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May 31, 2014 - July 11, 2020
Judgment Day
Moral Objections to the Doctrine of the Last Judgment
The Ethics of Fear
Divine Punishment
Amputation
Crucifixion
Women to be Immured
Flogging
Historical Errors in the Koran
Regulations for the Muslim Community
Of Religion in General, and Islam in Particular
Sudan
Indonesia
The Totalitarian Nature of Islam
No Separation of State and Church
Islamic Law
The Koran
The Sunna
IJMA
Kiyas
The Nature of Islamic Law
Criticisms of Islamic Law
45
In the Shadow of God
From The End ...
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SAM HARRIS
Anyone who imagines that no justification for the Inquisition can be found in scripture need only consult the Bible to have his view of the matter clarified: If you hear that in one of the towns which Yahweh your God has given you for a home, there are men, scoundrels from your own stock, who have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” hitherto unknown to you, it is your duty to look into the matter, examine it, and inquire most carefully. If it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that
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The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius III, to crush the popular movement of Catharism.
There seems, in fact, to have been nothing wrong with these people apart from their attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs about the creation of the world. But heresy is heresy. Any person who believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will understand why these people had to be put to death.
The first came in 1199 when Pope Innocent III decreed that all property belonging to a convicted heretic would be forfeited to the church; the church then shared it both with local officials and with the victim’s accusers, as a reward for their candor. The second was the rise of the Dominican order. Saint Dominic himself, displaying the conviction of every good Catholic of the day, announced to the Cathars, “For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying, weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, ‘where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may
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The question of how the church managed to transform Jesus’ principal message of loving one’s neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder and rapine seems to promise a harrowing mystery; but it is no mystery at all. Apart from the Bible’s heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and irreconcilable aims, the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence—that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of
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The Spanish Inquisition did not cease its persecution of heretics until 1834 (the last auto-da-fé took place in Mexico in 1850), about the time Charles Darwin set sail on the Beagle and Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful. Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm.
Will Durant: “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”
Witch and Jew
Witches are of particular interest in this context because their persecution required an extraordinary degree of credulity to get underway, for the simple reason that a confederacy of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed. There were no covens of pagan dissidents, meeting in secret, betrothed to Satan, abandoning themselves to the pleasures of group sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors, crops, and cattle. It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams, and sheer confabulation—and confirmed by confessions elicited under the most
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Anti-Semitism is of interest here, both for the scale of the injustice that it has wrought and for its explicitly theological roots. From the perspective of Christian teaching, Jews are even worse than run-of-the-mill heretics; they are heretics who explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ.
The following anecdote is typical: In 1595, an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry at not being invited to share the sports of the country people on a day of public rejoicing, was heard to mutter something to herself, and was afterwards seen to proceed through the fields towards a hill, where she was lost sight of. A violent thunderstorm arose about two hours afterwards, which wet the dancers to the skin, and did considerable damage to the plantations. This woman, suspected before of witchcraft, was seized and imprisoned, and accused of having raised the storm, by filling a
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But what was it, precisely, that people believed? They appear to have believed that their neighbors were having sex with the devil, enjoying nocturnal flights upon broomsticks, changing into cats and hares, and eating the flesh of other human beings. More important, they believed utterly in maleficium—that is, in the efficacy of harming others by occult means. Among the many disasters that could befall a person over the course of a short and difficult life, medieval Christians seemed especially concerned that a neighbor might cast a spell and thereby undermine their health or good fortune.
After nearly four hundred years some ecclesiastics began to appreciate how insane all this was.
The church did not officially condemn the use of torture until the bull of Pope Pius VII in 1816.
Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.
Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime. The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries.
The Holocaust
At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish dogmas, poorly arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some ludicrous instrument of death. Nazism evolved out of a variety of economic and political factors, of course, but it was held together by a belief in the racial purity and superiority of the German people. The obverse of this fascination with race was the certainty that all impure elements—homosexuals, invalids, Gypsies, and, above all, Jews—posed a threat to the fatherland. And while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way,
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(Indeed, the Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)
An analysis of prominent anti-Semitic writers and publications from 1861 to 1895 reveals just how murderous the German anti-Semites were inclined to be: fully two-thirds of those that purported to offer “solutions” to the “Jewish problem” openly advocated the physical extermination of the Jews—and this, as Goldhagen points out, was several decades before the rise of Hitler.
While Goldhagen’s controversial charge that the Germans were Hitler’s “willing executioners” seems generally fair, it is true that the people of other nations were equally willing. Genocidal anti-Semitism had been in the air for some time, particularly in Eastern Europe. In the year 1919, for instance, sixty-thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine alone. Once the Third Reich began its overt persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic pogroms erupted in Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and elsewhere.
But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its willingness to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby enable them to trace the extent of a person’s Jewish ancestry.
Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, “after committing crimes as great as any in human history.”
