Thoughts on Prayer Breakfast - part 3

Continued from last week

Scroll down a few centuries to 1398 and we find Timur destroying the city of Delhi, but before the battle, Timur executed more than 100,000 captives from the city of Tulamba. A century later, Timur’s descendant, Babur, founded the Mogul dynasty that ruled most of India as a Muslim domain until 1862.

Certainly such wholesale slaughters are a thing of the past! Look again. In 1971 well after independence and the partition of India, West Pakistan tried to stamp out an independence movement in East Pakistan by initiating a crackdown on Bangladesh’s aspirations for independence. Pakistani military and supporting militias killed as many as 3,000,000 people and raped as many as 400,000 Bangladeshi women. One million fled to India. This is admittedly political violence, but can you conceive of a current western army raping 400,000 women?

These are certainly not isolated incidents. Just three months before this writing, in November 2014, Jihadists killed around 5,000 people in Syria, Africa and elsewhere, according to best estimates. THAT’S FIVE THOUSAND (5,000) IN ONE MONTH.  ONE MONTH!!! A good rule of thumb is that Muslim armies and individuals kill 170 people a day in obedience to what they claim is the command of God. There are about 25 wars currently raging; 21 involve Muslims. These things are all easily verifiable. Look it up. Let’s look at the score.

There has been only one Islamic war against the rest of the world. It has lasted 1,400 years. In the 1,400 years of continuous Jihad 80 million Hindus, 60 million Christians, 10 million Buddhists and 120 million Africans have perished for a grand Islamic total of 270 million.

In the Crusades 1096 - 1272, perhaps 3 million died. That’s it,  3,000,000 in 2,000 years. These are the only wars waged by Christians as religious wars against non-Christians. The other wars of Christianity have been mostly directed against fellow Christians and have been largely political.  In the peasants’ revolt in reformation Germany approximately 150,000.  In the Thirty Years war between German Protestants and German Catholics, maybe 6 million died. The French wars of religion killed just short of 3 million. In the English Puritan war against fellow Protestant and the Catholics of Ireland (1642–1651) about 700,000 died and let’s throw in the witch burnings for good measure (about 50,000 in the 1600’s) and the ever popular Spanish Inquisition which comes in at a disappointing 3,000 in the four centuries of its existence between 1478 and 1834. Incidentally the Spanish Inquisition burned almost no witches. They mostly thought it was nonsense. (I have not included the Indigenous American Holocaust in the total. It is impossible to sort out the horrific death toll, but the vast majority of it was due to disease brought by European contact with indigenous Americans who had no resistance to European disease. It can be argued that, in most cases, in Latin America, Catholic missionaries struggled to save the indigenous populations from economic and political oppression. The same cannot be said of English speaking America. So the death toll of all Christian religious wars whether waged against non-Christians or fellow Christians comes to a grand total of 12,953,000.

So, by the numbers it seems that Islam is 20 times more violent than Christianity.  I am not trying to say that we Christians, having the lower score have won as if in a horrific game of golf. I am horrified that almost 13 million people have been killed to defend a religion that had no armies and fought no wars for its first four centuries. These numbers horrify me because I am a Christian and I deplore unnecessary violence.  The Gospel of Christ was spread very successfully by an evangelism that involved preaching, teaching, exorcisms and charismatic healings. Violence was abhorrent to the first followers of Jesus and was never part of the first spreading of the Gospel. It was most certainly NOT abhorrent to the first followers of Mohammed. Religiously motivated violence seems integral to the development of Islam. Muhammad had about 100 followers until he took up the sword in Medina to spread his new faith.

I resent being told that Christianity is as violent as Islam. It just isn’t true. Muhammad was a conqueror. Jesus was a carpenter. I suspect that non-Muslim apologists for Islam say what they wish were true, as if saying it made it so. When will we stop kidding ourselves?

Rev. Know-it-all

P.S. As to the general horribleness of the human species I refer you to:  “Rev. Know-it-all “Isn't religion the reason for war?”

Next week: a handy guide to Christian wars of religion

Thoughts on the President's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast

A very sincere warning: Some will find this offensive and Islamophobic. Facts are not phobic. Facts fear nothing. They simply are. If you find this offensive, I implore you, refute it. If you think it untrue, research it. I would be happy to be wrong about these things.

I had a friend named Alex von Doernberg. I was twice a guest in his home. He enjoyed speaking English with American and British visitors to his castle, Burg Herzberg. He was the descendant of Junker Hans von Doernberg, the man who took charge of our town in Germany after a shooting war between two bishops in 1465. The 20th century Von Doernberg, my friend died in 1983. He had lived a long life as a Hessian nobleman, a hereditary baron under the Kaiser, then he had been part of the Weimar government after the first world war where he learned his craft as a German jurist, diplomat and, after joining the SS, as Head of Protocol Department of the Foreign Office from 1938 to 1945. His English was perfect and he put it to good use as Von Ribbentrop’s adjutant in London. He became a member of the SS in order to continue at his post in the German diplomatic corps. He testified at the Nuremberg trials for the prosecution and the war was a distant memory by the time I met him. I got to know him because he always liked to talk to Americans.

He had served at the German embassy in Washington DC in 1926. Von Doernberg with his splendid English helped make British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain more pliable during the negotiations over the Munich Agreement. In August 1939, he accompanied Ribbentrop to Moscow to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Convincing Chamberlain that German intentions were good and reasonable was the work of my friend, Alexander von Doernberg. The refusal to see past the sweet words and urbanity of my friend convinced the world that Hitler had nothing but the best of intentions. People like that surly, difficult, unattractive Winston Churchill would have none of it. Regarding the Munich Agreement, Churchill told the English Parliament, “England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.”

Chamberlain’s good intentions paved the way for the next big accomplishment of my friend the baron. In August 1939, he accompanied Ribbentrop to Moscow to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact by which Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe and untold millions were consigned to violent deaths. Our world was devastated by the Nazi horror of the last century, followed by the tyranny of Marxism. The death toll of these two anti-Christian movements was somewhere around 300 million. 

My friend, the Baron von Doernberg was a delightful man; polished, polite and well educated. I was glad to be counted as his friend and to have been his guest I imagine that Neville Chamberlain was just as delightful. Churchill was a disagreeable, ugly, little man who wore as little clothing as possible and smoked a big stinking cigar. Definitely the Baron von Doernberg was the nicer fellow. Nonetheless he was one of the handful of men at the center of the storm that swept away Europe and the culture of the West. For the sake of niceness, Chamberlain, von Ribbentrop and von Doernberg had hands that dripped with the blood millions. The moral of the story is, as I have heard from a great American philosopher, “Better a Churchill than a Chamberlain.”

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I have just read President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, the speech criticized by so many non-believing Christians. To my mind it is perhaps the most moving and meaningful speech since Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…”  It is a true call to what faith in God is about, no matter our religion or lack of it. It is a call to live up to the promise of our country. This speech has made me an Obama fan and, hopefully, a more humble believer in our loving God.

Yours,

Hiram “Hi” Horst

Dear Hiram,

Yes it was quite a speech. The President reminded us that we have been just as violent as Muslims. Allow me to quote his text: 

“We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic…. Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

Herein I think we see some assumptions. Unspeakable things have admittedly been done by Christians for revenge, for profit and for a host of ungodly reasons, but have any of these things ever been done at the behest of Jesus of Nazareth? 

The 4th crusade in which the Venetians got the Franks et al. to divert their expedition to the Holy Land in order to conquer the Byzantine-Roman capital, Constantinople in 1202 was certainly shameful and denounced by the pope in Rome as such. The attack was, in part, revenge for the Massacre of the Latins in which the citizens of Constantinople killed as many as 50,000 western Christians in 1182 (look it up.) 

Was this done in the name of Christ who said, “Turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) and “Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44)? If you listen to the Prince of Peace, Jesus of Nazareth, you don’t take revenge, though you may possibly defend the weak. 

On the other hand, regarding religiously inspired violence, Muhammad, the prophet of Islam said, or Allah said through him in the Quran, “…slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush.” Quran 9:5

If you are listening to Jesus of Nazareth then aggression and violence are forbidden to you.  Perhaps you have read some verses that seem to favor non-Muslims in the Quran. To understand them in their context you need to know about “abrogation.” This Islamic doctrine holds that the later verses of the Quran, cancel out earlier verses that seem to contradict them. It is as if Allah broke the hard truths to us slowly. This particular verse, the verse of the sword, (Quran 9:5) abrogates around 120 verses of the Quran according to most Islamic theologians. Modern apologists for Islam claim that this verse calls only for internal, spiritual struggle. This is a very recent interpretation. Far more typical is the interpretation of Ismail Ibn Kathir (1300-1373) an influential Muslim theologian. “Do not wait until you find them. Rather, seek and besiege them in their areas and forts, gather intelligence about them in the various roads and fairways so that what is made wide looks ever smaller to them. This way, they will have no choice, but to die or embrace Islam.”  

Didn’t the God of the Bible order such things when He put certain nations under the ban? When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy (Deut 7:1-3).

 

Add to this the Amalekites and in all 8 specific groups were put under the ban; that is slated for obliteration. Why these specific peoples? There are a number of sins of which they were guilty. The one that is most striking to is the worship of Moloch, (sometimes called “Chemosh” or addressed by the title “Baal”)

"'Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.”

Continued next week………..

Who is in charge when there is no pope? Epilogue

Letter to Sue Quetta, epilogue)

It has been pointed out to me, by people who are paying entirely too much attention, that I promised to explain the Defenestration of Prague but have not yet done so. Remember that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Still, for the sake of the curious I will explain the incident.

There were not one but two Defenestration’s of Prague! The First Defenestration occurred on July 30, 1419. During a religious procession, an angry mob of Hussites (followers of Father Jan Huss, a precursor to Luther and Calvin) stormed the town hall of Prague where they threw a judge, the burgomaster, and thirteen members of the town council out of the window to the pavement below where they were killed by the fall or by the mob of devout religious reformers.

The second Defenestration was the result of the election of Ferdinand of Styria as King of Bohemia. The Protestant Bohemians wanted nothing to do with this devoutly Catholic monarch.  So, when he sent two Catholic representatives to Prague in 1618, the Protestants, in a kind of reminiscence of the good old days, pitched the ambassadors out the castle window (a height of about five or six stories). Amazingly they lived! The Catholics said that angels had softened their fall, thanks to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Protestants said that it was dumb luck that they landed on a pile of manure in the castle courtyard. Are the stories not irreconcilable? After all, grace builds on nature. No matter the reason, the angry Protestants failed to kill the ambassadors of the new Crown Prince Ferdinand, (soon also to be Holy Roman Emperor). They lived, but a lot of other people didn’t. 

The fight soon spread to all of Europe and killed an uncountable number of people. Half of the male population of Germany died, and at least a third of the general German population, perhaps a million people. During the mayhem the Catholic villages of my maternal and paternal families were burned to the ground by the Protestant Elector, the Duke Christian of Braunschweig, home of the yummy delicacy usually called liverwurst. Perhaps that is why, as a boy, I often ate fried liverwurst, much loved in our household. Anyway, Duke Christian certainly fried a number of my ancestors.  The wars of religion raged for thirty years in central Europe, from 1618 to 1648. Simultaneously, the Huguenot and Puritan Wars ravaged France, England, and particularly Ireland, killing thousands possibly millions more. All because a couple of guys got tossed out the window in Prague. Who knew?

It is interesting to think that in the oppressive Catholic lands of Italy and Spain, dominated by medieval superstition and the terrors of the Inquisition, not a single person died as a result of the wars of religion.  In Germany, it may have been one million. In Ireland, it was about 600,000. In France, the Catholics got the upper hand and, rather than slaughter all the Protestants, they forced them to convert or leave. So, I suspect that the French death toll was less than 100,000.  The total death toll of the wars of religion was certainly more than two million. 

The wars finally ended in the German states in 1648 with the peace of Westphalia. Each prince would have the right to determine the religion of those under his authority. This is called “cuius regio, eius religio” (His region, His religion). In other words, “If you live in the town or land I own, you will practice my religion,” said the duke, the count, the baron etc. The principle of freedom of religion ended in Europe with the peace of Westphalia. And the end of religious freedom meant the end of religious conversion which has ultimately resulted in the end of Christian religion in much of Europe. Religious affiliation was no longer a matter of choice, but of good citizenship.  Now it is non existent in many places.

It is easy to find pundits who rail against the Inquisition, but who rails against the disorder and death that resulted from simple and grandly defiant gestures like Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church or the glorious Defenestrations of Prague? These appeal to us as heroic defiance in the defense of liberty. They in fact initiated a new form of government enforced religion and resulted in far more death and oppression than the Inquisition ever could have.  Still, we Americans and our modern imitators love the grand gesture.

I cannot get over the scathing criticism of Pope Benedict’s red shoes. The rumor went out that they were by Prada or Gucci! They were in fact made by a Peruvian shoemaker, by the name of Antonio Arellano, who has a small shop in the neighborhood of the Vatican. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used to have his old shoes repaired there. When he got a new gig as pope, he revived the custom of the red papal shoes, red being the color worn by popes before the white cassock. He simply steered a little business Antonio’s way. Benedict tried to restore the unity of Catholic history which he called the hermeneutic of continuity. He wanted to remind the world that there had been a Catholic Church long before the Second Vatican Council. The Church grows. It doesn’t change. Its expression is ever new. Although the appearance is different, the truth is eternal. The DNA is always the same, to use a modern analogy.

The world clucked its tongue led by the American media. We Americans felt so vastly superior to the luxury loving pope with the flashy shoes because we buy our shoes at cheap outlet stores, thus being somehow simpler and more noble. Look a little more closely at the red shoes. When his shoes were still black, Joe Ratzinger had his old shoes repaired by an immigrant cobbler. He made them last a little longer. We throw old shoes out and buy new.  When he needed new shoes, decent shoes for a demanding job, he paid about $200 to a worker he knew, a just wage for a decent product. We, in our simplicity, go to the mall and buy $300 sneakers made by slave laborers who get pennies on the dollar if they get anything at all. And we are superior? We are more moral? We are frauds. We are stealing from the poor of the world, but have the gall to criticize a man who pays a fair wage to a free worker. We love the gesture, not the truth.

The pundits of the entertainment world  critique the old men who run the church as they pretend to be philanthropists. In reality, they do no more than let crumbs from their tables fall to the poor and feel noble for doing so. And we are foolish enough to think them sincere. We love the gesture, not the truth. C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece the “Screwtape Letters,” has the demon Screwtape remind his nephew that “the Enemy (God) wants men to be humble, or charitable or to be forgiving. We, the demons want them to feel humble, to feel charitable, to feel forgiving.” 

We moderns don’t believe that something is real if we don’t feel it. A Mother Teresa, or a Joseph Ratzinger, or for that matter, a Christ on Calvary who begged His Heavenly Father to let Him off the hook, have no place in our shallow sentimental culture. Because we love the gesture, not the truth,  Cardinal Ratzinger’s repaired shoes, Mother Teresa’s service in the midst of dryness and the nails in Christ’s hand were no gesture. They were truth.  Our new pope is being lionized by the media for what they perceive as humility. If, heaven forfend, his humility turns out to be more than a gesture, I have no doubt that they will turn on him, and would throw him out a window if they could. The grand gesture has caused more suffering and human misery than can be imagined. 

The truth and only the truth will set you free.