{"id":3470,"date":"2017-11-05T23:30:17","date_gmt":"2017-11-05T20:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3470"},"modified":"2022-04-12T23:46:19","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T20:46:19","slug":"rethinking-the-inquisition-the-exaggerated-crimes-of-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3470\/rethinking-the-inquisition-the-exaggerated-crimes-of-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking The Inquisition: The Exaggerated Crimes Of Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, but for good people to do bad things\u2014that takes religion.” <\/em>\u2014Steven Weinberg, Facing Up<\/em><\/p>\n

T<\/strong>HE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS <\/strong>have sought to answer the intellectual arguments against Christianity as articulated by the best atheist minds of our day. In the next several chapters we turn to their moral arguments and consider the charge that Christianity is worse than irrational\u2014it is evil. For centuries it was God who judged man and Christian clerics who issued charges of heresy and immorality. Now man has perched himself in the judge’s seat and points the finger of accusation at God, and Christianity must answer the charge of fostering evil and threatening civil peace. In this chapter I will investigate whether religion is the source of most of the conflict and death in the world, and if so, whether the world would be better off without it.<\/p>\n

Prominent atheists have been very successful in convincing millions of people\u2014even religious people\u2014that religion has been the bane of history. In The End of Faith, <\/em>Sam Harris calls it “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.” Steven Pinker writes that “religions have given us stonings, witch-burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, and abortion clinic gunmen.” In another book Pinker adds further offenses that he attributes to religion; he says humans believe God has commanded them to “massacre Midianites, stone prostitutes, execute homosexuals, slay heretics and infidels, throw Protestants out of windows, withhold medicine from dying children, and crash airplanes into skyscrapers.”Christianity is typically the focus of the atheist moral critique. In his book Why I Am Not a Christian, <\/em>philosopher Bertrand Russell argues that “the whole contention that Christianity has had an elevating moral influence can only be maintained by wholesale ignoring or falsification of the historical evidence.” Columnist Robert Kuttner spells out the case against Christianity: “The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.”<\/p>\n

Nor have the dangers posed by religion faded with time. Richard Dawkins surveys the Middle East, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, India, and Sri Lanka and contends that “most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today” are due to the “divisive force of religion.” So parlous is the contemporary influence of religion, notably Islamic extremism and Christian fundamentalism, that Daniel Dennett fears “a toxic religious mania could end human civilization overnight.”<\/p>\n

The problem with this critique is that it greatly exaggerates the crimes that have been committed by religious fanatics while neglecting or rationalizing the vastly greater crimes committed by secular and atheist fanatics. This is the topic of the next two chapters, in which we examine more closely the historical evidence the critics invoke. I intend to show that the widely held view that religion is the primary source of the great killings and conflicts of history is simply wrong\u2014indeed that it can only be held by those who insist on ignoring or falsifying the evidence.
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\nLet’s begin with the Crusades, which are vividly described by James Carroll as “a set of world historical crimes” whose “trail of violence scars the earth and human memory even to this day.” A Catholic, Carroll is an example of how many liberal Christians have absorbed the secular allegation that the Crusades illustrate the horrors of religion. Moreover, in fairly standard fashion, Carroll reserves his harshest language for the role of Christians in the Crusades. About the horrors perpetrated by the Muslim side, he is notably reticent. Here we have the familiar doctrine: religion is bad but Christianity is worse.<\/p>\n

But is it true? Let’s remember that before the rise of Islam the region we call the Middle East was predominantly Christian. There were Zoroastrians in Persia and Jews in Palestine, but most of the people in what we now call Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt were Christians. The sacred places of Christianity\u2014where Christ was born, lived, and died\u2014are in that region. Inspired by Islam’s call to jihad, Muhammad’s armies conquered Jerusalem and the entire Middle East. They then pushed south into Africa, east into Asia, and north into Europe. They conquered parts of Italy and most of Spain, overran the Balkans, and were preparing for a final incursion that would bring all of Europe, then known as Christendom, under the rule of Islam. So serious was the Muslim threat that Edward Gibbon speculated that if the West had not fought back “perhaps the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet.”<\/p>\n

More than two hundred years after Islamic armies conquered the Middle East and forced their way into Europe, the Christians finally did strike back. Rallied by the pope and the ruling dynasties of Europe, in the eleventh century the Christians attempted to recover the heartland of Christianity and defend it against militant Islam. These efforts are now called the Crusades. (The term is a later invention; it was not used by the Christians and Muslims who fought in those battles.)<\/p>\n

Who were the Crusaders? Historian Jonathan Riley-Smith disputes the idea that theywere rapacious conquerors or murderers. Rather, he says, they were pilgrims. They were responding to Christ’s call to Christians to “deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.” Many of them put their fortunes and their lives at risk. Their rulers provided nothing\u2014the Crusaders were expected to bring their own horses, pack animals, and equipment. The proof that they were not in this for gain is that virtually all of them returned poorer than they left. Yes, there was looting and foraging on the way, but Riley-Smith says this is because the Crusaders had to make provision for their own survival.”<\/p>\n

The First Crusade was a success. The Christians captured Jerusalem in 1099 and held it for several decades. Eventually the Muslims regrouped and routed the Crusaders. Saladin reconquered Jerusalem in 1187. Subsequent Crusades were failures, and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule. So the Crusades can be seen as a belated, clumsy, and unsuccessful effort to defeat Islamic imperialism. Yet the Crusades were important because they represented a fight for the survival of Europe. Without the Crusades Western civilization might have been completely overrun by the forces of Islam. The Crusades are also seen as a precursor to Europe’s voyages of exploration, which inaugurated the modern era. Certainly one can dispute the worthiness of these objectives, and there were expeditions of rape and murder committed during the Crusades that no one can justify. Even so, these rampages do not define the Crusades as a whole. In the context of the history of warfare, there is no warrant for considering the Crusades a world historical crime of any sort. The Christians fought to defend themselves from foreign conquest, while the Muslims fought to continue conquering Christian lands.
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\nAnd the Inquisition? Contemporary historians have now established that the horrific images of the Inquisition are largely a myth concocted first by the political enemies of Spain\u2014mainly English writers who shaped our American understanding of that event\u2014 and later by the political enemies of religion. Henry Kamen’s book The Spanish Inquisition <\/em>is subtitled “A Historical Revision.” and it is a long book, because Kamen has a lot of revising to do. One of his chapters is called “Inventing the Inquisition.” He means that much of the modern stereotype of the Inquisition is essentially made up.<\/p>\n

The Inquisition, Kamen points out, “only had authority over Christians.” The idea that the Inquisition targeted Jews is a fantasy. The only Jews who came under the purview of the Inquisition were Jews who had converted to Christianity. There were quite a few of these, as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had issued an ordinance in 1492 expelling Jews from Spain. The only way to stay was to convert. Of course, many Christians suspected that some of these conversos <\/em>or “new Christians” were not Christians at all. They were Jews pretending to be Christians. Interestingly the main source of allegations against the “new Christians” came from other Jews who were angry about their fellow Jews relinquishing their Judaism. These Jews had no qualms about testifying before the Inquisition courts because as Jews they were exempt from its jurisdiction. Kamen points out that the grand inquisitor himself, Tomds de Torquemada, had known Jewish ancestry.<\/p>\n

Inquisition trials, according to Kamen, were fairer and more lenient than their secular counterparts, not only in Spain but also across Europe. Frequently the only penalty given was some form of penance, such as fasting or what we would today call “community service.” How many people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition? Kamen estimates that it was around 2,000. Other contemporary historians make estimates of between 1,500 and 4,000. These deaths are all tragic, but we must remember that they occurred over aperiod of 350 years.<\/p>\n

The best example of religiously motivated violence in America is the Salem witch trials. How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, fewer than twenty-five. Nineteen were sentenced to death, and a few others died in captivity. Yet the witch trials have been memorialized in books, movies, and plays like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. <\/em>Miller tried to use the Salem trials as a historical precedent to show the extensive harms of McCarthyism, but little did he realize that his historical example actually proved the opposite. Wrong though the trials were, they harmed a relatively small number of people. Few casualties, big brouhaha.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting to see the way in which atheist writers try to magnify the horror of the witch trials. In The Demon-Haunted World, <\/em>Carl Sagan writes of the witch trials in Europe, “No one knows how many were killed altogether\u2014perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.” That’s one big “perhaps.” Sagan cites no sources, and the most reasonable conclusion is that he has no idea. His fellow atheist Sam Harris, who has actually done some reading on the subject, cites contemporary historical sources that put the number of witches burned much lower, at 100,000. That’s a substantial figure, but it’s a far cry from Sagan’s demon-haunted estimate, and 200 percent lower, Harris notes, than some previous absurd estimates.
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\nStill, Harris argues, “Such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and injustice of this period.” Why not? Let’s apply his logic to other historical events and the absurdity will become apparent. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths, and the debate continues over President Truman’s decision to end the war in this way. But let’s reduce the casualty figures by a factor of 200, in the manner of Harris, and we are down to 500 deaths for both bombs. Would this, in Harris’s words, “do little to mitigate the horror and injustice” of the bombs? On the contrary, it would dispel much of the horror and virtually eliminate any moral debate over the legitimacy of Truman’s action.<\/p>\n

When the numbers aren’t on your side, it’s time to try some hypothetical reasoning. Putting on his biggest philosophical hat, Carl Sagan asks how the civilized people of Europe could possibly have condoned witch-burning. His answer: “If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong… then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations.” In other words, it could happen again, and right here in America. But how plausible is this? Carl Sagan believed in evolution, the Big Bang, and lots of other things. I’m sure he was convinced he was absolutely right, and that his enemies the creationists and fundamentalists were absolutely wrong. Even so, Sagan didn’t burn anyone. I believe certain things to be absolutely true, and yet my personal record on witch-burning is exemplary. If you go to Salem today, you’ll see that the witches are thriving. They don’t even bother to employ security when they perform their rituals\u2014 indeed, they have become tourist attractions. Clearly Sagan was engaging in a little paranoia.<\/p>\n

How about the Thirty Years’ War? This conflict involving the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant states in Germany lasted from 1618 to 1648. While religious motives were present initially, historians today emphasize that these wars were mainly fueled by political contests of power. The emerging nation-states of Europe were clashing with each other over territory and influence. We can see how political motives overrode religious ones in the role played by Catholic France in the latter phases of the war: concerned about thestrength of the greatest Catholic power in the world, the Holy Roman Empire, French statesman Cardinal Richelieu organized a force made up of Swedes and Frenchmen to help the Protestant side.<\/p>\n

Just as in the Thirty Years’ War, many current conflicts that are counted today as “religious wars” are not being fought over religion. This is a point that never seems to get through to atheists like Dawkins and Harris. Dawkins complains about the media’s insistence on describing the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Iraq as “ethnic” rather than religious. But the media is right and Dawkins is wrong. These are ethnic rivalries. Dawkins terms the clash between the Shiites and Sunni in Iraq as “religious cleansing.” Nonsense. Aside from the radicals of al Qaeda, the fight in Iraq is between one group that, in league with the secular despot Saddam Hussein, ruled Iraq for a quarter century, and another group\u2014the Shiite majority\u2014 that is now in power. Religion has very little to do with this internecine conflict.<\/p>\n

Dawkins gives several other examples, and they all work against him. The Israeli- Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. Rather, it arises from disputes over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims\u2014”God gave us this land” and so forth\u2014but even without these religious motives the conflict would remain essentially the same. But aren’t the Jews fighting for this land because it is holy? No, they are fighting because this is their ancestral land and, after the Holocaust, many Jews have become convinced that they can feel secure only in a country of their own. The people who founded the state of Israel were secular, not religious, Jews. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was from its origin a secular nationalist group.
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\nEthnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in the Balkans. Christopher Hitchens gratuitously proposes that the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkans be called “religious cleansing” even though he admits that “xenophobic nationalism” and territorial aggrandizement rather than religion are the primary motivations for the violence. Moving on to Northern Ireland, Hitchens tells a joke without realizing that it undermines his own argument. A man is walking down a street in Belfast when a gunman leaps out of a doorway, points a gun, and says, “Protestant or Catholic?” The man exclaims, “Neither. I’m an atheist.” To which the gunman replies, “Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?” The real point of the joke is that it doesn’t matter because religion is not really the issue. In the same vein, the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland aren’t fighting about transubstantiation or some point of religious doctrine. They are fighting over issues of autonomy and over which group gets to rule the country.<\/p>\n

Even when religion is clearly not the issue, modern atheist writers insist on twisting evidence to make it the culprit. Consider Sam Harris’s analysis of the conflict in Sri Lanka. Harris is trying to blame suicide bombing on religious people. Yet he has a problem. The inventors of the modern form of suicide bombing are the Tamil Tigers. So Harris gets to work. “While the motivations of the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death. The cult of martyr worship that they have nurtured for decades has many of the fea- tures of religiosity that one would expect in people who give their lives so easily for a cause.” In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as combatants in a secular political struggle over land and self-determination, Harris detects a religious motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be some underlying religious crazinessthat explains their fanaticism.<\/p>\n

I do not for a moment deny that religion can be a source of self- righteousness, and that this tendency can lead to persecution and violence. In the past, it has indeed been so. In the Muslim world, violence in the name of religion is still a serious problem. But for Christians the tragedy of violence in the name of religion is thankfully in the ancient past.<\/p>\n

I’ll conclude this chapter by suggesting why this is so. In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, <\/em>one of the brothers tells the story of the grand inquisitor, in which Christ himself appears before the tribunal. He is immediately recognized and thrown into prison. That night, the inquisitor comes to visit him. He asks him to “go and never return again.” The reason is clear. Christ’s teachings are those of a peacemaker. They are the very opposite of the persecutions and violence that have sometimes been perpetrated in the name of Christianity. Jesus says in Matthew 7:1-5, “Judge not that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again…. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam from your eye, and then you shall see clearly how to cast the mote out of your brother’s eye.” This may not always have been the spirit of Christians, and it is not always the spirit of every Christian today. But it is the spirit of the founder and guiding light of Christianity, and it continues to supply a noble standard for a war-weary and violent world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, but for good people to do bad things\u2014that takes religion.” \u2014Steven Weinberg, Facing Up THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS have sought to answer the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7447,7448,7449,7450,7451,7452,7284,7453,7454,7363,693,7378,7455,7456],"class_list":["post-3470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-abortion-clinic","tag-arguments-against-christianity","tag-bertrand-russell","tag-christian-clerics","tag-christian-philosopher","tag-civil-peace","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-dying-children","tag-moral-critique","tag-sam-harris","tag-steven-pinker","tag-steven-weinberg","tag-suicide-bombers","tag-witch-burnings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}