Red Star Over Bethlehem

Merry Christmas, comrades.

Comments

[Joel]

Okay.

Up till now, I thought anything with a photoshopped kitten would inevitably be really funny.

Yet another illusion shattered. Thanks so much.

[Er?k Gabhran Boston, Esq.]

OK, who will be first to speculate on exactly what kind of shit would hit the fan if someone did that with the Nazi party?

[Brandybuck]

Communists are the good totalitarians, so it's okay to poke fun at them in a good natured and respectful manner. But Nazis are bad totalitarians, and humour is not allowed where they are concerned.

[Pro Libertate]

Well, there is Hogan's Heroes.

[Lefiti]

The Nazis were explcitily evil and openly racist. Communists were associated with all sorts of good things from civil rights (in the U.S.) to the union movement everywhere. Communists sided with the oppressed and opposed racism. In pratice, of course, many communists truned out to be murderous thugs, but the ideology itself had a great appeal on purely humanist grounds. Nazism never had such an appeal. If you saw a biker with a swastika on his helmet, you would assume he was violent and dangerous. If you saw a biker with a hammer and scikle on his helmet, you would assume he was a nostaligic leftist who might help an old lady across the street. Big difference. It's just something you right wingers have to live with.

[Pro Libertate]

Why?

[MNG]

Lefiti I'm not sure you're right. I remember Hitler's architect said that he joined the Nazi party after hearing Hitler talk for two hours about selfless love (love of country, love of family, love the German people, etc). The Nazi's often pedaled humanitarian sounding stuff, and the Communists often pedaled straight up brutal goals. And both were murderous evil thugs when it came down to it.

[Alberta Blue]

"If you saw a biker with a swastika on his helmet, you would assume he was violent and dangerous."

Not always, from what I hear the Nazi's had a great social safety net.

"If you saw a biker with a hammer and scikle on his helmet, you would assume he was a nostaligic leftist who might help an old lady across the street. Big difference. It's just something you right wingers have to live with."

Yeah, as we all know Communist countries have always been based upon purely humanist grounds.

What if the old lady happens to be a Tsar?

[Lefiti]

From Wikipedia:

The Communist Party made the fight against racism within the labor movement and Jim Crow outside it one of its consistent principles from the early 1920s forward. While maintaining a position against white supremacy, the Party made special efforts to organize black miners in the strikes its National Miners Union led in western Pennsylvania in 1928 at the same time as leading strikes of (nearly exclusively) white textile workers in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1929 and coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931. Local authorities used this issue and the Party's support for "godless communism" and the Soviet Union to drive a wedge between the strike leadership and white workers.

The Party made more progress in organizing African-American workers in the New Deal era, particularly through unions associated with it, such as Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, which organized black miners in Alabama, the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, which created interracial coalitions in the meatpacking plants in Chicago and elsewhere, and the Food and Tobacco Workers, who established integrated unions with interracial leadership in North Carolina and Kentucky. Those unions established deep roots among the black workers in those industries, who remained supportive of the left leadership of their unions even as the party itself became increasingly unpopular in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

In the United Auto Workers, in which the CPUSA once vied for leadership, both the party and its opponents led by Walter Reuther campaigned for the demands of black workers and against "hate strikes" and race riots led by white workers opposed to working with African-Americans, but disagreed as to how the union should respond.

Party activists and organizers also played a significant role in organizing black workers in other unions, such as the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, in which the CPUSA had a role, but not leadership. The party did not, however, make any consistent progress in recruiting black members through its union organizing efforts. In the SWOC, for example, the Party's organizers suppressed their identity as communists and much of their politics in order to avoid political differences with Philip Murray, who headed the organizing the campaign, and the CIO, which was financing it. Those organizers rarely were able, in any case, to stay in an area long enough to allow them to cultivate the relationships that would have allowed them to bring individual workers into the party.

[tigre]

"OK, who will be first to speculate on exactly what kind of shit would hit the fan if someone did that with the Nazi party?"

Have you not seen the Hitler parodies from Downfall that are all over YouTube?

[Lefiti]

This did not endear Communists to Ron Paul's subcription list.

[Lefiti]

MNG

The Nazis were openly racists and anti-Jewish from the beginning. They appealed to German ethnocentrism.

[Lefiti]

North Korea is a worker's paradise.

[Pro Libertate]

Well, by sheer statistics, the Communists have killed a much greater number of people than the Nazis did. Less systematically, I suppose, but I doubt that matters much to the dead.

[Joshua Holmes]

That's going to be stuck in my head the whole time I'm purging the kulaks.

[Anon]

This is rather obviously not pro-communist in any way, and not only that Mr Vietch has also done the odd Nazi kitten video (all be it without nazi based lyrics), but there are plenty around, and anyone who thinks that shouldn't be the case can go get fucked frankly.

On the case of NAZIS EVIL COMMIES

[Lefiti]

"Yeah, as we all know Communist countries have always been based upon purely humanist grounds."

I'm talking about perceptions, not reality. But in the Us., the Communists reeally were associated with many good things.

[Lefiti]

cuba has the best medical care in the world and it is %100 free.

[Pro Libertate]

The Nazis gave us much better movie villains than the Communists. I'm beginning to suspect that many on the left got their politics from film in the first place. . .which would explain a lot.

[Seamus]

Not always, from what I hear the Nazi's had a great social safety net.

Not to mention their enlightened views on getting rid of environmental carcinogens and working to eliminate tobacco use. Oh, yes, and great infrastructure improvements like the Autobahnen. (You know, change you can believe it.)

[Anon]

Fuck half my comment was cut out.
Basically I said that eoonomics has nothing to do with whether you are evil and mass murdering. It's the authoritarian/libertarian scale. Though communist leaders rack up far higher kill counts due to their general disregard for anything that doesn't fit their view of a perfect world (and for the record Hitlers National Socialism was centrist)

[Anon]

Lefiti you're either a troll or delusional. Cubas health system is not the best in the world. The best health systems in the world are held by most of northern mainland Europe. Which are various examples of how a National Health system can work (alongside a private one, so I'm not 100% libertarian, shoot me)

[Seamus]

Actually, when I saw the title, "Red Star over Bethlehem," I thought it meant that Communists had won municipal elections in that town. Then I remembered that, while Arabs within Israel proper often vote for Maki (the Israeli Communist Party) (or at least used to), that's probably only because they don't have the opportunity to vote for openly Palestinian Nationalist or Islamicist parties, as they do on the West Bank.)

[PapayaSF]

Lefiti, here's how I do the calculating:

Nazis: Killed tens of millions, associated with very little good, no intellectual/academic respectability, gone for 60+ years.

Communists: Killed around 100 million, associated with some good, has some intellectual/academic respectability, still around and killing and oppressing people.

I don't think the communists "win" that comparison.

[Lefiti]

Here's an honest question: Why is the right, even the so-called libertarian right, so susceptible to racism?

[Lefiti]

I don't think the communists "win" that comparison.

Yeah, but communists, especially American communists, were often true progressives who ddi all maner of sefless work on behalf of the poor and the oppressed.

[Lefiti]

Racism is collectivism so we on the left should own that.

[Pro Libertate]

What's the libertarian body count?

[Lefiti]

So Ron Paul is a leftist then?

[Lefiti]

What's the libertarian body count?

Libertarians--the right-wing American variety--have never even got their hands dirty much less killed anybody. Wait a minute, Ron Paul may have inspired some hate crimes.

[Lefiti]

lol just trollin' guys...

[Lefiti]

The Munchkins never killed anybody either.

[Lefiti]

Mao Zedong was the greatest leader of the 20th Century, by far.

[travman67]

What no comments on the 2Pumpkins 1Cup?

[Mike Laursen]

cuba has the best medical care in the world and it is %100 free.

The quality of Cuba's medical care has been debated here before, so I won't go into it. But you must have meant something other than "it is %100 [sic] free". Perhaps you meant that not everybody has to pay or that Cubans don't directly pay for treatment. It's obviously not true that it is 100% free of charge.

[Mad Max]

"In pratice, of course, many communists turned out to be murderous thugs"

Oh, darn! What an unfortunate coincidence!

(And many communists turned out to be atheists, too, but I'm not harping on that point, and I'm sure there is a perfectly rational explanation for it)

[BDB]

Do you really want to do a body count of the Catholic Church, Mad Max? On a per capita basis, that is?

[BDB]

Or hell, just a body count of the Catholic monarchies (especially Spain in Latin America)?

[SKR]

Of course we can have comedy with the Nazi's.

And now it's...
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Rhineland's a fine land once more!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Watch out, Europe
We're going on tour!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany

[MNG]

"The Nazis gave us much better movie villains than the Communists."

When you attempt genocide on a group of people with a great deal of pull in show business you are going to be the bad guys of many a movie...The genuis of the Soviets was to kill Ukranians. I mean, how many movies have those people made 😉

[Dread]

I want an evil communist kitten for Christmas.

[MNG]

On a more serious note it has always appalled me that for every one movie that details the murderous ways of the Soviets we have a hundred detailing the murderous ways of the Nazis. The Nazis deserve every bad depiction they get, but surely we can make more movies about the ghastly things the Soviets did...

[Lefiti]

MNG

I feel your pain, but when you have nutbars on your side like Ron Paul with his racist newsletters, you're just going to keep getting hammered. The left has always had a better press. Celebrities and beatiful people tend to be left. Boring old fucks and fat, creepy losers tend to be right. Who knows why?

[Eric the .5b]

I'm going to just ignore the whiny partisan bitchery in these comments and note that the video was mildly funny. Not as good as some of their others, but not as bad as their weakest stuff.

[MNG]

"Boring old fucks and fat, creepy losers tend to be right."

Hey, let's keep TAO out of this!

[PAc]

Guys, it's kittens being cute and funny. Let's not make a big thing out of this. Heck i want one of those shirts. Better than a che shirt IMO.

I referenced Che watch all hell break loose

[pac]

But Nazis are bad totalitarians, and humour is not allowed where they are concerned.

Stalag 17 is a great movie

[O RLY?]

"fat, creepy losers tend to be right."

Yeah, sure they do! Yup!

[Pac]

Don;t click the link

It's a keylogger

ROFLMAO

[Seamus]

"The Nazis gave us much better movie villains than the Communists."

When you attempt genocide on a group of people with a great deal of pull in show business you are going to be the bad guys of many a movie...The genuis of the Soviets was to kill Ukranians. I mean, how many movies have those people made 😉

Steve Sailer has discussed this phenomenon (http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/katy.html), in connection with a movie that, atypically, discusses a Communist atrocity (and one which, ironically, the Reds tried to pin on the Nazis).

[Seamus]

That's an *atrocity*, not a movie, that the Reds tried to pin on the Nazis.

[Brandybuck]

The Nazis gave us much better movie villains than the Communists. I'm beginning to suspect that many on the left got their politics from film in the first place. . .which would explain a lot.

It explains most things about leftists. They have warped view of history which gets reinforced by movies. I've more than once heard a leftist say that a movie dared to tell the truth. Huh?

Look at how Hollywood portrays corporations. None of it is real. They're not plotting to take over governments, they're not deploying private armies, they're not engaged in routine criminal activities, etc. Yet most leftists behave as if only a strong government prevents CEOs from becoming Blofelds.

[Elemenope]

Do you really want to do a body count of the Catholic Church, Mad Max? On a per capita basis, that is?

Ouch. I felt that one sting over here.

Personally I'd say that Nazism makes better villainy than Communism is because one by force of its own ideology requires a person to be homocidally prickish towards a great many people, whereas it is not an *ideological* requirement with the other. That in both cases is is a practical requirement is irrelevant (as any ideology that seeks to remake people or force them to act in certain ways ultimately ends up being inhumane) to the fact that one is rightly perceived as worse *on its face* than the other.

When you start talk of body counts, it isn't long till someone points out that every ideology has blood all over its hands. What about capitalist Americans bombing a country into the stone age (and murdering half a million Vietnamese while we were at it) for the cause of "freedom"? Fuck, three-quarters of a million Americans killed each other over the cause of "national unity".

[The Angry Optimist]

"Boring old fucks and fat, creepy losers tend to be right."

Hey, let's keep TAO out of this!

What warranted that piece of immaturity?

[Mike]

"Personally I'd say that Nazism makes better villainy than Communism is because one by force of its own ideology requires a person to be homocidally prickish towards a great many people, whereas it is not an *ideological* requirement with the other. That in both cases is is a practical requirement is irrelevant (as any ideology that seeks to remake people or force them to act in certain ways ultimately ends up being inhumane) to the fact that one is rightly perceived as worse *on its face* than the other."

Agreed. Socialism and communism allow for a greater degree of cognitive dissonance. Nazism is right up in your face with "You better hate teh Jews!!!"

[Mad Max]

"Do you really want to do a body count of the Catholic Church, Mad Max? On a per capita basis, that is?"

The U.S. government killed more Protestants in the last two centuries than the Catholic Church. Ever heard of Waco?

But when it comes to the *sheer number* of atrocities, the socialists - whether they're Marxist-Leninists or National Socialists - have the U.S. beat.

Likewise with socialist atrocities v. Catholic atrocities. There's no contest - the Marxist-Leninist Socialists and National Socialists killed more human beings before breakfast (without trial) than the Catholic Church killed all year (with full trial and due process).

[libertymike]

Elemenope-

Good for you for being that someone. I see that you have seen fit to cite Licnoln's bloodbath. Now, that is being a real good someone.

[libertymike]

Mad Max and Elemenope-

More have certainly perished in the name of government than religion-unless you want to call the insane desire to lord over others a religion.

[Mike Laursen]

The Nazis gave us much better movie villains than the Communists.

The Nazis had the uniforms. I'm not sure of the reasons or people behind it, but they were very concerned about giving themselves a look. Which is one of the big reasons you see bikers wearing Nazi paraphernalia but never see them wearing Communist stuff.

[Pro Libertate]

The Nazis dressed better than the communists, too. I think directors like better-dressed villains.

[Old Peddler]

Senses of humor for sale!

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Learn to relax - Buy a fine sense of humor right here!

Feel what it's like to smile or even laugh once in a while with one of these nice senses of humor for sale!

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[libertymike]

Being the hard-core anarcho-free enterprise-individualist that I am, I would never be so foolish as to sign up for the communism wasn't really as bad as naziism club.

[Mad Max, with rabies]

At least with the Nazis there are no abortions!

[Mad Max]

At least with the Nazis there are no abortions!

Are you sure about that?

[Residual Foaming]

And, for that matter, no homosexuals.

[Mad Max]

'More have certainly perished in the name of government than religion-unless you want to call the insane desire to lord over others a religion.'

Yeah, that's the ticket - the inconvenient atheism of the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century (Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.), and the paganism/pantheism of the National Socialists, can be glossed over by saying that all mass murderers were religious. By a sleight-of-hand definition all the greatest murderers of history can be redefined as religious.

See - Stalin was religious, just like the Christers and fundies!

[Mad Max]

"And, for that matter, no homosexuals."

Are you sure about that?

[Elemenope]

You sure do provide compelling references, Mad Max! I mean, someone created a website, complete with animated wallpaper and an animated picture of Hitler and a mass grave, designed explicitly to engage in an ad hitleram against US abortion policy, and because of these things (as well as the utter lack of anything resembling documentation or references) we *know* that they are impeccable and objective researchers.

[Elemenope]

Ernst R?hm...oh yeah! Isn't that the guy that Hitler had shot?

[Mad Max]

"Ernst R?hm...oh yeah! Isn't that the guy that Hitler had shot?"

Hitler had a habit of ingratitude. R?hm helped him reach the pinnacle of power, then when the military was jealous of R?hm, Hitler threw R?hm under the bus.

This was, so to speak, a lovers' quarrel within the National Socialist movement.

[Elemenope]

This was, so to speak, a lovers' quarrel within the National Socialist movement.

So, and let me get this straight, your thesis is that there is *semantical* homosexuality in Nazi Germany, and Hitler was killing his "lover"?

[Mad Max]

LMNOP,

And I'm sure that the same charge of bias can be laid against this Decision of the West German Constitutional Court in 1975, finding that existing German law didn't do enough to protect the unborn child. From the court's opinion:

'By Paragraph 14 of the Statute for the Prevention of Hereditarily Ill Offspring in the edition of the amendatory law of June 26, 1935, (Reich?s Reporter of Law I, p. 773) these prerequisites for the terminations of pregnancy permissible on medical grounds [by previous court decision] were legally established.'

[Lefiti]

Michael Moore is fat, but nobody would call him a loser.

[Mad Max]

LMNOP,

When Hitler was still consolidating his power, he felt it necessary to crush his own party's paramilitary arm (S.A.), and its boss Ernst R?hm. By murdering R?hm , Hitler was able to dupe the military leaders into thinking the National Socialist movement was respectable and law-abiding. The military leaders at least had an excuse: They didn't have specific knowledge about the lawless actions that the National Socialist government would be committing after 1934, once the German military was in a position to serve as the National Socialist military arm.

What excuse do modern people have for taking Hitler's professions of respectability and legality seriously?

[The Angry Optimist]

Yeah, that's the ticket - the inconvenient atheism of the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century (Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.), and the paganism/pantheism of the National Socialists, can be glossed over by saying that all mass murderers were religious

Are you stating, as a thesis, that direct cause of the bloodiness of these regimes is their lack of monotheism?

Come now.

[Mad Max]

TAO,

Please keep up - I was responding to the suggestion that political mass murderers should be considered religious by a clever redefinition of terms:

'More have certainly perished in the name of government than religion-unless you want to call the insane desire to lord over others a religion.'

[Elemenope]

I was responding to the suggestion that political mass murderers should be considered religious by a clever redefinition of terms...

How do you define religion?

[The Angry Optimist]

Mad Max - their religion is irrelevant, but you seemed to be making it an essential and substantive part of the doctrines and regimes that caused these deaths.

[Mad Max]

"their religion is irrelevant, but you seemed to be making it an essential and substantive part of the doctrines and regimes that caused these deaths."

Oh, no, I'm sure it was just a coincidence.

"We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life." -

[Mad Max]

- Leon Trotsky

[The Angry Optimist]

oh, how did I know that you were backhandedly making the argument that atheism leads to mass slaughter and evil?

No shock there. I do not suppose that it occurred to you that a lot of these states destroyed the old moral codes of religion to fill them with the new ones of the State? If that were the case, that certainly does not give much weight to your contention that religion is a bulwark against evil, only that gaining blind allegiance to one thing requires destroying blind allegiance to something else.

[Elemenope]

I believe it was Nietzsche who first identified the modern State serving explicitly as a poor (and evil) substitute for God.

But, MM, you never answered my question. You accuse libertymike of equivocating "cleverly" on the definition of religion. So, what's *your* definition of religion, such that it does not admit to the substance of the aforementioned equivocation?

[Mad Max]

"I believe it was Nietzsche who first identified the modern State serving explicitly as a poor (and evil) substitute for God."

Better look into this Nietzsche guy. He sounds like some kind of fundamentalist.

"you never answered my question [etc] what's *your* definition of religion [etc]"

If you want to look into the distinction between true and false religion, why not check out Pope Pius XI's anti-Nazi encyclical of 1937.

Some highlights:

'7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

'8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

'9. Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.'

[Mad Max]

"oh, how did I know that you were backhandedly making the argument that atheism leads to mass slaughter and evil?"

Not in every case - Robert Ingersoll wasn't a fan of mass slaughter, for instance. There are atheists who qualify as "virtuous pagans." There are others who had a religious upbringing and, while trying sincerely to abandon all the God stuff, still adhere to the ethical codes under which they were raised.

So . . . you don't have to be an atheist to murder millions upon millions of people for the sake of some abstract ideology - but it sure helps.

[MNG]

Oh c'mon Max history abounds with religious, including many devoted Catholic, leaders often for explicitly religious reasons, ordering and approving of many a brutal killing and massacre (the Old Testament, if you believe that sort of thing, is full of it).

There were no real athiestic states until modern times. There were totalitarian states before the U.S.S.R and the Nazis. There were leaders, devout and not, that ordered massacres. The main difference was that these massacres occurred in the modern era when technology enabled the kind of coordinated killing that can reach unimaginable levels. So I find it more likely that rather than atheism leading to unprecedented mass murder that modernity makes both significant amounts of athiesm and unprecedented mass murder possible. Kind of a spurious relationship.

Even a rather "old fashioned" supposedly "low-tech" mass killing as what happened in Rwanda in the 90's would not have been nearly so bad if not for technology such as radio.

[ed]

But Nazis are bad totalitarians, and humour is not allowed where they are concerned.

Tell that to Mel Brooks.

[Strappado]

Of course Mad Max is going to minimize the Nazis. The Pope used to be one. Duh.

Mad Max and his religion are soaked in blood. Just because he tries to splatter everyone else with it while flailing around cannot and will not change that fact.

[nobody]

Michael Moore is a loseer.

[SusanM]

I think it's about time to stop using nazis as a comparison. They were around foe twenty years and lasted until 1945 (63 years ago). Meanwhile there are still a few Communist countries hanging around.

[SusanM]

"they were around FOR twenty years". I hate misspellings!

[Elemenope]

7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God.

So...Buddhism is not a religion? Huh.

'8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

Pope's been reading his Nietzsche. Good for him!

'9. Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculation. Use your influence on the Faithful, that they refuse to yield to this aberration. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.'

So...you should be all about ditching that "In God We Trust" crap on our money, and "Under God" in the Pledge. After all, there really is no way to interpret their presence other than as this generic label for a fuzzy idea, and not any true God. Right?

[R C Dean]

I nominate this as the most tedious and pointless thread ever.

[BDB]

"
Likewise with socialist atrocities v. Catholic atrocities. There's no contest - the Marxist-Leninist Socialists and National Socialists killed more human beings before breakfast (without trial) than the Catholic Church killed all year (with full trial and due process)."

Only because 1)those crimes happened in the 20th century when there were more people to kill. On a per capita basis though the Wars of Religion were as bloody as the World Wars. Fewer people died, but as a % of population it was horrific.

[BDB]

Ditto for the Spanish conquest of Latin America. But hey they're all Catholic now, so of course that's different.

[BDB]

I mean, do you really think that if the Crusaders or Conquistadors had had access to tanks, machine guns, nukes, and Zyklon B they would have not used them against "heathens" because of their Catholic morals? Spare me.

[sarah]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Sarah
http://www.thetreadmillguide.com