Research on Belief in God

[RetroActive]

There is no such thing as Progress and there were no such things as Dark Ages. These really are illusions !

It's true that there's no progress without regress. We gain something at the expense of something. We amplify one aspect of ourselves by suppressing other aspects of ourselves. At this point we're consuming natural capital at such a rate... a tower, that's ever increasing in height, whose foundation has been stripped away to build the roof...I'd imagine will topple.

...the dark ages...and the renaissance didn't happen, nor the age of enlightenment...yada, yada, yada.

You really have some funny ideas.

 

[aphronesis]

It's true that there's no progress without regress. We gain something at the expense of something. We amplify one aspect of ourselves by suppressing other aspects of ourselves. At this point we're consuming natural capital at such a rate... a tower, that's ever increasing in height, who's foundation has been stripped away to build the roof...I'd imagine will topple.

...the dark ages...and the renaissance didn't happen, nor the age of enlightenment...yada, yada, yada.

You really have some funny ideas.

Credit where due. The dark ages weren't dark as such. That's a myth maintained by those who hold the Greco-Roman period as the pinnacle of human achievement.

 

[Echoes]

Nobody with a little bit of humility and knowledge talks about Dark Ages referring to the period between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, all right?

That period is called the MIDDLE AGES ! Go dictionaries !

 

[RetroActive]

Credit where due. The dark ages weren't dark as such. That's a myth maintained by those who hold the Greco-Roman period as the pinnacle of human achievement.

Fair enough. I know one thing though: Heresy and the inquisition weren't a high point.

 

[Echoes]

What is 'inquisition'? (you did not capitalize the 'i', that has a meaning)

An inquisitorial system is opposed to the accusatory system.

The accusatory system was the Roman system, in which the plaintiff had to provide himself the evidence for his accusation and if he didn't he owed the accused compensation and risked the sentence that he asked for. The process did not work for it was too risky and usually the individual would rather make justice himself.

The inquisitorial system however is a system in which the authorities are in charge of the complaint and no longer the plaintiffs. It's based on investigation (hence inquisition) and verification. It is still the present-day justice system (at least in Europe) !! I personally think it's a high point !

The Cathars (heretics) were a harmful sect for society. the Inquisition (capital I) was supported by public opinion. They denied the Family structure, ownership, they reduced women to secondary status, they denied any kind of 'oath', which made them perfect anarchists 'avant la lettre' and most importantly murderers (Avignonet Massacre 1244).

Needless to say Inquisition in the Middle-Ages had nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition that took place in the Renaissance.

According to the great Belgian cool historian Henri Pirenne, the medieval economy was good and loyal, worthy of its contemporary cathedrals, insuring a cheap life, fraud was combated, the workers were protected against competition and exploitation, salaries were regulated, their health was cared for and apprenticeship was provided. Oh and of course child labour was probihited ! Golden era.

With Louis IX aka Saint Louis you even had the first public services to help the unprivileged: “établissements de commun profit” (sort of hospices).

 

[aphronesis]

Fair enough. I know one thing though: Heresy and the inquisition weren't a high point.

True. Nor were modern slavery, human trafficking, the Shoah, communist purges, etc.

 

[rhubroma]

What is 'inquisition'? (you did not capitalize the 'i', that has a meaning)

An inquisitorial system is opposed to the accusatory system.

The accusatory system was the Roman system, in which the plaintiff had to provide himself the evidence for his accusation and if he didn't he owed the accused compensation and risked the sentence that he asked for. The process did not work for it was too risky and usually the individual would rather make justice himself.

The inquisitorial system however is a system in which the authorities are in charge of the complaint and no longer the plaintiffs. It's based on investigation (hence inquisition) and verification. It is still the present-day justice system (at least in Europe) !! I personally think it's a high point !

The Cathars (heretics) were a harmful sect for society. the Inquisition (capital I) was supported by public opinion. They denied the Family structure, ownership, they reduced women to secondary status, they denied any kind of 'oath', which made them perfect anarchists 'avant la lettre' and most importantly murderers (Avignonet Massacre 1244).

Needless to say Inquisition in the Middle-Ages had nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition that took place in the Renaissance.

According to the great Belgian cool historian Henri Pirenne, the medieval economy was good and loyal, worthy of its contemporary cathedrals, insuring a cheap life, fraud was combated, the workers were protected against competition and exploitation, salaries were regulated, their health was cared for and apprenticeship was provided. Oh and of course child labour was probihited ! Golden era.

With Louis IX aka Saint Louis you even had the first public services to help the unprivileged: “établissements de commun profit” (sort of hospices).

No that would be the alimentarius instituted under Trajan and then, the diaconae: ecclesiastical welfare centers issued by Pope Gregory the Great on places where the praefectus annonae (Roman officer of grain provisions) had previously held office.

In any case, are you really arguing for a superiority ("high point") medieval justice and inquisition? How many a so called "verification" was exacted under the most horrible torture, only then to be burned at the stake when one "confessed" his or her crimes. Other than accusatory system, it was merely the old Roman one guided by ecclesiastical hypocrisy to render a strategically preconceived verdict, though without certain guarantees provided in the ancient Roman legal code.

Though all is excused by you, I'm sure, in light of the Church having then acted with everyone's own salvation in mind and in accordance with God's plan.

Your characterization of "the Pure," i.e. Cathars, moreover, is merely laughable, for they were largely a peace-loving, vegetarian sect that followed within the dualist, gnostic tradition of antiquity. They might even be regarded as the first "hippies" ante litteram and, because they openly denounced the corruption, immorality and worldliness of the orthodox faith's ecclessiastical heirarchy, from 1208-1244 the Church of Rome savagely attacked the Cathars, the peaceful ‘heretics of the Languedoc’ of Southern France, with a viciousness and detestable arrogance paralleled only by the Nazi atrocities during WW II. The first European holocaust was thereby conducted. Furthermore the so called Avignonet Massacre of 1244 needs to be contextualized within the context of the Albigensian Crusade organized against them in 1208. The Cathar fortress of Montsegur was entirely pulled down by the victorious French Royal forces after the fall of the castle and the surrender of the Cathars in 1244. The Carthars were then put under the lash of the inquisitors and they retaliated by massacring them, in a moment of desperate self-defense for their own survival in an otherwise horrid war that sought to extinguish them and that was ultimately successful. Finally Catharism has been seen as giving women the greatest opportunities for independent action, since women were found as being believers as well as Perfecti, who were able to administer their sacrament of the so called consolamentum, whereas Catholic theologians still debated whether or not women even had a soul (to give you an idea of the essentially misogynistic culture that prevailed within that institution).

Now I'm under no illusion that the medieval Church would have acted according to that basic Christian tenant of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," let alone embrace a policy of tolerance, however, what's truly appalling is that its theological doctrines (which are no more the total sum of sheer fabrication) were quite often used as instruments to bring the necessary pressure to bear and ruthlessly pursue all non-conformists to either force them to succumb to its sovereign will, or else seek out their elimination and extinction. The Catholic Church did this on a proxy basis in cases like this, through the secular armies, their henchmen, under royal mandate, with the sheer objective in mind of preserving its ideologically motivated power base and the total control of all human beings that came within its clutches. The Cathars were branded as heretics, as was the case with all heresy, simply for their different set of non-orthodox beliefs and their refusal to comply with the established order. Personally I have no interest in them, other than the fact that they were treated ferociously and so cannot be viewed in any way as the executioners, but the victims of their own state sponsored, Church approved, slaughters.

Interesting that their movement overlapped, in several ways, with that of St. Francis of Assisi, although the latter was eventually accommodated by the Church of Rome, though not without initially considerable duress. While in order to do so, the Franciscans had to ultimately bend there will with total submission to the official doctrines of the Church and papal primacy, while giving up their communal innocence. That papal and orthodox primacy, by the way, had been baldly stated in the Dictatus papae of Pope Gregory VII (1074):

“Only the Roman Pontiff is rightly called universal; the Pope can be judged by no one; no one can be regarded as a catholic who does not agree with the Roman church; the Roman Church has never erred and never will err till the end of time; the Roman Church was founded by Christ alone; the Pope alone can depose and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops to another see; he alone can call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own judgments; his sentence cannot be repealed by anyone and he alone can review the judgments of all; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he can absolve subjects from their allegiance to impious rulers; the Pope is the only man to whom all princes bend the knee; all princes should kiss his feet; his legates, even those in inferior orders, have precedence over all bishops; an appeal to the papal court inhibits judgment by all inferior courts; a duly ordained pope is undoubtedly made a saint by the merits of St. Peter.” Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand), the intimate disciple of Pope Leo IX, Dictatus Papae (decreed in 1074 and reiterated at the 1st Lateran Council (one of twenty R.C. ‘Ecumenical Councils’); Latin text in Karl Hofmann, Der Dictatus Papae Gregors VII (Paderborn [Germany]: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1933), p. 11.

Your re-reading of history is rather curious to say the least, besides being totally false and disturbing with it.

 

[Echoes]

Re-reading history is every historian's job. Re-writing it is of course something else but you are re-writing and not me.

The use of torture and burning at stakes was rare during the medieval Inquisition, saying the opposite is defamatory !! The secular justice practiced torture, that is right but the Inquisitors would often resort to mild sentences (religious penance). My sources are Jean Sévillia, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie and Henry Charles Lea.

Comparing the medieval Inquisition to Nazism is again reaching the Godwin Law and it discredits you completely.

 

[rhubroma]

Re-reading history is every historian's job. Re-writing it is of course something else but you are re-writing and not me.

The use of torture and burning at stakes was rare during the medieval Inquisition, saying the opposite is defamatory !! The secular justice practiced torture, that is right but the Inquisitors would often resort to mild sentences (religious penance). My sources are Jean Sévillia, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie and Henry Charles Lea.

Comparing the medieval Inquisition to Nazism is again reaching the Godwin Law and it discredits you completely.

I have more than a little experience in historical and cultural criticism. I have no doubt, consequently, about the validity of my conclusions and I've certainly got every confidence in my sources. In the case of the Albigensian Crusade a comparison to Nazism isn't at all unwarranted. The Inquisition, in fact regularly resorted to torture in custody, faking evidence, enforced betrayal of family and neighbors, and mass execution - such things are the tools of murderous dictators and police states. But for hundreds of years they were also the tools of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church, used by them against heretics, and later indeed any group that appeared to threaten the papacy. From its beginnings in thirteenth-century France to its present day incarnation as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, passing through the Roman and Spanish inquisitions and the career of the notorious Tomas de Torquemada, the Inquisition is a grim reminder of the adjacency of church and torture chambers in many historical periods. It's mania for witch finding, the Inquisition as censor and the shift in the Inquisition's role from 'purifying' the faith to protecting papal power, is an incisive and often harrowing account of the subject.

By contrast your sources are obviously written from the apologists point of view, with clear objectives in mind to distort the facts or deemphasize what's absolutely essential, which is always poor historical writing and falsifies everything. Secondly they are highly irrational in seeking to excuse or look beyond the plain truth. Then again I'm writing to someone who is a Nazi apologist and a bigot with it, which isn't only grotesque, but appalling and obscene. Everything you have written in this thread has only been a demonstration of this. Enough said.

 

[aphronesis]

I have more than a little experience in historical and cultural criticism. I have no doubt, consequently, about the validity of my conclusions an I've certainly got every confidence in my sources.

By contrast your sources are obviously written from the apologists point of view, with clear ojectives in mind to distort the facts or deemphasize what's absolutely essential, which is always poor historical writing and falsifies everything. Secondly they are highly irrational in seeking to excuse or look beyond the plain truth. Then again I'm writting to someone who is a Nazi apologist and a bigot with it, which isn't only grotesque, but appalling and obscene. Everything you have written in this thread has only demonstrated this. Enough said.

Ladurie and Lea are creditable, if conservative. Sevillia is--unsurprisingly-- a figure of the cultural and intellectual backlash that threatened to reform France in the '80s. Setting the latter aside, I think the issue here (as has been demonstrated repeatedly) is with the reader and not the history.

 

[rhubroma]

Ladurie and Lea are creditable, if conservative. Sevillia is--unsurprisingly-- a figure of the cultural and intellectual backlash that threatened to reform France in the '80s. Setting the latter aside, I think the issue here (as has been demonstrated repeatedly) is with the reader and not the history.

Credibility, of course, is in the judgment of each reader. I don't find conservative historiography very credible, let's just put it that way.

 

[Echoes]

Then again I'm writing to someone who is a Nazi apologist and a bigot with it


I'm magnanimous. I won't report to the mods.

 

[rhubroma]

Then again I'm writing to someone who is a Nazi apologist and a bigot with it


I'm magnanimous. I won't report to the mods.

Report whatever you like, then we must only accede to the evidence.

 

[aphronesis]

Credibility, of course, is in the judgment of each reader. I don't find conservative historiography very credible, let's just put it that way.

I'm sure you're aware of my position on that. Call it mildly responsible then and maybe at least factually useful. Beyond that I won't vouch for the endeavor or its audience.

 

[horsinabout]

I'll just take one example. the Galileo Case. For anti-Christians it's the typical case of a scientist being a martyr of science against an obscurantist Church that burnt him at stakes while they know he died peacefully at home) because he found out that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

No burning at stakes, or slipping polonium in his Sushi, just good old house arrest....Orthodox church style.

Here articulated Aussie style - have a G'day Mate!

http://youtu.be/w1awvC1l7mM

By contrast your sources are obviously written from the apologists point of view, with clear objectives in mind to distort the facts or deemphasize what's absolutely essential, which is always poor historical writing and falsifies everything. Secondly they are highly irrational in seeking to excuse or look beyond the plain truth. Then again I'm writing to someone who is a Nazi apologist and a bigot with it, which isn't only grotesque, but appalling and obscene. Everything you have written in this thread has only been a demonstration of this. Enough said.

Done it again rhubroma, nail head hit on. This post should win the noble post prize for peace

 

[rhubroma]

I'm sure you're aware of my position on that. Call it mildly responsible then and maybe at least factually useful. Beyond that I won't vouch for the endeavor or its audience.

I know, though it is in the endeavor and its audience that is so essential. Discerning this allows us to critically perceive what is "factually useful" and what isn't.

The differences in critical point of view though and, I might add, intellectual sincerity, are at times oceanic.

 

[Echoes]

What can a troll who thinks Nazis were Catholics teach me about the Galileo Case. I don't need any comments from Australia about it, I've got all I need to know about it and about all the anti-Christian lies around it.

I see that Rhub's violent ad hominem attacks has followers. Nobel Peace Prize, he sure deserves it, actually when you see what the Nobel Committee really is, no surprise he should be their hero.

But keep on insulting me, my shoulders are solid enough.

 

[rhubroma]

What can a troll who thinks Nazis were Catholics teach me about the Galileo Case. I don't need any comments from Australia about it, I've got all I need to know about it and about all the anti-Christian lies around it.

I see that Rhub's violent ad hominem attacks has followers. Nobel Peace Prize, he sure deserves it, actually when you see what the Nobel Committee really is, no surprise he should be their hero.

But keep on insulting me, my shoulders are solid enough.

Bene, keep up the fight then. That is that Catholics aren't Nazis. Not all were of course, but the case of Austria is illuminating, for which national socialism and Catholicism went hand in hand.

 

[Echoes]

Normally I don't discuss with a troll who considers me a Nazi apologist but I want to inform cycling fans about the TRUTH of WWII.

"Science cannot lie ... It's Christianity that's the liar"

“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.”

“ I’m convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse. An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.”

“Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”

All quotes by Hitler in the Table Talk

"The Christian religion and National Socialist doctrines are not compatible." (Bormann in the Table Talk; Bormann being the atheist of the pack, deal with that; AND a very powerful man in the regime !!)

"We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity." (Himmler)

"The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian; he views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. Both [Judaism and Christianity] have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed." (Göbbels)

"The days of the Cross are counted. We must deliver the German nation from the pernicious influence of Christianity." (Ludendorff, in Anti-Semitism Through Ages by Coudenhove-Kalergi)

1. Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked.... complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion. (OSS Report, quoted by the BBC in 2002: http://www.camlaw.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/nuremberg/nurinst1.htm)

Is that sufficient ???

I have more:

Pius XII being supposedly Hitler's Pope. HUGE MYTH !!

The whole thing started by a play in the sixties (after the Pope's death) by Rolf Hochhuth, called The Deputy, probably sponsored by the Soviets.

John Cornwell would then make his pseudo-scientific research Hitler's Pope. From the cover on, it's all wrong.

This is the cover of his book. You see Eugenio Pacelli, future Pius XII, with the German soldiers (the reader would think from the Wehrmacht), getting out of a banquet in Berlin (probably in honour of Hitler). Only problem, the picture is from 1927 (6 years prior to Hitler's rise to power). The soldiers definitely had Reichswehr uniforms and not Wehrmacht. He was invited to celebrate Hindenburg's birthday. Pacelli was called back to Rome in 1929, and never set foot to Germany afterwards. How do you make a picture lie !

Let us remember that Cornwell was the guy who question the fact that Albino Luciani's body, aka John-Paul I, was discovered by Sister Vincenza a quarter of an hour before the official report. Probably he had ties with the P2 lodge that killed the Pope.

The advocate of the Hitler's Pope theory have no arguments at all. They only thought the Pope remained silent while they know he did spoke out and each time he did there came a massacre afterwards. However they silenced the fact that the Vatican and the Italian Jewish Resistance organized the biggest Jewish rescue operation in all occupied territories. 4,000 Jews owed life to Pius XII, including the 700 who were delivered false passports by Gino Bartali, who was a part of the operation. On a cycling forum, this should normally be known but apparently not ...

Éric Zemmour had a nice quote for all these liars: "Hitler is easier to fight dead than alive."

Even the so-called ratlines did not involve the Vatican. That's a myth again. That came from the action of Mgr Hudal and Father Draganovic, who did not have any support from the Vatican. They had passport from the Red Cross and not from the Vatican. Draganovic also had ties with OSS.


Even more, in occupied France, all Dreyfusards, left-wingers, which means atheists gathered together around Marshal Pétain and entered into active collaboration with the Nazis. Pétain himself tended towards left. There are never-ending lists of those. NEVER-ENDING !
All this comes from a research by the Israeli historian Simon Epstein, in two great books: Dreyfusards sous l'Occupation and "Un paradoxe français".

And in order to make things even worse Epstein showed that the traditional Catholics and Monarchists in 1940 massively went underground and resisted or else went to London and joined General de Gaulle in order to keep on the fight in the Colonies. De Gaulle almost only had "far-right" guys and Jews in 1940 and they quarreled with each other (De Gaulle put them back to back). De Gaulle himself was a traditional Catholic, reader of the Action française. The best known of these Catholics fighters in the Free French Troops was obviously General Leclerc !

As long as the atheists/left-wingers can't recognize those truth, they won't be credible. They are just decerebrated by decades of anti-Christian propaganda.

Oh yeah, my grandpa was a Catholic and a WWII vet. He landed in Walcheren, Netherlands and was severely wounded. He fought the Wehrmacht. Would atheists have the balls to do what he has done? I don't think so!

 

[rhubroma]

You simply don't get it do you? During WWII in a state like Austria, a predominantly Catholic country, the Nazi supporters where mostly conservative and traditionalist Catholics. Read Bernhard.

Similarly in fascist Italy the most fervent fascists were also abiding Catholics. There was also the Lateran pact with Mussolini in 1929.

Simply because Hitler and Mussolini rejected traditional Christianity as such, does not signify that many Catholics did not identify with their nationalist and conservative ideologies.

 

[The Hitch]

You simply don't get it do you?

Judging by the last sentence where he claims the capacity for courage is directly correlated to religious belief, I don't think he "gets" anything at all.

Oh yeah, my grandpa was a Catholic and a WWII vet. He landed in Walcheren, Netherlands and was severely wounded. He fought the Wehrmacht. Would atheists have the balls to do what he has done? I don't think so!

You're wasting your time rhub with the likes of him

 

[Echoes]

and I am telling you that in countries like France and Italy, Catholics would massively enter resistance or keep on the fight out of patriotism while the left-wingers and atheists, out of pacifism - and dishonour - entered into active collaboration. Can't you read ???

Besides your idea to strictly focus on the common men shows how much of an elitist you are !


Oh and the Resistance in Austria was led by ... Otto of Habsburg, an atheist perhaps (though I don't like the man)

 

[rhubroma]

and I am telling you that in countries like France and Italy, Catholics would massively enter resistance or keep on the fight out of patriotism while the left-wingers and atheists, out of pacifism - and dishonour - entered into active collaboration. Can't you read ???

Besides your idea to strictly focus on the common men shows how much of an elitist you are !


Oh and the Resistance in Austria was led by ... Otto of Habsburg, an atheist perhaps (though I don't like the man)

Oh, right, i prtigiani how could we foget them? Many were Catholics, to their credit, but most were not. In any case the official Church has always been consrevative and, as such, philo-regime. One need only think of Pius XI, Petain and the rise of fascist Vichy France.

The left wing, to their dishonor, entered into active compliance with the fascist regime in Italy!????? The left in Italy has always been most virulently anti-fascist, was the very backbone of the resistance and contributed greatly to the nation's democratic rebirth afterward. Your post shows, not only in terms of reading, which obviously you cannot, or have been grossly misinformed by the utter nonsense you have ingested (and which makes us want to vomit), but that you are certifiably insane. Yours is thus idiocy personified.

PS: You don't like the man because he was perhaps atheist, and does that somehow taint the resistence? Conversely would being a Christian supporter of the regime have been more congenial to you than being an atheist opponent?

 

[The Hitch]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/23/censorship-in-uk-universities?CMP=twt_gu

 

[Echoes]

Oh, right, i prtigiani how could we foget them? Many were Catholics, to their credit, but most were not. In any case the official Church has always been consrevative and, as such, philo-regime. One need only think of Pius XI, Petain and the rise of fascist Vichy France.

Fascism was not conservative. Pius XI was a strong anti-Nazi, just like his successor, despite some hesitation due to the Communist threat and as I've been saying all the time, Pétain had the WHOLE left at his feet, while the traditional Catholics either joined the Resistance or joined General de Gaulle in London !

The left wing, to their dishonor, entered into active compliance with the fascist regime in Italy!?????

In France !

(and which makes us want to vomit)

So do I when I read your posts or Eshnar's or Horsinabout's

PS: You don't like the man because he was perhaps atheist, and does that somehow taint the resistence? Conversely would being a Christian supporter of the regime have been more congenial to you than being an atheist opponent?

Otto of Habsburg was the head of the PanEuropean Union. Nothing to do with his attitude during the war.