Entries in Life

The religious leader question is a good mental exercise because as I started going back through the big genocides that involved primarily self-identified Christian populations in the oppressor group, the most recent two biggies being the situations in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the mid 1990s, I realized that Christianity wasn't necessarily a central tenet of the leader's message.

I haven't gone through and done an exhaustive point-for-point comparison, it's hard, for instance, to classify where the crimes of Hitler, who clearly wasn't Christian, should count because he used the mythology of Christianity as a very powerful lever to move a population that did self-identify as Christian.

But, yeah, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, we can leave those numbers out of those I'd leave at the feet of Christians.

So you got me wondering if the apparent correlation is simply a matter of Christanity's dominance overall. If 50% of people claim to hold a belief then, yeah, 50% of all evil will be done by people holding that belief.

Hmmm...

And interesting lumping the Quakers in with the Mennonites and the Amish. As someone who grew up in a culture that deliberately steered away from the popular culture I was about to lash into the Mennonites and the Amish (and, besides, they don't have computers so they can't lash back [grin]), but the Quaker thing brought me up hard. Gonna have to think on this.