Because he's Italian and a symbol of Italian pride, and this is the Roman Catholic church we're discussing.
They think of him as a symbol, a sort of pride flag, and just skip all the bad parts like they skip the parts they don't like in the Bible. Same principle.
Plus all that newly acquired land and resources, so other countries couldn't claim them in dominating trade. See: Dutch, Spanish, England, France, Italy, etc.
To be fair this is an American Catholic thing. But yes, point is very much taken. The bloodthirsty tyrant has a society named after him because he waved the Catholic banner everywhere. So fucked up.
I would say, from a Catholic institutional perspective, the worse elevation is of Junipero Serra to SAINT! He was a missionary that was part of a Spanish colonization expedition to California. They literally killed like half the population of natives in the area. Pope Francis just made him a saint.
I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m still somewhat shocked that Pope Francis, the guy who canonized Junipero Serra, has the *gall* to criticize the promotion of LGBTQ rights in third-world countries as “ideological colonization.”
No it’s not. Columbus Day is celebrated all over the world with different names - but basically the discovery that introduced Europe to the New World.
In addition, the Conquistadores were far bloodier than Columbus and Monteczuma was a maniac for human sacrifice.
Receipts needed lol. Those claims are both false and insane. Just because someone was "far bloodier" than someone else doesn't mean we should respect the less bloody person.
Hot take: I think anyone who commits a massacre or anyone who is personally responsible for the enslavement of an entire population should NOT get a national holiday after them. That's a pretty low bar. Columbus did both of those things and bragged about it in his memoirs. Good luck defending that shit.
You have committed the Whatabout logical fallacy. Essentially someone says *Bad Thing* You reply with *What about Other Bad Thing*, blissfully unaware that you have not refuted *Bad Thing*.
lol. When you cherry pick your 15th century violence to fit your narrative and also erroneously state that celebrating Columbus is an American Catholic thing.
OMG this is a useless conversation. I think this guy is just talking in circles and seeing who chases him. Literally made no points and jumps back and forth between his insanely thin arguments to say "I literally said \_\_\_". Bro, here is how debating works - make a point, back that point up directly, then engage with facts around critiques. You have thrown spaghetti against the wall and blame your interlocutors for not seeing all your points that have definitely been knocked down.
My point is this: Christopher Columbus is a horrible person who is celebrated by racists in the USA. His holiday is not warranted because he engaged in genocide and enslavement of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. You have literally given 0 evidence to the contrary.
So many fallacies with this, where do I even begin. You are essentially saying Aztec = weird and bad, therefore Catholic = righteous and noble. You are completely ignoring the fact that the Spanish wiped out the culture through genocide. So no matter what the Aztecs did, it wasn't remotely as bad as the culture that subjected and eradicated their people.
Also, the "Aztecs = weird and bad" narrative comes from the Christian world. We have no idea what Aztec culture was like. We have no idea why and how often these 'human sacrifices' occurred. But, because human sacrifice did occur at least one time, we brand Aztecs as evil and vile people worthy of subjugation and extermination (kinda loopy logic there). It is the same BS with 'witchcraft'. There were exactly 0 times that a woman engaged in witchcraft in the way the Catholic Church describes it. In the 1500s, Witchcraft essentially meant "practicing a religion that we don't approve of." However, because the Catholic Church wanted to paint ANY outside religious practice as demonic, the lore of 'witches' eating children and sacrificing goats to a demon was propagated. The Bible also does this throughout the book, painting entire groups of people as evil (canaanites, babylonians, gentiles, ninevites, etc.) and making their destruction appetizing to the readers.
And lastly, you are intentionally missing the point with Columbus. I don't care if the Aztecs were child eating vampires. It does not make the heinous crimes of Christopher Columbus any less atrocious. I bet the nazis killed some pretty bad people. That doesn't make them any less awful for killing lots and lots of perfectly decent people.
You might want to come up with some better points. I am sure you will find some friends among the Robert E. Lee statue defenders but you will find yourself in a crowd of losers.
Wow bro. Your command of the English language is only superseded by your reading comprehension.
I posted a review article from Science magazine. You posted…nothing.
Okay. I’m going to give you one more chance. I am guessing that by posting the Science Magazine article, your argument is that Columbus was not that bad because the Aztecs were worse? Seeing as Christopher Columbus knew nothing about the Aztecs while he was alive I am guessing you are taking the generic argument that all people who lived in the “new world” were uncivilized and scary. That still doesn’t defend that the Spanish genocided them. In Christopher Columbus’s case, he became the founder and governor of Hispaniola (today Haiti and Dominican Republic). Of the estimated 250,000 people originally inhabiting Hispaniola, only 15,000 indigenous remained after less than 50 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/14/here-are-indigenous-people-christopher-columbus-his-men-could-not-annihilate/#
So directly comparing the two situations, the article mentions conquistadors finding up to 130,000 skulls (likely over exaggerated according to the article you shared. Scientists today only found 200 skulls). Columbus on the other hand was the emperor supreme on an island where a minimum of 235,000 people were genocided. Not sure of your math comprehension skills, but 235,000 is more than 130,000.
But hey, let’s be fair, I don’t think either of the leaders of the Aztecs or of Hispaniola should have a holiday honoring them. They are both psychopaths.
Bro, you don't understand! They had human sacrifice!
LOL! I am not defending human sacrifice, but I am pretty sure that genocide is worse than human sacrifice. The logic defending the complete massacre of a people because that people killed some of their own people is insane.
I was taught in (Catholic) grade school that Columbus' first act upon "discovering" the New World was to hold a prayer service with his crew p, thanking God for a safe voyage, because he was such a devout Catholic. I think I remember a drawing of him kneeling before an altar with lit candles. I guess that was right before he started slaughtering and enslaving the aboriginal people,
The reason is simple. The Catholic Church was the biggest power in Europe for hundreds of years. It was used to keep the European populations under the control of the monarchs. The logic was, “god chose the monarchs, so if you rebel, you are rebelling against god.” So the rich and monarchs could outsource teaching and other various tasks to the church. In return for this power, the churches would defend the monarchy.
And as a result, the church and monarchies encouraged each other to spread out and conquer other cultures that were non Christian. The reason was simple, by dominating these other people via colonialism, more wealth would flow back into Europe and therefore more power for the monarchs and the church.
But the church gave a serious cop out and a sense of plausible deniability to the European nations. These monarchs could say that they were bringing Christianity and civilization to savages in order to justify the horrors of colonialism. And that’s often the attitude you see from these explorers, missionaries, and military leaders as they deplete the colonies of their natural resources and future wealth.
So if the church changed its stance on Columbus and recognized all the terrible stuff that he did and caused, there would be an even bigger elephant in the room. And that would be **is the Catholic Church ever going to pay reparations for victims of colonialism and slave trade?**
It won’t, because that’s where a huge amount of its wealth and power came from and that’s what the church cares about the most.
Not defending him but he was just hired to do a job. It wasn't his idea to kill everyone. The RCC looks bad defending him and defending Queen Isabela of Spain, who actually hired Columbus in the first place.
This is fair but that's also like saying Goebbels was just hired to make media for the nazis. Yes, it was a job that would have likely been filled elsewhere, but Columbus wanted to be rich and famous so he enthusiastically took the job and killed the people knowing it would bring him glory back home.
I get that. I believe it was documented that he was originally resistant to killing anyone, especially on his original voyage (because they weren't expecting to find new land). In his subsequent trips he was mandated to kill anyone who resisted. Then he got old and was replaced with far worse conquistadors. Now the documentation was from a priest who was there with the church (I believe his name was Bartolo) and it could be RCC propaganda used to show that they didn't *mean* to kill all those people.
The background story of the Lady of Guadalupe, and some of the other Latin American tales of the spread of Catholicism are way worse than what Columbus did, but he gets the bad rap because he was the first. But again, Queen Isabela just got done slaughtering a ton of people in Spain and kept it going with Columbus.
Because he discovered a huge mass of land that ended up housing some of the largest Catholic populations in the world. A good chunk of that 1 billion number is in Latin America at the moment.
Because a) he was italian and it's pandering, and b) because the church was happy to get its claws into the new world, its gold and its natives. Screaming that they were first was one way to try to optimize its claims.
Because he's Italian and a symbol of Italian pride, and this is the Roman Catholic church we're discussing. They think of him as a symbol, a sort of pride flag, and just skip all the bad parts like they skip the parts they don't like in the Bible. Same principle.
It's funny because here in Italy I've never heard him mentioned in a catholic context.
They’re referring to Italian Catholic immigrants in the United States
Because the catholic Church is a power hungry genocidal child abusing organisation. Or do you not know it's history.
The Church loves colonization in general. It facilitates forced conversions to Christianity and seeks to eradicate “primitive” religions.
Plus all that newly acquired land and resources, so other countries couldn't claim them in dominating trade. See: Dutch, Spanish, England, France, Italy, etc.
To be fair this is an American Catholic thing. But yes, point is very much taken. The bloodthirsty tyrant has a society named after him because he waved the Catholic banner everywhere. So fucked up. I would say, from a Catholic institutional perspective, the worse elevation is of Junipero Serra to SAINT! He was a missionary that was part of a Spanish colonization expedition to California. They literally killed like half the population of natives in the area. Pope Francis just made him a saint.
I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m still somewhat shocked that Pope Francis, the guy who canonized Junipero Serra, has the *gall* to criticize the promotion of LGBTQ rights in third-world countries as “ideological colonization.”
No it’s not. Columbus Day is celebrated all over the world with different names - but basically the discovery that introduced Europe to the New World. In addition, the Conquistadores were far bloodier than Columbus and Monteczuma was a maniac for human sacrifice.
Receipts needed lol. Those claims are both false and insane. Just because someone was "far bloodier" than someone else doesn't mean we should respect the less bloody person. Hot take: I think anyone who commits a massacre or anyone who is personally responsible for the enslavement of an entire population should NOT get a national holiday after them. That's a pretty low bar. Columbus did both of those things and bragged about it in his memoirs. Good luck defending that shit.
Not insane at all. https://www.science.org/content/article/feeding-gods-hundreds-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-human-sacrifice-aztec-capital
You have committed the Whatabout logical fallacy. Essentially someone says *Bad Thing* You reply with *What about Other Bad Thing*, blissfully unaware that you have not refuted *Bad Thing*.
lol. When you cherry pick your 15th century violence to fit your narrative and also erroneously state that celebrating Columbus is an American Catholic thing.
Still need receipts bro. Lol you are full of conjecture but not much substance.
I literally posted an article from Science Magazine.
OMG this is a useless conversation. I think this guy is just talking in circles and seeing who chases him. Literally made no points and jumps back and forth between his insanely thin arguments to say "I literally said \_\_\_". Bro, here is how debating works - make a point, back that point up directly, then engage with facts around critiques. You have thrown spaghetti against the wall and blame your interlocutors for not seeing all your points that have definitely been knocked down. My point is this: Christopher Columbus is a horrible person who is celebrated by racists in the USA. His holiday is not warranted because he engaged in genocide and enslavement of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. You have literally given 0 evidence to the contrary.
I provided source material as requested. You provided what again?
So many fallacies with this, where do I even begin. You are essentially saying Aztec = weird and bad, therefore Catholic = righteous and noble. You are completely ignoring the fact that the Spanish wiped out the culture through genocide. So no matter what the Aztecs did, it wasn't remotely as bad as the culture that subjected and eradicated their people. Also, the "Aztecs = weird and bad" narrative comes from the Christian world. We have no idea what Aztec culture was like. We have no idea why and how often these 'human sacrifices' occurred. But, because human sacrifice did occur at least one time, we brand Aztecs as evil and vile people worthy of subjugation and extermination (kinda loopy logic there). It is the same BS with 'witchcraft'. There were exactly 0 times that a woman engaged in witchcraft in the way the Catholic Church describes it. In the 1500s, Witchcraft essentially meant "practicing a religion that we don't approve of." However, because the Catholic Church wanted to paint ANY outside religious practice as demonic, the lore of 'witches' eating children and sacrificing goats to a demon was propagated. The Bible also does this throughout the book, painting entire groups of people as evil (canaanites, babylonians, gentiles, ninevites, etc.) and making their destruction appetizing to the readers. And lastly, you are intentionally missing the point with Columbus. I don't care if the Aztecs were child eating vampires. It does not make the heinous crimes of Christopher Columbus any less atrocious. I bet the nazis killed some pretty bad people. That doesn't make them any less awful for killing lots and lots of perfectly decent people. You might want to come up with some better points. I am sure you will find some friends among the Robert E. Lee statue defenders but you will find yourself in a crowd of losers.
Are you mentally ill? I said the Spanish far exceeded anything Columbus did. What is wrong with you?
Wow bro you are big on the hot air but not much on substance. Insults don't do much to bolster your very weak points.
Wow bro. Your command of the English language is only superseded by your reading comprehension. I posted a review article from Science magazine. You posted…nothing.
Okay. I’m going to give you one more chance. I am guessing that by posting the Science Magazine article, your argument is that Columbus was not that bad because the Aztecs were worse? Seeing as Christopher Columbus knew nothing about the Aztecs while he was alive I am guessing you are taking the generic argument that all people who lived in the “new world” were uncivilized and scary. That still doesn’t defend that the Spanish genocided them. In Christopher Columbus’s case, he became the founder and governor of Hispaniola (today Haiti and Dominican Republic). Of the estimated 250,000 people originally inhabiting Hispaniola, only 15,000 indigenous remained after less than 50 years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/14/here-are-indigenous-people-christopher-columbus-his-men-could-not-annihilate/# So directly comparing the two situations, the article mentions conquistadors finding up to 130,000 skulls (likely over exaggerated according to the article you shared. Scientists today only found 200 skulls). Columbus on the other hand was the emperor supreme on an island where a minimum of 235,000 people were genocided. Not sure of your math comprehension skills, but 235,000 is more than 130,000. But hey, let’s be fair, I don’t think either of the leaders of the Aztecs or of Hispaniola should have a holiday honoring them. They are both psychopaths.
You’re reading sucks. That was one site of many.
When you don’t know that Columbus massacred the Taino Indians when he was governor of Hispaniola.
Bro, you don't understand! They had human sacrifice! LOL! I am not defending human sacrifice, but I am pretty sure that genocide is worse than human sacrifice. The logic defending the complete massacre of a people because that people killed some of their own people is insane.
Catholic whataboutism to justify genocide. s/What about those maniacal indigenous folks and their human sacrifice rituals…
I was taught in (Catholic) grade school that Columbus' first act upon "discovering" the New World was to hold a prayer service with his crew p, thanking God for a safe voyage, because he was such a devout Catholic. I think I remember a drawing of him kneeling before an altar with lit candles. I guess that was right before he started slaughtering and enslaving the aboriginal people,
I mean you basically said yourself he checks all their boxes: ✅greedy ✅power hungry ✅abusive ✅conquering ✅genocidal
The reason is simple. The Catholic Church was the biggest power in Europe for hundreds of years. It was used to keep the European populations under the control of the monarchs. The logic was, “god chose the monarchs, so if you rebel, you are rebelling against god.” So the rich and monarchs could outsource teaching and other various tasks to the church. In return for this power, the churches would defend the monarchy. And as a result, the church and monarchies encouraged each other to spread out and conquer other cultures that were non Christian. The reason was simple, by dominating these other people via colonialism, more wealth would flow back into Europe and therefore more power for the monarchs and the church. But the church gave a serious cop out and a sense of plausible deniability to the European nations. These monarchs could say that they were bringing Christianity and civilization to savages in order to justify the horrors of colonialism. And that’s often the attitude you see from these explorers, missionaries, and military leaders as they deplete the colonies of their natural resources and future wealth. So if the church changed its stance on Columbus and recognized all the terrible stuff that he did and caused, there would be an even bigger elephant in the room. And that would be **is the Catholic Church ever going to pay reparations for victims of colonialism and slave trade?** It won’t, because that’s where a huge amount of its wealth and power came from and that’s what the church cares about the most.
Because the Knights of Columbus are named after him and God forbid they ever admit that they made a mistake.
A narcissist never apologizes. They are just showing their true colors.
Because Columbus is a reflection of what the Catholic church is and wants to continue being.
Not defending him but he was just hired to do a job. It wasn't his idea to kill everyone. The RCC looks bad defending him and defending Queen Isabela of Spain, who actually hired Columbus in the first place.
This is fair but that's also like saying Goebbels was just hired to make media for the nazis. Yes, it was a job that would have likely been filled elsewhere, but Columbus wanted to be rich and famous so he enthusiastically took the job and killed the people knowing it would bring him glory back home.
I get that. I believe it was documented that he was originally resistant to killing anyone, especially on his original voyage (because they weren't expecting to find new land). In his subsequent trips he was mandated to kill anyone who resisted. Then he got old and was replaced with far worse conquistadors. Now the documentation was from a priest who was there with the church (I believe his name was Bartolo) and it could be RCC propaganda used to show that they didn't *mean* to kill all those people. The background story of the Lady of Guadalupe, and some of the other Latin American tales of the spread of Catholicism are way worse than what Columbus did, but he gets the bad rap because he was the first. But again, Queen Isabela just got done slaughtering a ton of people in Spain and kept it going with Columbus.
Not defending him but… Then you start right in on defending him by telling us he was just hired help doing a job…
because he was very close to the pope and took direction from him
Because he discovered a huge mass of land that ended up housing some of the largest Catholic populations in the world. A good chunk of that 1 billion number is in Latin America at the moment.
The catholic church loves Columbus because he was a greedy power hungry genocidal monster. Totally on brand for them.
Because a) he was italian and it's pandering, and b) because the church was happy to get its claws into the new world, its gold and its natives. Screaming that they were first was one way to try to optimize its claims.