| > I don't think this is true. Judaism and Islam both feature the same fundamental concept: there is a single god who cares about you personally and that your behavior and belief will shape that relationship in terms of direct, personal consequence. This is not true of the pre-Abrahamic faiths, it's not true of the religions of Asia or Africa. "Personal relationship with God" refers to the idea that God knows us as individuals and cares about us individually (rather than as an abstract collective). That's a uniquely Christian theology. Islam and Judaism both believe that God knows and cares about his creation in general, but that a relationship with God isn't possible because God is beyond human understanding (Christianity also agrees that God transcends human understanding, but disagrees that this prevents a personal relationship). Indeed, both Islam and Judaism maintain that "God is not a person", while Christianity maintains that Jesus is the literal personification of God. > Can you name any other conquerors in history who had a clearly and repeatedly stated goal of the complete elimination of the conquered? 1. I don't accept that this is true for European powers in any general sense at any point in history. 2. Selection bias--even if prehistoric peoples did have this stated goal, we would be far less likely to have any evidence. We do have evidence of prehistoric genocides and all manner of other violence, and we don't have any compelling framework for why Europeans would be uniquely evil. Even still, history records many attempted and successful genocides by non-European powers (e.g., Rwanda, Cambodia, Ottoman Empire, etc) and many European genocides which predate the Christianization of Europe (contrary to your framework about why Europeans are/were uniquely evil). 3. I don't accept that "repeated stated goals of genocide" is the right metric when we can look at actual genocides. |
My question wasn't about the totality of the European record, but specifically about what was done when they arrived in the Americas.