Originally Posted by redietz View Post
Before making blanket statements about the Chinese or the Christians, I think it might be wise to consider that technology drives the wagons. And luck has as much to do with who looks good in retrospect as alleged styles of human organization.

As to mickey's 50 million died from "A," it's also true that an estimated 50 million plus Native Americans died from pandemics associated with European contact. So there's that. The Christians came, saw, and were responsible for 50 million deaths. Was Christianity to blame for that per se? Depends on how you want to define cause and effect, I suppose. At some point, the Europeans knew their diseases were killing the Native Americans. It's a question of whether the leaders cared enough to take action. The argument can be made that it was a kind of American gulag -- except disease, not arms, drove the Native Americans to their end.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a Pulitzer winning book, is a great place to start exploring these questions.
Would you be referring to the smallpox that was mostly unintentionally spread, but also occasionally used as one of the first examples of biological warfare? One such example, of course, being Lord Jeffrey Amherst who...that's right, motherfuckers...has an American college named after him. He's one of the few people, in fact, who has been definitively proven to have promoted this form of biological warfare.

In any event, Christians tend not to be too concerned with communicable diseases and prefer denying their existence---particularly Evangelicals and even to this day, so maybe should give a partial pass for that.