Conquest of the Americas vs. Conquest of Canaan

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agnosticatheist
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Conquest of the Americas vs. Conquest of Canaan

Post #1

Post by agnosticatheist »

For fundamentalist Christians:

Was the conquest of the Americas (North, Central, and South America), the mistreatment of the natives during and after the conquest, and the killing of the natives, by Europeans good or evil?

Was the conquest of Canaan, the mistreatment (including theft of native property) of the natives during and after the conquest, and the killing of the natives, by Israelites good or evil?

If you say the former was evil and the latter was good, why are you employing a double standard?

Many, maybe even most, fundamentalist Christians would condemn the conquest of the Americas, but then turn around and condone and even attempt to defend the conquest of Canaan.

I saw screw them both. Screw the white man and the Jew man...
If it turns out there are one or more gods, then so be it.

If it turns out there are no gods, then thank reality that no one is going to suffer forever.

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Post #2

Post by agnosticatheist »

Hahaha, no response from Christians. I love it. I saw screw Christians, too, along with the white man and the Jew man. I may never post here again. This is pathetic.

You lose, Christians. I win. Bye.
If it turns out there are one or more gods, then so be it.

If it turns out there are no gods, then thank reality that no one is going to suffer forever.

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Post #3

Post by bluethread »

I began posting yesterday, but had to go to work. I guess it is pathetic that I actually work for a living, rather than sitting in my underwear all day responding to every post on a given website.


Unfortunately, since this was posted yesterday it was way down on the list. I spent the time I had today addressing other threads. Since this topic covers such a long time period in the history of these United States and the two to be compared differ so greatly, it calls for a long detailed post that I can not do at the moment. However, I will address it sometime this week, schedule permitting.

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Post #4

Post by bluethread »

I began posting yesterday, but had to go to work. I guess it is pathetic that I actually work for a living, rather than sitting in my underwear all day responding to every post on a given website.


Unfortunately, since this was posted yesterday it was way down on the list. I spent the time I had today addressing other threads. Since this topic covers nearly all of the history of the Americas and the two to be compared differ so greatly, it calls for a long detailed post that I can not do at the moment. However, I will address it sometime this week, schedule permitting.

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Post #5

Post by bjs »

[Replying to post 1 by agnosticatheist]


:warning: Moderator Warning


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Please review our Rules.

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Post #6

Post by bluethread »

Thought the OP is gone, let me answer as promised and take his place as a counter OP.

Since it's coinage the term "genocide" has been used as an absolute pejorative and not a specific descriptive. This has permitted the user of the term to apply it to nearly any devastation of a society. In the case of the European migration to the Americas, this has given rise to several accusations of "genocide". Let's examine each of these in order.

Smallpox blanket genocide

The accusation is that since large numbers of tribal people died of a given disease, the spreading of that disease was genocide. Even though this accounts for the majority of the devastation of American tribal populations in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was not intentional but a matter of environmental diversity, brought on by naval exploration. Diseases that had caused many deaths in Europe gradually over a thousand years, caused the Tiano population to drop from over 60,000 to some 500 in little over fifty years after Columbus arrived. The same happened with regard to Cortez and Tenochtitlán. Less than four months after his arrival and his final assault, half the population was dead or dying from smallpox. www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/06/how-eur ... -new-world

There are two reasons why it is deceptive to group this together with things like the Holocaust. First, one would then also have to call the Black Plague European genocide caused by Africans. That is because it was brought to Europe from Africa on ships that had sailed there. Second, apart from not showing up in the first place, there was little they could have done to stop the spread. Apart from the natural immunity of the Europeans that had survived the with it for over a thousand years, here was not effective treatment at the time.


Cultural genocide


The tribal peoples of the Americas were primarily stone age cultures that did not develop serious technology or innovation. One the other hand, in order for the Europeans to have arrived in the Americas, it was necessary for them to have developed such societies. Though there were some exceptions, Europeans did not set out to destroy the cultures of those tribal peoples. They merely displaced them. Along with advanced technology, Europeans also had developed more sophisticated legal concepts, most notably those of public and private property. Without that heritage, tribal people found it difficult to adjust and either floundered in European societies, or found themselves having to move further and further out to find environments beyond European influence.

Equating this with the holocaust is also misplaced, since it is little more than an extreme version of the Ludite argument. One can not expect societies to cease innovation simply because other societies have difficulty keeping up.

Military genocide


This is the form that would properly include the holocaust and would also properly include comparisons with the conquest of Canaan. However, it is still way too broad a concept to permit a perfect analogy in all cases. That is because wars have various causes and not all causes are equal. War is primarily the result of conficts in social standards, which can not be resolved by other means. The greater the conflict the closer one would come to seeing what is called "genocide" as a means of resolving nthat conflict.

With regard to the wars between societies of the tribal peoples of the Americas and those of the Europeans, the stesses of disease and cultural differences over time resulted in a long series of social conflicts and wars. However, this is not the same as planned annihilation. It is indeed common through out history on all continents. One could even argue that every military conquest, or at least parts thereof, could be called "genocide".

So, though this does not actually address the comparison of the "Conquest of the Americas vs. Conquest of Canaan", it does narrow the scope of the discussion to actual acts of war and not other factors that can cause populations to decline and/or disappear. At this point, I will stop and see if there is agreement on these issues. if so then we can progress to the actual comparison and what would be involved in calling one or the other "evil".

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Post #7

Post by Willum »

[Replying to post 6 by bluethread]

Hmmmm.
They even teach us in High School that blankets given to the Native Americans were contaminated.

That you can make this claim, puts you squarely in a denier camp, and lets me understand how very clearly you can support the barbarism of the Torah.

You really, really believe it didn't happen, or was OK, because it was empowered by God, don't you?
It doesn't bother you that, were there a God, it would be an abhorrent monster?
Since there is not a God, it makes the practitioners of these acts, abhorrent monsters.
And you a denier that they are abhorrent monsters.

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Post #8

Post by ttruscott »

Willum wrote: [Replying to post 6 by bluethread]

Hmmmm.
They even teach us in High School that blankets given to the Native Americans were contaminated.
So, have you accepted everything you heard in high school or just the things that you can use to support your anti-Christian pov?

Your proof that this teaching is true is...?
PCE Theology as I see it...

We had an existence with a free will in Sheol before the creation of the physical universe. Here we chose to be able to become holy or to be eternally evil in YHWH's sight. Then the physical universe was created and all sinners were sent to earth.

This theology debunks the need to base Christianity upon the blasphemy of creating us in Adam's sin.

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Post #9

Post by Tcg »

Willum wrote: [Replying to post 6 by bluethread]

Hmmmm.
They even teach us in High School that blankets given to the Native Americans were contaminated.
I have heard that there is some question about whether or not contaminated blankets were used in the genocide against Native Americans.

You know what isn't questionable? The mass slaughter of the American Bison.

The reason? To destroy the Native Americans main source of food and clothing.

So the question is not whether or not there was a genocide, but rather the details of how it was accomplished.

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Post #10

Post by Willum »

[Replying to post 8 by ttruscott]

The death of millions of Native American Indians by disease, and the admission of the officers approving them.

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