Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Does Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equal the Inquisition?

Commentor Hoo directs us to a fascinating essay on 'Tea Party Catholics' and the Enlightenment. The essay, by John Zmirak, takes a look at the American Catholic experience of the Enlightenment, and at the relevance of the Enlightenment for American Catholics and for the Church as a whole.

Zmirak:
We ought to be deeply thankful for the heritage of the Enlightenment — because the American anti-Catholics of the 19th and 20th century were dead right about one thing: Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition. Do I exaggerate? Consider the fact that during the Spanish occupation of New Orleans, before the Louisiana Purchase, an officer of the Inquisitionwas interrogating heretics and collecting torture equipment — which he never got the chance to use, thank God. (The Inquisition did take root in Florida, and continued in Cuba until 1818.) Protestants in Spain were subject to legal restrictions as late as the 1970s. The great defender of Pius IX and Vatican I, Louis Veuillot, summed up what was for centuries the dominant Catholic view of religious liberty:

"When you are the stronger I ask you for my freedom, for that is your principle; when I am the stronger I take away your freedom, for that is my principle." 
As Americans, too, we must be self-critical, and acknowledge that in their reaction against the paternalism of the past, men like John Locke made grave philosophical errors — and unwittingly poisoned the ground of human dignity where the roots of freedom must rest. Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker do an excellent job of explaining Enlightened errors in Politicizing the Bible, as does Edward Feser in his classic The Last Superstition. In Tea Party Catholic, Samuel Gregg shows in detail how freedom-loving Catholics can reintroduce the critical truths about human nature that our Founding Fathers overlooked. Such constructive criticism of the Enlightenment project, which we might call “reparative patriotism,” is essential to preserving the lives of the unborn and the integrity of marriage, among many other things.

It is one thing to say that John Locke and Thomas Jefferson had flawed views of human flourishing. It is quite another for Catholics — given our long, unhappy heritage of paternalism and intolerance — to reject the Enlightenment wholesale; to pretend that religious, political, and economic freedom are the natural state of man, which we can take for granted like the sea, the sun, and the sky. These freedoms are the hard-won fruit of centuries of struggle, and many of our ancestors were fighting on the wrong side. If we expect to preserve our own tenuous freedom in an increasingly intolerant secular society, we must make it absolutely clear to our non-Catholic neighbors that we treasure their freedom too. Denouncing the Enlightenment a mere fifty years after our Church belatedly renounced intolerance, at the very moment when men as level-headed as Archbishop Chaput and Cardinal Burke are warning that Catholics face the risk of persecution, and we desperately need allies among our Protestant neighbors… can anyone really be this reckless?
To borrow a phrase, when I hear of the 'Enlightenment' I reach for my gun. Not that I am against being enlightened, nor am I against some aspects of the Enlightenment project (for example as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights). I love my country-- I'm American to my bones-- but just as I love several of my somewhat-less-than-lovely relatives, not all of America is easy to love.

American slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, eugenics, the abortion genocide, and big government Progressivism are as much Enlightenment denouements as are republican government and unalienable rights. The Enlightenment was a Big Thing-- the biggest thing since Constantine-- and it has convulsed humanity. It gave us atheism and fundamentalism and Marxism and representative democracy and Nazism and a fervent solicitude for human rights. Its effects are still playing out, and we're in the middle of it. Sometimes we're so much in the thick of it that we-- each of us is deeply embedded in American Protestant culture-- don't recognize it for what it is.

There is so much to say on this, and so much I don't understand and haven't thought through. A few things I'm certain about, though:

1) It is a damnable lie that "Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition". Catholicism minus the Enlightenment is the High Middle Ages, the theology that brought Athens and Jerusalem together, profound Scholastic philosophy, the nursery of all Western education and universities, the Renaissance, magnificent Western art and music and architecture. The Enlightenment was a perversion of Catholicism and a perversion of truth. Yet it is a consequence of a truth so powerful and beautiful-- the Catholic Church-- that even its perversions are in some ways beautiful as well, and very consequential.

2) It is a damnable lie that the Inquisition was inherently a bad thing. The Inquisition was a feature, not a bug, of Catholicism. That is not to say that torture was appropriate-- it was not-- but vigilance and taking heresy seriously were laudable. Where the Inquisition was most effective-- Spain comes to mind-- the slaughter of the Wars of Religion of the 17th century passed over. The lack of a German Inquisition depopulated the German states by at least a third during the Thirty Years War-- as lethal as the Black Death of the 14th century.

The Inquisition was in most respects noble and necessary. I'd pay money to see several modern Catholic-American politicians summoned to the Holy Office.

3) I am a Catholic first, and an American second. America is a treasure and a nightmare for the Church--a brilliant unruly beloved son. We Enlightened Americans demanded our inheritance and set out for a far away land. Unlike the prodigal in Luke, we're still squandering our wealth on harlots and wild living. We haven't turned back.

We're not hungry enough, yet. Therein lies the problem America poses for the Church. 

36 comments:

  1. You're getting weird, Egnor.

    Ben

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    1. Ben,

      I don't think that I could have expressed it any better.

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    2. I'm a bit of an iconoclast, Ben.

      I do appreciate well-reasoned arguments against my positions, which is certainly an Enlightenment virtue-- and a Catholic virtue, too.

      ... waiting for well-reasoned arguments...

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    3. Maybe you should start by writing well-reasoned posts.

      Hoo

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  2. When dictator Franco ruled Spain, the RC Church had the monopoly on educating children. Did the RCC object? Nah.

    Egnor's opinion on Franco:

    We need more Francos

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    1. Franco was a mass murderer, and you admire him. He was a buddy of Hitler and Mussolini.

      Since there were precious few Jews, Masons, or Bolsheviks in Spain, the notion of their conspiracy was an infinitely flexible one, applied simply to everyone who had supported the legal political order of the Republic. They were to be eliminated according to a “prior plan of systematic mass murder.” Preston calls this an “investment in terror”: mass killing was not only a way to win a civil war, but also to prepare for the dictatorship to follow. Franco’s idea of a “redemption” of the population through blood had a particular application to women, as Preston carefully chronicles. In the natural order of things, women were subordinate. Young peasant women were supposed to be content with prostituting themselves, quite literally, to inheritors of landed wealth. Women who were free to decide for themselves about their sexual life became, as the Right saw matters, politically perverted supporters of the Republic. Thus “redemption” for them meant rape before murder, a double assertion of power.

      The historical challenge that this book presents for the Roman Catholic Church is considerable. Although some priests sought to prevent violence or shelter those who were under threat, more seemed to have supported the rebellion, and even joined its fighting columns. Some adopted fascist salutes and took direct part in the killing. One priest shot a man who was seeking shelter in a confessional.


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    2. troy:

      [Franco was a mass murderer, and you admire him. He was a buddy of Hitler and Mussolini.]

      The Spanish Communist Party was closely allied with Stalin, who at the end of the war would be allied with Hitler. So the CP was buddies with Stalin and (vicariously) with Hitler.

      War is nasty business, and civil war is nasty war. The Spanish Civil War was nasty civil war. There were atrocities galore, rather evenly distributed. You can name countless Rightist atrocities, I can name countless Leftist atrocities.

      But one doesn't evaluate wars by counting atrocities. The issue in the Spanish Civil War was whether the country would become a vassal of Stalin, who was making a big play with massive support of the CP on the Left.

      Franco's dealings with Hitler were pragmatic-- there was considerable animosity between them, and Hitler commented, after his only meeting with Franco, that he hated the guy and would rather have teeth pulled than see him again. Franco was perhaps the only foreign leader to meet with Hitler and treat him with contempt.

      Franco refused to assist Hitler in war with Britain, which is of course unlike Stalin-- the Spanish Left's patron-- who was actively collaborating with Hitler and in fact made Hitler's war in the West possible.

      The Spanish Civil War was nasty business. Franco was anti-totalitarian, but certainly authoritarian, and he saved Spain from communist rule.

      That counts for something-- a lot really. We on the non-communist side will keep looking for saints to win our civil wars, but we may have to settle for real guys who got the job done and saved a nation.

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    3. Your ideas have been clearly abducted by the fascist version of the history. Saying that Franco saved Spain from communist rule is forgetting he wasn't even fighting against communist at all (that was that his propaganda said). He fought against the republic, a democratic elected government, who in his short life saw left and right political parties be put on top by the people.

      That is the reason why Stalin didn't really help republicans as you can see if you check historical data. His help was short and very very expensive, what is a sign that his supposed affinity to republicans is false (wikipedia: "The Republic had to pay for Soviet arms with the official gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, in an affair that would become a frequent subject of Francoist propaganda afterward (see Moscow Gold). The cost to the Republic of Soviet arms was more than US $500 million (in 1936 prices); the entire of Spain's gold reserve, the fourth-largest in the world. 176 tonnes was transferred through France."). The problem was other democratic countries wouldn't interfere because they feared a continental war (remember the latter history with Hitler being a bad guy across Europe, trying to get attention?) and they didn’t allow sale of weapons to spanish republicans. So Stalin was the ONLY ONE left whose arms republicans were able to buy (Does this fact make republicans Stalinist communist? In contrast Franco counted with the free help of the nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
      Among the republicans there was a huge range of different people and ideas. Society was enlightened before the war, one should only account how many intellectuals and artist left Spain during and after the war because of Franco to see that the war itself and more his result was terrible for Spain and his people.

      You Americans should stop seeing the last century like the war between communism and capitalism. There were and there are many things out there that differ from your system and have also nothing to do with dictatorial communism. Historically you systematically turned down any try from left-wing parties and ideas to have a predominant power over a country, putting instead cruel right-wing dictatorships, fearing that those people could turn to be other Stalins (see Latin America). Of course that was not the case from Spain, where US had nothing to do. But stop being so manicheism!

      And I shouldn’t have to say this, but supporting Franco is like supporting Hitler. He was an idiot and a mass murdered.

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  3. Egnor: There is so much to say on this, and so much I don't understand and haven't thought through.

    A perfect reason to stay away from the keyboard, if you asked me. Contemplation isn't in your habit. Shoot first, ask questions later.

    Hoo

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    1. 'My name is Mike, and I am a bloggorrheic.'

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  4. While trying to denying it, you are actually making the case that “Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the inquisition”. Its people like you, “a Catholic first, and an American second”, who believe the inquisition wasn’t an “inherently bad thing”, and that “vigilance and taking heresy seriously were laudable”, that make freedom loving Americans like me fight against religion in politics.

    -KW

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    1. The Spanish and Italion Inquisitions led to the death of several thousand people over three centuries. None of the deaths were inflicted by the Church-- only the State imposed the death penalty, which the Church often opposed. Torture by the Church was rare (1% of cases)-- it was common by the secular authorities. It was common for trouble-makers to beg to be tried by the Church, rather than the State, because the Church was so much more lenient.

      There are more children put to death every day in America's abortion clinics than heretics were put to death from the 16th to the 19th century. The Church never ran slave plantations, never imposed Jim Crow, never imposed eugenics and sterilized people.

      Myopic American patriotism is idolatry. There is much to love about America, but much to regret.

      It's amusing to hear an heir to the folks who gave us chattel slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK and eugenics and population control and DDT hysteria and the abortion holocaust pontificating about the evils of the Inquisition.

      The Inquisition was a bake sale compared to the stuff you guys did, and do.

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    2. Nice reply about Inquisition.

      *There is much to love about America, but much to regret.*

      We, from Communist countries were very impressed by few simple words on American dollar: In God We Trust. That simple powerful confidence of a nation meant a lot, it gave us hope and drive to persist. You Americans should be proud of that.

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    3. Just as my Massachusetts forbearers where majority Republican well into the 1950’s, party affiliation can and does change. I am heir to the folks that fought slavery. The heirs to the folks that gave us chattel slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK are all Republicans now. Your mangled history is a brazen lie.

      -KW

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    4. "The heirs to the folks that gave us chattel slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK are all Republicans now"

      Yea. The Republicans and Democrats switched bodies (kinda' like Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday) in 1960. All the Repubs who loved Lincoln and fought slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK morphed into Dems, and Dems who lynched and segregated and blocked schoolhouse doors and cut deals with friends wearing hoods (eg Wilson, FDR) showed up at the Republican National Convention wearing fake mustaches and noses so no one would notice that they used to be Dems.

      You're a moron, KW. Anti-black racism became declasse in the 1960's, so the historic racebaiters (aka Democrat Party) did some tactical adjustments and decided to profit politically from the same racism that they had stoked for a century and a half.

      Democrats realized in the 1960's that blacks were more useful as bought-off voters than as tree ornaments. As pro-lynching Lyndon Johnson quipped-- "we'll have the niggers voting Democrat for 200 years".

      Republicans have always stood for colorblind law and society.

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    5. LBJ also said “we’ve lost the south for a generation” anticipating the racist backlash against Johnson’s Democratic Party; a backlash that Nixon was keen to exploit when formulating his Southern Strategy. The only reason Republicans fight for a “colorblind” society is so they can do away with affirmative action and maintain their white privilege.
      What next, you going to try and tell me that the South didn’t fight a war to keep slaves?

      -KW

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    6. KW:

      Democrats didn't "lose the South for a generation". The South voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992-- both Democrats and neither any kind of racist. In local politics in the South, Democrats continued to dominate politics until 1996.

      The facts are straightforward:

      1) When the South was racist and segregated, it was pure Democrat.

      2) When segregation ended and racism receded, the South segued to other political dynamics, particularly economic issues. Southerners became more economically pro-growth and anti-big-government, which corresponded to Republican views.

      By Bill Clinton's second term, Republicans dominated in the South, for the first time in history.

      When the South was racist, it was 100% Democrat. When it ceased being racist, its politics became more mixed, with Republicans dominating on economic issues.

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    7. [the racist backlash against Johnson’s Democratic Party; a backlash that Nixon was keen to exploit when formulating his Southern Strategy]

      Bullshit. Nixon was strongly pro-civil rights. He worked closely with Eisenhower to get the 1957 and 1960 Republican Civil Rights Bills passed, and in 1971 Nixon was the first President to order all federal contractors to use "affirmative action" in hiring blacks.

      Affirmative Action at the federal level was started by Richard Nixon, at precisely the time you bizarrely claim that he was employing a "southern strategy" to court racists.

      From this link:

      "Among the most pressing civil rights issues was desegregation of public schools. Nixon inherited a nation in which nearly 70% of the black children in the South attended all-black schools. He had supported civil rights both as a senator and as vice president under Eisenhower, but now, mindful of the Southern vote, he petitioned the courts on behalf of school districts seeking to delay busing. Meanwhile, he offered a practical New Federalist alternative -- locally controlled desegregation.

      Starting in Mississippi and moving across the South, the Nixon administration set up biracial state committees to plan and implement school desegregation. The appeal to local control succeeded. By the end of 1970, with little of the anticipated violence and little fanfare, the committees had made significant progress -- only about 18% of black children in the South attended all-black schools."

      Those Republicans sure were racist, huh KW?

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    8. KW:

      Wrap your little Democrat mind around this:

      For a century and a half Southern schools were segregated, all under Democrats. Even after 8 years of the Kennedy-Johnson "liberal" Democrats and the 1964 and 1966 Civil Rights Acts (opposed by the majority of Democrats), 70% of black kids in the South attended segregated schools.

      Nixon became president in 1969. By the end of 1970-- 2 years, KW-- Nixon had quietly and without violence reduced the percentage of Southern black kids in segregated schools to 18%.

      Racial equality and racial harmony was the Republican "Southern Strategy". As soon as Republicans had effective power in the South, racism receded very quickly.

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    9. KW:

      "The only reason Republicans fight for a “colorblind” society is so they can do away with affirmative action and maintain their white privilege."

      Richard Nixon started Affirmative Action at the Federal Level in 1971.

      Have you no shame, KW?

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    10. KW,
      Anyone who has spent even a minimum of time on the subject knows the civil war was NOT fought over slavery. No more than WWII was fought over the German or Russian death camps. To infer such is naked victor's revisionism.

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    11. “Anyone who has spent even a minimum of time on the subject knows the civil war was NOT fought over slavery.”

      Go spend 2 minutes on Wikipedia moron. Specifically section 1, Causes of Secession. Please note section 1.1 SLAVERY. Try fixing it and see how far you get.

      -KW

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  5. Does Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equal the Inquisition? The better and more obvious question is, does the Enlightenment without Christianity equal the holocaust? And the answer is, of course it does. It also equals the guillotines of the French Revolution, Mao's and Stalin's purges, America's forced sterilizations and the -- the greatest genocide perpetuated on mankind and done specifically in the name of enlightenment -- the slaughter of the unborn. The death toll which lays directly at the feet of an unrestrained enlightenment is the better part of a billion human lives, but according to sons of the Enlightenment like Peter Singer -- we need to be more dead bodies -- just not his or course.

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    1. Rich:

      "does the Enlightenment without Christianity equal the holocaust?'

      Yes.Yes.Yes. You nailed it. The good things of the Enlightenment are the Christian things. But the Enlightenment is a much bigger project than just a Christian/Catholic facelift, and the non-Christian parts of it are astonishingly lethal.

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  6. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 8, 2014 at 10:41 AM

    Doc, I see from the length and detailed arguments in most comments that you blew the doors off many of the local commentariat. I particularly missed a learned and long-winded Rube Goldberg disquisition from backfield. But not every day can begin with a ray of sunshine.

    Anyway, the Inquisition as originally intentioned should still be an institution within the Church. It is well within the Church's ambit, and, indeed, responsibility, to declare individuals as heretics on the basis of canon law. It's amusing in the extreme to read comments bitching about the inquisition from individuals otherwise attempting to silence the Discovery Institute. They would do well to cast the beam from their own eye, given that they are making up naturalistic "canon law" as they go along.

    Big Rich is exactly right: "The death toll which lays directly at the feet of an unrestrained enlightenment is the better part of a billion human lives..."

    And still they hunger for more...

    Belgium took a big step on Thursday to becoming the first country to allow euthanasia for incurably ill children, after the upper house of Parliament voted by a large majority to extend to minors a 2002 law legalizing the practice for adults.
    --- NYT 12/12/13

    The root cause for the modern malaise can, in my opinion, be laid directly at the feet of sola Scriptura and the Reformation. Not only did that effectively destroy theology, the vicious wars that resulted were blamed by Enlightenment philosophers on the faith, instead of being laid at the feet of the rulers of Western Europe who sought to exploit a weakened and fragmented Christian faith for political gain.

    And thus, as BR notes, we have Peter Singer, utilitarian, acolyte of death, whose tolerance extends to goat fucking... as long as the goat consents. :-)

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    1. Wow, Peter Singer is crazy. You Americans should not be proud of that.



      Admiral, if Peter Singer prefers the male goat does that make him gay?



      :D

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    2. "As long as the goat consents"

      The new Enlightenment morality-- "... between consenting mammals."

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  7. So. did all the deaths that were the result of the Inquisition come at the hands of the RC Church? or the State?

    I'll bet the separation of church and state keeps the death squads away. But that requires freedom OF religion -- not freedom FROM religion.

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  8. History is as much a science as physics and biology. It uses the scientific method. Collect a large amount of data about the events which happened (preferably from primary sources, at a pinch from secondary sources provided the authors have had access to the primary sources and have reported them accurately). Make an observation consistent with the data. Formulate an hypothesis to explain the observation. Attempt to disprove the hypothesis by re-examining the data and looking for more data (and look for other hypotheses which may explain the observation better).

    Egnor has started with an observation - the Inquisition was prosecuted severely in Spain, which wasn't affected by the 17th century Wars of Religions (which was actually also a political war, as Catholic France paid Protestant Sweden to wage war in the largely Protestant northern German states), whereas the Inquisition was hardly persecuted in the German states, but was severely affected by the Thirty Years War (the Wars of Religion).

    He takes this observation to come up with a hypothesis; the severity of the Inquisition is inversely related to the severity of suffering in the Wars of Religion.

    The trouble is - I doubt that Egnor actually knows what happened. Spain became united, instituted a policy of ethnic cleansing by forcing Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity or leave, and then instituted the Inquisition to prevent backsliding amongst the converts. The German states - there were about 300 of them at the time of the Thirty Years with the same number of rulers - had Catholic rulers or Protestant rulers. Egnor hasn't established that the Inquisition wasn't employed in any of the 300 German states, and with that number of states you have a lot of data points - you could divide the states into quartiles for example (ranging from most Inquisition to least) and compare it to the death rate to see if there's a correlation.

    Egnor hasn't done that.

    It would help if Egnor would cite a reputable historian who has proposed a similar hypothesis. Which has survived the certain criticism of other historians.

    Even assuming the observation is correct, are there any other hypotheses that could explain it better? Well, for one - Spain was united and isolated in the periphery of Europe. The German states were disunited and weak in the middle of Europe. Perhaps it was just location, location, location...

    To support this hypothesis - England was similarly isolated. It wasn't affected much by the Inquisition (the Catholics were the ones suffering, though there still were plenty of Catholics, including Catholic nobles), and England wasn't affected by the Thirty Years War (although it later suffered a civil war between the king and parliament).

    The Enlightenment started around 1650. It finished with the start of the French Revolution in 1789, or perhaps the coronation of Napoleon in 1804. The Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent peace were a definite end to the Age of Enlightenment, which saw the rise of nationalism, and the bastardised ideas that if individuals compete to survive based on 'fitness', then nations also need to compete, usually by war, to determine who's superior or inferior.

    Europeans had no doubt that they were superior.

    Attempting to blame the Enlightenment for the suffering of the 20th century is doubtful in the extreme. I 'd previously noted in another thread that the Great War, directly or indirectly, was the cause of most of the disasters of the 20th century.

    No Great War - no Soviet Union, no Hitler, no Second World War, no Holocaust, no Cold War... The list goes on and on.

    And the Great War was started by Christian leaders of civilised Christian European countries, with million-strong armies marching off to fight for God, king and country.

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    1. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 8, 2014 at 2:28 PM

      blimpfull: "History is as much a science as physics and biology. It uses the scientific method."

      Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history first articulated by Karl Marx...
      --- Wiki: Historical materialism

      Ahhhh, my leetle Bolsheevek. Always faithful.

      The Great War wasn't fought for God, you moron. The underlying cause of the Great War was imperialism, pure and simple...


      And [b]y the end of the war, four major imperial powers—the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires—ceased to exist.
      --- Wiki: WWI

      Very convenient for the colonialist survivors who, paying close attention to the Beatitudes, ground the faces of their opponents into the mud. And, by Lenin's beard, it was convenient for the Bolsheeveks. Until that ramshackle economic fraud and murder machine collapsed under its own weight several decades later.

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    2. Senile old fart,

      I rest my case. Your last comment proves that you're a 'senile old fart'.

      'The underlying cause of the Great War was imperialism, pure and simple'.

      If you're that certain, why don't you write a book expounding on it? Last year, there were at least 4 books on the causes of the Great War. Imperialism wasn't given as a cause in any of them.

      Agreed. It caused the demise of 4 empires. And the fatal weakening of a 5th.

      But it was a war started by Christian leaders of civilised Christian European countries employing million strong armies fighting for patriotic reasons. For God, king and country, as I wrote.

      And the Great War was the dominating disaster of the 20th century, and the start of a new ThirtyYears War, which only finished in 1945.

      The original Thirty Years War led to the Enlightenment. The latest Thirty Year war led to the Cold War.

      I know which one I prefer.

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    3. The Great War is the entrance into the political/military rabbit hole of the current era. It is was the point at which the systems were first altered and the new systems steered in with all sorts of bold and moral sounding language over a sea of toil and blood.
      I would not accept any simplistic theory of economy or policy to explain the first justifications for 'world war'.

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  9. "It is a damnable lie that "Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition" ..."

    As you know, I have no use for The One True Burauucracy -- I think Christianity would be much better off were all Catholics to become Protestants. That said, it is indeed a "damnable lie" that "Catholicism minus the Enlightenment equals the Inquisition".

    "Catholicism minus the Enlightenment is the High Middle Ages, the theology that brought Athens and Jerusalem together, profound Scholastic philosophy, the nursery of all Western education and universities, the Renaissance, ..."

    Ah, yes, the so-called Renaissance ... which, among its other perversities, made astrology again socially acceptable in Christendom.

    "It is a damnable lie that the Inquisition was inherently a bad thing. ..."

    I even agree with that.

    "The Inquisition was in most respects noble and necessary. I'd pay money to see several modern Catholic-American politicians summoned to the Holy Office."

    Indeed!

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  10. First of all it should be clear that I'm Spanish. And I see that Troy uses discredited historians as Paul Preston. It should be clear that the early Christian theologians of the stature of Tertullian, St. Ambrose of Milan and San Martin de Tours held that religion and violence are incompatible. They were more supportive of the evangelical doctrine recommends correcting and admonishing one squanders the common good of faith. Tno The Inquisition was formally abolished until 1834 during the regency of María Cristina. Regarding the number of executed no definitive data because so far not been able to study all causes conserved in. Although partial, are actually closer to the studies by Contreras and Heningsen teachers and over 50,000 open cases between 1540 and 1700: concluded that 1,346 people were burned, 1.9% of the courts

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  11. Paul Preston is not very reliable, in terms of repression, it is absolutely true that it not only began after the war but was carrying Franco's troops as they advanced. Repression does not lack in the end of all strife and always takes the winning side. I have read books by authors you point and I suggest also read the Angel David Martin Rubio (Myths of repression) Edward Knoblaugh (Last minute war in Spain) Felix Schlayer (Matanzas in Madrid Republican) and Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov (Spain betrayed).

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  12. However, we are not supporters of undue glorification of certain characters or the historical circumstances surrounding certain deaths forget since most of the victims of repression in the domestic rear and in the postwar period can be identified by their participation in excesses and crimes committed during the revolutionary period. For example , when they are paying homage to the so called " victims of Francoism " in places like Merida, the honors are aimed , among hundreds of other cases that might be adduced , a militiaman from Tarancón (Cuenca ) taken prisoner in the Serena in the summer of 1938 and subsequently shot in the town, for having participated in hundreds of crimes , including the murder of the Bishop of Cuenca , Beato Cruz Laplana .

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