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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
When I was a kid, Western Civilization seemed as eternal as the ancient granite hills threading through my hometown. Christian churches were packed on Sunday. Even forms as minor and ephemeral as jokes and song lyrics assumed, in the hearer, proficiency in a cultural heritage from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare to NASA. You couldn’t understand Cole Porter or Johnny Carson without having been baptized into this heritage. The day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and no one sat that out or even made rude comments or eye-rolls. Classroom walls featured silhouette profiles of Washington and Lincoln.
That everything had changed hit me hardest when I was teaching. I might casually allude to a line I assumed everyone knew, like, “In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Or, I might use a phrase like “ex nihilo,” or “fiat lux.” And I would be met with complete incomprehension. The Vietnam War. Nothing. The Greek Miracle. Blank stares. Normandy Beach. Huh?
My students’ minds were not empty. They were full of data of which I had previously been unaware. For example, the Nazis were all Christians, their only victims were Jews, and World War II was the inevitable consequence and culmination of Christianity. Americans were the only people who ever practiced slavery. Black people were the only people who had ever been enslaved. The Founding Fathers were nothing but a bunch of oppressors and they never did anything worthwhile for anyone.
My students knew that there were fabulous alternatives to Western Civilization that could be adopted as soon as we tossed into the garbage heap all that oppression and racism and stupidity our white, benighted elders had saddled us with. We could replace greedy, destructive capitalism with compassionate socialism. We could replace weird, wicked Christianity with peaceful, meditative Eastern religions, or nature-loving indigenous spirituality, or sexy, feminist Neo-Paganism, or clinically clean, always correct, completely rational Science.
When teaching writing, as someone of immigrant stock for whom Standard English was an adopted and idolized tongue, the key to America’s great blessings, I wanted to focus on technical excellence, like proper use of the predictive nominative. But I found myself in tugs of war with students and campus superiors certain that any aspect of Western Civilization, including use of the predict nominative, was racist, sexist, and oppressive. In passing this civilization on to students, I was passing on a filthy rag pregnant with contagion.
The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Witch Craze, the Atlantic slave trade, and Nazism were all proof that the West was rotten to the core.
I hadn’t trained as an historian. I went in search of answers. I discovered a couple of things. One was that propagandistic invocations of the Crusades, the Witch Craze, and the Inquisition to discredit Catholicism often relied on material produced centuries ago by Protestants in power struggles with Catholics. The Dutch and the English competed with Catholic Spain. The Black Legend denigrated Spain and Catholicism.
Here’s an example of how one nugget of anti-Catholic propaganda made its way into Wikipedia. Friedrich Spee (1591 – 1635) was a German Jesuit. At the height of the witch craze, Spee risked his life writing a passionate, influential anti-witch-craze book, Cautio Criminalis. New Atheists Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer cited in their recent, bestselling books an anecdote they got from one source, Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; see here. Mackay falsely describes the heroic Spee as a religious fool. There is no support for Mackay’s character assassination. Why, then, did Mackay include it in his book? Perhaps because, as one blogger alleges, “Mackay was a prominent member of a clique of British historians characterized by their anti-Catholicism.” Pinker and Shermer repeat this invented slander, and it is now found on Wikipedia’s page devoted to Spee.
In 1999, Yale University Press published The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. This book “firmly rebuts a variety of myths and exaggerations that have distorted understandings of the Inquisition.” Author Henry Kamen is of English, Burmese, and Nepali descent and he was born in Rangoon, Burma. Eurasian Kamen can’t be accused of bias toward his own ethnic group in his deconstruction of the anti-Spanish Black Legend. He is, simply, a real scholar – “one of the most important living historians of Spain,” according to the Atlantic Monthly. Kamen, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is courageous enough to tell the truth. Kamen appears in the 1994 BBC documentary, The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, viewable here.
Kamen’s work has not trickled down to popular consciousness, though. People are more likely to understand the Spanish Inquisition through the work of Monty Python than Henry Kamen, or from films like Goya’s Ghosts. Academy-Award-winning Milos Forman directed Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman in a lurid, fictional tale of a priest who tortures and rapes an innocent woman. Bloggers might point out the film’s inaccuracies – see here – but a sexy priest torturing a sexy movie star packs a punch that a dry rebuttal never can.
The Spanish Inquisition was criticized by contemporaneous Christians outside of Spain, including popes. Jesus never recommended to his disciples that they force conversion or kill people for their faith. Why, then, did this Inquisition take place? Muslims invaded Spain in 711 AD. As Darío Fernandez-Morera demonstrates in his excellent book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, reviewed here, Muslim Spain was not the paradise some insist it was. The Reconquista or Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula lasted until 1492. Spain decided that peace and prosperity required homogeneity. We don’t have to approve of the Spanish Inquisition to understand the historical circumstances that contributed to its creation. Any population after centuries of warfare between practitioners of different religions might crave demographic purity. In fact many colonial-era American Protestants craved the same, and, after Europe’s religious wars, banned Catholics from living within their borders.
The Crusades were not, as one of my students passionately insisted, a bunch of Catholics, for no good reason, marching off to murder Muslims. Any real understanding of the Crusades begins not with the obvious Medieval exaggeration, that, in the 1099 Siege of Jerusalem, Crusaders murdered so many Muslims that “blood reached horses’ knees.” Both Crusaders and Muslims exaggerated casualty figures. Muslims, eager to commodify their defeat, want to say that 70,000 died; the number defies historical realty and Jerusalem’s estimated population size. Crusaders wanted to boast of their prowess, as warriors, in mowing down the enemy.
Any real understanding of the Crusades begins with this: Islam had been waging no-holds-barred, genocidal warfare against Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Pagans, Buddhists, and Hindus for hundreds of years before the Crusades began. Dr. Bill Warner’s “dynamic battle map” plots jihad assaults on the classical world of the Mediterranean basin. It’s here. As Warner shows, the entire history of the Crusades is tiny in comparison to jihadi activity.
Robert Spencer provides more background here. Spencer writes, “Early in the eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies.” Both Muslim officials and Muslim criminals robbed Christians, the first in the jizya tax extorted from Christians and Jews. Muslims forbade public display of the cross and forbade Christians from informing others – including their own children – of their faith. Christians’ and Jews’ hands had to be stamped with an identifying mark. The Crusades were intended to make the Holy Land safe for Christians.
Again, though, popular consciousness is more likely to be misinformed by movies like 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven than historical fact. Jonathan Riley-Smith, the late Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge and an historian of the Crusades, detailed the many “ruthlessly” “distorted” inaccuracies of Ridley Scott’s film. Real Crusaders, Riley-Smith argues, followed a “coherent theology” that to some extent “constrained” their actions. “An expedition could not be launched to spread Christianity or Christian rule, but had to be a defensive reaction to an injury perpetrated by another.” Crusaders were informed by Saint Augustine’s concept of “just war;” see here. In Scott’s film, on the other hand, “A cruel, avaricious and cowardly Christian clergy preaches hatred against the Muslims and most of the crusaders and settlers are equally stupid and fanatical.” Kingdom of Heaven, Riley-Smith alleges, is “dangerous to Arab relations.” The film presents “Osama bin Laden’s version of history.”
The Witch Craze? I did enough research on that topic to teach a course on it. A video is here; an article is here. Just about everything we “know” is true about the Witch Craze has been overturned by recent scholarship. Nazism? I published a prize-winning, well-reviewed book that addresses, inter alia, misunderstandings of what Nazism really was; I argued against identifying Nazism with Christianity.
Pointing out that historical events have been distorted for propagandistic reasons doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen or that we approve of these events. Rather, I would communicate the following to my students. “A fish doesn’t know it is in water.” Most of my students had very limited notions of any historical period except the present and any culture except their own. They didn’t know about non-Western genocides, for example in Cambodia or Rwanda. They didn’t know about largely Muslim Nigerians, in the late 1960s, starving two million largely Catholic Biafrans to death. They didn’t know about Muslim Indonesians, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, committing atrocities against tens of thousands of Catholic East Timorese. They didn’t know about Pakistan’s mass atrocities against Bangladeshis in 1971. Blessed by Muslim imams, Pakistanis raped hundreds of thousands of women. Pakistanis mass murdered Bangladeshis, especially Hindus. Pakistanis drove an estimated eight million Hindus into exile. I regularly read in the New York Times and the New Yorker about Indian PM Narendra Modi’s “Islamophobia.” One does not have to approve of Modi to wish that the mainstream press would provide some background. Islamophobia in the subcontinent has roots going back 1,400 years.
Pop culture and even students’ own professors peddled an image of non-Western peoples and cultures as uniformly benevolent. For example, see the 2015 Canadian documentary, Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World. This documentary depicts the Haida people as peaceful, egalitarian, artistic, and in harmony with nature. White people came along and exploited the forests and the fisheries and left devastation and injustice. Modern-day Haida are shown reconnecting with their superior, ancestral culture by carving totem poles and starting fires without matches.
The documentary does not depict a central fact of Haida culture. According to the Canadian Museum of History, “The Haida were feared … because of their practice of making lightning raids against which their enemies had little defense. Their great skills of seamanship, their superior craft and their relative protection from retaliation in their island fortress added to the aggressive posture of the Haida towards neighbouring tribes.” Haida were the “Indian Vikings of the North West Coast.” Each war canoe “carried a shaman … to catch and destroy the souls of enemies.”
Haida went to war for slaves. “Most estimates put the presence of slaves between ten and thirty-five percent of most Northwest Coast populations,” according to the Sealaska Heritage Institute. An 1886 account reports that, “slavery in its most shocking form has been thoroughly interwoven with the social policy of the Indians of Alaska, and still exists in many localities under circumstances of extreme cruelty. The life of the slave is entirely at the disposal of his master or his mistress, and it has been customary among them to kill one or more slaves on the death of a master, or on the happening of some other event, such as the completion of a new house. Boring the ears, or putting out an eye, of a slave, or some other mode of marking the flesh, has been and is now a custom with some of the families of these people … the object of such mutilation is to impress upon the slaves their inferiority, and render their humiliation complete.”
My message to my students was not “Humanity sucks; abandon all hope.” I insisted that there were lights in the darkness, lights on which the civilization they inherited was based. The Ancient Greeks broke from surrounding cultures and insisted that “Man is the measure of all things” and Athens developed a democratic system. The Jews worshipped one God, who, in an act of love, created everything, ex nihilo, and pronounced it “good.” He wanted us to be happy. We all descend, equally, no matter our height or wealth or skin color or language, from this one act of benevolent creation. Christians believe that Jesus, god incarnate, suffered and died for us.
Westerners are not a superior form of human. Even our role models do bad things. Peter denied Jesus; Paul executed Christians. But the West gave us a system for dealing with the inevitable bad that we do. We confess, we atone, we can rejoin society. Those we have wronged can forgive, accept restitution, or, if restitution is not possible, believe that ultimate justice is in God’s hands, and move on.
The Judeo-Christian tradition didn’t just hand humanity a mechanism for dealing with evil. It also provides incentive to do good. Saints Christopher, Francis and Mother Teresa, did good deeds for people it’s difficult to want to be around. Saint Christopher carried a heavy child across a river; the child revealed himself to be Jesus. Francis had a horror of lepers. To overcome his resistance to the command to love, he embraced and kissed a leper. The leper revealed himself to be Jesus. Mother Teresa ministered to dying humans abandoned in the streets. She called their appearance a “distressing disguise.” When she helped them, she was sure, she was helping Jesus. People who look upon needy people and see an opportunity to serve their God behave differently from others who do not share this belief.
Jesus promised, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me.” Those who follow this teaching believe not just that they are performing service in gratitude to Jesus, who suffered and died for them. They also believe that they earn an eternal reward.
Of course not everyone in the West has fully believed, or believed at all, in Christian teaching. But some have. And those who have held, or at least honored, this belief, have also contributed to the establishing of hospitals, universities, and charitable institutions. They have tried to determine how war can be waged justly. They have challenged rulers to live up to Christian ideals.
In the long run, a belief system that teaches the concept that we are all equally made in God’s image, in Hebrew, “b’tselem elohim,” and in Latin, “imago dei,” is going to produce a certain kind of society. A different kind of society will be produced by, for example, a belief system that teaches that its own members are certified by Allah as “the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind,” and that Allah commands his believers to rape, torture, pillage, and kill, even if those believers don’t want to commit any of those heinous acts – see Quran 3:110, 2:216, 5:33, 2:191, 4:24.
In 2019, Tom Holland published Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The book is reviewed here. Holland, an agnostic, called Christianity a “depth charge” that, slowly but surely, century by century, changed the world through the individual acts of those who take the Bible seriously.
***
All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church was published by Orbis Books in 2022. Orbis Books is a Catholic publishing house, established in 1970. Oppression’s author, Christopher J. Kellerman, is a Jesuit priest. Oppression is 230 pages long, inclusive of an index and a bibliography. The Journal of Global Slavery points out that the book fills an important and unique niche. “This impressive and thoroughly researched work is the first book-length study in English since 1975 to provide an accessible, era-by-era exploration of the Catholic Church’s historical involvement with slave-holding and abolitionism.” The book “constitutes a new starting point for understanding the Catholic Church’s historical relationship with slavery.”
I sought out this book because an influential author and activist made a derogatory comment about Catholics not having any problem with slavery. I was astounded. I thought of the 1170 Gniezno door in Poland that depicts, in bronze bas-relief, Saint Adalbert freeing Slavic slaves. I thought of Peter Claver (1580 – 1654). Claver was born in Spain. At university, he wrote, “I must dedicate myself to the service of God until death, on the understanding that I am like a slave.” He would eventually become “Aethiopum servus,” the slave of the Africans. In Colombia, he dedicated his life to ministering to slaves newly arriving on foul and disease-ridden slave ships. Claver learned African languages and informed the new arrivals that God loved them and that they were of equal worth as any other human being.
Hearing that slavery never bothered the Catholics, I thought, also, of Sublimis Deus, a 1537 Papal bull that forbade the enslavement of Native Americans. I realized, though, that I was hitting on highlights. I had never read a comprehensive treatment of Catholicism’s 2000 year history on the topic of slavery.
All Oppression Shall Cease is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Kellerman’s prose is smooth and economical. Kellerman manages a minor miracle: a deeply researched history of a very controversial topic that engages many voices in just 230 pages. To achieve that economy, and also to honor his subject, Kellerman forgoes melodramatic language. He allows the gruesome facts to speak for themselves, without much editorial commentary.
All Oppression Shall Cease is devastating. Kellerman is fearless and he lets the reader know what he is in for from the first sentences. “The history of the Catholic Church and slavery is not pretty in any aspect. It is really ugly, and there is no way to make it look otherwise without being dishonest.”
Oppression is in no way comparable to Kingdom of Heaven or Haida Gwaii or Goya’s Ghosts or Shermer’s or Pinker’s Christophobic slander. Oppression is an exemplar of historical writing. And it could make a reader lose his faith, or at least his fealty to Catholicism.
This book, devastating though it is, did not demolish my faith. I saw this extended, reasoned cry of “I accuse” as support for why I am Catholic, and why I became, to the extent that I am able, a defender of the West. In Catholic school, I was told that every night I was to make an examination of conscience. I had to look over my deeds of that day and note what I got wrong. I would take those wrongs to the confessional. I would admit to another person my failings, I would receive absolution, and I would resolve to be a better person. That a Catholic priest wrote a book that places the Catholic Church in the dock and finds it guilty as charged is a reflection of the best in Catholicism. Most of Kellerman’s book is straightforward history. In his conclusion, Kellerman acts as a devout Catholic. He demands that essential step in any absolution of sins. He demands atonement.
Oppression is dense with names, dates, controversies, and quotes over the course of 2,000 years. There are heroes here, clear-eyed Christians who recognized how slavery could never be made to comply with the overall message of the entire Bible. Kellerman insists on disabusing his reader of any false hopes. He makes clear that for over a thousand years, those Christians who could and did publicly record denunciations of slavery per se were a distinct minority, and they exercised little to no influence. Rather, all too often, and very influentially, Catholics, including popes, made statements that ranged between acceptance of slavery as an inevitability in a fallen world, to Catholics who caused believers to conclude that slavery was in no way inconsistent with Christian faith.
Kellerman will also not allow the weak excuse, “But everyone thought that way back then.” First, a church that declares itself a purveyor of transcendent truth cannot hide behind that excuse. Second, there were people “back then”, non-Christian and Christian alike, who recognized slavery as an intrinsic evil.
When doing my feeble best to defend Western Civ to my students, I reminded them that just because a person was baptized, that did not mean that that person acted on, or believed, Christian precepts. Hitler was a baptized Catholic. He rejected Catholicism as a teenager and targeted the church for persecution. He replaced the cross with the swastika, meant to represent his party’s blend of nationalism and Neo-Paganism.
In Oppression, the reader encounters men who have risen to the highest ranks of the church. These true believers in Christianity managed to produce shockingly absurd statements to support slavery. These statements were valued by slave traders and owners.
Kellerman’s scrupulousness demands that he acknowledge that the Bible does not contain a condemnation of slavery per se. Rather, the Old Testament contains instructions on slave-holding. In the New Testament, Jesus interacts with slaves and does not take those opportunities to condemn slavery. New Testament letter-writers adjured slaves to be obedient to their masters.
Even so, the Bible inspired slaves, abolitionists, and Civil Rights activists. Exodus, after creation, is possibly the most famous and stirring narrative in the Old Testament. In this book, God demands and receives the liberation of slaves. God repeatedly says, “Let my people go.” Freedom is a Biblical value. Jesus commands his followers, “Love one another as I have loved you,” and “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
These contradictory features of the Bible – its emphasis on freedom, equality, and love, and its apparent acceptance of slavery – explain why both abolitionists and supporters of slavery have turned to the Bible for support.
Kellerman records how Christian authors in the church’s early centuries followed the pattern set by the New Testament. They took slavery for granted as part of life after the fall and adjured slaves to be obedient and masters to be kind. Augustine argued that slaves might deserve their fate because of some sin. A few church fathers argued that slave owners should not have sex with their slaves. In sum, “As far as we know, there were very few bishops and theologians in the early Church who thought that slave-holding was morally wrong.”
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who lived circa 335 – 394 AD, “is the only Church theologian who wrote abolitionist works that survive.” He called slave-holding a sin and instructed slave owners to free their slaves (See here). “He developed theological arguments demonstrating slavery’s sinfulness and those same arguments would be employed by the abolitionist movement centuries later.” Slave owners, Nyssen argued, placed themselves above God. They turned human beings into the equivalent of “four-footed things.” Psalm 8, he argued, lists the animals over which God had given humans dominion. God never gave man dominion over man. Slavery defies the Bible because it divides humanity in half. “If a royal birthday or victory celebration opens a prison, shall not Christ’s rising relive those in affliction?” Nyssen asked. Kellerman acknowledges that Nyssen’s ideas exercised little influence.
On the other hand, theologian David Bentley Hart praises Nyssen’s words as, as far as we know, unique. “Nowhere in the literary remains of antiquity is there another document quite comparable to” Nyssen’s condemnation of slavery. “Certainly no other ancient text still known to us—Christian, Jewish, or Pagan—contains so fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of the institution of slavery … It is a passage of remarkable rhetorical intensity. In it Gregory treats slavery not as a luxury that should be indulged in only temperately (as might an Epicurean), nor as a necessary domestic economy too often abused by arrogant or brutal slave-owners (as might a Stoic like Seneca or a Christian like John Chrysostom), but as intrinsically sinful, opposed to God’s actions in creation, salvation, and the church, and essentially incompatible with the Gospel.”
In contrast to Nyssen, sixth-century Saint Pope Gregory the Great “thought that slavery had been ordained by God and that the lord arranged people in the hierarchy of the world according to their sinfulness.” Gregory gave a teenage slave to Bishop Felix. “You are empowered … to do whatever you want with him.”
Abbot Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (c. 770 – c. 840) told Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s heir, that to be a good Christian king, he must not allow “captivity.” “Smaragdus quotes multiple passages from the Old Testament which, at least in his mind, show that God does not like slavery.” “Everyone should let slaves go free,” Smaragdus wrote. Alas, “Louis the Pious did not follow Smaragdus’ advice, and slavery remained in the Carolingian kingdom.”
Theologians of the High Middle Ages were almost unanimously pro-slavery in their writing. Thomas Aquinas never challenged slavery in any significant way. There was an exception. Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (1265 – 1308) was “the heavyweight antislavery voice of the era … Scotus was a true abolitionist theologian, and he provided all the intellectual arguments needed for the Church to condemn slavery.”
Portugal, a Catholic country, dominated in the Atlantic slave trade (see here). Kellerman points out that while, yes, the 1537 papal bull Sublimis Deus forbade the enslavement of Native Americans, the Vatican gave the green light to the enslavement of Africans. Native Americans, the Vatican believed, were gentle people brought to the faith through persuasion. Africa was associated with Islam, and, therefore, harsher measures were permitted. “The beginning of the Atlantic trade in African slaves was approved by not just one pope but four over the course of seventy-five years … Theologically speaking, these documents gave the Portuguese free reign in conquering and reducing people to slavery in Africa.”
In the mid-1500’s, “major Catholic figures began to sharply criticize” the Atlantic slave trade “and document its injustices.” Dominican Friar Bernardino de Vique questioned the morality of the trade. Dominican Friar Bartolome de las Casas rejected the idea that papal permissions supported Portuguese behavior in Africa. “A thousand mortal sins are committed” in the slave trade. “Las Casas was the first of many Catholic priests and theologians to speak against the trade’s injustices … From las Casas onward, Catholic theologians and writers would be nearly unanimous in their judgment that terrible injustices were occurring on a massive scale in the trade. The only real question of debate would be what to do about those injustices … the great Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto” argued that owners must free their wrongfully captured slaves. Catholics engaging in slave trading were “slandering the faith.” Two Jesuits refused to absolve, in the confessional, any slaveholders.”
Perhaps because Kellerman is himself a Jesuit, he details Jesuits buying and owning slaves. But he also mentions Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina who became in 1594, “the first theologian to publish an in-depth moral analysis of the African slave trade.” Molina did not condemn slavery per se; rather, he recycled previous defenses of it. He did, though, condemn some aspects of the Atlantic slave trade as “unjust and evil … all those that operate [this trade] sin mortally and are in a state of eternal damnation.” That the slaves might eventually become Christian was no excuse. The ends does not justify the means, he argued. The king should issue a decree ending this trade.
Jean Bodin, Pierre Charron, and Yves de Paris were three sixteenth / seventeenth-century French, Catholic writers who condemned not just the Atlantic slave trade, but also slave-holding. Pierre Charron, a priest, condemned slavery as “monstrous and shameful.” Early Christians did not call for abolition, he wrote, because they were a minority in a world where slavery was a widespread practice. “Easily and very smoothly over time” Christians “abolished” past sins. Capuchin priest Yves de Paris condemned slavery as a system that took “this living image of God, which is animated by his grace, and made capable of his glory … to work like the beasts.” Alas, Kellerman writes, the Catholics protesting against slavery that he lists “didn’t make a dent” in Catholic slave-holding. Rather, “Catholic participation in the slave trade was only expanding.”
Capuchin priest Epiphane de Moirans wrote “the sharpest Catholic theological takedown of the Atlantic slave trade that had yet been written and perhaps ever would be.” Servi Liberi Seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio – A Just Defense of the Natural Liberty of Slaves, from 1682, is a “fiery and apocalyptic denunciation” of the slave trade. “God will pour out divine wrath upon Christians for their grave sins.” God, Moirans writes, “will strike the Catholics … scourge them … make vengeance until he finally annihilates them, and passing a judgment for the oppressed Indians and Africans enduring injury, making Christians captives in his wrath, driving out princes and missionary ecclesiastics, he will strip the Christians kings of their dominions.”
About halfway through Oppression, Kellerman begins to address the American and British abolitionist movements. These non-Catholic movements, Kellerman acknowledges, turned the tide. Catholics learned from these movements and added their voices. Kellerman details how the American and British activists relied on Biblical concepts like imago dei, the equality of all before God, the command to love, the need to evangelize all nations, and the book of Exodus to make their case.
Many Catholics were deaf to these arguments. Catholics in the U.S., including clergy and church institutions, continued to own slaves and to publish defenses of slavery, including racist defenses. In 1814, Pope Pius VII became “the first pope to denounce the Atlantic save trade in any fashion.” He sent private letters to European royals. In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI released the papal bull In supremo apostolatus. This document was the first public papal condemnation of the Atlantic slave trade. Gregory “condemned any participation in the Atlantic trade whatsoever.” He even condemned mere defense of the slave trade. Kellerman does not rejoice. He points out that Pope Gregory acted, in 1839, on information that crusading priests, black and white, had been presenting to the Vatican since the 1540s.
Oppression astounded me so much that I often made audible harrumphs while reading it. As popes and empowered others began to issue unambiguous, public declarations that inched closer and closer to condemning slavery per se, my harrumphs increased, even as I read in a public library. The newly emerging papal condemnations of slavery did something that amazed this reader. They said things like, paraphrase, “As we Christians have always said, slavery is bad.” Kellerman calls this approach a “radical historical rewrite.” Kellerman courageously states, “Gregory’s version of history was not accurate.” But, Kellerman says, “It is very probable that the pope believed this version of history.”
Here is an example from In supremo apostolatus: “We say with profound sorrow – there were to be found … among the Faithful men who, shamefully blinded by the desire of sordid gain, in lonely and distant countries, did not hesitate to reduce to slavery Indians, negroes … Certainly many Roman Pontiffs of glorious memory, Our Predecessors, did not fail, according to the duties of their charge, to blame severely this way of acting as dangerous for the spiritual welfare of those engaged in the traffic and a shame to the Christian name.”
Kellerman has just demonstrated to his reader that Catholics and other Christians have not always and universally condemned slavery per se. And yet they believed they did, or spoke as if they believed they did. Pope Gregory invokes the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa, who did, indeed, articulately and on Christian grounds condemn slavery. If only popes had followed Nyssen’s words 1,444 years previously.
The Bible tells slave-owners to be good to their slaves. Kellerman says that this is like telling a kidnapper to be good to his hostage. Kellerman quotes elderly former slaves interviewed in the 1930s during FDR’s presidency. Some former slaves say nice things about their former Catholic masters. Others report vicious treatment. One former slave says, “If’n you wants to know what unhappiness means, jess’n you stand on the slave block and hear the auctioneer’s voice selling you away from the folks you love.” The reality of that experience makes a mockery of the concept of masters treating slaves kindly.
Catholic abolitionism strengthened in the nineteenth century. Kellerman covers three notable figures: Daniel O’Connell, an Irish statesman, Jaime Balmes, a Spanish priest, and Parisian journalist Augustin Cochin. Balmes took an interesting approach to the “the Church has always opposed slavery” position. He said that earlier Christians might not have been aware of the long-term impact of a belief system that preached full equality and demanded charity. “It is not necessary to suppose,” he wrote, “that the first Christians knew the full force” Christianity would exercise on “the abolition of slavery.” “The sole force of Christian doctrines and the spirit of charity that was spreading along with them throughout the earth attacked slavery so vividly that sooner or later they had to carry out its complete abolition, because it is impossible for society to remain for a long time in an order of things that is in opposition to the ideas with which it is imbued.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the high impact abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, cited and praised Balmes.
French journalist Augustin Cochin published L’Abolition de L’Esclavage in 1861. Cochin’s lengthy work included economic data supporting slavery’s abolition. Kellerman devotes his final historical chapter to Leo XIII, a fully abolitionist pope. In 1888, Leo produced In plurimis, an encyclical thoroughly denouncing slavery on Christian grounds, even as slavery was abolished in Brazil.
Kellerman closes his book with a carefully reasoned and fully supported appeal for Catholic institutions to make restitution, as well as they can, to descendants of slaves those institutions once owned. And Kellerman does not shy away from the implications of his research. If the Church was wrong in the past – wrong here meaning that popes advanced a position that defied Biblical teachings on equality, human dignity, and charity – could the Church be wrong today? Kellerman does not mention a few issues on which American Catholics disagree with Church teaching. According to Pew polls, most American Catholics think that homosexuals should be accepted. Most American Catholics think women should be allowed to become priests, and most American Catholics think that priests should be allowed to marry. Catholics have produced lengthy publications addressing all of these issues. Their arguments are rooted in scripture and tradition.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Professor Goska, you’re missing the overarching and crucial philosophical point, you’re missing the difference between Augustinian Christianity and Thomist Christianity.
Augustinian Christianity is thoroughly anti-reason, ANTI-FREEDOM, anti-science, anti-this world, anti-life, and anti-happiness.
Thomist Christianity represents the introduction of the secular, rational, and logic-based philosophy of Aristotle into the Christian Dark Ages. Thereafter, and because of the pagan Aristotelian influence, the Renaissance began. “Renaissance” means rebirth, not the rebirth of Christian faith and Christian dogma, but the rebirth of Aristotelian reason and logic.
“What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable; mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.” – Leonard Peikoff
You are totally wrong. Read M. Stanton Evans’ book The Theme is Freedom.
THE THEME IS FREEDOM
The CSPAN video…
https://www.c-span.org/video/?62252-1/the-theme-freedom
The book…
Correction, Augustinian Christianity WAS anti freedom, how much more time is needed before you move on?
You don’t understand (but I actually think you prefer not to understand) Christianity is ALWAYS weaponized for theocracy, weaponized for the hatred of man, and weaponized for the hatred of life.
What Thomas Aquinas did was to develop a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christianity. A synthesis that is ultimately and fundamentally incompatible and unstable, like a mixture of oil and water.
Moreover, there are Platonic elements in the philosophy of Aristotle which rendered it vulnerable to attack by the Platonists and the mystics. Ayn Rand has resolved those flaws with her philosophy of Objectivism.
Ultimately, you cannot have both, Christianity can always break free from Thomist Aristotelianism and revert back to its fundamental undiluted, unadulterated, mysticism. Back to its true, consistent, form of Augustinian, Neo-Platonist Christianity.
“[Thomas Aquinas] has a monumental, ingenious philosophic system, more thorough, more systematic, than any in all of philosophy prior to his time. In its key concepts, however, it is not very original; it is an attempted synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity.” – Leonard Peikoff
“Thomas Aquinas: The Union of Aristotelianism and Christianity by Leonard Peikoff, part 28 of 50”
Do you really mean I have to watch a video in addition to reading your endless gibberish.
Oh God no! Please don’t read my comments or reply to them. Do us both a big ole favor, please ignore me completely.
Don’t you have better things to do with your time than to waste it on me.
Go watch your Bugs Bunny cartoons with your bowl of cereal.
In answer to your silly question I can only say, don’t you have better things to do with your time than to waste your ridiculous Objectivist propaganda on us?
Most intelligent people would realize afteryears of rejection and downvotes that the message is just not resonating. But then whoever said you are intelligent.
You post the same crap everyday that no one reads. Today is overkill. Maybe your time would be better spent at some other website where the readers haven’t been exposed to your Objectivist virus yet.
Professor Goska,
Rational principles and rational values (such as the freedom and dignity of the individual) embedded in an ocean of contradictory Holy Scripture, contradictory mysticism, contradictory superstition, and contradictory supernaturalism become practically impotent, here on earth, in this life.
That’s why and how someone like Martin Luther could embrace the contradiction of freedom and liberty from the Roman Catholic theocracy but not secular, individual, freedom for pursuing personal and individual happiness here on earth, in this lifetime.
Christianity, in its full and complete context, does NOT offer the individual, personal freedom to pursue his personal happiness. Christianity, in its full and complete context, only offers the individual the freedom to serve God, or be sent to Hell for eternity. That is NOT freedom and liberty in any rational and secular sense of the word.
The right to the pursuit of personal happiness, here and now, on earth, in this earthly life, is a thoroughly SECULAR value, completely divorced from the Christian idea of being the servant of God, completely divorced from the doctrine of Original Sin, completely divorced from the idea that this life on earth is a punishment for Original Sin, and that the purpose of this life is to seek redemption for Original Sin through self-sacrifice.
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s SELFISH possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff
She still won’t date you. You are a loser.
“What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was anti-materialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life — and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable; mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.
What about freedom in this era? Study the existence of the feudal serf tied for life to his plot of ground, his noble overlord, and the all-encompassing decrees of the Church. Or, if you want an example closer to home, jump several centuries forward to the American Puritans, who were a medieval remnant transplanted to a virgin continent, and who proceeded to establish a theocratic dictatorship in colonial Massachusetts. Such a dictatorship, they declared, was necessitated by the very nature of their religion. You are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenter; therefore, you are a servant who must act as your Creator, through his spokesmen, decrees. Besides, they said, you are innately depraved, so a dictatorship of the elect is necessary to ride herd on your vicious impulses. And, they said, you don’t really own your property either; wealth, like all values, is a gift from heaven temporarily held in trust, to be controlled like all else, by the elect. And if all this makes you unhappy, they ended up, so what? You’re not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway.
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Middle Ages?
Less than 100 years ago rational scientists decided eugenics was the way forward.
Rationality is a consistent dedication to reason and logic. And reason and logic are the means and the method of establishing, in a NON-CONTRADICTORY way, the facts of reality.
In other words, just because a “scientist”, or a “philosopher, claims to be speaking of the facts of reality, does not mean he is actually speaking of reality.
Eugenics and Social Darwinism, like lobotomy and Phrenology, are quackery and pseudo-science, not actual science.
Anthony Fauci. like Rousseau and many others before him, is a power-lusting quack, a power-lusting charlatan, not an actual scientist.
Objectivism is philosophical quackery…..as if you are not a power-lusting quack and a power-lusting charlatan, not an actual philosopher. But you are a very good copy/paste nerd. Not that your chosen profession actually accomplishes anything.
“There can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must offer an obedient faith to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own intellectual master; in such a case, you cannot guide your behavior by your own judgment either, but must be submissive in action as well. This is the reason why — as Ayn Rand has pointed out — faith and force are always corollaries; each requires the other….
The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has a value as an individual — that the individual soul is precious — is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite Original Sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power — only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy — only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.
(continued below)
Rational scientists create dangerous viruses and vaccines.
Correction: power-lusting quacks and power-lusting charlatans create dangerous viruses and vaccines in order to gain UNEARNED power and UNEARNED wealth, and to terrorize and destroy human beings.
You aren’t human. You are a cockroach.
“What — or who — ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: “It’s all right. You don’t have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Back we go again to the Middle Ages.
Christianity is ALWAYS weaponized to create a Dark Age of unreason.
A republic of liberty if you can keep it, means a republic of reason if you can keep it.
“Kant is dead in academic philosophy; the subject has effectively expired under his tutelage. He is dead among the intellectuals, whose world view is disillusionment (they call it the “end of ideology”). He is dead in the realm of art, where nihilism, with little left to defy, is turning into its inevitable product: nihil (this is now being called “minimalism” and postmodernism”).
Kant is dead even in Berlin and Moscow. As of this writing, although it is too early to know, communism seems to be disintegrating.
The collapse of a negative, however, is not a positive. The atrophy of a vicious version of unreason is not the adoption of reason. If men fail to discover living ideas, they will keep moving by the guidance of dead ones; they will keep following, by inertia, the principles they have already institutionalized. For the nations of East and West alike today, no matter what their faddish lipservice to a “free market,” the culmination of these principles is some variant of dictatorship, new or revised—if not communist, then fascist and/or religious and/or tribal. Force and faith on such a scale would mean the fate of the ancients over again.
The only man who can stave off another Dark Ages is the Father of the Enlightenment [Aristotle].
It is true that Aristotle has flaws, which always gave his enemies an opening. But now the opening has been closed [by Objectivism].” – Leonard Peikoff, “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
Gee I think I saw this garbage yesterday too. You never really have anything to say. Rinse and repeat.
Hello THX Or we could look at Christianity itself, by which I mean what the Bible actually says. It has one consistent message from Genesis to Revelation. It was a revelation to me when I found out – a wonderful one too.
Two examples. The Bible warns that our faith must stand to reason – we must use the reasoning powers God gave us.
At Matthew 22:37-40, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment of the Law is, he answered this way: “‘You must love Jehovah your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.’”
And with your whole mind – faith must be based on reason, otherwise what is there to prevent us from worshipping the moon, or believing it is made of green cheese? Or, horribly, ending up in Jonestown, drinking the poison?
And what Christianity promises us is “the glorious freedom of the children of God”. It is a freedom that we, the damaged, dying children of Adam have never yet known. But we can know it. Our Creator offers it to all of us – life forever on this beautiful planet, with more joy, with more freedom than we can now imagine. I hope we will all be there to experience it. I hope Ayn Rand will be woken from the dreamless sleep of death and experience it too.
Didn’t you post most of this crap yesterday in another FPM article. Is there that little going on in your pathetic life?
I watched this TV program and the discussion was about the current slave trade. One of the men on the program said slavery is worse today than it ever was with an estimated 1 in every 150 humans being held in bondage which comes to 50 million or more slaves around the world.. All around the world, including the West and including the U.S. There seems to be an apathy on this matter by our politicians. Particularly at our border. So, it’s not a certain bygone era that holds all the blame nor any particular group. This is ongoing and must have the sponsorship, or at least the blessing, of some influential people.
In Florida, there is a mandatory Continuing Education course for nurses on human trafficking and it is not a pleasure to read at all. However, it is something I think that should be taught in schools everywhere. It seems the least we could do.
Great coverage to this topic. I learned a lot again. Take care and
Meow.
Socialism, Marxism, communism, fascism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it, is slavery by another name.
During the Christian Dark and Middle Ages men were not free, Under Islam men are not free.
“I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it and the people in the rising religious movement today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor, but philosophy and culture are…. Religion has been the root of [totalitarianism] from the beginning, it has ruled in disguised forms, and still is, and now the disguise had to be stripped off… What socialism is doing is really helping religion, the bigger the statism, the more people grow accustomed to government rule over everything, the more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead from the more secular side… The socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over.” – Leonard Peikoff
Didn’t I see this crap yesterday?
Well, it’s not the Ayn Rand tedium, anyway, But still the same pseudo-intellectual objectivism. Fanaticism, after awhile, is just boring. Thinking with someone else’s ideology isn’t really thinking as far as I can see.
First of all, if you’re going to smear Objectivism as “pseudo-intellectual” you need to provide a legitimate, rational, and objective argument to prove your smear. Please provide your argument.
Secondly, the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights constitute an ideology, do you agree with that ideology? Do you agree with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? If you do, does that mean you are thinking with someone else’s ideology and not really thinking? No, it does not. It should mean that you have thought about the ideas of Jefferson and Madison and you have found that those ideas are TRUE, therefore you agree with their ideas.
Do you use arithmetic? Do you use geometry or basic algebra at any time in your life? Did you originate those mathematical ideas? No, you did not. But does that mean that you are not really thinking because you do percentages or long division, mathematical formulas, that were not developed by you? No, it does not.
On the contrary, even though you did not invent arithmetic, you use arithmetic because you have done your thinking, and your thinking has proven to you that arithmetic, or Euclid’s geometry, is true and corresponds to the facts of reality.
Objectivism, as I have found out by observation and THINKING for myself, corresponds to, is consonant with, the facts of reality.
I don’t care that much to turn dreary monotony into a debate. Got better things to do. And I have no personal need to be right. Just effective.
Only you could call the Constitution/Bill of Rights ideology. I’ve always thought of the Constitution as a framework for government. That’s why the guy who wrote it and those that debated it are called the framers.
You are not even close to believing what the Constitution says. You have always hated the document, it’s intent and the founders. You seem to believe we are always on the verge of some Christian theocracy.
I wonder which “facts of reality” you have observed through your little philosophy.
Everyone that I know has used all of those mathematical disciplines without relying on quack philosophy. In fact no one I know has ever heard of rational selfishness or Binswanky.
But you seem really angry today. Take a valium. Note: It’s Saturday and it’s still not working out for you is it?
“Men can learn from one another, but learning requires a process of thought on the part of every individual student. Men can cooperate in the discovery of new knowledge, but such cooperation requires the independent exercise of his rational faculty by every individual scientist. Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients.” – Ayn Rand
Oh God, not her again.
Well, that didn’t take long…
In re: THC (or so one reasonably concludes) …
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From a sublime ass comes sublime asininity. ~
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Danusha, if your students can’t grasp that lesson, the fault is not yours. It is theirs. For them to grasp it, they must toss aside their lifetimes of pop culture brainwashing. For them to grasp it, the must say to themselves “I don’t care what the (interchangable) SNL Hosts think!”…..and they don’t have the guts to do so.
They can’t grasp it because they simply won’t.
The Demon-Rats were the Slave Owners their the ones who Kept Sold Traded abused Slaves and Separated Families
WHY DID SCIENCE BEGIN?
Science began, once again, in the West (Ancient Greece, not Christianity, gave the West science), because Thomas Aquinas introduced the rationality and logic of the pagan Aristotle into the Christian Dark ages.
“Christianity’s War against the Mind – Aristotle Versus Religion (5 of 7)” – Andrew Bernstein
https://www.andrewbernstein.net/2016/03/christianitys-war-against-the-mind-aristotle-versus-religion-5-of-7/
Well I guess that means, in your world, that I can’t have science if I embrace religion or vice versa. You really do live in a self-restricted world don’t you.
Are you really that stupid? I guess you are.
The introduction to the article credits Islam with introducing science to the West. However, I discovered a note in an old Jewish quarterly that suggests that Islam may simply have appropriated geometry, at least, from other sources.
“Under the heading Mathematics the series of articles in the Bibliotheca Mathematica, 1893 seq., by Steinschneider, Mathematik bet den Juden, might be mentioned. Perhaps the most important fact in this connexion is Curtze’s discovery (Adéhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Leipzig, 1902) that the Practica Geometriae of Leonardo Pisano, considered the main source for the introduction of Arabic geometry into Europe, is based entirely on the Latin translation of the Hebrew geometry of Abraham Bar Hiyya. The original of the latter has been published by M. Guttmann (Berlin, 1912-3).” p.533 jewishquarterlyr10drop
If you put jewishquarterlyr10drop into the archive.org browser, you will get the scan of the original journal.
The West has led the way in its Declaration of the Rights of Man by Lafayette in 1789. Who was a sincere CATHOLIC. He was not a hypocrite like Jefferson who talked about inalienable rights given by God and one of them is Liberty in
”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain UNALIENABLE Rights, that among these are Life, LIBERTY and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Yet Jefferson had 200 slaves and unlike George Washington,never freed any of them.Washington wrote his will in such a way that on his death, all his slaves were freed.
1. FRANK TUREK,Evangelical apologist, has said that 75% of young Evangelicals who leave home abandon Christianity.The main reason being intellectual skepticism. It is based on PEW Research,very reliable.
Turek has written ”I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” ( 2004 ) with NORMAN GEISLER,famous Evangelical theologian, admirer of Thomas Aquinas,an ”Evangelical Thomist”.
2. EVANGELICAL Christians are 100 million ( 33% of the US population) and are Christian Zionists, giving Israel,no matter how many war crimes it commits, UNCONDITIONAL support. There are more Christian Zionists than there are Jewish Zionists.
3. However 75% of the 18-30 Evangelical group leave Christianity. And 50% of Evangelical couples end up in DIVORCE. And the husband loses 50% of his money,his house,has to give alimony to the ex-wife her entire life.He is ruined financially and emotionally.
Becaue in 80% of cases it is the WIFE(Evangelical and other) who demands the divorce.
4. So of the 25% who remain Evangelical, 50%,if they marry at all,will be divorced by their holy wife. Plus the BIRTH rate is so low, and will be worse: 50% of all women today,Evangelical and other, will NOT have any CHILDREN.
Evangelical Christians are the only ones who are missionary.Who write books,make videos defending the Bible.
1. In MATTHEW 22:37-40, when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment of the Law he said,“‘You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole MIND.
This is the greatest and first commandment.’”
2. He also said to his followers,”Behold I send you as Sheep among WOLVES (like the CIA), be as Sly as Serpents and as Innocent as Doves” (Be good but not stupid)
3. Ignorance is Bliss.Knowledge is Power.
Evangelical Christians,due to their lack of curiosity,pathological in fact, never learn to what an extent the CIA
manipulates them. NO Evangelical leader,not even FRANKLIN GRAHAM,son of Billy Graham, has defended JULIAN ASSANGE. In 2017 Wikileaks released thousands of documents that showed:
1. The CIA created a system that enables it to SPY on you via your SMART TV ( traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web features that allow users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos).
Even if you have your Smart TV turned OFF. Yes,thank Assange for that info, Any compassion from Franklin Graham for a man,Assange,who had spent 5 YEARS
in SOLITARY confinement in the UK? None.
2. In 2017 Wikileaks released the procedure,the method used by the CIA to:
a. HACK into an organization,company and leave TRACES,links,little evidence here and there that are FAKE traces. Those traces and links are linked to say the RUSSIAN or CHINESE or IRANIAN or X government.
It is called the CIA’s VAULT 7 system,the holy of holies, the Holy Grail.
So Evangelicals are fooled and say,Yes,let’s go to war against Russia,China,Iran.
3.Remember RUSSIAGATE? That there were traces,evidence that linked Trump to PUTIN. Putin helped Trump win in 2016. He has to be IMPEACHED, out of power.
The CIA and others used Vault 7 but since they were exposed by Wikileaks then it was shown Russiagate was a FALSE FLAG. Any thanks from any Evangelical leaders to Assange,any campaign to free him by them? Never.
4. It is more than probable that the Globalist CIA shared Vault 7 with ISRAEL, so when you head from Mossad that yes, here are the links,traces,evidence from our hackers that
IRAN,etc is behind this and that, and we have to bomb them, then you have to be skeptical.
Ignorance is Bliss and Knowledge is Power.
Evangelical Christian leaders all over the world,who represent 500 million followers, by their actions,have made Christianity lose all moral authority. They NEVER protest human rights violations by the US government.
Jesus said, in MATTHEW 5:13-16 :” “You are the SALT of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the LIGHT of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
1.During the civil war in SALVADOR 65,000 civilians were killed. Virtually all by the sadists and psycopaths of the DEATH SQUADS. In the name of battling Communism.
Who gave them money and arms?
The CIA of the US. No protest from Evangelicals.
2.During the civil war in GUATEMALA 200,000 to 250,000 MAYA Indians were killed by death squads of the Guatemalan military dictatorships. They were civilians, unarmed men,women and children. In the name of fighting Communism.
Who gave them money and arms?
The CIA of the US. No protest from Evangelicals.
I start with the now obligatory, “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.”
Yes, so slavery has been a well-nigh universal human institution since at least the Code of Hammurabi about 1700 BCE and Catholics were often part of it and justified it…as did pretty much everyone else. I have seen reliable estimates of deaths…executions. No doubt some people died in prison but no one seems to have a good idea. I hardly applaud it but that was a fair week sometimes for the NKVD.
I have a fair amount of experience substitute teaching in districts ranging from sub-mediocre to about as good as you’ll find these days. And yes, I have had students flatly refuse to believe me when I say the US is hardly the only country to have slavery and…I emphasize this is by no means a defense of it…it wasn’t even the worst example. By the way, the students have no idea at all about the longer and more destructive eastward Muslim slave trade.
The unique thing about western civilization regarding slavery is that it eventually developed the idea that slavery was morally wrong per se and not just wrong when tried on you.
I am hardly a New Testament scholar but no, as far as I’m aware Jesus did not enjoin his followers to force conversions and kill those who resisted. Islam did…and does. Judaism hasn’t been evangelical for a couple of thousand years and among other reasons,the one incident I know of…there may be others..of forced conversion to Judaism was the Idumeans by the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus. ONe of those converted was the ancestor of Herod the Great so that didn’t work out too well.
Dr. Goska, I saw “Kingdom of Heaven” on cable so I didn’t bother anyone else when I had my reactions to it. This is an area in which I cannot claim more than in Oscar Levant’s phrase “a smattering of ignorance.” Nevertheless, while I grittily watched it all the way through I kept muttering, “That’s not right,” and “this didn’t happen” and “no,he wasn’t really like that.” But this is the idea that most younger people have today about the Crusades.
By the way, I have also had students and not just blacks refuse to believe me when I tell them that pretty much all the slaves taken westward on the Atlantic slave trade were captured by other Africans. One student’s objection was, “That’s not the way I saw it on ‘Roots.'”
According to Raymond Ibrahim’s article on the subject “Exposed: Islam’s Role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, (archived on his website) there were middle men involved who were neither European nor African.