One of the arguments I keep seeing is that 95% of world was illiterate through the dark ages. Are you now saying that wasn't the case?
Yeah right, Uncle Chip, you American/Western Protestants have a lot to be proud of.
Shame on you.
Those terrible Protestants have brought freedom to the world. There is no other nation in the history of man that has been as exceptional as America. We are the first nation to declare in our founding documents that our rights are given by God, that all men are created equal. We have sacrificed our greatest treasure, our sons and daughters, to protect the right of people to speak freely. We have sacrificed our treasure to free people from tyranny. After winning wars we do not enslave, or take the natural resources of those we have defeated. We help those we have vanquished rebuild and try to help them establish more representative forms of govt. and then we try to do trade with them .
I'm sorry you don't see the long term goal of the WOT. We are not only attempting to destroy the terrorists, but we are trying to transform the muslim culture and bring them out of the 7th century into the modern world. We are trying to establish representative govt. where none has existed before. We are trying to create market place economies supported by a judicial system that respects property rights and recognizes individual God give rights. Whether we can succeed, or are meant, to is another question.
If we can't civilize the muslim horde what's the alternative. Europe's birth rates are collapsing. Muslims are reproducing at dramatically higher rates. Russia is a basket case. We either civilize them, or pull back to our shores and abandon your friends and neighbors over there.
It is those Protestants you demean that are fighting the fight. All I see from the RC's and EO is accommodation with the enemy.
True, true!
Well Said — Thank You.
“One of the arguments I keep seeing is that 95% of world was illiterate through the dark ages. Are you now saying that wasn’t the case?”
That would be in the West, WF, not in the East.
“All I see from the RC’s and EO is accommodation with the enemy.”
Really?! Are the EO and the RCs picking up the tab for the destruction of Reformed Protestantism by crazed Mohammedans? No? Why is the American government picking up the tab for the destruction of Eastern Christian cultures and people? Why is the American government paying for Fatah and both the Sunni and Shia movements in Lebanon and the Turkish hell of No. Cyprus, ethnically cleansed of Christians? Does that make you proud WF? Are you satisfied that the non Protestant heretics are getting what they deserve and are you happy your money is paying for it?
And WF, do you really think that we went into Iraq to bring the blessings of liberty and democracy to that benighted land or did we go in to whack a guy we thought posed a threat to us and make an example of him and when the Bush government didn’t have the guts to finish the job, they came up with the democracy/liberty routine?
Does American exceptionalism excuse the groveling of Bush before the Saudi king and other Sunni leaders? Does it excuse, no, explain, American complicity in the destruction of non Protestant Christian communities? How does any American excuse the monstrosities of Kosovo and Lebanon and No. Cyprus and the destruction of 2000 year old Christianity in Iraq? Short of saying that those Christian communities were not products of the Protestant Revolution and thus heretics, no American can!
I don't agree with your idealistic portrayal of the world. You left out greed and business interests that also have their place in our society and foreign policy. You also left out dirty politics.
I served twenty years in the military through three wars. You are going to tell me that I "accommodate" the enemy? Shame on you.
Maybe the problem is that we have decided to change how 1.2 billion people live and what they believe and make them in our image. Or maybe we decided to side with their enemies, and get involved in their local dispute, instead of minding our own business.
How do we promote our values in Bosnia and Kosovo or in tolerating occupied Cyprus? Why are we keeping a couple of thousand troops in Western Europe 19 years after the Soviet Union collapsed? Why is NATO expanding now that it is no longer a "defensive" organization? Are you ready to send our sons and daughters to nuclear holocaust over Estonia? For what?
And how would you like if Germans or French of Japanese tried to interfere in our elections and push their values on us?
Are you going to call Gen Wesley Clark and tell him he is "accommodating" the enemy too because he is opposed to our senseless war in Iraq? Accommodating the enemy is treason. Are you calling Gen Clark, all EO's and RCCs traitors because they disagree with one of the worst Presidents in the American history (my opinion), George W. Bush? Shame on you.
You are shutting people up for speaking their mind because you disagree with their opinion. And you are exalting freedom of speech as the basic American value? Being opposed to foreign policy is not treason. Maybe it was in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But not in America. Shame on you.
Kolo is absolutely right. But one must be able to see the other side to make a comparison. Unfortunately, multidimensional weltanschauun is alien to so many one-dimentional individuals whose see only one side of the moon and therefore have nothing to compare it to.