The guilt-by-association attacks on Christians are illogical, insulting and divisive. The killing of Dr. Tiller by an insane antiabortion zealot cannot logically be blamed on Christian beliefs. The bible has many apparent contradictions but prohibition of murder is very clear.
Thou shalt not kill.
Only tiny extremist antiabortion groups that claim to be Christian attempt to justify murder in the name of Jesus. Attempts to blame Christianity for the sordid elements of its past are exercises in prejudice if the same criteria are not applied to the sordid history of other groups. Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot were atheist. Should atheism be blamed for their murder of millions? No. That would be illogical.
The shows of anti-Christian bigotry by a number of individuals here since Tiller's murder have been divisive to the causes Democrats and progressives. Christianity has never had one set of defined beliefs since Christ was crucified as texts such as the Gospels of Thomas and Mary make clear. The eastern orthodox church and the Roman church divided almost 2 millenia ago. Christianity is too old and too diverse to be defined by the set of beliefs ascribed to one sect or one church. Several logical fallacies have been used in arguments (I have seen here in the past 2 days) attacking Christianity.
Composition
The Fallacy of Composition is to conclude that a property shared by a number of individual items, is also shared by a collection of those items; or that a property of the parts of an object, must also be a property of the whole thing. Examples:
"The bicycle is made entirely of low mass components, and is therefore very lightweight."
"A car uses less petrochemicals and causes less pollution than a bus. Therefore cars are less environmentally damaging than buses."
A related form of fallacy of composition is the "just" fallacy, or fallacy of mediocrity. This is the fallacy that assumes that any given member of a set must be limited to the attributes that are held in common with all the other members of the set. Example:
"Humans are just animals, so we should not concern ourselves with justice; we should just obey the law of the jungle."
Here the fallacy is to reason that because we are animals, we can have only properties which animals have; that nothing can distinguish us as a special case.
Converse accident / Hasty generalization
This fallacy is the reverse of the Fallacy of Accident. It occurs when you form a general rule by examining only a few specific cases which aren't representative of all possible cases. For example:
"Jim Bakker was an insincere Christian. Therefore all Christians are insincere."
There have been dozens of comments and one rec listed diary that employed one or more of these logical fallacies repeatedly. First, look at the diary.
The reality is that people are getting assaulted, murdered, or otherwise prejudiced against in this country because of their sexual orientation, race / ethnicity, apparent social class for hundreds of years now. The motives have been slightly different, but what is the common thread what binds together most of the perpetrators of such hate crimes?
Not race, that’s for sure. (Heck, if anything, a sizable number of the mass murderers who are making the news in the past couple of years have been of Asian origin... who woulda thunk?).
Not atheism, that’s for sure as well. Neither is it Islam, Hinduism, Taoism or any other –ism. Not even Scientology, even.
What belief system drives them on, then?
Could it be Scots-Irish values, the values that Jim Webb has written a book about? No true Scotsman would use Christianity as an excuse for murder.
Fallacy
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."
—Antony Flew, Thinking about Thinking (1975)
In putting forward the above rebuttal one is equivocating in an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. The proposer initially treats the definition of "Scotsman" (i.e., a man of Scottish ancestry and connection) as fixed, and says that there exists no predicated case that falls within that definition. When one such case is found, the proposer shifts to treat the case as fixed, and rather treats the boundary as debatable. The proposer could therefore be seen prejudicially not to desire an exact agreement on either the scope of the definition or the position of the case, but solely to keep the definition and case separate. One reason to do this would be to avoid giving the positive connotations of the definition ("Scotsman") to the negative case ("sex offender") or vice versa.
No, a true Scotsman wears nothing under his kilt.
The wild eyed rants here against Christianity could be applied to any large group of people independent of religion. Does this writer believe that atheists are responsible for Stalin's mass murders?
found in this thread
The Dark Ages is what it means to be a christian.
The Spanish Inquisition is what it means to be a christian.
How nice of you to erase your whole history and pretend it never existed. Especially when its ugly bits raise their heads today and kill people in your god's name.
But wait! This killer's not a REAL christian because he killed! Don't be so bloody obtuse. Your entire history is one of bloodshed in the name of your god. And it hasn't stopped yet.
Your equation is wrong. Christianity is torture, murder, rape, mayhem, extermination of the Maya, extermination of other indigenous tribes who refused to accept your fairy tales, the enslavement of amerinds, and their virtual extermination in the Caribbean, the destruction of cultures in Africa and Asia, the deliberate poisoning of water and infection by small pox and other diseases of nonbelievers, of modern day book burnings, and worse.
If you are so dead set against looking clearly at your own faith's murder, rape, slavery and war, I can understand why you so easily reject your own lawbreaking by ignoring Leviticus and others. Because hypocrisy is nothing less than part and parcel of your faith.
Unfortunately, genocide, war, murder, rape, looting, mayhem and bigotry are cross cultural human activities. We can do something about the destructive elements in human nature when we see them in ourselves.
The reason the Israel Palestine situation is intractable is that one side always blames the other side.
The only one you can change is yourself.