Dean's World

Reverend Sensing (always worth reading--no, seriously, always) recently took Muslims to task for abhorrent behavior--in this case, a group of Muslims who lynched a guy because they thought he'd burned a copy of the Koran.

Well, you know, I'm down with that condemnation. Of course I am. The only exception I took to any of Sensing's words were these two lines:

"Religious tolerance for thee, but not for me. I’ll start listening to Muslims giving me advice about religious toleraance when Christians can openly, publicly worship in in Saudi Arabia."

Oooh man! So, so close to something I couldn't disagree with. But, as I noted in the good reverend's comments, there is this article every Christian should click right here to read, written not long ago by Presbyterian lay theologian Stephen R. Haynes, which I quote briefly here:

WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS who want to remember Rwanda learn from this genocide? Most scholarly analyses ignore the religious dimensions of the tragedy, portraying the Hutu extermination campaign as an indictment of European colonialism or a metaphor for the dilemmas of post-cold-war foreign policy. But there are important exceptions. For instance, Timothy Longman’s contribution to In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in The Twentieth Century documents the active involvement of church personnel and institutions in the genocide: 'Numerous priests, pastors, nuns, brothers, catechists, and Catholic and Protestant lay leaders supported, participated in, or helped to organize the killings,' Longman writes. And he remarks that more people may have been killed in church buildings than anywhere else.

Last I heard--anyone who wishes to correct me should do so--a substantial number of those butchered in the Rwanda genocide were muslims.

Now, in Rev. Sensing's comments, one learned fellow named Chuck Pelto took me to task a little, saying, "I do believe that more people have been slaughtered by atheists than by the ‘religious’ in the Twentieth Century....So, don’t pat yourself on the back too quickly, compadre."

Presumably, Chuck is not familiar with my writings on this subject. Perhaps I need to make a "definitive posting" on it and put it in my archives, although anyone who searches around knows my view on this. Clearly--and irrefutably--the greatest murderers of the 20th century were atheists. You need only add up the Communist body count. If you do so, then those of us who've said things like "religion is the opiate of the masses" need to hide our heads in shame.

Chuck on the other hand tried to add Hitler's body count to the atheists' horrendous, stupifying, 100 million+ total. But nope, that doesn't work. He wasn't an atheist. Neither was his regime atheist. Some try to pin his vile crimes on Christians, but that dog won't hunt either--Hitler's having used some Christian symbolism and rhetoric won't hide the fact that he was basically a pagan mysic trying to restore a perverse form of Asatru to Germany.

Which, come to think of it, makes the 20th century horrors come full circle: the atheists, the monotheists, and the polytheists all have their hideous monsters in their closets, now don't they?

But there is a ray of hope: We're all united in our hatred of the Jews.

It's good that we can all get together on something, isn't it?

;-)

More seriously: I've seen a good bit of Catholic-bashing this last couple of weeks. The elevation of the new Roman Catholic Pope seems to have brought a lot of that out. Especially from people who love to bring up religious persecution by the Roman Catholic Church. This brought to mind this fabulous article more people should read:

The Protestant Inquisition: "Reformation" Intolerance and Persecution, by Catholic theologian Dave Armstrong.

In it, Armstrong documents pretty much everything you Lutherans, Calvinists, and other papist-bashers ought to be apologizing to Rome for--if we're going to be in the business of cringing about our spiritual forefathers, anyay.

(Yeah I'm being flip but you should read it. Some of you guys who kick around the Catholics for the Inquisitions really need to shut up and learn the meaning of the words "forgiveness" and "humility.")

In closing, I'll mention something that Father Dan Madigan (a Jesuit, no surprise) wrote not long ago:

If one considers the history of warfare as a whole, the conflicts between Muslims and Christians pale into insignificance against the much bloodier conflicts waged between groups professing the same religion.

The history of the Muslim community has been marred since the beginning by internecine war – and continues to be so even up to our own times: East and West Pakistan; Iran and Iraq; Iraq and Kuwait; in Algeria, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Indonesia to name only the most striking examples.

Virtually all the European wars up until our own time have been fought between rival groups of Christians. And if we think we have left that bitter history behind, let us not forget the 800,000 Christians murdered by their fellow Christians in Rwanda, or the Christian Serbs and Croats who fought one another as well as Muslims in the former Yugoslavia.

Indeed, anyone who knows history knows that America's First Amendment came into place because our founding fathers were afraid of the endless wars of one group of Christian against another that so many of them had escaped from in Europe.

Anyway, you can read Father Madigan's most-excellent piece by clicking right here.