Jonah Goldberg: Comparing Today’s Terrorists to Inquisition is Apples to Oranges

From the Columbus Dispatch. Goldberg is spot-on in his analysis. This is what happens when we parrot soundbites and don’t do the hard work of studying history. And if you doubt that, check out the comments that follow the column in the Dispatch. They speak for themselves.

But the Inquisition and the Crusades aren’t the indictments Obama thinks they are. For starters, the Crusades — despite their terrible organized cruelties — were a defensive war.

“The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living English-language historian of Islam.

As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.

Historian Thomas Madden, director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, writes that the “Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.”

In medieval Europe, heresy was a crime against the state. Local nobles, often greedy, illiterate and eager to placate the mob, agreed to execute people accused of witchcraft or other forms of heresy. By the 1100s, such accusations were causing grave injustices (in much the same way that apparatchiks in Communist countries would level charges of disloyalty to have rivals “disappeared”) .

“The Catholic Church’s response to this problem was the Inquisition,” Madden explains, “first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184.”

I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions, especially in Spain. But there’s a very important point that needs to be made here that transcends scoring easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism. Christianity, even in its most-terrible days, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.

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C.S. Lewis Opines About Theology

This is worth your read, especially if you are one who considers yourself to be “spiritual” but not “religious.” Excerpted from The Joyful Christian.

Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you… They all say “the ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion.” I have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool. Theology means “the science of God,” and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated like children?

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real, to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America [from England].

Now Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But the map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you or I are likely to get on our own way are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

Columbus Dispatch: Who Knew? | Does the Lore Surrounding Groundhogs, Shadows and Winter Hold Any Truth?

I told you those crazy Pennsylvanian rodents can’t be trusted. Not the case with those wise Ohio rodents like Buckeye Chuck.

1aa-whoknew07---feb--7-art-ggr10bnoa-1groundhog-standingUpon their arrival during the 1700s in Pennsylvania, German settlers had a tradition known as Candlemas Day — at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. With the occurrence of fair weather, according to the superstition, the second half of winter promised to be cold and stormy. For early Christians in Europe, the custom on Candlemas Day had involved clergy blessing candles and distributing them in the dark of winter, with a lighted candle placed in each window of a home…

The official recognition of Groundhog Day began on Feb. 2, 1886, with a proclamation in The Punxsutawney Spirit. The first of a series of groundhogs was named “Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” and his hometown called the “Weather Capital of the World.” His forecasting accuracy, however, ranks as low: 39 percent.

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