AlexM comments on Modest Superintelligences - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Wei_Dai 22 March 2012 12:29AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 23 March 2012 03:07:42PM 0 points [-]

From your first link:

The massacre of the Rhineland Jews by the People's Crusade, and other associated persecutions, were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church. The bishops of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms had attempted to protect the Jews of those towns within the walls of their own palaces, but the People's Crusade broke in to slaughter them. Fifty years later when St. Bernard of Clairvaux was urging recruitment for the Second Crusade, he specifically criticized the attacks on Jews which occurred in the First Crusade. [...] Albert of Aachen's own view was that the People's Crusade were uncontrollable semi-Christianized country-folk (citing the "goose incident", which Hebrew chronicles corroborate), who massacred hundreds of Jewish women and children, and that the People's Crusade ultimately got what they deserved when they were themselves promptly slaughtered by Muslim forces as soon as they set foot in Asia Minor.

So your ancestors were killed by stupid peasants, not the Church.

Few remember the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the complete destruction of the Cathars.

What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. "Kill them all, God will know His own." And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can't just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don't kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.

Comment author: AlexM 23 March 2012 07:49:46PM 3 points [-]

What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. "Kill them all, God will know His own." And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can't just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don't kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.

I see you are fan of Marx and Weber. If Protestantism leads to capitalism and capitalism leads to communism, it makes sense to strike at the root of the evil.

Unfortunately, one fact kills the theory - in Catholic countries, communism was extremely strong and popular, while in Protestant ones communist parties were nearly nonexistent.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 March 2012 11:08:36AM *  1 point [-]

I've read little Marx or Weber; that's not really my model. My model is that rejection of politco-religious authority leads to democracy, liberalism, communism, atheism, fascism, uFAI, and a bunch of other evil things; the divine right of kings was the only defensible Schelling point, and when it fell chaos spread. Communism wouldn't have existed if the Catholic Kings had crushed the progenitors of the Reformation the same way they crushed the Cathars.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 24 March 2012 03:15:02PM 2 points [-]

Communism wouldn't have existed if the Catholic Kings had crushed the progenitors of the Reformation the same way they crushed the Cathars.

Actually communism only seems to have taken hold in monarchies and other right-wing tyrannies that attempted to stifle political speech. Countries like Russia and China and Cuba, as opposed to countries like England and France and the United States, or even countries like Canada and Sweden. Even countries recently threatened to fall under communist control were authoritarian monarchies like Nepal.

Not very paradoxically the power of communist regimes to slaughter and oppress tends to derive from the authoritarian mechanisms of the state they inherited.

So I think you have it the other way around.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 25 March 2012 09:03:00PM 2 points [-]

You are arguing with a religious person about the value of an untestable counterfactual.