Slander - Liberal Lies About Christianity
By Bruce Walker (08/28/03)
Ann Coulter wrote a magnificent book describing how liberals slander conservatives. This deliberate campaign of defamation also describes how liberals approach traditional Christianity. Belief in a Creator whose moral authority transcends every conceivable ideology or institution of man is anathema to the secular dogmatists of the Left.
Consequently, Leftism is hostile to any serious ethical monotheism. But Christianity is to Leftists what America was to the Soviet Union: the “Main Enemy.” Why? Because Christianity teaches us that though we are born with murder in our hearts, God can replace that murder with love.
The good news of Christianity contradicts all the bad news of class exploitation theories, racial hatred, sexism, and any other social pathology which poisons people against other people. Christianity says that material accomplishments will never change the world, conquering armies will never change the world, and only divine love can change the world.
This threatens everyone who craves power, prestige and popularity - those tokens of value which Leftists crave like addicts crave drugs. No fame, fortune or power; no hordes of people screaming hoarse cries to the Fuhrer or the Vozd can ever do what the simplest prayer of a ordinary, trusting soul to his Creator can do.
Leftism pretends to be new and fresh, but it is ancient and foul. Leftism was antiquated long before Marx or the revolutionaries of France had their say. It is no more than envy, pride and lies dressed in finery.
Leftists once whispered to Alexander the Great that more conquests and slaughter would make him a god. It proclaimed to the brutally efficient Romans that aqueducts and roads - “infrastructure” - justified the enslavement, the slaughter, and the conquest of millions.
Leftism whispered to the Bourbons of France that the exquisite art of Versailles made up for callousness toward the poor, and it guided Robespierre to decapitate people with the “crime” of noble birth based upon the greater good of the masses.
Leftism led Hitler to Marxism, then to National Socialism and always away from a loving God. Leftism guided the hand of Mussolini in his first political essay - “God Does Not Exist”- and guided his life according to that atheistic dogmatism. Leftism has guided every Marxist leader in the Twentieth Century to casual democide, capricious torments and blase corruption.
Leftism says above all else that the end justifies the means and that the proper ends are no more than what men who with truncheons say that those ends should be. Recoiling at Jesus is the instinct of all Leftism. Redwood forests may be holy to Leftists. Academia may be infallible truth to Leftists. Savagery in the vindication of old, presumed wrongs may be the sacrament of Leftism. But Jesus is the negation of these and every phantom of meaning in the ultimate nihilism that is Leftism.
Christianity is an unparalleled force for good in human history - whatever one believes about the metaphysical validity of Christian doctrine - and this very success in transforming the world for the better makes vicious slander of true Christianity is indispensable to Leftism. Recall the motto of revolutionary socialism: “The worse, the better.”
The defamation of Christianity is not important to other faiths. Religiously serious Jews and Moslems, like Christians, are anchored in transcendent values. Franz Rosenzwieg, probably the most important Jewish theologian of the Twentieth Century, considered Christianity to be the Judaism of non-Jews - an equally valid path to the Holy One. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian of equally great repute, considered Jesus as “my brother” and as a great Jewish teacher.
Islam considers Jesus to be a great prophet - equal in stature to Abraham and Moses. Slandering and mocking Jesus in strictly Islamic countries is a very serious criminal offense. No one could produce Last Temptation of Christ in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Pious Jews and Moslems, of course, hold different beliefs than pious Christians. But pious Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, Mormons and Russian Orthodox Christians hold differing beliefs regarding Christianity as well.
All three major monotheistic religions - Jews, Moslems and the various denominations of Christianity - believe absolutely in a Blessed Creator of the Universe. Each submits himself to moral laws which transcend man and mankind. Indeed, Islam roughly translates as “submission to the will of the One Lord.”
Leftists, however, fancy themselves gods. They will always be the worst and most emphatic slanderers of Christianity. How is this ancient slander manifested? Not by some different version of the absurd anti-Judaic fraud, like the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but rather by repeating factual inaccuracies about Christians which over time become accepted as fact.
How deeply have these slanders infected modern consciousness? Consider some of the following “facts” which most of us consider as true without thought or reflection.
Christopher Columbus, we learn in history books, proved that the world was round by traveling to what he thought was India (and was actually the Western Hemisphere) - right? Wrong. Christians never proposed the absurd proposition that the world was flat. Until the 1830s, no one believed that Christians in medieval Europe had ever thought that the world was flat.
One French and two American writers - Antoine-Jean Letronne, John Draper, and Andrew Dickson White - schemed to create a non-existent schism between Christianity (which these men loathed) and science (which these men thought our secular salvation). They simply said that medieval Christians believed something that was never believed by these Christians at all.
If anything, Christian science and Christian theology at the time of Colombus explained the spherical nature of the Earth better than other systems of thought. The journey of Colombus was not about discovering the roundness of the Earth, but about finding another route to Café and India. Why invent this myth? The purpose was to make Christians, whose intellectual achievements were transforming human thought, appear ignorant and childish: pure slander.
The Earth revolves around the sun, but most of us have been taught to believe that Christians uniquely resisted this cosmological fact. This proposition is so absurd that malice against Christianity is the only conceivable motive for it. Every scientists involved in proving the heliocentric theory - Copernicus, Kepler, Napier and Galileo - were Christians. Yet the trial of Galileo is reflexively assumed as evidence of Christian bigotry toward science. Was it?
Galileo was not tried based upon theological objections to his theory, but rather upon scientific objections to his theory. These scientific objections showed intellectual rigor, not laziness. The Ptolemaic theory, which was accepted not just by Christians but by Moslems and Jews, worked. The sophisticated system of concentric circular orbits accurately predicted eclipses and accurately guided ship captains across oceans.
The heliocentric theory that was proposed by Galileo, by contrast, did not work. If his theory was true, then we should have been able to perceive stellar parallaxes. Galileo himself acknowledged this problem and that he could not explain the absence of such evidence. Centuries later, a stellar parallax was observed - but this remained a serious defect in his theory at the time of his trial.
Galileo said that the planets circle the sun. They do not. The planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun, which is a critically important fact in how the bodies of the solar system move in space.
Galileo proposed a heliocentric theory of the universe rather than a geocentric theory of the universe. He was completely wrong. The sun travels through the cosmos, just like the Earth. It is not, as Galileo insisted, the unmoving center of the universe.
Galileo could not answer these scientifically serious problems with his theory, but the Catholic Church did not even demand that Galileo stop expounding his heliocentric theory. He could even proposed that his theory of how the heavenly bodies moved was superior to the Ptolemaic theory. The trial of Galileo resulted in a verdict directing that he cease teaching his theory as fact.
Education, at this time, was taught in religious institutions throughout the world. Consequently, the Catholic church had a duty to protect students from intellectually false studies. That was all which the trial purported to address, and the Church was right and Galileo was wrong: the theory he proposed was wrong in two critical areas and was unprovable as fact in those areas in which his theory contained some scientific truth.
These two misrepresentations of Christian intellectual understanding were calculated slanders. Even worse have been those slanders which paint Christians as bigoted and immoral. How often have we been warned about the horrors of the Salem Witch Trials? Hollywood and every other vehicle for Christophobic venom has painted this as one of the darkest chapters of religion and justice in human history.
This episode is important because it is the worst example that anti-American Christophobes can find of religious injustice in America, but consider the actual facts of the cases.
In 1692 a total of twenty people were executed for witchcraft. Within five years of these executions, the Massachusetts general court offered public repentance for these actions. It also deplored the action of the judges in these cases. One of these judges publically confessed his sin from the pulpit. The jurors who convicted the alleged witches signed a statement of regret. Member of the families of those who had been executed were offered indemnities.
The Salem Witch Trials were an example of religious hysteria leading to tragic results, but human history is filled with endless examples of such punishment of the innocent. What should amaze serious historians is the unprecedented, total and timely repudiation of this crime by the very people who perpetrated it. When else in history has this happened?
Moslem Turkey today does not recognize its genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in the Twentieth Century. China does not acknowledge any fault in its genocide of Tibetan Buddhists. The Soviet Union never apologized for its extermination of millions of believing Christians.
But Christians in New England, over three centuries ago, took their miscarriage of justice very seriously and did precisely what Jesus instructed them to do: repent quickly and completely. Why does Hollywood and history books make so much of this event?
The answer to that question is easy: how many of you knew only about the witch trials themselves, often in great detail, but knew nothing at all about the utter and absolute repudiation of this sad episode by the Christians of Massachusetts Bay Colony within five years of the trials?
Why do most people know nothing about the 1.5 Million Polish Christians stuffed into cattle cars and sent to concentration camps by Soviets between September 1939 and June 1941? Why do most people not know that Germans joining the Schutzstaffel or “SS” - the monsters who perpetrated the Holocaust - were required to renounce their Christianity?
Christians are blamed for the Holocaust. This horrific slaughter of more than six million Jewish men, women and children is rightly condemned as among the worst crimes of the Twentieth Century or, indeed, of human history.
But the very first people who voluntarily opposed Hitler and his Nazi Regime out of religious conscience were the Protestant clergy of Germany. Had they simply ignored the evil of Nazism, they could have lived in relative comfort and safety. Most did not.
The political ruler in Europe who risked the most to save Jews, who did so with no hope for any earthly reward, and who saved at least forty thousand Jews from extermination, was also the most profoundly religious political ruler on the continent of Europe: Francisco Franco of Spain.
When Tsarist Russia began its last round of pogroms at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the loudest voices in opposition were Christian church leaders from around the world. When the long exile of Jews from England ended, this was the result of the only governor of England who owed his power specifically because of the utter support of pious Christians, Oliver Cromwell, the great Puritan commander.
When Jews first found a real home after the diaspora, the safety and security of America, it was George Washington, who embraced Christianity more seriously than perhaps any president in American history, who wrote his famous “Letter to the Jews of Newport.”
This document, which is still read every year in some synagogues, goes far beyond simple toleration, which cynical and irreligious European rulers of the Enlightenment had often offered Jews, but protection against bigotry and persecution. The letter is not legalism, but morality - Christian morality - that welcomed Jews to America.
Leftists lie about Christianity. Leftists slander Christians because as look as people worship a loving God in a gentle theology, they will never worship the secular gods of a hateful misology.
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