This is the first time I’ve done this, and I’m not planning on making it a habit, but reader tolkien posted such a long and detailed response on my piece Reason over Radish, that I felt it deserved its own post. I’m not saying I agree with all, or even any of it, but it’s worth putting up in its own right so that people can comment on’t directly.
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I’ve come to this site via Mark Steyn.
I’d just like to pick up a couple of points you make about the death toll caused by traditional Christianity, as you refer to it.
The Thirty Years War was, as Peter Wilson put it, Europe’s Tragedy. I studied this as part of my special subject for my history degree. A long time ago, I know, but still. That religious conflict was important, is not disputed. But it was largely a war over power in the Empire, and the ability of rulers to be truly sovereign. After all, a war where Catholic France allied with Protestant Sweden can be described in many ways, but not convincingly solely as a religious war. Emperor Ferdinand II had Protestant allies. The war started with two causes – the Defenestration of Prague (the attempted replacement of the Habsburg dynasty in Bohemia with that of the ruler of the Palatinate – to whom Elizabeth, daughter of James 1, was married) and the war by Spain to reconquer the rebellious provinces of the northern Netherlands (Revolt of the Netherlands was, ahem, my special subject). This was as much a religious war as that between Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Persia. The war by Spain no doubt had religious causes, but was fought because the Netherlands were about the richest part of Europe and the Spanish (a) didn’t like rebels (like every ruler of the time, Catholic or Protestant) and (b) could do with the tax revenue. It would also improve Spain’s strategic position in Europe and increase pressure on (Catholic) France. I don’t think you need to look at religion as the sole cause. Power politics and dynastic rivalry are more than sufficient.
The death toll was indeed horrific. But rather than a death toll of a third of central Europe, as you write, the best estimate (p787 of the hardback) is 20% of the Empire. Spain, France, England etc were unaffected. Still horrific, but not quite as bad as painted. Civil wars, particularly when powerful external parties intervene, are always very bloody.
You’ve been reading that nice Mr Pinker on mediaeval wars and deaths haven’t you? Did i mention I studied mediaeval European history? Where did you get your numbers on the Albigensian crusade? You should read (http://bedejournal.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/pinker-tackles-albigensian-crusade.html) on this.
I can’t let you get away with your slur on the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. You should try reading Michael Burleigh (A New History of the Third Reich). In fact the Pope published an encyclical (known as Mit brennender sorge, from its opening words in German) read out in every parish in Germany.
Denouncing Nazism
The first part of the encyclical traces a history of the concordat and it points out the continual violations in regard to the Catholic Church and the faithful.
There is a part in which “Mit Brennender Sorge” denounces “whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God.”
The encyclical condemns racist ideas, which “divinize with an idolatrous cult,” land and blood and “perverts and falsifies the order God has planned and created.”
The pontifical document underlines “the error of speaking of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are as a drop of a bucket.”
“Mit Brennender Sorge” strenuously defends the Old Testament, arguing that “whoever wishes to see banished from church and school the biblical history and the wise doctrines of the Old Testament, blasphemes the name of God, blasphemes the Almighty’s plan of salvation, and makes limited and narrow human thought the judge of God’s designs over the history of the world.”
The encyclical commends those who, defending the Catholic religion, “are subjected to a violence that is as illegal as it is inhuman,” and it speaks clearly of temptations to “the Judas bargain of apostasy.”
There is also an explicit condemnation of the attempt to build a “national German church.”
On the moral plane “Mit Brennender Sorge” strongly opposes “all the efforts to remove from under morality and the moral order the granite foundation of faith,” a road that leads to “the moral degradation of individuals and societies.”
The condemnation of the Nazi principle that “there is a right to what is useful for the nation” is also implied. Indeed, in a prophetic way it is said that, “that principle, detached from the moral law, would mean internationally a perpetual state of war among nations.”
It was the Catholic Bishop Galen who condemned – in the middle of the Second World War, the euthanasia of the weak, the feeble minded, whom secularists of the left would have approved of culling. Hitler was not himself an atheist, more a pantheist, but many leading Nazis were anti- Christian (Bormann for one. Himmler was a neo-pagan) and Hitler in his table talk regarded Christianity as a religion of the weak, and determined to settle with it after the end of the war.
As to the Othodox church and Tsarism, you should read Solzhenitsyn (the Gulag Archipelago and First Circle). The persecution and tyranny of Tsarism paled before the hecatombs of corpses piled up by the acolytes of scientific atheism. You might try reading Karl Schloegel’s Moscow 1937 – truly magnificent. I can’t overpraise it. Read the chapter “The Foundation Pit”which narrates, as emblematic of Bolshevik barbarism – did I mention they claimed to be scientific atheists? – the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 1931. Try reading the chapter “The Butovo Shooting Range”. I don’t suppose you will be surprised to read that the Bolsheviks set quotas for execution and deportation in 1937. Describing how the murders were carried out in one particular place – Butovo Shooting Range – Schloegel writes as follows:
Numerically, the peasants were followed by the faithful. … Even earlier, in the first two decades after 1917, the Orthodox Church had been exposed to harsh persecution. But in 1937 a new general assault began on the Church and its faithful. In 1937 around 8,000 churches were closed down, seventy dioceses and parishes were dissolved, and sixty (!) bishops shot – so much for the idea that the church snuggled up to Stalin – The first clergy wre shot in Butovo on 20 August 1937. They were an especially large proportion of those murdered in autumn 1937 and winter 1937/8. On 21 October 1937, the Feast of the Icon of the Holy Mother of God, forty-eight priests and laymen were shot; on 10 December, forty-nine priests were executed, among them Archbishop Nikolai of Vladimir and the last abbot of the Trinity Monastery at Sergiev Posad. Seven bishops, one metropolitan and two archbishops were killed at Butovo, together with a large number of archimandrites, abbots, priests, cantors, vergers and ordinary lay members of the congregation. Those murdered included elderly, frail and highly respected church leaders. The oldest among them was Serafim, the metropolitan of Leningrad. The archbishop of Mozhaisk, Dmitrii, was seventy-three when he was arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ and shot on 21 October 1937. The last abbot of the Chudov Monastery, which was in the Kremlin but had been dismantled in 1929, had asserted under interrogation that the Soviets would be overthrown by the people. He was shot on 27 September 1937. It was not until the Nazi invasion that the persecution was halted. Until then I do not think that the church snuggled up to Stalin.
As you can see, I have taken a lot of trouble to refute a few facts thrown off by you in the context of a blog post.
Anyway, best wishes,
