How Britain proved his point

Derek BLADES

On his arrival in Britain, the Pope told the Queen that “Britain’s historic respect for truth and justice, for mercy and charity ...derived from Christian principles.”

The blatant cover-up of sex crimes by priests suggests that the Catholic Church has little regard for truth, justice, mercy or charity. I wonder what Christian principles he had in mind.

Tony Pearson

"the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society"

Well; the most all inclusive, God dominating, God worshipping, God fearing theology is Islam. It produces the most unpleasant philosophy imaginable.
Give me humanism any time.
Do you honestly believe Ratzinger deserves any respect at all? Who must bear responsibility for the child abuse cover up? Not atheism. We are talking about the crimes of the priesthood, the cadre of Catholicism.

Every day that goes by I am relieved that I am not a muslim nor a catholic. My moral standards are far superior to theirs. I don't need gods and spirits and angels and jinns infecting my brain.
If anything, it's the drippy Christian leadership that is accomodating Islam with 'faith dialogue' and 'we all worship the same god' nonsense.

Frank Sutton

Tony Pearson : "My moral standards are far superior to theirs."
Expand on this claim, please

Dixon

"Britain was facing an ‘aggressive new atheism’ and ‘Christians were at a disadvantage’."

What bunkum. As you well know, Britain is witnessing the assertion in all walks of life of an aggressive new theocracy in the guise of Islam. The real marvel is how the same people who protest against and denounce Christians are out in support of Muslims' right to impose their mores upon us. As myriad examples attest, from the global reaction to a few cartoons to book-burning hysteria.

How can people like messrs Fry, Tatchell and Pratchett (who I used to respect, but no longer) shamelessly attack the enfeebled church whilst tacitly approving (by their failure to protest against) the new religious bigotry that is gradually rising around us?

Mike MC

Wow...just reading the responses to your article adds weight to your thesis.

dominic

Thank you Mel. Christians and Jews and all people of goodwill must stand together to reassert the timeless values that have sustained the West over 2000 years. May God bless you.

William Reid Boyd

We few, we happy band ... (to compare great things with small).

And Pius XII Mel? How would you rate him intellectually speaking? What's your take on the judgement at Yad Vashem

"In 1933, when he was Secretary of the Vatican State, he was active in obtaining a Concordat with the German regime to preserve the Church's rights in Germany, even if this meant recognizing the Nazi racist regime. When he was elected Pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-Semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing. In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene. The Pope maintained his neutral position throughout the war, with the exception of appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia towards its end. His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged Churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react."? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII_and_Yad_Vashem

Bishop Alois Hudal, that fellow scourge of all things liberal? What about him (after all he wrote books and everything fhs)? His support of Fritz Stangl, the commander of Treblinka and unrepentant despatcher of at least 9000,000 souls : men, women and children, most of them Jews : whom he helped escape to Brazil? Would that have been an ethical or a moral position he was taking there? Neither of the above perhaps (daring thought!)?

Do let us have your profundly deliberated thoughts on the matters.

David Kennedy

It is striking that the Pope has been able to visit many countries where Catholicism has had problems and scandals, but in all of those cases the locals have behaved like grownups - except Britain, where it's problems and scandals have been comparatively mild. From here in Australia, I'm struck by the sheer childishness of much of the criticism,

So I think your key point about the reaction to the visit is well-taken. It tells us much more about the current state of Britain than it does about the Pope.

Paul Owen

There's not enough space to fully refute all of the nonsense in this post. But it's irritated me enough to write a long post about it on my own blog. It is illogical, ignorant posts like this which make secularists and atheists speak out. One can only assume that someone of Melanie's obvious intelligence is being wilfully ignorant in this case, which is sadly typical of the religious. One would have hoped for better.

Drakken

Ah yes Blades attacks Catholics, why am I not surprised, moral compass is a tad skewed yet again.

Sara Greene

I know this is rather off-topic, but I have two quick questions for Melanie (if I may):

1) Do you personally believe that the age of the earth is less than one million years?

2) Do you accept that humans and, say, gorillas, share a common biological ancestor?

Thank you.

Mort

Who's idea of 'profound' are we using here, Katie Price's?

TomTom

Kasper apparently has a foot injury and is 77. What he told focus is factual and true. Reading books by Ratzinger in German reveals a very clear rational mind, that of a philosopher. He is regarded as the greatest German theologian since Martin Luther. His writings are certainly lucid and worthy of detailed discussion.

The behaviour of Simonyi-funded Dawkins on MIcrosoft funds and the assorted carton characters shows a desire to stifle discussion and philosophical debate with smear and innuendo.

The tactic used by the NSDAP to bring the Roman Church to heel by way of a Modus Vivendi in Germany was an attack on Catholic schools, a press campaign against priests alleging pederasty and abuse, and physical intimidation. Legislation removed crucifixes from schools and persecuted Catholic Believers.

The cycle is being repeated and the press is engaged in the same activities for Common Purpose

Derek BLADES

Drakken writes "Ah yes Blades attacks Catholics, why am I not surprised, moral compass is a tad skewed yet again." Despite Drakken's appalling grammar, I would like to reply.

Looking again at what I wrote I believe I was indeed mistaken in suggesting that the Cahtolic Church showed no mercy or charity in its handling of the paedophile scandal.

The Church showed great mercy and charity towards the priests involved. Perhaps that is what the Pope had in mind.

GaryO

Dixon (@September 17th, 2010 1:30am) has hit the spot once again. In the face of rising Islamism around us, the hypocrisy and downright cowardice of progressives and lefties is astonishing.

Where were Terry Pratchett & Co. when Ken Livingstone, not in his personal capacity, but as a Mayor of London no less, played host to the radical islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi who supports suicide bombers, is a rampant homophobe and oppressor of women's rights?

What this Pope's visit has proved is that Britain is no longer a Christian country.

Dominic L-R

I'm curious as to what kind of protest and criticism Melanie Phillips would find valid. It seems to me that if an atheist makes any kind of criticism of the Pope or his visit, it automatically becomes "agressive", "gross intolerance" and "hatred". Stephen Fry was recently attacked in the Daily Mail for his protest, but take a look at what he actually said: "I have no objection to the Pope visiting Britain. He is welcome to do so". Hardly 'agressive'. What he was actually protesting about was that the Pope had been granted a state visit, when the Vatican couldn't really be considered as a State. Seems fair enough.
And what about people who disapprove of the Pope's stand on, say, condoms and Aids? After all, this is a Pope who has actually spread the lie that condoms increase Aids. Are people allowed to protest about that, or would Melanie consider that "agressive" or "intolerant"? How is such criticism "frightening illiberal"? Are we all supposed to just accept the Pope's position on such issues in the name of tolerance? Are we supposed to keep quiet in the name of politeness? Does Melanie do the same when it comes to Islam? Of course not. She makes valid, much needed criticism of the more extreme views of that religion. So why the double standard when it comes to criticism of the Pope and the Catholic Church? Shouldn't we be free to criticise religions equally, or do we have to back off when it comes to Christianity?

Tony Pearson

" the same people who protest against and denounce Christians are out in support of Muslims' right to impose their mores upon us"

This is untrue.
A brief look at Dawkins' forum will reveal a considerable group of knowledgeable activists against Islam.
All the well known 'public atheists' have made powerful statements against this abrahamic faith. There are dozens of examples on YouTube. Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihadwatch is an atheist and he has written extensive criticisms of Islam. When is Rowan Williams going to do so? Never, I would suggest.
The Christian leadership is impotent against Islam because it is committed to the same delusion, the same respect for 'prophets' and abrahamic faiths.
It is true that there are pockets of the left that have aligned with Islam, though they tend to be associated with the revolutionary left. This small but sometimes influential group does so because it has a primary agenda of formenting conflict which it hopes will lead to the overthrow of western civilisation.
These people have to be denounced at every opportunity, but they are not the same as humanists.

engineerist

I am not a catholic,however many friends of mine are. I am aware of the many horrors perpetrated by people pretending to be christians throughout history, I do not support paedophilia either.To those who are anxious to attack the catholic church on this issue, you may like to peruse this article http://www.gayconspiracy.info/priestmarraige.html Its part of a much larger study that is very interesting to anyone concerned about the wellbeing of this country, it is very exhaustive, but well worth the trouble

Mjolnir de Jersiaise

Mort says: "Who's idea of 'profound' are we using here, Katie Price's?"

Well that's obviously the definition you are working from. Just as obviously, it appears you have never read a single book by Ratzinger.

Paul H. Goodley M.D.

Melanie Philips' erudite, awesomely powerful and succinct analysis of the Pope's incisive description of British increasingly self-destructive self-threats would, I think, be more persuasive if the Church wasn't so massively mired in its own corruption, pedophilia +>

Verity

What the Pope said about Britain is indisputable fact It is being said by clergy in many parts of the Uk , and ignored but because the Pope said it, God forbid, some of the populace may take notice and be alerted. That is why the liberals ( or illiberals ) are attacking back.

Joshua

"Do you accept that humans and, say, gorillas, share a common biological ancestor?"

John Prescott is living proof that this must be true.

Nick

If you want to believe in your Sky Gods and bedtime stories go ahead, but know that I laugh at you. I don't care if you're Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Your God(s) are a fantasy and your 'holy' books worthless fiction.

Religion is nothing but Medieval superstition and bunkum that spreads intolerance, repression and violence. It has no place in 21st Century society.

Ed

Posts such as this "set out to illuminate in flashing neon lights the truth of the Papal analysis of Britain’s morally illiterate, frighteningly illiberal and degraded moral and intellectual state." Melanie, you could not have done a better job.

John.

Derek Blades: While Nick - see below - may be right, nevertheless Christian values are presumably based on what Jesus is actually supposed to have said and a lot of that is commendable and acceptable to any righteous person of good-will - "love your neighbour as yourself" for instance. You seem to advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rousseau said many valuable things about education in his "Emile" and about freedom and equity in his famous "Discours...", yet he put all his children, one by one, into an orphanage and never took any active part in politics. Does that invalidate what he said?

Tiberius

It would be interesting if one of the subscribers to "humanism" were to define what it is.

The "how" of life is increasingly understood as a result of scientific discovery, but not the "why". Dismissing God as the answer to "why" is, ironically I suppose, a demonstration of a greater tendency to believe in fairies.

Dai from Edinburgh

By far most child abuse takes place in the home and is committed by men and women who are either wreckless as parents or criminal. In my time working in social care I never came across a single case of a priest being investigated for child abuse - this is not to say that such abusers don't exist as they do in other institutions where children are involved - but the point I'm making is that secularists obsessively target the Catholic church on this point because it is a useful boyeyman issue for them to tarnish the church in general with. Taken to its logical conclusion - if these church attacking secularists are genuinely concerned about child abuse - a male priest abusing a boy suggests that the priest is gay and therefore gays should not be allowed in the priesthood, right? No, I don't expect secularists obsessed with attacking the church and all that it stands for ethically and morally to make that obvious connection.

simone

Spot on, Melanie.
Cardinal Kaspar was right. The Pope is right. The only sad thing is that it takes a couple of outsiders to say it.

Pete

And this is the Britain that even conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson acknowledge rose to greatness through piracy, slavery and the massive exploitation and colonisation of other countries (with a few massacres here and there to keep things ticking over nicely and the cash coming in).

I might take another look at these Christian values you extol - they sound as if they would fit in very nicely in 'our degraded moral and intellectual state'.

Linda Smith

Tony Pearson wrote:
“The Christian leadership is impotent against Islam because it is committed to the same delusion, the same respect for 'prophets' and abrahamic faiths.”

Beats me how the Christian leadership can respect Islam when Islam’s central belief is that Abraham and all the other prophets were Muslims, that God gave the Muslim (not code to Moses (Musa) and the Bible is false. The Koran vilifies the Jews who it accuses of substituting words in the Torah and says the Jews and Christians (the People of the Book) must be humiliated and their lives forfeited if they fail to pay a tax (jizya) to the Muslims. Of course, the Christians are viewed as idolators for worshipping a man-god.

Whew! The Christian leadership is not just impotent, they’re stupid. I wonder if any Jews said the Nazis' views should be respected.

Stuart

I agree with Paul Owen. If I didn't know better I'd say this whole article was a spoof.

'One of the most profound thinkers of our time.'

We are talking about a man who thinks that wearing a condom is an abominable sin and has directly compared tolerance of gay people to rainforest destruction.

‘Christians were at a disadvantage’.

'Absolutely correct.'

So what are Christians in the UK not allowed to do that everybody else can?

Bickers

Melanie,

Are we to assume from your comments that the only way society can function in a cohesive and moral way is to believe in religion and its imaginary friends. What happened to the Enlightenment?

You say the Pope talks about Britain's historic respect for truth and justice, for mercy and charity. But you didn't mention the Church turned a blind eye to our slave trade as the German Church and Rome did to the Holocaust!

Our morals have improved during the last 50 years and we didn't need religion to do that.

What all religions want is power. And to use that power to coerce people to lead a life that the leaders of religion deem 'right'.

As science advances we see God receding into more gaps between our knowledge. We don't need God and religion to lead decent lives, we need education and good democratic governance to do so.

Dave M

"By contrast, atheism showed how
the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’."

Is Melanie here confusing militant atheism with Prof Dawkins? I agree and I disagree on this. I agree in this country we have militant atheists who smugly discriminate against Christians. However, this doesn't mean atheism is purely negative. Prof Dawkins himself, so far as I'm aware, doesn't seek to root out and attack religion by discrimination. He praises the 10 commandments. In fact, anyone who reads his book carefully will see he actually endorses the preservation of religious traditions on the basis of cultural heritage. That is, he would never suggest knocking down churches or synagogues. His point is only that religion seeks for itself an immunity from criticism and investigation of truth. By that, I suggest you could aggressively question Plato's Republic or Einstein's theory of relativity but to tackle religion sends half of the world into a fury, fists and placards in the air. More so in the Middle East as we know.
I don't think atheism is so negative. If you look at the situation in Tsarist Russia with the power and exploitation of the Church amonst the peasantry, you can see why Lenin became so secular. Religion has usually always been linked to a King, Tsar or crazy Mullah to subjugate people to a non democratic system.
As to the Pope aid's comment on Third World within these borders, yes, I agree he had a good point.

Eddie

Dai - your argume is this: 'I never knew of any priest abusing kids so thereforemost don't'. So if no-on is arrested for murder, that means that there have been no murders, right?

Errr.... what? Good grief! Is that good practice in social work?

So because it's hidden it doesn't exist?

Are you catholic by any chance?

The one thing I'd say in defence of priests is that religious men of all religions are just as bad - especially from the totalitarian religions (catholicism, islam etc).

There is still SO much abuse in religious contexts that is hidden.

Liz

Sara Greene, I know your question was posed to Melanie and not me. But since, by your implied criticism, you believe that the answer to your questions is yes, perhaps you'd like to prove it.

Linda Smith

Apologies to anyone puzzled by my editing error in my message at 12:48pm. Please ignore “(not”, in the first sentence, second paragraph.

EDDIE

The Pope has suggested that quite a few of his priests are ill. Indeed they may be, and they should be treated, but in a prison environment. That is not likely to happen. What was also so tragic was that once the abuse was discovered there seems not to have been attempts to stop further abuse.

Corsair

Geologists believe (on evidence) that the Earth is some 4.5 10E9 years old; zoologists believe (on evidence) that humans and gorillas have a common ancestor > 5 million years ago.

What either of these facts has to tell us about the validity of Christian ethics, of Christian teachings in general, or of anything at all for that matter, entirely eludes me.

Marcus from the USA

I don't remember atheists and/or agnostics burning each other at the stakes like Christians did in merry old England just a few centuries ago.

No beheadings either, unlike how Anglican Queen Elizabeth I had Catholic Mary Queen of Scots killed.

Corsair

"There is still SO much abuse in religious contexts that is hidden."

Then how do you know about it?
Are you able to divine abuse in secular contexts too, or does your sixth sense not work on that frequency?

John thomas

"Give me humanism any time", says Tony Pearson. Correction, it should be called "inhumanism" as more evil has been done as the product of secularism/atheism than by any religion; and there's more to come: as we (the West) move more and more towards man-centred philosophies and materialist "values", the ordinary, individual person will count for less and less, and the Culture of Death will increase its hold. Dystopia comes.

Marcus from the USA

Linda Smith:

It is even more mind boggling how the Christians can hold inter-faith dialogue with Jews, a group who believe in a religion that states that Jesus is a false messiah.

The term "Judeo-Christian" is an oxymoron.

Sara Greene

Liz wrote: "I know your question was posed to Melanie and not me. But since, by your implied criticism, you believe that the answer to your questions is yes, perhaps you'd like to prove it."

Actually, my answer to the first question (earth less than one million years old) would be an emphatic 'No'.

Anyway, I find it a little odd that you should challenge me to 'prove' the scientifically well-established age of the earth, and our shared biological ancestry with gorillas. Both rest on firm, scientific, evidence-based foundations (which, of course, would count for absolutely nothing to most creationists). Would you also have challenged me to 'prove' Einstein's general theory of relativity if I had merely asked Melanie if she accepted its validity?

Incidentally, I would dearly love to ask the unelected and somewhat evasive Cabinet Minister, Sayeeda Warsi, the same two questions. It's just that I have this 'gut feeling' (not wishing to second-guess her) that she wouldn't give a simple 'Yes' or 'No' to either question.

I might well ask her!

TomTom

"The term "Judeo-Christian" is an oxymoron."

Not really. Once you surmount the pablum that passes for Christianity in The West ie Sentimentality & Good Feelings you find Jesus The Jew observing Torah and uttering much the same as was written in Leviticus but elevating Faith above Ritual.

There is not much in The New Testament that was not predicated upon The Jewish Bible or Old Testament.

Those who deny the Jewish roots of Christianity are Neo-Pagan

Jamie

"the brutally reductive vision of man as no more than a random assembly of atoms"

No-one - literally no-one, no scientists, no atheists, no secularists, no Christians, no group of any type - believes that man is merely a "random assembly of atoms".

To imply that they do is a complete misunderstanding of, well, everything.

Sara Greene

'John Thomas':

Thousands of deeply devout, religious people over the millenia have done evil, wicked, terrible things to people.

And many of the perpetrators were Christians -- worshippers of their Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. I guess they weren't "Real Christians", right? ;-)

Millions have died (often horribly) at the hands of the religious, and hundreds of thousands have been tortured and abused by the religious.

I fear the opposite to what you do: I believe that religion is slowly creeping back and beginning to assert itself, although here in the UK, I suspect that Islam (the Religion of Peace - as everyone knows) will be the religion (actually, it's a religio-political ideology) calling the shots over the coming decades. Over in the USA, the Christian young earth creationist nutjobs on the Conservative "Religious Right" are likely to grow strong and influential and may even gain real power (Christine O'Donnell's recent electoral victory makes me shudder with dread). This prospect probably doesn't worry you too much, does it?

I think that dark times lie ahead for most of us.

Time will tell, of course.

Corsair

“We don't need God and religion to lead decent lives”

Well, yes and no: the reason why atheists are able to lead decent lives is that we are still warmed by the last embers of Christian morality, and the decency atheists practice is still, at root, Christian decency – the manners and mores accreted over 1500 years and more in the West. Beyond the borders of Christendom the concept of decency barely exists: the only two arguable examples I can think of are the Annalects of Confucius and the teachings of Zoroaster (who believed in being kind to animals. Especially dogs). In both these cases, of course, as with Christianity, many who professed to be adherents quite simply ignored the strictures.

Absent God (perhaps we assert he is dead), on what does any proposed system of morality base its claim to authority? Tradition? Natural Law? Experience teaches us that those who want rid of God have scant regard for either: they have their own plans.

And what plans! Based, we are told on the authority of ‘reason’; or ‘the nation’; or ‘the race’; or the ‘working class’; or (most recently) ‘science’; to which they, and their anointed associates, have alone been granted unique gnosis.

Hmm, history teaches us that none of this has ended well. One can’t simply rub out the word ‘God’ and replace it with ‘Reason’ and expect people to grant it the same respect. After all, why is it more ‘reasonable’ to venerate Reason enshrined in her Temple than the Virgin enshrined in Notre Dame? Why should be accept the axioms upon which reason bases its moral arguments if we reject those upon which Christianity bases its? One can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, after all.

God may be dead (or driven away), but the urge to the transcendent still exists. It can’t be subdued but it can be perverted. What were socialism, Nazism, fascism and the ‘progressive’ movement (with its ghoulish pleasure in eugenics and death-chambers) but ghastly parodies of the very organised religion they claimed was redundant? What motivated their true believers if it was not a millenarian longing to create the Kingdom on earth. Ironic, isn’t it?

“Where there is no God, there is no Man either” is an observation of historical fact. The exaltation of Man – his reason, his race, his class – always seems to end up as the exaltation of a man – unlimited by tradition, law, God or religion – beyond whom there is no appeal, for what could one appeal to? Nothing left but power, the prophecy of the Overman realised.

Final point: atheists have not, it is true, burned their enemies at the stake: the peasants of the Vendee, the so-called ‘Kulaks’, the Crimean Tartars, the landlords and capitalist-roaders, the millions upon millions, the tens of millions of men, women and children murdered because God is dead, can perhaps – perhaps – be grateful for that.

Eddie

John Thomas - your argument, like the Pope's, in an entirely false one: neither nazis nor communists did the evils they did in the name of atheism (which just means not believing in god/s) - they did what they did in the name of their ideologies, which were really quasi-religions - and hero worship cultures of death too (ring any bells?).

Stalin was brought up by orthodox monks; Hitler was a catholic choir boy who stated he was and always would be a catholic. The catholic church was ofetn a supporter to fascism (cf Spain).

Really, your posts are too silly for words. Please read Dawkins to see why your equating atheism with fascism is nonsense.

Archie

Indeed, Miss Phillips, and now a foiled alleged Papal assassination plot by Muslims to add to our glorious multi-cultural status!

Sarah AB

As an atheist I find this post pretty offensive. I respect religious friends and colleagues and don't care for militant atheism (secularism is quite another thing) but how is this post any different from a reversed version of that kind of sneering intolerance?

Lindsay

The Pope calls secularism close kin of Nazism. Secularists protest. The fact of their protest is taken as proof of "Britain’s morally illiterate, frighteningly illiberal and degraded moral and intellectual state". This is surely a fine example of misdirection.

Michael Roberts

I am an admirer of Melanie'work, but I do feel she has gone "gone off on one" a little here.

As these comments have spread into many other related areas, I am prompted to express support for those who, like me, are regularly exasperated by the traducing of Professor Dawkins as a 'militant atheist' by the bigoted (and militant) religiose.

The arrogation of all virtue, altruism and milk of human kindness by all religions, whilst admittedly effective and not entirely unhelpful as far as it goes, is completely spurious. It is, again admittedly, and certainly to most people in earlier times, a much more easily accepted explanation of the nature of things than the far more plausible - to those who use their presumably God-given brains - idea that such universal human virtues, though like physical human attributes they are unevenly spread, are a product of both animal and human psychological evolution over quite unimaginable time, and are not 'revealed' to us by our imaginary friend via his 'prophets'.

That was then, this is now. All the evidence points the same way. But the propensity to attribute formerly inexplicable events to a deity was probably, and sadly, implanted evolutionarily into the genes or 'memes' as well, and God knows (as you might say) how long it could take to reduce to a manageable level. There may not be enough time.

Unfortunately the power of religion has too often been subverted and thus entrenched by human vices.

We know what's best for every bugger else, and by God we'll make them have it.

Funny how this applies to socialism as well.

Sorry about the rant, Melanie, all power to your elbow on most other subjects.

GeoffM

Shock, horror, Papal aide speaks truth and British secularists throw rattle out of pram.

We've seen it all before.

You are right - game set and match to Rome.

It's funny how they made hay over the Pope being drafted into the Hitler youth as a young boy but gagged over the fact that National and International Socialism embraced atheism and went on to kill more people than any ideologies/religions in the history of mankind.

Besides, did everyone see what a grey and sad spectacle the Protestant Taliban under rev Paisley made on Thursday?

It tool me right back to the 60's.

Bless...

Augustus

William Reid Boyd - On the other hand..."From 1941 to 1944 Pope Pius and the Catholic Church were responsible for saving more Jews from Nazi persecution than any other person or institution. Some Israeli scholars estimate that as many as 860,000 European Jews
were saved from death through concealment in church facilities, issuance of fake baptismal certificates, public appeals and other methods. In one instance, Pius lent the Roman Jewish community part payment of a ransom demanded by the Nazis to save several hundred Roman Jews. Prior to becoming Pope, Pius negotiated a Concordat between the Vatican
and Germany, which provided that Jews who had converted to Christianity would not be subject to persecution in Germany as Jews. The provision enabled local priests to save tens of thousands of Jews from deportation by issuing fake baptism certificates. The World Jewish Congress, American Jewish Community, Chief Rabbis of Jerusalem, Rome, Budapest, Golda Meir, and many other prominent Jewish representatives praised Pius for
his relief efforts and public denuciation of racial persecution." Pius XII had also ordered Rome's convents and monasteries to hide Jews during WW2, and he was reported to have been a co-conspirator in the July '44 plot to assassinate
Hitler.(Wikipedia/Pope Pius XII)

Adrian Elliot

It is outrageous that the coverage has focused on atheists when this visit is about the Catholic church and its victims, who in the most part are not atheists at all.

It is high time Ratzinger, not God, is brought to justice.

Adam B.

Marcus, Judaism does not, as far as I am aware, "state" that Jesus is a false Messiah. The Jews simply don't recognize Jesus as the Messiah, nor anyone else (there has been more than one contender). There is a difference.

Do you still think Jesus is an English name?

If your knowledge of Judaism is akin to your knowledge of Israel, no wonder you spout such anti-Israel nonsense.

charles soper

The Pope's position is a careful synthesis of Biblical theology and humanist philosophy. See the Vatican's classic example (in JP2's time) of Christian syncretism with an indigenous pagan mythology - neo-Darwinism.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP961022.HTM

However the classic locus of Protestant opposition to the Pope has been curiously muted of late - idolatry.
http://www.strateias.org/trent.htm

watttyler

Let's face it Melanie. What aggressive secularism comes down is loving vice, and loving irresponsibility, and making sure that equality of law does not apply. They may come on here and obsfucate with words, but it all boils down to hatred of a code that tells them they must abandon vice, and they must not abdicate their responsibilities, and they are equal under the law.

That is what it boils down to.

Gary

The Vatican should hand over all the guilty priests to police authorities. These are the people who believed the Sun orbited the Earth. When Galileo pointed out it didn't, they were very "aggressive".
We were created by the Sun, and the big bang before it, not a "God". In fact, the universe and its workings, Saturn's rings, Io, etc are far more magnificent and full of wonder than anything in the Bible.

In the Wilderness in America

Corsair and Augustus

Some very fine points about Christianity, secularism, and Pope Pius XII.

Let me just add the following:

There was another cleric in Rome at the time of the Holocaust who was a hero. He turned out to be Pope John XXIII who saved thousands from the ovens and who is part of a special memorial in Jerusalem celebrating those heroes who were instrumental in saving lives during that horror.

As far as secularism is concerned, it too has been responsible for the death of millions. Consider Stalin, Hitler, and Mao and what depravity and brutality they inflicted on civilisation.

This is why morality is so crucial in the upbringing of children. This is why we must fight evil wherever it exists, whether in a religion or in a secular organization.

Lindsay

Augustus
September 17th, 2010 9:30pm
I think you are right to redress the balance somewhat. However, Pius still had a lot to answer for. He blundered in agreeing to dismantle the Catholic Party in exchange for his Concordat. This was of a piece with his preference for alliances with authoritarian regimes dedicated to the eradication of atheistical communism, but at a stroke it destroyed the most credible political force in Germany that could have opposed civilised values to the Nazi barbarism. He was also shockingly complicit in the most atrocious slaughter in the Balkans of Orthodox by Catholics.

Sarah AB

@in the wilderness - a secular state, as I see it, is one which is neutral in religious matters and doesn't support religion, or one particular religion, or indeed support irreligion. It treats everyone as equals from all religions or none. So I don't see the Soviet Union and China as proper secular states - more atheist theocracies which persecute(d) and/or sought to control religion, if not stamp it out completely. I support a secular state, and I'm an atheist, but I think bans on particular types of religous buildings, headwear, etc are illiberal whether they are carried out in the name of 'secularism' or theocracy.

Dave M

"I am prompted to express support for those who, like me, are regularly exasperated by the traducing of Professor Dawkins as a 'militant atheist'"

His book is also not lacking in humour. I found the comments on Lot (inhabitant of Sodom) very witty to say the least. Dawkins points out the scriptures make Lot out to be an example to us all and paragon of virtue. That in spite of the fact he offers to boot his own daughter out of the house so a mob of degenerates can have some other victim rather than the angel who was there on a domestic visit (warning of slipping morality). Dawkins compares that moral standard with modern norms. Clearly the moral ethics depicted in that instance seem to hold very little esteem for women, to say the least.
Even worse was the tale of the poor soul caught collecting firewood on a Sunday. His just deserts was to be stoned to death by order of Moses apparently. Such observations do offend but Dawkins has a point we have definitely progressed morally in spite of religion.

cuffleyburgers

Rubbish.

British values derive from the works of the likes of JS Mill, Locke and Adam Smith.

Catholocism (and religion generally) is an intellectual and ethical fossil.

Its sole value lies in the comfort it can bring to individuals, and therefore the agressive proseltysing of our left-footed or islamic friends is totally wrong.

Having said the above I am dismayed by the ridiculous media hoohaa about this visit.

I would have much preferred to see him decorously and politely ignored, as he deserves.

Eddie

"As far as secularism is concerned, it too has been responsible for the death of millions. Consider Stalin, Hitler, and Mao and what depravity and brutality they inflicted on civilisation."

What nonsense!

Secularism is the ONLY way to ensure freedom of belief and faith for everyone!

Hitler was a catholc; Stalin was brought up by orthodox monks. Fascism was supported by the catholic church - which for centuries accused the jews of killing jesus!

In fact, Fascism and communism and Maoism are just death cults and quasi-religions.

No-one has EVER been killed in the name of atheism - (which just means not believing in God) - and it is evil for religious persons to equate atheism and nazi-ism. But very VERY telling of course...

John.

What is meant by "Christian"? Someone who humbly tries to live according to the precepts of Jesus or anyone who happens to have been baptised or otherwise inducted into a Christian church? If the former one will not find many pirates, slave traders numbered amongst the membership, (though there are of course exceptions). If the latter, then any amount of scoundrels and criminals will be found, but they can never be considered as exemplars of Christian values. Most reforms for the better, in British society, were begun by convinced Christians in past centuries - William Wilberforce and Elizabeth Fry for e.g. The fact that Stalin was a seminarist as a young man and Hitler a catholic does not make them examples of Christian values at work. Marxist ideology means that religion has to be stamped out - as in Stalin's USSR, (until it became cynically expedient to re-open the churches during the war). Likewise people like Bonhoeffer were persecuted by the Nazis. Mao was no friend to religion either, although the Party has become more pragmatic as time has gone by, in China.

Edward McLaughlin

cuffleyburgers

Yes, as a general rule it is better to decorously and politely ignore the left-footers.

GeoffM

Funny how the BBC hasn't rounded on Peter Tatchell for wanting to lower the age of consent to 14 so that he and his fellow gays can, legally, go about recruiting adolescent boys.

A bit rich given the focus on fallen priests who do just the same.

Augustus

You don't have to be a Catholic,
or even a Christian, to see that the British reaction to the state visit of the Pope is a disgrace. So, not the beacon of tolerance we make out to be.
The Pope leads more than a billion Catholics worldwide, and around 9% of people in this country are RC. No doubt the group who wishes that he had never been invited are those good old-fashioned anti-Catholic bigots who, not that long ago, would have happily seen Papists burnt at the stake.

Derek BLADES

"Pope Benedict is one of the profoundest thinkers of our time"

Are we talking about the fellow who tells his followers in Africa not to use condoms? Is it the same chap who regards homosexuality as unnatural?

This tells us much about Ms Phillips.

Eddie

"You don't have to be a Catholic,
or even a Christian, to see that the British reaction to the state visit of the Pope is a disgrace. So, not the beacon of tolerance we make out to be."

Errr Augustus. We pay our taxes for this state visit and the man is treated with massive fanfare too! How exactly is that a disgrace? His face is plastered everywhere - and TV has been rather sychophantic and respectful, I think.

Ratsinger is directly responsible for covering up child abuse - and continues to keep important information from the police. The man has the nerve to criticise us for being too secular and to equate atheism and nazi-ism! And with the catholic church's history! He has the sheer brassneck to lecture us on values after what his church has done, is doing and continues to do.

The catholic church is a disgrace. My sympathy is 100% with all the children whose rape they facilitated and then covered up. Not with some old oppressive church with backwards values that really just wants to turn back the clock so it enslaves us all again.

Too sad and pathetic for words really - and most catholics I know seem to treat the pope like some doddery old senile aunt at Christmas. One tolerates with such eccentrics - but one most certainly does not agree with them!

Corsair

>>Hitler was a catholic

And a vegetarian. And very anti-smoking. And terrified of women.

So what.

Hitler was raised and educated in a self-consciously catholic country. Whether, as an adult, he regarded himself as a catholic, is debatable to say the least. He certainly expressed the full range the crank conspiracy theories regarding the Vatican and the church hierarchy, and held the catholic clergy in scarcely less contempt than he did the evangelical. Despite popular misconception, he did not subscript to the occult and ‘alternative’ ideas current in interwar Germany: he mocked ‘wandering volkisch scholars’ and had none of Himmler’s obsession with the subject; there is evidence, however, that he had at least read the work of the crank racist guru and apostate monk Jorg von Lebenfel.

The god that Hitler believed in was not the god of Abraham and Moses, not the god that Jesus called out to on the cross; he was a private god, the offspring of Hegelian ‘History’ and Wagner’s Wotan.

Somewhat earlier, Lenin had instigated an explicitly atheist campaign against the Orthodox church, fuelled by the same conspiracy theories adapted to local conditions: there were murders aplenty in the early twenties, conducted by self-proclaimed atheists in the name of atheism Consult the recent works of Michael Burleigh for the details.

Dunno about Stalin – haven’t had the stomach for any of the recent biographies yet.

sleeping dolls

Augustus: catholics and protestants have been murdering each other for centuries, as you well know. Neither side is blameless. In a similar fashion, perhaps, to Jews and Muslims. The only difference is most UK anti Catholic bigots confine themselves these days to name calling, and holding up daft placards. Reading the comments on some of the more Israel oriented posts, I get the feeling many here would still happily watch Muslims burn at the stake. Just goes to show that religion is far more dangerous than, for example, cannabis. Thank God this country has seen the light!

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

It's barking up the wrong tree completely to attribute Hitler's savageries to his wandering from the Christian path. The murders by "atheists" in Germany in the early 1920s with which you try to freeze our blood are piffling compared to the millions mechanically slaughtered by armies of good Christian believers.

The Holocaust did not happen because of misunderstood ideas about Evolution or Wotan or what the "pope", with his habitual cynicism, calls "atheism". It happened because a man who claimed to be a sincere Christian - Adolf Hitler - was VOTED into office by many millions of believing Christians, and sustained there with the staunch backing of the official churches. Hitler's own motives were both race and Christian-based. He expressly identified himself as Christian many times when in office and before, and repeatedly identified himself with Jesus as a fellow suffer from the persecutions of the Jews - a thought directly derived from two thousand years of Christisan teaching.

The churches committed one of their most horrific crimes of dishonesty after the fall of Hitler, whom they had supported, by trying to place the blame for the Holocaust on paganism and atheism. The citing of atheism is particularly scoundrelly as the Nazis were ruthless enemies of atheists. Only a few Nazis dabbled in ideas about returning to the pre-Christian gods, and Hitler, as you say, specifically ridiculed them.

German historical scholarship has established that the Nazis, even in the leadership let alone the rank-and-file, were overwhelmingly Christian. They got their anti-semitism not from the occult, or Wotan, or Nietzsche or Darwin, but the plain old churches which had been systematically poisoning European minds with lurid anti-semitic legends for almost 2000 years.

You accuse Lenin of being subject to "conspiracy theories".

What is a more conspiracy prone mindset than that of "believers" who so often jump to the conclusion that anyone who doubts their laughable mumbo-jumbo must be part of a "leftwing" conspiracy?

Indeed, religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are THE great original conspiracy theories - the most vulgar, lurid and dangerous.

Ganpat Ram

How ironic that Phillips commends the "pope" for rejecting atheism because of its "brutally reductive" consequences for the human individual ....while also endorsing a "cardinal" Kasper who jeers at Heathrow because many of the people to be seen there are "Third World" coloureds. What could be more brutally and cynically "reductive" of human beings (many of them no doubt CATHOLICS) than that sneering implication that to be "Third Wor;d" or coloured is to be undesirable?

Louis Berk

The only flaw in your arguments, Melanie, is that the majority of our population is neither morally illiterate, nor illiberal or even lacking in the common sense to reject the minority of self-absorbed, self-important and ultimately self-indulgent individuals who object to the Pope's visit and his assessment of our society. And to be fair to Cameroon (with whom I have no great love) he did stand up and announce that Britain was (and still is) broken. The sad fact is that the influence in our society of a small group of moral/intellectual/liberal retards is still far too great for the number of people they actually represent. They push their agenda at a docile media that are happy to let themselve be manipulated in order to avoid thinking about content and stories. After all, who would you most value in terms of their opinon: Jeremy Clarkson, or Peter Tatchell?

Simone

Derek Blades:
"Are we talking about the fellow who tells his followers in Africa not to use condoms? Is it the same chap who regards homosexuality as unnatural?
This tells us much about Ms Phillips."

Is this the same fellow who condemns criticism of Islamic pictures in police stations as "racism"?
This tells us much about Derek Blades.

Simone

Ganpat Ram:
"What could be more brutally and cynically "reductive" of human beings (many of them no doubt CATHOLICS) than that sneering implication that to be "Third World" or coloured is to be undesirable?"

I think he was referring to the third world in the context of religion. Much of the recent immigration has been non-Christian and that is very evident around Heathrow. There is nothing wrong with thinking that this will have a negative impact on our culture. In fact, I think it needs to be said.

Rose

To quote Alec Salmond who I am no fan of but who certainly got it right when he spoke of the Pope's visit

"This is a triumph over cynicism"

Ganpat Ram

Simone:

You defend this Kaspar "cardianl" fellow by saying:

"Much of the recent immigration has been non-Christian and that is very evident around Heathrow."

I haven't the smallest respect for that racist attitude because the Church itself is endlessly determined to spread its own religion in the Third World. You think people in the Third World can't say this weakens THEIR culture? Trying to have it both ways, as usual. Claiming to be Christian and showing the utmost meanness at the same time. Reducing others to nothing on grounds of religious difference.

London Calling

How Britain proved his point…

Cardinal Kasper made a comment, but what was the point and how exactly did he prove it to Britain?
We can all point fingers…Rome with its bloody history in the name of the Emperor under the worship of many Gods and later Christ, brutal dictatorship, the Mafia and more recently the aggressive removal of Immigrants from Italy, which far exceeded the French removal of the Romany Gypsies…= Tolerance?

The following make a point also…

BBC-Vatican sources said Cardinal Kasper said his "Third World" comment referred to the UK's multicultural society…?

Guardian - But what is truly baffling about Kasper's comments about the third world in Britain, the idea that this country is full of people who are not from Christian Europe, is that these are the people who are bolstering Britain's religious communities. If there is one church in Britain whose congregations are a melting pot, it is the Roman Catholic church. Once dominated by Irish migrants, Catholic churches now have rainbow congregations – Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Spanish, Italians, Brazilians, Costa Ricans, Ghanains, Nigerians, and people from many Middle Eastern countries, including Iraqis and Palestinian Christians who have fled the troubles in their homelands.Plenty of them arrived recently and are the kind of people who keep London going through their employment as cleaners, taxi drivers, catering staff and shop assistants. In fact, they're just the kind of people who work at Heathrow.

And my final point…

The Third World isn’t Multicultural…And if Gods true message was the gathering of all Nations to create a New Jerusalem on earth…Britain so far hasn’t failed to be part of Gods plan…

Carlos Perera

Thank you very much, Ms Phillips, for posting the above favorable analysis of the Papal visit to Great Britain. Whether or not one subscribes to the tenets of Catholic Christianity, any informed and reasonable--not to say rational--assessment of this Pope's role as defender of what is best in Western Civilization must credit his good faith, keen intellect, and scholarship. Much as one need not be Jewish to value Israel's role as an outpost of Western Civilization in the Middle East, or the contributions of Jewish scholars in so many fields of Western learning.

Unfortunately, many of the responses to Ms. Phillips' blog entry display only arrant anti-Catholic bigotry of the most vitriolic sort, replete with planted axioms, calumnies, and an embarrassing display of misinformation regarding the "pedophilia" scandals--actually better characterized as pederasty by men who should never have been allowed into seminary in the first place--that have scourged the Church . . . and which this Pope has confronted with both resolve and Christian charity.

Peter Viereck's famous 1959 aphorism, "Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual," perhaps substituting "pseudo-intellectual" at sentence's end, has been shown still to apply half a century later.

Saul

http://www.youtube.com/MACrusaders

Not all of Britain's religions welcomed the Pope's kind words.

Eddie

Corsair - no-one has EVER been killed or oppressed in the name of 'atheism'. Oh no they haven't!

All atheist means is not acceptingbelief in a god for whom there is no evidence. Show the evidence and atheists will believe. People have been killed in the name of religions and belief systems - including chrictianity, Islam etc, plus the quasi-religions communism and fascism. Not atheism. Can you please try and understand that? For the pope to equate atheism and nazi-ism is both tragedy and comedy - and really very VERY dubious and underhand and dishonest, morally speaking.

Read some Epicurus and learn - he debunked god-worship over 2000 years ago!

Ganpat - I think Simone is just suggesting why the cardinal said what he said about Heathrow. Question: would those in India be happy if most workers at their airports were white or africans? Yeah right... My suggestion: we can have positive action for white people - in order to ethnically balance the staff at Heathrow (where staff are mostly Asian because it's near Southall). Say, 50% minimum white workers? Why not? The BBC and others do the same in order to reduce the number of whites and men on TV after all. It's called 'positive action' when it's done for women and ethnic minorities' benefit - and as a white man who has seen fourth rate women and black people leapfrog over better white men, I know it goes on! Can we have it both ways please? Hoorah!

Miranda Rose Smith

This is off-topic, Ms. Phillips, but I hope you, and all the religious Jews on this website, had easy, headache-free fasts. Gemer Chatima Tova.

Simone

Ganpat Ram:
"Simone: You defend this Kaspar "cardianl" fellow by saying:
"Much of the recent immigration has been non-Christian and that is very evident around Heathrow."
"I haven't the smallest respect for that racist attitude because the Church itself is endlessly determined to spread its own religion in the Third World. You think people in the Third World can't say this weakens THEIR culture?"

They can say that if they like.
It is their decision whether or not to accept Christianity.
By the way, I know people who are married to ethnic minorities from other religions, but even they don't want that culture transferred here. All cultures are NOT equal. I'm sorry if that offends you, but that's what I believe.

Corsair

I posted this last night but I don't think it got through...

GR: “it's barking up the wrong tree completely to attribute Hitler's savageries to his wandering from the Christian path.”

I didn’t. And I doubt he was ever on it.

GR: “The murders by "atheists" in Germany”

As I said, it was Russia. And the numbers murdered by militant atheists in Russia in the ‘20s certainly does pale into insignificance compared to those murdered by other militant atheists in Russia from the ‘30s onwards.

GR: “staunch backing of the official churches”

The official churches? Perhaps you mean the National Socialists’ ‘German Church’, staffed by apostates from Protestantism and sporting the swastika and Mein Kampf on the altar rather than the cross and the Bible? It would be hardly surprising if it gave staunch support to the Party and State. Elsewhere in the Nazi empire, some clergymen – of both major confessions – betrayed their calling and took, so to speak, the mark of the beast; others – inspired by faith and duty - passed the test and displayed the very highest courage. Such is human nature.

GR: “Only a few Nazis dabbled in ideas about returning to the pre-Christian gods, and Hitler, as you say, specifically ridiculed them.”

But not because of any Christian beliefs he had. He had none. The ‘volkisch’ scholars he mocked were a typical product of the life-reform movements that were fashionable in German-speaking Europe after the 1890s – you know, the whole new-agey thing – vegetarianism, guitars, nudism, free love, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, alternative religions and histories – mixed in with a stiff dose of ethnic nationalism and, ahem, manly outdoor pursuits. Hitler though that having these sorts of people hanging around in the Nazi Party would give it a bad name. Nevertheless, the Nazis were known at the time as ‘Bohemians with guns’. Somewhat ironic given Hitler’s opinion of the Czechs.

As for Hitler’s anti-semitism, he himself claimed that he first became aware of ‘The Jew’ whilst residing as a bum in Vienna. The reader is justified in doubting his veracity, though I myself wonder if this is not something he would wish to be truthful about. Either way, his anti-semitism was not the traditional religio-ethnic hatred that had plagued European Jewry for centuries. He regarded himself as far too sophisticated for that sort of thing: his was the modern, scientific and metaphysical anti-semitism that had, like the hogwash listed above, become fashionable with German speaking intellectuals in Hapsburg Austria from 1890 onwards. Hitler read their output avidly in his flop house. He had the complete set of ‘Ostara’ magazine, IIRC. After that, the biggest influences on his anti semitic thought were probably Karl Lueger, the anti-semitic mayor of Vienna whose demagoguery Hitler greatly admired, and Anton Drexler.

As for pre Christian gods, by the 1940s Heinrich Himmler, who was, I believe, quite influential in Germany at the time, had set up the Ahnenerbe, taken Karl Maria Wiligut onto his personal staff, invested the SS with the Sig rune and begun converting the Wewelsburg into its cult-centre. Christians would have, at the very best, ended up as some sort of ‘dhimmis’ in a victorious Third Reich, I guess.

GR: “What is a more conspiracy prone mindset than that of "believers" who so often jump to the conclusion that anyone who doubts their laughable mumbo-jumbo must be part of a "leftwing" conspiracy?”

…Or the mindset of leftists who so often jump to the conclusion that anyone who doubts their laughable mumbo-jumbo must be part of a "rightwing" conspiracy, for that matter. And we have it on the authority of no less a person that the current US Secretary of State that it’s a “vast” conspiracy too. I wonder how one joins?

In any case, your comment hardly invalidates the point about Lenin, though, does it? And it would be a very strange reading of history indeed to claim that Lenin, no less than Stalin, was not motivated by his paranoid belief in conspiracy theories.

Oh, and for the record, my own religious beliefs are to be found somewhere in the grey area between vague Presbyterian (but not Calvinist) agnosticism and atheism.

Simone

London calling:
"The Third World isn’t Multicultural…And if Gods true message was the gathering of all Nations to create a New Jerusalem on earth…Britain so far hasn’t failed to be part of Gods plan…"

Who said that is God's plan?

Eddie

Corsair - there you go again, using that nonsense phrase 'militant atheist'. I repeat: NO-ONE has ever been killed in the name of atheism. Communism, yes; Fascism, yes; Religion, yes; anti-Religion, yes. But NOT atheism - because all that means in not believing in god. You are defining the word wrongly. Perhaps you mean communism? You are like the pope going on about 'aggressive atheism' and equating it with nazi-ism! Utter piffle!

And yes. Hitler was a catholic - he was a catholic choir boy, learnt all about dictatorial power and theatre from the church - and for catholics to disown him and anyone else who is generally decided by everyone to be bad (although many catholics supported and loved him and fascism). Why can people not accept that Hitler was catholic? It is a fact!

Simone said:

"By the way, I know people who are married to ethnic minorities from other religions, but even they don't want that culture transferred here. All cultures are NOT equal. I'm sorry if that offends you, but that's what I believe"

Exactly - I also know such people. Of course, many immigrants come here precisely because it is NOT like third world countries - which is why pandering to every ethnic communities by betraying our values is so wrong. For example, the appeasement of Islamofascism. We should not change one iota and not compromise our values for multiculuralism.

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR

You are avoiding my central point that the Holocaust would never have happened without nearly two thousand years od daily, virulent anti-Semitic preaching by the Catholic and other Christian churches, which made possible the mass support for Hitler. The MASSES got their anti-Semitism from the churches, not Wotan or Nietzsche or the Hindus or atheists or whoever the churches latch on to in their desperate search for scapegoats.

For the vast number of Christians who were fervent anti-Semites, it was no mere excuse, but the outcome of their deeply-held faith. Just because you find it uncomfortable does not mean it is not Christian. It was their Christianity, and the most IMPORTANT Christianity, because it was the one that actually RULED: the Christianity which ruled the Roman world and introduced unprecedented laws to persecute Jews, the Christianity that spread through Europe and brought murderous persecution of Jews with it to places like Germany, Poland and Russia. As a South Indian, I have witnessed Christianity introducing anti-Semitism to my land where people knew nothing of it until converted persons started spouting it.

This anti-Semitic Christianity is the Christianity that changed history. Most philosophies can always claim to be innocent, in principle. In principle, there is nothing wrong with Communism, for instance. It is the PRACTICE that is decisive. And Christian practice over two thousand years has been about spreading toxic anti-Semitism.

German historical scholarship (see for instance the book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, "The Holy Reich", Cambridge University Press 2003) has decisively established that most Nazis were Christians, even at the top, let alone the rank and file. The post-1945 Churches tried in their usual dishonest way to evade responsibility for their age-old anti-Semitism leading to the Holocaust and their support for Hitler by claiming the Nazis were pagans. Only a tiny number dabbled in paganism, and Hitler ridiculed it. He was especially harsh on atheists.

As for the huge, intimate, collaboration of the Catholic Church with Hitler, that is a matter of record despite the frenetic efforts of scribblers like Michael Burleigh to efface the blood trail. His savage, vituperative language itself indicates how badly it riles him that his pet Church is so ineffaceably guilty.

If the Catholic or other churches had taken tough stances againt Hiler before he came to power, it would have prevented his getting the one-third share of votes that made him a credible candidate for Chancellor. But of course, the churches' own virulent, gut anti-Semitism and anti-communism prevented any such consistent stance.

When Hitler assumed office, the Catholic Church made a Concordat with the Nazi regime and praised him in tones normally reserved for God. They failed to speak up in public against the horrific attacks on Jews and the sadistic series of laws crushing them which horrified the world. On the one occasion when the churches did raise a hullaballoo against Hitler in the churches - against his policy of murdering mental defectives - Hitler did take notice and curtailed his campaign. So Hitler was vulnerable to church attack. But the churches had no guts for it, and too many Christians had gone over to Nazism anyway.

The Catholic Church even after the War continued its collaboration with the Nazis, helping Nazi war criminals to escape to the ferocious right wing dictatorships in Latin America it so favoured. The Church seeks exculpation by pointing to the number of Jews it did save from the gas chamers, but this was a fraction of those who went there thanks to its 2000 year anti-Semitic campaign.

It is worth pointing these things out in our time when propagandists like Burleigh glorifying the Catholic church and whitewashing its truly appalling record are getting such a wide hearing.

Frightened of Islam, Europeans are undoubtedly rummaging in their Christian culture and taking it seriously again, more and more. But this is a dangerous business and is likely to bring back the demons of the past. It is worth reminding people what a sinister past Christianity has.

RichardH

It seems to simplistic me that most of the protests about the Pope's visit centre ion him not taking action or responsibility for the child abuse cases.
Does this mean they'll also hold Blair/Brown personally responsible for every crime committed by a Labour party member?
Like I said, simplistic me.

Corsair

“Why can people not accept that Hitler was catholic? It is a fact!”

You seem to regard Catholicism in the same way that the Nazis regarded Judaism: an ineradicable fact of birth.

Hitler was married by a Nazi rite (in which he and the future Mrs Hitler had to swear they were of Aryan decent), never consulted a priest, never made confession, never took communion and finally committed suicide. He was a eugenicist who personally authorised the euthanasia of the disabled; his world-view was one of apocalyptic paganism: he despised the clergy, despised Christianity and despised the Vatican.

Consider, for example, this (July 1941): “National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.”

Or perhaps (December 1941): “Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.”

Or (February 1942): “I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch during the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn't... behold it."

And I could go on. And on. Hitler certain did. My, it must have been fun being entertained by Der Fuhrer over dinner. He once noted (unnecessarily, one feels) that “he had no real attachment to the Catholic Church”. But he was, at least initially, an astute politician, so he lied about that.

Given all this, one is left to ponder in what sense can Hitler’s alleged Catholicism be regarded as a fact? Beats me.

Eddie

Corsair - only Hitler knows if he was a catholic and died one -though your belief that his committing suicide means he couldn't have been catholic is really very quaint. Does that mean no catholic ever kills themselves? Well, a lot of those abused by priests as children have, eh?

Let's stick to the facts: Hitler was brought up a catholic, was a choir boy, and observed the theatre, power politics and anti-semitism of catholicism.

Surely that, in part, created Hitler and nazi-ism? Nazi-ism was a death cult quasi-religion, and could perhaps not have arisen without the influence of the catholic church, which is not to say the catholic church created it alone, of course.

But to pretend that Hitler had nothing to do with the catjolic church and was not influenced by it suggests cowardice and denial, really. Rather like muslims always stating that any muslim who is a murdering dictator is not 'a true muslim'. Dodgy argument, mate.

And the catholic church has a long tradition of supporting the elite - royalty, fascist dictators, and anyone who supprts them really and is anti-communism.

Augustus

Ganpat Ram - You can interpret Christianity as anti-Semitic as much as you like, but not directly in the Bible. There is no anti-Semitism in the Bible. But there is in the Koran and the Hadith, and not in small measure either. Jews, just as Christians, were obliged under Muslim rule to pay a dhimmi tax.
Hitler's Nurenberg laws are a direct derivative of those dhimmi laws.

andy

"who subscribe to the brutally reductive vision of man as no more than a random assembly of atoms"

This is untrue and it detracts from the many good points you make.

baileyntx

Personally, I find it quite interesting that atheists or secularists have become what they least admire about religion.

Intolerant and abusive of other peoples religious beliefs.

You do not like religous moral judgements made upon you...and yet you have your own set of morals that you use to pronounce judgement upon others.

I suppose in the end you will cause atheists to become religious...just to get away from you.

Lindsay

Augustus
September 19th, 2010 5:40pm
What do you make of the suggestion by various scholars that the writers of the early Gospels and Epistles made a deliberate effort to absolve the Romans, in defiance of standard Roman procedures in dealing with troublemakers? I think part of their thinking is that the Empire offered the early Christians more scope to proselytise than the Jews, and they made a hard-headed decision on their propaganda. If not from the accounts in the New Testament, where did the Church get the story of the Jews as the killers of Christ,a libel flung at the Jews by the Church until the 1960s?

The Church history I was taught at school makes it difficult to believe that Christians were not anti-semitic and did not derive their anti-semitism from their reading of the New Testament.

And could you tell me where you learned that the Nazis' Nuremburg laws derive from Mulsim legal practice. I would be interested to know. Thank you.

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

As to whether Hitler was a sincere Christian, the evidence is mixed but points to his believing in an Aryan Christ betrayed by the Jews.

The statements you quote are not sourced. If they come form "Hitler's Table-talk", the authenticity of that has been strongly questioned, including by the distinguished historian Ian Kershaw.

Hitler is on record as declaring that Nazism "will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of moral life."

On March 23, 1933, he addressed the Reichstag: "The National Government regards the two Christian confessions (i.e. Catholicism and Protestantism) as factors essential to the soul of the German people. ... We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of most of the German people."

Hitler remained a formal member of the Catholic Church until his death. According to biographer John Toland, Hitler was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God—so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty."

According to historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, Hitler's reference to God as the "Lord of Creation" and the necessity of obeying "His will" along with several references to Jesus, reveals the infusion of Christianity into his thinking. Other sources also show Hitler's Christian thinking, according to Steigmann-Gall. He notes an unpublished manuscript where Hitler sketched out his world-view with similar Christian references, and he gives as an example a speech on April 1922 where Hitler said that Jesus was "the true God." Finally, Steigmann-Gall gives another example where in a private Nazi meeting Hitler again stated the centrality of Jesus' teachings to the Nazi movement.

Private statements
Hitler's private statements about Christianity were often conflicting. Hitler's intimates, such as Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann suggest that Hitler generally had negative opinions of religion, although the historical validity of some remarks has been questioned, particularly the English translation of Hitler's Table Talk. Historian Ian Kershaw remarked upon the questionable nature of Table Talk as a source, stating "the `table talk’ monologues of the last months (the so called `bunkergespräche’) of which no German text has ever been brought to light must be treated with due caution." Historian Richard Carrier goes further, contending that certain portions of Table Talk — especially those regarding Hitler's hostility of Christianity — are poor mistranslations. Carrier states that Hitler was criticizing Catholicism in particular, while remaining entirely religious.

In 1941, according to the diary of Nazi General Gerhart Engel, Hitler stated "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain a Catholic."

Some scholars maintain, that in contrast to other Nazi leaders, Hitler did not adhere to esoteric ideas, occultism, or Nazi mysticism, and even ridiculed such beliefs in private and possibly in public. Hitler stated: "We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us." Drawing on higher criticism and some branches of theologically liberal Protestantism, Hitler for a time advocated for German Christians a Positive Christianity, traditional Christianity purged of everything that he found objectionable and with certain, particularly racist, additions. Hitler never directed his attacks on Jesus himself, but viewed traditional Christianity as a corruption of the original ideas of Jesus, whom Hitler regarded as an Aryan opponent of the Jews. In Mein Kampf Hitler writes that Jesus "made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross."

What rwlly mattewrs, though, is that bwithout the anti-Semitism of the German masses inculcated by the Church over many centuries, Hitler would have gpt nowhere.

B. Elsie Bob.

Most of the people I know, have abandoned God, but they have not become Atheists instead to a Man and Woman they have become devout alcoholics! When God is banished from the Human heart, there are many alternatives to fill the chasm (the most popular are drugs and booze). It takes great self Discipline and devotion to believe in nothing. You have my admiration.

Ganpat Ram

SIMONE:

Coloured immigrants in this country may offend you or the fellow called "cardinal" Kasper, but Westerners have over many centuries looted and pillaged the coloured parts of the globe too much for me to sympathise with that emotion. There has to be some pay back, and this multicoloured crowd at Heathrow is part of it.

Tough, "cardinal".

At least they work for their living, mostly, unlike the "cardinal", nor have they been accused of covering up for child rapists.

Vija P.

I'm with you Corsair.
Ganpat Ram, you are nuts, as all lefties are.

Comprehensiveboy

I was there yesterday, in the choir. Wonderful on every level. You're all just jealous because Catholicism represents eveything that is ideal and positive about community, tradition and the family and is based on love. It appeals to the simple and sophisticated, accepts ethinic and national dfferences and forges a wider unity. Enjoy your cinicism!

Ganpat Ram

VIJA R:

I believe in making serious arguments rather than cheap jibes. That makes me nuts by your standard.

I am no conventional "leftist", either: I am pretty critical of the Noam Chomsky outlook on life. But I certainly don't like the shrieking bigots.

Corsair

“But to pretend that Hitler had nothing to do with the catjolic church and was not
influenced by it suggests cowardice and denial, really.”

I don’t know why, since I don’t have a dog in that fight. I think my points above should be sufficient for a fair-minded reader to draw their own conclusions about Hitler’s alleged Catholicism. Your argument is akin to that which regards Bolshevism as ‘Jewish’ because Marx was a Jew. I bet the man never saw the inside of a Synagogue his entire adult life.

And isn't the term 'in denial' a great rhetorical trick! The argumentum ad hominem wrapped up in po-faced psychobabble. What's not to love about it? "You don't agree with me so you must be nuts." I may well be, but not for that reason.

Answering GR’s point about the Holocaust having finding its cause in historic European anti-semitism, and (separate assertion) that being a specific product of Roman Catholicism, would take more time than I have on a work-day. The outline of such an answer may be deduced from my comments above, and would be extended to include points about the general persecution of ethnic minorities everywhere, the highly devolved nature of the Catholic Church, the fact that the Church often protected Jews from mobs (and certainly had no policy of pogrom) and the rise, after the French Revolution, of specifically secular anti-semitisms of the Right and Left – both of which Nazism was heir to (D. Pipes). This is not at all to deny that pogroms occurred, and were perpetrated by those who considered themselves Catholics and to be acting in the name of Catholicism – though the perpetrators were often heretics or the followers of apocalyptic madmen well beyond the boundaries of Catholicism and often very hostile to it (sound familiar?). And in the absence of Jews, the fired-up medieval looter had no problem slaughtering the ‘rich’ or even the clergy in their stead (N Cohn). And there is even an argument that anti-semitism predates Christianity.

Corsair

PS – interested readers wishing to follow up GR’s post can do no worse than starting here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany#Nazi_Attitudes_towards_Christianity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier

Richard Steigmann-Gall doesn’t have a Wikipedia page (hurray! Something Wikipedia doesn’t know). Google turns up this:

http://jch.sagepub.com/content/42/1/47.abstract

Enjoy.

Dave M

"My suggestion: we can have positive action for white people - in order to ethnically balance the staff at Heathrow (where staff are mostly Asian because it's near Southall)."

You're quite right and I couldn't agree more. In fact, I would have loved to be on Question Time when the cosmopolitan audience hammers the multicultural agenda home, backed by BBC bigwigs. I'd simply like to ask them how many Welsh, Irish, Scots or English people are "represented" in industry and councils abroad. Could you imagine an Indian, Somalian, Bengali resident being asked to tick a box on a form when applying for work in their own country so employers can comply with "diversity". Surely this is a huge injustive if it's not reciprocated?
Of course, this is the major flaw. Personally I might become more tolerant if other countries decide I too have the same rights to employment soon as I cross the border.

Dave M

"Much of the recent immigration has been non-Christian and that is very evident around Heathrow."

I'm not so sure he was referring to race at all. I have had friends who call Britain a Third World country and the evidence for that is as follows:
(1) Massive hospital waiting lists. Madonna once referred to them as "Victorian" so flew back to the States to be treated.
(2) Boarded up shops, businesses and closed down factories. My area is full of it.
(3)Rampant crime, including gangs and the so-called gansta rap culture. Would it be tolerated in China, I wonder?
(4) Homeless people often very visible.
(5) People appear far more skinny than in the U.S. and Europe - a diet of junk food no doubt.

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

Looks like one will have to go into some detail on this.

There are two thousand years of vicious Christian anti-semitism only too well known to every serious historian and the Jews themselves.

Two reputable recent American historians who have documented Chritianity's primary responsibility for the Holocaust are Frederick Schweitzer and Robert Michael.

The New Testament sought to place responsibility for the Crucifixion of Jesus and his death on Jews, rather than the Roman emperor or Pontius Pilate. So Christians for centuries viewed Jews as "the Christ Killers". The destruction of the Second Temple was seen as judgment from God on the Jews for that death, and Jews were seen as "a people condemned forever to suffer exile and degradation". The Gospel of John in particular contains many verses that refer to Jews in a pejorative manner.

In 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, Paul states that the Churches in Judea had been persecuted by the Jews who killed Jesus and that such people displease God, oppose all men, and had prevented Paul from speaking to the gentile nations concerning the New Testament message. Described by Hyam Maccoby as "the most explicit outburst against Jews in Paul's Epistles", these verses have repeatedly been employed for antisemitic purposes. Maccoby views it as one of Paul's innovations responsible for creating Christian antisemitism.

The Codex Sinaiticus contains two extra books in the New Testament – the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. The latter emphasizes the claim that it was the Jews, not the Romans, who killed Jesus, and is full of antisemitism. The Epistle of Barnabas was removed from later versions of the Bible; Professor Bart Ehrman has stated "the suffering of Jews in the subsequent centuries would, if possible, have been even worse had the Epistle of Barnabas remained".

A number of early and influential Church works — such as the dialogues of Justin Martyr, the homilies of John Chrysostom, and the testimonies of church father Cyprian — are strongly anti-Jewish.

During a discussion on the celebration of Easter during the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, Roman emperor Constantine said:

"...it appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul...Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way."

Prejudice against Jews in the Roman Empire was formalized in 438, when the Code of Theodosius II established Christianity as the only legal religion in the Roman Empire. The Justinian Code a century later stripped Jews of many of their rights, and Church councils throughout the 6th and 7th century, including the Council of Orleans, further enforced anti-Jewish provisions. These restrictions began as early as 305, when, in Elvira, (now Granada), the first known laws of any church council against Jews appeared. Christian women were forbidden to marry Jews unless the Jew first converted to Catholicism. Jews were forbidden to extend hospitality to Catholics. Jews could not keep Catholic Christian concubines and were forbidden to bless the fields of Catholics. In 589, the Third Council of Toledo ordered that children born of marriage between Jews and Catholic be baptized by force. By the Twelfth Council of Toledo a policy of forced conversion of all Jews was initiated (Liber Judicum, II.2 as given in Roth). Thousands fled, and thousands of others converted to Roman Catholicism.

Because of the growing power of the Church, Christian theology and the Church Fathers became more and more obsessed with Jewish guilt. The teachings of the Fathers were handed down throughout succeeding generations in Christendom. Origen (185-254 C.E.) echoed the growing hostility:

"On account of their unbelief and other insults which they heaped upon Jesus, the Jews will not only suffer more than others in the judgment which is believed to impend over the world, but have even already endured such sufferings. For what nation is in exile from their own metropolis, and from the place sacred to the worship of their fathers, save the Jews alone? And the calamities they have suffered because they were a most wicked nation, which although guilty of many other sins, yet has been punished so severely for none as for those that were committed against our Jesus."

The Church, which claimed it was now Israel, had to discredit the other Israel. It did so by making anti-Jewish theology an integral part of Christian apologetics. The Fathers turned out volumes to prove that they were the true people of God, and that Judaism had only been a prelude to or in preparation for Christianity. Justin Martyr along with Hippolytus (170-236 C.E.) was obsessed with the belief that the Jews were receiving and would continue to receive God's punishment for having murdered Jesus. Hippolytus writes:

"Now then, incline thine ear to me and hear my words, and give heed, thou Jew. Many a time does thou boast thyself, in that thou didst condemn Jesus of Nazareth to death, and didst give him vinegar and gall to drink; and thou dost vaunt thyself because of this. Come, therefore, and let us consider together whether perchance thou dost boast unrighteously, O, Israel, and whether thou small portion of vinegar and gall has not brought down this fearful threatening upon thee and whether this is not the cause of thy present condition involved in these myriad of troubles."

As the Church came into power in the fourth century, it turned on the synagogues with even greater intensity. Jewish civil and religious status was deteriorating, thanks to the influence the bishops had in the political arena. Laws were passed making it a capital offense for any Jew to make a convert, they were excluded from various professions, denied all civil honors, and their autonomy of worship was being threatened. In every way, they were being discriminated against. Christians felt that their belief in divine punishment was now supported by this growing evidence.

Hilary of Potieres spoke of the Jews as "a people who had always persisted in iniquity and out of its abundance of evil glorified in wickedness." Ambrose defended a fellow bishop for burning a synagogue at Callinicum and asked "who cares if a synagogue - home of insanity and unbelief - is destroyed?" Gregory of Nyssa (331-396 C.E.) gave the following indictment:

"Slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, adversaries of God, men who show contempt for the Law, foes of grace, enemies of their fathers' faith, advocates of the Devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men whose minds are in darkness, leaven of the Pharisees, assembly of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteousness."

The strongest attacks on Jews and Judaism by the Church Fathers are to be found in the Homilies of Chrysostom (347-407 C.E.) in his Antioch sermons. He is considered to be among the most beloved and admired in Church history. His name translates in Greek as St. John the Golden Mouthed. His discourses were prompted by the fact that many Christians were meeting on friendly terms with Jews, visiting Jewish homes, and attending their synagogues. Chrysostom said:

"The Jews sacrifice their children to Satan....they are worse than wild beasts. The synagogue is a brothel, a den of scoundrels, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews, a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, a gulf and abyss of perdition."

"The Jews have fallen into a condition lower than the vilest animal. Debauchery and drunkenness have brought them to the level of the lusty goat and the pig. They know only one thing: to satisfy their stomachs, to get drunk, to kill, and beat each other up like stage villains and coachmen."

"The synagogue is a curse, obstinate in her error, she refuses to see or hear, she has deliberately perverted her judgment; she has extinguished with herself the light of the Holy Spirit."

Chrysostom further said that the Jews had become a degenerate race because of their "odious assassination of Christ for which crime there is no expiation possible, no indulgence, no pardon, and for which they will always be a people without a nation, enduring a servitude without end."

He elaborated further on God's punishment of the Jews:

"But it was men, says the Jew, who brought these misfortunes upon us, not God. On the contrary, it was in fact God who brought them about. If you attribute them to men, reflect again that even supposing men had dared, they could not have had the power to accomplish them, unless it had been God's will...Men would certainly not have made war unless God had permitted them...Is it not obvious that it was because God hated you and rejected you once for all?"

On another occasion Chrysostom is quoted as saying "I hate the Jews because they violate the Law. I hate the synagogue because it has the Law and the prophets. It is the duty of all Christians to hate the Jews."

Chrysostom's Homilies were to be used in seminaries and schools for centuries as model sermons, with the result that his message of hate would be passed down to succeeding generations of theologians. The nineteenth century Protestant cleric R. S. Storr called him "one of the most eloquent preachers who ever since apostolic times have brought to men the divine tidings of truth and love." A contemporary of Storr, the great theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman, described Chrysostom as a "bright, cheerful, gentle soul, a sensitive heart..."

Augustine, the great theologian, was also guilty of the growing hatred. In a sermon on Catechumens, he says:

"The Jews hold him, the Jews insult him, the Jews bind him, crown him with thorns, dishonor him with spitting, scourge him, overwhelm with revilings, hang him upon the tree, pierce him with a spear...The Jews killed him."

"But when the Jews killed Christ, though they knew it not, they prepared the supper for us."

In another sermon he characterized the Jews as "willfully blind to Holy Scripture," "lacking in understanding" and "haters of truth."

The Church Fathers had sown the seeds of intolerance and Jews were to become the object of hatred and persecution all over Europe for centuries to come.

Every terrible accusation brought against the Jews by Hitler, every horrible insult of the Jews by the Nazis, was prefigured by the Catholic Church's most important founders.

Trying to divert attention from this primary source of anti-Semitism through the ages (the Protestants had their share too, to be sure) won't work, Corsair. Hitler's anti-Semitism drew on various kinds of thinking, not just Christian; but for the MASSES in Germany who supported him, the Churches were the sorce of anti-Semitism. He would have been nothing without them. You always avoid facing this key point. So does the Catholic Church. It talks of pagans, atheists, secular anti-Semites...anyone and everyone except itself and its 2000 year history of anti-Semitic legends and preachings profoundly influencing Christians and making the Holocaust possible.

It's a question of fundamental honesty and decency, and as on the child rape scandal, the Church has failed abysmally.

Suffolkbor

Ganpat Ram:

The vast majority of British people never even benefited from the British Empire , let alone roamed around the world abusing native peoples.

I think you will find they were far to busy working in vile conditions for extremely long hours in factories and being worked to the point of exhaustion on farms for a pittance .

The average life span for an industrial worker in the early part of the twentieth century was 46 years .

The assumption that we , the British people, are all collectively guilty of the perceived injustices of a minority trader class back in the distant past is crude and spiteful as is the "Payback Principle" concerning immigration .

The "Britain Is An Immigrant Nation " routine and the English are all mongrels slur comes from exactly the same stable .

Charles

So let me get this straight.

Throughout history, so far as we can tell, any group that has had enough power to create and run an empire has ended up abusing that power, at considerable human cost, and they've done it in the name of a number of religions, as well as other belief systems.

The more recent empires tend to get vilified the most, presumably because they are freshest in the memory.

All of which makes MP's original point possibly fair, and inevitably hypocritical, since all belief systems share the same glass house and need to throw their stones with due circumspection.

Harumph.

Ganpat Ram

SUFOLKABOR:

Even if the average Englishman's lifespan was only 46 years at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, it was almost double that of an Indian.

Even if (which I am far from admitting) the British working class did not beneft from the Empire, a substantial minority of Britons did. We are here as pay back for that. So join us in the struggle.....!

In any case, it is the likes of "Cardinal" Kaspar who would be sympathetic to your dislike of coloured immigrants. Take your paryers to him. He will sympathise, as his church did with Hitler.

Suffolkbor

Ganpat Ram:

You are a complete and utter waste of time!

Simone

Ganpat Ram:
"You always avoid facing this key point. So does the Catholic Church. It talks of pagans, atheists, secular anti-Semites...anyone and everyone except itself and its 2000 year history of anti-Semitic legends and preachings profoundly influencing Christians and making the Holocaust possible.

It's a question of fundamental honesty and decency, and as on the child rape scandal, the Church has failed abysmally."

Actually, the Catholic church has apologized for not doing more during the Holocaust. As has the Lutheran Church, and others. The Catholic church changed its liturgy and theology too, to avoid defaming Jews.

You're also forgetting that the allies who defeated Nazism were overwhelmingly Christian too.

Britain's Got Tallis

Not only third wold, not only morally illiterate, but also culturally self-repudiating, as Melanie Phillips has so frequently pointed out. Thus this cultured Pope, who himself plays piano sonatas by Schubert and Brahms, was greeted in the land of Byrd, Tallis, Britten and John Taverner, by a grotesque pop talent quest winner singing a tawdry ditty from a FRENCH musical comedy, again proving Cardinal Walter Kasper's point.

Ganpat Ram

SIMONE:

As a matter of fact the Catholic propagandists and the "popes" themselves (including the current one) have repeatedly blamed the Holocaust on paganism and atheists, and failed to acknowledge the primary role of 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitsm. Many of the Church Fathers were themselves fierce anti-Semites and yet are adulated by the Church. Msrtin Luther was adulated by Hitler, and was a particularly fierce anti-Semite, suggestng measures against Jews prefiguring the Nazi policies.

As for Hitler's defeat, the Allies fought him not for the sake of Jews (whom they did not admit in large numbers to their countries when that could have saved a much larger part of European Jewry) but to defend themselves against Hitler. Not all Christian countries participated in the Holocaust, but millions of non-Germans did, and all Christian countries were tainted with the evil of anti-Semitism.

Baron

secularism replaced the fear of God with the fear of a policeman, it ain't the same, a policeman can get shot

LIEBE

Ganpat Ram 20 09 10: You write that you are in this country as payback for what the British Empire did to your country, India.
Compare this: When she was 17 my daughter visited India for the first time with our church to support Christians in India. The people and country grabbed her heart, and she was asked to go there to work with them, which she was unable to do. Meanwhile she trained as a teacher, taught here, but went to India every year. 11 years ago God released her to go to India. She researched what was most needed, and found it was teacher training outside the state system, where millions are educated. She was and is supported by churches and friends, and her small company has made a lot of difference in various types of schools. Only in the last year has she taken some expenses, as the company's fees are kept deliberately low in order that training can be afforded. Some of it is done free. Her work is based on Christian love, and a belief that God has called her to do this. She loves India and the people. This year for the first time she has had terrible problems with getting a visa, and was treated disgracefully for no known reason. She is now having problems with being allowed to stay there. Contrast this with your ability to be in England- for payback!! Which attitude do you think makes the most contribution to common good? And which is a better motivator-love or hate?

LIEBE

Ganpat Ram 20 09 10: You write that you are in this country as payback for what the British Empire did to your country, India.
Compare this: At 17 my daughter visited India for the first time with our church to support fellow Christians in India. The people and country grabbed her heart, and she was asked to go there to work with them, but was unable to do so. Meanwhile she trained as a teacher, taught here, and went to India every year. 11 years ago God released her to go to India. She researched what was most needed, and found it was teacher training outside the state system,from which many millions of children are excluded. She was and is supported by churches and friends, and her small company has made a lot of difference in a wide variety of schools and groups. The training is much wanted and needed. Only in the last year has she taken some expenses, as the company's fees are kept deliberately low in order that training can be afforded. Some of it is done free. Her work ethic is based on Christian love, and a belief that God has called her to do this. She loves India and the people. This year for the first time she had terrible problems with getting a visa, and was treated disgracefully for no known reason. She is now having problems with being allowed to stay there. Contrast this with your easy ability to be in England- and for payback!! Which attitude do you think makes the most contribution to the common good? And which is a better motivator-love or hate/revenge?

Simone

Ganpat Ram:
"As a matter of fact the Catholic propagandists and the "popes" themselves (including the current one) have repeatedly blamed the Holocaust on paganism and atheists, and failed to acknowledge the primary role of 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitsm. Many of the Church Fathers were themselves fierce anti-Semites and yet are adulated by the Church. Msrtin Luther was adulated by Hitler, and was a particularly fierce anti-Semite, suggestng measures against Jews prefiguring the Nazi policies.

As for Hitler's defeat, the Allies fought him not for the sake of Jews (whom they did not admit in large numbers to their countries when that could have saved a much larger part of European Jewry) but to defend themselves against Hitler. Not all Christian countries participated in the Holocaust, but millions of non-Germans did, and all Christian countries were tainted with the evil of anti-Semitism."

Christian anti-semitism did not have the primary role in the holocaust though.
You're right that some of the Church Fathers had a few anti-semitic things to say, but I doubt if that was general knowledge among Germans. Martin Luther too, but you can't blame the Catholic church for him. Martin Luther broke from the Catholic Church.

And as for your accusation that the allies were unconcerned about Jewish suffering; the Allies liberated the camps and brought the Nazis to justice, executing them for crimes against humanity.

Ganpat Ram

LIEBE:

I am not sure what your gripe is. You say you (or your daughter) love India. Your choice and fine by me.

Are you complaining about the coloured immigrants in Britain? They have mostly worked their way (unlike the "pope") and India has done plenty enough for Britain, including having its people killed in British wars.

So no room for griping.

As for your visa problems with India, I am not the Inadian Embassy, so I can't help you. May I point out plenty of Indians have trouble visiting Britain, too.

Your air of Christain condescension towards India is contemptible. India has its own culture and does not need your patronage. Charity is always welcome, but spreading religion on the pretext of charity is a disgusting practice. Especially such a smug, intolerant religion.

Simone

Ganpat Ram:
"Your air of Christain condescension towards India is contemptible. India has its own culture and does not need your patronage."

India is multicultural. There is no single Indian culture. Indian culture includes white European culture and Christianity, since there are many Europeans in India and many Christians.

Actually, Christianity arrived in India long before it arrived here.

Roy Young

How can the pope be regarded as "one of the most profound thinkers of our time", when he teaches doctrines from the dark ages. The belief in "transubstantiation" is not the hallmark of a profound thinker, but a manisfestion of pure evil. To hold that the pope or any other Roman Catholic priest during the Mass can create the Creator, and then consume Him, is a delusion that is only found in Catholicism, and makes those who teach such nonsense no more profound than the inmates of Bedlam.

John.

Ganpat Ram: The rather small number of British in India during the Raj, left in 1947, (as they did, except for tiny minorities), from all other imperial countries. Is there any prospect of you and your millions of fellow immigrants ever leaving our shores? No. So no tit for tat there.
Secondly, those who receive a label at birth, without any conscious decision on their part, can scarcely be considered to be shining exemplars of whatever religion or ideology they have been labelled with, until they reach the age of reason and actually choose to take whatever it is seriously and either put it into practice or not. A true follower of Christ would presumably give all they had to the poor and practice practical loving of their neighbours. Dogma and ideology would not be salient influences upon their lives. So a real Christian and a nominal Christian are two very different things. All dogmatic religion and dictatorial ideology seek total power and in so doing persecute imagined, fabricated or even real, enemies in that pursuit. Class enemies, infidels and, perhaps, your imagined imperial persecutors come within this purlieu, (though it is hard to discern what, besides self-interest, is exercising you). The moment Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire its dogma and ideology became associated with the maintenance of secular power and, obviously the moral basis of the religion was compromised. However real Christians continued and continue to dedicate their lives to helping the poor, the ill, the imprisoned and the least fortunate of their fellow men. These are they who deserve the name of Christian, not those automatically labelled as such at birth. The true practice of Christianity differs not a jot from the true practice if the Vedanta as outlined by Krishna in his talk with Arjuna, in the Baghavad Gita. Indeed Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit, Bede Griffith and his fellow monks in India all saw this and brought the insights and practice of the apparently distinct outlooks together. Read their books.

Ganpat Ram

JOHN:

Many thnaks for your enlightening post.

I am learning a lot about what astounding bigotry and racism that can lurk beneath smooth talk by "Christians" who even claim to admire a faith like Hinduism - while apparently being dead keen on coloured communities scramming from UK shores.....! I ask you.

On the last burning question, I CAN offer hope.

The British may have been relatively few in numbers in India - though there are estimated to be about three million British graves there. But they were there for a heck of a long time - ruling almost two centuries. They looted mercilessly and were pitiless in sending Indians to die in their wars. During the last world war, Churchill deliberately withheld food shipments to India, letting several million Indians starve to death; British rule was punctuated by devastating famines, which ended abruptly with Independence.

In 1947, when fierce Sikh-Muslim riots broke out in the Punjab on the eve of the Partition of India to create Pakistan, the British refused permission to Sikh soldiers guarding their oil installations in the Middle East to be allowed to return home to save their families. Such was British rule in India: utterly callous, exploitative and neglectful.

So: will Indians in the UK "go home"? Yes: after two centuries, as did the British in India. But meanwhile they will, most of them, work and help pay British pensions and welfare. So no tit for tat there.

Satisfied?

Ganpat Ram

SIMONE:

Thanks for making my case for me. If India is multicultural, so is the UK. So coloured types are quite OK here.

In the Wilderness in America

OK, so there is controversy about whether or not Hitler practiced Catholicism. There is no controversy about the European anti-Semitism for centuries before Adolph made the scene and promulgated by the churches.

Stalin and Mao are other kettles of fish. They did their butchery not in the name of god but in the name of the people, and they destroyed millions.

Point is that there is a lot of tyranny going around historically and currently. No religion or political system escapes unscathed.

Corsair

GR, I do commend your cutting-and-pasting skills. Wikipedia is a wonderful resource. Had you dug a bit deeper, you would have found this…

“1235: The Jews of Fulda, Germany were accused of ritual murder. To investigate the blood libel, Emperor Frederick II held a special conference of Jewish converts to Christianity at which the converts were questioned about Jewish ritual practice. Letters inviting prominent individuals to the conference still survive. At the conference, the converts stated unequivocally that Jews do not harm Christian children or require blood for any rituals. In 1236 the Emperor published these findings and in 1247 Pope Innocent IV, the Emperor's enemy, also denounced accusations of the ritual murder of Christian children by Jews. In 1272, the papal repudiation of the blood libel was repeated by Pope Gregory X, who also ruled that thereafter any such testimony of a Christian against a Jew could not be accepted unless it is confirmed by another Jew. Unfortunately, these proclamations from the highest sources were not effective in altering the beliefs of the Christian majority and the libels continued.”

The last sentence makes my point.

Medieval mobs murdered Jews because they were handy, easily recognised, poor and defenceless: their anti-semitism was ‘folkloric’ rather than learned. Very few of them ever read the Codex Sinaiticus. Killing sprees were triggered by local events, and one often finds that they were whipped up by deranged visionaries acting on their own initiative. The opinion of the Church was that the Jews were Very Bad, but they were certainly not to be murdered.

The anti-semitism that fuelled the Holocaust was of a completely different stripe: secular, scientific and thoroughly modern. The men who organised the Holocaust had PhDs and professional diplomas; they were progressives, up to date with the latest scientific theories of race and eugenics: morally autistic intellectuals who were grateful to a State that recognised their outstanding qualities and dismissive of out-moded bourgeois sentimentality (i.e. Christianity).

Now I do love this term ‘the masses’, with its haut-en-bas condescension and implication of undifferentiated and inert human raw material. It’s authentically butch and revolutionary, like a blouson leather jacket. Why did ‘the masses’ support the Nazi regime? Each for his or her own individual reasons, I imagine: patriotism, idealism, excitement, self-advancement, fear of communism and, ultimately, simple fear. Most simply acquiesced. Not an honourable position, but understandable. Eric Hoffer provides an excellent account of the psychology of mass movements.

As for the killers themselves, the men whose daily grind was mass-murder, what motivated them? I regret I don’t know. I have not faced the scholarly work on this subject yet. One can hazard a guess, though: they killed because they were told to and had no particular objection to killing. Some probably liked it; most, I would guess, were indifferent. Jews came off the cargo-trains, so they gassed Jews; if anyone else had come off, they’d have gassed them too. It was their job. The banality of Evil. Tyrants never have any trouble finding these people.

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

I am no longer astonished at the lengths to which you will go to exculpate the Church hierarchy for the lethal consequences of their 2000 year cultivation of anti-Semitism. Anything to save their holy faces and the reputation of their immaculate "faith"!

You say:

"The opinion of the Church was that the Jews were Very Bad, but they were certainly not to be murdered."

That says it all, does it not?

I said that Church anti-Semitsm laid the ground for the killing of Jews, ultimately for the Holocaust. I did not say the Churches generally ORGANISED the killing - though there are many examples of that, too.

But if organisations with such vast and awseome moral authority (particularly then: we are a bit more cynical about them now after the Holocaust) as the Catholic and other churches proclaims a people as VERY BAD (your own words) - i.e. does PRECISELY what I said they did: launch countless deadly slanders and legends against the Jews from their seat of vast authority- what surprise that this leads to anti-Semitism among the masses which the likes of Hitler can exploit?

You think it all fell from the sky?

How many times do I have to repeat that while the Nazi LEADERS undoubtedl;y drew their anti-Semitism from several sources, not just from Christianity, the MASSES certainly learned it from the churches. They did not read Darwin or Nietzsche. And without their support Hitler could never have come to power or carried out the Holocaust. Had there been no intense mass tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany, there would have been no Hitler, and no way a ruler could have launched and sustained such a murderous attack on the Jews.

That says it all, does it not? What needeth words more?

Isn't it long past time then for the Catholic Church and other churches to own up squarely and HONESTLY for their primary share in the Holocaust rather than pasting the blame on "pagans" and "atheists" and keeping their holy faces?

simone

Ganpat Ram:
"I said that Church anti-Semitsm laid the ground for the killing of Jews, ultimately for the Holocaust. I did not say the Churches generally ORGANISED the killing - though there are many examples of that, too."

You said that Christianity had the "primary role" in the Holocaust. Now you are saying that churches organised the killing.
I would like to see you prove both of those assertions.

Ganpat Ram

SIMONE:

I prefer to debate with people who can read a bit better than you seem to be able to and are a bit better informed.

Kindly look back at what I wrote.

It would be very odd if nearly 2000 years preaching of anti-Semtic doctrines and legends from church pulpits had nothing to do with creating the appalling prejudices that led to the destruction of European Jewry. Read almost any worthwhile history of the Jews or the Holocaust. Paul Johnson's, for instance, and he is a Catholic writer.

Kevin Dunn

"Marcus from the USA" writes: "I don't remember atheists and/or agnostics burning each other at the stakes like Christians did in merry old England just a few centuries ago."

Ever heard of Stalingrad?

Edward McLaughlin

Corsair 5 - Ganpat Ram 1

Bring on the next leftist malcontent.

Simone

Ganpat Ram:
"It would be very odd if nearly 2000 years preaching of anti-Semtic doctrines and legends from church pulpits had nothing to do with creating the appalling prejudices that led to the destruction of European Jewry"

There was anti-Semitism in the churches in the past. Nobody denies that.
Catholicism is not a threat to Jews today though. I think we all know where the threat is coming from today.
I don't suppose you will be venting your spleen on that any time soon though.

Rubadubadoobag

@ Corsair:

While others have taken issue with your views on the Nazis, I am amazed that no one else has commented on your thoughts about civilisations outside the West. Frankly, for a clearly intelligent person as yourself to assume that the concept of decency was/is unknown outside the borders of Christendom shows a Eurocentric arrogance so deep and ingrained that it is nothing short of repulsive.

What of Ashoka, who argued for religious tolerance and equality before the law in 250BC? What about the system of respecting tribal chiefs or elders, which took root in continents as disparate as Africa and pre-colonial Australia? What about Buddha himself? Far from being sunk in barbarism as you seem to imagine, EVERY culture has independently evolved standards of decent behaviour and related concepts such as marriage, family and God. Can you be so naive as to imagine that no one besides Jesus ever thought of the 'golden rule'?

Western civilisation was special because of the way it ruthlessly took advantage of its era of technological dominance, not because of any ethical superiority. In fact you might well imagine that the former was facilitated by a lack of ethical progress.

I think your arguments about Christian moral superiority are obviously naive triumphalist hogwash when one considers the Crusades, the Inquisition and various other bloody events in European history. However, to be fair, I don't think that the bloody history of Christianity is directly due to the Christian creed itself. I think it is more attributable to the superiority complex, that dark side of Western civilisation that manifests itself as xenophobia, racism and religious intolerance, and can be seen in events such as the Holocaust, the past and continuing treatment of blacks in the American south, the bombing of Hiroshama and Nagasaki, etc etc. In fact I would say that the Pope, Ms Phillips and yourself are living examples of this phenomenon.

Simone

Roobadubadoobag:

"However, to be fair, I don't think that the bloody history of Christianity is directly due to the Christian creed itself. I think it is more attributable to the superiority complex, that dark side of Western civilisation that manifests itself as xenophobia, racism and religious intolerance, and can be seen in events such as the Holocaust, the past and continuing treatment of blacks in the American south, the bombing of Hiroshama and Nagasaki, etc etc. In fact I would say that the Pope, Ms Phillips and yourself are living examples of this phenomenon."

Barely disguised racism of your own there.
Anyway, if you don't think the West has a superior culture, then nobody is forcing you to live here.
It's strange that those who hate the most, and scream the loudest, are the ones fighting the hardest to stay here though.

I think what the Pope is saying is virtually the same thing as a well-known atheist said eg.
replacing Western Christian culture with a third world culture would be a poor exchange.
I don't see why that is considered to be controversial.
Plenty of immigrants from the third world would agree.

Corsair

Rubadubadoobag “Western civilisation was special because of the way it ruthlessly took advantage of its era of technological dominance, not because of any ethical superiority. In fact you might well imagine that the former was facilitated by a lack of ethical progress.”

And why was the West technologically dominant? Was it, perchance, because only –only – in the West, and influenced by the Christian concept of individual salvation as well as by Greek and Roman ideas of freedom and constitutional law, did their arise such eminently ethical ideas as individual liberty (and hence initiative), security of property, the rule of law, free speech, free enquiry, the limited state (render unto Caesar…) and the concept of the Citizen? It was a rocky road, to be sure, with many setbacks, by where, beyond the borders of the West, does one find a Perikles, a Magna Carta, a Declaration of Arbroath, a Principia Mathematica, a Vindication of the Rights of Women, a proclamation beginning ‘We, the People’, a William Wilberforce or a Richard Feynman? The West grew because in the end, Athens defeated Sparta after all – once again, and most wonderfully, in our own time.

It should also me borne in mind that Western expansion was facilitated by the fact that often the local inhabitants were at each other’s throats, Hernan Cortez would not have succeeded in throwing down Tenochtitlan without his Mexica allies, who – justly – hated the Aztecs. They had the full measure of the desperate and violent Spaniards, and they still preferred them. Similar circumstances pertained in South Africa, India and the Middle East.

Rubadubadoobag “In fact I would say that the Pope, Ms Phillips and yourself are living examples of this phenomenon”

Your flatter me ;-) I certainly don’t merit to be listed in such company! In fact, I suspect that the robust Ms Phillips would find me a limp-wristed libertarian and the Pope – a lefty German academic of the ‘60s – wouldn’t be that impressed either ;-)

Corsair

"Eurocentric arrogance so deep and ingrained that it is nothing short of repulsive."

My arrogance is Anglocentric, if you don't mind.

Simone

Corsair:
"My arrogance is Anglocentric, if you don't mind"

Quite right. Mine too! ;-)

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

Crediting the Middle Eastern fanaticism known as Christrianity with helping the rise of science is the stuff of jokes. As well credit witch doctors with it.

History shows that societies tend to be freer when religions are not monotheistic.

It is true Socrates had a hard time with the government of his day in polytheistic Greece. But Athenian regimes generally allowed enormous freedom for debate, which is why the city became the field of the incredible Athenian intellectual and cultural flowering, never equalled before or since.

What happened to that thriving intellectual culture after the conquest of the classical world by monotheistic Christianity?

We know only too well. Several centuries of persecution and suppression of any thoughts that could not fit into the narrow impoverished desert creed, suppression of the old intellectual elites and learning, ironically too ruthless anti-Semitism leading to the expulsions of Jews themselves to “pagan” areas where there was still tolerance, smashing of the ancient temples and their replacement by churches, etc… All the dreary and (to Hindus) only too well known accompaniments of takeover by Middle Eastern monotheist fanaticisms.

There were certainly contests for power in Christendom between popes and prelates and kings, but the kings claimed to be no less representative of God than the priests – they were in effect claiming to be both kings AND popes. That was what caused the fight. In the Byzantine and Orthodox areas, kings were also the top priests.

All this obsession with Middle Eastern monotheistic fanaticism took a long time to fade. It was not until the Renaissance, caused by the rediscovery of pagan classical learning, from the fifteenth century onward, that clearly secular ideas made their appearnce in the West, the modern idea that God is unknowable and therefore we should concentrate on what men can do.

Certainly, the domination of secularist thinking also had much to do with the exhaustion with religious preoccupations that came with the endless wars fostered by the Reformation and the reaction against it. People realised they were paying too heavy a price for these religious obsessions and, with the world having opened out with the discovery of America and the globe as such, they seem to have decided to move on to a higher stage of barbarism.

That’s European history in a nutshell.

Europe escaped the barbarity of Middle Eastern monotheism because its society was always more variegated than that of, say, the Arabs, one where the merchant class had a more important role, where Roman law clearly separated the ruler’s political rights from others’ rights to property. Asian societies lacked these clear-cut limits to rulers’ rights.

European society also had the immense and invaluble wealth of pre-Christian thought to draw upon to save them from the Christian intellectual nullity.

The Arabs had a naturally more ruler-oriented society, and were unable to retain the intellectual autonomy to develop towards secularism.

The bottom line is: humanity advances when it is free from monotheistic religious obsessions like Christianity and Islam. It regresses when (as today) these obsessions are powerful.

In general, the post-Christian West, Hindu India and the Confucian Far East, with their easy-going attitudes to religion and the gods (in most of India Muslims can freely and publicly ridicule Hinduism, which is as it should be) will probably make much more headway in the world of thought than the Muslim world dominated by monotheistic fanaticism

Disregarding the epochal contributions of Buddha and Confucious to ethical awareness is just the kind of back-street philosophy I expect from you.

Western scientific development and the rise of modernity, too, is the result of economic forces, not some mythological drivel about the "individual" soul.

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

As to arrogance, anglo-centric or other, may I point out there is no quality of thought or expression you have shown here which in the least justifies it.

Some Westerners have made big contributions to human thought and progress, true, but they were often people who could see much beyond petty ethnic bragging, identified with humanity as such, and would have winced if they were told their achievements would be appropriated by petty ethnic braggers.

One of the greatest of all Western thinkers, Karl Marx, for instance, identified so little with the West that he was impatient to see Indians throw the British out of their country.

As Nehru once wryly observed, the West is indeed great (as is the East, of course), but Westerners who boast of it are seldom so.

John.

Ganpat Ram: It is easy to concentrate on the worst points of what you are attacking while conveniently forgetting a multitude of good ones. I have visited quite a few British cemeteries in India and would doubt that there are three million British graves there. However what I did discover is that the majority of the graves were those of young children and infants, doctors, engineers, teachers, young women and, obviously. imperial administrators and soldiers. Very much more often than not, these unfortunate people died of diseases, for which there was almost no cure then,and in their early twenties. Clearly most of these people had gone out to India intending to help the Indians, and not to exploit them. What were doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers and little children getting out of it? Where do you think the highways, railways, hospitals, schools, universities,dams, irrigation works, ports and courts of justice built in those days, came from? Why did Macaulay institute universal education for all children in India? How oppressive was that? More than once Indians have come up to me in India and told me how glad they were to have the Birtish there rather than some other power. Eric Newby in "Slowly Down The Ganges" mentions visiting a village in which he was told that in former days the British District Officer would visit them once a year and ask what needed to be done and then it would be done. He went on to say that nowadays they were lucky if anyone came to visit them and, even if they did, nothing would be done as a result. In any case much of India consisted of self-governing princely states, albeit with a British resident in attendance. As the power of the Moguls waned a power vacuum was created and someone was going to fill it. As I say, it seems that people are glad that it was the British rather than, say, the Portuguese or the French, (who were other candidates). Ghandi said that one thing India could learn from the British was to install proper sanitary arrangements
! So even he had a good word to say about them. He also said that he could not have gained independence from any other nation - it was British fair play that counted. Let us consider the other colonial powers that have occupied India - and STAYED! First the Aryans, who destroyed the Harrapan civilisation and imposed the caste system, which still endures, upon the whole population and by which they ensured that the dark Dravidians would forever be in the lowest ranks of the social hierarchy. Now that IS oppression! Secondly the Muslim invasions and conquest. Bakhtiyar Khalji destroyed one of the greatest seats of learning in the world in 1193 when he demolished the great monastery/university of Nalanda, beheading the Buddhist monks and burning all the books, which were so numerous that it took 3 months to burn them all. That was the end of Buddhism in India. The first Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples, massacred people on a large scale and carried enormous treasure back to Afghanistan. While some Mogul Emperors were tolerant some definitely were not and the Hindus suffered pretty badly as a result. The Muslims also stayed and managed to convert so many people, many forcibly, that the very last result was the partition of India. I would say again that these were oppressive invasions and regimes. If you were to read Marjory Perham's "The Colonial Reckoning", you would get a fair summing up of the question of whether the British Empire was a good or bad thing. It was a benign set-up which, while obviously established so as to allow favorable trade between the mother country and the rest of the empire, nevertheless was concerned for the welfare of the people over whom Britannia ruled. Indeed some countries were forced to leave it in the end , against their will! Belize for instance. All tax raised in India was spent in India: it was against the law to use Indian tax anywhere else. Just as we now admire the Romans and Roman Britain, I suspect that, in time, the British imperial administration will, in its turn, come to be admired.

As to particular points raised in your letter: well the muslims looted India mercilessly, but I find scant evidence for any remotely similar behaviour on the part of the British. You perhaps forget that during the war there was near starvation in Britain itself - the German U-boats sank phenomenal amounts of merchant shipping. Perhaps it has not occured to you that there simply wasn't the shipping available and that the main theatre of war was in Europe at the beginning so the troops and the resistance had to be kept alive to be able to fight. As for the Sikhs, they had presumably volunteered to serve in the army and signed on. This meant that they were bound by contract to do whatever they were told to do. In any case I doubt that, in the horrofic chaos of Partition they would have been able to make much of a difference. People were being massacred everywhere and no military force can be everywhere at the same time. Likewise the Indian troops who fought in both world wars were volunteers. No-one forced them to fight. They were also much admired and won many medals and a lot of praise.

As for the Jews, well, some Jews did very well out of Chritianity, namely Jesus Himself, the disciples and the apostles! Also may real Christians, (not all!), heal the sick, visit prisoners, teach children, build bridges and irrigation systems etc. without any proselytising - unlike those of other religious persuasions.

Corsair

GR: “the modern idea that God is unknowable and therefore we should concentrate on what men can do”

This is not a Christian, or Western, idea at all: it is, as I understand it, an Islamic idea. And (perhaps) a Calvinist one. The Christian idea is that God may be known by both Faith and Reason, as Pope Benedict reiterated at Regensburg.

GR: “but the kings claimed to be no less representative of God than the priests – they were in effect claiming to be both kings AND popes. That was what caused the fight.

Hmm. I should have mentioned the Investiture Crisis in my list of Great Western Things above. That ended with Henry on his knees at Cannosa, IIRC, which secured the Western concept of social space beyond the State, at least until the rise of the monolithic secular fundamentalisms of modern times.

GR: In the Byzantine and Orthodox areas, kings were also the top priests.

And they weren’t Western.

GR: too, is the result of economic forces

Economic forces: the magical motivating pixie of Marxist superstition. What was it, I wonder, that generated these ‘economic forces’, if it was not the individual decisions of millions of souls, decisions made because their ethical milieu permitted them to do so? Certainly, the ‘desire to better one’s condition’ (as a great Scotsman put it) has been a driver of history (I put it this way for convenience), but only where the ethical milieu has permitted it (as in the West): in fact, the very idea that Man can better his condition has its roots in Christian eschatology, is itself eschatological, and reaches it most extreme form in the toxic apocalyptic Gnosticism of Marxism. The static societies of the east had no such concept (though it does occur in Zoroastrianism).

And I do believe that you are mischievously missing my point about individual salvation as a key concept in western thought – and hence dominance. I once read that ‘each person in the West sees himself as the star of his own private movie; people in China see themselves as bit-players in someone else’s’. True or not, it makes the point nicely. Only in the West, with its fusion of Hellenistic and Jewish thought (i.e. Christianity), is the individual soul (i.e. personality, moral actor) considered to be the fundamental human phenomenon. Everything else I listed follows from that.

It’s proved popular, too. Let’s consider the countries that those fed up with their decent tribal elders make a bee-line to. They are, in no particular order, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even (I learned on holiday) tiny Malta. Hmmm. What do they have in common? The small northern European kingdoms are popular too, though there the natives are getting a bit hacked off with it, I gather. Strangely, things haven’t gone quite so well in Nehru’s country: But then, he was, alas for those who suddenly found themselves his countrymen, a vain and vacuous Bandung-generation grandstander, so it got off to a bad start.

GR: “One of the greatest of all Western thinkers (sic), Karl Marx, for instance, identified so little with the West that he was impatient to see Indians throw the British out of their country.”

But not for the British to throw him out of their country! ;-)

Mark Robinson

The main point about belief, or lack thereof, in modern Britain, is that most people in these Isles now realise that Christianity, like Judaism, Islam and every other form of religion, is a man-made construct. It should be obvious to any thinking person that men have been inventing belief systems throughout history, and pre-history, to try and explain the unfathomable nature of our existence. Religion exists purely because we are afraid of death, and it is less painful for us if we delude ourselves into thinking that by holding to a particular set of beliefs we can somehow cheat death.

As far as Christian principles are concerned, if Melanie was to speak to this ex-member of the Hitler Youth, he would no doubt express great sorrow because of Nazi persecution of European Jewry, but, if pressed, on a certain doctrinal matter, he would be able to confirm that she, because of her rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, will be consigned to hell flame for all eternity, whereas Popes like Gregory VI and Innocent III, who made great sport of persecuting Jews, will be accepted into the House of the Lord.

Ganpat Ram

CORSAIR:

I am not sure why I bother to plunge again into the thickets of your back-street pubroom philosophising, but here goes...The sheer fun of it, I suppose.

First, a simple lesson in reading English. I said: “the modern idea that God is unknowable and therefore we should concentrate on what men can do”...I said "modern"; I did NOT say "Christian". Though even the Christians fall back on the iscrutability of God when they are faced with some pretty obvious problems with claiming he is just, decent, etc. It is the secular idea I am talking of; if you think it is not Christian, that's my very point. That's why Westerners had to get away from Christianity to discover it and modernise.

I said: "In the Byzantine and Orthodox areas, kings were also the top priests."

You reply: "And they weren’t Western."

Precisely. But they were CHRISTIAN. Which shows that the division between church and state is not Christian, rather Western. A key favourable aspect of Western society had nothing to do with Christianity as such.

You say: "Economic forces: the magical motivating pixie of Marxist superstition. What was it, I wonder, that generated these ‘economic forces’, if it was not the individual decisions of millions of souls, decisions made because their ethical milieu permitted them to do so? Certainly, the ‘desire to better one’s condition’ (as a great Scotsman put it) has been a driver of history (I put it this way for convenience), but only where the ethical milieu has permitted it (as in the West): in fact, the very idea that Man can better his condition has its roots in Christian eschatology, is itself eschatological, and reaches it most extreme form in the toxic apocalyptic Gnosticism of Marxism."

Really? You don't say so, old fellow.

H. G. Wells used used to ridicule this frenzied and comical "Christian" attempt to take over the glory of industrilisation by politely asking where this supposed "Christian" compulsion to better the condition of individuals and societies was in the more than 1500 years Christianity dominated the West BEFORE the Industrial Revolution? Where was it hiding? In actual fact, Christianity, like any religion, is perfectly compatible with a wide variety of social orders, including slavery and feudalism in the West. Jesus, the supposed founder of this "individualism", did not repudiate slavery, note. He took it for granted: it was a reality of the society he knew.

You say: "I once read that ‘each person in the West sees himself as the star of his own private movie; people in China see themselves as bit-players in someone else’s’. True or not, it makes the point nicely."

Really? You don't say, old chap.

Notice your blithe phrase: "true or not". That is you all round. The truth matters not.

Here we are in the thickets of easy, ignorant dehumanising of a different culture (the Chinese) that you can't be bothered to find out about. The Chinese are as individual or as little individual as anyone else, social and economic conditions taken into account. In the feudal or slave societies, the Christian Westerner was a person given to a more collectivist identity than today. So Christianity had nothing to do with individulaism. There is greater individualism now in the West, since economic conditions permit it. Even so, there is depressingly little. I am of Indian background, and I have been amazed to see how little individuality the average Westerner has; he or she tends to be the victim of the stock cliches of the day, and often haa astoundingly little curiousity about any culture, even the Western one. Mankind has a long way to go to develop into real individulity. Pubroom philosophers won't help it.

You boast in a high point of pompous comedy: "Only in the West, with its fusion of Hellenistic and Jewish thought (i.e. Christianity), is the individual soul (i.e. personality, moral actor) considered to be the fundamental human phenomenon. Everything else I listed follows from that."

i leave this Humpty Dumpty bragging to swing in the wind.

You say: "It’s proved popular, too. Let’s consider the countries that those fed up with their decent tribal elders make a bee-line to. They are, in no particular order, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even (I learned on holiday) tiny Malta. Hmmm. What do they have in common? The small northern European kingdoms are popular too, though there the natives are getting a bit hacked off with it, I gather."

Well, here we go again with ignorance and provincialism. Why does this emigration you are so strangely opposed to (aren't those people individuals making the decision to improve their lives?) happen now? How come in previous centuries it was the Westerners who made a beeline for India? When the British sarted ruling India, it was the biggest single (along with China) exporter in the world, and this had been the case for many centuries. "The Economist" recently produced an interesting graph on this subject. When the British left, after a rule punctuated by massive famines and looting, the Indian share of exports was piffling.

Nehru got his economics sadly wrong; correct. But even HE did infinitely better for India than the British, supposed exemplars of "Christian" economic genius. Much better than Churchill, who deliberately withheld food aid from India and allowed several million Indians to starve to death. Mass famines such as those in British days ended suddeb]nly in India on Independence.

You respond, with your usual knack for missing the obvious point, that Marx did badly to wish the British out of India while living in Britain himself...Poor marx.

He had no objection to individual Britons living anywhere, including India; it was their colonial rule and looting of other countries he objected to.

There are many Christain countries which are backward; there are non-Christian countries which are advanced. A simple point that would have saved your would-be philosophising time for the beer in that pub.

Edward McLaughlin

Ganpat Ram

"The Chinese are as individual or as little individual as anyone else, social and economic conditions taken into account."

Well, you don't say old chap.

As blithe statements go, this one is up there with the best.

Ganpat Ram

McLaughlin:

I lived several years among the Brits, and individuality was the very last quality I noticed about them.

Most had only one serious topic of conversation - a senseless, inelegant ritual whereby oafish types chase a muddy ball around a field in the midst of a shrieking mob. It was known as "footer". No class of Brit was far removed from this kind of non-existence.

The Canadians, among whom I live now, are at least polite. A notable improvement. But their obsession is with another imbecilic ritual known as "ice-hockey" (simply "kockey" to Canadians).

As a Vancouverite I am very well acquainted with Chinese; we have a vast, wonderful Chinese community in Vancouver. Many of my friends are Chinese. They have as much individuality as any other people.

John.

Ganpat Ram: repeat: the number of British in India at any one time during the Raj, was tiny, and they all left after independence. As for famines, perhaps it has not occured to you that the final cessation of famine was due to the vast irrigation works undertaken by the British? Likewise it does not seem to occur to you that India is now a democracy because of being the inheritor of the Raj. Another point is: what do you think would have happened to India if the British had not filled the power vacuum left by the decline of the Moguls? I may also mention that the study of sanskrit and the Vedas and the Upanishads, having become reduced to almost vanishing point at the start of the nineteenth century was revived and restored by British scholars. You seem to have a rather one-sided view of what went on during the Raj, the ethos of the administrators, and what went on before the Raj and the ethos of the former administrators. I have mentioned this in my last contribution, but you seem to ignore it. Lastly I well remember, as a war-time child, being urged at school to bear in mind, when thnking of the future, going out to somewhere in the Empire "to help those less fortunate than ourselves". Does this sound to you like the message of a looting, persecutory regime? I have mentioned the huge number of graves in India of unfortunate engineers, doctors, nurses,teachers, women and children who had gone out from Britain to do exactly what we were still being encouraged to do when I was a boy. In former years famines occured everywhere, not just in India, and were not part of some sinister lack of concern by ruling powers. No food meant people starved in the days before refrigerated ships and air transport. No food was usually the result of crop failure caused by adverse weather. As for saying that the millions of immigrants and their descendants will leave Britain after 200 years: htis is about as likely as the sun rising in the West. On what do you base this absurd statement? Finally, I don't recognize your description of the British in your picture of football-mad yobs. They exist, but they are by no means the majority. Possibly more scientific discoveries and innovations have been made in GB than in any other place in the world. More generosity is shown to poorer countries than by any other country. We are considered to be the mother of democratic parliaments. Really you ought to learn to look at the whole picture rather than concentrate upon the worst side of everything you criticize.

Ganpat Ram

Even Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winning economist who is harshly critical of Indian governments' appalling neglect of the Indian population, praises the post-Independence order for at least ending the crushing series of famines, each sweeping away millions, that marked British rule. Sen is an authority on this issue of great distinction.

I find it ludicrous that even now many British characters are unable to come to terms with the stark reality of their country's rule in India. It did unify the country, and did some good work in building the railways, also created an effective army. These achievements are real enough. But in terms of the economic record, British rule in India was a disaster with few equals.

"The Economist" recently published an interesting graph comparing countries through the ages in terms of estimated shares of world trade. For most centuries, India and China had far and away the biggest shares. With British rule India's share began to decline sharply, and by its end, was piffling. The British could have done better for a country with so much potential. Indian economic growth rates under the British were pitiful, barely behind population growth (which was rather low, by the way). The result was a catastrophic impoverishment that is very much with us today.

Even the economic historian Niall Ferguson, very much out to boast about the virtues of British imperialism, gives a very sheepish account of the economic performance of the Brits in India.

Of course, that does not by any means absolve the governments of Independent India. They could have done immensely better, had they not followed an economic model that crushed industrial initiative with over-regulation, and criminally neglected mass schooling and healthcare.

This last was a feature of British rule too: India is estimated to have had a literacy rate at the end of their almost two centuries of rule lower than when they began.

Indian rulers since Independence have been a notably unimpressive and deluded lot. Yet, sadly, even THEY have been incomparably better than the British.

Corsair

John - I understand that Trinity College, Cambridge (which I didn't attend) has more Nobel prizes than France!

GR: I'm not a big fan of football myself, but I do like listening to my friends squabbling about it in the pub. They're very knowledgable, and so angst-ridden! I'm more of womens' beach volleyball fan myself: now, there's a sport.

And so, it's Friday, it's a bank holiday weekend in Glasgow, and all this back-street philosoperisationing has left me might dry. I'm off to sip an expresso with my comrades, look moody and earnest, and discuss the inevitability of proletarian revolution. Next week, I may look into taking a property just off Argyle street, next to the specialist bookshops and pervy tattooists. I think I'll fit in.

TTFN

Ganpat Ram

I also find it a trifle ironic that British characters should often bewail immigration to the UK from India (as if this notably peaceful [the Hindus and Sikhs] and hardworking community had done Britain some irreparable harm), while boasting of the greatness of British rule in India.....They lack a sense of humour, evidently. If British rule had done such wonders for India, why did so many Indians leave for abroad as soon as they could? They hardly get much respect here.

Joe De Mocritus

Since when is belief in some ritual superstition and myth automatically produce "respect for truth and justice, for mercy and charity"?
You can perfectly well derive similar respect from secular humanist principles,

John.

Ganpat Ram: What is depressing is your own refusal to face up to stark reality of British rule in India: Macaulay was the first ever person to address the question of universal education in India, and that was in the middle of the 19th century - how many other places were doing this at that time apart from English-speaking countries and some European countries? As for health, there were hospitals all over the place, though not enough money available to treat everyone who may have needed treatment, but such was the case everywhere else at the time, including Britain itself till 1945. The cause of continuing poverty in India is largely due to an uncontrolled increase in the population and may have been so since the beginning. Facts have never removed chips from shoulders I fear, so I'm probably wasting my time writing all this.