England headed for A Caliphate

[Bomb#20]

Atheists, liberals, socialists and scientists are still behaving like Christians even though they have largely moved on regarding belief in God.

The evangelising urge is the big one. The rest of the world just cares about gaining power.

And that those at the bottom of the status hierarchy are worthy of dignity. Modern liberal democracy wouldn't be possible without a Christian way of thinking.

Ever have one of those bosses who takes credit for his underlings' accomplishments but their screwups are never his fault? ... So given that context, why the heck would we take it seriously when Christianity tries to take credit for caring about more than power and for those at the bottom of the status hierarchy being worthy of dignity? Shouldn't we suspect those were plagiarized too? Funny story about that...

Your comment is missing its mark. You seem to be engaging in polemics. I'm not.

If I believe the things you seem to think I do, I would be a Christian. I'm not. I'm an atheist. So's Tom Holland

The heck are you on about? I didn't indicate I think you believe anything except what you said: that we're "still behaving like Christians" and that liberal democracy is "a Christian way of thinking". You're giving Christianity credit for advances just because they happened on Christianity's watch. That in no way implies you'd be Christian -- lots of people give bosses credit for what happened on their watch whether the bosses deserve credit or not. Well of course those things all happened on Christianity's watch -- everything that happened in Europe and America happened on Christianity's watch, because Christianity ruthlessly suppressed every competing worldview. But I see no reason to think the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the rise of human rights and liberal democracy wouldn't have happened anyway if Christianity hadn't been there. Christianity probably slowed them down -- it was a lot of the reason the Dark Ages went dark. Westerners came out of the Dark Ages when the Crusades put us in contact with Arabs and we found they'd preserved copies of vast amounts of knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans that our monks had scraped off parchments to overwrite with Christian prayers. If the Roman Empire had never turned Christian then when the Visigoths et al. overran it, the new rulers and the new societies they formed would have ended up adopting Stoicism and Epicureanism and so forth instead of scraping parchments and persecuting heretics. We never would have lost that ancient knowledge and the early modern era could have been born hundreds of years sooner. We could have had science without the Church intimidating Copernicus, imprisoning Galileo, and burning Bruno. We could have talked one another out of slavery without fighting a Bible that was a literal instruction manual for it. The seeds for science, liberalism and democracy were all there in the world Christianity erased; what they needed in order to flower was freedom of thought -- and there was a hell of a lot more freedom of thought in the Roman Empire before it went Christian than after. We have those things now in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

Another way to say the same thing. Christianity is a package of beliefs, values, rituals, iconography.

When Europe secularised we told ourselves that God is dead and now we were godless and humanistic. We were free. The Jacobins of the French revolution banned God and converted churches to "temples of reason". Robbespierre kept going on about virtue and that all people should be forced to be free, on pain of death.

Sounds like a famaliar behaviour?

Yeah, well, there's a reason the world learned democracy from Britain, not from France.

Nietzshe took a peak at how pagan Europe operated and how its values worked and compared them to modern values and realised how deep Christian thinking went. He called it "slave morality". In "Thus spake Zarathustra" he speculated on how a non Christian mindset might function in Europe. The Overman.

Nietzsche also fried his brain trying to save a horse from its owner's whip. Some part of him knew there are more possibilities in this world than slave morality and master morality.

Pagans had slaves. Might makes right. The idea that this would be problematic were fringe philosophical musings.

Christians had slaves; the idea that this would be un-Christian was fringe philosophical musings. And pagans were never about might makes right; that's a story told by paganism's enemies. As Xenophanes wrote, Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and a reproach among men. They knew perfectly well that abuse of power was a shame and a reproach. The idea that the powerful had a duty to be just and virtuous runs all through ancient writers. Good lord, man, the entire origin story of the Roman state runs back to an act of justified rebellion against its king for letting his son get away with rape.

Or put even simpler. If everyone is Christian it has cultural side effects that persist even if people stop being Christian. It completely permeates everything in the west.

Socialism I'll give you. Atheism, liberalism and science, not so much.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Look, I get it -- like pretty much every other bit of left-wing insanity, the intent is to remake society to line up with innate human moral intuition. Innate human moral intuition, like every other instinct, is ancestral memory -- it's the cumulative evolutionary lessons each species learned about itself by brutal experience.

I don't think leftist theories are that simple. Leftism (going all the way back to early Enlightenment) only has in common that, if we change stuff, (insert theory) it'll get better. Often the ideas are utopian. Most often the theories are not only wrong, but (in hindsight) completely insane. But the foundational theories are all over the place and have varied wildly over time. There's trends. But the trends change.

But some of the ideas were actually good. Our entire political systems today, all over the political spectrum, it all started out as a leftist idea at some point. All conservative ideas today started out as leftist ideas they later adopted (after much resistance).

So yes, leftists are often wrong. But without us the world would be pretty shit. Being right some of the time is good enough.

 

[Elixir]

all of you decide what the people would agree to by consulting your inner visions instead of asking other people what they'd agree to.

Oh, get off it.
If you REALLY SERIOUSLY need to point out that my friend’s “switch wallets” proposition was never more than a mental exercise, you must have a depressingly dim view of everyone but yourself.
Yes B20, you are absolutely correct; this idea will never fly. I appoint you in charge of protecting us from such madness, since you are so hyper-sensitive to it.

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Atheists, liberals, socialists and scientists are still behaving like Christians even though they have largely moved on regarding belief in God.

The evangelising urge is the big one. The rest of the world just cares about gaining power.

And that those at the bottom of the status hierarchy are worthy of dignity. Modern liberal democracy wouldn't be possible without a Christian way of thinking.

Ever have one of those bosses who takes credit for his underlings' accomplishments but their screwups are never his fault? ... So given that context, why the heck would we take it seriously when Christianity tries to take credit for caring about more than power and for those at the bottom of the status hierarchy being worthy of dignity? Shouldn't we suspect those were plagiarized too? Funny story about that...

Your comment is missing its mark. You seem to be engaging in polemics. I'm not.

If I believe the things you seem to think I do, I would be a Christian. I'm not. I'm an atheist. So's Tom Holland

The heck are you on about? I didn't indicate I think you believe anything except what you said: that we're "still behaving like Christians" and that liberal democracy is "a Christian way of thinking". You're giving Christianity credit for advances just because they happened on Christianity's watch. That in no way implies you'd be Christian -- lots of people give bosses credit for what happened on their watch whether the bosses deserve credit or not. Well of course those things all happened on Christianity's watch -- everything that happened in Europe and America happened on Christianity's watch, because Christianity ruthlessly suppressed every competing worldview. But I see no reason to think the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the rise of human rights and liberal democracy wouldn't have happened anyway if Christianity hadn't been there. Christianity probably slowed them down -- it was a lot of the reason the Dark Ages went dark. Westerners came out of the Dark Ages when the Crusades put us in contact with Arabs and we found they'd preserved copies of vast amounts of knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans that our monks had scraped off parchments to overwrite with Christian prayers. If the Roman Empire had never turned Christian then when the Visigoths et al. overran it, the new rulers and the new societies they formed would have ended up adopting Stoicism and Epicureanism and so forth instead of scraping parchments and persecuting heretics. We never would have lost that ancient knowledge and the early modern era could have been born hundreds of years sooner.

That's a bullshit Enlightenment era anti-Christian rant. The Dark Ages went dark because they previously wrote on papyrus. When west Rome lost Egypt they lost papyrous. Velum is way more expensive. Papyrous naturally desintegrates. Its like an inbuilt knowledge timebomb. So copyists had to be selective about which works to copy.

Eventually we figured out how to make paper. Now the price of copying books went down to previous levels.

The gap between papyrous and paper we call the dark ages. The books the Christian monks didn't prioritise disappeared. But that's a function of technology. Not persecution. Europe never stopped being litterate. Constantinople had access to papyrous longer than west Rome, so more books survived. But they to lost access to Egypt, and ran into the same problem.

We could have had science without the Church intimidating Copernicus, imprisoning Galileo, and burning Bruno. We could have talked one another out of slavery without fighting a Bible that was a literal instruction manual for it. The seeds for science, liberalism and democracy were all there in the world Christianity erased; what they needed in order to flower was freedom of thought -- and there was a hell of a lot more freedom of thought in the Roman Empire before it went Christian than after. We have those things now in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

Another way to say the same thing. Christianity is a package of beliefs, values, rituals, iconography.

When Europe secularised we told ourselves that God is dead and now we were godless and humanistic. We were free. The Jacobins of the French revolution banned God and converted churches to "temples of reason". Robbespierre kept going on about virtue and that all people should be forced to be free, on pain of death.

Sounds like a famaliar behaviour?

Yeah, well, there's a reason the world learned democracy from Britain, not from France.

Nietzshe took a peak at how pagan Europe operated and how its values worked and compared them to modern values and realised how deep Christian thinking went. He called it "slave morality". In "Thus spake Zarathustra" he speculated on how a non Christian mindset might function in Europe. The Overman.

Nietzsche also fried his brain trying to save a horse from its owner's whip. Some part of him knew there are more possibilities in this world than slave morality and master morality.

Pagans had slaves. Might makes right. The idea that this would be problematic were fringe philosophical musings.

Christians had slaves; the idea that this would be un-Christian was fringe philosophical musings. And pagans were never about might makes right; that's a story told by paganism's enemies. As Xenophanes wrote, Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and a reproach among men. They knew perfectly well that abuse of power was a shame and a reproach. The idea that the powerful had a duty to be just and virtuous runs all through ancient writers. Good lord, man, the entire origin story of the Roman state runs back to an act of justified rebellion against its king for letting his son get away with rape.

Or put even simpler. If everyone is Christian it has cultural side effects that persist even if people stop being Christian. It completely permeates everything in the west.

Socialism I'll give you. Atheism, liberalism and science, not so much.

Well... its even more complicated. Rome had a variety of paralell moral codes. The elite were various types of Platonists. These shaped Christianity. Christianity is like 1% judaism and 99% Platonism.



What judaism brought to the table was inclusion and intolerance. All Jews are welcome into the faith, even the poor. All Jews is equal in the eyes of God. And Jews who don't accept judaism need to be forced to behave.



So Christianity has a moral code, ethics and theology, that is 100% platonism. Which the Roman elites already followed. What Christianity added was to expand it so that it applies to all Romans, not just the rich.



Before Christianity poor people weren't allowed into the temples (which must have sucked when it rained). Only rich people were allowed in.



But that little 1% of Judaism changed everything. Changed the whole culture. Instead of a kaleidoscope of faiths, beliefs, philosophies, communities, in groups and outgroups there was just one. That changed the culture in fundamental ways.



Christians still thought like pagans until the 500's. The big shift came with the Justinian plague. Power centres moved from cities into the countryside. Where urban luxuries weren't available. Soon after (550 AD) was the last war where the losers were systematically enslaved.



That's arguably when Christians started thinking in a way we would recognise as Christian. Before that they were still, very much, thinking like pagans. Italy today still have loads of pagan cultural remnants. Its a slow process.



De-Christianisation will obviously be equally as slow.



I can't imagine socialism or liberalism surviving in a post Christian world. Both, I think, are products born out of Christianity. People, obviously, aren't equaly as valuable. That's just a fact. Some are more capable than others. As Christian values fade, I think, powerful individuals, will increasingly amass power. Eventually kings and aristocrats will return and be the new normal. I struggle to see any other viable development.

Science and the scientiffic method sprung out of monasticism and was an attempt to decode God's plan. Castel Gandolfo was one of the first and finest scientiffic institutions.

 

[Bomb#20]

Look, I get it -- like pretty much every other bit of left-wing insanity, the intent is to remake society to line up with innate human moral intuition. Innate human moral intuition, like every other instinct, is ancestral memory -- it's the cumulative evolutionary lessons each species learned about itself by brutal experience.

I don't think leftist theories are that simple.

Well, that's fair. What description isn't an oversimplification?

Leftism (going all the way back to early Enlightenment) only has in common that, if we change stuff, (insert theory) it'll get better. Often the ideas are utopian. Most often the theories are not only wrong, but (in hindsight) completely insane.

When are the ideas ever not utopian? When are the completely insane ideas ever insane only in hindsight, and not in foresight as well? This is my point about foraging vs. farming -- the ideas are utopian because they're derived from intuition about what ought to work instead of from experience about what does work. The "it'll get better" relies on a standard of "better" that passed its expiration date ten thousand years ago; they're insane in foresight because somebody with experience of the world applies that experience when he conducts a thought experiment about (insert theory), instead of allowing himself to be carried along by the theorist's imagery.

"But the Marxists say, this minority will consist of the workers. Yes, no doubt... of former workers, who, as soon as they become governors or representatives of the people, cease to be workers and start looking down on the working masses from the heights of state authority, so that they represent not the people but themselves and their own claim to rule over others. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of human nature." - Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 1873​

But the foundational theories are all over the place and have varied wildly over time. There's trends. But the trends change.

But some of the ideas were actually good. Our entire political systems today, all over the political spectrum, it all started out as a leftist idea at some point. All conservative ideas today started out as leftist ideas they later adopted (after much resistance).

You appear to be simply defining all innovation as leftist and only the status quo or reaction as non-leftist. That's not really how it works. The so-called "father of conservatism" made this clear in Reflections on the Revolution in France. His point was that progress is faster and more certain when society changes by small steps that are easily reversible if they turn out to have negative unintended consequences; this is a reality that's familiar to anyone who's worked on a simulated annealing optimization program. It was never about conserving the status quo for its own sake.

Apart from hard-core revolutionary communists like Marx who explicitly rejected it, our entire political systems today, all over the political spectrum, started out with rule-of-law, the concept that the government itself was not above the law. In the English common-law tradition that goes back to the Magna Carta; in the continental civil law tradition it goes back to the Rape of Lucretia. Those were not in any recognizable sense leftist ideas. They were power struggles within the aristocracy itself, demands that the king treat the nobles like nobles and not like rightless commoners.

 

[Emily Lake]

Reallty? Are there doing these horrible things in Indonesia, which has by far the most Muslims in the world?

We need a reaction. Your post doesn't make sense to me.

The word “there” should be “they.” Typo.

That doesn't really help. I'm trying to figure out why you're limiting the discussion to Indonesia. It seems like you're looking at one specific little sliver and saying "see, it's no big deal". Perhaps that's not your intention, but I can't figure out any other rational reason for you to single out Indonesia here.

 

[Emily Lake]

It's a perfectly rational thing to say when I can't remember off the top of my head which countries in the European theatre have nukes. Also, I thought Turkey was nuclear capable too?

Do they not have Google where you live?

Is this actually material or important to my point? Seriously, WTF difference does it make that there are only two in what you consider europe, and you're not counting Turkey?

At the end of the day, are you really comfortable with religious zealots gaining control of a nuclear nation that is in a genographic position that would let it demolish all of Europe and the Americas?

 

[Patooka]

The heck are you on about? I didn't indicate I think you believe anything except what you said: that we're "still behaving like Christians" and that liberal democracy is "a Christian way of thinking". You're giving Christianity credit for advances just because they happened on Christianity's watch. That in no way implies you'd be Christian -- lots of people give bosses credit for what happened on their watch whether the bosses deserve credit or not. Well of course those things all happened on Christianity's watch -- everything that happened in Europe and America happened on Christianity's watch, because Christianity ruthlessly suppressed every competing worldview. But I see no reason to think the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the rise of human rights and liberal democracy wouldn't have happened anyway if Christianity hadn't been there. Christianity probably slowed them down -- it was a lot of the reason the Dark Ages went dark. Westerners came out of the Dark Ages when the Crusades put us in contact with Arabs and we found they'd preserved copies of vast amounts of knowledge from the ancient Greeks and Romans that our monks had scraped off parchments to overwrite with Christian prayers. If the Roman Empire had never turned Christian then when the Visigoths et al. overran it, the new rulers and the new societies they formed would have ended up adopting Stoicism and Epicureanism and so forth instead of scraping parchments and persecuting heretics. We never would have lost that ancient knowledge and the early modern era could have been born hundreds of years sooner. We could have had science without the Church intimidating Copernicus, imprisoning Galileo, and burning Bruno. We could have talked one another out of slavery without fighting a Bible that was a literal instruction manual for it. The seeds for science, liberalism and democracy were all there in the world Christianity erased; what they needed in order to flower was freedom of thought -- and there was a hell of a lot more freedom of thought in the Roman Empire before it went Christian than after. We have those things now in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

What a wonderful block of text not triggered by a bigot notsowhatever.

 

[Emily Lake]

Here is the deputy leader of the Green Party. He will likely challenge the antisemite breast whisperer for the leadership

Your posts would be more useful if you didn't feel the need to fill them with weird innuendo-laden name-calling references. Honest to whiskey, I don't know what the heck a "breast whisperer" is supposed to be. Can't you just post like a normal human?

 

[laughing dog]

Here is the deputy leader of the Green Party. He will likely challenge the antisemite breast whisperer for the leadership

Your posts would be more useful if you didn't feel the need to fill them with weird innuendo-laden name-calling references. Honest to whiskey, I don't know what the heck a "breast whisperer" is supposed to be. Can't you just post like a normal human?

Mr Polanski worked as a hypnotherapist and once claimed that hypnotherapy could enlarge women's breasts(Polanski stood by breast enlargement hypnosis claim).

But I do not share your optimism that TSwizzle could make his posts more useful.

 

[Emily Lake]

Good post overall. I'm just going to nit-pick this one little bit...

Look, I get it -- like pretty much every other bit of left-wing insanity, the intent is to remake society to line up with innate human moral intuition.

I think you're being too generous in assuming it's innate human moral intuition. I don't think it's innate, nor do I think it's moral, nor do I think it's intuitive.

I think it's a combination of toddle level concepts of "fair" combined with the naive belief that you can just make humans not act like humans. It's all based on the utopian wish that if you create a perfect system, then nobody will exploit it, there will be no fraud, no conmen, no liars or cheats, no free-riders, no lazy slobs, and everyone will be nice people doing exactly what they ought to do all the time and then everyone will get the same stuff and they'll all like it.

It's a baffling view of humanity. To simultaneously think humans are at heart noble and altruistic players while also needing to force them to be so.

 

[Emily Lake]

all of you decide what the people would agree to by consulting your inner visions instead of asking other people what they'd agree to.

Oh, get off it.
If you REALLY SERIOUSLY need to point out that my friend’s “switch wallets” proposition was never more than a mental exercise, you must have a depressingly dim view of everyone but yourself.
Yes B20, you are absolutely correct; this idea will never fly. I appoint you in charge of protecting us from such madness, since you are so hyper-sensitive to it.

God forbid you might ever indulge in a thought experiment.

It's not that it will never fly, Elixir. It's that it doesn't even work as a thought experiment. It only works if you assume that everyone wants the same things, and everyone will make the same choices. It requires homogeneity of behavior and values to even be a thought exercise.

 

[Emily Lake]

I can't imagine socialism or liberalism surviving in a post Christian world. Both, I think, are products born out of Christianity. People, obviously, aren't equaly as valuable. That's just a fact. Some are more capable than others. As Christian values fade, I think, powerful individuals, will increasingly amass power. Eventually kings and aristocrats will return and be the new normal. I struggle to see any other viable development.

I'm far from a theologian... but I'm inclined to butt in anyway. I think there's a really significant difference between Catholic values and Protestant values. I think a significant amount of our technological progress, as well as liberalism in general, is the result of Protestant values and ethics supplanting Catholic ones.

 

[Emily Lake]

Here is the deputy leader of the Green Party. He will likely challenge the antisemite breast whisperer for the leadership

Your posts would be more useful if you didn't feel the need to fill them with weird innuendo-laden name-calling references. Honest to whiskey, I don't know what the heck a "breast whisperer" is supposed to be. Can't you just post like a normal human?

Mr Polanski worked as a hypnotherapist and once claimed that hypnotherapy could enlarge women's breasts(Polanski stood by breast enlargement hypnosis claim).

There are too many crazy people in the world.

But I do not share your optimism that TSwizzle could make his posts more useful.

More understandable?

 

[DrZoidberg]

I can't imagine socialism or liberalism surviving in a post Christian world. Both, I think, are products born out of Christianity. People, obviously, aren't equaly as valuable. That's just a fact. Some are more capable than others. As Christian values fade, I think, powerful individuals, will increasingly amass power. Eventually kings and aristocrats will return and be the new normal. I struggle to see any other viable development.

I'm far from a theologian... but I'm inclined to butt in anyway. I think there's a really significant difference between Catholic values and Protestant values. I think a significant amount of our technological progress, as well as liberalism in general, is the result of Protestant values and ethics supplanting Catholic ones.

I think Protestantism is a dead end for Christianity. A religion based on shared values, beliefs and dogma needs one guy to tell everyone what to believe. The fact that its one guy is more important than what he says. The moment you allow people to think for themselves regarding God, weirdness will escalate until it shakes itself apart.

Protestantism, I think, will inevitably lead to religious extremism. Sooner or later people will get sick of the extremism and become liberal Christians. That's an inevitable slippery slope to atheism. I think its a one way inevitable process. It can be slow or fast. But will happen imho.

This btw is René Girard's critique against Protestantism. He's a Catholic apologist. He lumps protestantism in with paganism. He has identified stuff protestants started doing that pagans did (that Catholics don't). Like finding scapegoats to blame our ills on and then destroy them.

Yes, the technical innovation and wealth of northern Europe is linked to protestantism. But I don't think its because of a work ethic or Christian values.

Stability is generally good for people. So that's what the Catholic church works toward. The protestant part of Europe didn't have that moderating force.

The free market capitalist and scientiffic revolutions is the result of the Dutch Republic and English Civil war. The secret sauce of protestant success is legalism. Not special values or work ethics. Laws that bind everyone, including kings and nobles. If nobody can just take your stuff on a whim, you have more of an incentive to work hard and get rich.

What made this possible imho is that protestants fetishized legally binding texts. First one specific text. Then it spread.

What happens when someone gets so powerful they think following laws is an unecessary nuisance and just ignores them? Its already happened a number of times. Eventually this world order will fold. Because God is dead. I think.

 

[DrZoidberg]

BTW, my disbelief in the Protestant work ethic isn't just my theory. Its Tom Holland, (and a bunch of other modern historians). Trying to discredit it. The moment Max Weber first coined the term (in 1905) it seems to have annoyed every liberal historian in the world, and they all had a go at it.

Protestant work ethic - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[bilby]

This btw is René Girard's critique against Protestantism. He's a Catholic apologist. He lumps protestantism in with paganism. He has identified stuff protestants started doing that pagans did (that Catholics don't). Like finding scapegoats to blame our ills on and then destroy them.

So... does he think that Catholics disbelieve the resurrection, or is he just embarrassingly lacking in self-awareness?

I mean, the entire Easter story and basis of all Christianity (including Catholicism) is a story of scapegoating the Son of God.

Jesus died for our sins, they say. It's absurd, not least because it is the ultimate in scapegoating. Without scapegoating, Jesus just died - but (spolier alert) he didn't stay dead. So, what was the point?

 

[Bomb#20]

This btw is René Girard's critique against Protestantism. He's a Catholic apologist. He lumps protestantism in with paganism. He has identified stuff protestants started doing that pagans did (that Catholics don't). Like finding scapegoats to blame our ills on and then destroy them.

So the Jews were expelled from France in 1254, from England in 1290, from Hungary in 1360, from Austria in 1421, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1496, because Martin Luther was antisemitic?

 

[DrZoidberg]

This btw is René Girard's critique against Protestantism. He's a Catholic apologist. He lumps protestantism in with paganism. He has identified stuff protestants started doing that pagans did (that Catholics don't). Like finding scapegoats to blame our ills on and then destroy them.

So the Jews were expelled from France in 1254, from England in 1290, from Hungary in 1360, from Austria in 1421, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1496, because Martin Luther was antisemitic?

1) Girard's argument is that scapegoating is a normal baseline human behaviour. He argues that Catholicism, among other things, is a mechanism to moderate it. Its a strong behaviour. Catholicism doesn't make it go away. Just becomes less of a problem. He thinks.

2) Jews have always been a problem for Christianity. Christianity is fundamentally intolerant. If you don't belong to the correct faith you are a heretic and need to be forced to comply. That includes Jews. In Christian theology there's no difference between Jews and any other form of heresy. Christians have always have had to adopt a stance toward Jews where the endgame is that all Jews convert. What Christians have chosen between is, how do we get them to convert. Either by convincing or force.

That's not scapegoating. Its way more fundamental to Christian theology.

 

[Tigers!]

This btw is René Girard's critique against Protestantism. He's a Catholic apologist. He lumps protestantism in with paganism. He has identified stuff protestants started doing that pagans did (that Catholics don't). Like finding scapegoats to blame our ills on and then destroy them.

So the Jews were expelled from France in 1254, from England in 1290, from Hungary in 1360, from Austria in 1421, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1496, because Martin Luther was antisemitic?

Might be a bit rough blaming all of those expulsions on Luther. He was not born until 1483.

The Irish are apparently a bit proud of the fact that they never expelled Jews. That's because they never let them in.