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Back when abortion held a death penalty

Thread ID: 18522 | Posts: 91 | Started: 2005-06-03

Petr [OP]

2005-06-03 20:40 | User Profile

Most people would probably today choke at the idea of punishing an infanticide procedure known as abortion with death. They would probably consider it as utterly barbarous caveman behavior.

In fact, apparently quite recently this unnatural crime held the ultimate penalty in the most civilized of European countries:

[B]From Rodney Stark's "[I]For the Glory of God[/I]," (2003, Princeton University Press) p. 204:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue]"But here, too, keep in mind that capital punishment was the [I]usual[/I] penalty for all significant offenses - even at the height of the witch-hunts, many times more thieves and robbers than "witches" were being executed. (23) Indeed, "[I]more women were probably executed for for infanticide than for witchcraft[/I]." (24)

[B]For example, in Rouen, between 1550 and 1590, at the height of the witch-hunts, sixty-six women were burned for infanticide, while three women and six men were burned for the witchcraft[/B]." (25)

23: Weisser, 1979. 24: Briggs, 1998:262 25: Monter, 1999.[/COLOR]

I think here might be also a good point to quote G.K. Chesterton:

[COLOR=DarkRed][B][I]"People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. "[/I][/B][/COLOR]

[url]http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/part1c6.htm[/url]

Petr

2005-06-04 08:27 | User Profile

ping!

Angler

2005-06-04 11:54 | User Profile

For example, in Rouen, between 1550 and 1590, at the height of the witch-hunts, sixty-six women were burned for infanticide, while three women and six men were burned for the witchcraft. I'm confident that nearly all of the women burned for infanticide had lost their children through natural causes -- e.g., miscarriage before birth, or what would be known today as sudden infant death syndrome if the death occurred after birth. And obviously the people burned for witchcraft were innocent, since real witches don't exist.

People were so damned stupid back in those primitive times. And their stupidity was matched by their cruelty. Sickening injustice was the rule during the Dark Ages. The "authorities" were always looking for an excuse to torture or kill someone.

For the record, I don't approve of abortion. I think it should be illegal once the fetus has developed a brain and is at least potentially capable of feeling pain. I'm not sure what a suitable punishment would be, but I think death is a bit extreme, especially since that would psychologically punish the (presumably innocent) loved ones of the person being executed.

Petr

2005-06-04 16:59 | User Profile

[COLOR=DarkRed][B][I] - "I'm confident that nearly all of the women burned for infanticide had lost their children through natural causes -- e.g., miscarriage before birth, or what would be known today as sudden infant death syndrome if the death occurred after birth."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Do you have any concrete proof for this assertion? You do seem to have contempt for the intelligence of those people.

[COLOR=DarkRed][B] [I]- "And obviously the people burned for witchcraft were innocent, since real witches don't exist."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

There has always been some occultist underground around - ever heard of Gilles de Rais?

Even the supposed "martyr of science", Giordano Bruno, was more like an actively conspiring Hermetic sorcerer [I]a la [/I] Aleister Crowley rather than a predecessor of Isaac Newton.

[COLOR=DarkRed][B][I] - "People were so damned stupid back in those primitive times."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

No, they weren't. Once again you are blindly spouting worn-out "Enlightenment" cliches.

Stark demonstrates in his book how the [B]humanistic legal rationalism [/B] of Renaissance actually played a great (perhaps the greatest) part in [I]systematizing[/I] witch-hunts at the dawn of modern era to a degree totally unheard of in the Middle Ages! Humanists make great totalitarians.

(As Oswald Spengler points out, even [I]Malleus Malleficarum[/I] was written in the best humanist Latin...)

Yes, until the 15th century, witch-hunts were practically non-existent in Europe and the church actually actively [B]discouraged[/B] paganistic beliefs (which still cause witch-killings in Africa) about witches in the [B]early[/B] Middle Ages!

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I] by Rodney Stark, (Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 228:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue]"[B]But perhaps the most astonishing (and far too seldom mentioned) aspect of the Church campaign against superstition was the inclusion of [I]belief[/I] in witchcraft among the [I]condemned[/I] superstitions[/B]!

"Saint Boniface (?-754), the English missionary to Germany, taught that to believe in witches is un-Christian. [B]At the same time, acting on the advice from theologians, Charlemagne (724?-814) pronounced the death penalty for anyone who burned supposed "witches" as this was a "pagan custom."[/B] (143) In the ninth century, Saint Agobard (779-840) denied that "witches" could influence the weather. These [B]views denying the reality of witchcraft were made part of official canon law and came to be known as the [I]Canon episcopi[/I].[/B] This document proclaimed of anyone who believes that some people "ride on certain beasts ... in the dead of night to traverse great spaces of the earth" that such a person "is beyond doubt an infidel." [B]The document further advised that "priests throughout their churches should preach with all insistence to the people that they may know this to be in every way false."[/B] (144)

[B]In conformity to this Church teaching, in the eleventh century the king of Hungary took no notice of "witches" "since they do not exist." [/B] (145) For many centuries, that's how things stood.[/COLOR]

Read and weep, Angler: rather than representing enlightened evolution as compared to this sensible Medieval attitude, [B]this[/B] is how Renaissance [B]rationalist intellectuals[/B] approached this issue:

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], pp. 222-223:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue]"[B]Even leading [I]anti[/I]religious voices of the day supported the persecution of witches.[/B] [B]Thomas Hobbes[/B] (1599-1679), the famous English philosopher and outspoken atheist who, in his very influential book [I]Leviathan[/I], (118) dismissed all religion as "credulity," "ignorance," and "lies" and Gods as but "creatures of fancy", also wrote in the same book, "Bs for witches ... they are justly punished[/B]." (119)

"Or consider [B]Jean Bodin[/B] ([I]ca[/I]. 1530-1596), a bitter enemy of the Church, secret atheist, and "the undisputed intellectual master of the later sixteenth century." (120) Bodin wrote [I]Colloquium [/I] [I]of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime[/I], which became the "underground classic" of seventeenth-century atheism. in it Bodin noted that because all of the competing religions claim to be true, "all are refuted by all." (121) [B]Although he seems not to have believed in God, Bodin was a firm believer in in demons and the Devil, served as a judge in several witchcraft trials, and advocated burning witches alive in the slowest possible fire[/B]. [B]In 1580 Bodin also published [I]Demonomania of Witches [/I] (122) - "[U]the book which, more than any other, reanimated the witch-fires throughout Europe[/U]" (123) - a book that Henry More judges to be "rational and sagacious."[/B]

"Bodin wrote a book on witchcraft in France to make it more accessible to local judges and prosecutors, but Latin and German editions quickly appeared, and the book was a "best-seller" - by 1604 more than ten editions of the French version had been sold. What Bodin did was to update the [I]Malleus maleficarum [/I] and adapt it for use in secular courts, while retaining every aspect of the satanist perspective, including cannibalism, infant sacrifices, and sex orgies with the Devil. [B]The scholarly value of Bodin's book today lies in the fact that his arguments demanding death, not only for all the witches, but for everyone who doubted any detail of his demonology, march to the clear beat of logic[/B]. [B]Ultimately, he appealed not to emotion or superstition (although there is plenty of both), but to [I]reason[/I].[/B] In this, Bodin was not exceptional. The primary treatises on witchcraft are not wild ravings, albeit they contain a great deal of anger and what we now know to be nonsense. [B]Rather, they are the well-reasoned work of writers who took pride in their logic.[/B] This is true even of the [I]Malleus maleficarum[/I].[/COLOR]

Thus we see how a [I]rationalistic atheist [/I] Jean Bodin was responsible for a great amount of witch-hunt victims! Oh, the irony!

One needs only to observe the persecution of educated creationists and ID people to see how easily atheists can whip themselves into a witch-hunting frenzy...

By the way Angler, Rodney Stark also refutes your assertion that mentally disturbed people were taken to be witches in olden times:

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 211:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue][SIZE=4]Mental Illness[/SIZE]

"A variant of the claim that "witches" were real argues that the victims suffered from mental illness, which was misinterpreted in these prepsychiatric times. (46) [B]This could be argued only by those unfamiliar with trial transcripts, which clearly reveal the rationality of the overwhelming proportion of victims[/B], (47) as well as the fact that their "delusions" were extracted by coaching and torture and were frequently recanted in court.

Moreover, as Nachman Ben-Yehuda (48) noted, the psychopathological interpretation begs the significant question. [B]Since madness did not suddenly appear in the fifteenth century, (49) why should the mentally ill have been labeled as witches only during this era[/B]?

In fact, mental illness was not mistaken for witchcraft; many records survive of courts distinguishing between the two. (50) [B]For example, a demonology published in 1624 to facilitate the detection of "witches" warned against the mistaking various forms of melancholia for witchcraft[/B]. (51)

[U][B]Indeed, to the extent that madness may have played a role, it was that sometimes psychotics were taken to be [I]victims[/I] of witchcraft - to have been "bewitched." [/B][/U]

The idea that "witches" were mislabeled as psychotics is spurious. (52) This is not to suggest, of course, that many of those selected as "witches" weren't quite peculiar.[/COLOR]

Petr

Texas Dissident

2005-06-04 18:13 | User Profile

Good post, Petr.

Angeleyes

2005-06-04 20:32 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]Good post, Petr.[/QUOTE] While Petr's post is for me a refreshing enlightenment, wordplay and usage errors may cloud the conversation. There remain new age pagans running about with their "revived in the 19th century" versions of witchcraft, Hekate worship, and the generally matriarchical Wiccans. The Women's Lib movement of the '60's seems to have given them social momentum, no surprise for an anti-Christianity school of thought. See also the fascination with Gnosticism among "liberated women."

The worship practices of matriarchical pagan rites versus the witchcraft as an art that enables the performance of miracle-like magic is a good example of imprecision in language and usage.

People hear or read witch, and unless they have bothered to look into the matter with a critical eye, cannot differentiate between new age paganism, and the "she turned me into a newt" fantasy. It is gratifying to see the early Church fathers raised the BS flag on that one. I wonder what Cotton Mather would have to say had he understood such clearly written doctrine?

Even if the "witches" of Rouen could not cast spells of transformation, and so on, the apparent overturning of the powerful natural process of fertilization, gestation, and birth may have seemed, to some observers, a "magical" power to nullify conception. "God gave us a son/daughter" is still a common turn of phrase after a baby is born. Consider that context in medeival France. A baby is a gift from God, or at least a sign of blessing. Ending a pregnancy could be perceived as spell casting rather than a herbal assault, a poisoning, of the nascent life in the womb.

This takes me to the Mosaic law, and "do not suffer a witch to live" versus "do not suffer a poisoner to live." I think the switch came around the King James Version time, though I am not sure.

If a woman admitted to "poisoning" -- as in using certain herbal toxins -- to rid herself of the growing life in her womb, that might have been construed as a witch, or a poisoner. I don't know ancient French, so I can't support that explanation very well via contextual or cultural clues, nor to show that the line of thought is dead on arrival -- like an abortion.

TexasAnarch

2005-06-04 20:50 | User Profile

Those who oppose abortion should have been aborted themselves -- They certainly wouldn't know the difference -- anymore than Terry Shiavo knew when they pulled the plug. And everyone would be better off. They are the killers of Vietnam and servants of the Bush Demon god.

The solution to the abortion issue is to make it retroactive for whoever opposes it. Anyone who gets in the way of my friend's girlfriend, who had to get one because there was not way they could raise a child properly, I would shoot dead on the spot. Then, now, or forevermore. Too bad we can't have a couple of pigs offed like that .. it woud stop the abortion Dr. killings, which are inspired by cowards and followers of Randall Terry and the abused (read: f**ked in the ass) who cannot be thankful for their own lives so are driven to spread misery whever they can. The Unborn cons -- worse than neos, but brothers under the foreskin.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-04 21:12 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr]

[B]For example, in Rouen, between 1550 and 1590, at the height of the witch-hunts, sixty-six women were burned for infanticide, while three women and six men were burned for the witchcraft[/B]."[/QUOTE]

Contrarily, it is my understanding that most who were burned or drowned for infanticide were punished for just that, INFANTICIDE, namely the killing of, or sacrificing to Satan of, a NEWLY-BORN child, or infant.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-04 21:15 | User Profile

[QUOTE=TexasAnarch]Those who oppose abortion should have been aborted themselves -- They certainly wouldn't know the difference -- anymore than Terry Shiavo knew when they pulled the plug. And everyone would be better off. They are the killers of Vietnam and servants of the Bush Demon god.

:: whiff :: a proud baby killer. Puke.

TexasAnarch

2005-06-04 21:25 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Exelsis_Deo]:: whiff :: a proud baby killer. Puke.[/QUOTE]

wads aren't babies.

Angler

2005-06-04 21:44 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=DarkRed][B][I] - "I'm confident that nearly all of the women burned for infanticide had lost their children through natural causes -- e.g., miscarriage before birth, or what would be known today as sudden infant death syndrome if the death occurred after birth."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Do you have any concrete proof for this assertion? No, I don't. Do you have any concrete proof that the people were guilty?

What I do have is the common knowledge that people back then were highly vindictive and superstitious. They attributed all kinds of natural occurrences to supernatural causes. One can gain an insight into how pig-ignorant people were back then by reading the Malleus Maleficarum (available for free online). It's truly pathetic.

You do seem to have contempt for the intelligence of those people. That would be an understatement. We're talking about people who thought black cats were demons in disguise. Such beliefs were plainly irrational and just plain retarded.

[COLOR=DarkRed][B] [I]- "And obviously the people burned for witchcraft were innocent, since real witches don't exist."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

There has always been some occultist underground around - ever heard of Gilles de Rais? Sure, but sickos like him have always been extremely rare. I seriously doubt that most people convicted of witchcraft had done anything worse than show kindness to a black cat or mutter to themselves during church services.

Even the supposed "martyr of science", Giordano Bruno, was more like an actively conspiring Hermetic sorcerer [I]a la [/I] Aleister Crowley rather than a predecessor of Isaac Newton. I have never heard any such thing about Bruno. Do you have an objective source for this? And even if it's true, no one deserves to be punished for having religious (or scientific) beliefs different from the mainstream. Those who punished Bruno were intellectual cowards who couldn't defeat him with reason, so they resorted to brutality instead. The whole lot of his persecutors weren't fit to wipe Bruno's butt.

[COLOR=DarkRed][B][I] - "People were so damned stupid back in those primitive times."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

No, they weren't. Once again you are blindly spouting worn-out "Enlightenment" cliches. Yes, they were. Again, we're talking about people who thought that witches had supernatural powers and rode broomsticks to orgies with the Devil. They were ignorant fools, Petr.

What do you have against enlightenment, anyway? Do you think it's better for people to live in the darkness of superstition and ignorance as long as they have the "right" religious beliefs?

Stark demonstrates in his book how the [B]humanistic legal rationalism [/B] of Renaissance actually played a great (perhaps the greatest) part in [I]systematizing[/I] witch-hunts at the dawn of modern era to a degree totally unheard of in the Middle Ages! Humanists make great totalitarians. Sounds like Stark is full of it. The witch-hunts were blind superstitious fanaticism, nothing more.

(As Oswald Spengler points out, even [I]Malleus Malleficarum[/I] was written in the best humanist Latin...) The writers of the MM were obviously not humanists. They were religious fanatics.

Yes, until the 15th century, witch-hunts were practically non-existent in Europe and the church actually actively [B]discouraged[/B] paganistic beliefs (which still cause witch-killings in Africa) about witches in the [B]early[/B] Middle Ages! Whenever witch-hunts did take place, who was responsible for them? Certainly not pagans (at least not in Europe). I'm not aware of any mass witch-hunts perpetrated by pagans.

[COLOR=Blue]"[B]But perhaps the most astonishing (and far too seldom mentioned) aspect of the Church campaign against superstition was the inclusion of [I]belief[/I] in witchcraft among the [I]condemned[/I] superstitions[/B]!

The Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer), first published in 1486, is arguably one of the most infamous books ever written, due primarily to its position and regard during the Middle Ages. It served as a guidebook for Inquisitors during the Inquisition, and was designed to aid them in the identification, prosecution, and dispatching of Witches. ...

At the time of the writing of The Malleus Maleficarum, there were many voices within the Christian community (scholars and theologians) who doubted the existence of witches and largely regarded such belief as mere superstition. The authors of the Malleus addressed those voices in no uncertain terms, stating: "Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinacy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy." The immediate, and lasting, popularity of the Malleus essentially silenced those voices. It made very real the threat of one being branded a heretic, simply by virtue of one's questioning of the existence of witches and, thus, the validity of the Inquisition. It set into the general Christian consciousness, for all time, a belief in the existence of witches as a real and valid threat to the Christian world. It is a belief which is held to this day.

It must be noted that during the Inquisition, few, if any, real, verifiable, witches were ever discovered or tried. Often the very accusation was enough to see one branded a witch, tried by the Inquisitors' Court, and burned alive at the stake. Estimates of the death toll during the Inquisition worldwide range from 600,000 to as high as 9,000,000 (over its 250 year long course); either is a chilling number when one realizes that nearly all of the accused were women, and consisted primarily of outcasts and other suspicious persons. Old women. Midwives. Jews. Poets. Gypsies. Anyone who did not fit within the contemporary view of pieous Christians were suspect, and easily branded "Witch". Usually to devastating effect.

It must also be noted that the crime of Witchcraft was not the only crime of which one could be accused during the Inquisition. By questioning any part of Catholic belief, one could be branded a heretic. Scientists were branded heretics by virtue of repudiating certain tenets of Christian belief (most notably Galileo, whose theories on the nature of planets and gravitational fields was initially branded heretical). Writers who challenged the Church were arrested for heresy (sometimes formerly accepted writers whose works had become unpopular). Anyone who questioned the validity of any part of Catholic belief did so at their own risk. The Malleus Maleficarum played an important role in bringing such Canonical law into being, as often the charge of heresy carried along with it suspicions of witchcraft.

It must be remembered that the Malleus is a work of its time. Science had only just begun to make any real advances. At that time nearly any unexplainable illness or malady would often be attributed to magic, and thus the activity of witches. It was a way for ordinary people to make sense of the world around them. The Malleus drew upon those beliefs, and, by its very existence, reinforced them and brought them into the codified belief system of the Catholic Church. In many ways, it could be said that it helped to validate the Inquisition itself.

[B]In conformity to this Church teaching, in the eleventh century the king of Hungary took no notice of "witches" "since they do not exist." [/B] (145) For many centuries, that's how things stood.[/COLOR] See above. Things certainly didn't stay that way during the Inquisition (or, later, the Salem witch-hunts).

Read and weep, Angler: rather than representing enlightened evolution as compared to this sensible Medieval attitude, [B]this[/B] is how Renaissance [B]rationalist intellectuals[/B] approached this issue:

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], pp. 222-223:[/B]

"Bodin wrote a book on witchcraft in France to make it more accessible to local judges and prosecutors, but Latin and German editions quickly appeared, and the book was a "best-seller" - by 1604 more than ten editions of the French version had been sold. What Bodin did was to update the [I]Malleus maleficarum [/I] and adapt it for use in secular courts, while retaining every aspect of the satanist perspective, including cannibalism, infant sacrifices, and sex orgies with the Devil. [B]The scholarly value of Bodin's book today lies in the fact that his arguments demanding death, not only for all the witches, but for everyone who doubted any detail of his demonology, march to the clear beat of logic[/B]. [B]Ultimately, he appealed not to emotion or superstition (although there is plenty of both), but to [I]reason[/I].[/B] In this, Bodin was not exceptional. The primary treatises on witchcraft are not wild ravings, albeit they contain a great deal of anger and what we now know to be nonsense. [B]Rather, they are the well-reasoned work of writers who took pride in their logic.[/B] This is true even of the [I]Malleus maleficarum[/I].[/COLOR] Merely attempting to appeal to rationality and logic, or claiming that oneself is doing so, hardly makes one a rationalist. Jean Bodin was obviously no such thing.

Thus we see how a [I]rationalistic atheist [/I] Jean Bodin was responsible for a great amount of witch-hunt victims! Oh, the irony! Nice try, but that doesn't hold water. Again, Bodin was no rationalist! He was just another fool who believed in witches and other nonsense.

One needs only to observe the persecution of educated creationists and ID people to see how easily atheists can whip themselves into a witch-hunting frenzy... LOL

By the way Angler, Rodney Stark also refutes your assertion that mentally disturbed people were taken to be witches in olden times:

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 211:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue][SIZE=4]Mental Illness[/SIZE]

Moreover, as Nachman Ben-Yehuda (48) noted, the psychopathological interpretation begs the significant question. [B]Since madness did not suddenly appear in the fifteenth century, (49) why should the mentally ill have been labeled as witches only during this era[/B]? I doubt that labeling the mentally ill as witches only started during that era. And even if that's the case, prior to that time they could just as easily have been thought to be possessed by demons.

Whatever the details of a particular time and culture, appeals to the supernatural were the standard mode of explanation for mental illness.

In fact, mental illness was not mistaken for witchcraft; many records survive of courts distinguishing between the two. (50) [B]For example, a demonology published in 1624 to facilitate the detection of "witches" warned against the mistaking various forms of melancholia for witchcraft[/B]. (51) Many illnesses (such as Tourette's Syndrome) were not even identified in those times, so how could people have distinguished them from witchcraft?

[U][B]Indeed, to the extent that madness may have played a role, it was that sometimes psychotics were taken to be [I]victims[/I] of witchcraft - to have been "bewitched." [/B][/U] I'll buy that. It's still an example of ignorance and superstitious belief, though.

Angler

2005-06-04 22:02 | User Profile

Since we're on the topic, here's another example of medieval idiocy. It's the Bull of Innocent VIII (though it sounds more like Bullsh!t to me):

Desiring with the most hearfelt anxiety, even as Our Apostleship requires, that the Catholic faith should especially in this Our day increase and flourish everywhere, and that all heretical depravity should be driven far from the frontiers and bournes of the Faithful, We very gladly proclaim and even restate those particular means and methods whereby Our pious desire may obtain its wished effect, since when all errors are uprooted by Our diligent avocation as by the hoe of a provident husbandman, a zeal for, and the regular observance of, Our holy Faith will be all the more strongly impressed upon the hearts of the faithful.

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, TrÃÂ©ves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, [color=red]have slain infants yet in the mother's womb[/color], as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many. And although Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, Professors of Theology, of the Order of Friars Preachers, have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical pravities, and still are Inquisitors, the first in the aforesaid parts of Northern Germany, wherein are included those aforesaid townships, districts, dioceses, and other specified localities, and the second in certain territories which lie along the borders of the Rhine, nevertheless not a few clerics and lay folk of those countries, seeking too curiously to know more than concerns them, since in the aforesaid delegatory letters there is no express and specific mention by name of these provinces, townships, dioceses, and districts, and further since the two delegates themselves and the abominations they are to encounter are not designated in detailed and particular fashion, these persons are not ashamed to contend with the most unblushing effrontery that these enormities are not practised in these provinces, and consequently the aforesaid Inquisitors have no legal right to exercise their powers of inquisition in the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and territories, which have been rehearsed, and that the Inquisitors may not proceed to punish, imprison, and penalize criminals convicted of the heinous offences and many wickednesses which have been set forth. Accordingly in the aforesaid provinces, townships, dioceses, and districts, the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished not without open danger to the souls of many and peril of eternal damnation.

Wherefore We, as is Our duty, being wholly desirous of removing all hindrances and obstacles by which the good work of the Inquisitors may be let and tarded, as also of applying potent remedies to prevent the disease of heresy and other turpitudes diffusing their poison to the destruction of many innocent souls, since Our zeal for the Faith especially incites us, lest that the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and territories of Germany, which We had specified, be deprived of the benefits of the Holy Office thereto assigned, by the tenor of these presents in virtue of Our Apostolic authority We decree and enjoin that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every way as if the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, territories, yea, even the persons and their crimes in this kind were named and particularly designated in Our letters. Moreover, for greater surety We extend these letters deputing this authority to cover all the aforesaid provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, territories, persons, and crimes newly rehearsed, and We grant permission to the aforesaid Inquisitors, to one separately or to both, as also to Our dear son John Gremper, priest of the diocese of Constance, Master of Arts, their notary, or to any other public notary, who shall be by them, or by one of them, temporarily delegated to those provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and aforesaid territories, to proceed, according to the regulations of the Inquisition, against any persons of whatsoever rank and high estate, correcting, mulcting, imprisoning, punishing, as their crimes merit, those whom they have found guilty, the penalty being adapted to the offence. Moreover, they shall enjoy a full and perfect faculty of expounding and preaching the word of God to the faithful, so often as opportunity may offer and it may seem good to them, in each and every parish church of the said provinces, and they shall freely and lawfully perform any rites or execute any business which may appear advisable in the aforesaid cases. By Our supreme authority We grant them anew full and complete faculties.

At the same time by Letters Apostolic We require Our venerable Brother, the Bishop of Strasburg (Albrecht von Bayern, 1478-1506 - ed.), that he himself shall announce, or by some other or others cause to be announced, the burthen if Our Bull, which he shall solemnly publish when and so often as he deems it necessary, or when he shall be requested so to do by the Inquisitors or by one of them. Nor shall he suffer them in disobedience to the tenor of these presents to be molested or hindered by any authority whatsoever, but he shall threaten all who endeavour to hinder or harass the Inquisitors, all who oppose them, all rebels, of whatsoever rank, estate, position, pre-eminence, dignity, or any condition they may be, or whatsoever privilege or exemption they may claim, with excommunication, suspension, interdict, and yet more terrible penalties, censures, and punishment, as may seem good to him, and that without any right of appeal, and if he will he may by Our authority aggravate and renew these penalties as often as he list, calling in, if so please him, the help of the secular arm.

Non obstantibus . . . Let no man therefore . . . But if any dare to do so, which God forbid, let him know that upon him will fall the wrath of Almighty God, and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.

Given at Rome, at S. Peter's, on the 9 December of the Year of the Incarnation of Our Lord one thousand four hundred and eighty-four, in the first year of Our Pontificate.

The translation of this Bull is reprinted by permission from "The Geography of Witchcraft," by Montague Summers, pp. 533-6 (Kegan Paul).

There's your proof that people in those times, from the Pope on down, were superstitious idiots who blamed everything from miscarriages to male impotence on witches.

When an irrational person doesn't understand something, he invents an easy explanation for it by attributing the phenomenon to supernatural powers. Today, this behavior is largely harmless (except to those who rob themselves of wisdom by maintaining such a mindset). Back in the Dark Ages, countless people suffered greatly because of it. Thank God for the development of modern science and the rise of critical thinking.

Petr

2005-06-04 22:19 | User Profile

[COLOR=Blue][I][B] - "have slain infants yet in the mother's womb"[/B][/I][/COLOR]

[COLOR=Red][I][B] - "There's your proof that people in those times, from the Pope on down, were superstitious idiots who blamed everything from miscarriages to male impotence on witches."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

You aren't nearly as clever as you think, Angler. Throughout the history witches have been known as [B]dealers of drugs and poisons [/B] (the very Greek word in NT for "sorcery" if [I]pharmakos[/I], from which we get the word "pharmacy"), including ones that can [B][I]terminate pregnancy [/I] [/B] (or cause impotence, for that matter).

[COLOR=Purple][U]226 AD Minucius Felix[/U] "There are some [pagan] women who, by [B]drinking medical preparations[/B], extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come down from the teaching of your [false] gods. . . . To us [Christians] it is not lawful either to see or hear of homicide" (Octavius 30).

[U]228 AD Hippolytus[/U] "Women who were reputed to be believers began to [B]take drugs to render themselves sterile[/B], and to bind themselves tightly so as to expel what was being conceived, since they would not, on account of relatives and excess wealth, want to have a child by a slave or by any insignificant person. See, then, into what great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by teaching adultery and murder at the same time!" (Refutation of All Heresies).

[U]314 AD Council of Ancyra[/U] "Concerning women who commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived, or [B]who are employed in making drugs for abortion[/B], a former decree excluded them until the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Nevertheless, being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have ordained that they fulfill ten years [of penance], according to the prescribed degrees" (canon 21).

[U]374 AD Basil the Great[/U] "He that kills another with a sword, or hurls an axe at his own wife and kills her, is guilty of willful murder; not he who throws a stone at a dog, and unintentionally kills a man, or who corrects one with a rod, or scourge, in order to reform him, or who kills a man in his own defense, when he only designed to hurt him. But the man, or woman, is a murderer that gives a philtrum, if the man that takes it die upon it; [B]so are they who take medicines to procure abortion[/B]; and so are they who kill on the highway, and rapparees" ((First Canonical Letter, canon 8).

[U]396 AD Jerome[/U] "I cannot bring myself to speak of the many virgins who daily fall and are lost to the bosom of the Church, their mother . . . [B]Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness[/B], and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when, as often happens, they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder" (Letters 22:13). [/COLOR]

[url]http://www.bible.ca/H-Abortion.htm[/url]

And anyways, a Protestant like me would argue that the Church was closer to the true doctrine of God in the early Middle Ages, but that it had been infiltrated by various pagan superstitions by the 15th century.

Petr

grep14w

2005-06-04 22:27 | User Profile

By golly, I think you guys have stumbled on to a winning campaign strategy, to bring back good old fashioned moral values and paleoconservatism to the benighted masses: bring back burning people at the stake! Heretics, witches, abortionists - whatever, it's all good.

Don't hide your light under a bushel, boys, wasting your words of wisdom on a mere web forum such as this. The masses must know! Victory awaits.

TexasAnarch

2005-06-04 22:39 | User Profile

This is really a fine thread!

... except... there's no real connection between burning witches ("But what are you gonna do about them, then, preacher?" Deacon Jones asked, after a sermon condemning the practice.) and abortions. Doubt if there ever has been. The quote about ripping babies from mother's wombs applies to that Kansas psycho who killed the mother to get the fetus -- probably an anti-abortionist.

Is the ANY ancient writer, Christian or otherwise, that condemned abortion? It seems to have always been kept appropriately out of sight until this generation of psychokiller Daddies (see Anakin, in REVENGE OF THE SITH) laid it onto the survivers. To make 'em feel gratful for that much, I suppose.

grep14w

2005-06-04 22:46 | User Profile

Supposedly the medieval "witch" was a "wise woman" who knew a thing or two about herbs and could help induce an abortion by making concoctions containing the right combination of herbs.

Remember, the original pagan hippocratic oath includes a prohibition on inducing abortions - I believe by herbal means, but my memory could be faulty there.

So AFAIK there's no reason not to make some kind of a connection between witches and abortion.

grep14w

2005-06-04 22:53 | User Profile

[QUOTE=TexasAnarch] Is the ANY ancient writer, Christian or otherwise, that condemned abortion? [/QUOTE]Some of them at least were encouraged not to participate in the act:

[url]http://www.imagerynet.com/hippo.orig.html[/url]

The Oath of Hippocrates

I SWEAR by Apollo the physician and AEsculapius, and Hygiea, and Panacea, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation-- to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required; to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation; and that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others. I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. I will not cut persons laboring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves. Whatever, in connection with my professional service, or not in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men, in all times. But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-04 23:09 | User Profile

the secular authorities and courts killed more witches than the Church did ( even though the Church handed them over to the secular authorities, the secular authorities OFTEN and widely carried out witch trials totally without the Church's oversight and/or approval. [url]http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15674a.htm[/url]

the majority of those killed during the " Inquisitions " were not witches at all. They were not accused of it either. In Spain, most were Jews trying to overthrow the government. see here [url]http://www.sspx.org/against_the_sound_bites/defense_of_the_inquisition.htm[/url]

Angeleyes

2005-06-04 23:22 | User Profile

A woman, or a man and a woman, who face an unintended pregnancy need, as soon as possible, to get out of denial and "Oh no, what have we done" and immediately into "What do we do?" While the simple answer is "have and raise the child" not everyone is of the same belief of Faith. Not everyone is a Christian who believes that once conception happens, it must run its course, even if miscarriage ends the life early. Must an Atheist, for example, be forced to procreate? I find that point of view strange. Yes, better not to have been irresponsible, but still it seems an odd position to take.

Far too many people get pregnant without having the wit or maturity to confront having to make a decision.** (Part of why the pregnancy occurred, in many cases.) When the decision is "this is our child, we will adjust our lives accordingly" then married or not, those two people are making a sacrifice of their own lives for the betterment of a baby. This takes a heart that understands giving.

They both may not be ready to be parents. They then need to face another decision, and whatever they do, making the decision alone is probably the harshest thing that could happen. Adoption or abortion? What then? If they want to end the pregnancy early, they had better, if Christian, try to find peace with God, if that is possible, and risk that they may be shunned and banned by their Church for doing so. Well, the adultery is a matter of fact already. If not Christian, they both still need to look deeply at what is important in life, seek help and counsel, before ending that just begun life.

But if the decision is made to end it, they have It may not matter to the Agnostic or the Atheist. That fall from Grace may or may not be permanent for the Christian. It seems a hard road to come back on, to seek absolution and forgiveness. I believe that it can happen with enough help.

If an Athiest, there is no dilema, since for an Athiest it is all chemical and mechanical. I can adivse, I can offer counsel, I can suggest doing the hard thing: having the baby and offering the child to a couple who cannot conceive for adoption. I can open my heart and provide such wisdom as I possess for support and help.

But I cannot make the decision for another, particularly if that other is an Athiest, a Buddhist, or any other who is not Christian. Why? Besides us all having to make our own decisions, and however it may break my heart, it is not my decision to make. I expect people to make their own decisions.

What to do about the young woman who is abandoned with a seed in her womb, who has sinned in adultery, and who cannot find or cannot convince the father of his responsibilities? What can her friends and family, her neighbours, offer her? Our hearts, and please, not our bile. Love the sinner, abhor the sin. I don't doubt she feels bad enough already if he "Effed her and forgot her."

Counsel and support, and if we guide by counsel to having the baby, further support for her as she takes on the thankless task of raising a child without a father. And while I am at it, an attempt to find the father and bring him around to accepting his role. I know such efforts will not find universal success, and bitter indeed is failure, as recent experience with people close to me has shown.

Spurning our neighbours who stand on the threshold of such decisions is callous and unloving. Shooting the doctors? Adds murder to abortion. It balances nothing.

I am grateful that my wife and I have two healthy children, a blessing we count every day. I daresay that I don't deserve to have been so blessed. Can a sinner be forgiven? I will find out, one way or another, won't I?

** As to old burdens, at age 19, my 20 year old girlfriend and I faced that bleak decision due to our damned foolishness. There was no baby, and for that matter, neither she nor I was willing or competent to be a parent. We were in no way righteous. I am accountable for that, and it may cost me severely. The wages of sin are well spelled out. The only hope is in forgiveness.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-04 23:54 | User Profile

"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those who are perishing." Proverbs 31:8

Exodus 21-22 "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Psalm 51:5 "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me." Luke 1:41 When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. 1) Here an unborn "fetus" is referred to as a "baby". The greek word "BREPHOS" refers to a baby, whether he/she is unborn or not. In Luke 2:12, the angels announce to the shepherds in the field that they will find the baby Jesus wrapped and lying in a manger. The word "baby" here is "BREPHOS" again. 2) The Bible makes no distinction, and has no separate word for a baby who is unborn versus a baby who is born.

Isaiah 49:1-6 Give ear, ye islands, and hearken, ye people from afar. The Lord hath called me from the womb, from the bowels of my mother he hath been mindful of my name. Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations. Proverbs 6:16-19 "There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue,[B] hands that shed innocent blood[/B], a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers." Matthew 19:18 " You shall do no murder " Matthew 19:19 " Honor thy mother and thy father, and love thy neighbor as thyself " U[/U]

"We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life--the unborn--without diminishing the value of all human life."-- [U]Ronald Reagan[/U]

"The chief purpose of government is to protect life. Abandon that and you have abandoned all." -- [U]Thomas Jefferson [/U]

[U]Pope John Paul II - Homily at Giants Stadium - 5 October 1995[/U] "When the unborn child - the "stranger in the womb" - is declared to be beyond the protection of society, not only are America's deepest traditions radically undermined and endangered, but a moral blight is brought upon society " and " When innocent human beings are declared inconvenient or burdensome, and thus unworthy of legal and social protection, grievous damage is done to the moral foundations of the democratic community. The right to life is the first of all rights. It is the foundation of democratic liberties and the keystone of the edifice of civil society." [url]http://www.eadshome.com/BibleandAbortion.htm[/url] [url]http://www.priestsforlife.org/brochures/thebible.html[/url]

Angeleyes

2005-06-05 01:08 | User Profile

Good words indeed, and a great help in the counseling and advising those who are in need of our help.

Well spoken, ED.

EDIT: Point taken, Ponce.

Ponce

2005-06-05 03:39 | User Profile

Come on people, no need to repost anything that you can read right above it.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-05 05:13 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Ponce]Come on people, no need to repost anything that you can read right above it.[/QUOTE]

to you Ponce.

Do not cast down upon one who is moved by the Word.

His Zeal is a Blessing, and his understanding is a fruit on our field.

Your sarcasism is evil borne, and The Spirit is not to be mocked.

Petr

2005-06-05 10:27 | User Profile

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "I have never heard any such thing about Bruno. Do you have an objective source for this?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Well, then it's time to expand your consciousness outside mere shallow "freethinker" hagiographies.

[COLOR=Red]"Placing Bruno--both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake--in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of [B]Renaissance humanism but of its interplay[/B]--and conflict--with [B]magic and occult practices[/B]."[/COLOR]

[url]http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7261.ctl[/url]

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "What do you have against enlightenment, anyway?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

I spit on the whole self-congratulating 18th-century concept of "enlightenment." What was good about it was not original and what was original was no damn good.

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 123-4:[/B]

Indeed, as we see evo-propagandists parading around as the ultimate incarnations of the scientific spirit - parasites...

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "Sounds like Stark is full of it. The witch-hunts were blind superstitious fanaticism, nothing more."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Mere assertion without evidence to back it up. Witch-hunters were not, at the bottom of it, much more superstitious than 20th-century political movements that were zealously searching out "traitors," "spies," or "enemies of the people."

[B][COLOR=Indigo][I] - "Whenever witch-hunts did take place, who was responsible for them? Certainly not pagans (at least not in Europe)."[/I][/COLOR][/B]

Medieval Christianity was not able to weed out all quasi-pagan superstition out of Europeans. Call it syncretism.

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "The writers of the MM were obviously not humanists. They were religious fanatics."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "I'm not aware of any mass witch-hunts perpetrated by pagans."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

What would constitute as a "mass" witch-hunt? Like Stark documents, Charlemagne put an end to witch-burnings in his empire, denouncing it as a pagan practice.

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "Here's an excerpt from the Introduction of my copy (I'll try to find you a link):"[/B][/I][/COLOR]

That introduction seem to contain just the kind of ignorant anti-Christian bias that Stark really nails down in his book. For example:

[I]"first published in 1486, is arguably one of the most infamous books ever written, due primarily to its position and regard during the Middle Ages."[/I]

Can you say oxy[B]moron[/B]? This guy just said that it was published in [B]1486[/B], and then waxes on about its position in the[B] Middle Ages[/B]!

[I]"Estimates of the death toll during the Inquisition worldwide range from 600,000 to as high as 9,000,000 (over its 250 year long course)"[/I]

Whoa daddy! This guy is clueless.

[B]From [I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 202-203:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue][U][B]Few topics have prompted so much nonsense and outright fabrication as the European witch-hunts[/B].[/U] Some of the most famous episodes never took place, existing only in fraudulent accounts and forged documents, (2) [B]and even the current "scholarly" literature abounds in absurd death tolls[/B].

Andrea Dworkin claimed that nine million European [I]women[/I] were burned as witches, (3) while Mary Daly was content with "millions" of women. (4) Pennethorne Hughes included both genders in the "number who died as witches" and, having noted that some estimate the total as "nine millions,"he added, "It may be many more." (5) Norman Davies (6) devoted only two of the more than thirteen hundred pages of his history of Europe to witchcraft, but that was sufficient to include his confident report that the "craze" had "consum(ed) millions of innocents."

...

During the entire three centuries, in the whole of Europe it is very unlikely that more than 100,000 people died as "witches." [B]In fact, scholars who have sifted through the actual records with a real concern for numbers agree that the best estimate is that only about 60,000 people - men as well as women - were executed as witches during the entire witch-hunting period.[/B] (8)[/COLOR]

[I]"either is a chilling number when one realizes that nearly all of the accused were women, and consisted primarily of outcasts and other suspicious persons"[/I]

[B]p. 212:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue][B]Based on computations covering the entire era of witch-hunting, about a third of all victims were men.[/B] (56)[/COLOR]

(In addition, witch-hunts tended to concentrate in some particular conflict-ridden areas like Germany, France or Scotland, whereas countries like Spain or Russia were almost completely immune to them.)

After all this ignorant nonsense, why should we take this statement of his seriously?

[I]"At that time nearly any unexplainable illness or malady would often be attributed to magic, and thus the activity of witches."[/I]

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "Things certainly didn't stay that way during the Inquisition"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Actually Stark proves in his book that it was precisely [B]the Spanish Inquisition [/B] that kept witch-hunts under a very tight control in the Pyrenean peninsula - its centralized power suffocated the witch-hunting "activism" of common people that was allowed to ge free elsewhere:

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 256:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue]Even the virulently anti-Catholic Henry C. Lea agreed that witch-hunting's having been "rendered comparatively harmless" in Spain "was due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition." (206)[/COLOR]

[B]p. 261:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue]In Portugal, which had its own Inquisition and did not become part of Spain until 1580, six "witches" were burned by secular officials in Lisbon in 1559. The Portuguese Inquisition burned a "witch" in Evora in 1626. [B]And that was it[/B]! Hence Francisco Bethencourt's assertion that the "witch-craze which affected most central and western European countries ... did not occur in Portugal." (217)[/COLOR]

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "An atheist, by definition, cannot believe in the Devil. And if Jean Bodin believed in witches, then he was not a rationalist, regardless of whether some find it convenient to label him as such in an effort to discredit true rationalists."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

A True Scotsman again: "he was not a real rationalist"!

In fact, Jean Bodin may well have been what C.S. Lewis called in his "Screwtape Letters" as a "[B]Materialist Magician[/B]" - a person who does not believe in God but is still superstitious:

[COLOR=Red]"We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. [B]When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all he pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. [/B] At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The "Life Force", the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. [B]If once we can produce our perfect workÃ¢â¬â[U]the Materialist Magician[/U], the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits[/B]"Ã¢â¬âthen the end of the war will be in sight."[/COLOR]

[url]http://pasx.5u.com/upload/Lewis,%20C%20S%20-%20The%20Screwtape%20Letters.html[/url]

People like Aldous Huxley or Adolf Hitler would probably fit in this category (or panspermians for that matter).

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "Merely attempting to appeal to rationality and logic, or claiming that oneself is doing so, hardly makes one a rationalist."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

And I see that you were silent about Thomas Hobbes...

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "It didn't take much to be accused of witchcraft or heresy back in those days."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Stark actually shows in his book how witch-hunts began to intensify just around the same time as non-orthodox movements began to appear - and they got into full force when Reformation really got rolling in the 16th century. All "suspicious elements" needed to be weeded out during the time of conflict, typical wartime hysteria.

Same stories about secret gatherings and sexual deviancy were told about heretical groups as about witches - remember, Tacitus accused even early Christians about all kinds of abominations!

[B]From [I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 234-5:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue][SIZE=3][B]HERESY AS WITCHCRAFT[/B][/SIZE]

In some parts of Europe the word of witch was [I]gazarius[/I], which is a corruption of [I]Cathar[/I], and in many areas it was [I]wuadensis[/I] or [I]vaudois[/I], both being corruptions of [I]Waldensian[/I]. In the Jura region, the word for witch in local dialects was derived from the word for heretic. (159) This linguistic association reflects the fact that Europeans initially conceived of witchcraft, and became concerned about it, as a function of organized heretical movements. [B]Thus in 1258 Pope Alexander IV advised inquisitors that they "ought not intervene in cases of divination or sorcery unless these [I]clearly savour [/I] of manifest heresy." [/B] (160)

[B]It was in response to Cathar doctrines concerning Satan's immense power and control over worldly affairs that Christian leaders began to worry about actual pacts with the Devil and to condemn Cathars for satanic dealings. [/B] Moreover, it was in response to heresy that practice or burning people at the stake became common. In 1184 Pope Lucius III endorsed burning heretics by quoting John 15:6: "If a man abideth not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into fire, and they are burned."

... [B]And it was the search for Cathars and Waldensians that encouraged belief in witches' sabbats[/B],[B] since these heretics often did, of necessity, meet in secret places, often at night, where they performed heretical rites [/B] - to which cynical propagandists and gullible theologians added elaborate claims about orgies and depravity: "kissing cats and frogs, calling up the Devil, and fornicating in an orgy with the lights turned out." (162) Recall from Chapter 1 that the Church nearly always accused heretical groups of sexual inproprieties, and this easily carried off into tales about the sexual degeneracy of "witches."[/COLOR]

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "Many illnesses (such as Tourette's Syndrome) were not even identified in those times, so how could people have distinguished them from witchcraft?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

You are just begging the question that ancient people were dumb and thought that all strange behavior implied witchcraft.

Petr

Angler

2005-06-05 12:04 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "I have never heard any such thing about Bruno. Do you have an objective source for this?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Well, then it's time to expand your consciousness outside mere shallow "freethinker" hagiographies. Pfffft. As if you read anything other than pro-Christian literature. :rolleyes:

I'll have you know that I have read more Christian literature in my life than "freethinker" material. What's interesting is that Christian literature reinforces my disdainful views about Christian superstition just as much as any agnostic or atheist material.

[COLOR=Red]"Placing Bruno--both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake--in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of [B]Renaissance humanism but of its interplay[/B]--and conflict--with [B]magic and occult practices[/B]."[/COLOR]

[url]http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7261.ctl[/url] Okay, I accept this. So Bruno was an occultist. Whatever. He also had some heretical (and accurate) ideas about cosmology. In the end, I believe he was burned for the "heresy" known as docetism (belief that Jesus did not have a human body). Whatever the case, he was an exceedingly brave man who stood up for what he believed in against a mass of idiotic cowards.

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "What do you have against enlightenment, anyway?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

I spit on the whole self-congratulating 18th-century concept of "enlightenment." What was good about it was not original and what was original was no damn good. Is that because you're in love with religious superstition and long for a return to the "good old days" of witch-burning?

The Enlightenment was the beginning of the end for religious tyranny and superstitious crapola. It was perhaps the most triumphant period in human history, when reason was used to illuminate the cobwebbed recesses of superstitious human minds. The process continues to this day, and it will never end. You might as well spit on a charging rhinocerous as spit on the Enlightenment. Now that mankind has learned about the error of past superstitious BS, it will never unlearn it. :thumbsup:

[B][I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 123-4:[/B]

[COLOR=Blue]"As part of this discussion, [B]I show that the leading scientific figures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries overwhelmingly were devout Christians who believed it their duty to comprehend God's handiwork[/B]. [B][U]Turning to an assessment of the "Enlightenment," I show it to have been conceived initially as a propaganda ploy by militant atheists and humanists who attempted to claim credit for the rise of science[/U][/B]. The falsehood that science required the defeat of religion was proclaimed by such [B]self-appointed cheerleaders as Voltaire, Diderot and Gibbon, who themselves played no part in the scientific enterprise[/B] - a pattern that still continues."[/COLOR] Your buddy Stark is just a little bit biased. Obviously most scientists of those times were Christian. So what? Most scientists today aren't. Which scientists know more -- those of today, or those of centuries past? The most humanity progresses in knowledge of the natural world, the less room there is for religious superstition.

Indeed, as we see evo-propagandists parading around as the ultimate incarnations of the scientific spirit - parasites... The "parasites" are those who condemn or ridicule rationality and the scientific method while availing themselves of all the benefits of modern technology, health care, etc. None of those modern wonders would exist without rationalism. If someone you love ever gets some awful disease, try praying for a cure instead of going to the doctor. See how effective it is.

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "Sounds like Stark is full of it. The witch-hunts were blind superstitious fanaticism, nothing more."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Mere assertion without evidence to back it up. So you think the witch-hunts might have been based in rationality? LOL!

Witch-hunters were not, at the bottom of it, much more superstitious than 20th-century political movements that were zealously searching out "traitors," "spies," or "enemies of the people." Belief in witchcraft is OBVIOUSLY less rational than belief in espionage or similar mundane threats. I hope you understand why.

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "The writers of the MM were obviously not humanists. They were religious fanatics."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

A "true Scotsman" fallacy, and you seem to automatically assume that in Renaissance, humanism and piety were mutually exclusive concepts. Reason-worshipper like you apparently cannot realize just how nuts some humanists can get with all their logic and prefect Latin. LMAO! I suppose that if I said "No good husband beats his wife," you would call that a "no true Scotsman" fallacy also?

Here's one definition of humanism:

A doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason Source: [url]http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=humanism&x=0&y=0[/url]

Does that definition sound like it fits the authors of the MM? I really don't think so. Here is another excerpt from the MM:

The method of beginning an examination by torture is as follows: First, the jailers prepare the implements of torture, then they strip the prisoner (if it be a woman, she has already been stripped by other women, upright and of good report) [1]. This stripping is lest some means of witchcraft may have been sewed into the clothing--such as often, taught by the Devil, they prepare from the bodies of unbaptized infants, [murdered] that they may forfeit salvation. And when the implements of torture have been prepared, the judge, both in person and through other good men zealous in the faith, tries to persuade the prisoner to confess the truth freely ; but, if he will not confess, he bids attendants make the prisoner fast to the strappado or some other implement of torture. The attendants obey forthwith, yet with feigned agitation. Then, at the prayer of some of those present, the prisoner is loosed again and is taken aside and once more persuaded to confess, being led to believe that he will in that case not be put to death. Source: [url]http://history.hanover.edu/texts/mm.html[/url]

Indeed, the humanism of the authors of this passage really shines through! :lol:

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "Here's an excerpt from the Introduction of my copy (I'll try to find you a link):"[/B][/I][/COLOR]

That introduction seem to contain just the kind of ignorant anti-Christian bias that Stark really nails down in his book. For example:

[I]"first published in 1486, is arguably one of the most infamous books ever written, due primarily to its position and regard during the Middle Ages."[/I]

Can you say oxy[B]moron[/B]? This guy just said that it was published in [B]1486[/B], and then waxes on about its position in the[B] Middle Ages[/B]! A minor nitpick. The date at which the Middle Ages ended is considered somewhat arbitrary. It could be taken to be within the 1500s. Whatever.

[I]"Estimates of the death toll during the Inquisition worldwide range from 600,000 to as high as 9,000,000 (over its 250 year long course)"[/I]

Whoa daddy! This guy is clueless.

[B]From [I]For the Glory of God[/I], p. 202-203:[/B]

During the entire three centuries, in the whole of Europe it is very unlikely that more than 100,000 people died as "witches." [B]In fact, scholars who have sifted through the actual records with a real concern for numbers agree that the best estimate is that only about 60,000 people - men as well as women - were executed as witches during the entire witch-hunting period.[/B] (8)[/COLOR] Even if "only" 60,000 people were executed as witches, that is more than enough to prove that people of that time period had their heads up their rectums.

After all this ignorant nonsense, why should we take this statement of his seriously?

[I]"At that time nearly any unexplainable illness or malady would often be attributed to magic, and thus the activity of witches."[/I] Because you can read writings from that time period and find out what people thought? Caviling about details such as the number of people executed for witchcraft doesn't change easily-demonstrable facts.

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "An atheist, by definition, cannot believe in the Devil. And if Jean Bodin believed in witches, then he was not a rationalist, regardless of whether some find it convenient to label him as such in an effort to discredit true rationalists."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

A True Scotsman again: "he was not a real rationalist"! You are obviously confused about the "true Scotsman" fallacy. Here's some help:

No true Scotsman is a term coined by Anthony Flew in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking. It refers to an argument which takes this form:

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

This form of argument is a fallacy if the predicate ("putting sugar on porridge") is not actually contradictory for the accepted definition of the subject ("Scotsman"), or if the definition of the subject is silently adjusted after the fact to make the rebuttal work. Source: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman[/url]

I repeat: An atheist, by definition, cannot believe in the Devil. And I think it's very clear that people who genuinely espouse rationalism do not believe in supernatural powers such as those supposedly possessed by witches.

In fact, Jean Bodin may well have been what C.S. Lewis called in his "Screwtape Letters" as a "[B]Materialist Magician[/B]" - a person who does not believe in God but is still superstitious. C.S. Lewis obviously didn't understand that the term "materialist magician" is a contradiction in terms. Materialists, by definition, do not believe in magic.

People like Aldous Huxley or Adolf Hitler would probably fit in this category (or panspermians for that matter). Unknown natural forces are not the same as magic.

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "Merely attempting to appeal to rationality and logic, or claiming that oneself is doing so, hardly makes one a rationalist."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

Who made you a pope to decide who is a real rationalist and who is not? He sure seemed to like that "could any of these myriads of contradictory religions be true"-argument that you yourself employed. I'm entitled to my opinion. And my opinion is that a real rationalist is someone who adheres to rationalism: "a view that reason and experience rather than the nonrational are the fundamental criteria in the solution of problems." (Merriam-Webster again. No, I didn't write the dictionary.)

And I see that you were silent about Thomas Hobbes... Oh, sorry. My comments apply to him as well if he believed in witchcraft.

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "Many illnesses (such as Tourette's Syndrome) were not even identified in those times, so how could people have distinguished them from witchcraft?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

You are just begging the question that ancient people were dumb and thought that all strange behavior implied witchcraft. Not ALL strange behavior, of course. But yes, they were highly irrational. They didn't practice critical thinking. Their lack of knowledge can be excused, of course, but their reliance on the supernatural to explain gaps in their knowledge was willful stupidity. And the cruelty that arose from that stupidity was damnable.

I rest my case that people of the Middle Ages were unreflective, superstitious, irrational believers in nonsense. For you or anyone else who wants to read more of the Malleus Maleficarum to see just how retarded people were back then (not only the authors, but all those who took them seriously), here's a link to the entire online text:

[url]http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/[/url]

Petr

2005-06-05 12:31 | User Profile

[COLOR=Indigo][I][B] - "Pfffft. As if you read anything other than pro-Christian literature."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

Pffft to yourself. Little do you know me.

[B][COLOR=Indigo][I] - "What's interesting is that Christian literature reinforces my disdainful views about Christian superstition just as much as any agnostic or atheist material."[/I][/COLOR][/B]

Likewise, the more I read "freethinker" material, the more my contempt grows for their whole hollow, pretentious ideology. I pity those fools.

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "The Enlightenment was the beginning of the end for religious tyranny and superstitious crapola. It was perhaps the most triumphant period in human history, when reason was used to illuminate the cobwebbed recesses of superstitious human minds. The process continues to this day, and it will never end. You might as well spit on a charging rhinocerous as spit on the Enlightenment. Now that mankind has learned about the error of past superstitious BS, it will never unlearn it. ."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Empty, emotional rhetoric. "Freethinkers" seem to be addicted to it. Actually only bitter ex-believers like yourself are still genuinely interested in the hollow legacy of endarkenment.

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "The most humanity progresses in knowledge of the natural world, the less room there is for religious superstition."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Blah blah blah

[I][B][COLOR=Indigo] - "The "parasites" are those who condemn or ridicule rationality and the scientific method while availing themselves of all the benefits of modern technology, health care, etc. None of those modern wonders would exist without rationalism."[/COLOR][/B][/I]

"Rationalism" in the positive sense of the word was an outcome from Christian theology, derived from faith in the reliability of God. "Rationalism" in the atheistic sense of the word have given birth only to post-modern nihilism.

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "I care a lot more about the opinion of mainstream historians than about this Stark guy, who's obviously very biased." [/I] [/B] [/COLOR]

Stark [B]is[/B] a respected mainstream scholar, and you are only reacting with predictable tantrum as he shatters so many of your dearly-held humanist myths. You simply cannot admit to yourself that you have accepted biased garbage like these multi-million witch-victim figures as stellar results of "modern scholarship."

[COLOR=Indigo][B][I] - "C.S. Lewis obviously didn't understand that the term "materialist magician" is a contradiction in terms."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

You are merely quibbling with sophistic definitions, not comprehending all the paradoxes that human soul is made of and capable of.

Petr

Ponce

2005-06-05 15:14 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angler]Pfffft. As if you read anything other than pro-Christian literature. :rolleyes:

Okay, I accept this. So Bruno was an occultist. Whatever. He also had some heretical (and accurate) ideas about cosmology. In the end, I believe he was burned for the "heresy" known as docetism (belief that Jesus did not have a human body). Whatever the case, he was an exceedingly brave man who stood up for what he believed in against a mass of idiotic cowards.

Is that because you're in love with religious superstition and long for a return to the "good old days" of witch-burning?

Your buddy Stark is just a little bit biased. Obviously most scientists of those times were Christian. So what? Most scientists today aren't. Which scientists know more -- those of today, or those of centuries past? The most humanity progresses in knowledge of the natural world, the less room there is for religious superstition.

The "parasites" are those who condemn or ridicule rationality and the scientific method while availing themselves of all the benefits of modern technology, health care, etc. None of those modern wonders would exist without rationalism. If someone you love ever gets some awful disease, try praying for a cure instead of going to the doctor. See how effective it is.

So you think the witch-hunts might have been based in rationality? LOL!

Belief in witchcraft is OBVIOUSLY less rational than belief in espionage or similar mundane threats. I hope you understand why.

LMAO! I suppose that if I said "No good husband beats his wife," you would call that a "no true Scotsman" fallacy also?

Here's one definition of humanism:

Source: [url]http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=humanism&x=0&y=0[/url]

Does that definition sound like it fits the authors of the MM? I really don't think so. Here is another excerpt from the MM:

Source: [url]http://history.hanover.edu/texts/mm.html[/url]

Indeed, the humanism of the authors of this passage really shines through! :lol:

A minor nitpick. The date at which the Middle Ages ended is considered somewhat arbitrary. It could be taken to be within the 1500s. Whatever.

I care a lot more about the opinion of mainstream historians than about this Stark guy, who's obviously very biased.

Even if "only" 60,000 people were executed as witches, that is more than enough to prove that people of that time period had their heads up their rectums.

Because you can read writings from that time period and find out what people thought? Caviling about details such as the number of people executed for witchcraft doesn't change easily-demonstrable facts.

You are obviously confused about the "true Scotsman" fallacy. Here's some help:

Source: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman[/url]

C.S. Lewis obviously didn't understand that the term "materialist magician" is a contradiction in terms. Materialists, by definition, do not believe in magic.

Unknown natural forces are not the same as magic.

I'm entitled to my opinion. And my opinion is that a real rationalist is someone who adheres to rationalism: "a view that reason and experience rather than the nonrational are the fundamental criteria in the solution of problems." (Merriam-Webster again. No, I didn't write the dictionary.)

Oh, sorry. My comments apply to him as well if he believed in witchcraft.

Not ALL strange behavior, of course. But yes, they were highly irrational. They didn't practice critical thinking. Their lack of knowledge can be excused, of course, but their reliance on the supernatural to explain gaps in their knowledge was willful stupidity. And the cruelty that arose from that stupidity was damnable.

[url]http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/[/url][/QUOTE]

OK, as you can see I am very moved.

TexasAnarch

2005-06-05 15:38 | User Profile

[QUOTE=grep14w]Some of them at least were encouraged not to participate in the act:

[url]http://www.imagerynet.com/hippo.orig.html[/url][/QUOTE]

 Yes, there IS a (non-Christian - pagan, gnostric, humanistic) source!  What do you know.  THANKS!

I've been reading Herodotus on the Egyptians, who had perfected the art of medicine that later turned up in the great Hermetic (=Thoth) tradition. The linen in one of the Pharoah's mummies wrappings (over 600 yrs long single piece) was said to have 360 separate colored twisted strands in each thread.

 We are talking a degree of perfectionism the much later Christians, low-bred people as most were, except around Ephasus when Paul faced down their scribblers (Adonis stone bloggers) would simply have not understood.  Abortion was never mentioned, to my knowledge, in the sqabbling between African Iraneus and Helenistic (Neo-Platonic) Marcion, where the battle over Christology and Father-God identity was fought out (still going on in excellent thread of AntiYuppie on Hegel, to which I am trying to get together something to contribute -- we're addressing issues not previously even perceived).

Angeleyes

2005-06-05 17:30 | User Profile

Angler, a couple of comments.

[QUOTE] 1. The Enlightenment was the beginning of the end for religious tyranny and superstitious crapola. It was perhaps the most triumphant period in human history, when reason was used to illuminate the cobwebbed recesses of superstitious human minds. The process continues to this day, and it will never end. You might as well spit on a charging rhinocerous as spit on the Enlightenment. Now that mankind has learned about the error of past superstitious BS, it will never unlearn it.

Your buddy Stark is just a little bit biased. Obviously most scientists of those times were Christian. So what? Most scientists today aren't. Which scientists know more -- those of today, or those of centuries past? The most humanity progresses in knowledge of the natural world, the less room there is for religious superstition.

The attacks on Christianity that have ebbed and flowed since the growth of the Enlightenment have sadly undertaken the "zero sum game" approach, with negative consequences all around. Part of this is the common human failing of attaching your ego to your argument, and part is due to tunnel vision. You note that not all Scientists are Atheists.

That many of the scientists and thinkers who gave birth to the enlightenment were Believers through and through makes me wonder at what agency took hold of that evolution to turn it into a weapon. For example, I read a good article around Christmastime about Gallelio. He was put in jail for disagreeing with the Pope, publicly, and a prime motivator was not just his disagreement, but his public ridicule of the Pope. At that time, the Pope was a secular as well as spritual authority, and in any authoritarian society, see King George III or any Chinese Emperor, public ridicule of the "head dude" will get your butt put in jail. Had Newton likewise insulted his King publicly, I daresay he'd have done jail time. The reductionist story of the Cause and Effect relationships that landed Gallelio in jail miss the political and human dynamic, and the context of the time. Of such narrow views are fairy tales, legends, and myths made. Myths used to stir up hate against any non literalist.

Back on point, how does a Scientist reconcile his Faith with his vocation? He first off discards the blinders, and opens himself to both ways of thinking. It expands his art of the possible, and in my opinion allows for a wider "Eureka' potential. Some will argue that ascribing to the Tao is just as valid as Faith, but I will leave that for another time.

The intangible is real, just as the square root of negative one is a defineable imaginary number. The very ability to act on leaps of intuition in scientific research are emotionally and mentally similar to leaps of Faith.

Science is still a work in progres, a mesure of "how much do we know so far" and when honestly considered, knows its strengths and limitations. Not all pure humanists accept the limitations, [u]although good scientists do, [/u]Atheist or otherwise. I find self defeating the humanist Faith in Science being able to enable omniscience.

When the the moral and the literal sides of the societal coin choose to work together, there is a win-win synergy, see Gregor Mendel and genetic experiments. When the moral and literal choose to play a zero sum game, you end up with soulless materialism. Frankenstein, anyone? Nuclear weapons, power for the sake of power?

I find the renewed assault on Christainity in the past generation not only unhealthy, but the symptom of a deliberate, negative agenda. "Science" is being used, in my opinion, as a foil or fig leaf for a less legitimate agenda.

We are dealing with a war of ideology. Cold War was a piker in comparison.

Science itself is neutral. It is a tool, a process, and a set of disciplines bounded by certain rules. Likewise, religions, faiths, and philosophies are bound by rules. What people do with Science and its discoveries is driven by their moral framework, which comes from moral beliefs and Faith. I find Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a well presented argument that reason alone hits a limit in utility. (No, I did not read it in original German.)

I'd rather see less zero sum gaming and more "win win" approaches between Science and Faith. When we use difference in frame of reference as an excuse for conflict, societal entropy increases, or the Devil laughs. Pick your metaphor. The net result is an increase in hate and discontent in the world. That is a lose lose outcome.

I don't care "who started it," since the perpetuation of this centuries long acrimony continues to be both wasteful and entropic.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-05 18:14 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angler] So you think the witch-hunts might have been based in rationality? LOL!

Even if "only" 60,000 people were executed as witches, that is more than enough to prove that people of that time period had their heads up their rectums.[/QUOTE]

Exodus 22:18 18 Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Have you ever read Montague Summers ? I have a copy of[U] " The History of Witchcraft "[/U] at home. The book digs up official documents from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in which it becomes difficult to refute the reality of Witchcraft. I'm sorry, but the correct historical argument is on the side of Witchcraft as Reality, and it's suppresion based on Rationality.

From the Preface of[U] " Witchcraft and Demonology " [/U] Ã¢â¬ÅIn the following pages I have endeavored to show the witch as she really was Ã¢â¬â an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counselor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age".

Deuteronomy 18:10-11 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

There are historical examples too numerous to mention which demonstrate supernatural events. Have you heard of the showdowns between Simon Magus and St. Peter ? How about the Flying Friar ?

TexasAnarch

2005-06-05 23:24 | User Profile

From ED

"Luke 1:41 When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. 1) Here an unborn "fetus" is referred to as a "baby". The greek word "BREPHOS" refers to a baby, whether he/she is unborn or not. "

 No, there is no word in any language that refers to a "baby" whether unborn or not, because there is no such thing as an "unborn baby" except by verbal manipulation. Words do not change reality.  None of that langauge that purports to stretch over and negate the difference between being born and not being born has really ever been used in relation to abortion until after Vietnam, and the mental deficits passed on from baby boomers to their Yuppie brats.

It's certainly not the case that "Christians" eschew abortions. Why should they? Christianity starts well after birth, with re-birth, as Jesus explained to Nicodemus (John 3.16)

No, there is no ground except strictly subjective -- infantile identification with the fetus (quotes not necessary --that is the word for what is "unborn") -- conferring what it is to be a real person to fetuses. Yankee abolitionists wore the same stripes.

 Moreover, anti-abortionist cannt be admitted the right to exist, themselves, since they can't define who or what "they" are except falsely, in a way that includes what they are not ... which makes them a threat to all humanity.

 Moreover, they unanimously support Republican pathological liars and psychologial killers, after it has been established they are the party of the homosexual Jew and anti-Nazi Catholics (John O'Connor)

I certainly will not defend their right to exist, any more than I will Israel's, with whom anti-abortionists appear to identify at the unconscious level.  (Remember Lacy Peterson and her "unborn son Connor"? -- and "Scott").  I defend those who wish they didn't exist.  Nobody needs them.  Nobody.

Amaara

2005-06-06 01:35 | User Profile

[QUOTE=TexasAnarch]Anyone who gets in the way of my friend's girlfriend, who had to get one because there was not way they could raise a child properly, I would shoot dead on the spot. Then, now, or forevermore.[/QUOTE]So, let me get this straight. Your friends killed their baby because they couldn't raise it "properly." I assume from the fact that you post on this site that your friends were White. And from that assumption I am led to believe that your friends would rather see their baby dead than being raised by another White couple. Given that White babies are in overwhelmingly high demand, this decision is breathtakingly selfish. But I don't have to tell you that.

The good news about this is that your friends' genes are being removed from the White gene pool. As self-hating unregenerates fornicate themselves into extinction and low IQ Whites permanently miscegenate out of the race, White Christians are undergoing a fascinating genetic bottleneck. The generations which will emerge will find our age to be as foreign and u[font=Times New Roman][size=3][font=Verdana][size=2]nscrutable as we will find theirs. Keep on keeping on, TexasAnarch, and Godspeed to you and yours![/size][/font][/size][/font]

RowdyRoddyPiper

2005-06-06 02:12 | User Profile

If anyone doubts that the religious fanatics of the pre-Enlightenment period who burned "witches" at the stake were backwards, ignorant primitives, look at which cultures the persecution of "witches" flourishes in today:

[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4607435.stm[/url]

At least the Europeans of the Middle Ages had the excuse that they were living in the Middle Ages for their behaviour. Angolan immigrants don't have that excuse.

It's really unbelieveably sad that people, children even, could be persecuted in England for witchcraft in this day and age.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-06 07:39 | User Profile

[QUOTE=RowdyRoddyPiper]If anyone doubts that the religious fanatics of the pre-Enlightenment period who burned "witches" at the stake were backwards, ignorant primitives, look at which cultures the persecution of "witches" flourishes in today:

[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4607435.stm[/url]

[/QUOTE]

Witchcrat is a hard charge to prove, but if proved beyond all reasonable doubt then the witch must die.

Satan is real, and people consciously in league with Satan must not be sufferred to live.

It shouldn't be surprising that witchcraft was associated with abortion. Satan likes child sacrifice. In the OT they immolated their babies to Moloch to gain favor in business and other worldly affairs. Our modern day abortion has the same practical magic feel to it. Abortion is pitched to us as a career enhancing and life-affirming move.

And at the root of all of it is Old Slewfoot.

The health of society demands harsh measures. The Bible is clear on this.

Angler

2005-06-06 10:30 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Satan is real, and people consciously in league with Satan must not be sufferred to live.[/QUOTE]How do you know Satan is real and not just ancient Hebrew mythology, Walter? What evidence can you provide?

In fact, the concept of Satan evolved from that of an angelic servant of God whose job it was to accuse men of wrongdoing into that of a "fallen angel." His image was later influenced by the pagan god Pan (cloven hooves, horns, etc.).

If Satanic powers were real, then lots more people would use them. There are plenty of people who consciously ally themselves with the Devil and make no secret about it. Look at certain death metal bands like Morbid Angel, who blaspheme the Holy Ghost in their lyrics (see here: [url=http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/morbidangel/altarsofmadness.html#9]LINK[/url]). Why don't they have magical powers from Satan, if Satan grants his followers such things? If I were going to sell my soul to Satan, I'd make him give me all the hot women I could handle, billions of dollars, and the ability to shoot lightning out of my fingers like the Emperor in Star Wars.

C'mon, folks. There are enough real dangers and evils in the world. There's no need to pretend there are supernatural ones as well. Let's leave the Dark Ages behind and join the 21st Century.

Petr

2005-06-06 10:40 | User Profile

[COLOR=Sienna][B][I] - "In fact, the concept of Satan evolved from that of an angelic servant of God whose job it was to accuse men of wrongdoing into that of a "fallen angel.""[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Proof?

Even John's Revelation, which talks more about Satan than any other book of the Bible, calls "that old serpent" as "[B]the accuser of saints[/B]" that has now been cast down:

[B][COLOR=Red]12:10

And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: [U]for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night[/U]. [/COLOR] [/B]

Apparently the concept of Satan had not "evolved" at all, or then the concepts of "accuser" and "fallen angel" do not contradict each other at all!

[COLOR=DarkRed][I][B] - "His image was later influenced by the pagan god Pan (cloven hooves, horns, etc.)."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

Irrelevant aesthetic details.

Petr

Angler

2005-06-06 10:55 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=Sienna][B][I] - "In fact, the concept of Satan evolved from that of an angelic servant of God whose job it was to accuse men of wrongdoing into that of a "fallen angel.""[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Proof? For a deep study, I recommend you read Elaine Pagel's The Origin of Satan. For now, I refer you to the book of Job (1:6-12):

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face. And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD.

If Satan was cast out of heaven, then what was he doing appearing before God's throne? How did he sneak back into God's presence?

Later books of the Bible (e.g., the Gospels) describe Satan as God's archenemy, but those books were written after the evolution of the Satan concept had taken place.

RowdyRoddyPiper

2005-06-06 12:22 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Witchcrat is a hard charge to prove, but if proved beyond all reasonable doubt then the witch must die.[/QUOTE] Historically, proof "beyond all reasonable doubt" that someone was a witch usually took the form of dunking them to see if they would float (if they drowned they were innocent), weighing them on giant scales (weighing more than a pile of Bibles meant you were a witch), owning a pet (thought to be a familiar), or simply having the misfortune of having an odd birthmark or mole (a sure sign that one has been marked by the devil).

I'm unaware of recent advances in the science of witch-detection, but I say we start with all the Marilyn Manson and Black Metal fans, then move on to anyone who has read a Harry Potter book or watched that awful "Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" and enjoyed it :lol: [QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Satan is real, and people consciously in league with Satan must not be sufferred to live.[/QUOTE] Someone who consciously believes they are in league with Satan belongs in a mental institution. [QUOTE=Walter Yannis]It shouldn't be surprising that witchcraft was associated with abortion. Satan likes child sacrifice. In the OT they immolated their babies to Moloch to gain favor in business and other worldly affairs. Our modern day abortion has the same practical magic feel to it. Abortion is pitched to us as a career enhancing and life-affirming move.[/QUOTE] That's a good allegory for abortion. [QUOTE=Walter Yannis]The health of society demands harsh measures. The Bible is clear on this.[/QUOTE] True enough. But is witchcraft a serious threat to the health of society nowadays? I'm not sure it ever was either. Likely, witches were more often than not scapegoats in times of hardship or just eccentric individuals who were victims of ignorance. The story of the 8-year old girl tortured by her superstitious relatives that I linked in my previous post is a case in point.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-06 12:51 | User Profile

[QUOTE][RowdyRoddyPiper]Historically, proof "beyond all reasonable doubt" that someone was a witch usually took the form of dunking them to see if they would float (if they drowned they were innocent), weighing them on giant scales (weighing more than a pile of Bibles meant you were a witch), owning a pet (thought to be a familiar), or simply having the misfortune of having an odd birthmark or mole (a sure sign that one has been marked by the devil).[/QUOTE]

I'm talking about proving up on a charge of Satan worship.

Attending black masses, engagin in VooDoo practices, that sort of thing.

I don't see what's so difficult about that.

[QUOTE]I'm unaware of recent advances in the science of witch-detection, but I say we start with all the Marilyn Manson and Black Metal fans, then move on to anyone who has read a Harry Potter book or watched that awful "Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" and enjoyed it :lol:[/QUOTE]

I agree that Ozzie and Marilyn should probably be burned alive, publicly. But only after corresponding laws are in place, and after a public trial. We're Americans, after all.

If they are convicted of worshipping Satan after the appropriate laws are passed, then they should be burned alive on national television.

And no, I'm NOT KIDDING.

[QUOTE]Someone who consciously believes they are in league with Satan belongs in a mental institution.[/QUOTE]

No, they belong on the public square surrounded by creosote logs, lots of kindling wood and television cameras with satellite hook-ups.

[QUOTE]That's a good allegory for abortion.[/QUOTE]

Yes, but the comparison of abortion on demand to ancient demon worship is more than just allegory.

Abortion in modern feminist theory and practice is LITERALLY the immolation of children to Moloch. Many feminists in the pro-abort movement talk about this, especially those with New Age occult credentials, for whom abortion is a sacrament that makes them part of the demon goddess Lilith's (may she rot in hell) revolution against Yahweh, may His Name be forever blessed.

[QUOTE]True enough. But is witchcraft a serious threat to the health of society nowadays? I'm not sure it ever was either. Likely, witches were more often than not scapegoats in times of hardship or just eccentric individuals who were victims of ignorance. The story of the 8-year old girl tortured by her superstitious relatives that I linked in my previous post is a case in point.[/QUOTE]

Yes, of course satanism is a threat. Evil is a person, it's not just a substance (the Monty Python boys had a great thing on Evil being a grimey looking substance in their wonderful film Time Bandits). This is something the popular church doesn't like to talk about, but tolerating the worship of the Evil One lies at the heart of our social decay.

We should also keep in mind how common devil worship is. Not only Haitian VooDoo types, Black Sabbath fans, and members of the Temple of Set consciously worship Satan.

Freemasons worship the Devil. Most don't know that they do, but at the top they certainly know that. Tubal Cane is Vulcan, and Vulcan is Satan. Actually, I don't think they even need to go all the way to the top to know that, but I always found Masonry so distasteful that I tend to forget the details. Anyway, the point is that it was precisely the spread of Freemasonry and masonic ideas that is the driver of the evil that flowed from the French Revolution down to our own times.

And Orthodox Jews worship Satan, too. Shahak tells us that every morning Orthodox Jews offer prayers to Satan in the hopes of keeping him away from their goddess, Shekhinah. This is another fact nobody likes to talk about. Freepers and their ilk claim Christ and yet throw about oxymorons like "Judeo-Christian" while intentionally closing their eyes to the fact that most of the Orthodox Jewish groups offer prayers to the Devil every morning.

Christ Himself tells us that the Pharisees are the sons of Satan. But the modern Jews themselves proclaim the Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors.

When these maggots of cyberspace say "Judeo-Christian" they're actually saying "Christ-Antichrist," and the hell of it is that they know it in their heart of hearts, but they choose Antichrist because, well, he's got the money and power.

No Christian nation can allow this.

Devil worshippers must leave, and if that means in billows of smoke, then so be it.

Angler

2005-06-06 13:52 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I agree that Ozzie and Marilyn should probably be burned alive, publicly. But only after corresponding laws are in place, and after a public trial. We're Americans, after all. Ozzy Osbourne is not a Satanist. Marilyn Manson is. But in America, people are allowed to follow whatever religion they want to. Your attitude toward religion is about as un-American as anything I've ever seen. Burning people for religious reasons would violate the First and Eighth Amendments to the US Constitution. Obviously.

If they are convicted of worshipping Satan after the appropriate laws are passed, then they should be burned alive on national television.

And no, I'm NOT KIDDING. That's psychotic, Walter. If you don't realize that, then I fear for you. Also, any clergyman will tell you that such an attitude is sinful. A man's relationship to God is between him and God, not between him, God, and you. Worry about your own soul. Jesus said that you have no right to judge anyone else.

We should also keep in mind how common devil worship is. Not only Haitian VooDoo types, Black Sabbath fans, and members of the Temple of Set consciously worship Satan. I have been a fan of Black Sabbath for most of my life. You obviously know nothing about the band or their lyrics. They took their name from a Boris Karloff horror movie because they wanted a dark-sounding name. They were certainly never Satanists.

I will admit to listening to some bands who are Satanic (e.g., Emperor, Abigor), much more for the music than the lyrics. Many of their lyrics are suprisingly tame, actually (especially Emperor).

That's all irrelevant anyway, though, since the closest anyone will ever get to burning me at the stake will be if I burn my hand on the hot barrel of my assault rifle after emptying a magazine into that person. And believe me, bona fide Satanists (like the aforementioned Morbid Angel) all collect guns and are probably just waiting for an excuse to use them.

Freemasons worship the Devil. Most don't know that they do, but at the top they certainly know that. Worship is a conscious act by definition. You can't unknowingly worship someone or something.

And Orthodox Jews worship Satan, too. Of course they don't. That's not to say I like Jews, though.

Christ Himself tells us that the Pharisees are the sons of Satan. But the modern Jews themselves proclaim the Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors. And yet Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Still, I have no doubt that most of the Pharisees back then were loathsome people.

No Christian nation can allow this. This is not an officially Christian nation. It never has been. Familiarize yourself with the First Amendment and with the writings of Jefferson, Madison, et al, if you have doubts. You might also want to ask yourself why the word "Christ" never appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of this "Christian nation."

Devil worshippers must leave, and if that means in billows of smoke, then so be it. No such thing is going to happen in this nation of religious freedom. But take heart: devils and Satan are just myths, anyway. Those who worship them can do no harm. They're just wasting their time.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-06 14:21 | User Profile

[QUOTE][Angler]Ozzy Osbourne is not a Satanist. Marilyn Manson is. But in America, people are allowed to follow whatever religion they want to. Your attitude toward religion is about as un-American as anything I've ever seen. Burning people for religious reasons would violate the First and Eighth Amendments to the US Constitution. Obviously.[/QUOTE]

Do you think the Founders would have countenanced the worship of Satan?

The people of the time would have burned Marilyn Manson at the stake, and nobody would have said a thing.

You think this is un-American only because you've swallowed the whole liberal line about what freedom of religion means. It came to mean what you say in the popular imagination, but that's not what it meant to the men who of 1789. It is their intent that counts, for as Lincoln put it, "the intent of the lawgiver is the law."

[QUOTE]That's psychotic, Walter. If you don't realize that, then I fear for you. Also, any clergyman will tell you that such an attitude is sinful. A man's relationship to God is between him and God, not between him, God, and you. Worry about your own soul. Jesus said that you have no right to judge anyone else.[/QUOTE]

For an atheist you sure make some bold statements about Christianity and what my relationship to a God you believe to be only a figment of my imagination should be.

"Any clergyman would tell me" is no argument. The question is what the Bible and Christian Tradition taught. And as you admit above, the Church burns witches.

Psychotic? Maybe. But psychotic in the way all religions are of necessity mad.

[QUOTE]I have been a fan of Black Sabbath for most of my life. You obviously know nothing about the band or their lyrics. They took their name from a Boris Karloff horror movie because they wanted a dark-sounding name. They were certainly never Satanists.[/QUOTE]

Hmmm . . . you're saying Ozzie isn't a Satanist? That Black Sabbath isn't about Satanism. If memory serves, one of their albums was We Sold Our Souls for Rock and Roll, or something like that.

But I will defer to your knowledge in such matters of non-music.

[QUOTE]I will admit to listening to some bands who are Satanic (e.g., Emperor, Abigor), much more for the music than the lyrics. Many of their lyrics are suprisingly tame, actually (especially Emperor).[/QUOTE]

Nothing like unwinding to tame Satanism, I guess.

[QUOTE][QUOTE]And Orthodox Jews worship Satan, too. [/QUOTE]

Of course they don't. That's not to say I like Jews, though.[/QUOTE]

You are mistaken. Have you read Shahak's "Jewish History, Jewish Religion?"

They offer prayers to Satan on a daily basis. It's in Chapter 3, please read it. Very important.

[QUOTE]That's all irrelevant anyway, though, since the closest anyone will ever get to burning me at the stake will be if I burn my hand on the hot barrel of my assault rifle after emptying a magazine into that person. And believe me, bona fide Satanists (like the aforementioned Morbid Angel) all collect guns and are probably just waiting for an excuse to use them.[/QUOTE]

Bring it on.

[QUOTE]Worship is a conscious act by definition. You can't unknowingly worship someone or something.[/QUOTE]

Not so. As St. Paul tells us, we're really dealing with thrones and powers. Just because one is ignorant of the fact changes not the identity of the evil forces that prevail in this world.

[QUOTE]This is not an officially Christian nation. It never has been. Familiarize yourself with the First Amendment and with the writings of Jefferson, Madison, et al, if you have doubts. You might also want to ask yourself why the word "Christ" never appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of this "Christian nation."[/QUOTE]

Likewise the Constitution does not state that we are an English speaking nation, although there can be no doubt that the English language and the entire tradition rooted in that greatest of all languages is the soul of the American nation.

Likewise, too, it nowhere says that America is a white nation, but there can be no doubt that the Founders had no intention of allowing blacks in.

The Constitution didn't have to say that America is a Christian nation. It was always simply understood to be such.

[QUOTE]No such thing is going to happen in this nation of religious freedom. But take heart: devils and Satan are just myths, anyway. Those who worship them can do no harm. They're just wasting their time.[/QUOTE]

Do you say that the religion of Satan will produce no baleful results for our society?

Will the acceptance of abortion, homosexuality, and murder not do damage to the social fabric?

Pardon me, but that's psychotic. The relgion of Christ is the very matrix of all of our traditions. Your own feelings of right and wrong are a but a habit of mind formed from your living in a Christian society.

Where, Angler, do you suppose all these notions of freedom of conscience come from? Or of the worth of the individual? Of the evil of unlimited slavery? That children should be in school and not in coal mines? I assure you that paganism and other forms of Satan worship did not produce them.

They are the product of the very Middle Ages you would reproach.

Go back and read what you've posted above. You exhibit all the overweening moralism of an altar boy, yet you refuse to admit that all of your morality is grounded in nothing other than the very Catechism you reject.

Natural law only points at God, it doesn't bring us to Him.

You can't reject the Gospel and then expect to retain the moral progress the Gospels produced. Rejecting the Gospel will make us merely natural men again, and leave us open to the evil forces that prevail in this world. Rejecting the Gospel inevitably entails the loss of all the progress the world has made. It can only bring us back to the child burnings of Carthage.

And we're over halfway there.

No, we must burn witches. We must impose the Gospel, and if that means changing the Constitution then so be it.

We either will do that, or we will have the laws of Baal imposed on us. There is no middle ground.

TexasAnarch

2005-06-06 14:27 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Amaara]So, let me get this straight. Your friends killed their baby... baby dead ...[/size][/font][/size][/font][/QUOTE]

Here's what lets see if you can get straight.

These words come from YOUR head, not anyone else's. Why not call it "murder"? Many do. John Cardinal O'Connor called it Nazi's killing Jews.

All of that is craziness, as far I am concerned, but as long as it stays out of everyone else's face, everything is OK.

Its when it doesn't the trouble starts. Remember the end of Buth Cassidy and the Sundance kid? What they got is what anybody who interferres with anyone exercizing their rights to get an abortion should get. I expect they might, too, if they ever showed up in person. People who label what others do as 'murder' are murderers by their own admission of what is in their mind. Its OK to murder murderers, that is, anti-abortionists.

Texas Dissident

2005-06-06 16:24 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I'm talking about proving up on a charge of Satan worship. Attending black masses, engagin in VooDoo practices, that sort of thing. I don't see what's so difficult about that.

I agree that Ozzie and Marilyn should probably be burned alive, publicly. But only after corresponding laws are in place, and after a public trial. We're Americans, after all.

If they are convicted of worshipping Satan after the appropriate laws are passed, then they should be burned alive on national television.

And no, I'm NOT KIDDING.

No, they belong on the public square surrounded by creosote logs, lots of kindling wood and television cameras with satellite hook-ups.

Yes, but the comparison of abortion on demand to ancient demon worship is more than just allegory.

We should also keep in mind how common devil worship is. Not only Haitian VooDoo types, Black Sabbath fans, and members of the Temple of Set consciously worship Satan.

Christ Himself tells us that the Pharisees are the sons of Satan. But the modern Jews themselves proclaim the Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors.

No Christian nation can allow this.

Devil worshippers must leave, and if that means in billows of smoke, then so be it.[/QUOTE]

Excellent post, Walter.

We could start with the hard-core satanists and Seth-channelling new age degenerates. Then I would suggest going right to the porn peddlers.

You know, not 50 years ago if that kind of crap came to say, Morgan City, LA, it would have been taken care of in that exact manner. Makes you realize what a bunch of pansies we've become.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-06 16:53 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]Excellent post, Walter.

We could start with the hard-core satanists and Seth-channelling new age degenerates. Then I would suggest going right to the porn peddlers.

You know, not 50 years ago if that kind of crap came to say, Morgan City, LA, it would have been taken care of in that exact manner. Makes you realize what a bunch of pansies we've become.[/QUOTE]

Thanks, Tex. Heck, it would have been taken care of in much the same way in the Green Bay, Wisconsin I grew up in. Porno sold in grocery stores? They would have lynched the owner.

We've really gone much farther down the old slippery slope than we care to admit.

If our country has an original sin it is freemasonry.

We will never be a truly good and free country so long as masonic/satanic symbols adorn our money and our public buildings.

Did you ever notice how the ACLU doesn't seem to get ticked off about masonic symbols on our money, but "In God We Trust" drives them right up a wall?

No accidents there.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-06 17:55 | User Profile

Each time the priest initiated the ritual, she would enter a trance, rant in languages she didn't know, and show violent, superhuman strength. It was more than they could do to hold her down, her husband, Renzo, recalled. At one point, she vomited whole needles, her priest said, a symbol of diabolical torment.

"I know people say we are crazy," Renzo said. "You can't believe this stuff until you see it." Father Amorth reappears with his book and smiles. "Remember, when we jeer at the Devil and tell ourselves that he does not exist, that is when he is happiest."

[url]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Dstripbooks%26field-author%3Dgabriele%20amorth%26results-process%3Ddefault%26dispatch%3Dsearch/ref%3Dpd%5Fsl%5Faw%5Ftops-1%5Fstripbooks%5F8118055%5F2/103-0917459-0165453[/url] [url]http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2004/05/02/for_exorcist_the_devils_in_the_details?mode=PF[/url] [url]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1260364/posts[/url] [url]http://www.medjugorje.org/framorth1.htm[/url]

I see no reason in arguing with those such as Angler, Anarch, Piper, etc. who do not believe in the supernatural. It's a waste of time.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-06 18:27 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Exelsis_Deo]I see no reason in arguing with those such as Angler, Anarch, Piper, etc. who do not believe in the supernatural. It's a waste of time..[/QUOTE]

The main point is that every society has a ruling ideology/religion. It cannot be otherwise, b/c that's the way the human brain was designed.

The question is not whether we will have a religion, for Nature and Nature's God have decided that question for us.

The only question is what our religion will be.

In other words, the only question of any importance is who will impose their will upon whom.

And I would much, much rather be a hammer than a nail.

We must not allow ourselves to be fooled by the unilateral disarmament propaganda of our enemies. Once they get us to accept "tolerance" as our god, then they've won by default.

We Christians must impose our will upon others, before they impose their will upon us.

Forget niceness and civility, my brothers. This is our undoing. We must be mean, nasty jerks who offend nearly everybody outside our own circle if we hope to avoid a sort of Pagan dhimmitude.

We must impose dhimmitude on all others.

Christians must rule America without apology.

Quantrill

2005-06-06 19:16 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] In other words, the only question of any importance is who will impose their will upon whom.[/QUOTE] Walt, I am no fan of Lenin, but he formulated this rather nicely. He said the only question worth asking was -- 'Who? Whom?'

Walter Yannis

2005-06-06 19:41 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Quantrill]Walt, I am no fan of Lenin, but he formulated this rather nicely. He said the only question worth asking was -- 'Who? Whom?'[/QUOTE] Right.

That's actually a sort of Russian proverb.

There's an implied verb there. An extremely transitive one.

You can guess which one.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-06 19:49 | User Profile

Ralph Sarchie, the author of Beware the Night, joins the show this week with a fascinating interview on demons, ghosts, exorcisms and much more.

Ralph is a retired NYPD sergeant who has patrolled some of New York City's deadliest slums. He has made over 300 arrests and received more than 7 medals for his service as a police officer. For the past fifteen years, Ralph has moonlighted as a demonologist, investigating haunted houses, and cases of demonic possession. Ralph is a devoted Catholic and has assisted in more than 20 exorcisms.

For Walter or anyone else interested, Kathleen Keating recently interviewed Detective Ralph Sarchie in two hour-long segements. Listen here :

[url]http://kathleenkeating.com/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=189[/url]

[url]http://kathleenkeating.com/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=190[/url]

Myself I enjoyed the shows, although I don't have the book yet. The book has been out for a few years, this is not a promo for the book.

Petr

2005-06-06 21:32 | User Profile

[COLOR=DarkRed][B][I] - "And Orthodox Jews worship Satan, too. Shahak tells us that every morning Orthodox Jews offer prayers to Satan in the hopes of keeping him away from their goddess, Shekhinah."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Here is the exact quotation:

[url]http://abbc2.com/islam/english/books/jewhis/jewhis3.htm[/url]

[COLOR=Blue]Other prayers or religious acts, as interpreted by the cabbalists, are designed to deceive various angels (imagined as minor deities with a measure of independence) [B]or to propitiate Satan[/B]. ... Or take another example: both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands, uttering a special blessing. [B]On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God, by promoting the divine union of Son and Daughter; but on the other he is worshiping Satan, who likes Jewish prayers and ritual acts so much that when he is offered a few of them it keeps him busy for a while and he forgets to pester the divine Daughter.[/B] [B][U]Indeed, the cabbalists believe that some of the sacrifices burnt in the Temple were intended for Satan[/U][/B]. [B]For example, the seventy bullocks sacrificed during the seven days of the feast of Tabernacles9 were supposedly offered to Satan in his capacity as ruler of all the Gentiles,10 in order to keep him too busy to interfere on the eighth day, when sacrifice is made to God. [/B] Many other examples of the same kind can be given.[/COLOR]

Petr

Walter Yannis

2005-06-07 04:40 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=DarkRed][B][I] - "And Orthodox Jews worship Satan, too. Shahak tells us that every morning Orthodox Jews offer prayers to Satan in the hopes of keeping him away from their goddess, Shekhinah."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Here is the exact quotation:

[url]http://abbc2.com/islam/english/books/jewhis/jewhis3.htm[/url]

Petr[/QUOTE]

Thanks, Petr.

It's very important to keep this in mind. And it's very important to rub this in the noses of "Judeo-Christian" Freepers and Dittoheads at every opportunity.

These a$$holes want to snuggle up to a religion that offers prayers to Satan as part of its daily ritual.

Freepers and Dittoheads make my skin crawl.

Petr

2005-06-07 05:52 | User Profile

[COLOR=Sienna][B][I] - "These a$$holes want to snuggle up to a religion that offers prayers to Satan as part of its daily ritual."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

In all fairness, even Christians admit that Satan is, in some sense of the word, a god or prince of this world, (John 16:11, 2 Corinthians 4:4) but for some reason they do not see it necessary to placate him.

[COLOR=Blue][B]And the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen. (Romans 16:20).[/B][/COLOR]

Petr

Angler

2005-06-07 08:12 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]In other words, the only question of any importance is who will impose their will upon whom.[/QUOTE]I have no desire to impose my will on anyone else. What's beyond me is why people can't just mind their own business. In particular, I don't understand why so many self-righteous Christians think they're so such good buddies with God that they have they right to "throw the first stone," in direct contradiction to Jesus' teachings.

Similarly, no one -- whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or whatever -- is going to impose his religious beliefs on me. Anyone who attempts to do so is going to be smashed into oblivion. I guarantee it. And I would hardly be alone in the fight against such tyranny. For all their faults, most Americans understand that religious freedom is one of the bedrock principles of this nation. "Liberalism" has nothing to do with it! It's insane to believe otherwise. Some of the more prominent Founding Fathers were not even Christian! The very author of the Constitution, James Madison, was a Deist. These are historical facts. For some quotes, see [url=http://www.deism.org/foundingfathers.htm]this link[/url].

By advocating such sick, sadistic policies such as a return to the barbarism of the Middle Ages, some of you people marginalize yourselves even more than American neo-Nazis ever could.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-07 18:09 | User Profile

[QUOTE][Angler]I have no desire to impose my will on anyone else. What's beyond me is why people can't just mind their own business.[/QUOTE]

I'm not getting the basic point across to you, which is that your whole notion that you as an individual or society as a whole can function without a religion is pure sophistry.

Rushdoony intuited this fact of science perfectly, or perhaps I should say he gleaned it from the Scriptures. The Natural Law and the Scriptures accord perfectly on this point. We will have a religion, for Nature and Nature's God have so ordained.

Any change in law is merely a symptom of an underlying change in religion.

What's beyond me is how you can't seem to get this. Angler, dude, just LOOK at what you've written. You're proceeding from deeply held emotionally based convictions about what's good and what's bad. These beliefs of yours are feelings just as much as anybody else's feelings of right and wrong. They PRECEED your reasoning about them. They form the context for your philosophizing. Indeed, as E.O. Wilson shows, they instruct your reason behind the scenes as to precisely what you should reason about.

That's science, man. Science proves that what you wrote above is as religious as anything Moses ever wrote.

And the real kicker my friend is that your religion is PROFOUNDLY CHRISTIAN:

[QUOTE]In particular, I don't understand why so many self-righteous Christians think they're so such good buddies with God that they have they right to "throw the first stone," [B]in direct contradiction to Jesus' teachings[/B].[/QUOTE]

Ha! My young agnostic friend is TAWKIN' JAY-ZUS!!!

pa-RAYZ GAWD!!

You're just another altar boy who's discovered that his father isn't perfect. Dude. Join the club! :holiday:

I mean, why can't you see that all of your values are CHRISTIAN, and that you as much as admit this above? On a deep emotional level - the limbic level from whence religion supervises our reason - YOU'RE A CHRISTIAN.

Don't you see that? How can you NOT SEE THAT? I swear man, you need to get a little more perspective on yourself than that.

When, oh when, wil you get this point?

Walter Yannis

2005-06-07 18:14 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][COLOR=Sienna][B][I] - "These a$$holes want to snuggle up to a religion that offers prayers to Satan as part of its daily ritual."[/I][/B][/COLOR]Petr[/QUOTE]

There's no question that this is Satan's world.

Which places us squarely behind Enemy lines.

This world is an evil, evil place.

We are the subversives. We are the revolutionaries. We are the ones who strive to overturn the order of worldly things.

Exelsis_Deo

2005-06-07 18:25 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angler]Some of the more prominent Founding Fathers were not even Christian! The very author of the Constitution, James Madison, was a Deist. These are historical facts. For some quotes, see [url=http://www.deism.org/foundingfathers.htm]this link[/url]. [/QUOTE]

Angler, you accuse others of quoting from biased links, yet your link above, is to Deism.Org !!

Here's some Madison quotes and other Founding Fathers, from an UnBiased source [url]http://www.doctorsenator.com/JamesMadison.html[/url]

James Madison, founding father, known as the "chief architect of the Constitution," on June 20, 1785, wrote in regard to the relationship between religion and civil government.

"Religion is the basis and Foundation of Government.... We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

James Madison, who made copious notes in his personal Bible, wrote in Acts Chapter 19:

Believers who are in a State of Grace, have need of the word of God for their Edification and Building up therefore implies a possibility of falling. v. 32. Grace, it is the free gift of God. Luke. 12. 32-v.32. Giver more blessed than the Receiver. v. 35. To neglect the means for our own preservation is to Tempt God: and to trust to them is to neglect him. v. 3 & Ch. 27. v. 31. Humility, the better any man is, the lower thoughts he has of himself. v. 19. Ministers to take heed to themselves & their flock. v. 28. The apostles did greater Miracles than Christ, in the matter, not manner, of them. v. 11

In another place he states:

It is not the talking but the walking and working person that is the true Christian.

James Madison, wrote on November 9, 1772 to William Bradford:

A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal monuments of Renown and Bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven.

So even you must now admit that he was a Christian " deist ". :smartass:

Angler

2005-06-08 10:25 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I'm not getting the basic point across to you, which is that your whole notion that you as an individual or society as a whole can function without a religion is pure sophistry. Of course people can function without religion. I certainly do. And society doesn't need religion, either. Basic notions of right and wrong can exist without religion. I think they are hard-wired into most peoples' minds by evolution. Social groups that cooperate with each other are more likely to survive than those that don't.

Rushdoony intuited this fact of science perfectly, or perhaps I should say he gleaned it from the Scriptures. The Natural Law and the Scriptures accord perfectly on this point. We will have a religion, for Nature and Nature's God have so ordained. This is all a figment of religious peoples' imaginations.

What's beyond me is how you can't seem to get this. Angler, dude, just LOOK at what you've written. You're proceeding from deeply held emotionally based convictions about what's good and what's bad. These beliefs of yours are feelings just as much as anybody else's feelings of right and wrong. They PRECEED your reasoning about them. They form the context for your philosophizing. Indeed, as E.O. Wilson shows, they instruct your reason behind the scenes as to precisely what you should reason about. As explained above, I don't believe notions of "right" and "wrong" have to come from God. They are most likely the product complex interactions between innate instincts honed by evolution (as mentioned above) and each individual's upbringing in society.

That's science, man. Science proves that what you wrote above is as religious as anything Moses ever wrote. Religion has nothing to do with it. I won't rule out that some God exists, though. I'm not an atheist. I do have my doubts about God's existence, but most of my skepticism is leveled at human beings who think they can speak for God in any way. If God exists, then He can surely speak for Himself.

And the real kicker my friend is that your religion is PROFOUNDLY CHRISTIAN. You mean science? That's ridiculous.

Ha! My young agnostic friend is TAWKIN' JAY-ZUS!!!

pa-RAYZ GAWD!!

Buddy, and this is meant in all good faith, you really need to take a step back and just grok the fullness of how bloody funny that is. I mean, doubled over with laughter. Seriously. Wiping a tear from my cheeks. Laugh all you want, but I honestly don't see what's so funny about it. You think agnostics can't also read and understand the Bible? My understanding of the Bible is no different now from when I was a Christian.

The Bible clearly has Jesus saying that you have no right to punish people for sins such as adultery unless you are sinless yourself. Jesus might have thought differently about murder or other crimes that actually hurt others, but adultery is an example of a crime that is essentially victimless. The same is true of "heretical" worship or not belonging to the "right" religion. If you try to harm people for doing such things, then not only do you risk earthly consequences of your actions, you are also going directly against your OWN Scriptures.

I mean, why can't you see that all of your values are CHRISTIAN, and that you as much as admit this above? On a deep emotional level - the limbic level from whence religion supervises our reason - YOU'RE A CHRISTIAN.

Don't you see that? How can you NOT SEE THAT? I swear man, you need to get a little more perspective on yourself than that.

When, oh when, wil you get this point?[/QUOTE]I have no problem whatsoever with admitting that I have some values in common with Christianity. I have never claimed otherwise. I believe in helping the poor, for example -- not because some God said to do that, but because I want to. It makes me feel good. Why? Because of innate, evolved instincts that make us feel good if we help others. In a way, doing so partially relieves us of our own anxieties about life, since contributing to the formation of a society in which everyone helps the less fortunate makes ourselves more secure. Even animals, normally considered without souls and amoral by religion, show signs of altruism. I think the reasons for altruism are the same in both humans and lower animals.

On the other hand, the fact that I have some values in common with Christianity (and some other religions too, for that matter) doesn't mean I believe in the foundational principles of that religion. I can't believe in anything as farfetched as Christianity without some good, solid evidence to back it up. I did believe in it for a long time (~30 years), but that was only because I'd been raised to believe in it and was afraid to question it for a long time (lest I make an anthropomorphic God "angry").

Angler

2005-06-08 10:30 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Exelsis_Deo]Angler, you accuse others of quoting from biased links, yet your link above, is to Deism.Org !! Do you dispute their quotes? I think they sourced them pretty well.

It's a well-known fact that the aforementioned Founding Fathers were Deists. Not only that, but ALL of the Founding Fathers agreed on the Constitution, which clearly protects religious freedom. Moreover, simple common sense provides that religion is a matter that should be left to the individual. No human being is so far above another than he has the right to dictate what is to be believed. Not only that, it's downright impossible to force someone to believe something. So why even bother trying? Let each person's beliefs remain between him and God. It's no one else's business. Everyone can worry about himself.

Angeleyes

2005-06-11 17:09 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Likewise the Constitution does not state that we are an English speaking nation, although there can be no doubt that the English language and the entire tradition rooted in that greatest of all languages is the soul of the American nation.

Likewise, too, it nowhere says that America is a white nation, but there can be no doubt that the Founders had no intention of allowing blacks in.

The Constitution didn't have to say that America is a Christian nation. It was always simply understood to be such. .[/QUOTE] Two points.

The First Ammendment is a compromise, structurally, in that it is a statement that is aimed at both freedom from imposed religion and freedom to worship as one chooses. I infer from the historical context that it was a statement of purpose against Popery, against Caliphs, against required Anglicanism and an endorsement of "you can be Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian, whichever, and that is fine." I agree that the underlying assumption was "but you will be some sort of Christian." I don't imagine most founders considered not having religion in their lives any more practical than I would consider not having a car in my present life.
"No attention of allowing blacks in?" They were already in, albeit as 3/5th's of a person in some states. :smoke: If I remember right, Franklin was an opponent of slavery, on moral grounds as well as others. The founders did not deem it appropriate for franchise to extend to blacks, women, or men without property. That has since changed via a method the Founders instituted: the Ammendment process.

That they envisioned the world through American/European eyes is undeniable. There was no MTV yet to corrupt them, though there is evidence Freemasons were around in force. :confused:

Call in a Birth Defect of a Nation? :whstl:

Angeleyes

2005-06-11 17:18 | User Profile

Angler: A couple of points.

Nurture versus nature and game theory.

Your instinct to help another may not be deterministic in origin, but a learned behavior inculcated by your parents teaching you from your earliest years. Being able to differentiate between instinct and patterning is difficult at best, and I'd say nigh impossible from inside yourself.
As for societies that built laws and rules, and a belief in something greater than themselves, at the least it is a well developed survival strategy. The big debate between secularists and theologists, as I see it, is whether or not the proto civilizations came up with the ideas on their own, or with an assist from someone smarter.

We don't know, and can only infer and look backwards with imperfect hindsight.

Which takes us to Faith versus Religion. People may be able to live without religion, but can you live without faith in something? To do so seem to me a life without out hope, a life without meaning.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-11 17:37 | User Profile

[QUOTE][Angeleyes]Two points.

I agree that the underlying assumption was "but you will be some sort of Christian." I don't imagine most founders considered not having religion in their lives any more practical than I would consider not having a car in my present life. [/QUOTE]

I agree with that, but the question is how the founders would have felt about not tolerating satanic worship in their towns and villages. So we don't even need to say that they assumed some brand of Christianity (although that's obviously the case for the great majority of them) to prove the point that they would have had no problem burning people who participated in a black mass.

[QUOTE]2. "No attention of allowing blacks in?" They were already in, albeit as 3/5th's of a person in some states. :smoke: [/QUOTE]

That's not exactly right. The three fifths thing was most emphatically NOT about negroes as persons - they simply weren't considered persons in the sense of being the subjects of human rights. Rather, the founders viewed negroes as objects - objects of the property rights of white men who held God-given rights.

The three-fifths clause was a compromise the States agreed to to allow slave states to increase their representation by including three fifths of their negro population in the census figures to determine congressional representation. It was about whites and their rights, not negroes and their (even diminished) rights.

[QUOTE]Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, [U]three-fifths of all other persons[/U]. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct.[/QUOTE] Read the Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney does a fine job of debunking the notion that the founders viewed blacks as members of our society. America was a white country.

For the record, I disagree with Taney as to his conclusion that SCOTUS had the right to strike down the Missouri Compromise.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-11 17:45 | User Profile

Here are a couple of excepts from [URL=http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Scott/]Dred Scott[/URL]:

[QUOTE]The words 'people of the United States' and 'citizens' are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the 'sovereign people,' and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? [U]We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. [/U] On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. [/QUOTE]

Here's an interesting passage about American Indians:

[QUOTE]The situation of this population was altogether unlike that of the Indian race. The latter, it is true, formed no part of the colonial communities, and never amalgamated with them in social connections or in government. But although they were uncivilized, they were yet a free and independent people, associated together in nations or tribes, and governed by their own laws. Many of these political communities were situated in territories to which the white race claimed the ultimate right of dominion. But that claim was acknowledged to be subject to the right of the Indians to occupy it as long as they thought proper, and neither the English nor colonial Governments claimed or exercised any dominion over the tribe or nation by whom it was occupied, nor claimed the right to the possession of the territory, until the tribe or nation consented to cede it. These Indian Governments were regarded and treated as foreign Governments, as much so as if an ocean had separated the red man from the white; and their freedom has constantly been acknowledged, from the time of the first emigration to the English colonies to the present day, by the different Governments which succeeded each other. Treaties have been negotiated with them, and their alliance sought for in war; and the people who compose these Indian political communities have always been treated as foreigners not living under our Government. It is true that the course of events has brought the Indian tribes within the limits of the United States under subjection to the white race; and it has been found necessary, for their sake as well as our own, to regard them as in a state of pupilage, and to legislate to a certain extent over them and the territory they occupy. But they may, without doubt, like the subjects of any other foreign Government, be naturalized by the authority of Congress, and become citizens of a State, and of the United States; and if an individual should leave his nation or tribe, and take up his abode among the white population, he would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people.[/QUOTE]

Angeleyes

2005-06-11 20:53 | User Profile

Yes, chattel, not citizens. No argument there. I had edited out my comment on chattel in the first version, should have left it in. :tongue: Thanks for the Dred Scott excerpts, saved me a few minutes of searching. :cool:

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I agree with that, but the question is how the founders would have felt about not tolerating satanic worship in their towns and villages. So we don't even need to say that they assumed some brand of Christianity (although that's obviously the case for the great majority of them) to prove the point that they would have had no problem burning people who participated in a black mass.

Read the Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney does a fine job of debunking the notion that the founders viewed blacks as members of our society. America was a white country.

For the record, I disagree with Taney as to his conclusion that SCOTUS had the right to strike down the Missouri Compromise.[/QUOTE]

MadScienceType

2005-06-12 17:04 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angeleyes]Angler: A couple of points.

Nurture versus nature and game theory.

Your instinct to help another may not be deterministic in origin, but a learned behavior inculcated by your parents teaching you from your earliest years. Being able to differentiate between instinct and patterning is difficult at best, and I'd say nigh impossible from inside yourself.
As for societies that built laws and rules, and a belief in something greater than themselves, at the least it is a well developed survival strategy. The big debate between secularists and theologists, as I see it, is whether or not the proto civilizations came up with the ideas on their own, or with an assist from someone smarter.

We don't know, and can only infer and look backwards with imperfect hindsight.

Which takes us to Faith versus Religion. People may be able to live without religion, but can you live without faith in something? To do so seem to me a life without out hope, a life without meaning.[/QUOTE]

Very nicely put. :clap:

Walter Yannis

2005-06-12 17:45 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angeleyes]Thanks for the Dred Scott excerpts, saved me a few minutes of searching. :cool:[/QUOTE]

I like what Taney had to say about Indians:

[QUOTE]It is true that the course of events has brought the Indian tribes within the limits of the United States under subjection to the white race; and it has been found necessary, for their sake as well as our own, to regard them as in a state of pupilage, and to legislate to a certain extent over them and the territory they occupy. But they may, without doubt, like the subjects of any other foreign Government, be naturalized by the authority of Congress, and become citizens of a State, and of the United States; and if [U]an individual should leave his nation or tribe, and take up his abode among the white population, he would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people[/U]. [/QUOTE]

And this comports with what anybody who's ever been exposed to Indians and blacks (as I have) knows in their heart: Indians (despite their many serious foibles) are very obviously as fully human as any man, but that it takes a real leap of faith to believe in the full humanity of the sub-Saharan African.

Not that I deny the humanity of black Africans. I accept their humanity, but I do so as a matter of discipline - out of submission to the teachings of my Church. I don't find the full humanity of Africans to be anything like a self-evident truth.

Sorry you egalitarian lukers here, you know this is true. A walk down any street in Southeast Washington or the South Bronx, or Johannesburg or Bahia for that matter is sufficient to prove the point. It matters not where you go the whole world over. The black race is not like the rest of mankind. Blacks are much closer to the animals than are the other branches of humanity.

That fact is so obvious that disbeliving it requires years of brainwashing.

Again, you liberals reading this know it's true.

Petr

2005-06-12 18:41 | User Profile

[COLOR=Sienna][I][B] - "The black race is not like the rest of mankind. Blacks are much closer to the animals than are the other branches of humanity."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

I am not prepared to fully accept this, for I have met some Blacks in person that do not fit this description.

Besides, once you decide that some ethnic groups "are not really human," it is easy to get pickier and pickier until you consider very few people to be worthy of being called "human beings." This is a road to a vicious misanthropy (which is also called as "democratic racism").

Just look in how similar manner (with the same patronizing tone of voice and then ultimately with de-humanization) Heinrich Himmler spoke about Slavs:

[COLOR=Indigo]"Now, back to the Slavs! I consider it necessary to speak to each other about this once again. Whether it's Peter the Great or the late Czars, whether it's Lenin or Stalin, they know their own people. [B]They are perfectly well aware that the concepts of "loyalty", "never betraying", "never conspiring", have no place in the Russian vocabulary[/B].

"Whatever people may tell you about the Russians, it's all true. It's true that some of the Russians are fervently pious, and fervently believe in the Mother of God of the Khasans or someplace else, it's absolutely true. It's true that the Volga boatmen sing beautifully; it's true that the Russian of today, in moden times, is a good improviser and good technician. It's true, for the most part, that he's even a lover of children. It's true that he can work very hard[B]. And it's just as true that he is stinking lazy. It's just as true that he is an uninhibited beast, who can torture and torment other people in ways a devil would never permit himself to think of. It's just as true that the Russian, high or low, is inclined to the perversest of things, even devouring his comrades or keeping his neighbour's liver in his lunch bag. [/B]It's all part of the scale of feelings and values of the Slavic peoples. It's often purely a matter of chance which lot he draws; and to people who don't know the beast, he is often a very great riddle: what is the fellow up to now?

...

"[B]It is basically wrong for us to project our whole harmless soul and heart, all our good nature, our idealism, onto foreign peoples.[/B] This applies to Herder, who wrote the "Voices of the Peoples", probably in a drunken hour, and caused us, in later generations, such boundless suffering and misery. [B]That applies to the Czechs and Slovenes, to whom, after all, we brought their national feeling. They themselves were absolutely incapable of it; rather, we invented it for them.[/B][/COLOR]

[url]http://www.cwporter.com/posen.htm[/url]

Besides, no Christian is ever allowed to forget these words when dealing with people with lesser mental capacities: [COLOR=Red][B] Matthew 25:40:

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. [/B][/COLOR]

But in any case Walter, have you ever given any thought to the theory of "The Curse of Ham" (the father of Canaan)? That God would have permanently intendedd the Black race to be in a submissive position? [COLOR=Red][B] Genesis 9:25-7:

And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. [/B][/COLOR]

Petr

Walter Yannis

2005-06-12 19:22 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr][But in any case Walter, have you ever given any thought to the theory of "The Curse of Ham" (the father of Canaan)? That God would have permanently intendedd the Black race to be in a submissive position?

Genesis 9:25-7:

Petr[/QUOTE]

Please note that I accept the humanity of blacks, I just do so begrudingly.

I think that the Scriptures are clear on this. Blacks are human, but they are a lesser branch of humanity. Shahak goes into some detail on this point in terms of the Talmudic tradition. I'm not sure what the Arabs thought of them, but they had no problem enslaving them. Still goes on today.

This accords perfectly with the Natural Law. The generally accepted theory of human evolution has it that the biggest fault line dividing humanity is "Africans and all others." Human groups left Africa 120 thousand years ago, whites and Asians split only 40 thousand years ago, or so it is thought. Whites, Asians, American Indians are all on the opposite side of a yawning evolutionary abyss from blacks. While the distance between those other groups is significant, it's close enough that we recognize our common humanity with little difficulty.

Human tradition also proves beyond doubt that blacks must be grouped in their own class, separately. Blacks NEVER produced a complex civilization. Whenever blacks live among other groups, they invariably wind up in the inferior social position. No other group - not EVER - found living with blacks acceptable. There is invariably social unrest. And, worst of all, wherever black genes have infiltrated the population significantly, there the cultural potential of the infected group is greatly diminished.

The phenomenon is too globally and secularly uniform to explain black failure and black social inferiority as a series of cultural bad breaks and misunderstandings. It's Nature, not Nurture. And judging by the Scriptures and Tradition, it is also the will of God that we recognize these obvious differences and our higher social status compared to blacks.

At least in this world. Christ said the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, in the next world. It's important to keep that in mind. God has a way of standing things on their heads to limit our pride.

But it's also a prideful thing to deny the clear evidence of our eyes, the great weight of human tradition, and the plain meaning of Scripture.

I accept blacks as my bretheren, but as my lesser bretheren.

[QUOTE]Just look in how similar manner (with the same patronizing tone of voice and then ultimately with de-humanization) Heinrich Himmler spoke about Slavs:[/QUOTE] :hitler:

The point being that Himmler lied about the Slavs. The Slavs are white people, there is very little genetic distance between Czechs and Germans, look it up on the online genetic distance calculator.

Same with the Irish and all the horrible stuff the English Imperialists said about them.

But see, and here's the main point, it's not true about the Slavs and the Celts, but IT IS TRUE ABOUT BLACKS.

You illustrate the point about how bad the Nazis really were for the white cause. By lying about other white groups and committing unspeakable atrocities against them, they succeeded in discrediting even the most sober racial thinking in the minds of nearly all whites.

Perhaps the greatest disservice the Nazis did our race.

Angler

2005-06-12 20:07 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angeleyes]The First Ammendment is a compromise, structurally, in that it is a statement that is aimed at both freedom from imposed religion and freedom to worship as one chooses. I infer from the historical context that it was a statement of purpose against Popery, against Caliphs, against required Anglicanism and an endorsement of "you can be Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian, whichever, and that is fine." I agree that the underlying assumption was "but you will be some sort of Christian." I don't imagine most founders considered not having religion in their lives any more practical than I would consider not having a car in my present life.[/QUOTE] I'm afraid this is mistaken. There is simply no way that the Founders intended for Christianity to be forced upon anyone. (And even if they had intended that, no one has any right to force anyone to adopt any religion. Neither is it possible to force someone to believe something.)

The writings of Jefferson, Adams, Madison, etc., are full of proof that they were supporters of complete religious freedom. Here's an example from Jefferson:

"SECTION I. Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

"SECTION II. We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities. Source: [url]http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/biog/lj12.htm[/url]

Here are some quotes from John Adams ([url]http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/adams.htm[/url]):

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! -- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, from George Seldes, The Great Quotations, also from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. -- John Adams, "this awful blasphemy" that he refers to is the myth of the Incarnation of Christ, from Ira D. Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion

"As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims] ... it is declared ... that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.... The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation." -- Treaty of Tripoli (1797), carried unanimously by the Senate and signed into law by John Adams (the original language is by Joel Barlow, U.S. Consul)

There is no shortage of proof that the Founders intended religious freedom in the US to be complete. As long as you're not harming other people (e.g., sacrificing babies), your religion is between you and whatever God you believe in. It's none of anyone else's business. Christian zealots who claim otherwise are indulging in wishful thinking.

Petr

2005-06-12 20:07 | User Profile

You tend to enthusiastically mix Darwinism and evolutionist presuppositions into your theology, which I simply will not do. I am at war with the whole bestial evolutionist ideology, that giant with clay feet. [COLOR=Indigo][I] [B] - "The point being that Himmler lied about the Slavs."[/B][/I][/COLOR]

It is not quite that simple, Walter. Himmler took some (to a certain degree) [B]reality-based[/B] stereotypes about Russians and gave them a wicked twist. It shows just how far even justified prejudices can take you.

For example, as a Finn I can tell you that one of the negative stereotypes alive in these parts of the world is that Russians have quite poor work ethics compared to people like Germans or Finns, and that they are quite incompetent when they actually do something.

(Even today, Finnish language has this derogatory expression: "ryssiÃÂ¤ jotain", meaning literally "to Russian(ize) something" but actually standing for "to scr#w to something up")

Likewise, they were not considered to be very reliable allies, and naturally prone to conspiracies.

Petr

Angeleyes

2005-06-13 00:46 | User Profile

Angler: [QUOTE=Angler]I'm afraid this is mistaken. There is simply no way that the Founders intended for Christianity to be forced upon anyone. (And even if they had intended that, no one has any right to force anyone to adopt any religion. Neither is it possible to force someone to believe something.) [/QUOTE]That is not what I said. You may not be hearing what I am saying, for which I squarely blame my own muddy prose. To elaborate.

"Underlying assumption" does not equal forced religion. That is the whole point of "there shall be no established state religion." The establishment clause has since been warped and twisted into a statement of Anti Religion in some circles, which is a perverse interpretation. It is a clear compromise: freedom [u]from[/u] enforced worship and freedom [u]to[/u] worship in the same article, and freedom to print the truth in the press, etc. Busy Ammendment! Given the rarity of professed Atheitsts in those days (Nietzche's "God is dead" was some years in the future) I still believe that an unwritten, indeed, needless-to write-down-assumption was that since the vast bulk of Americans were Christians of some stripe, and for that matter typically protestant, they would tend to choose their favorite style and not be legally constrained otherwise. Mormons had not yet showed up, nor Hari Krishnas, Muslims were virtually unheard of on our shores, and the animist beliefs of the Indians quite possibly not considered a religion in the same status as a "real" monotheistic religion like Christianity.

What common cultural assumptions do you operate under now?

I tossed in a throwaway about cars, but look at public education. That common cultural assumption is being challenged, and has been for about 20 years. When I was in school, 60's, public education had not yet rotted to its core on Ivory Tower idiocy, and was [u]assumed[/u] to be positioned to continually improve into the future.

Oops, bad assumption. The mediocrats got involved.

As to this:

[QUOTE]"As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims] ... it is declared ... that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.... The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation."[/QUOTE] I will point out to you that this was a letter from one head of state to another, and Adams was at pains to differentiate his government from that of the Caliph's, and of his centuries long foes of Christian/Papist/Anglican Europe. The core message is that the US was not a Theocracy, which it was not, unlike the Ottoman Empire. That cannot usurp the fact that the vast majority of Americans were, and still are (see also de Tocqueville's observations) Christian. Does that make America a Christian nation? It makes it a nation of Christians. And in that semantic sliver of a gap lies a whole host of angels dancing on the heads of needles.

This letter has been taken out of context by modern critics who ignore the imbedded influence of Christianity on the Enlightenment, as though the Enlightenment sprang ex nihilo from a non Christian society.

That be mummery. :cool:

Walter Yannis

2005-06-13 08:28 | User Profile

[QUOTE][Petr]You tend to enthusiastically mix Darwinism and evolutionist presuppositions into your theology, which I simply will not do. I am at war with the whole bestial evolutionist ideology, that giant with clay feet. [COLOR=Indigo][I][/QUOTE]

I think that darwinian theory explains a lot in science, and that it's the working theory nowadays. It now doubt will change and improve, but it's basic outlines seem well established. We Catholics believe in the Natural Law, the notion that Nature helps us understand the mind of Nature's God. It follows that evolutionary theory can help us understand the Creator.

Of course, Natural Law must be viewed in the cotext of Scripture and Tradition, and in view of that perhaps I'm a bit too enthusiastic about darwinian theory. I'll take that as a valid criticism and take the matter under advisement.

[QUOTE][B] - [QUOTE]"The point being that Himmler lied about the Slavs."[/B][/I][/COLOR][/QUOTE]

I have no problems with criticisms of other whites in cultural terms. The Russians have their plusses and minuses, as do the Germans (God help us all).

Indeed, such discussions are very good, because oftentimes we can only see ourselves in the mirror of other nations. That sort of dialogue is a prerequisite to cultural progress.

But Himmler didn't confine himself to a criticism of Slavic culture, but rather he concluded that the Slavic cultural minuses - which were perhaps real enough - derived wholly from inferior bloodlines.

But in terms of race the Germans and the Slavs are nearly identical. Himmler's big lie consisted in this.

But today's BIG LIE consists in affirming that there are no significant genetic differences between blacks and whites. That's an even bigger lie than the lie Himmler told about the Slavs.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-13 08:41 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angler]"SECTION I. Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; [B]that Almighty God hath created the mind free[/B], and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption .[/QUOTE]

You miss the main point, which you kindly set out in black and white for all to see.

The Virginians took as self-evident truth that there is a Creator Who endowed man with rights, as the Declaration had it. Here that same fact is affirmed - it is self-evidently true that there is a God Who gave us freedom.

From that fact it follows that there can be no state compulsion in matters of religion THAT PRESUPPOSE THE SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD.

Thus, the state doesn't get involved in internal church disputes. Any brand of Christian can be an American. Indeed, you could probably push it beyond that to anybody who accepted the existence of the Creator as self-evident truth, but that's another issue.

But just as clearly NO BRAND OF ATHIEST MAY BE AN AMERICAN.

Americanism is founded upon the self-evident truth of a Creator, from Whom all our rights are derived, and since our rights come from the Creator no man or man-made government may deprive us of them. To deny the existence of the Creator is to deny the very essence of Americanism.

Nobody may deny God and be counted as an American.

RowdyRoddyPiper

2005-06-13 09:42 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I think that darwinian theory explains a lot in science, and that it's the working theory nowadays. It now doubt will change and improve, but it's basic outlines seem well established. We Catholics believe in the Natural Law, the notion that Nature helps us understand the mind of Nature's God. It follows that evolutionary theory can help us understand the Creator.[/QUOTE] Well said.

Gabrielle

2005-06-13 11:26 | User Profile

The white race is dying off because of aborticide; and you want to murder white people who are trying to prevent the murder of unborn white babies?!

Angler

2005-06-13 12:15 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]You miss the main point, which you kindly set out in black and white for all to see.

From that fact it follows that there can be no state compulsion in matters of religion THAT PRESUPPOSE THE SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. It is not self-evident that God exists. It is entirely possibly that the universe is self-existent. Many extremely intelligent people recognize this. But you're right that the non-Christians among the Founders (Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Ethan Allen, etc.) did generally believe in some sort of God (as Deists).

Thus, the state doesn't get involved in internal church disputes. Any brand of Christian can be an American. Indeed, you could probably push it beyond that to anybody who accepted the existence of the Creator as self-evident truth, but that's another issue.

But just as clearly NO BRAND OF ATHIEST MAY BE AN AMERICAN. Plainly false. Read the passage again. The author (speaking on his own behalf as well as others) is clearly saying that while he believes in God (Jefferson was a Deist), the religious opinions of citizens are not the state's business. He doesn't qualify it with, "unless the person is an atheist." You are trying to shoehorn that in there. If a person interprets the available evidence as unsupportive of God's existence, then that's his right.

Maybe this quote will make things even more clear regarding Jefferson's position on religion:

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. Source: [url]http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Thomas_Jefferson/11[/url]

Does the above quote sound like it came from someone who wouldn't have approved of atheism? Or maybe you think Jefferson wasn't "American" enough? Let's not deceive ourselves.

More Jefferson:

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.

SIX HISTORIC AMERICANS, by John E. Remsburg, letter to William Short Needless to say, it doesn't sound like Jefferson would have shared your point of view, Walter.

Americanism is founded upon the self-evident truth of a Creator, from Whom all our rights are derived, and since our rights come from the Creator no man or man-made government may deprive us of them. To deny the existence of the Creator is to deny the very essence of Americanism.

Nobody may deny God and be counted as an American.[/QUOTE]Patently false, as already explained.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-13 12:54 | User Profile

[QUOTE][Angler]It is not self-evident that God exists.[/QUOTE]

First, I point out that that is the most un-American statement one can make. The Declaration makes this clear. We are founded upon the notion that we have a Creator Whose Mind can be discerned from our observations of His creation and our reason. How do you square that statement with the Declaration?

Second, the question of whether God really is self-evident isn't the point. I am not trying to prove the existence of God from the Constitution and the other founding documents of the American Revolution, as you seem to imply. The point is that Americanism presupposes the existence of God.

I have proved that all of the Founders believed in God, that His existence is self-evident, and (most importantly for the present discussion) that all of the rights of man derive directly from this self-evident God.

This clearly excludes atheists from Americanism.

[QUOTE]It is entirely possibly that the universe is self-existent. Many extremely intelligent people recognize this. But you're right that the non-Christians among the Founders (Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Ethan Allen, etc.) did generally believe in some sort of God (as Deists).[/QUOTE]

NS?

[QUOTE]Plainly false. Read the passage again. The author (speaking on his own behalf as well as others) is clearly saying that while he believes in God (Jefferson was a Deist), the religious opinions of citizens are not the state's business. He doesn't qualify it with, "unless the person is an atheist." You are trying to shoehorn that in there. If a person interprets the available evidence as unsupportive of God's existence, then that's his right.[/QUOTE]

You're being obtuse.

Here's what you quoted above.

[QUOTE]"SECTION I. Well aware that . . . Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint . . [/QUOTE]

This is a legal document, and should be construed as such. Your quote is a "whereas" clause, a statement of fact that is simply pesumed to be true and upon which all further construction of the document depends. It is like a postulate in geometry; we presume facts like "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" as self-evident, we don't prove them. Indeed, I think we can't prove them, which is precisely why we assume them. Anyway, so too the authors of this document presume the existence of God as the postulate upon which all further legal reasoning about the rights of man proceeds..

You therefore get the argument exactly backwards. You're saying "I postulate that men are free, and therefore they may believe in God or not." But that's not what the authors of this document or indeed all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence said. The founders are saying here that "We hold as self evident truth - i.e. we make a fundamental postulate as in a geometric proof - that there is a God, and it follows from that fact and our observations of His creation that He intended men to be free."

Therefore, freedom follows from the postualte of a self-evident God; God is not a concept that can be questioned as a matter of self-evident human freedom.

In other words, in Americanism, God precedes our freedom, and not the other way around as you would have it - our freedom is the postulate and it follows that we are free to believe or disbelieve in God.

Do you see this now?

As to Jefferson, you're quoting him out of context in a most dishonest fashion, please see next post below.

In any event, the question is not Jefferson, who wrote a great deal over his long life and contradicted himself many times, especially when quotes are torn from their context as is so often the case when Jefferson is quoted (look at the abomination of his memorial to prove that ugly point). The question is rather what the mind of the Founders was when they came up with this thing called America. And that was set down for all time in the Declaration:

"We hold these truths to be self evident . . . that man is endowed by his Creator . . "

God intelligible in Nature is the postulate that forms the very plinth of the entire American philosophical edifice. You cannot attack the foundation of our philosophy and then turn around and call yourself loyal to the project.

I add that until recently, the common law (which the Constitution incorporates by reference) gave little or no weight to the testimony of atheists, or those who denied the Final Judgement. And rightly so - atheists are by defnition outside the American polity.

Clearly, one cannot be both an atheist and an American.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-13 13:20 | User Profile

You tear that quote out of context, much like those who cut and pasted some of his quotes out of context in his memorial.

[URL=http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/11/205407.shtml]Here's [/URL] an article on this very matter:

[QUOTE]Jefferson on Finding God Steve Farrell Monday, Jan. 12, 2004

Liberty Letters, Jefferson, Letter 7

Was Thomas Jefferson an enemy of God?

The quote, found in a personal letter to Peter Carr, has been combined by these cynics with several other Jefferson jabs at religion, to give the impression that Thomas Jefferson was more like a soul mate of Karl Marx than John Adam, and more in favor of freedom from religion than freedom of religion.

But that isnÃ¢â¬â¢t true. The Jefferson quote is taken out of context Ã¢â¬â way out. So what else is new?

Place the quote in context, and Ã¢â¬Â¦ well, take a look for yourself.

Jefferson begins:

"Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object [religion]. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious." (2)

This is anti-God? A mature, unbiased approach is more vital regarding this subject than any other. Why? Because Jefferson believed that the two most important teachings of Christ, along with love of God and love of neighbor, were a belief in life after death and final judgment. (3) Get the point?

He continues:

"Ã¢â¬Â¦ shake off all the fears and servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." (4)

It was also an endorsement of the democratic approach to faith that arose in America, where all men were free to study and discover God and the Bible on their own rather than through an elite few.

So, what's wrong with that?

Better yet, take a look at Jefferson's recommended course of study; it is certainly not for the weak-hearted and weak-minded, who might blindly discard God without an honest search.

"Ã¢â¬Â¦ naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus." (5)

What did he mean? When one reads all of the educational advice letters Jefferson sent to Carr, it is clear that he meant read the Bible in the original, cover to cover, which in this case meant study it in Greek, and in Latin, and in Hebrew, and then compare the three. (6)

He was also saying to extend at least as much trust to the spiritual writer as to the secular writer. Specifically, he encouraged the lad to implicitly trust in "the authority" of the biblical writer when the facts "are within the ordinary course of nature" and to engage in a more aggressive and reflective probe only when "those facts in the Bible Ã¢â¬Â¦ contradict the laws of nature." (7)

This makes sense. It is typical Jefferson.

"Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he relates." (8)

In other words, Jefferson believed that God preferred something more than producing blind faith in humans, whom he endowed with reason.

Nevertheless, as he noted, there can be strong enough evidence of a different sort, which may override the laws of nature, or at least our meager understanding of those laws, and override reason as well.

In this regard, earlier in the same letter he noted, "He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science." (9)

Regarding Christ, his approach was equally demanding and equally open-minded. Christ ought to be studied from the perspective of believers and non-believers, and from biblical as well as extra-biblical sources, before judgment is passed.

"[Y]ou should read all the histories of Christ [including Roman], as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists. Ã¢â¬Â¦ Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some, however, still extant, collected by Fabricius, which I will endeavor to get and send you." (10) (Emphasis added)

This is no passing, no lazy, no antagonistic approach to finding God, Christ and true religion, but rather a serious, vigorous, open-minded, open-ended labor Ã¢â¬â a labor Jefferson personally pursued throughout his life. (11)

And here's the crux of the matter: If, after all this effort, one decides to reject God and Christ as real or divine, Jefferson explained, he will nonetheless "find incitements to virtue" and a "love of others" as a by-product of this labor. (12)

On the other hand, wrote Jefferson to Carr, "If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, [this] will be a vast additional incitement [to virtue]," while hope of "a future state [and] a happy existence in that [state] increases the appetite to deserve it; [and] if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love." (13)

Just what is wrong with all of this? And how is it that this quote was an ode to atheism, an ode to a liberty which bans God and Christ from America?

No, it is no such thing, but proof of the sort of dishonesty you and I are daily fed regarding the faith of our forefathers.

So, here is the truth the prevaricators won't let out: Jefferson believed in God, believed in eternal life, believed in final judgment, and believed a proper education included a fair and vigorous, lifelong, personal quest to know God and His true religion.

NewsMax pundit Steve Farrell is associate professor of political economy at George Wythe College and the author of the highly praised inspirational novel Ã¢â¬ÅDark Rose.Ã¢â¬Â

Contact Steve at [email]farrell@newsmax.com[/email].

Footnotes

Bergh, Albert Ellery, editor. "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Volume VI, p. 258. This quote is sited as a stand-alone on nearly 1,900 Web pages. A sampling of some of the organizations, institutions, publications and Web sites that have used this quote to prove Jefferson was against God and in favor of an anti-religious agenda for America include: The Yale Political Quarterly; The University of Virginia's Library (the University Jefferson founded and that houses his personal library); Secular Humanists of Cornell; Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics of Louisiana State University; The Thomas Paine Historical Association; The Ayn Rand Institute; Capitalism Magazine; Counterpunch Magazine; The American Prospect; Capitalism.org; New America Foundation; EarlyAmerica.com; The Freedom From Religion Foundation; The Objectivist Center; Atheism.org; PositiveAtheism.org; AtheistParents.org; Infidels.org; Unbelief.org; SecularStudents.org; Humanists.net; Socialist Party of Arizona; ReligiousTolerance.org; NoBeliefs.com; Deism.com; Ordo Antichristianus Illumaniti (Illuminists, Scholars and Statesmen of the New Order and Antichristendom); MemorableQuotations.com; Quoteland.com; QuoteProject.com; RefDesk.com; GiftofWisdom.com; StudyWorld.com; TheHappyHeretic.com; exmormon.org; exchristian.net; religionisdumb.com; and let's not forget: realmagick.com; jackowitch.com; wikiquote.com. Out of 800 Web sites this writer personally surveyed, only a handful used the quote in context and in a manner that reflected a faith in God by Jefferson. Return
Ibid., p. 258. Return
Cousins, Norman, editor. "In God We Trust," New York, Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958, p. 160. In Jefferson's Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, Jefferson writes: "The Doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of men. 1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect. 2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments. 3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself is the sum of religion. These are the great points on which he endeavored to reform the religion of the Jews." The man who followed this religion was "the true and charitable Christian." Return
"The Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Volume VI, p. 258. Return
Ibid., pp. 258-259. Return
See, for instance, Jefferson's letter dated Aug. 19, 1785, to his nephew, Peter Carr, wherein he notes, "I advise you to begin a course of ancient history, reading everything in the original and not in translations." Jefferson personally went verse by verse through the New Testament, in this fashion, compiling and analyzing comparisons in Greek, Latin, French and English, for years. "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Volume V, p. 84. Return
"The Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Volume VI, p. 259. Return
Ibid. Return
Ibid., p. 257. Return
Ibid., p. 261, see also p. 260. Return
Jefferson pursued a study of religion from his early youth to the end of his life. He was the creator of the first "red letter" edition of the New Testament, a work he pursued even as President of the United States; and he had in mind to produce a similar work, highlighting all of the great moral teachings of the Old Testament, but never got around to it (he did, however, persistently encourage the project in others). He was in constant contact, particularly in his retirement, with ministers and thinkers on the subject of religion, from across the globe-sharing notes, books, opinions, and deep feelings on the subject. This was especially the case in his exchange of letters with John Adams. (See Norman Cousins, "In God We Trust: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers," Chapters 4-6, especially Chapter 5.) Return
"The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Volume VI," p. 260. Return
Ibid., pp. 260-261. Return

Editor's note: Charlton Heston presents "The Bible" Ã¢â¬â click here now[/QUOTE]

Angeleyes

2005-06-14 04:34 | User Profile

I am going to split hairs with you for a moment.

[QUOTE=Angler]He doesn't qualify it with, "unless the person is an atheist." .[/QUOTE] Atheism is NOT a religious belief. Atheism is a statement of belief that there is NO God. The logical problem of trying to prove a negative hurts the Atheists reasoning, but the Atheist does indeed have the right to believe that there is No God. Trouble is, as Walter points out, if the underlying theme, which is what the language indicates, assumes a Creator, then it cannot assume NO Creator.

This leaves the Atheist a fish out of water, in 1789.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-14 06:53 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angeleyes]Atheism is NOT a religious belief. Atheism is a statement of belief that there is NO God. [/QUOTE]

That's exactly why Atheism is a religion.

It is a statement of belief upon which all further philosophy is based.

Atheism is a FIRST THING as much as Christianity.

Texas Dissident

2005-06-14 06:57 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]The point is that Americanism presupposes the existence of God.

This clearly excludes atheists from Americanism.
In other words, in Americanism, God precedes our freedom, and not the other way around as you would have it - our freedom is the postulate and it follows that we are free to believe or disbelieve in God.

"We hold these truths to be self evident . . . that man is endowed by his Creator . . "

Clearly, one cannot be both an atheist and an American.[/QUOTE]

Oh my. I bow to you sir (and thank my Creator that you're on my side in this debate). Simply brilliant.

Game, set and match.

Walter Yannis

2005-06-14 07:01 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]Oh my. I bow to you sir (and thank my Creator that you're on my side in this debate). Simply brilliant.

Game, set and match.[/QUOTE]

You are very kind, good sir.

My last gig ended after a big crunch-time, and now I'm just sitting around bored.

I'm looking for targets, man. :rockon:

Angler

2005-06-14 10:51 | User Profile

Well, if you guys are done patting yourselves on the back, I'd like to reply. :)

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]First, I point out that that is the most un-American statement one can make. It's not nearly as un-American as advocating the use of cruel punishments for people who hold religious opinions that you don't approve of.

Besides, if my statement is "un-American" to some, then so be it. I care about the truth, not about conforming to someone else's standard of what beliefs are "proper" to an American. The fact is that the existence of God is not self-evident, regardless of what the Founders wrote on that topic (one of the few things they wrote that I disagree with). There is plenty of room for doubt about God's existence. The more one knows about science (particularly physics), the more one realizes this.

Here's an important point, though: I hold that rights can exist even without God, but only as a part of human instinct. Obviously, God or no God, might makes right in the real world unless God intervenes in human affairs. But humans can instinctively "feel" right from wrong in accordance with their evolved social nature -- "right" is what contributes to survival of one's genes (not just oneself, but one's progeny as well) and "wrong" is the opposite. Thus, the fact that I believe in rights still makes me an American in my book, even if I question the existence of God.

The Declaration makes this clear. We are founded upon the notion that we have a Creator Whose Mind can be discerned from our observations of His creation and our reason. How do you square that statement with the Declaration? I have never denied that the Founders believed in God and believed that freedom came from God. That doesn't change the fact that they thought freedom of religious opinion is a universal right that applies to everyone -- even to atheists or others whose beliefs you disapprove of. THAT is what I'm arguing.

Second, the question of whether God really is self-evident isn't the point. I am not trying to prove the existence of God from the Constitution and the other founding documents of the American Revolution, as you seem to imply. I did not intend to imply that.

The point is that Americanism presupposes the existence of God. That depends on how you define "Americanism," but I'll grant you that at least the founding documents did presuppose the existence of God. (They DID NOT presuppose the truth of Christianity, as many Christians like to claim.) Nevertheless, I stand by my main point: the Founders believed that all men have the right to believe as they wish. Yes, they believed that right came from God -- I am not denying that. But if all men have that right, then atheists have it, too. This is not paradoxical. The essential point is that civil governments have no business attempting to coerce people into following this or that religion.

I have proved that all of the Founders believed in God, that His existence is self-evident, and (most importantly for the present discussion) that all of the rights of man derive directly from this self-evident God. Once again, I have never denied that the Founders believed these things. You have set up and tackled a strawman. What I am arguing is that the Founders believed in absolute religious freedom for all people, even atheists.

This clearly excludes atheists from Americanism. Not necessarily. I think as long as someone believes that people have inalienable rights from whatever source, his views are compatible with the founding principles of this nation. After all, what's the whole point of American government, in the view of the Founders? To guarantee and protect rights. As long as an atheist believes in those rights, what harm can he do? As long as he isn't trying to prevent other people from exercising their freedom of religion (and I'll admit that a vocal minority of atheists do this), he should fit right in with the Founders' goals.

You're being obtuse. Hardly.

This is a legal document, and should be construed as such. Your quote is a "whereas" clause, a statement of fact that is simply pesumed to be true and upon which all further construction of the document depends. It is like a postulate in geometry; we presume facts like "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" as self-evident, we don't prove them. Indeed, I think we can't prove them, which is precisely why we assume them. Anyway, so too the authors of this document presume the existence of God as the postulate upon which all further legal reasoning about the rights of man proceeds.. Yes, I agree with all of this...

You therefore get the argument exactly backwards. No, I understand the argument perfectly. Read on...

You're saying "I postulate that men are free, and therefore they may believe in God or not." But that's not what the authors of this document or indeed all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence said. The founders are saying here that "We hold as self evident truth - i.e. we make a fundamental postulate as in a geometric proof - that there is a God, and it follows from that fact and our observations of His creation that He intended men to be free." You're a bit confused here. THIS is what the authors were saying:

(1) We believe in God and that all rights come from God.

(2) Because of (1), we hold that all men have the right to their own opinions in matters of religion.

Tell me: How does the above exclude atheists? If all rights come from God, then so do the rights of atheists to not believe in God! That's the point you're missing.

Besides, as I've argued myself and as Jefferson himself even said, nonbelief in God (or doubt about His existence) is not a choice people make. You cannot rightly hold someone accountable for honest doubt or disbelief. This is axiomatic as far as I'm concerned.

Therefore, freedom follows from the postualte of a self-evident God... Okay...

...God is not a concept that can be questioned as a matter of self-evident human freedom. Nope! This is a non-sequitur. The Founders would have said: "That atheist has a right to his nonbelief in God BECAUSE God gave him that right." There is no paradox or logical inconsistency here whatsoever.

In other words, in Americanism, God precedes our freedom, and not the other way around as you would have it - our freedom is the postulate and it follows that we are free to believe or disbelieve in God. So you admit that people are free to believe or disbelieve in God! That's all I wanted.

Let me also repeat: I think belief in inalienable human rights is sufficient to be a true American, even if one doesn't believe in God (or, like myself, merely has doubts about His existence). I can understand people thinking that rights can only exist if God exists, but I don't think that's necessarily true. Rights can be put on a naturalistic foundation, though that's a more complicated issue than simply attributing them to God.

As to Jefferson, you're quoting him out of context in a most dishonest fashion, please see next post below. Kindly refrain from falsely accusing me of dishonesty.

In any event, the question is not Jefferson, who wrote a great deal over his long life and contradicted himself many times, especially when quotes are torn from their context as is so often the case when Jefferson is quoted (look at the abomination of his memorial to prove that ugly point). The question is rather what the mind of the Founders was when they came up with this thing called America. And that was set down for all time in the Declaration:

"We hold these truths to be self evident . . . that man is endowed by his Creator . . " Addressed above.

God intelligible in Nature is the postulate that forms the very plinth of the entire American philosophical edifice. You cannot attack the foundation of our philosophy and then turn around and call yourself loyal to the project. No one can prove God doesn't exist, so there's really no point in "attacking" this foundation. To repeat, I think as long as one believes in human rights, one is perfectly compatible with American philosophy.

Let's also not forget that there are some people who believe in God who don't believe in inalienable rights, either. The current president of the US doesn't believe that all men have inalienable rights. The same is true of a large number (maybe a majority) of US citizens, many of whom approve of torture and other obvious violations of human rights as long as Americans aren't the victims. The last I checked, the Declaration said that ALL men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights -- not just those who live within US borders.

I add that until recently, the common law (which the Constitution incorporates by reference) gave little or no weight to the testimony of atheists, or those who denied the Final Judgement. And rightly so - atheists are by defnition outside the American polity. Well, that was a very foolish policy, considering that religious people can be ever bit as dishonest as atheists. Moreover, it is entirely possibly to believe in God and not believe in the Final Judgment. Deists (like Madison, the very author of the Constitution) fall into that category.

Clearly, one cannot be both an atheist and an American.[/QUOTE]It is more American to be an atheist and believe in inalienable human rights than to believe in God and not believe in those rights. I mean, come on, Walter! Weren't you the one who was recently saying that you thought burning at the stake for having improper religious beliefs was an acceptable punishment in America? I don't care how strong your belief in God is; such talk is FAR more un-American than ANY atheist. If rights come from God, then you can't take them away. As Jefferson once said, "Even God will not save men against their wills." So what business do mortals have "saving" others if even God won't do that?

I don't have time right this minute to reply to article about the Jefferson quote, but rest assured -- I have read his entire letter to Peter Carr and my original point stands. The context of the quote does NOT change its meaning. I will come back later today and address that.

Angler

2005-06-14 14:29 | User Profile

Okay, I have a free moment here. Let's look at this letter from Jefferson to Peter Carr (Jefferson's nephew). For reference, the entire text can be found here:

[url]http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new?id=JefLett&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=61&division=div[/url]

Here is the part we're primarily interested in:

Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, & the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first the religion of your own country. Read the bible then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy & Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature does not weigh against them. But those facts in the bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, &c. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis as the earth does, should have stopped, should not by that sudden stoppage have prostrated animals, trees, buildings, and should after a certain time have resumed its revolution, & that without a second general prostration. Is this arrest of the earth's motion, or the evidence which affirms it, most within the law of probabilities? You will next read the new testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions 1. of those who say he was begotten by god, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven: and 2. of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, & was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile or death in furcÃÂ¢. See this law in the Digest Lib. 48. tit. 19. (symbol omitted) 28. 3. & Lipsius Lib. 2. de cruce. cap. 2. These questions are examined in the books I have mentioned under the head of religion, & several others. They will assist you in your inquiries, but keep your reason firmly on the watch in reading them all. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort & pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, & that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a god, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, & neither believe nor reject anything because any other persons, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision. I forgot to observe when speaking of the new testament that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, & not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some however still extant, collected by Fabricius which I will endeavor to get & send you.

What Jefferson is saying here could not be more clear: think for yourself in matters regarding religion. Don't be swayed too much by what others say (though it would be equally wrong to go against what others believe just for the sake of novelty). Use your own head. If you decide that there's a god, fine. If you decide there's no god, that's also fine. Jefferson did NOT say, "if your reason determines that there's no god, then I will disown you, and you ought to be kicked out of the country."

Now let me make a few comments on the article you posted:

Jefferson on Finding God Steve Farrell Monday, Jan. 12, 2004

Liberty Letters, Jefferson, Letter 7

Was Thomas Jefferson an enemy of God?

Numerous anti-Christian cynics feel certain, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that the answer is "yes." After all, Jefferson once advised, "Question with boldness even the existence of a God." (1) An interesting challenge. Jefferson was not an "enemy of God." I don't know of anyone who claims that he was. He was a Deist. Deists believe in God. Farrell is obviously setting up a strawman from the very beginning of his piece.

The quote, found in a personal letter to Peter Carr, has been combined by these cynics with several other Jefferson jabs at religion, to give the impression that Thomas Jefferson was more like a soul mate of Karl Marx than John Adam, and more in favor of freedom from religion than freedom of religion. This is a thinly-veiled ad hominem fallacy designed to link atheism with communism. The reasoning goes: "Karl Marx was a nonbeliever and a communist. Thus, all nonbelievers are communists." Anyone with the slightest understanding of logic can see the fallacy.

But that isnÃ¢â¬â¢t true. The Jefferson quote is taken out of context Ã¢â¬â way out. So what else is new? The context doesn't change the meaning of Jefferson's quote. In fact, it reinforces it. Jefferson was a freethinker, and his advice to question even God's existence reflects that clearly. He even tells his nephew not to fear if he should determine that God doesn't exist. It's right there in the letter.

Place the quote in context, and Ã¢â¬Â¦ well, take a look for yourself. I have done so, and long before I used that quote.

Jefferson begins:

This is anti-God? And Farrell deftly tackles the strawman! Who said it was "anti-God"? No one.

A mature, unbiased approach is more vital regarding this subject than any other. True.

Why? Because Jefferson believed that the two most important teachings of Christ, along with love of God and love of neighbor, were a belief in life after death and final judgment. (3) Get the point? Where the hell does Farrell get this?! LOL!! :lol: Is he reading the same letter I am?

He continues:

There's the quote, and here's the honest interpretation, to this point: The biblical record, as Jefferson understood it, testified that God is a God of love and liberty, not fear and tyranny. Therefore, if the record is true, God must be the author of free inquiry on the subject of his existence. This, then, is a rejection not of God but of the European church, which Jefferson believed perverted the gospel. Pardon me, but this is absolute BULLSH!T. The above words of Jefferson are written in plain English and mean one thing and one thing only: questions of religion should be decided using reason. If there is a God, then (because he's presumably wise), he should approve of such use of reason and not wish for people to believe based on the base emotion of fear. Note that this last point is in direct contradiction to most Christian doctrines, which emphasize belief based on faith in the Bible and/or the authority of the Church. Fundamentalists never question the Bible, and "good Catholics" don't question the Pope (though in practice many Catholics even disobey the Pope). The use of reason in religious matters is the Deist point of view. Since Jefferson was a Deist, his remarks fit right in with that philosophy, as any objective reader can see.

It was also an endorsement of the democratic approach to faith that arose in America, where all men were free to study and discover God and the Bible on their own rather than through an elite few. They were also free to study and fail to discover God and reject the Bible, if that's where their reason led them. Jefferson told his own nephew not to be afraid if his reason led him to unbelief.

Better yet, take a look at Jefferson's recommended course of study; it is certainly not for the weak-hearted and weak-minded, who might blindly discard God without an honest search.

"Ã¢â¬Â¦ naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus." (5)

What Jefferson clearly meant, as the context indicates perfectly well, is that the Bible should be read as any other historical work. It should not be judged by a special standard. In other words, one should read it with the same critical eye as the works of other ancient historians.

He was also saying to extend at least as much trust to the spiritual writer as to the secular writer. Specifically, he encouraged the lad to implicitly trust in "the authority" of the biblical writer when the facts "are within the ordinary course of nature" and to engage in a more aggressive and reflective probe only when "those facts in the Bible Ã¢â¬Â¦ contradict the laws of nature." (7)

This makes sense. It is typical Jefferson. Then according to Jefferson, every miracle or supernatural occurrence in the Bible should be questioned, since all such occurrences by definition contradict the laws of nature. There is no need, however, to be as aggressive in questioning simple historical statements and the like.

"Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he relates." (8)

In other words, Jefferson believed that God preferred something more than producing blind faith in humans, whom he endowed with reason. I agree with this.

Nevertheless, as he noted, there can be strong enough evidence of a different sort, which may override the laws of nature, or at least our meager understanding of those laws, and override reason as well.

In this regard, earlier in the same letter he noted, "He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science." (9) I won't quote that part of the letter here, but anyone can look at it at the link I posted. Basically, Jefferson believed that morality was a naturalistic instinct, but one given to humans by God.

Regarding Christ, his approach was equally demanding and equally open-minded. Christ ought to be studied from the perspective of believers and non-believers, and from biblical as well as extra-biblical sources, before judgment is passed. Agreed.

"[Y]ou should read all the histories of Christ [including Roman], as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists. Ã¢â¬Â¦ Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some, however, still extant, collected by Fabricius, which I will endeavor to get and send you." (10) Here Jefferson is referring to the Apocrypha. He is right in saying that there is no more reason to believe in or doubt the Apocrypha than to doubt or believe in any other Biblical author. What Church "authorities" decide regarding Biblical inspiration is irrelevant to any thinking person. People should think for themselves, using the available evidence and their own powers of reason.

This is no passing, no lazy, no antagonistic approach to finding God, Christ and true religion, but rather a serious, vigorous, open-minded, open-ended labor Ã¢â¬â a labor Jefferson personally pursued throughout his life. (11) Jefferson never because a Christian, as this sentence seems to imply.

And here's the crux of the matter: If, after all this effort, one decides to reject God and Christ as real or divine, Jefferson explained, he will nonetheless "find incitements to virtue" and a "love of others" as a by-product of this labor. (12) Correct. Many atheists are very kind and generous people. Some people don't need the promise of reward or the threat of punishment to be good to their neighbors. They simply have an instinct that makes them feel good when they are kind to others.

On the other hand, wrote Jefferson to Carr, "If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, [this] will be a vast additional incitement [to virtue]," while hope of "a future state [and] a happy existence in that [state] increases the appetite to deserve it; [and] if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love." (13)

Just what is wrong with all of this? And how is it that this quote was an ode to atheism, an ode to a liberty which bans God and Christ from America? Nothing is wrong with it at all. And it's a lie that atheism is some monolithic movement that seeks to "ban God and Christ from America." Some atheists are the rabid-militant type, but most are not. My opinion (as an agnostic, not an atheist) is that people should be allowed to practice whatever religion they choose -- in school, at work, publicly, privately, or whatever, as long as it doesn't interfere with other peoples' rights. I have no problem with prayers in public schools, for example, as long as no one is forced to participate. If that's what the majority of people want to do, then that's fine with me. I have no desire to ban God or anyone's religious beliefs. I do, however, demand the same respect for my own beliefs. No one has the right to tell me what religion to adopt -- and no one will.

No, it is no such thing, but proof of the sort of dishonesty you and I are daily fed regarding the faith of our forefathers. Actually, Farrell has been pretty dishonest himself, as has already been shown. And as I said, he has tackled a strawman with this essay. I'm not aware of any atheists or agnostics who claim Jefferson or the other Founders were atheists. Any who do claim such a thing are wrong. The most famous of the Founders were generally Deists. Many others were Unitarian. Those are the historical facts that no objective person denies.

So, here is the truth the prevaricators won't let out: Jefferson believed in God... Yes, as a Deist.

...believed in eternal life, believed in final judgment... Whoa! Where does Farrell get this? Now who's "prevaricating"?!

...and believed a proper education included a fair and vigorous, lifelong, personal quest to know God and His true religion. LMFAO! What "true religion" does Jefferson endorse in the Carr letter or in any of his other writings?

Some of what Farrell said in this essay is true, but he sure mixed in a lot of transparent bullsh!t and ass-over-elbow logical leaps. "True religion," my anus. Jefferson said no such thing!

Angler

2005-06-14 14:49 | User Profile

Another bit of proof that at least Jefferson would not have approved of burning people at the stake for religious beliefs:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802 No further proof is needed. The above says it all. This conservative believes in the America of Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, not the America of Pat Robertson.

Texas Dissident

2005-06-14 15:05 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angler]This conservative believes...[/QUOTE]

Funny. You're about as conservative as Lenin.

[url]http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=29[/url]

The Founding Fathers and Deism

by David Barton

(We receive numerous requests from across the country to answer various editorials and letters-to-the-editor. The subject is usually the religious persuasions of the Founding Fathers, and the standard assertion is that they were all deists. The following is but one of many possible replies to such accusations.)

I notice that your newspaper has an ongoing debate concerning the religious nature of the Founding Fathers. A recent letter claimed that most of the Founding Fathers were deists, and pointed to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Hamilton, and Madison as proof. After making this charge, the writer acknowledged the "voluminous writings" of the Founders, but it appears that she has not read those writings herself. However, this is no surprise since the U. S. Department of Education claims that only 5 percent of high schools graduates know how to examine primary source documentation.

Interestingly, the claims in this recent letter to the editor are characteristic of similar claims appearing in hundreds of letters to the editor across the nation. The standard assertion is that the Founders were deists. Deists? What is a deist? In dictionaries like Websters, Funk & Wagnalls, Century, and others, the terms "deist," "agnostic," and "atheist" appear as synonyms. Therefore, the range of a deist spans from those who believe there is no God, to those who believe in a distant, impersonal creator of the universe, to those who believe there is no way to know if God exists. Do the Founders fit any of these definitions?

None of the notable Founders fit this description. Thomas Paine, in his discourse on "The Study of God," forcefully asserts that it is "the error of schools" to teach sciences without "reference to the Being who is author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin." He laments that "the evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching [science without God] has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism." Paine not only believed in God, he believed in a reality beyond the visible world.

In Benjamin Franklin's 1749 plan of education for public schools in Pennsylvania, he insisted that schools teach "the necessity of a public religion . . . and the excellency of the Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern." Consider also the fact that Franklin proposed a Biblical inscription for the Seal of the United States; that he chose a New Testament verse for the motto of the Philadelphia Hospital; that he was one of the chief voices behind the establishment of a paid chaplain in Congress; and that when in 1787 when Franklin helped found the college which bore his name, it was dedicated as "a nursery of religion and learning" built "on Christ, the Corner-Stone." Franklin certainly doesn't fit the definition of a deist.

Nor does George Washington. He was an open promoter of Christianity. For example, in his speech on May 12, 1779, he claimed that what children needed to learn "above all" was the "religion of Jesus Christ," and that to learn this would make them "greater and happier than they already are"; on May 2, 1778, he charged his soldiers at Valley Forge that "To the distinguished character of patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian"; and when he resigned his commission as commander-in-chief of the military on June 8, 1783, he reminded the nation that "without a humble imitation" of "the Divine Author of our blessed religion" we "can never hope to be a happy nation." Washington's own adopted daughter declared of Washington that you might as well question his patriotism as to question his Christianity.

Alexander Hamilton was certainly no deist. For example, Hamilton began work with the Rev. James Bayard to form the Christian Constitutional Society to help spread over the world the two things which Hamilton said made America great: (1) Christianity, and (2) a Constitution formed under Christianity. Only Hamilton's death two months later thwarted his plan of starting a missionary society to promote Christian government. And at the time he did face his death in his duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton met and prayed with the Rev. Mason and Bishop Moore, wherein he reaffirmed to him his readiness to face God should he die, having declared to them "a lively faith in God's mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of the death of Christ." At that time, he also partook of Holy Communion with Bishop Moore.

The reader, as do many others, claimed that Jefferson omitted all miraculous events of Jesus from his "Bible." Rarely do those who make this claim let Jefferson speak for himself. Jefferson own words explain that his intent for that book was not for it to be a "Bible," but rather for it to be a primer for the Indians on the teachings of Christ (which is why Jefferson titled that work, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth"). What Jefferson did was to take the "red letter" portions of the New Testament and publish these teachings in order to introduce the Indians to Christian morality. And as President of the United States, Jefferson signed a treaty with the Kaskaskia tribe wherein he provided—at the government's expense—Christian missionaries to the Indians. In fact, Jefferson himself declared, "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." While many might question this claim, the fact remains that Jefferson called himself a Christian, not a deist.

James Madison trained for ministry with the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, and Madison's writings are replete with declarations of his faith in God and in Christ. In fact, for proof of this, one only need read his letter to Attorney General Bradford wherein Madison laments that public officials are not bold enough about their Christian faith in public and that public officials should be "fervent advocates in the cause of Christ." And while Madison did allude to a "wall of separation," contemporary writers frequently refuse to allow Madison to provide his own definition of that "wall." According to Madison, the purpose of that "wall" was only to prevent Congress from passing a national law to establish a national religion.

**None of the Founders mentioned fit the definition of a deist. And as is typical with those who make this claim, they name only a handful of Founders and then generalize the rest. This in itself is a mistake, for there are over two hundred Founders (fifty-five at the Constitutional Convention, ninety who framed the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, and fifty-six who signed the Declaration) and any generalization of the Founders as deists is completely inaccurate.

The reason that such critics never mention any other Founders is evident. For example, consider what must be explained away if the following signers of the Constitution were to be mentioned: Charles Pinckney and John Langdon—founders of the American Bible Society; James McHenry—founder of the Baltimore Bible Society; Rufus King—helped found a Bible society for Anglicans; Abraham Baldwin—a chaplain in the Revolution and considered the youngest theologian in America; Roger Sherman, William Samuel Johnson, John Dickinson, and Jacob Broom—also theological writers; James Wilson and William Patterson—placed on the Supreme Court by President George Washington, they had prayer over juries in the U. S. Supreme Court room; and the list could go on. And this does not even include the huge number of thoroughly evangelical Christians who signed the Declaration or who helped frame the Bill of Rights.**

Any portrayal of any handful of Founders as deists is inaccurate. (If this group had really wanted some irreligious Founders, they should have chosen Henry Dearborne, Charles Lee, or Ethan Allen). Perhaps critics should spend more time reading the writings of the Founders to discover their religious beliefs for themselves rather than making such sweeping accusations which are so easily disproven.

Thank You, David Barton/WallBuilders

Petr

2005-06-14 16:26 | User Profile

It is notable how Jefferson addressed Danbury [B]Baptists[/B], who in their opposition to a state church of any kind have often acted as unwilling allies of secularism.

Petr

Angeleyes

2005-06-15 00:56 | User Profile

TD, thanks for that link. :notworth:

Angler: read with interest your last few posts, I think you answered pretty well.

Having spent considerable years as an Agnostic, my own convoluted path to faith took some years. However, I did not start with an upbringing in Faith, so it appears that our paths are almost directly opposite. You will either return to Faith, or you won't, and your heart will guide you. 'Nuff said there.

If someone wants to be an Atheist, there is only so much one can offer them as an inducement to change their point of view, and shouting at them rarely gets the message across. For my money, soft sell works better.

More flies with honey?

Petr

2005-06-19 20:43 | User Profile

To Angler, on the origin of Satan:

[COLOR=Blue][B][I] - "For a deep study, I recommend you read Elaine Pagel's The Origin of Satan."[/I][/B][/COLOR]

Pagels is a highly biased and probably unreliable new-ager source (you know, Da Vinci Code stuff), as shown by her studies on Gnosticism:

[COLOR=Sienna][SIZE=4]"Gnostic Gnonsense: A Critical Review of Elaine PagelsÃ¢â¬â¢ The Gnostic Gospels "[/SIZE]

PagelsÃ¢â¬â¢ evidences turn against her theory again in Chapter 3, where she argues that the rejection of the Gnostic gospels from the New Testament canon had something to do with the Gnostic affirmation of female deity (i.e. the Mother god) to whom the Demiurge was subject. Pagels would have her readers believe that orthodoxy rejected the Ã¢â¬ÅMother godÃ¢â¬Â based on the contrasting attitudes toward women in orthodox vs. Gnostic circles. [/COLOR]

[url]http://www.answeringinfidels.com/content/view/42/50/[/url]

[COLOR=Blue][B][I] - "If Satan was cast out of heaven, then what was he doing appearing before God's throne? How did he sneak back into God's presence?"[/I][/B][/COLOR]

To begin with, time does not necessarily progress in such a linear way in the celestial world as in this one. Once again I must quote:

[COLOR=Red][B]Deuteronomy 29:29: The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: [/B] [/COLOR] [COLOR=Red] [B]Isaiah 55:8-9:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. [/B] [/COLOR]

Anyways, Revelation describes how it was the Blood of Christ, [I]the crucifixion[/I], that really pushed Satan out of God's presence: [COLOR=DimGray] [B]Revelation 12:10-11:

And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.

[U]And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb[/U], and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. [/B] [/COLOR]

Petr

madrussian

2005-06-19 21:17 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angeleyes] More flies with honey?[/QUOTE] Doubt Angler will be back. He's being paid money for thinking logically and rationally :smartass:

Angeleyes

2005-06-21 03:15 | User Profile

I read one of Pagels books on Gnosticism. While interesting, I found ironic that her argument explained, unintentionally as I saw it, that Gnosticism is a very elitist approach to God, along the lines of a Maslow's heirarchy of bare survival to Self Actualization in its form. That means that according to Gnostics, most people [u]won't[/u] get it, can't reach the level of internal enlightenment necessary to achieve Grace.

Christianity, as taught by Jesus and recorded in the Gospels, is all inclusive. It is for all, including "the least of these." :biggrin:

In a world when over 90 percent of the population was illiterate, the time when the Christian doctrine writers were very successfully showing up Gnosticism for the elitist movement that it was, (the heresy of a second string god as God aside) the "just a few of us really get it" style of worship was bound to eventually die from excessive institutional navel gazing. The early Christian opponents did it a favor, as I see it, to move it along in its natural progression. Had they not done so, Islam would have squashed it quite handily. :wacko:

[QUOTE=Petr] Pagels is a highly biased and probably unreliable new-ager source (you know, Da Vinci Code stuff), as shown by her studies on Gnosticism:

[color=sienna][size=4]"Gnostic Gnonsense: A Critical Review of Elaine PagelsÃ¢â¬â¢ The Gnostic Gospels "[/size]

Petr[/QUOTE]

Origen

2005-07-09 10:46 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Angler]What I do have is the common knowledge that people back then were highly vindictive and superstitious. The desire for revenge is basically a universal human trait. As for "superstitious," rationality is a myth. There is no human without his fears, his hunches, his superstitions - not one! Your belief that medieval Christians were ignorant is completely irrational. Ignorant people could not have designed and built amazing cathedrals of breathtaking beauty. In addition, they could not have developed what we know as the scientific method. Yes, that is specifically a development by medieval Christians. > They attributed all kinds of natural occurrences to supernatural causes. One can gain an insight into how pig-ignorant people were back then by reading the Malleus Maleficarum (available for free online). It's truly pathetic. Do you deny that occult orders exist which spew hatred for God and flout conventional morality? Of course they exist, and some of your favorite bands exemplify that well. Marilyn Manson, oh yes, now there is a great role model for White America. snort Since such abominations exist today, what makes you so sure that they did not exist in medieval times? What indeed, other than your own superstitions? > Yes, they were. Again, we're talking about people who thought that witches had supernatural powers and rode broomsticks to orgies with the Devil. They were ignorant fools, Petr. Do you deny that there are people with anti-Christian beliefs who participate in orgies? Again, there's no doubt that some of your favorite Black Metallers do just that. I just read a news article about murder, rape, and cannibalism by a Black Metal band in Europe.> What do you have against enlightenment, anyway? Enlightenment beliefs are just that: beliefs. Those who claim Enlightenment can easily be fanatical. You are an excellent example.> Do you think it's better for people to live in the darkness of superstition and ignorance as long as they have the "right" religious beliefs? Thank you for again showing that secularists are self-righteous as well as irrational. > An atheist, by definition, cannot believe in the Devil. Every atheist I've ever seen treats "religion" as the "devil" (other than their own religion, of course). They also typically worship a god (or gods), e.g. the State (in the case of fascists), Race (in the case of racialists) or Self (in the case of egoists).