The Conservative Cave
Current Events => The DUmpster => Topic started by: CC27 on February 03, 2009, 05:12:11 PM
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struggle4progress (1000+ posts) Tue Feb-03-09 05:51 PM
Original message
The "Religion Causes War" put-up or shut-up challenge:
Advertisements [?]here are some lists of US military inventions. Which of these conflicts were essentially religious?
FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO IRAQ: A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
http://www.swans.com/library/art6/zig055.html
List of United States military history events
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mili...
US Interventions
US Military and Clandestine Operations in Foreign Countries - 1798-Present
Global Policy Forum
December 2005
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/intervention...
A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present
by William Blum
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x196375
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DUmmies discussing religion is about a useful as Bubba Clinton talking about marital fidelity.
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DUmmies discussing religion and the military is about as intellegnet as the next barrycokesnorker pick for HHS.
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Primitives discussing religion and the military, among other things, makes as much sense as consulting Doug's ex-wife, the "EFerrari" primitive, formerly the "sfexpat2000" primitive, on marital problems.
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gcomeau (1000+ posts) Tue Feb-03-09 05:58 PM
Response to Original message
5. I would propose you give some thought...
...to the difference between these two statements:
1. "Religion causes wars"
2. "Wars are caused by religion"
You appear to be confusing the two. Especially when you appear to be relying only on the military record of a nation that explicitly separates the church from the business of the government (like... war declarations) to try to illustrate your point.
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Somebody failed basic logic.
"Religion causes wars" ... A => B
"Wars are caused by religion" ... B <= A
Logical difference between the two statements: none.
Of course, standard symbolic logic only uses left-to-right conditionals (as well as bi-conditionals but that's irrelevant here), since this concept is so obvious to anyone with a half-functioning brain that to use both would be needlessly redundant.
gcomeau (1000+ posts) Tue Feb-03-09 06:18 PM
Response to Reply #12
16. No, they are not equivalent.
"Religion causes wars" does not even passingly imply that religion is the only cause of wars.
"Wars are caused by religion" on the other hand carries an extremely strong connotation that that is the case.
Your entire post seems to be based on trying to claim the former statement is not true by disproving the latter. It's a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand. If you can find a bunch of wars that weren't caused by religion,, well then religion doesn't cause wars! Sorry, but no.
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Connotation is only of relevance to the logically inept - which, to be fair, would include most leftists, thus I can understand such a concern at the DUmp.
Neither sentence is explicitly quantified. If the second statement had read "ALL wars are caused by religion" this might be relevant. Lacking that word ALL, of course only an existential quantifier can be assumed.
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Primitives discussing anything more advanced than Lincoln Log cabin construction makes no sense. It's like watching little kids playing grownup.
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They're wasting their time, because no matter how loud they squeal, they are not going to drive Christianity from the country or its history.
And that is the case they keep trying to make.
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I actually fall into the all wars are ultimately caused by economics mode. Unlike the DUmmies, I could provide reasonable proof of my statement.
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I actually fall into the all wars are ultimately caused by economics mode. Unlike the DUmmies, I could provide reasonable proof of my statement.
True. Many wars have simply been large-scale armed robberies......or the pre-emptive prevention of a large-scale armed robbery.
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Except that for the regimes that remove religion (ie communist/socialist/secular) have more dead people on their hands (by about two orders of magnitude) than religious countries this argument makes total sense.
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Two things a DUmmy knows nothing about
1. Religion
2. War
That is ALL
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Two things a DUmmy knows nothing about
1. Religion
2. War
That is ALL
Respectfully, I'd add economics and civility.
Whatever, though, they lack the ability to know that they don't know anything about these things.