Was the crusades purely defensive?

> no battle for Constantinople
FAKE MAP

>Constantinople
>battle

Of course

Just like the Palestinians attacking Israel in self defense

Defending from Muslims who already conquered it like hundreds years already? It is like defending Berlin from Napoleon today.

Crusades weren't launched to defend the Holy Land, but to reverse the results of an already settled campaign. They were full-fledged campaigns in their own right, not counter-offensives in military terms.

>trying to build up forces and remove the heretics
>the fucking Orthodox faggots do literally dick all and let The Holy Land fall to appease the snakes
>The Latins had to come in and try to remove heretics and defend The Holy Land again
>isn't a defensive war

Religion, like any ideological indoctrination, prepares the ground, narrows the view, makes it easier to manipulate and justify and then, once they have blood on their hands, sanctifies and comforts the killers. It's a tool of the powerful, the ruthless and the mad.

...

We dinu dunuffin *sacks Constantinople*

>I base this on absolutely nothing
noise.
Religion gives answers, without answers you seek them out, there's nothing to suggest that a civilization couldn't be formed around pure might of a tribal lord if there was no religion to keep people in check.

Exactly the kind of thorough, watertight rebuttal I've come to expect from the religiously-minded.

...you're implying that belief in the paranormal causes people to spontaneously plant crops, write, gather wealth, and organize themselves into heirarchal societies?

>implying the Orthodox didn't have it coming

Except the Islamic world and Christian Europe were still in conflict to some degree (invasions of southern Italy, piracy across the Mediterranean, repeated invasions of Byzantium), and the Holy Land was still majority Christian at that point, and the newest arrivals to the region (the Seljuk Turks) were absolutely mistreating the Christian population. Coupled with Byzantium's direct pleas for western intervention, and the fact that Christian Europe in the west had only just recently gotten the strength to effectively retaliate the Crusades could be considered defensive to some degree. At least in principle
The centuries in between the first Islamic conquest and the firs crusade don't really matter when it's a fairly continuous assault from the Islamic world

>meaningless rhetoric
shitpost discarded

Rebuttal? You simply hate the light.

>This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out by God.
John 3:19-21

Finally some one who recognizes religions role in the start of civilization, hail thor!

Monotheistic religions are by default conflict orientated by their very founding definitions. To exclude all others as heretics whilst proclaiming that the true path to the divine belongs to a specific group was always going to create fierce opposition which ultimately leads to violence.

No, I am telling you that the spiritually empty are like animals.

Religion could be just a downside of spirituality.

Roughly defensive, yeah. Liberals like to argue da mooslims wuz so progressive they spared and lived wit da joos and da christians in peace, and while that might be true they were still very aggressive towards Europe.

Your statement is nonsensical.

Wrong. Religion can and has been used as a framework for the study of the natural world. Most intellectuals and natural philosophers of the past did this because they all assumed that the world had been created by God and therefore they were studying his creation. This point of view allowed people to be both religious and curious enough to study the natural world through science, mathematics and astronomy etc. If being religious in general stunted a person's intellectual capacity then none of the greatest intellectuals to ever live would not be religious. Except that isnt the case at all, see Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton etc.

It all began when Moses had slaughtered farmers who occupied the land chosen by his people. The Arabs also praised God for the turmoil of the Byzantine and Persian empires which enabled them to spread from Arabia. The Crusades was a case of misguided mediaeval yobs going east to pillage and be blessed.

It certainly could be a useless side effect of some much more fundamental and important cognitive functions.

So we're going with the mish mash of pseudo-intellectual half truths that everyone needs to accept without question to mindlessly insult every religion because your parents made you go to Sunday school instead of letting you play video games

I never thought I would ever agree with you on anything but the spirituality existing without religion meme needs to to die. spirituality and religion are the same damn thing

>Except the Islamic world and Christian Europe were still in conflict to some degree
Sort of. It's not like any of these conflicts between Muslims and Western Christian factions in the past 300 years before the First Crusade involved either Fatimid North Africa, the Seljuk Turks, or the native Muslim dynasties of the Levant. The campaigns of Muslim emirs of Southern Italy had already been resolved decades earlier, and for about a century the Italian city-states had been raiding and conquering the Mediterranean islands rather than defending against Moorish pirates.

I believe in God but religion seems to be a scam around legit concept.

>I never thought I would ever agree with you on anything but
Why and why "but"?

I wanna pet that lamb.

because I'm atheist scum

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#Etymology

> are the same damn thing
They aren't. One is an attribute of a person. Other is a set of culture practices how to express it. As different as sexuality and prostitution.

What about hugging the Lamb of God?

Why "but"?

But why would Jesus hug me>

My bad for , I thought that with you were implying your statement is the fruit of your use of more important cognitive functions, in other words "im smart, ur stupid".

>Why "but"?
did I make a grammar error or something? if I'm an atheist then I'm obviously going to disagree with a lot of your posts since you mostly post in religion threads

Why are you an atheist?

CRUSADER CRUSADER PLEASE TAKE ME WITH YOU
youtube.com/watch?v=yhhDbaah9DQ

By accepting Him and following His teachings, why wouldn't He?

>If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
John 14:23

Can you explain what you mean by this? From my point of view religion is mostly a waste of time just because Absolute Power is so high above humans that they couldn't really influence it and even use it as some kind of referent point in their lives. Seems crystal clear that God is real, but all worship is the trying to catch reflections in the water at best. And most of our etymologies covers that fruitless effort.

>This image proves the Crusades were defensive. They weren't motivated by "defense", they were a politcal takeover disguised as a holy crusade, no amount of Islamic conquests changes the motivations of the Pope, the Byzantine Emperor, and any random european noble.
Also: Seljuk Turk=/=Forces of Saladin

ye and if they didnt happen ud all be speakin muslim

>Seems crystal clear that God is real
You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! (James 2:19)

Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. You need to understand this. He is the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.

Underrated post.

The Qu'ran calls us to peace. Muhammad lived a saintly life and fought to stop slavery, he encouraged his followers to pursue peace at all costs. No one can honestly read the Qu'ran and not see its beauty, its call to universal brotherhood and sisterhood, it insistence on peace. The early Muslims completely expanded their territories by peaceful preaching, unlike the Crusaders.

Overpopulation drove the Crusades.

Muhammad was a gluttonous wealthy slave owner, an adulterer, a child-molesting pedophile, a murderer, a liar, he encouraged theft, rape, torture and the list goes on. He was the pawn of Satan and is now in Hell.

Yeah, dumbass?

Stoneage people had religious beliefs and the pic in the second post I quoted is a perfect example of cherrypicking.

religion provides the necessary ideological framework that allows groups of people to organize themselves into hierarchical, agricultural societies

Abrahamic religion is a result of agriculture. It wasn't a precursor whatsoever.

So, like human ideologies, armies, laws and actual fucking tools like hammers then .

Yeah right

If you believe in the clash of civilizations, then yes; else, nope.

Basically if you believe wars between purely Christian factions and purely Muslim factions is war between Christianity and Islam then it was defensive.

No, not purely, but there were still quite a few Christians living in the Holy Land who saw themselves as an occupied people.

>christians dindu nuffin
when will this meme picture stop being posted

If you are going to include all muslim conquests 632-1920, might as well include the christian colonialism, imperialism and also the often forgotten northern crusades.

>cherrypicking
How?

>Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Romans 1:28-32

He's correct.
If cavemen don't think that big bad shaman can kill them with just a glance, then they won't do what big bad shaman tells them to do

The first Crusade was technically defensive from the Byzantine's point of view.

If I have one dream for the human race it is that religion will vanish in its entirety, and that future generations will look back on these very dark times and scratch their heads at what their ancestors were prepared to do in its name.

Religion is an insult to human dignity.

You have no heart

All anyone needs to do to understand that religions breed, and serve to justify, violence (and myriad other forms of immoral, rotten, perverse, and unethical behavior) is to read their "holy" books.

And what of the love that they foster, and the countless artists, writers and creators they have inspired to make the world a better place?
You won't get anywhere if you keep thinking in black and white

Human dignity is an insult a human dignity.

We'll go to war over a bucket, gas a man for simply having a different skin color, and alienate one another over unfounded rumors.

Remove religion, and you'll realize humanity will make up another easy excuse to go to war over.

Does this mean religion should be removed? No, I'm saying humans are fucking savages, regardless of religion.

>religion is bad and not the basis for all of human civilization and human achievement

Yeah, man, and World War II wasn't just a continuation of World War I.

Seriously?

Would there be mass genocides against groups who follow a different sky fairy to you? No.

Would medieval and barbaric regimes be able to justify witch burnings, inqisitios and subjugation of women? No.

Would there be suicide bombers without the deluded promise of a made-up heaven? No.

>we'll be better people once we get rid of religion

We're already shit people WITH religion. We'll still be shit people without it. We'll just make up ANOTHER reason to be shit to one another.

No, we'll just do all these things under another thing. Like buckets. Or ideologies. Or even dick girth.

I'm not even kidding. The greatest genocide was race-driven. Sri Lanka suffered from race-based terrorism (aggravated by the perfidious Albion when it was a British colony). The Cold War was ideological in nature.

There was a war over a fucking bucket. A FUCKING BUCKET.

Yes, yes and yes.

All of those were due to external factors and would have happened regardless; religion was just a convenient excuse to act upon them.

And the same could be argued the other way around.

Would Ashoka have stopped his carnage if he hadn't converted?

How many people have done the right thing because they believed that they would be punished otherwise?

Ashoka converted to Buddhism and later Jainism BECAUSE he felt horrified by the pain and suffering he caused

Remove every bit of text from any religious book encouraging discrimination, violence, torture and death and then we can have a discussion. Until then, I know who my enemies are and I won't be pandering to them.

These "Holy"books should be illegal

Should Marx be illegal too?

So is religion to blame for man's innate cruelty?

I beg to disagree.

This is completely facetious

No rational person thinks medieval standards of morality are acceptable today

Going by that metric, all of Karl Marx's works should be illegal, Ayn Rand should be doubly illegal and getting a copy of Mein Kampf should get you the death sentence. And while we're at it, propaganda and the mass media as well.

Any form of media that fulfills what you've laid out should be illegal then.

Marx wrote that violence was acceptable to establish his ideal state.

Christian morality is deeply ingrained within Western culture. To say otherwise is silly. There is a clear line of thought that links the late writers of Rome to those of our modern day. Most of that thought was created by Christians with Christian mindsets.

Theres a slight difference,
None of those works claim to be the literal word of god.

Religion is (and always has been) the mechanism that enables men to carry out the horrific duties of murder of destruction that war demands, in the belief that they are doing something good

Remove religion from the equation and humanity would be far less inclined to endure misery and hatred that wars bring.

Aye, but they'd be less inclined to do acts of good as well

Less wars but also less charity?

Sounds like a good trade-off to me

>Building up forces.
You know what western Europe was doing between the time Jerusalem was conquered (600's AD) and the first crusade? (late 1000's)

Minding their own business and fighting each other. They was no master plan passed down for close to 500 years of retaking Jerusalem or some shit. Hell, the Frankish Empire even maintained friendly relations with the Abbasid Caliphate. Between those years the Catholics in the west were more concerned about defending from Vikings or Steppenegroes and the odd Muslim incursion from Spain.

If anything, the Crusades was a counterattack. But that implies there's a long, continuous, unceasing war between islam and christianity, which is historically the wrong way to look at things.

More people die of starvation and disease than of war.
This idea that a religion-less world would be a utopia is incredibly silly, and I will ask you to please consider going back to redd!t

But you support welfare?

Religion is the most convenient excuse that leaders use to manipulate the fact that we are tribalistic, aka the "us versus them" mentality. It's easy to use because everyone is religious, even nominally. Most humans are too lazy to be critical.

Again, once you remove religion, all your leaders need to do is to find another thread of commonality. The usual fallback is nationalism or "Do this or I'll fucking arrest you."

Fuck, have you even heard of football (divegrass) hooliganism? Europe's full of it. Over fucking sports teams. That chase a fucking ball over a grass field for 120+ minutes.

If man wants to thoroughly fuck over another man, he'll find some justification for it. No exceptions.

Again you are avoiding the fact that religious books give specific instructions too kill non-believers/those who arnt right.

yes it has harnessed tribalism just like football does, but football is not responsible for the majority (yes Majority) of wars through the centuries.

It lends legitimacy to a holy crusade,it allows you to absolve yourself of the responsibilities of the horrors of war

Great Answer

Fuckin' Christfags

>mfw living in Northern Ireland where football and religious beliefs are well and truly conflated.

If you wear Celtic, you are Catholic; Rangers, a Protestant. That's how it is and it is very much as instigator of violence.

Good times.

Ah, I tip my hate to you, Sir. Care for a gimlet, drop of Chardonnay? While we muse and ponder these questions and laugh at the feeble minds of the religious, let us stave from ever falling into the pall of an eunni for there is much at stake right now. These sheep of religious stock must be tamed or culled, Monsieur as you will agree - perhaps we should strike the Shepherd and watch the sheep scatter? I think so too; the institutions of the dull minded - The Church, must be eradicated if reason is to ever prevail.

Then we shall walk hand in hand, drinking Gimlets into an Idyll life full of sagacity and peace of mind.

>Tips