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To: SeekAndFind

Looking at the last 2000 years or so of Western history, it is not unreasonable to see John Brown as being in line with Christian tradition, if not Christ’s teaching.
He was a psychopathic, arguably genocidal, murderer who saw himself as an enforcer of Christian principle. How this differentiates him from Bishop Theophilus who burned the Library at Alexandria, the Christians who killed the female mathematician, Hypolita, the Crusaders who killed every Jew and Muslim in Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the Spanish Inquisition, the genocidal treatment of Native Americans and the collaboration of millions of European Christians including Pope Pius XII in the Holocaust.
I could easily continue.


8 posted on 07/28/2022 2:33:46 PM PDT by georgecorgi
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To: georgecorgi

“. . . not unreasonable to see John Brown as being in line with Christian tradition, if not Christ’s teaching.”

You are very wise to draw a distinction between “tradition” and Christ’s teaching.

Still, your post comes across to me as a smear of Christianity; but maybe you intended something else.


13 posted on 07/28/2022 3:04:38 PM PDT by jeffersondem
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To: georgecorgi
None of the acts you mention are supportable by Scripture. And your understanding of many of those acts sounds bereft of their historical context, or is just atheistic propaganda gibberish. (For example, even the usually anti-Christian Wikipedia site debunks the Library of Alexandria myth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria)

As an example, after the Reconquista pushing back Islamic conquests in Iberia, mobs and Spanish nobles were known for torturing and abusing suspected heretics. The Catholic Church stepped in to say, not unreasonably, that illiterate mobs and nobles shouldn't be the ones deciding who was and was not a Christian. Thus the Inquisition was born, not as an extremist effort of the Catholic church but the opposite, to squash the extremism of those whose affiliation with the church was often weak and questionable itself.

Ironically, judgmental critics like you portray the Inquisition as an example of Christian extremism. But it was part of a religious body that had long gone off the rails in abandoning Christian faith and teaching itself. And as a result its mission to hunt and prosecute heretics became focused on actual Christians as the Reformation got under way.

Ignorant critics fail to understand that anyone who said they were not a Christian was automatically outside the scope of the Inquisition and immediately shown the door (what happened to them after they stepped into the street was another matter, of course.) It was Christians like myself who were hunted and persecuted by the Inquisition. And now have to deal with fools who get their understanding of the Inquisition exactly backwards today.

17 posted on 07/28/2022 3:37:19 PM PDT by EnderWiggin1970
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To: georgecorgi

“I could easily continue.”

Not a fan of Western civilization I see.


33 posted on 07/28/2022 4:46:37 PM PDT by A strike (LGBFJRoberts)
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To: georgecorgi

An atheist speaks


36 posted on 07/28/2022 5:11:52 PM PDT by Nifster (I see puppy dogs in the clouds )
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