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And that’s exactly the sentence that started this mess, because it compresses way more than you say you believe into one glib line. If “just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the civilized world” is all you mean, then either: you are downplaying Sudanese and regional agency, or...

This suggests that your point is not that germans used genetics to try to justify the same basic identity-based violence that has been around for a really long time, but rather that the entire concept of using identity itself as the basis for violence was the new”colonial” idea. What I pushed...

Yeah, that line sounds cute, but it completely misses what’s happening. I’m not “defending Christians,” I’m defending basic intellectual honesty. I don’t have to believe a word of Christian doctrine to insist that if you’re going to criticize it, you should at least describe it accurately...

No, what’s clear is that I can separate “this is what Christians say they believe” from “this is what I think is true.” You’re the one mixing those up. I can describe Christian doctrine resurrection, heaven, judgment, new creation because that’s what they openly teach. That doesn’t mean I buy...

If you’re not here to change minds, then you’re not showing truth, you’re just asserting it and walking away when asked to back it up. Anyone can say, “I know what millions of people secretly believe, it’s just the truth.” Flat-Earthers, cult leaders, conspiracy guys all talk like that. You’re...

That’s fine, you don’t have to care what anyone thinks of you. I wasn’t “assigning” you an opinion, I was quoting what you actually wrote and responding to that. At this point you’ve already walked your position back to something we mostly agree on, you just won’t say that out loud. I’m good...

You’ve got that backwards. I grabbed onto what you phrased badly because you repeated it several times and built arguments on top of it, and then I also engaged the clarified version once you finally wrote it out. I’ve already said your later clarification “the idea isn’t unique to Europe, the...

What you quote as your clarification is actually much closer to what I’ve been saying all along: “Ethnic cleansing isn’t unique to Europe or colonialism… Civilizations have been eliminating or relocating populations based on identity since the earliest empires… What changed with Europe wasn’t...

People like you don’t believe it, that’s why it’s a secret” isn’t an argument, it’s a magic trick. You’ve gone from making a claim about what millions of Christians really believe to basically saying, it’s true because you can’t prove it isn’t, and if you ask for evidence, that’s proof it’s...

That’s your call, but let’s be real about what just happened, I engaged the position you actually wrote, you didn’t like how it looked once it was spelled out, and now you’re declaring the conversation over rather than defending it. I’m fine leaving it there. Anyone reading the thread can decide...

You’re dodging, not clarifying. You did introduce that 1980-reset scenario as the supposed “other thing” they’d have to say, and then talked about “unspoken knowledge” sustaining the narrative. That’s why I called it out. If you now agree Christians don’t actually believe that, great then it...

Nothing in mainstream Christianity says, “There’s a man secretly living on Earth right now who is God incarnate, and when he dies reality will reset to 1980.” That’s your head canon, not their doctrine, not their creeds, not their sermons. You keep inventing a bizarre belief, then treating the...

That’s not an explanation, that’s an escape hatch. If your claim depends on “they all secretly believe it, but you’ll never see any evidence because it’s a secret,” you’ve just admitted it’s unfalsifiable. You might as well say Christians secretly worship Thor too and call my disbelief “proof”...

You’re making way too many claims you never actually back up. Most Christians do not secretly believe “Jesus is currently living on Earth and when he dies everything ends.” That’s just not their doctrine. They believe he already died, rose, and is alive in heaven until the end of the age. If...

You keep acting like the “quote function” is some magic truth spell. Whether I wrap your words in the forum’s quote markup or paste them as plain text doesn’t change what you actually wrote. I’ve already reproduced your own lines, verbatim, more than once: – that you’re “treating fixed...

I’ve already quoted the lines, verbatim, multiple times in this thread. You haven’t once said, “I never wrote that sentence,” you’ve only said you don’t like how I’m reading it. Now you’ve switched to acting like the words themselves are in doubt. You wrote, in this same exchange, “No I’m...

You asked what “substance” I’m talking about. I mean two very simple things. First, the historical claim itself. You’re not just saying “modern states have censuses and race codes.” You went a lot further and tied the existence of a certain kind of identity logic to that moment fixed...

You saying it “meant nothing” doesn’t actually do anything to the substance. The quotes are still there, the shift between “did not exist in antiquity / modern and European thing” and what you’re now defending is still there, and anyone reading the thread can see it for themselves. You can...

Nobody’s denying that modern states institutionalize identity in ways Rome or Han China couldn’t. Censuses, ID cards, racial codes, colonial “native” categories that whole package is clearly modern. Where you and I part ways isn’t on the existence of that machinery, it’s on the claim you keep...

You don’t have to like the word “tightening,” but the gap between “did not exist in antiquity / modern and European thing” and what you’re saying now is in your own posts, not in my head. If you want to “let it cook,” that’s fine, I’ve already laid out the pattern in your own quotes, and...