Posted on 09/10/2007 1:33:20 PM PDT by Caleb1411
The tripartite division of the recent CNN series God's Warriors into Jewish, Christian and Islamic segments conveyed its underlying message: Religions produce murderous fanatics. That particular trope features in all the recent spate of books proclaiming, "I am an atheist, and if you had any brains, you would be too."
That thesis, however, is badly flawed. First, religious fanatics prove no more about the inherent nature of religious belief than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot prove about non-belief.
And the implicit equation of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious fanatics is absurd. In the first two categories, CNN's Christine Amanpour dredged up Dr. Baruch Goldstein and a handful of (largely unsuccessful) Jewish terrorists from the 1980s and a few Christian abortion clinic bombers. (The former allowed Amanpour to segue into a BBC-style frontal attack on Israel and the "Israel lobby," already admirably dissected by Jonathan Tobin and Andrea Levin in these pages.) Radical Islamists, by way of comparison, have killed thousands around the globe in recent years - in New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Afghanistan and Iraq. An Iranian regime with the declared mission of spreading the worldwide reign of Islam is on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons, and an already nuclear Pakistan could fall under Islamist rule.
Political Islam, according to Mary Habeck of Johns Hopkins University, recognizes no permanent political boundaries with unbelievers, for doing so "would end the expansion of Islam and stop offensive jihad, both of which are transgressions against [divine] law that commands jihad until the entire earth is under the rule of Islamic law."
That mindset, in both its Sunni and Shi'ite variants, claims millions of adherents around the world, including tens of thousands who have declared their willingness to kill and be killed
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
Hopefully, CNN will lose people of faith as a result of this.
The key word is “fanatic.” All it requires is fanatics who believe you must suffer if you aren’t one of them. The motivation, whether religion, political ideology, gangs or love of a sports team, is irrelevant.
What needs to happen is to have someone do a documentary on sharia law..........from start to finish. Sharia law basically states that those that will not convert to Islam and become muslims, can be killed. Not in my country....no way Jose.
The Inquisition and the Separation of Church and State.
It is a nice sounding theory that when you separate the Christian Church from the state, you get stability, but it does not pass the common sense test.
For instance, I know it is the first words out of any atheist mouth when you try to talk with them about Jesus, “Explain the Inquisition,” and “Look how evil the church was!” and “Look what they did in the name of Jesus!”
It is true that about 500 years ago, Christian fanatics killed about 10,000 people over a 100 year time period (about 100/year) in the name of the Roman Catholic church. It is a shame on the record of an organization that claims to be promoting the ministry of Christ. Now compare this record to the example of the countries that have officially done away with religion. To the countries that have outright banned religion and imprisoned those who try to practice it (the ultimate test of the theory of separation of church and state).
Yes, I am talking about Communist countries. In the Communist Manifesto, Engel and Marx declared, “Communism abolishes all religion.” In my father’s lifetime, the numbers of people that officially atheist countries have murdered in the name of no-religion is staggering; the USSR slaughtered 20 million, China slaughtered 10 million, Communist Cambodia slaughtered 2 million, Communist North Korea has/continues to murder untold numbers, Communist Cuba has/continues to murder untold numbers, the list goes on.
The grand total is over 50 million dead in the last 80-year time span (over 600,000/year). Even comparing the worst time of “Christian Persecution” to an average time of a just one country that has officially and forcefully separated church and state, the conclusion is obvious: Christianity has a huge calming influence on government.
by
2banana
“Religions produce murderous fanatics.”
Yeah.
But most were real slouchs when compared to those nice godless Communists
of the 20th Century.
And if anything, any “murderous fanatics” operating under the Jewish
or Christian labels...sure were at odds with the ethos of each of
those religions.
At least for the past two millenia.
Islam on the other hand...their murderous fanatics were simply...
Observant and dedicated practitioners of the dictates of The Holy
Koran and The Hadiths.
I think people are sort of mindless in their attacks on the Inquisition as well. The Spanish Inquisition came after 700 years of oppression by the Muslims in Spain, who used Jewish administrators very often, and who allied in part with Sephardic Jews in the conquest, reconquest and defense of Muslim expansion in Spain. The Inquisition was in part in the nature of what we would today classify as “counter-intelligence,” “war crimes tribunals,” and other types of proceedings that are conducted post war. At that time, I’m sure, there remained a fear that Islam would again attack and reconquer Spain.
bump
fanatic n. One having excessive zeal for and irrational attachment to a cause or position.
Sounds like Amanpour.
The real issue is what are the "positions", the objects of pursuit for each religions "true believer." For a Christian it is "...love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you in order than you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 5:44,45). For a Muslim it is "...slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each [an] ambush." (Qur'an 9:5)
“That passivity in the face of threat is directly linked to Europe’s loss of religious belief. Those who view themselves as nothing more than sophisticated, pleasure-seeking animals, whose life has no purpose outside itself and ends with death, consider nothing worth dying for and war to be an invariably irrational option.”
This is what I”ve said for some time concerning Europe. They really have no philosophical framework from which to wage a war against Islam. As the author notes, this is evident in their falling birthrates along with their servile attitude regarding Islam.
Living in a largely post-Christian (and in some ways post modern) culture I’m afraid what will ultimately happpen for parts of Europe is some charismatic madman appearing on the scene preaching something akin to Nazism (they’ll be looking for some sort of savior). The Europeans may well wake up, I’m not convinced that what ultimately galvanizes them against Islam will be an acceptable option. Or in the final analysis, will be all that much different than Islam (given the strong anti-semitic attitudes in Europe and in the past the Nazi’s willingness to collaborate with the Islamists).
Europe’s future will be decided quickly as their falling birthrates will settle the question in this generation.
Thanks for posting.
I thought most major religions had already made CNN a sin.
While I can understand the motivation of those beginning the Inquisition, and also understand that they lived in more savage times than we (at least here in the US - I wouldn’t say that about much of the Arab World), the gratuitous use of the most horrible forms of torture by the Inquisitors over the course of centuries, and even in the New World, wasn’t justified. Torqueamada didn’t get his brutal reputation for being a nice guy. Burning people alive wasn’t excusable, and it was done a LOT. Check out http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Inquisition.html for more information.
You’re correct, most people are misinformed about the Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition was instituted to weed out those baptized Jews and Moslems who pretended to be sincere Catholics, while they secretly adhered to the practices of Judaism and Mohammedanism, which is a most serious sacrilegious offense. They were also enemies of the State, which was Christian in principle and carried the Cross in battle against the Crescent. As further evidence, consider what Dr. Salo Wittmayer Baron, one of America’s foremost Jewish historians, has to say about this matter. I quote from “A Social and Religious History of the Jews” (N.Y., 1937, VOL 2 p. 58) -
“It appears to be a fact as well as a theory that Jews who never ceased professing Judaism were, on the whole, left undisturbed. - In the fourteen years of the activity of the Spanish Inquisition, from its establishment in 1478 to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, we hear of only one persecution directed against a Jewish community, where the Jewry of Huesca was accused in 1489 of having admitted conversos (pseudo-converts from Judaism to Christianity) to the Jewish fold. It was precisely the inability of the inquisitorial courts to check Jewish influence on the conversos that served as a decisive argument for the Catholic monarchs in banishing Jews from Spain......
Remember that in 15th century England the punishment for treason was to hang a man, cut him down while still alive, disembowel him, and then drag him in four pieces with horses or cut him in 4 pieces. “Hung, drawn, and quartered.” In France they boiled traitors. You do acknowledge that it was a brutal age compared to our own. That’s that.
Torquemada was appointed to reform the inquisition which was being used in unjust ways in the view of the Papacy. He actually reduced punishments.
Remember also that there is no question at all that the Jews in Spain worked with the Muslim conquerors and aided in the wars against Christians.
I don’t even think we can jokingly say that the Jews backed the wrong horse, since the Jewish population had 7 centuries of special privileges under the Muslim masters.
Even then, it's extremely disingenuous to compare the evil done under Christianity over three hundred years ago with what the Muslims are doing right now.
I am extremely tolerant when it comes to religion -- whatever works for you. But my patience is about gone. As "supreme leader" I'd seriously think about an ultimatum: clean your own house or we have bunch of nuclear warheads ready to make the world's biggest glass sculpture.
That is an excellent point.
I’m a Protestant, but in light of the conflict with Muslim’s today, I think Belloc is looking like a prophet. The Catholic and patriotic Spanish historians didn’t have a chance when the Protestant and Jewish historians lined up the horrors of the Inquisition to beat the Catholic Church with, centuries after the Muslim threat had abated and people had forgot what the times were like for the Spanish immediately after the Reconquista was complete in 1492. Spain blazed as the world’s greatest power for a century and then drifted away and the power was in the hands of the Protestants. It makes for inaccurate or incomplete history when the historians have a grudge, as the Protestant and Jewish historians had against the Catholic Church and nations..
As for "7 centuries of special privileges under the Muslim masters" - give me a break. Christians were, for the Moslems, THE enemy. The way they looked at things then (and even most of them today-the total fanatics notwithstanding) was that at least the Jews worshipped the same Deity - whereas, in their view, the Christians are idolators. Oh, and the Jews were a small minority with no military forces and no hope/desire to fight the Moslems for that reason. So OF COURSE the Jews had "special" privileges - "special" being no forced conversions, as long as they acted like proper Dhimmis, paid their Dhimmi tax, etc. Maybe you refer to the "Court Jews," those exceedingly few Jews who were advisors, physicians or merchants who acted on behalf of the Moslem leadership. Well, OF COURSE they had special privileges - they served a purpose, and would have lost those privileges the moment they stopped doing so. Such is the case in virtually every society, no matter who the minority and majority parties are.
7 centuries - you kind of get the feeling if things have been a certain way for quite a while that they're going to be that way FOREVER. After a while, the Moslems ceased being "the conquerors" and just became "the ruling class" (which for Jews is always someone else). How can you blame Jews living in Spain then for cooperating with the ruling class, when failure to do so would have entailed grievous penalties? Oh, and lest we forget, many Christians were less than kind to the Jews well before the Moslems conquered Spain - so why on Earth would the Jews of that time and place have resisted cooperation with a government that at least allowed them to keep their religion and let them live and work in whatever jobs they wanted to in order to feed their families.
Should American Jews cease to work with the largely white power structure, or refuse to aid the US in wars? After all, the white man is a conqueror of the continent from the Indians.
Please, stop excusing the Inquisition. You didn't do it, nor did the modern Church, and no one is blaming you or it for the heinous crimes committed over hundreds of years - just as modern day Turks didn't carry out the genocide of the Armenians during WW1 - so why are you (or the Turks) so sensitive about it?
The Inquisition wasn’t directed at all the Jews, only the Jews that were suspected of lying in their profession of a change of faith to Catholicism. The Reconquista began almost immediately after the Muslim conquests, it was a centuries long war, with Jews and Muslims on one side and Christians on the other for the most part.
I don’t defend the Inquisition per se, but rather a historical view of it, because we are once again at war with Muslims and it is important that we know our true history instead of the carictures that have been offered in the past. The histories of the Crusades and the Inquisition have both been falsified by historians with agendas against the Catholic Church. I am not a Catholic. But we face a new enemy now, Islam, and we need to know the true history of our conflict with Islam, which has now been going on for over a thousand years.
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