Because you exlude Christians persecuting Christians. I´m sorry, that doesn´t make sense.
Why not?
To repeat myself: we were interested in which number is greater: Christians killed in persecutions, or people killed by Christians in persecutions. Christians killed
by Christians in persecutions fall under both categories, and therefore raise both numbers, so they are neither here nor there as far as this question goes.
Ah, but the Christians were more succesful, weren´t they?
Were they? What relevance does that have, though?
Also, see above. Sir, your reasoning is flawd: Chrsitian hatefulness shows its face especially (though not exclusively) when fellow Christians are involved. "Thou shalt not kill" is the first Commandment Christians will break.
You're going beyond hyperbole to absurdity now. I know a lot of Christians and I can assure you that not one of them has broken the commandment you mention, although certainly many of them have broken various of the others.
As mentioned the Middle East crusades weren´t the only ones. "They are not cases of people in power oppressing those within their dominions." I´d like to see some citation for that.
What kind of citation is required to support the claim that the Crusades to the Middle East were
wars? I don't understand what you're disputing here. And certainly the Middle East Crusades were not the only one. You'll notice that I included the Albigensian Crusade in my tally of persecutions, even though it's questionable whether it was strictly a persecution (since it could also be seen as a war), and one might also call it a case of persecution
of Christians just as much as one
by Christians, depending on whether one thinks of the Cathars as Christians or not.
Also, the religious wars of Christianity were in most cases indeed accompanied by persecution. I mention only the Reformation era.
Right, so you accept that there is a distinction between a religious war and a persecution (otherwise it wouldn't make any sense to say that the one can be "accompanied" by the other). It's the persecutions we're interested in, not the religious wars.
Not at all. Firstly, Christianity has existed in China since at least the seventh century.
Yes. Why does that undermine what I said?
Secondly, Christianity in China is actually a case in point: it has not (because it could not) spread on the wings of aggression. (BTW, the most optimistic estimate of Christians today are between 40-130 million , most of which are Protestant.)
So the existence of tens of millions of Christians, who came to their faith as a result of non-aggressive means, somehow supports your claim that Christianity spreads primarily through aggression? I don't understand what this is supposed to demonstrate.
In fact the history of Catholicism in China seems to me to undermine your claim that Christianity spreads primarily through aggressive means. When the Jesuit policy of cultural respect was followed, Catholicism did quite well in China - nowhere near as well as it had done in Japan, but it still spread steadily and respectably. Then the Vatican overturned the Jesuit policy and insisted that Catholicism was incompatible with key elements of Chinese culture, and that evangelism had to be done in a way that opposed these elements. The result was what you would presumably term a more aggressive method of evangelism (although it was certainly not violent). The result was that the Chinese authorities banned Christianity, tried to chuck out all the missionaries, and generally suppressed the religion. That is why there are not many Catholics in China today, at least compared to Protestants. So there's an example of how the less aggressive mission technique was more successful than the more aggressive one. That suggests that it is quite wrong to think that Christianity has spread mainly through aggression and has used less aggressive techniques only as a feeble last resort. A similar example could be made of the British Empire; in the early nineteenth century, missionaries within the Empire tended to be quite culturally sensitive and keen to integrate themselves into the cultures they visited, without forcing Christianity on people. This was, in part, because the missionaries tended to be nonconformists and have little official backing. They were very successful (India and Nigeria being good examples). In the later nineteenth century, things changed as the authorities took up the cause of mission and combined it with the cause of the Empire itself, and trade. The culturally sensitive approach to mission fell into disfavour and a much more aggressive approach was used instead. It was much less successful.
Thirdly, Africa is again a case in point. Apart from Ethiopia and the Coptic Church (which have been present since ancient times), Christianity has only spread in modern times, when violent means are no longer availbale to spread the word.
I don't understand what this is supposed to prove. Again, you're citing an example of very successful spreading of Christianity that didn't involve violence. So why does that support your claim that Christianity spreads primarily through violence, and not my claim that it doesn't?
Which only seems to be true for Christianity.
What are you trying to say here? That because Christian missionaries have suffered much more than missionaries of other religions - what does that prove, other than that Christian missionaries have been braver (or, perhaps, more foolhardy) than missionaries of other religions?
I notice you skipped over my example of the entire Americas...
I didn't have much to say to it. Certainly Christianity came to America in a very violent way. But I would dispute that this is typical of the way that Christianity has spread. I've given lots of counter-examples.
Africa. Christianity has only spread there after Western (i.e. Christian) conquest. Obviously since the colonizers left forceful conversiob was no longer an option; peaceful conversion was the only means left. Which was my point.
So you're admitting that forceful conversion didn't work, and that peaceful conversion did work. How was that your point?
Asia. Due to obvious reasons forceful conversion was (with some exceptions) not an option, resulting in 24 million followers in India, constituting 2.3% of India's population. Christinanity has been present in India very early and is almost as old as Christianity itself. Christianity has existed in China as early as the 7th century AD. Present day estimates are at 40 million Christians total, with a 2:1 Protestant-Catholic ratio. Both nations have a total population of over 1 billion. This is what happens when Christianity spreads peacefully.
Again, you're ignoring the facts of how Christianity
actually spread in these places. It spread much more successfully under (a) Catholic missionaries of the early modern period who, following the methods of people like Francis Xavier, Alessandro Valignano, and Matteo Ricci, showed great respect for the cultures they were living in and certainly did not use force or violence against them; and (b) nonconformist Protestant missionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who were typically operating quite independently of any "official" governmental or trade company capacity - people like Frederick Schwartz and William Carey. As is well known, the East India Company discouraged missions to the Indians for much of this period. When the Catholic Church changed its mission techniques to be more confrontational, and when the British authorities took over the Protestant missions, they tended to be a lot less effective.
In other words, if (as you seem to be implying) Christianity didn't spread very well in these countries, it certainly wasn't because it was doing so peacefully and peaceful means are less effective; if anything, it was because the peaceful means were not allowed to continue to flourish as they did in the early stages.
Finally, you're ignoring cases such as Korea, already mentioned frequently as an example of extremely successful non-violent mission (indeed Christianity started taking off there in the eighteenth century when a group of Korean intellectuals basically evangelised themselves by importing Catholicism from China). And Japan is another obvious case; the Jesuit missions under Xavier and his successors were incredibly successful, with hundreds of thousands of Japanese Christians by the end of the sixteenth centuries and some areas, such as Kyushu, being largely Christian. This was achieved by peaceful, Jesuitical means. Again, the late nineteenth century saw a tremendous spread of Christianity in Japan again, mainly done by Japanese Protestants who travelled around converting other Japanese (western missionaries were very restricted in their movements at this time). There was a big revival movement there in the 1880s which led many to hope, not without justification, that Japan might actually become a Christian country in the near future. Ultimately of course it faded, thanks in large part to the government's attempts to discourage Christianity in the 1890s and afterwards, but here again we see very successful spreading of Christianity through non-violent means.
You yourself mentioned that in Polynesia peaceful conversion was impossible, resulting in more martyrs. Conquest did the job.
Absolute nonsense; Christianity spread in the south Pacific thanks to the efforts of the London Missionary Society, a non-denominational organisation that operated with no official or governmental sanction at all. Their missionaries converted Tahiti in the 1810s with the help of the ruler, Pomare, and Tahitian missionaries subsequently travelled to other islands and spread the religion themselves. Samoan missionaries also played an important role. More LMS missionaries arrived, including John Williams and Aaron Buzacott, who was a builder who spent his time helping the islanders to build better houses, and preached to them as he did so (like St Paul with his tent-making). They preached in a way that did not try to replace the islanders' own culture with Christianity, but in a way that found common cultural links such as
tapu which could be Christianised. Christianity was known in the region as
Lotu.
Absolutely none of this had anything to do with European conquest, and everything to do with the European missionaries' genuine attempts to understand and respect the culture of the islanders and adapt their message to that culture, as well as help people's material wellbeing. And the success of Christianity in the region led to much less violence, since many of the island cultures revolved around constant warfare with their neighbours; when they became Christians this stopped, as did the practice of cannibalism (which had led to Williams' death in 1839). To assert that the Christianisation of the south seas was done through "conquest" is frankly insulting to the bravery and care of the people who did their best to spread their religion in a respectful and moral way, and who found great success in doing so.
Actually it is true. Early Christianity did not conform yet to the state - simply because the state did not agree with it. So yes, in these cases Christianity did spread peacefully - and was wiped out because it lacked state support.
Again, simplistic and largely irrelevant assertions. Apart from anything else, Christianity spread in western central Asia to a large extent because the Persians resettled huge numbers of captured Roman Christians there, so in fact it did have state support of a kind. But that's not really relevant; it seems to me that your response to any evidence that goes against your assertions is simply to say that it doesn't count, for some reason that makes no sense. You're happy to admit that Christianity has often spread peacefully, but for some reason that I cannot understand, you think that all of these examples somehow support your claim that Christianity spreads mainly through violence.
My point was not "that Christianity is notably violent"; indeed, early Christianity was not. However, as soon as it could, it was. That is my point.
It's not true, though. As I said before, Roman Christians did not start executing pagans until the time of Justinian - two and a half centuries after Constantine. Compare that to the thirty years it took pagans to start killing Christians after the emergence of that religion. You can say that Christians started being violent as soon as they had the opportunity to do so, if you want, but the evidence doesn't support it.
And obviously I did not resort to the use of individual examples, so I´m not sure why you mention them. I used the example of the conversion of the Americas (which you simply ignore) and Africa and opposed this to the (lack of) spread of Christianity in Asia, were violent means were not at their disposal.
Again, this ignores the history of how Christianity actually spread in those areas and in what circumstances, as I've said above.
