evolution. The ideas you present are pre-Darwinian, even if some people used later evolutionary theories to justify them.

Go study it yourself if you don't want to take my word for it.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It's easy, if they are murdering people, or discriminating they are doing it wrong.

I know morally bankrupt people can't tell the difference. But hey nobody is perfect.

Sorry, but murder is doing it right according to The Good Book. It's commanded, and examples of how and when to do it are offered. Feel free to pray for bears to rip children to shreds if they tease you.

 

[Grandliseur]

If you want to understand the issue of scientific racialism, you need to go back to before Darwin.

It is a basic fact that scientific racialism dates back to the Enlightenment, to 18th C figures such as Kant. This obviously makes it predate Darwinian evolution. The ideas you present are pre-Darwinian, even if some people used later evolutionary theories to justify them.

Go study it yourself if you don't want to take my word for it.

It doesn't have to be Darwinian evolution to be the concept of evolution as the German article so clearly shows.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

So I watched a documentary about the KKK on netflix a while back and it got me thinking about a couple of things. Manley because majority of the people they showed on the documentary were fervent believers in God. They even held a 'church service' so to speak.

But that really doesn't make sense. Because the Christian-Judaeo God really favors the Jewish people. There's a whole part of the bible in which he demands the death of anyone who tries to oppose his people. Also the fact that their savior is descended from a long line of Jewish family. Since they hate people of Jewish decent too.

So does anyone have a opinion on the matter. I'm only asking because I'm curious.

Now, here is a thinker! ^ ^

Should a person striving to be a Christian really hate anybody?
Matthew 5:44 says otherwise.

 

[Augustus]

It doesn't have to be Darwinian evolution to be the concept of evolution as the German article so clearly shows.

Scientific racialism predates even Lamarckian evolutionary theories. Evolutionary theories emerged in the 19th C, scientific racialism in the 18th from Enlightenment figures like Kant, Kames and Hume.

Scientific theories of race did not develop from evolutionary theories as they predate them. Later on evolutionary theories were added into a preexisting framework of scientific racialism.

 

[Grandliseur]

Scientific theories of race did not develop from evolutionary theories as they predate them. Later on evolutionary theories were added into a preexisting framework of scientific racialism.

And, yet, the idea of being inferior, not quite human, like us, is there. So whether the egg or the chicken came first is not quite the problem. This concept that 'those over there' are inferior to us, so we can suppress them, take their land, force them into slavery, etc. - is nonetheless, part and package of evolutionary thinking whether the term was coined earlier or later. Darwin didn't come on the scene of the world without the conditions for his teachings being ready for them. It wasn't just him, it was the view of the world in treating the newly 'inferior' and uncivilized parts of the world.

The whole concept we see where in movies we see the ship sail up to some part of the world, the sailors, captain step off ship and plant the flag claiming this territory for Britain, Holland, Spain, or some other world power - no matter that people already lived there and owned these lands - is a concept of our superiority and their being savages, inferior, know-nothings. Thus, the inevitable birth of Evolution was on the march by this image we had of our own superiority. and 'their' obvious inferiority. Only countries in which the captain and the ship would have been killed had they done that avoided this even though later even such places as Japan had ultimatums posed to them, if memory serves. Even such places as China didn't avoid this stamp of inferiority, their immigrants being considered so low that in some places killing a china-man was not even murder. This clearly was not according to Christian dogma.

As I said at first, imo, a kind of pseudo Christian-evolutionary, even atheist, thinking was at work here. That Evolution later got rid of god is another question, and finally it became a movement in its own right. In doing that, we again see though that nothing moral was attached to this teaching that so many embraced and it showed.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

You need to understand that an extremely small % of "Christians" are in the KKK.

By saying all Christians are white supremacist you are accusing African Americans amongst other ethnicities of being white supremacist as well. Which is extremely offensive. So I'd be careful of that.

Many more Christians belong to denominations that came out of the Protestant Reformation, but luckily, most of them have discarded the anti-Semitic parts of Luther’s teachings.

And while it’s probably never been the case that most of Christianity was anti-Semitic, there has been a strong anti-Semitic thread going back through Christian history, at least to Marcion and probably earlier.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

And, yet, the idea of being inferior, not quite human, like us, is there. So whether the egg or the chicken came first is not quite the problem. This concept that 'those over there' are inferior to us, so we can suppress them, take their land, force them into slavery, etc. - is nonetheless, part and package of evolutionary thinking whether the term was coined earlier or later. Darwin didn't come on the scene of the world without the conditions for his teachings being ready for them. It wasn't just him, it was the view of the world in treating the newly 'inferior' and uncivilized parts of the world.

The whole concept we see where in movies we see the ship sail up to some part of the world, the sailors, captain step off ship and plant the flag claiming this territory for Britain, Holland, Spain, or some other world power - no matter that people already lived there and owned these lands - is a concept of our superiority and their being savages, inferior, know-nothings. Thus, the inevitable birth of Evolution was on the march by this image we had of our own superiority. and 'their' obvious inferiority. Only countries in which the captain and the ship would have been killed had they done that avoided this even though later even such places as Japan had ultimatums posed to them, if memory serves. Even such places as China didn't avoid this stamp of inferiority, their immigrants being considered so low that in some places killing a china-man was not even murder. This clearly was not according to Christian dogma.

As I said at first, imo, a kind of pseudo Christian-evolutionary, even atheist, thinking was at work here. That Evolution later got rid of god is another question, and finally it became a movement in its own right. In doing that, we again see though that nothing moral was attached to this teaching that so many embraced and it showed.

"a kind of pseudo Christian-evolutionary, even atheist, thinking was at work here"

So your position is that if there was just more Christianity and less of the competing worldviews, that there would be less of the kinds of violence that you described above - conquering, genocide, slavery, murder, etc..?

Do you believe that if there was just more Christianity in America in 2003, and less humanist thinking (there is no atheist thinking beyond skepticism for gods), perhaps America wouldn't have done exactly what you described and referred to as flag planting in the lands of foreign cultures and people deemed inferior?

If so, you might want to rethink that argument. Christianity has a brutal history, and was spread through the world at the point of a sword, from the days of Constantine to the Crusades to the age of the conquistadores. It was Christians that decimated indiginous people and imported slaves into what would become the United States. None of those ideas come from Darwin's theory, but the Bible is full of similar stories.

You seem to dislike the idea of cultural evolution, equating it with Darwin and assorted atrocities that are blamed on the arrival of the idea of survival of the fittest.

But cultural evolution, which has been largely humanist driven in the West, has been a good thing for us, at least so far. It's never been a better time to be alive, at least for those who have been its beneficiaries. Public education, literacy, public health, labor laws, scientific progress, democratic governments, guaranteed personal freedoms and rights - all humanist projects of the last few centuries.

But that might not be true for long, Unfortunately, in America, humanism is being successfully opposed by an ideology of greed and power which has teamed up with the church, so things are regressing - devolving if you will.

 

[kjw47]

So I watched a documentary about the KKK on netflix a while back and it got me thinking about a couple of things. Manley because majority of the people they showed on the documentary were fervent believers in God. They even held a 'church service' so to speak.

But that really doesn't make sense. Because the Christian-Judaeo God really favors the Jewish people. There's a whole part of the bible in which he demands the death of anyone who tries to oppose his people. Also the fact that their savior is descended from a long line of Jewish family. Since they hate people of Jewish decent too.

So does anyone have a opinion on the matter. I'm only asking because I'm curious.

Israel sent Jesus to his death--God cut them off of being his chosen-Matthew 23:37-39)--he left the door open to them( vs 39) they have outright refused for over 1950 years.

 

[Kenny]

So I watched a documentary about the KKK on netflix a while back and it got me thinking about a couple of things. Manley because majority of the people they showed on the documentary were fervent believers in God. They even held a 'church service' so to speak.

But that really doesn't make sense. Because the Christian-Judaeo God really favors the Jewish people. There's a whole part of the bible in which he demands the death of anyone who tries to oppose his people. Also the fact that their savior is descended from a long line of Jewish family. Since they hate people of Jewish decent too.

So does anyone have a opinion on the matter. I'm only asking because I'm curious.

Certanly what KKK does is actually misusing scriptures.

May I add that the Christian/Judeo God favors the world and no longer is demanding the death of anyone because of the Cross.

 

[metis]

Certanly what KKK does is actually misusing scriptures.

May I add that the Christian/Judeo God favors the world and no longer is demanding the death of anyone because of the Cross.

You finally got rid of your white hoody!!!

 

[Grandliseur]

So your position is that if there was just more Christianity and less of the competing worldviews, that there would be less of the kinds of violence that you described above - conquering, genocide, slavery, murder, etc..?

With the way things have functioned with the Catholic church even dictating things to rulers, I don't think Christ's teachings change the way our world functions. However, if Christ's teachings had been followed that make people recognize each other with fellow feeling and trying to assist the needy, things would have been better.

What that says to the powers that be, you can form your own opinion on. The Vikings at least were honest about things, worshiping divinities that glorified war and killing. The others seem to claim to be Christian while indulging in terrorizing others.

It's never been a better time to be alive, at least for those who have been its beneficiaries. Public education, literacy, public health, labor laws, scientific progress, democratic governments, guaranteed personal freedoms and rights - all humanist projects of the last few centuries.

The good times are coming to a quick end. It seems that we entered a pocket of time from after WWII where the west prospered as you say. Now, democracy, the making things better is nearly over. I see nothing but a serious decline on all fronts in the future. This decline is already in the house, past the doorstep.

At the moment, we are preparing for war on a global scale. The only question is when will it start! If we have atomic warfare soon, all things nearly shall be destroyed, the stock market, the various systems growing food and carrying it to us. I suggest you go our with your family and enjoy things while they are around in quiet moderation and take in the sights, for they will be gone soon, imo.

 

[ajay0]

So I watched a documentary about the KKK on netflix a while back and it got me thinking about a couple of things. Manley because majority of the people they showed on the documentary were fervent believers in God. They even held a 'church service' so to speak.

But that really doesn't make sense. Because the Christian-Judaeo God really favors the Jewish people. There's a whole part of the bible in which he demands the death of anyone who tries to oppose his people. Also the fact that their savior is descended from a long line of Jewish family. Since they hate people of Jewish decent too.

So does anyone have a opinion on the matter. I'm only asking because I'm curious.

This is something that creates a lot of confusion in me as well. Reading the above has increased the confusion.

Neo-nazis project themselves as Christians and then add their hatred of Jews as well in other posts, probably to assert their neo-nazi identity to their own uncertain and confused selves.

They declare their hatred of Jews and then their devotion to the Judeo-Christian religion and Christ who is of Jewish origin. I find the whole thing quite contradictory.

It only makes me wonder at the extent people will go to concoct some kind of identity for themselves to escape the sense of emptiness within, no matter how nonsensical the so-called identity is.

 

[Augustus]

But cultural evolution, which has been largely humanist driven in the West, has been a good thing for us, at least so far. It's never been a better time to be alive, at least for those who have been its beneficiaries. Public education, literacy, public health, labor laws, scientific progress, democratic governments, guaranteed personal freedoms and rights - all humanist projects of the last few centuries.

Without resorting to tautological reasoning, it's pretty hard to specifically credit humanists for any of these things. Influence, sure, but simply one of many and often not the biggest.

Religion played a far bigger role in education and literacy, from universities to schooling. Scientific progress too, until relatively recently at least.

Welfare state was all sorts from conservatives, liberals, socialists, fascists. Democracy another hodge podge of diverse influences that evolved gradually over the centuries. Workers rights likewise with significant religious motivations in 19th C industrialists, Quakers especially.

The "Humanists to the rescue" narrative doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny.

 

[Augustus]

And, yet, the idea of being inferior, not quite human, like us, is there. So whether the egg or the chicken came first is not quite the problem. This concept that 'those over there' are inferior to us, so we can suppress them, take their land, force them into slavery, etc. - is nonetheless, part and package of evolutionary thinking whether the term was coined earlier or later. Darwin didn't come on the scene of the world without the conditions for his teachings being ready for them. It wasn't just him, it was the view of the world in treating the newly 'inferior' and uncivilized parts of the world.

Slavery and imperialism go back millennia, and different parts of the world were not 'newly' inferior.

The major difference in later times was the concept of biological race being an issue rather than culture that marked one as superior/inferior.

Look at what the Romans wrote about places like Germania and Britannia, they were often appalled at these course, uncivilised barbarians. Cicero described Brits as being too stupid to be good slaves, and Julius Caesar believed they could not be taught music due to their intellectual deficiencies.

It's not like the world was waiting for evolution to be able to classify the world in terms of civilisation.

Scientific racialist theories certainly had a negative effect on Western society, but you are trying to hard to put the evils of the world on evolution.