RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Two soldiers are murdered because a Koran is improperly disposed of...

it's amazing how I can ignore this subforum for a week and a half and come back and not miss a beat. well done, everyone.

"It calmed things down."


...WOW.....Motherfucker.

Eastern Roman involvement in Seljuk disputes with independent states like Armenia and Georgia not withstanding. Or, you know, five-hundred years of relations/wars between the Eastern Romans and the greater Turkic peoples of which the Seljuks were only the most recently ascendent tribe. Sure, they were totally unprovoked.



You know, I can admit that religious wars--in this case, The Crusades--generally also have non-religious aims (social, political, economic, ethnic, etc.), but to claim those somehow eradicate the religious aspect strains credulity.



Eh, not quite. The actual states didn't really take part in the Crusades until the call for them by Bernard at the onset of the Second Crusade. This was in response to the failure of the first Crusader army to take the field in the First Crusade, Peter the Hermit's People's Army. Even the professional armies of the First Crusade weren't necessarily designated as representatives of the states from which they came. And, even I discount the greed theory based on the idea that somehow all the nobles who went on the First Crusade were tertiary sons in a primogeniture world. Most--if not all--of these guys were moved by something other than selfish motives or social/economic pressures. Maybe, it had to do with plenary indulgence, remission of sins, and such promised to those who took back Jerusalem for Christ or just general religious fervor stirred up by tales of persecuted pilgrims and devastated churches. Since, you know, these were religious wars.

The one I will give you is that Norman who founded the principality of Edessa. Dude was a total douche and, I believe, motivated completely by greed.



As with most everything, we'll probably just have to agree to disagree here. There are many of us in the field that believe such distinctions do more harm than good. Many of the movements pointed to as a way to prove that secularism is just as/more violent than religion are very religious in character while atheistic in scope. Even the most rabid of the "anti-religious" campaigns run parallel to the establishment of leader/state/race/humanity/philosophical concept cults that are rehabilitations of religious phenomena that spans the course of our known history.



I'll try to dig up the direct quotes, but I seem to remember Bernard of Clairvaux (charged by Pope Eugene...I think...with organizing and executing the Second Crusade on behalf of the Church) writing quite fondly of how the death of infidels brought glory to God. I will give him credit for tamping down on violence against Jews during the Second Crusade, though.

As for the Klan, my point is that without the Churches/ministers adopting it and opening themselves up to it due to its turn toward Anti-Catholicism then it would have just withered away into Stone Mountain obscurity. I can concede that the Protestant Churches weren't there at its conception. However, I do believe it was their open adoption of the movement that allowed the Klan to reach the levels it did at the time.

RAWK