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To: RobbyS
Whether Luther was right or wrong theologically is beside the point, which is that he initiated an age of war motivated by religious fanaticism.

Luther initiated nothing of the sort. Idiots simply used Luther's teaching as their excuse to kill others. None of Luther's teachings can be interpreted as initiating an age of war. Following this idiotic reasoning, Jesus was responsible for the Crusades and the inquisition while Moses cause the Holocaust.

21 posted on 07/31/2007 7:48:43 PM PDT by american_ranger
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To: american_ranger
Whether Luther was right or wrong theologically is beside the point, which is that he initiated an age of war motivated by religious fanaticism.

Luther initiated nothing of the sort. Idiots simply used Luther's teaching as their excuse to kill others. None of Luther's teachings can be interpreted as initiating an age of war. Following this idiotic reasoning, Jesus was responsible for the Crusades and the inquisition while Moses cause the Holocaust.

By the same reasoning an unreasonable Pope, that forced Luther to nail his thesis to the door of the Church by selling indulgences and ignoring the teachings of Jesus, initiated the war even more than Luther did.

22 posted on 07/31/2007 7:53:36 PM PDT by american_ranger
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To: american_ranger
Luther would not have survived without a political protector, and after the peasant revolt he threw himself into the arms of the princes. They wanted to end Roman taxes and to prevent the Emperor from exercising sovereignty in the Empire. Reform became identified with the interests of the princes, and the Emperor was perforce the champion of the papacy. Henry VIII went the same way as the German Protestant princes, but as the only true prince in the British Isles, he was able to impose reform on the whole country on his own terms. Francis I had already made a deal with Rome, gaining most of what
Henry did but without a formal break with the pope or the direct appropriation of the assets of the Church. But the nobility in France was stronger and like the rebel princes in Germany, enlisted under the banner of Reform. In any case, by 1555, it was settled that the religion of the land would be what the prince wanted: church and state had been united, whether in Reformed or Catholic lands. After the Council of Trent provided the Church with a program of its own, with an ideology as intense as that of the Reformers, every war between rulers or every contest for power within, was informed by one of the other of these ideologies as well as the usual motives.
24 posted on 07/31/2007 8:22:51 PM PDT by RobbyS ( CHIRHO)
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