Posted on 10/05/2014 6:02:28 PM PDT by vabible
Johnny come lately? Two thousand years compared weigh the Sun-god cult of the Enlightenment, which goes back less than three hundred. I dare say that men die/kill for many causes other than religion. And men who call themselves Christian give their own lives and take those of other more often for gold and glory than for the sake of Christ. The men who died by the millions in the Great War did not do so because their priests commanded them to do so, although many priests did ask victory for their nation. They did so because a few dozen men, the leaders of their nation, persuaded them that they had to fight and kill and die in order to defend their nations. The popes, Pius X and Benedict XV tried to get the nations to make peace. The year before the war, Pius X even gave a famous speech predicting what was to come. His successor sought from the end of the first year, where the parties were stalemated, to end the blood shed. No one listened.In August, 1916, the young Kaiser Karl of Austria tried through the Church and by secret meetings with the Allies, and communications with Wilson, to feel out the possibility of a separate peace. No one would take him up, the Germans caught winds of it, and the Kaiser was marginalized by the War Party. Too much blood had been spilled, and even the United States was moving toward war in the name of a new religion, democracy.
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