In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, Professor Jared Diamond, makes the point that it was not just superior technology (guns and steel) that enabled European imperialists to colonise much of the undeveloped world, but also our armoury of lethal germs that we unwittingly took with us.
Our germs, many of which are derived from related varieties in our domestic cattle, had being living with us for thousands of years in Europe where the population had developed a degree of natural resistance. However, when we came into contact with people who had lived, for example, on remote Pacific Islands, these people had little or no natural immunity, so diseases like measles and mumps were lethal and spread quickly, going ahead of us like a fifth column, working in secret to kill or severely weaken the indigenous population, making it easy to take control through force of arms.
This is an example of a sudden environmental change giving a big advantage to one group and being severely detrimental to a rival group. In evolutionary terms, this could be one reason why we have failed to develop complete resistance to our commensal and sometime pathogenic microbes and viruses; as we evolved, it was advantageous to us to have this invisible 'fifth column' to help us take over new territory. It's a classic example of how genes can form alliances and don't even need to belong to the same species, just so long as both benefit from the alliance.
Now two researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) School of Culture, History & Language, PhD candidate Phillip Parton and Professor Geoffrey Clark, have shown that this devastation of the population on Pacific islands was even worse than previously thought, with the population of the island of Tongatapu in the kingdom of Tonga being reduced to just 10,000 in 50 years, from 50-60,000 when Europeans first landed.
Their work, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, indicates population declines were a lot larger than previously thought.
More evidence of the astonishingly stupid, but highly successful pro-Trump antivaxx campaign against the COVID-19 vaccinations was produced today in the form of evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic death rate in the USA produced a significant fall in life-expectancy in 2021, continuing a sharp fall in 2020. It also showed how there were persistent disparities in life expectancy by race and ethnicity.
The antivaxx campaign came about in support of the then president, Donald Trump, who, realising he was out of his depth with the science, but due to his narcissistic personality disorder, was incapable of admitting it, panicked and set about politicizing the pandemic, threatening and vilifying scientists who tried to advise him and pressurizing officials to supress bad news and provide disinformation.
He first declared the pandemic to be a hoax, then to be a mild illness that would be over by April (2020) and which could be prevented with wackadoodle, untested 'preventative' chloramphenicol. This subsequently turned out to not only be ineffective in preventing infection or minimising the symptoms but was positively dangerous.
At one point, in a comical pretence of medical expertise that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so seriously stupid, the fool even suggested drinking surface disinfectants or inserting a UV light source into the body to cure the disease. Soon, wearing face-covering and social distancing became political acts, as did getting vaccinated when the vaccines were produced. Evangelical preachers preached against face-masks and for the right to continue to hold super-spreader events in their churches, and Trump's election rallies in which face-coverings were discouraged, became serious super-spreader events in their own right.
Consequently, when the Omicron wave hit, the death toll became overwhelmingly of unvaccinated people in Republican-leading areas of America, to the extent that some commentators referred to it as a self-inflicted genocide of the most gullible, as the Republicans Party became possibly the first political party in history with policies seemingly designed to kill their own supporters and with supporters who believed that risking the lives of themselves, their families and society at large was the patriotic thing to do.
The prominent, right-wing, MAGA-hat wearing Trumpanzee and anti-vaxx campaigner,
Doug Kuzma, is reportedly seriously ill, sedated and on a ventilator, in a
Virginia hospital, with COVID-19, after attending a QAnon rally in Texas.
Several other attendees at the rally also became unwell but have claimed they
were suffering from 'anthrax poisoning'. Anthrax is a bacterial infection,
unlike COVID-19 which is viral, so is easily distinguished from it.
Kuzma is in many ways an example of what happens when you, consciously or
unconsciously, buy into a cult and adopt cult-think in place of rational
thought. He has a long history of recruiting into the Trumpanzee cult by
uncritically repeating any QAnon-originating conspiracy theories and campaigning
to persuade the gullible dupes who listen to his raving right
Frog News spots, not to get vaccinated. As a right-wing evangelical
Christian he has no hesitation in risking the health and welfare of others to
serve his ego-tripping self-promotion.
No wonder Europeans look at America and ask, "What is wrong with these people?"
As though electing a narcissistic moron with the mentality of a spoilt adolescent wasn't stupid enough, they are still being led by the legacy of indifference to the coronavirus pandemic he left them with as a result of his own narcissism and inability to accept that there are people in the world who are more expert at something than he is. In this case, understanding the science behind a lethal viral pandemic as it rips through a population with little or no resistance to it.
I'm talking about Donald Trump and his disastrous 4-year term playing at POTUS from his room, via a Twitter account, of course, like a friendless teenager with nothing but the social media and a following count for self-validation and feeding his sense of self-importance.
The problem was, as leader of one of America's two main political parties in what is effectively a two-party state (or according to some, a one party state with two wings, each vying for dominance), party loyalists has little choice but to follow his lead and minimise the seriousness of the pandemic, or break ranks and face the opprobrium of their voters.
Now they are stuck with that policy and can't afford the political damage a volte-face on the issue would involve, with those Trumpanzee loyalists on the right accusing them of disloyalty and those on the left pointing out how their error had cost thousands of lives needlessly. Caught between a metaphorical rock and a hard place is never a comfortable position for a politician on the make to find him or herself.
The result of all this is of course, now the δ variant is raging through America, that new cases are coming predominantly from the states governed by GOP governors who have actively minimised the pandemic and rubbished the need for social distancing, face masks and vaccinations, and the parts of America where fundamentalist, Trumpanzee Christian churches are still influential and there are votes to be gained from pandering to them.
And all of this is the legacy of Donald Trump's initial knee-jerk response, which was to dismiss what he lacked the intellect to understand and the ability to formulate an effective plan against, to dismiss the scientists and epidemiologists as incompetent or unpatriotic traitors conspiring against him, and then stick to that fatal position at all costs and in the face of all the evidence that he had got it wrong. While Americans died on an unprecedented scale, he and his appointees tried to bully and intimidate the scientists and experts who delivered the facts he didn't like and didn't want people to know. And now GOP governors like DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbot in Texas are repeating Trump's blunder, politically unable to change tack, even going to the lengths of banning measures to mandate wearing of face-masks in the belief that face-masks are a symbol of political opposition to them, just as dopey Donald Trump did.
And now, as was entirely predictable, we have a new variant, the δ variant, that has a ready population of unprotected idiots who not only have not been vaccinated but for whom even taking basic precautions means losing face and probably provoking the ire of their peer group of suckers. Suckers who will see any precautions as signs of disloyalty and being politically suspect, even 'hating Jesus' by not accepting his 'protection' with faith, or even worse, being in league with Democrats and the "cannibalistic, child-trafficking paedophile deep state" that the pro-Trump QAnon, neo-Nazis have invented to scare their credulous victims with.
As a result of this unwitting, although entirely predictable, effective genocide of their own supporters by Trumpanzee cultists, cases in the USA are rising exponentially again, as are hospitalisations and deaths, almost all of unvaccinated people from red states. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned viewers of ABC News, things are going to get much worse, unless there is a massive change in the behaviour of GOP voters, evangelical Christians and Trumpanzee cultists. And, as the number of cases rises, so the number of people in whom even more virulent and possibly vaccine-escaping variants evolving increases exponentially and so the probability of that happening at all increases, also exponentially.
Donald Trump's lasting legacy to his own cult-like supporters, in alliance with evangelical Christians and neo-Nazi white supremacists, could be a self-inflicted genocide of those gullible enough to have believed he was a good president and giving a lead worth following instead of the narcissistic, criminally incompetent buffoon who deserved to be sacked and should now face prison. How on Earth can a president who through wilful dereliction of duty and incompetence not only allowed, but is now actively causing, the deaths of tens of thousands of those he was elected to protect, be allowed to get away with it?
It's a mark of just how far decent Humanist values have penetrated into Christianity that Christian apologists are now having to make excuses for the things God supposedly ordered in the Bible that nowadays would be thought of as barbaric and unacceptable - the actions of a tyrannical war-criminal.
When it was written in the Bronze Age, no doubt the terrible things they wrote about God ordering were the sort of things you would expect a powerful despotic tribal leader to order his people to do, so, naturally, any self-respecting god would be expected to behave the same way. A brutal, merciless tyrant who rewards his loyal followers with plenty of land, war-booty and women captives and in return sanctions and glorifies their savage and brutal behaviour.
Ratko Mladić, devout Orthodox Christian, the Butcher of Bosnia, has been found guilty by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague of crime against humanity for his part in the Bosnian Genocide in the early 1990's.
He has been on trial since 2012 since when he has been held at the Scheveningen prison in The Hague where he spends his days playing chess against his compatriot, coreligionist and fellow genocidist, Radovan Karadžić, former president of Serbia, who was convicted of genocide in 2016. The third member of the murderous regime that took over Serbia following the break up of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, escaped conviction by dying during his trial.
Mladić, aged 74, has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
The crimes were committed in the series of wars which followed the break-up of former Yugoslavia when Orthodox Christian Serbia tried to exert control over neighbouring Bosnia and Croatia to create a 'Greater Serbia', maintaining the traditional Serbian domination of Yugoslavian politics.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter, martyr, liberator or defender. It's just a matter of perspective; of the perception of right and wrong.
This was illustrated by the results of the above YouGov poll published recently. The question asked of the 4812 respondents, weighted to make them representative of the GB population, was, "Do you think terrorist acts that are carried out by Muslims do or do not tell us anything about the nature of Islam?"
The result by political view was (terrorist acts carried out by Muslims):
Fr. Josef Tiso with his friend and role model, Adolf Hitler
In addition to their close involvement in creating the first fascist state in Europe in Portugal, and their support for Italian and Spanish fascism, the Catholic Church was actively involved in another even more extreme fascist regime in Slovakia.
Unlike Portugal and Spain which stayed out of World War II and have no history of sending Jews to Hitler's slave labour and death camps, Slovakia, under the leadership of a Catholic priest and fascist dictator, Fr. Josef Tiso, enthusiastically shipped around 60% of Slovakian Jews (over 52,000 of the population of 89,000) to the death camps, mostly Auschwitz.
News that the former Yugoslavian states of Bosnia and Serbia are cooperating over war-crimes committed during the Bosnian war marks a welcome replacement by humanist standards of the murderous faith-based morality which led to the Bosnian genocide of Muslims by Orthodox Christian neo-Nazi fundamentalists, and acceptance that those who committed these atrocities weren't nationalist heroes but murderous thugs whose religion told them killing people for having the 'wrong' religion was the right thing to do.
The civilised world struck another blow for peace and freedom today when the war crimes Tribunal in The Hague upheld the principle that Christians are also bound by the requirement to behave in a civilised manner no matter that their 'faith' gives them an excuse to behave otherwise, when two more genocidal Christian terrorists were convicted and sentenced.
Mico Stanisic was the interior minister of the Bosnian Serb republic ('Republica Srbska') and Stojan Zupljanin was a senior security official. Both men were convicted of crimes against humanity including acts of murder, torture, unlawful detention, deportation and plunder in various parts of Bosnia in 1992 as the took part in a "joint criminal enterprise with the objective to permanently remove non-Serbs from the territory of a planned Serbian state" and were sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Two more Christian terrorist, Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic are still on trial at the ICTY over atrocities committed during the conflict, including the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Their leader, former Serbian President, Slobodan Milosovic died whilst in custody before completing his trial for genocide.
Golden Dawn Flag
During the faith-based Bosnian conflict, in which Orthodox Serbian Christian gangs of killers sought to eradicate Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats, an estimated 100,000 people were murdered. The murder gangs were supplemented and supported by a large contingent of Orthodox Christian volunteers from Greece, many of whom now form the nucleus of the violently right-wing Greek neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' political party which enjoys wide support from within the Greek Orthodox Church.
The defence offered was the traditional one of genocidists that they were merely obeying orders and carrying out the lawful instructions of their government. What is not clear is whether the new Pope as head of the Catholic Church, who, when a Cardinal in Argentina was accused of standing by as his government 'disappeared' it's opponents including his own priests, and whether the new pastoral head of the Anglican Communion, aristocratic multi-millionaire Justin Welby, leaders of the two largest Christian denominations, have distanced themselves and their churches from the teaching of St. Paul in this respect.
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.
Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.
Romans 13:1-7
St. Paul was perfectly clear on the point: it is the duty of all Christians to obey the instructions of their government because all actions by all governments are always God's will and are always against evil, hence the Bosnian murderers were in fact acting in accordance with a basic Christian principle established by the Church's founder. It remains to be seen whether the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury distance themselves from this traditional genocidists' excuse and side with the forces of civilisation and progress in their attempt to establish the principle that all people are entitled to be treated with respect and dignity even when they disagree with Christians.
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. Viktor Vasnetsov, 1887
Is American Christian racism a thing of the past?
In earlier blogs I looked at the history of Christian anti-Semitism and how it was a fundamental component of Christian theology almost from the outset, through the Middle Ages and up to the twentieth century, with frequent catastrophic results for European Jewry. (See "Famous Christians - Adolf Hitler", "Famous Christians - Martin Luther" and "More Famous Christians".)
Just in case Jews imagine that the post World War II love and respect American Christians affect to have discovered for them, and the unswerving support they profess for Israel and Zionism, is genuine, it's worth looking at the history of American Christian fundamentalism, how they see the near future and where Israel and the Jews fit in this view.
Martin Luther is recognised as the founder and inspiration for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Before then the entire Western Christian church was Catholic. Luther's Protestant Reformation gave rise in turn to the myriads of non-Catholic western churches, including Anglican/Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Anabaptist, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, Shakers, Aamish, Calvinist, Pentecostalists, and as many independent churches as there are Pebbles on a beach.
So, if you're a Christian and live in Western Europe, The Americas, Africa, Australia or the Pacific Islands, and you're not Catholic, the chances are your church traces its origins back to Martin Luther.
Clearly an inspirational figure, eh?
Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German monk, priest, professor of theology and important figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.
Luther taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans.
His translation of the Bible into the vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the translation into English of the King James Bible. His hymns influenced the development of singing in churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.
In his later years, while suffering from several illnesses and deteriorating health, Luther became increasingly antisemitic, writing that Jewish homes should be destroyed, their synagogues burned, money confiscated and liberty curtailed. These statements have contributed to his controversial status.
Martin Luther was also a major influence on the German Nazi movement of the early twentieth century, building as it did on German and Austrian racial supremacist ideas and anti-Semitism, and combining this with Catholic anti-democratic authoritarianism into a Germanic form of the extreme right-wing political Catholicism of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Fascism.
So what sort of things did Luther say which inspired such a following?
I've numbered the following for ease of reference. Just append the page URL with #nn where nn is the number of the quote.
I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen.
He did not call them Abraham's children, but a "brood of vipers". Oh, that was too insulting for the noble blood and race of Israel, and they declared, "He has a demon". Our Lord also calls them a "brood of vipers"; furthermore in John 8 he states: "If you were Abraham's children ye would do what Abraham did.... You are of your father the devil. It was intolerable to them to hear that they were not Abraham's but the devil's children, nor can they bear to hear this today.
Therefore the blind Jews are truly stupid fools...
Now just behold these miserable, blind, and senseless people.
...their blindness and arrogance are as solid as an iron mountain.
Learn from this, dear Christian, what you are doing if you permit the blind Jews to mislead you. Then the saying will truly apply, "When a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit". You cannot learn anything from them except how to misunderstand the divine commandments...
Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.
Moreover, they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury. Thus they live from day to day, together with wife and child, by theft and robbery, as arch-thieves and robbers, in the most impenitent security.
However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath.
If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies-- that is, longer than two thousand years.
...Christ and his word can hardly be recognized because of the great vermin of human ordinances. However, let this suffice for the time being on their lies against doctrine or faith.
Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts?
Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy, and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God's wrath inflicts on the Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly giving God the lie.
No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.
Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg.
...but then eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!
Over and above that we let them get rich on our sweat and blood, while we remain poor and they such the marrow from our bones.
In brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule-- if my counsel does not please your, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all Christians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe-conduct, or communion with us. . . . With this faithful counsel and warning I wish to cleanse and exonerate my conscience.
Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew.
However, we must avoid confirming them in their wanton lying, slandering, cursing, and defaming. Nor dare we make ourselves partners in their devilish ranting and raving by shielding and protecting them, by giving them food, drink, and shelter, or by other neighborly acts...
Therefore we Christians, in turn, are obliged not to tolerate their wanton and conscious blasphemy.
Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death. My advice, as I said earlier, is:
First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire...
Second, that all their books-- their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible-- be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted...
Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country...
Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it...
He who hears this name [God] from a Jew must inform the authorities, or else throw sow dung at him when he sees him and chase him away.
But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews' synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God's name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God.
If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country.
...they remain our daily murderers and bloodthirsty foes in their hearts. Their prayers and curses furnish evidence of that, as do the many stories which relate their torturing of children and all sorts of crimes for which they have often been burned at the stake or banished.
...that everyone would gladly be rid of them.
Undoubtedly they do more and viler things than those which we know and discover.
If I had power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have, I would deal severely with their lying mouth.
They [rulers] must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, as Moses did...
If this does not help we must drive them out like mad dogs.
My essay, I hope, will furnish a Christian (who in any case has no desire to become a Jew) with enough material not only to defend himself against the blind, venomous Jews, but also to become the foe of the Jews' malice, lying, and cursing, and to understand not only that their belief is false but that they are surely possessed by all devils. May Christ, our dear Lord, convert them mercifully and preserve us steadfastly and immovably in the knowledge of him, which is eternal life. Amen.
Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies.
Inspired by those words, human beings did
this to other human beings, believing they were
doing what God wanted them to do.
Just feel that Christian love!
So there you are. If Luther was the original founder of whatever church you belong to, those are the sentiments that were once held in high esteem by your founding fathers; the same sentiments which led to the cultural cancer of German Fascism, the Holocaust - the industrialised murder of 6,000,000 European Jews and Romanies and a further 20,000,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, Polish and Russian POWs, homosexuals, Communists and mentally and physically disabled people - and the lives of some 34,000,000 civilians and young soldiers, seamen and airmen's lives on both sides to put down.
Godwin's Law states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". It sometimes seems that religious fundamentalists, and especially those from their retarded wing - creationism - imagine this means that the first to mention Hitler wins the debate. Almost invariably you'll be told that Hitler was a Atheist and/or a Darwinian Evolutionist. As is usually the case with religious fundamentalists, the truth of the matter is irrelevant to the 'argument' because for them reality can be disregarded at will.
As these quotes show, not only was he a Catholic who significantly, along with the rest of the Catholic Nazi High Command with one exception, was never excommunicated, but he was also a Creationist, although he, like other right-wing Christians even today, had no compunction about using pseudo-Darwinism, also called 'Social Darwinism', when he needed to give his religious bigotry, racism and hatreds a gloss of superficial scientific credibility.
Incidentally, the one exception to be excommunicated by the Catholic Church was Joseph Goebbels for the sin, not of killing tens of millions of people and waging a genocidal war against Jews and Romanies, but for the heinous sin of getting divorced.
It's a constant source of amazement and amusement how so many people claim to be Christians whilst acting like anything but a Christian. For example, in Women. Are You Free Or Christian? I showed Christian women should see themselves and behave according to the Bible and the founding fathers of their religion. In this blog, let's look at the way good Christian parents should be treating their children, again according to the Bible and some well-known apologists for Christianity.
Firstly, a warning. Almost all of what the Bible tells you to do to and with your children is very probably illegal, especially if you live in a civilised society. Under no circumstances should you do the things the Bible tells a good Christian parent to do in respect of your children. The least you could expect would be to have them taken into care.
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
Continuing my theme of religions giving permission to extremists, this is a collection of writing, pictures, cartoons, Twitter tweets and blogs in which religion is used to excuse and even advocate crimes against humanity such as violent persecution, genocide, mass murder against people with different beliefs or none. Things which any decent person with even a modicum of respect for their fellow human beings would look at and say, "That's wrong! And if your religion tells you it's right, your religion is wrong too."
It is an on-going project and will be added to as more material is gathered. Examples please.
First, a quote by the Christian apologist William Lane Craig, current darling of the US religious right who seems to have embarked recently on a campaign to make genocide and child mass-murder look like a Christian moral crusade (and I use that word deliberately). The full text may be read here.
According to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), when God called forth his people out of slavery in Egypt and back to the land of their forefathers, he directed them to kill all the Canaanite clans who were living in the land (Deut. 7.1-2; 20.16-18). The destruction was to be complete: every man, woman, and child was to be killed. The book of Joshua tells the story of Israel’s carrying out God’s command in city after city throughout Canaan...
So then what is Yahweh doing in commanding Israel’s armies to exterminate the Canaanite peoples? It is precisely because we have come to expect Yahweh to act justly and with compassion that we find these stories so difficult to understand. How can He command soldiers to slaughter children?...
I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses...
So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command...
But why take the lives of innocent children?... if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
So here we have a leading Christian apologist telling those so inclined that genocide and child mass-murder is good and it's not their fault when they do it. They are merely obeying a god's command and carrying out its wishes. Why, it would almost amount to a sin; to moral failure even, NOT to kill people who don't share your religion. And don't worry about such scruples as finding child murder distasteful or shocking. It's all to the good, and anyway it's actually good for children - it makes them happy!
And if you're tempted not to believe it, here is William Lane Craig saying it:
Just obey those voices in your head (or more likely, the voices of the right-wing politicians and their dutifully obedient clerics who tell you a god told them to tell you) and you have no responsibilities for the consequences of your actions. You have this on the personal assurance of William Lane Craig - not that HE would do such a thing, of course.
Note the several examples of suggestible and inadequate individuals taking up this theme and now feeling part of a new, exciting movement, in the Twitter tweets defending William Lane Craig's repugnant apologetic. Christians expressing horror at it and taking Lane Craig to task are, naturally, as rare as hens' teeth.
This one illustrates how suggestible amateur apologists then proudly take up this theme, free from any feelings of guilt, on the grounds that anything a god orders is moral, regardless of the consequences, safe in the knowledge that this view is now 'respectable' and somehow reveals a new understanding and insight to be taken up with the zeal of a crusade.
Here we see Radovan Karadžić at his trial for war crimes, explaining how the Bosnian genocide in former Yugoslavia was good and 'holy'.
What are the odds that his comrade in arms, fellow Greek Orthodox Christians, Ratko Mladić offers up the same justification.
And of course, these people gave permission to, and even participated directly in, the atrocities following the break up of the former Yugoslavia.
"It's not a pleasant job, but somebody has to do it. It's all to the good in the end!"
I wonder how many guards and Kommandants at Treblinka, Dachau, Belson, Buchenwald and Sobibor said that.
Hence I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Adolf Hitler
In this blog, (Tosin's Bible Blog) entitled "The Love Of God And Genocide" (No! Really!) also by a Christian we find people being compared to sick animals again, so genocide and child murder are equated to some sort of mercy killing; unpleasant but all to the long-term good. Even an act of love on the part of the perpetrator to whom we should be grateful and sympathetic.
"Not a pleasant job, but someone had to do it".
I guess most people would already know about the 6 million Jewish people killed through Nazism. This last statement is absolutely true, and I will research and post sources to corroborate it. However, this fact does not change the fact that yes, our loving God ordered these massacres, and yes, genocide is a very appropriate term for the massacres He ordered. How do we reconcile this with our faith?...
In the Bible, people are often compared to sheep. You know when the foot and mouth disease hit the UK, or in fact any contagious animal disease hits anywhere, culls of whole animal populations are ordered. Why? To stop the diseases spreading any further. Sometimes farmers are distraught at having to kill so many of their animals, yet everyone knows that if those animals were not killed, then even more animals would ultimately be lost. So it was with those cultures that God ordered to be destroyed. They were utterly saturated with the deadly and contagious illnesses of horrible sin. When foot and mouth strikes, you don’t say “Let’s spare the babies.” You have to systematically kill everything. And yet, the fact that a farmer kills so many of his animals does not mean that he does not love them, especially when he has carefully tended them and invested his very self into them. God invested His own image into all humanity. I know that this was a moral issue rather than a physical illness, so I sometimes think that surely, sometimes the children could have been spared, as they were too young to have imbibed the evil sinful practices and the attitudes of the adults. And in many cases children were spared. And yet in some cases God specifically commanded that even children – even animals were to be totally destroyed. I believe that in these passages God is using these civilisations as symbols for how sin has to be utterly destroyed. Remember that He is God, He is the Creator, He can do that.
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
Adolf Hitler, 12 April 1922
Probably little more need be said about this nauseating blog save to point out that "Tosin" seems ignorant of much of history, or at least is hoping his readers are. From the style of writing it would appear that "Tosin" is very young so perhaps the interesting point here is how he/she has picked up the permission to commit genocide currently being promulgated by William Lane Craig and his acolytes.
I hope the relative of the victims of the Holocaust derive some comfort from the thought that their loved ones died as an act of mercy to prevent the rest of us catching their disease, and that their deaths were ordered by a 'loving' god for the good of humanity, or simply because he can.
Interestingly, the only comments to date (10 Dec 2011), apart from my own, have been from Christians complimenting Tosin and thanking him for helping them to reconcile genocide with a loving god. None of them have questioned whether acts of genocide done in its name could actually raise questions about its 'loving' nature, or its existence.
In this blog, entitled "Why does the Bible Condone Genocide" by Christian apologist John Hendryx, at least there is none of the nauseating equation of humans with diseased animals, nor the claim that killing them was good for them; that we're doing them a favour for which they should be grateful, actually.
Instead we are simply assured that the Christian god has the right to do what it wants with humans and just uses believers to carry out its tasks, so freeing them of personal responsibility for their crimes and allowing them the excuse of blaming them on a god. Anyway, they were going to die eventually, so what harm was there? The murderers were just doing their god's work, so are to be admired.
Obviously, to this school of Christian 'morality', human life is of little value, so long as it's someone else's life. Notions of human rights and human dignity are unknown. We are nothing more than the playthings of their capricious and mendacious god and killing people is simply hastening the inevitable a little.
Before we get to Canaan, consider this further point: not only may God take life as he sees fit – he does take the life of every last human on earth (see Heb. 9:27)."...
A couple more points may be helpful to keep the slaughter of the Canaanites in perspective: first, at that time in the OT, God had given the nation of Israel clear civil authority and responsibilities; and as a lawfully-ordained civil government, functioning directly under his control, He commanded them to carry out His just judgment against the idolaters of Canaan...
When it is a judicial act of a properly instituted civil government, taking a life may sometimes be warranted. Apparently, the slaughter of the Canaanites was one such judicial act, carried out by the magistrates of Israel.
Corpses piled up behind the crematorium in Buchenwald concentration camp, April 1945
So, it's also okay so long as it's done with the approval of the government. No doubt Ratko Mladic will be relieved to know that, though it's a point which, strangely, the jurists at Nuremberg failed to appreciate. It's also a point which those who formulated and signed the Geneva Convention seem to have missed.
"Just obeying orders, yer honour! Anyway, a god told me to do it!"
So we see how religions, which purport to sanctify and value human life, reduce it to a worthless thing, easily extinguished to satiate the blood-lust or territorial ambitions of their followers and to permit the actions they purport to condemn and abhor - when it's expedient so to do.
People who can believe the blood sacrifice of an innocent person can absolve them of personal responsibility for their own sins, have a low regard for life, it seems. Someone else's life only has a utility value to them.
This example of a wanabee genocidist sitting at home casually and anonymously calling for the murder of everyone who disagrees with him, illustrates the point rather nicely I think.
'Keith' clearly feels he has permission to call for this because it is for the good of society and even his patriotic duty (as long as someone else does it, no doubt). No need any longer to bother about such niceties as right and wrong or whether your superstition has any merit; just kill everyone and have done with it, then there won't be anyone to bother you with those annoying little questions.
And dress the whole thing up as a moral crusade. Nowhere in it is there any hint of valuing human life or consideration of human worth. It's all for me and only I matter.
And still they come, though this one is struggling to explain in exactly what context child murder and genocide are right for Christians. Will update when he's decided, if ever.
