Posted on 08/13/2008 8:34:38 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
LONDON: It seems that new history has completely forgotten one of Britain's tallest leaders — Winston Churchill.
The wartime PM, who led Britain to victory in the World War II, failed to secure a place on the list of the most important people and events in UK history. In fact, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Captain Cook and Sir Walter Raleigh also couldn't get into the "British" list — though the Beatles found a place, the Sun reported.
A team of scholars working for the History Channel has compiled the comprehensive list for a television series.
This little unnoticed bit ought to send the ID people over the edge.
Another “comprehensive” attempt. We’ve had comprehensive immigration reform that was merely amnesty, Pelosi is attempting a comprehensive energy solution which neither produces energy nor is a solution, and now scholars are giving us comprehensive lists of historic figures that leaves out some of Britain’s most towering figures. I see a pattern here...when they use the word ‘comprehensive,’ you know the product is crap.
This little unnoticed bit ought to send the ID people over the edge.
Well, the intellectual history people, at any rate. Churchill was young when he wrote that, and he was showing a vestige of popular Enlightenment-worship—the religion where you believe that everything that happened before about 1750 was wrong. In this otherwise admirable quote, Churchill has it backwards as regards science. Christianity has not been "sheltered in the strong arms of science"; modern science was given birth by the Church. The scientific and philosophical pioneers who laid down the principles of evidence and made major discoveries were Catholic priests and other Christian divines: St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Albert the Great, (Fr.) Nicoleus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, (Br.) Gregor Mendel, to name a few.
Scientific discovery and technology are made possible by two concepts that grow directly from Christian thought: 1) God has an orderly universe, and because God loves man, He has made His laws discoverable by man; 2) The truth belongs to God and always leads to God.
Note that Copernicus began his inquiry into the solar system when he was asked to help redesign the ecclesiastical calendar. He protested that he couldn't do so until he better understood the motion of the sun and planets. And that it was his superiors in the Church who insisted that he publish his heliocentric hypothesis of the solar system—which upset 1,000 years of convention and understandably started quite a stir.
“But it also contains an odd selection of events such as the building in 1859 of the Red House, key to the development of British arts and crafts, the gin drinking craze of 1729 — and, astoundingly, the completion of the Channel Tunnel...Mr Westgaph also said he had argued they needed more traditional elements in the list but he said people would contend that was a “dead white males” view of history.
Television presenter and historian David Starkey called the list “just silly”.
So true - He was an exceptionally great man in the sense he was able to rise above his previous boundaries, to reach beyond himself, and in so doing he enabled England to do the same and save themselves.
Now he is thrown on the trash heap of history by the spoor of the very same people he rallied and helped save from becoming foot maids to the Germans.
The new generation are not deserving of the legacy of their forebears.
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