XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis   
   From: dd@dandrake.com   
      
   On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 09:15:12 UTC, Siwel Naph    
   wrote:   
      
   > I'd be interested to know whether you think the Church would have behaved   
   > worse or better had it won the ascendency in Japan its martyrs were   
   > seeking.   
      
   What does my opinion matter here?  My verifiable-falsifiable assertion is   
   that a whole lot of people were murdered by the native Buddhist-Shintoist   
   mut mainly Buddhist Japanese society for the crime of being of the wrong   
   religion.  What matter if they were Catholics, Muslims, or Quakers?   
      
   But I may want to take umbrage at the last phrase.  The victims were not   
   just a bunch of crazy missionaries going in and declaring "Convert, or   
   die, or kill me!"  There were lots of Japanese people who had decided to   
   adopt this dangerous foreign religion. If I'm wrong about this, and the   
   ones killed had sought martyrdom by making public disturbances that gave   
   the authorities no alternative to killing them, please let me know, with   
   citations.   
      
   >   
   > > That's a period when Buddhism was strong   
   > > enough that immediately upon the Meiji restoration (Thank you, USA --   
   > > but actually it was on the whole a good thing for Japan) the Shinto   
   > > (not montheists!)   
   >   
   > Which would be worthy of an exclamation mark only if I'd claimed   
   > monotheism alone was aggressive. I didn't.   
      
   My mistake. I thought Christianity was being singled out as especially   
   conducive to making war on theological enemies, and certainly we can't   
   single it out by contrast with other famous monotheisms (or the Amalekite   
   Liberation Front will get us); whereas some conspicuously non-monotheistic   
   belief systems have been examples of what might arguably be better.  But   
   I'll withdraw the exclamation point if that makes it easier to keep to the   
   point.   
      
      
   --   
   Dan Drake   
   dd@dandrake.com   
   http://www.dandrake.com/   
   porlockjr.blogspot.com   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)