As for American religons, looking only at the present, when was the last time the Mormons killed people travelling thru Utah, or Babtists killed Mormons going door to door, or Catholics attacked Jews. Or any religious group attacked a group of athiests.
In Iraq Sunni's and Shia kill each other every day. Add the Kurds and Christians and violence between religious groups seems common.
In Massachusetts, someone just
spray painted a swastika on a temple sign. I guess antisemitism is just part of the culture in the northeast; they don't value love and kindness the way we do.
Swastikas were also used to
vandalize supporters of Barack Obama. I guess antisemitism is just part of the culture among conservatives; they cherish hatred and anger in the way that we cherish puppies.
Oh look, spray painted over signs supporting California's
ban on gay marriage. Gay people who support gay marriage must also support Nazi fascism that would sentence them to death. I guess self-loathing and suicide is just a part of their culture; they just don't love life the way we do.
God, look at all the
spray painted swastika stories. I guess cowardly, anonymous threats of violence is just how Americans work out their differences; they just don't value civilized discourse like we do.
-Autistic Angel
The stories about Prop 8 in California go both ways......
Also I love how everyone always brings up the Nazi's and swastika's. As though they are a group like the Rotary or Lions Club. Look idiots are everywhere. Hate exists. But spray painting is not violence. Being anti-PC does not make violence.
I am sure there are better examples....go find them for me....you must have the time..
...okay.
For clarity, I was posting examples of silly it is to try to pass judgment on large swaths of people based on anecdotal incidents that involve only a tiny percentage of them. I thought that by using the same "evidence" to draw four wildly incompatible conclusions, it would provide an overly absurd parody of some of the ridiculously ethnocentric attitudes in this thread.
Since you appear to have drawn the conclusion that I think liberals, conservatives, gay people, and Americans are all pro-Nazi -- and that Barack Obama is Jewish -- I guess I should have been even less obtuse.
The point, Scuzz, is that picking out the worst behavior from a group and then shrugging, "Well, that's just part of their culture, it's how
those people are," would surely lead you to assume that poor people teach their kids how to rob liquor stores rather than get jobs, white people teach their kids to hate and fear minorities, and sports fans are mostly drunk, violent yahoos who riot at the slightest provocation.
In reality, the broad and ill-defined groups identified as "poor people," "white people," and "sports fans" do not nurture crime, racism, or violence to any extent worthy of calling it "part of their culture."
When a car bomb detonates in the middle of Baghdad rush hour traffic, the students, engineers, accountants, and restaurant cooks maimed in the explosion are not taking pride in a long heritage of death. Their friends and colleagues do not greet news of the destruction with a casual indifference, nor do their families dismiss their loss as a typical day in their culture of violence.
This kind of ethnocentric "those people aren't civilized like we are" nonsense has been propagated by ignorant fools and racists to dehumanize victims in conflicts throughout history, often to justify wanton carnage brought on by vague ideological grounds like "manifest destiny," "racial purity," or "spreading civilization." If it wasn't true about the Native Americans, the Spanish, the Confederates, the Germans, the Hooverville residents, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Communists, or the Romulans, what makes you so confident that this time you've finally picked out the *real* Culture of Death?
-Autistic Angel
