[Pants-of-dog]

It is a simplification to say that politicians kill their own people over a mere difference of opinion.

I could say that capitalists did that too when they enacted their killings of indigenous people. After all, there was merely a difference of opinion about how the land should be used.

But that would gloss over the whole thing about enriching yourself by taking someone else’s land and resources, racism, snd of course, religion.

[Truth To Power]

http://AtheismIsEvil.blogspot.com

Has anyone in this thread even bothered to define evil? What are you talking about?

[Besoeker2]

profoundly immoral and wicked.

[Julian658]

Has anyone in this thread even bothered to define evil? What are you talking about?

Evil is the absence of good. This has been known since the 4th century.

[SolarCross]

evil (adj.)

Old English yfel (Kentish evel) "bad, vicious, ill, wicked," from Proto-Germanic *ubilaz (source also of Old Saxon ubil, Old Frisian and Middle Dutch evel, Dutch euvel, Old High German ubil, German übel, Gothic ubils), from PIE *upelo-, from root *wap- "bad, evil" (source also of Hittite huwapp- "evil").

In Old English and other older Germanic languages other than Scandinavian, "this word is the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike or disparagement" [OED]. Evil was the word the Anglo-Saxons used where we would use bad, cruel, unskillful, defective (adj.), or harm (n.), crime, misfortune, disease (n.). In Middle English, bad took the wider range of senses and evil began to focus on moral badness. Both words have good as their opposite. Evil-favored (1520s) meant "ugly." Evilchild is attested as an English surname from 13c.

The adverb is Old English yfele, originally of words or speech. Also as a noun in Old English, "what is bad; sin, wickedness; anything that causes injury, morally or physically." Especially of a malady or disease from c. 1200. The meaning "extreme moral wickedness" was one of the senses of the Old English noun, but it did not become established as the main sense of the modern word until 18c. As a noun, Middle English also had evilty. Related: Evilly. Evil eye (Latin oculus malus) was Old English eage yfel. The jocular notion of an evil twin as an excuse for regrettable deeds is by 1986, American English, from an old motif in mythology.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/evil

[Godstud]

Evil is the absence of good. This has been known since the 4th century.

So the absence of black would be white? The world isn't that simple.

[Julian658]

:lol: So the absence of black would be white? The world isn't that simple.

You are the king of the straw man. I did not imply that. However, the absence of light is darkness. That would have been a better analogy. How about the absence of heat is cold? Another good one.

[Godstud]

Evil is the absence of good.

You are the one who made this statement, not I.
Many things are often subjective, and so the black and white view you take, is simplistic, at best. You like to think that if there's no evil, then everything's good. It's cute, but a bit naive.

That said, Atheism is mostly good, since morality is not limited to religion, but the human condition.

[Julian658]

You are the one who made this statement, not I.
Many things are often subjective, and so the black and white view you take, is simplistic, at best. You like to think that if there's no evil, then everything's good. It's cute, but a bit naive.

That said, Atheism is mostly good, since morality is not limited to religion, but the human condition.

Evil or good is whatever is best for the evolution of man. Sometimes it is advantageous to be selfish and every once in a while it is advantageous to be altruistic. Sometimes violence is justified and sometimes it is best to walk away. There is no such thing as evil or good. The terms are defined by the culture of the society .

[Godstud]

Yes, and so Atheism is not evil as you stated:

There is no such thing as evil or good. The terms are defined by the culture of the society .

I am glad that we are in agreement.

[Hindsite]

It is a simplification to say that politicians kill their own people over a mere difference of opinion.

I could say that capitalists did that too when they enacted their killings of indigenous people. After all, there was merely a difference of opinion about how the land should be used.

But that would gloss over the whole thing about enriching yourself by taking someone else’s land and resources, racism, snd of course, religion.

These so-called "indigenous people" that the settlers referred to as "savages" attacked and burned down the homes of the peaceful settlers. This is why we had to call in our cavalry troops to rid the area of this menace of evil savages.
Praise the Lord.

[Sivad]

Has anyone in this thread even bothered to define evil? What are you talking about?

Atheism also needs to be defined. If by atheism the op means anyone who doesn't believe in his fundie personal creator god then I'm an atheist and theism is evil. If the op means scientistic materialism then it's not really evil, it's just fucking stupid.

[Godstud]

These so-called "indigenous people" that the settlers referred to as "savages" attacked and burned down the homes of the peaceful settlers. This is why we had to call in our cavalry troops to rid the area of this menace of evil savages.

You must mean the "non-peaceful invaders". These peaceful settlers moved into other people's lands and then laid claim to them, and when the inhabitants objected to that, the "peaceful settlers", sent in their military to ethnically cleanse the indigenous peoples, or displace them to places where the "peaceful settlers" didn't want, like swamps and deserts.

Your knowledge of history is quite laughable. I won't even go into the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population.

[Hindsite]

You must mean the "non-peaceful invaders". These peaceful settlers moved into other people's lands and then laid claim to them, and when the inhabitants objected to that, the "peaceful settlers", sent in their military to ethnically cleanse the indigenous peoples, or displace them to places where the "peaceful settlers" didn't want, like swamps and deserts.

Your knowledge of history is quite laughable. I won't even go into the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population.

I know the history very well. I saw it on the movies from the time I was a child. You don't know anything about it. You are from Canada. How did the Canadians get their land to settle on? They killed the evil "savages" too.

[Godstud]

I know the history very well. I saw it on the movies from the time I was a child.

I see you're thoroughly brain-washed by idiotic American TV. TV is not a good place to get your American History... particularly in old "Westerns". They tend to romanticize things, too much, and gloss over the atrocities.

You don't know anything about it. You are from Canada.

I am likely better educated than you, so saying I don't know anything about it, is simply childish and petty. Do you have an actual argument, or is it the tired, and shallow, "You don't live here, so you don't know!", silliness?

How did the Canadians get their land to settle on? They killed the evil "savages" too.

Actually, Canada had a pretty miserable history, as well. It wasn't as bad as USA, mind you, which is why many natives fled to Canada, to avoid persecution, death and internment in "reserves".

They killed the evil "savages" too.

They were neither evil, nor savages. You referring to them as such, shows how ignorant, and racist, you actually are.

[Hindsite]

I see you're thoroughly brain-washed by idiotic American TV. TV is not a good place to get your American History... particularly in old "Westerns". They tend to romanticize things, too much, and gloss over the atrocities.

I saw it in movie theaters before there was television.

I am likely better educated than you, so saying I don't know anything about it, is simply childish and petty.

I am better educated than you and I am the Near Genius. I did not say I did not know anything about it. I said I know a lot about it from movies before your time.

They were neither evil, nor savages. You referring to them as such, shows how ignorant, and racist, you actually are.

Some were savages and some were okay. This does not make me an ignorant racist, but a knowledgeable realist.
HalleluYah

[Godstud]

I saw it in movie theaters before there was television.

Semantics. That's not an argument. All those movies eventually made it to TV, where they are still watchable. Having a Hollywood education about the Native Americans is pretty sad. You should endeavor to go beyond that.

I didn't get my education from TV, thankfully.

I did not say I did not know anything about it.

Then you should probably not comment on it, as it makes you look stupid, when you do.

Some were savages and some were okay. This does not make me an ignorant racist, but a knowledgeable realist.

That you refer to them as such(a gross generalization), only shows your true colours. I don't suppose you consider that most of the settlers were savages, in their own ways, but they were.

[annatar1914]

I won't even go into the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which inspired a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population.

America's ''Manifest Destiny'' had a direct influence on the thinking of Adolf Hitler, via the American-based Western fictional stories of German writer Karl May, influencing the development of the Nazi ''Lebensborn'' principle... Conquest, enslavement, or extermination of ''Savages'', in Hitler's case from the badlands of Eastern Europe. See, to these types of generally Germanic Fascists, they are surrounded and outnumbered by hordes of brutish sub-humans; Slavs, Celts, Latins, etc in Europe... As well as the darker peoples of the rest of the world in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, all squatting on land and resources best used and developed by the ''superior Aryan stock''. We're all the ''N-Word'' to these folks, although fear and tactical considerations usually keep them more or less secretive about what they really think of us these days.

[Hindsite]

I didn't get my education from TV, thankfully.

You apparently got your education from crazy people.

That you refer to them as such(a gross generalization), only shows your true colours. I don't suppose you consider that most of the settlers were savages, in their own ways, but they were.

Those that attacked the decent and hard working settlers, killing some of them, and burning down their houses were evil savages. That should be an obvious and accurate generalization to make. It is simple common sense, which you seem to lack.

[Godstud]

You apparently got your education from crazy people.

It's not crazy to get it from Hollywood, like you got yours? Are you simply talking shit for the sake of it?

Those that attacked the decent and hard working settlers, killing some of them, and burning down their houses were evil savages. That should be an obvious and accurate generalization to make.

Yes, that Hollywood education of yours is fucking pathetic. Did you see this on Last of the Mohicans? Or was it some other movie?

Educate yourself!
When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’
Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension.

On a cool May day in 1758, a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor’s children in rural western Pennsylvania. In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. She became the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life.

While Mary was ultimately returned to her white family—and some evidence points to her having lived happily with her adopted Indian tribe—stories such as hers became a cautionary tale among white settlers, stoking fear of “savage” Indians and creating a paranoia that escalated into all-out Indian hating.

From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.

The reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land—and the abundant natural resources that came with it. Indians’ collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them.

Even more fundamentally, indigenous people were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. To settlers fearful that a loved one might become the next Mary Campbell, all this stoked racial hatred and paranoia, making it easy to paint indigenous peoples as pagan savages who must be killed in the name of civilization and Christianity.

The Gnaddenhutten Massacre

In 1782, a group of Moravian Protestants in Ohio killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets.

Ironically, the Delawares were the first Indians to capture a white settler and the first to sign a U.S.-Indian treaty four years earlier—one that set the precedent for 374 Indian treaties over the next 100 years. Often employing the common phrase “peace and friendship,” 229 of these agreements led to tribal lands being ceded to a rapidly expanding United States. Many treaties negotiated U.S.-Indian trade relations, establishing a trading system to oust the British and their goods—especially the guns they put in Indian hands.

Battle of Tippecanoe, 1811. (Credit: Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Battle of Tippecanoe

In the early 1800s, the rise of the charismatic Shawnee war leader, Tecumseh, and his brother, known as the Prophet, convinced Indians of various tribes that it was in their interest to stop tribal in-fighting and band together to protect their mutual interests. The decision by Indiana Territorial Governor (and later President) William Henry Harrison in 1811 to attack and burn Prophetstown, the Indian capital on the Tippecanoe River, while Tecumseh was away campaigning the Choctaws for more warriors, incited the Shawnee leader to attack again. This time he persuaded the British to fight alongside his warriors against the Americans. Tecumseh’s death and defeat at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 made the Ohio frontier “safe” for settlers—at least for a time.

Creek Indians and inhabitants of Fort Mims, Alabama, during the Creek War, 1813. (Credit: MPI/Getty Images)

The Creek War

In the South, the War of 1812 bled into the Mvskoke Creek War of 1813-1814, also known as the Red Stick War. An inter-tribal conflict among Creek Indian factions, the war also engaged U.S. militias, along with the British and Spanish, who backed the Indians to help keep Americans from encroaching on their interests. Early Creek victories inspired General Andrew Jackson to retaliate with 2,500 men, mostly Tennessee militia, in early November 1814. To avenge the Creek-led massacre at Fort Mims, Jackson and his men slaughtered 186 Creeks at Tallushatchee. “We shot them like dogs!” said Davy Crockett.

In desperation, Mvskoke Creek women killed their children so they would not see the soldiers butcher them. As one woman started to kill her baby, the famed Indian fighter, Andrew Jackson, grabbed the child from the mother. Later, he delivered the Indian baby to his wife Rachel, for both of them to raise as their own.

Jackson went on to win the Red Stick War in a decisive battle at Horseshoe Bend. The subsequent treaty required the Creek to cede more than 21 million acres of land to the United States.

A painting depicting the Trail of Tears, when Native Americans were forced by law to leave their homelands and move to designated territory in the west. (Credit: Al Moldvay/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Forced Removal

One of the most bitterly debated issues on the floor of Congress was the Indian Removal Bill of 1830, pushed hard by then-President Andrew Jackson. Despite being assailed by many legislators as immoral, the bill finally passed in the Senate by nine votes, 29 to 17, and by an even smaller margin in the House. In Jackson’s thinking, more than three dozen eastern tribes stood in the way of what he saw as the settlers’ divinely ordained rights to clear the wilderness, build homes and grow cotton and other crops. In his annual address to Congress in 1833, Jackson denounced Indians, stating, “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere [before] long disappear.”

From 1830 to 1840, the U.S. army removed 60,000 Indians—Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and others—from the East in exchange for new territory west of the Mississippi. Thousands died along the way of what became known as the “Trail of Tears.” And as whites pushed ever westward, the Indian-designated territory continued to shrink.

Execution of Dakota Sioux Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, 1862. (Credit: Library of Congress/Photo12/UIG/Getty Images)

Mankato Executions

Annuities and provisions promised to Indians through government treaties were slow in being delivered, leaving Dakota Sioux people, who were restricted to reservation lands on the Minnesota frontier, starving and desperate. After a raid of nearby white farms for food turned into a deadly encounter, Dakotas continued raiding, leading to the Little Crow War of 1862, in which 490 settlers, mostly women and children, were killed. President Lincoln sent soldiers, who defeated the Dakota; and after a series of mass trials, more than 300 Dakota men were sentenced to death.

While Lincoln commuted most of the sentences, on the day after Christmas at Mankato, military officials hung 38 Dakotas at once—the largest mass execution in American history. More than 4,000 people gathered in the streets to watch, many bringing picnic baskets. The 38 were buried in a shallow grave along the Minnesota River, but physicians dug up most of the bodies to use as medical cadavers.

Sand Creek Massacre, 1864. (Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images)

The Sand Creek Massacre

Indians fighting back to defend their people and protect their homelands provided ample justification for American forces to kill any Indians on the frontier, even peaceful ones. On November 29, 1864, a former Methodist minister, John Chivington, led a surprise attack on peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos on their reservation at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. His force consisted of 700 men, mainly volunteers in the First and Third Colorado Regiments. Plied with too much liquor the night before, Chivington and his men boasted that they were going to kill Indians. Once a missionary to Wyandot Indians in Kansas, Chivington declared, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!…I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heavens to kill Indians.”

That fateful cold morning, Chivington led his men against 200 Cheyennes and Arapahos. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle had tied an American flag to his lodge pole as he was instructed, to indicate his village was at peace. When Chivington ordered the attack, Black Kettle tied a white flag beneath the American flag, calling to his people that the soldiers would not kill them. As many as 160 were massacred, mostly women and children.

Custer’s Campaigns

At this time, a war hero from the Civil War emerged in the West. George Armstrong Custer rode in front of his mostly Irish Seventh Cavalry to the Irish drinking tune, “Gary Owen.” Custer wanted fame, and killing Indians—especially peaceful ones who weren’t expecting to be attacked—represented opportunity.

On orders from General Philip Sheridan, Custer and his Seventh attacked the Cheyennes and their Arapaho allies on the western frontier of Indian Territory on November 29, 1868, near the Washita River. After slaughtering 103 warriors, plus women and children, Custer dispatched to Sheridan that “a great victory was won,” and described, “One, the Indians were asleep. Two, the women and children offered little resistance. Three, the Indians are bewildered by our change of policy.”

Custer later led the Seventh Cavalry on the northern Plains against the Lakota, Arapahos and Northern Cheyennes. He boasted, “The Seventh can handle anything it meets,” and “there are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”

Expecting another great surprise victory, Custer attacked the largest gathering of warriors on the high plains on June 25, 1876—near Montana’s Little Big Horn river. Custer’s death at the hands of Indians making their own last stand only intensified propaganda for military revenge to bring “peace” to the frontier.

Burial of the dead after the massacre of Wounded Knee. (Credit: Niday Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo)

Wounded Knee

Anti-Indian anger rose in the late 1880s as the Ghost Dance spiritual movement emerged, spreading to two dozen tribes across 16 states, and threatening efforts to culturally assimilate tribal peoples. Ghost Dance, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs, called for a rejection of the white man’s ways. In December 1890, several weeks after the famed Sioux Chief Sitting Bull was killed while being arrested, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry massacred 150 to 200 ghost dancers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

For their mass murder of disarmed Lakota, President Benjamin Harrison awarded about 20 soldiers the Medal of Honor.

Resilience

Three years after Wounded Knee, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner announced at a small gathering of historians in Chicago that the “frontier had closed,” with his famous thesis arguing for American exceptionalism. James Earle Fraser’s famed sculpture “End of the Trail,” which debuted in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, exemplified the idea of a broken, vanishing race. Ironically, just over 100 years later, the resilient American Indian population has survived into the 21st century and swelled to more than 5 million people.
https://www.history.com/news/native-ame ... ted-states