A History of Violence

I don’t think so. Jihadists hide their violence? No, they broadcast it to the world, for intimidation purposes. Cruelty as a means of political control is useless if unknown. Do you think people in North Korea don’t know about the brutality of the camps? Word spreads by word of mouth. Moreover, the rest of the world knows that they are horrible—no, we don’t know the full extent of the horror and yes Kim Jong Il does his best to keep information from getting out but it does get out and we know about it.

The same goes for the killing fields of Cambodia, Idi Amin, Rwanda. Stalin’s brutality was well known within the USSR and well enough known outside. Yes the intelligentsia in the West denied it and lied about it but the word got out to the rest of the world. Yes, many of these tyrants (Hitler etc.) tried to hide as much as they could of what they were doing, but the groups they seek to intimidate know very well what is happening to their fellow group members—otherwise the intimidation factor is lost. When someone like Kim Jong Il wants to intimidate the entire population, he makes sure the entire population knows and acts of utter brutality are crucial for that purpose.

Pinker is a fool. The exact same thing he is saying was said in the late 1800s—enlightened modern folk had turned their backs on the primitive brutal evil violent past. No more of that. Then came World War I, the Armenians, the Soviets and so on and so forth. Now there’s a comparative lull for forty or fifty years (and a lull only in relative terms) and he extrapolates to some great change.

It may well be true that certain situtations of political tyranny will favor merely making people disappear, as some of the South American dictators did. I can imagine that the Brave New World/Walden II dictators who lie just over the horizon in our neck of the woods may indeed want to avoid public executions and tortures in favor of hidden drugging up in “mental hospitals” and “sensitivity training campuses”—using mind-altering drugs to torture people by depriving them even of their own consciousness, their own ability to talk to themselves and their fellow prisoners, of the ability to bear witness to Truth even in the limited circumstances of the “sensitivity concentration camps.”

But the use of open brutality and violence to intimidate large blocs of people will never disappear. Yes, the tyrants may become even more sophisticated in their methods, but non-violent they will never be and never were.

Nothing’s really changed, Pinker. Prattle along to your fellow ivory tower pinheads. Meanwhile people around the world know very well that sadistic, brutal cruelty for political and religious control is alive and well. No amount of PinkerPontification can eliminate it.

This is simply false. The violence was roughly equal on both sides and it was part of the process of consolidating absolute royal power. You apparently know nothing of the sadistic violence of the Calvinist “brigands” who savaged northern France and Belgium and southern France, burning, raping, boiling alive, castrating, defecating in church sanctuaries, flaying alive and so forth. Henry VIII and Elizabeth executed just as many as Mary did, but over a longer period of time. And they did it for intimidation, in case you hadn’t noticed. And it worked.

If you tote up the scorecard on both sides, it comes out about as equal as you could ever want it to be. It’s not a pretty picture, but don’t start patting your Protestant behind prematurely. Do some actual research. You’ll have to get beyond the textbooks, though. In Anglo-American textbooks, the Protestant bias is palpable and therefore you are not to blame for having gained the impression that only Catholics used violence. But Freepers ought to know a thing or two about how trustworthy the school textbooks are (not).

And the violence in France was not committed by the Catholic church any more than the violence againts Catholics in England was committed by the Anglican Church. All over Europe in the 1500s kings were consolidating absolute power. The Protestant-Catholic conflict from 1546-1648 was state conflict in which princes chose sides in a religious dispute and turned it into political war. If the princes had no chosen sides the religious dispute with Luther might well have been resolved.

No where is this more visible than in France where men ambitious for the crown thought nothing of switching from Protestant to Catholic and back if they thought it would benefit their power grab.

Every historian of Spain in this period agrees that the kings took over the church courts to use the Inquisition as an instrument of state power. Popes protested the abuse of power by the kings. The most advanced system of justice in Europe at the time was in the Roman Inquisition in the Papal States where you had better due process protection (knowledge of who your accuser was etc.) than under Henry VIII with his Star Chamber court or where he simply executed people without trial: after failing to intimidate the London Carthusian monks by, after show-trials, disemboweling two batches of their leaders and earning public opprobrium for butchering innocent and highly respected holy men, he gave up and simply shackled the last batch to dungeon walls without trial and left them to starve. Margaret Roper, Thomas More’s daughter, bribed the jailers to be able to feed them—Henry got suspicious because they were taking too long to die and put an end to her ministrations and they eventually died wretchedly.

Are you Protestant-proud of all that yet?

You can't blame Protestantism for the sins of completely cynical kings like Henry VIII. Henry was no Protestant zealot; he seceded from Rome because of his lust, but that allowed some true Protestants to move into the new church. Many of those men were then burned alive by Mary, whose motive was entirely religious zealotry.

The affair of Luther would have also ended with his being burned, had not some German princes protected him. There was no resolution between Rome and Luther because the theological dispute was fundamental. Then, and even now, the RCC promoted beliefs which have no scriptural basis and are in fact contrary to scripture.

The historical facts do not allow contradiction, despite the complications you introduce to blur the issue. Free societies with limited government and freedom of religion did not arise in any Catholic country. They arose in England and a few other Reformed countries as logical consequences of Reformation thinking about the individual, his conscience, and his reliance on written scripture alone. Rome regarded the Bible as liberals regard the Constitution: as a living, breathing document they could add to or modify as the hierarchy chose.

When any church, whatever the theology, becomes established and allied with government, or acts as a government itself as the Roman church did in various times and places, corruption is inevitable. People took advantage of religious conflict to push various political agendas. However, it was Rome which was united with and even dominated the political regimes of European countries and their American colonies, so it was Rome which had not only the power but the incentive to use it to protect its vast wealth and corrupt system.

Once Europeans read the Bible for themselves, they realized that they didn't need hierarchies of priests speaking in dead languages, burning incense, and teaching doctrines which had no basis in the word of God. They learned from the Bible that all men are created equal, that all are valuable, and all are subject to law. Those are the basic principles necessary for free societies. The old rule of wealthy, corrupt church officials and hereditary elites (who were usually just the descendants of bygone warlords) was immediately put at risk.

The Heresiarch

His career began. He wandered to Strasbourg, Basel, Ferrara, and finally settled at Geneva in 1536 as preacher. There he was to show his full worth, not only as a preacher, but also as a political virtuoso. In five years, he was able to solidify his authority over the Consistory the Council of the Ancients, a disciplinary tribunal that passed sentence on all public sinners]; first as leader of the Protestants in exterminating the Catholics (half the city fled, ruined, all their property and possessions confiscated), then as president of the Council that voted on the right interpretation of the Bible, and finally as chief of the tribunal and the army of informers and police in charge of morality and doctrine.

The Tyrant

He began obsessively multiplying laws of public morality. Death was the penalty for high treason against religion as well as for high treason against the city, and for the son who would strike or curse his father, and for the adulterer and the heretic. Children were whipped or hanged for calling their mother a devil. A mason wearily exclaimed "to the devil with the work and the master," and was denounced and condemned to three days in prison. Magicians and sorcerers were hunted down. They always confessed, of course. According to the city register, in 60 years, some 150 were burnt at the stake.

The years went by; Calvin's obsession gripped the Genevans. The number of dishes that could be served at table was regulated, as well as the shape of shoes, and the ladies' hair styles. In the registers are to be found condemnations such as these: "Three journeymen tanners were sentenced to three days on bread and water in prison for having eaten at lunch three dozen pates, which is a great immorality."

That was in 1558. Drunkenness, taverns and card games were punished by fines. The city's coffers filled up and served to pay new informers. For there were ears everywhere in the republic of evangelical liberty, and the failure to inform was itself a misdemeanor. "They are to be stationed in every quarter of the city, so that nothing can escape their eyes," wrote Calvin. Sermons were given on Thursdays and Sundays. Attendance was obligatory under pain of fine or flogging. Not even children were excused. The spies would verify that the streets and houses were empty. Every year, the controllers of orthodoxy went house-to-house to have everyone sign the profession of faith voted that year. The last Catholics disappeared by death or exile. None spoke of changing religion, for Calvin had had a law voted punishing by death anyone who would dare question the reforms of the "servant of Geneva."

Calvin humbly took the title of "servant of Geneva," but God, he held, spoke by his mouth. "Since God has deigned to make known to me what is good and what is evil, I must rule myself by this measure..." And everyone else, too!

One morning the city awoke to find gallows had been erected in all the public squares, to which a placard was attached: "For whomever shall speak ill of Mr. Calvin." A letter from the dictator sums up his attitude: "It is necessary to rid the land of these damned cads who exhort the people to resist us, blacken our conduct ...such monsters must be stamped out."

It would be nice if you provided a reference telling everyone who wrote the rant you quote. I would guess it is by a rabidly pro-Catholic author. As I said before, you keep putting up side issues to hide that fact that no Catholic country ever developed a free society like that of Parliamentary England, let alone the U.S., which evolved out of English experience.

And let's go way back, long before there were any Protestants you can demonize. We'll see how Rome was already using religion to motivate political conquest and slaughter, centuries before the Reformation. The Pope incited a crusade against "heresy" in Languedoc, the region now considered the south of France, by offering the property of that region to the French who agreed to fight. With the huge wealth of this advanced region dangled before the bloodthirsty, sociopathic warlords of northern France, the result was inevitable: Years of war, about a million dead, and conquest by the French king. All the things you talk about--genocidal massacres, burnings, princelings flip-flopping as conditions changed--happened, and all at the instigation of the Roman church!

This established a pattern which went on and on. His Catholic Majesty of Spain tried to conquer England and force Catholicism down the throats of its people. Did the Pope object? Of course not. The Pope had the nerve to give the entire New World to the pet Catholic powers of Spain and Portugal. When a small colony of Huguenots driven out of their French homeland settled peacefully in Florida, a Spanish force descended on them and massacred the entire lot. You can't find any act by a Protestant nation which compares to the outright genocide inflicted on the Huguenots, a large minority within France, by the power of the royalty united with the Roman religion. Within a few years, Protestantism was almost dead in France. This would have been the fate of Protestants elsewhere, had they not taken up arms and attained alliance with political leaders in Germany and elsewhere. This kind of crap is why our Founders did not want any nationally established church in the U.S.!

Convenient. Henry’s purely cynical but Catherine de Medici is not. You cherry pick.

You don’t know what you are talking about. The trend toward consolidation of royal power had been building for centuries. The Church had been fighting power grabs by temporal rulers for at least since 1050. Initially the Church staved off the kings but in the end, the kings triumphed under Henry and Philip II and Joseph II from the 1500s to the 1700s.

There were no state churches until they were invented by Protestant rulers who made the church in their realms departments of state. This is as true of kingdoms like England as it is of city-states like Zurich. It’s a huge power grab by temporal rulers. They confiscate the property of monasteries under the specious claim that they will take better care of the poor. Ever heard that before? It’s just like what Obama’s doing now.

This happens in Protestant as well as Catholic areas, indeed, NONE of the jurisdictions that became “Protestant” would have become “Protestant” were it not for heavy-handed coercion from the top down.

As to cynicism. Rulers of that era believed sincerely that such heavy-handed control of religion was necessary for reasons of state, to ensure social stability etc. Both Protestant and Catholic rulers believed this. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between Protestant and Catholic rulers on these issue at the time.

Henry was a mixture of cynicism (like all powerful rulers) and true Believer—he truly believed that he was reforming Catholicism, that he was doing what was best for religion but he was sincerely wrong. At the same time he was grossly unjust, tyrannical (he exercised complete censorship over printing—so much for the wonderful liberating effect of Protestantism—he did so because he had to do this to gain total royal absolutist control). He could not distinguish between what he wanted for his own personal gain and what he wanted for state purposes. That’s the problem with Absolutism. But he was no different in this than the other absolutist rulers, whether Catholic or Protestant, of his day.

However there is one difference legally: in England state control of religion was written into law. In Catholic countries like France and Spain it was mostly de facto but not entirely de jure.

But I’m never going to convince you. You need to cherry pick you history in order to undergird your textbook Anglo-American Protestant prejudices. Why don’t you make some cherry preserves out of the fruit of your picking?

Nonsense. The trend toward royal absolutism precedes and is the father of established churches rather than the other way around. Protestant Reformers conceded everything to the emerging Absolutist state, Catholic reformers resisted it (had been resisting for centuries) but failed. The kings of the late Middle Ages fought the Church tooth and nail for control of the church, from the emperors against the popes up to about 1250 through the individual kings (Henry II and Becket, Philip IV and Boniface etc.) from 1150 onward.

Luther, who started out as an honest church reformer but went crazy (after being provoked by dishonest dealings behind his back by the Roman curia) against the Church and at that point, unwisely, ceded authority to reform the Church to the ruler of the state. He abandoned hope in God reforming the Church within the Church—that was his crucial error—and decided that the Church herself was irreformable, that the Prince along, as “Emergency Bishop” should do so. He gave up on the Christ-authorized leadership of the Church—the bishops. That was his fatal error.

So the origin of the de jure State Churches of the 1500s-1800s rest totally with Luther and the other Protestant Reformers. They took the easy way out—allied themselves with the increasingly powerful absolutist state, which came back to bite them as any idiot could have predicted it would. Make your bed with dogs and you get fleas.

It’s not a nice story. But it never helps to cover oneself in half-truths and special pleading because the truth is harder to bear.

The pope did not incite the crusade in Southern France. The temporal rulers had their eye on power aggrandizement and perverted the crusade idea for their own temporal power purposes. The Albigensian heresy was a real threat religiously as well—Dualism strikes at the very heart of the Christian faith. But trying to suppress it by force, in the end, was not wise. The popes who endorsed it were imprudent but the Albigensian crusade was every bit as much if not more a political crusade in its origin and execution.

How to stop heresy is a difficult problem. Let it flourish and people go to hell. Try to stop it by force and you make matters worse. We just say, who cares what anyone believes, which ultimately leads to even worse violence, including the slaughter of innocents in the womb.

We have not solved the religion and society problem today. We opted for religious pluralism, for understandable reasons, but that has led, once the generic Judaeo-Christian consensus faded, to the evergrowing colonization of the public square by militant atheism which is a Culture of Death. You will see horrors unimagined in the past because we have lost any religious consensus upon which to make and uphold public laws. We will have lawlessness unimaginable to people in past centuries.

And it started with an overreaching by the temporal rulers, led by your precious Protestant princes. The legitimate reaction against the overreaching, against the state churches, led to religious pluralism, which was necessary but required careful attention to a lowest-common-denominator Christian-Jewish underlying consensus if it was to survive. It didn’t and now we face the gales of Raw Power with all our laws cut down.

“Once Europeans read the Bible for themselves, they realized that they didn’t need hierarchies of priests speaking in dead languages, burning incense, and teaching doctrines which had no basis in the word of God. They learned from the Bible that all men are created equal, that all are valuable, and all are subject to law. Those are the basic principles necessary for free societies. The old rule of wealthy, corrupt church officials and hereditary elites (who were usually just the descendants of bygone warlords) was immediately put at risk.”

Absolute crap. Latin was a living language until well into the 18thc, certainly at the time of the Reformation. Anyone who wished to put some effort into it knew what was being said in the Mass. That most people didn’t wish to put the effort into it is typical of all Christians at all times. Most Bible Church attenders are woefully ignorant of what is preached at them—the surveys show that.

Nothing has changed. There always have been and always will be a lot of “CINOS”—Christians in name only and it’s just as true of your 10,000 precious Protestant denominations whose members DO NOT READ THE BIBLE FOR THEMSELVES but instead follow the hierarchical/priestly interpretations of Joe Evangelist or Hiram the Healer TV Preacher. Every single one of your 10,0000 Prot Denoms represents a new “priestly” religion of men.

People always have needed to interpret the Bible. The issue is not “reading it for yourself” versus having it interpreted for you by someone else but exactly who rightly does the interpreting—bishops in succession from Christ-appointed Apostles or one of the thousands of “Joe the TV Evangelist” bishops who run around the stage of American religion.

And Rome was the chief resitance to the nationalistic take-over of the Church in the early modern era. Period. That’s a simple fact. Rome was forced to take the role because breaking up the Church into national branches was the main momentum of the time. Protestants decided “we can live with that” and became pure and simple “national churches.” The Latin versus vernacular issue was simply a corollary of that more fundamental decsion for nationalism versus a pan-European, international, united Church. So Rome fought the nationalism and won in some areas and lost in others.

And those who made a pact with the devil of nationalism in order to beat up on “mean old Mama Rome” ended up fragmented into 10,000 denominations with religious belief being hounded out of the public square entirely and the Culture of Death and Anarchy bearing down on us. You Protestants are the guys who sowed the seeds for the divide-and-conquer victory of Death today.

We’ll all share the concentration camps together, though, so you might want to moderate your anti-Catholic bigotry before the Death-Wardens come in the middle of the night to carry you off.

Or is your hatred of the Catholic Church so great that you will actually join the Wardens of Death against the Catholics and their bishops who stand up to the Culture of Death? Will your bigotry against Catholics lead you join in the persecution of Catholics or will you recognize before it’s too late that the Protestant alliance with the State in the 1500s sowed the seeds of the fracturing of Christendom that has permitted Death to gain the upper hand today? Death will not win in the end, but Its defeat will come only via Christians, led by Catholics as they have led the fight against abortion (while Protestants either stood on the sideline or cheered Death on) for the past 40 years, paying a heavy price for their witness to Truth.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.