Not Even Voltaire Believed This One

Powerline ^ | February 10, 2005 | Hindrocket

[Fenris6]

Very few people realize how often mainstream media sources say things that just aren't true. Sometimes the reason is malice, more often it's ignorance or prejudice.

...The ludicrous assertion that priests had "roamed the streets" hanging people after the Lisbon earthquake was made by Vargas, and apparently passed by one or more editors at the Post without raising any questions

...Ms. Carpinelli has corresponded with Vargas and the hoax has been exposed, but as far as I can determine, the Post has not run a correction

...The moral of the story is that news sources that are considered reliable by many people, like the Washington Post, in fact make a great many errors--some innocent, others not. If an assertion sounds outlandish, like the claim that roving bands of 18th century Catholic priests went about hanging people, realize that it may very well be a fabrication.

...And bear in mind that false statements seem to be made more frequently about some people--Catholics, say, or Republicans--than about others.

[Fenris6]

Powerline sums up why Freepers exist :)

[xJones]

Interesting survey, I just finished it.

[Dumb_Ox]

Oddly enough, there was at least one autos-da-fe following the Lisbon earthquake, but it was of an orthodox Catholic Jesuit and not a putative heretic. Edward T. Oakes, reviewing Susan Nieman's Evil in Modern Thought writes:

Believe it or not, there once was a time (and not that long ago either) when earthquakes enhanced, rather than undermined, belief in God. Like other natural disasters, earthquakes used to be called “acts of God,” a phrase that now sounds quaint, a linguistic relic rarely invoked anymore except in insurance policies. But relics never lose their power to tell us about the past, and so too with this phrase: it reminds us of a time when natural disasters were invariably interpreted as regular (even if sudden and unexpected) episodes in God’s ongoing intervention in history, yet another divinely sanctioned call to repentance. But the temblor that struck Lisbon on the morning of All Saints’ Day in 1755 changed all that. Not since the fall of Rome had devout believers in God been thrown into such a defensive panic as by this cataclysmic irruption of the earth, a ten-minute convulsion that leveled the city, destroyed churches while the faithful were at Mass, unleashed fires throughout the capital and finally created, in reaction to these tremors, a series of tidal waves that ripped ships from their moorings and drowned those luckless throngs from the city who had sought shelter on the coastal beaches, driven there solely by their panicked need to flee the cauldron of plagues and fires that were ravaging the capital.

Anyone reading contemporary accounts of that cataclysm will not be surprised that such an appalling catastrophe caused panic, but why also a religious crisis? After all, an earthquake had struck Port Royal in Jamaica fifty years before Lisbon, and Europe had reacted then with its standard theological tropes: Port Royal was a Sodom and Gomorrah, filled with pirates, profligates and prostitutes, getting its just deserts, and so forth. So why the change? Was it just that Lisbon had hit closer to home? No. As Susan Neiman explains in her sober and provocative book, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton), by the time the Lisbon quake hit, the Enlightenment was well underway: “Traditional theologians’ faith in miracles and wonders was not what was threatened at Lisbon,” she explains. “What was shattered, rather, were liberal views about the miracle and wonder of nature itself.”

For that liberal crisis of faith we must thank Gottfried Leibniz and his epochal work, Theodicy (1710; the word is his coinage). In that most famous of his books, Leibniz made a distinction that has since entered the bloodstream of Western consciousness: between natural evil (earthquakes, tornados, floods, and so forth) and moral evil (murder and the like). By the time of the Lisbon earthquake Leibniz’s distinction had long become operational. Thus when the quake struck, Portugal’s Minister of State, the thoroughly Enlightened Sebastião Pombal, insisted that earthquakes be regarded as natural events that “just happen,” for only then could the municipal authorities begin to take practical steps to alleviate suffering and better prepare for the next one (as we do now with modern-day building codes, for example, or emergency-preparedness drills). In fact, Pombal even had a Jesuit preacher of the old Sodom-and-Gomorrah style arrested on trumped-up charges and executed an Enlightenment version of an auto-da-fé! For to his mind, it was precisely the old theological interpretation that was preventing the authorities from addressing a natural catastrophe on natural terms.