Posted on 12/07/2006 10:26:19 AM PST by ZeitgeistSurfer
Many in the West are congratulating Pope Benedict XVI’s recent trip to Turkey, where in the Blue Mosque he prayed facing Mecca and made other gestures meant to salve the wounds raised by his references to Islam’s history of violence. Personally, I found the whole scene a depressing exhibit of the West’s terminal failure of nerve, one particularly distressing given this Pope’s documented understanding that what we call the “war on terror” is in fact the latest episode in the centuries-long struggle with a militant Islam.
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
"If Christians have a claim over Hagia Sophia, then the entire territory of the United States should be restored to the Indians, as the conquest of the United States happened hundreds of years later."
As if the creation of a modern nation with railroads, highways, skyscrapers, modern technology and the highest standard of living from a wilderness once roamed by people stuck in the iron-age with no written language or even the wheel can compare to the wholesale theft of one of the greatest cities of the classical age can be equated.
Or simply put: We created a nation from nothing. The savages in Europe occupied a nation they could never create if they had 10,000 years.
"If Christians have a claim over Hagia Sophia, then the entire territory of the United States should be restored to the Indians, as the conquest of the United States happened hundreds of years later."
As if the creation of a modern nation with railroads, highways, skyscrapers, modern technology and the highest standard of living from a wilderness once roamed by people stuck in the iron-age with no written language or even the wheel can compare to the wholesale theft of one of the greatest cities of the classical age can be equated.
Or simply put: We created a nation from nothing. The savages in Europe occupied a nation they could never create if they had 10,000 years.
Remember, this wasn't really a Christian church building like you and I might think of a church building ~ instead of serving the interests of the Christian community as a whole it was little more than the private chapel of the Emperor.
The Faithful should not be expected to have their contributions on Sunday tossed away so casually.
Vast stretches of North and South America were converted over to agriculture, and many different writing systems were invented. You can find remains of their civilizations in many different places.
Remember, heretics are the folks who abandoned your religion for another religion (or another seriously different version of the same religion).
As an example, today almost all Protestants are not heretics ~ that's because they were never Catholics. However, the first Protestants were heretics. Which is, of course, why they referred to themselves as "Reformers". Polite Catholics hoping to avoid armed conflict also referred to early Protestant heretics as "Reformers".
Later on war happened anyway ~ Germany was nearly exterminated ~ Huguenots were murdered and driven to the far corners of the world ~ and finally the Treaty of Westphalia was signed and life went on as normal with the exception that Western European Christians quit calling each other heretics and they quit killing each other in the name of God (with the exception of the 17th Century when the Edict of Nantes was rescinded by the King of France and even more Huguenots poured out of France to go even further).
Non-Western European peoples have not yet learned this lesson.
Without them your skyscrapers would be many fewer in number and far more expensive.
We're using different definitions of heretic. We can talk later.
Silly
LOL!
Ha ha haaa!
Du voll idiot :))
The Church is NOT a building.. or a tax exempt organization..
Riiiight. No one during the depression would have taken those jobs. Not the Irish or the Italians- like in my family. Spare me.
It's quite obvious there were not enough Mohawk to do all the work so it's not at all surprising they were able to drag a few starving Italians and Irish up on the girders with them.
Then there are the window washers ~ rarely a blue-eye among them.
Blue eye? Wow- very enlightened of you.
The Church of Hagia Sophia belongs to the still functioning church in Turkey made up of now Turkish citozens - granted only 2,000 have survived the decades long ethnic cleansing but they are the ones that can claim ownership without force.
Let's be honest - Turkey could not keep the Church a mosque and see fit to break from its past and come closer to Europe and the Turks fear returning it to the Greeks because they fear that one day the Greeks will come back and take the city and Anatolia back (Irrational fear at this point but most fears are irrational) so the Turks made the Great Church into a museum as an attempt to make it neutral ground.
If Turkey was smart it would re-open the museum as a church and it would not only get into the EU quicker but would make billions in tourist and pilgrim money. But they are not smart.
Apples and oranges.
The Alhambra is a palace/fortress complex. The Hagia Sophia is a church.
The original Muslim populations no longer remain to lay any claim to any religous building inside The Alhambra but the Greek Church which had possession of Hagia Sophia still exists in Turkey though they are down to just 3,000 or less people thanks to ethnic cleansing.
The Orthodox Church does not challenge the earthly status of rulers.
The right of conquest of a city's rule does not apply to theft of private property - the church was the property pf the church as were dozens if not hundreds of churches the Turks destroyed or turned to mosques.
Case in point: I remember reading a letter from the time of the invasion of the Goths when they overran a Roman province causing a Roman landowner to flee for his life with his family only to be tracked down by the Goth messenger who to the astonishment of the Roman the goth gave him a letter asking the Roman if he was selling his land and how much he was selling his land for.
A case can be made that the land passed into ownership of the same people who now belonged to a new confession/faith.
For the purposes of this philosophical discussion populations who convert (in whatever manner) from one confession to another and then change the place of worship to match the new faith should not be in the same catagory as those whose place of worship was transfered from one ethnic population to another.
If Turkey was smart it would give to the Phanar the now Hagia Sophia museum allowing it to be restored to a church and it would not only get into the EU quicker but would make billions in tourist and pilgrim money it would also possibly allow healing between Greeks and Turks to take place and end the enmity. I would support having a portion of this hypothetically restored Hagia Sophia church have a mosque like the set up at St. Cathrine's monastery in the Sinai.
Interesting.
But remember the Turk is a Muslim. "Smart" and "Islam" are not compatable.
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