Most everything you said, once again, is not relevant as far as I am concerned. The question of 7 million is legitimate, but I did not say it was 7 million, only that some have suggested that.
When you tout some of the “good” things in Central America, all you are really doing is touting the advantage that state sponsored conquest offers in the short term. The reformers that came to America came as settlers, not conquerors. Ideals and principles vs. conquest and greed. In time that pays off.
I suggest you move to Honduras, the murder capital of the world, and start tweeting from there about the greatness that Roman Catholic Spain brought to central America.
Regarding Calvin
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390971.001.0001/acprof-9780195390971
also freeper quotes
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2902922/posts
http://books.google.com/books?id=CY2FMK-LdYgC&pg=PA176&lpg=PA176&dq=quotes+John+Calvin+George+Bancroft&source=bl&ots=iy0sXvYDmI&sig=nCVfj1wPJcmsddNFd1St3gQ79Hg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oV89VJz9A4i0yASk8AE&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=quotes%20John%20Calvin%20George%20Bancroft&f=false
http://www.amazon.com/Creed-Presbyterians-Egbert-Watson-Smith/dp/1410108988/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413309602&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Creed+of+Presbyterians
“You are crediting the books by John Calvin for what America is today more so than the contribution of any other man. That is pure hogwash and denotes how close minded and fanatic you are.”
LOL, that puts me in great company. President John Adams said similar. And George Bancroft sometimes called the father of American History. OR German Historian Leopold von Ranke
The fact that you would call declarations of eminent historians and a founding president of the US, close minded and fanatic is telling. More importantly it shows you really have NO CLUE as to the development of ideas that founded America(U.S.).
Nobody is perfect. It is hard to believe that John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of United States, and his second president, felt inspired by the teachings of John Calvin, the murderous tyrant of Geneve.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt felt such a close friendship with Joseph Stalin, that he called “Uncle Joe” to the genocide of 12 million Ukrainians.
Calvin, the Tyrant of Geneva
Fr. Leonel Franca, S.J.
http://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/e034rpCalvin_Franca05.htm
Calvin was as proud as Luther. At age 26, without any serious theological formation, he published his Institutes of the Christian Religion in which he pretended to explain all the doctrine necessary for salvation. In it he set out his thinking on the most elevated and intricate questions of dogma and morals to orient his action as impromptu reformer.
According to this young man, the whole Magisterium of the Roman Church – including all her Popes – had erred completely on the interpretation of the Gospel. Only he, during his three years of hasty private studies, understood the genuine meaning of the truths that the entire world had missed. He is the bright beacon that shines alone in the universal darkness…
The pseudo-Reformer of Geneva allowed no word spoken against him or his doctrine
Writing about the satisfaction, or reparation, demanded for sins committed, he stated: “Regarding satisfaction, I am little moved by the numerous passages in the writing of the fathers relating to satisfaction. I see many of them – frankly almost all the books that have come down to us – went astray of the truth in this matter.”(1)
Woe to those who would dare to disagree with the young doctor! He would call his adversaries offensive names: fools, crazy, frenetic, sophists, drunk, mad, sacrilegious, sycophants, wild beasts, atheists and swine, among other epithets.
Jean Jacques Rousseau describes him: “Who was ever more caustic, imperious, strong-willed and more divinely infallible, according to his own opinion, than Calvin? For him the least opposition, the least objection that someone dared to present was always considered a work of Satan, a crime deserving to be punished by fire.”(2)
When fellow pseudo-reformer John Eckius, who disagreed with him on various points, got sick in Geneva, Calvin wrote this about him: “One says that Eckius will recover: The world still does not deserve to be delivered of this wild beast.”(3) Is this the language of charity appropriate for one who pretended to be the restorer of evangelical Christianity?
Calvin, whose political influence grew enormously in Geneva from 1546 to 1564, imposed severe penalties on those who would return to Catholicism, not attend his sermons or speak a word against his doctrines or his person. Even Protestant authors, such as J.B. Galiffé, acknowledge the despotism of Calvin:
“For years people were obliged to report in minute detail every word spoken against him and the doctrine of predestination, with which he identified himself to such a degree that to speak against the dogma became as dangerous as to speak against him. The poor were dragged to prisons, scourged, reviled, obliged to walk in the streets barefoot wearing a penitential habit and carrying a torch to expiate for what Calvin arbitrarily called blasphemies.”(4)
For having disagreed with him on some points of doctrine, Sebastian Castillo, rector of a boys school in Geneva and an old friend of Calvin, was fired from his position and expelled from the city. For accusing the Calvinist doctrine of being absurd, Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec was sent to prison for weeks and then banished from Geneva.
Miguel Servet, condemned to burn for disagreeing with Calvin
For criticizing Calvin at a banquet, Pierre Ameaux, a city official, was forced to make expiation by parading through the city squares in a hair-shirt and begging God for forgiveness. These are the words of the official sentence:
“He is condemned to go around the city in penitential clothing, bareheaded, carrying a torch in his hand. When arriving before the tribunal, he must kneel, confess having evilly and maliciously spoken vile words, and manifest his repentance; then, he must beg for mercy before God and the justice of man. He is condemned to pay all the expenses. This sentence should be publically announced.”(5)
Others were still more unfortunate and had to pay with their lives for the crime of opposing the tyrant of Geneva. For having accused Calvin of being a heretic, Jacques Gruet was tortured and beheaded in 1547. Spanish physician Miguel Servet was sent to the flames for having censured the opinions of the master; he asked for a lawyer but this right was denied to him. Italian Valentino Gentile was condemned to a similar penalty but was forgiven after he humbly repented. Later, however, he was beheaded in Berne by the Swiss Protestants there.
It is horrifying to review the many criminal processes in Geneva during the autocratic reign of “this tyrant priest who submitted Geneva to the most infamous servitude,” Galiffé continues.(6) He reports that the number of judgments by public tribunals normally made in one year in the city “was easily surpassed in a single month or even a week under the rule of Calvin. Often there were many of these spectacles in a single day.”(7) Further on, he affirms that “two years of Calvin’s government produced 414 criminal processes. … There were hundreds of processes of this kind in that epoch, which some dare to call the most beautiful of our history.”(8)
Calvinist atrocities, 16th century woodgraving
Multiple death sentences are also reported by this same Protestant scholar, Galiffé, who delved into the records of that time. Describing a short period of Calvin’s rule he says, “One counts 30 executions of men and 28 of women, subdivided by method of death: 13 persons hanged, 10 beheaded, 55 quartered, 35 burned alive after being tortured.”(9)
Reporting the religious persecutions of Calvin, author Jean Tet affirms that “from 1542 to 1546, which was the softer period of his government, we count 58 capital executions, 76 banishments and 900 imprisonments.”(10)
In the blindness of his pride, the head of Swiss Protestantism issued the most extravagant moralizing prohibitions. He forbade sweets to be served at wedding banquets.(11) He forbade all kinds of amusement – especially gambling, singing and dances – as inventions of the Devil.(12) His despotism reached the point of forbidding people to drink from a mountain spring that was famous for healing the fever under the pretext that it was a form of idolatry. There were en masse denunciations of persons who were interrogated, placed under arrest and punished because they were healed in that manner.(13)
Notwithstanding this “moralization,” Galiffé concludes, never before did immorality take hold and spread as it did in the period of Calvin’s government.(14)
1. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, tran. by Henry Beverage (Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), Book Third, chap. IV, n. 38; Opera, vol. 2, p. 489.
2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Lettres de la Montagne (Amsterdam, 1764), vol. 1, p. 103.
3. Opera, vol. 11, p. 217.
4. J.B. Galiffe, Notices genealogiques sur les familles genévoises, (Genève: 1836), vol. 3, p. 545.
5. J.B. Galiffe, Nouvelles pages d’histoire exacte, 1863, p. 60.
6. J.B. Galiffe, Notices genealogiques sur les familles genévoises, vol. 3, p. 538.
7. J.B. Galiffe, Nouvelles pages d’histoire exact, pp. 105-106.
8. J.B. Galiffe, Notices genealogiques sur les familles genévoises, vol. 3, p. 544.
9. J.B. Galiffe, Nouvelles pages d’histoire exact, p. 100.
10. Jean Tet, Histoire de la persecutions religieuse à Genève (Paris: Lecoffre, 1879), p. 473.
11. Calvin à Genève, art. 141.
12. J.B. Galiffe, Notices genealogiques sur les familles genévoises, vol. 3, p. 381.
13. Ibid, vol. 3, p. 528.
14. J.B. Galiffe, Nouvelles pages d’histoire exact, pp. 95-98.
JOHN CALVIN, THE TYRANT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V9t_k5saGQ&feature=player_detailpage
According to our erudite Prophet: “The reformers that came to America came as settlers, not conquerors. Ideals and principles vs. conquest and greed. In time that pays off.”
But, according to History, the Pilgrims were Calvinists that turn out from being oppressors in Geneve, to be oppressed by their brothers, the Anglican Protestants in England. They came to America in quest of freedom while robbing the Indian’s territories not as conquerors, but as settlers. What a splendid Orwellian manipulation of the language. While on the other hand, the Catholic Spaniards came as conquerors and settled in the New World marrying the natives establishing families that gave to the world a new race, the “mestizo”. The British colonized Australia sending criminals from their jails.
As attested the American professor of History, Dr. Philip W. Powell: “the English government and people, and their New World progeny, exhibited for the most part, a supreme unconcern for the protection and welfare of the American Indian.”
According to American historian Francis C. Kelly: “A surprisingly large proportion of the (Spanish) pioneers of America were college men; and intelligence went hand in hand with heroism in the early settlements of the New World.” Along with the first missionaries many historians arrived, like the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and Toribio de Benavente (”Motilínea) who learned the native languages and tried to chronicle their history, traditions and legends, which until then had been handed down by word of mouth among the Indians for generations. With the exception of the Aztecs who left behind pictographic codicils, and the Mayas who had a hieroglyphic system, most of the Indians had no written language. Nothing escaped the inquisitive and sharp eye of these wise men; the flora, the fauna, the mineralogy and the geography of America broadened their intellectual horizons. Many, upon learning in depth about the native cultures, showed great admiration by leaving behind objective records of their experiences. More than 4 million documents and publications of great historical and scientific value from the 16th to the 19th centuries can be presently found at the “Archives of the Indies” in Seville.