[Vision2020] Christ is Our Commander-in-Chief or not!

[J Ford]

Are you forgetting that Dougie-boy was a student/mentee of Nick's?  That he 
graduated under the tutalage of Nick?!

But of course that is different, now isn't it?!


J  :]





>From: heirdoug at netscape.net
>To: vision2020 at moscow.com, nickgier at adelphia.net
>Subject: [Vision2020]  Christ is Our Commander-in-Chief or not!
>Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:26:28 -0400
>
>Dear Lounge Lizard,
>
>You are correct that most all of what Nick Gier writes is of no impact
>on the community as a whole. As a matter of fact very few people ever
>read his twaddle. If it weren't for Blind 2020 "Teach" wouldn't have
>any thing to do. But it is not what he writes but what he taught over
>the past 35 years that has grave consequences!
>
>What I did find out by reading the latest installment (yes I forced my
>self to actually look at the words that he put together) is that he
>left out some pretty substantial numbers of deaths from the recent
>world history.
>
>Maybe with the following statistics Nick can expand the pages of his
>new work to over 65 pages:
>
>The number of allied soldiers killed in the D-Day invasion (53,714) is
>the same number as were killed in the world in the past 9 hours by
>abortion.
>
>In the first year of the Iraq war we lost 589 brave men and women. That
>is the same number as were destroyed in the last 6 min.
>
>In the past 34 years, about the time that Nick Gier started his
>venerated career as a "Professional Philosopher", 44,388,860 living
>innocent babies had their lives snuffed out by abortion. Maybe some of
>the mothers who were deceived into believing they were doing the right
>thing were former students of Nick's, cheered on by his continual
>droning that what they were carrying was not a real person, YET! Just
>one fine example of his past teaching. I'm sure that can still find it
>at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier!
>
>Way to go teach. Please be our guest to continue the madness!
>
>Doug Farris (So there is no confusion as to who wrote this.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-------
>
>Why is it relevant with regard to HOW MANY individuals were killed by
>such-and-such people of a certain faith. Isn't it the simple act of
>killing and the reason behind the killing that is of importance?
>Keeping scorecards of "number killed" by "faith/belief structure" seems
>a bit sophomoric if the ultimate issue is to address the REASON behind
>the killing. Is one faith more evil or despicable because it killed
>2,000 more than another for the exact same reason?
>
>Furthermore, what does Gier's post really have to do with the stated
>objective of Vision 2020: "Moscow Vision 2020 is an informal,
>multi-partisan group of Moscow residents formed in 1993 to encourage
>more public information and debate about the future of Moscow and Latah
>County." I fail to comprehend where Gier's post, as well as many other
>posted here, has any connection with Moscow or Latah County. It appears
>that several posters use the board as a soapbox to spout off their own
>partisan or religious beliefs, or, in this case, to develop a thesis,
>without connecting how their post relates to Moscow's or Latah County's
>future.
>
>nickgier at adelphia.net wrote: Good Morning:
>
>I would like to thank Gary Crabtree for the inspiration for this week's
>KRFP radio commentary.
>
>Nick Gier
>
>CHRIST IS OUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF:
>RELATIVE VIOLENCE IN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
>
>I'm writing a book on the origins of religious violence and my thesis
>is that there has been far more religiously motivated violence in the
>Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—than the 
>Asian
>religions. Draft chapters can be viewed at
>www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/orv.htm.
>
>A person on our local list-serve Vision2020 had this to say about
>relative violence in Islam and Christianity:
>
>"Up to the eleventh century Islam had a sizable lead. From 1095 to 1291
>the Church picked up the pace and nosed ahead. It was neck and neck
>till 1834 and the end of the Spanish Inquisition. After that Allah's
>chosen made it no contest."
>
>There are more than a few problems with this summary history.
>
>Islam could not possibly have had any sort of lead before the 11th
>Century because Christianity had a very good head start. Under
>Theodosius I, being a pagan was a capital crime, and even Christians
>were arrested if they practiced even the most minor of pagan practices.
>
>On December 25, 390, Theodosius ordered the slaughter of 7,000 pagans
>in Thessalonica. The British historian Hugh Trevor Roper called
>Theodosius "the first Spanish Inquisitor," and "the Christian monarch
>who introduced the world to religious totalitarianism."
>
>Bishop Ambrose, who baptized St. Augustine, made Theodosius do penance
>for the atrocities at Thessalonica, but he still proclaimed that
>"Christ was now at the head of the [Roman] legions."
>
>This reminds me of the sign outside a fundamentalist church in L.A.,
>right after the invasion of Iraq: "Christ is our Commander-in-Chief."
>I'm assuming that our born-again president would have to agree with
>this demotion.
>
>Under Muslim rule Jews and Christians were generally asked to offer a
>special tax, not their heads. The slaughter of 4,000 Jews in Muslim
>Granada in 1066 was the exception rather than the rule, and Jews
>generally had much better lives in Muslim Spain than anywhere else in
>Christian Europe.
>
>In 1099, men, women, and children were slaughtered indiscriminately
>when Christian forces captured Jerusalem. An eyewitness reported that
>the Crusaders "rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.
>Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place
>should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had
>suffered so long from their blasphemies."
>
>When Saladin retook the city in 1187, Christians were only required to
>pay a ransom and then free to return home. Some of Saladin's officers
>paid for those who could not afford it, and about 7,000 others were
>sold into slavery.
>
>In Muslim India Buddhist and Hindus were, incredibly enough, declared
>"People of the Book," and the tax on non-Muslims was only sporadically
>enforced and even more infrequently collected.
>
>Most of the ancestors of Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh (especially
>here), India, Indonesia, and Malaysia freely converted to Islam. Areas
>in India where forced conversions were attempted are now the places
>where one finds the fewest Muslims per capita.
>
>Some Mughal emperors ordered the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist
>temples, but local resistance and intimidated Mughal functionaries
>meant that relatively few temples were liquidated. Early Christian
>emperors were much more successful in destroying pagan temples,
>including the one in Alexandria that housed the finest library in the
>ancient world.
>
>Curiously, the Vision2020 post above ended Christian atrocities in
>1834, but during the Taiping Rebellion, Chinese Christian armies were
>responsible for killing 10-20 million people between 1852-1864. I would
>hazard a guess that more Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian temples were
>destroyed by the Taipings in 12 years than 600 years of Muslim rule in
>India.
>
>Some have claimed that the Taipings were not really Christians, but
>that is simply not the case. They took great pains to eliminate Chinese
>religious influences; they enforced the 10 Commandments at the point of
>a sword; and they followed the Bible very carefully, including the
>prophecies in the Book of Revelation.
>
>Short of Osama bin Laden getting several nukes and using them,
>militant Muslims have a long way to go to match the historical
>Christian kill rate.
>
>Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for
>31 years. See his columns as the Palouse Pundit at www.NickGier.com.
>
>
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