Oct 13 2007
In defense of Christendom
It’s a constant source of oddity to see otherwise educated people deride Christianity. A commenter on Bookworm’s blog,Mr. Dagon, and many like-minded people relish in pointing out the horrors of Christendom in history but have they asked themselves the simple inauspicious question, Christianity is horrible in comparison to what?
The Spanish Inquisition was eventually smashed by other Christians, notably the “heretic” Protestant Queen of England, Elizabeth I. The crusading Templars were eventually smashed in Southern France by the Christian King, Phillip IV of France.
The point I’m making is that Christendom in its heyday policed itself and punished itself for its transgressions.
We find no concomitant acts by the atheist secularists and the Muslims to police themselves in whatever manner.
Instead of being repentant of the roughly thousands years in which they’ve stormed, killed and slaughtered Christians from all of North Africa into Spain to the very gates of Vienna, Muslims decry Christianity for the Crusades and blame the West for the desolation they’ve made for themselves. It is incomprehensible to most people that ALL of North Africa was populated by white Europeans as it was during Rome’s day until Islam swept through and murdered them. It was once verdant and fertile soil. Now as in almost all the lands inside the Islamic Crescent the earth has become a barren desert full of sand and desolation.
Instead of repenting of the hundreds of millions of people who were slaughtered, from the periodic communist purges in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, et al to the concentration camps of the fascism of Germany and Japan, the secularists continue on their road toward utopian nihilism. Indeed, the entire bloodbath that was the 20th Century was the product of the Enlightenment where Mankind for the first time in history decided it could dispense with God and create a heaven of this earth.
More is the tragedy that this blind belief in Mankind’s ability to create his own heaven on earth, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, has not yet died away with the hundreds of millions who died this past century; no, it continues now into the 21st Century. It wears different faces, dons different facades, but ultimately they all place their sacrifices on the alter in worship of Man. Entire nations and entire peoples were brought to ruin, and when this story finally ends and its last chapter finally written, people would remark, if there be anyone left, with amazement at the lengths Man would go to have his own deification.
In Christendom, God interpreted badly brought about tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of deaths, while ideology in the absence of God has rendered hundreds of millions dead. By sheer body count, Christendom has inflicted only a fraction of the devastation than has secularism.
This fact is beyond question, but it’s not one many atheists, or many Christians for that matter, would point out.
As a side note, I watched an interview with David Horowitz, a professed agnostic, on C-Span the other day and he gave in passing the comparison between Christianity and secular atheism.
Here’s a bit of interview I transcribed:
David Horowitz: The 19th Century is the really the crisis of religious faith. Religions, organized religion were a way of consoling people of the meaninglessness of their lives. A life without a God to redeem our existence without a redemption, without a future paradise; our lives are utterly meaningless…
… But either there is a God who redeems us or there’s not, and now for people who think there’s not life would be intolerable unless they had another hope. And that hope, Marxism is the most articulate… a secular Messanism a secular redemption is what a lot of people have find the consolation in…
There is obviously a whole atheist movement, but they have a similar, they have a religious passion which is that if we get rid of religion, then we’re going to have rationality, we’re going to have the enlightenment. Well, no we’re not, no we’re not.
Marxism is an enlightenment philosophy and look at the unbelievable misery that Marxists have caused. There is no exit. That is explains why Marxism is resurgent today. Atheists can’t do without some kind of faith and Marxism is a articulate a faith as one devised by Mohammed…