Hey Vlad - you said
“This fooled even Martin Luther who claimed to have visited the Vatican as the basis for his innumerable Satanic slanders:”.
Luther didn’t agree with the Catholic Church and you call them “satanic slanders”. There is no need for that kind of talk here. Take it somewhere else.
You wrote:
“Hey Vlad - you said “This fooled even Martin Luther who claimed to have visited the Vatican as the basis for his innumerable Satanic slanders:”.”
I did not say that. Dangus said that in post #15.
“Luther didn’t agree with the Catholic Church and you call them “satanic slanders”. There is no need for that kind of talk here. Take it somewhere else.”
1) Again, I didn’t write it. 2) There can be no doubt that Dangus has correctly described Luther’s slanders of the Church. Even the libtards at PBS got this right:
“Martin Luther’s criticism of the Church initially was that the Church was sending the wrong message, that the Church was ... giving to people the sense that they could save themselves by using the various things the Church offered, including indulgences. ... But when the Church did not listen, he came reluctantly to the conclusion that the Church, especially the office of the papacy, was the Antichrist, and that what it was doing was deliberate. It was the devil’s attempt to subvert, to submerge the good news, the gospel. The devil was working within the Church. And once he was convinced that that was happening, the papal office was the office of the Antichrist, and he saw the end time near. ... “
And...
“When Martin Luther first translated and published the New Testament, he thought that Revelation should not have the same status or authority as the gospels or the letters of Paul or Peter. ...But what’s interesting, even though he felt that way, it’s the one book that he illustrated, where he put woodcuts, because Revelation allowed him to make one of his central points, which was that the papacy was the Antichrist, and the end of the world was coming. And so there you see the only woodcuts in the New Testament. You see the whore of Babylon wearing a papal crown. You see the seven-headed beast wearing a papal crown. The message was clear. You didn’t have to read (as most people didn’t). You got the message. The papacy, the papal office—not the individual popes but the papal Church—was where Satan was working to undermine Christendom. And the fact that Satan was there meant the world was coming to an end soon. ...”
And..
“The pope claimed to be Christ’s representative on earth. Luther became convinced that the pope was the devil’s representative on earth. And that took graphic form very early in the Reformation ... with one of the most effective pieces of propaganda in the early Reformation: a series of 26 woodcuts that juxtaposed some action in Christ’s life with something in the papacy. Christ carrying his cross to be crucified; the pope being carried in his throne on the backs of people ... . Christ washing the feet of the disciples; the pope having his feet kissed. And over and over again, scenes from Christ’s life juxtaposed with scenes from the papacy. ... Christ was always humble and serving; the papacy, the pope was always lordly and [lording] over others. Christ is Christ; the pope is Antichrist.”
“At the end of his life, Martin Luther decided he had to issue his final testament against all the enemies of the gospel. And he published treatises, he encouraged people, but words were not sufficient. He also had to use images. And so he asked his friend, the painter Lucas Cranach, to do a series of woodcuts, and Luther wrote the verses for them. And these woodcuts were designed to show as graphically as possible, to those who could read and those who couldn’t, what Luther thought of the papacy. So for example, there’s a woodcut which shows the pope on his throne and peasants with their tongues out, their trousers down, farting in the pope’s face. Another one shows the pope riding an ass, holding a pile of dung in his hands, saying “The pope is offering a counsel.” And another that shows the German emperor lying on the ground with the pope with his foot on the emperor’s neck, which shows, once again graphically, Luther’s belief that the papacy was trying to control secular authority throughout the world. These were all actions of the Antichrist, and Luther wanted to make it clear what he thought of the pope. ...”
This sort of slander was always part and parcel of Protestantism: http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1996/9602fea1.asp
Luther’s slanders were satanic. Period.
Luther didn't agree with the Catholic Church in a lot of areas. One of those was the Jews in which he was repeatably slanderous as his books will attest:
On the Jews and Their Lies
Vom Schem Hamphoras
Warning against the Jews
Martin Luther’s Satanic Slanders refers to his writings against Satan, which are very graphic, earthy, and vulgar.
Here is a discussion of what is meant:
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=750
As you’ve been told by now, I’m the one who said that. In 1518, Luther asserted that the Muslim conquest of Europe was a punishment from God, agents of the apocalypse who would destroy the anti-Christ, by which he meant the papacy. He welcomed their coming. Bear in mind, at the time, there was no Christian Church in Western Europe but the Christian Church.
But this was no mere theological error. Luther based his assertion that the Christian Church was worthy of destruction on what he claimed he had witnessed in Rome. But since we know he had never been to Rome, we know that this was not the true basis for his assertion. It was simply hatred.
But view this hatred in context: Mohammed had taken dictation from Satan, himself. The armies of his disciples had killed hundreds of millions, from China to Morrocco, many times more than any other movement in human history. And here was Luther, setting forth slander to assert that Mohammed’s work, straight from Satan, was from God.
Due to various miraculous interventions (Read about the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, lest you wonder which side God was on), the Islamic horde’s conquest of Europe failed. A turning point had been the 1529 Siege of Vienna, in Germanic lands.
How deadly was Luther’s alliance with the Turks? The Christian crusades resulted in a total of 1 million deaths. The 30-years’ War, an alliance between Lutherans and Muslims, resulted in 15 million dead. (In comparison, the Spanish Inquisition killed 3,000.)
But then, how many Americans know that the 30-Years’ War was even fought by the Muslims? For instance, the same Wikipedia about the 30-years’ War explicitly mentions the involvement of 400,000 Turks, including 65,000 cavalry in the invasion of Poland, nearly half of the entire Protestant-Muslim-French force... but doesn’t even list Turkey among the beligerents, because tradition doesn’t mention the Turkish alliance.