Myths About Past (Quasi-)Christian Civilization.

The Crusades

Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., Th.D., "Christ, Muhammad, and the Culture of Beheading," August 1, 2004, http://www.chalcedon.edu/articles/0408/040801-1gentry.php:

• Secularists complain against such negative comparisons between Christianity and Islam. They invariably point to the Christian Crusades as evidence of our own failure. However, internationally renowned Islam authority Bernard Lewis responds: “The Crusade is a late development in Christian history and, in a sense, marks a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the Gospels .… In the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, the Crusade was late, limited, and of relatively brief duration. Jihad is present from the beginning of Islamic history — in scripture, in the life of the Prophet, and in the actions of his companions and immediate successors. It has continued throughout Islamic history and retains its appeal to the present day.” [Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern, 2003), 37.]

• Riddell and Cotterell agree, and contrast Islamic jihad with the Christian Crusades: “First, the Christian call for holy war was made by a human pope … and as such was subject to challenge by later theologians. The Muslim call to jihad, however, is cemented within the Qur’an for all time. Second, the doctrine of holy war has now largely fallen into disuse in Christian circles, whereas jihad as a military concept is still widely practiced by some Muslim groups.” [Peter G. Riddell and Peter Cotterell, Islam in Context: Past, Present, and Future (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 30.]

• We could also point out that the Crusades were defensive maneuvers against cruel, unprovoked Muslim conquests of Christian lands and that they were eventually not only forsaken but apologized for by Christianity. Such is not the case with Islamic jihad.

Middle Age of Faith v. Modern Age of Atheism—Which was more accepting of mass human slaughter?:

Gary North: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north295.html:

• No such announcement was made by the Spaniards to civilians [“become Catholic or die”]. The number of people who died in the Spanish inquisition was under a thousand [about 880 persons], and the main targets were Jewish Catholic converts who were suspected of being secret Jews. (The definitive book on this is Benzion Netanyahu's The Origin of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain. He is Benjamin's father.) There was no attempt by Catholics or Protestants to execute masses of civilians, with the exception I mentioned in my original essay: the Thirty Years' War. Europe reacted in horror to that event.

Gary North: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north292.html:

• There was a time in Western history when the rules of war specified that civilians were not to be deliberate targets during wartime. These rules had sometimes been violated: in the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), when Catholics and Protestants made war on each other in Germany, and in America's wars against the Indians. But these had been considered exceptions. Then, in 1864, beginning with Sherman's march to the sea and Sheridan's burning of farms in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the old standard was abandoned
  

See Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972) and Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Harper & Row, [1983] 1991). According to one-time Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-), at the height of the Spanish Inquisition (late Middle Ages) about ten persons per month were executed. During the eighty years before the Russian revolution, seventeen persons per year were executed. In the first two years of Lenin's revolution more than one thousand persons per month were executed without due process of law. At the height of Stalin's terror an estimated forty thousand persons per month were executed. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "America: You Must Think About the World," Soizhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (June 30, 1975), p. 9.

Also see:
J. Domínguez, M.D. http://biblia.com/christianity/spanish.htm#The%20modern%20historiography%20of%20the%20Inquisition:



Witch Hunts

Myth of the numbers executed for witchcraft and that it was genocide against females:

"Ten Common Errors and Myths about the Witch Hunts, Corrected and Commented" by Brian A. Pavlac, Ph.D.
http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/witch/werror.html - A secularist historian corrects some of the myths.

Pagan origin of witchcraft ordeals:

Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 57, 82:

• In Germanic society, the "trust-mistrust" syndrome was closely related to the overriding belief in an arbitrary fate, and this belief, in turn, was reflected above all in the use of the ordeal as a principal method of legal proof. The two main types of ordeal were those of fire and water, the former for persons of higher rank, the latter for the common people. Originally, these were invocations of the gods of fire and water, respectively. Those tried by fire were passed blindfolded or barefooted over hot glowing plowshares, or they carried burning irons in their hands, and if their burns healed properly they were exonerated. The ordeal of water was performed either in cold water or in hot water. In cold water, the suspect was adjudged guilty if his body was borne up by the water contrary to the course of nature, showing that the water did not accept him. In hot water he was adjudged innocent if after putting his bare arms and legs into scalding water he came out unhurt. (57)
  The emergence of Christianity and its spread across Europe was a unique event, which cannot he explained by any general social theory. By contradicting the Germanic world view and splitting life into two realms, Christianity challenged the ultimate sanctity of custom, including the ultimate sanctity of kinship, lordship, and kingship relations. It also challenged the ultimate sanctity of nature—of the water and fire of the ordeals, for example. It challenged their ultimate sanctity, however, without denying their sanctity altogether; on the contrary, the church actually supported the sacred institutions and values of the folk (including the ordeals). The church supported them and at the same time challenged them by setting up a higher alternative—the realm of God, God's law, the life of the world to come. (82)

Religion vs. Science

The "Dark Ages" is a myth. It is a phrase invented by atheists during the so-called "Enlightenment" to disparage Christianity. Likewise the "Scientific Revolution." Modern science was born in the Middle Ages in Europe. While the "Scientific Revolution" was a period of many important scientific advances, these advances were fruit born from the scientific enterprise that had its origin and growth in the preceding centuries. Christian Europe of the Middle Ages may not have had the fine roads of the Roman Empire, but it abolished the slave societies of ancient Rome and Greece, made technological advances beyond anything the world had known, and invented universities not only to preserve knowledge, but to innovate in all areas of human learning. This was all done by Christians who self-consciously thought in terms of a Christian worldview, founded on the existence of an absolutely rational Creator.


Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 127:

[T]he Spanish inquisitors paid virtually no attention to science per se. In his remarkable recent study, Henry Kamen reported:

• Scientific books written by Catholics tended to circulate freely. The 1583 Quiroga Index had a negligible impact on the accessibility of scientific works, and Galileo was never put on the list of forbidden books. The most direct attacks mounted by the Inquisition were against selected works in the area of astrology and alchemy, sciences that were deemed to carry overtones of superstition.
  
  In contrast, anyone in Spain could have gotten in deep trouble for reading books by Protestants, scientific or not. Even so, most of the books that actually got people in trouble with the inquisitors were not about religion, science, or superstition; they were pornographic. . . .
  
  But insofar as the suppression of science is concerned, the bloodiest incidents have been recent and have had nothing to do with religion. It was the Nazi Party, not the German Evangelical Church, that tried to eradicate "Jewish" physics, and it was the Communist Party, not the Russian Orthodox Church, that destroyed "bourgeois" genetics and left many other fields of Soviet science in disarray. No one has been prompted by these examples to propose an inherent incompatibility between politics and science. By the same toke, that there have been conflicts between churches and science does not justify belief in an incompatibility between religion and science. It is, rather, that autocrats often do not tolerate disagreement.

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 130:

• Thus only recently have historians realized that while Europe's leading scholars of, say, the eighth century may have written "inferior" Latin, and may not have been well versed in Plato and Aristotle, they were not "barbarians." They certainly were not barbarians morally: both Plato and Aristotle owned slaves, but during the "Dark Ages," Europeans rejected slavery. . . . And they certainly were not barbarians in terms of technology: during the "Dark Ages" came "one of the great inventive eras of mankind" as machinery was developed and put into use "on a scale no civilization had previously known." Or, as Lynn White put it, "In technology, at least, the Dark Ages mark a steady and uninterrupted advance over the Roman Empire." Histories of the technological achievements of medieval times are fascinating reading.

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 134-35:

• Christianity did not plunge Europe into an era of ignorance and backwardness. Rather, so much technical progress took place during this era that by no later than the thirteenth century, European technology surpassed anything to be found elsewhere in the world. This did not occur because of the "rediscovery" of classical knowledge. There is no more misleading account of Western civilization than the one that starts with classical culture and proceeds directly to the "Renaissance," dismissing the millennium in between as an unfortunate and irrelevant interlude. Western civilization is not the direct descendant of Greco-Roman culture. Instead, it is the product of centuries of interaction between the cultures of the "barbarians" (who, as we have begun to realize, had far more sophisticated cultures than had been acknowledged) and Christianity. In fact, it is far less the case that Christianity "Romanized" the Germans than that the latter "Germanized" Christianity. The subsequent addition of Greco-Roman learning was more decorative than fundamental. For the fact is that the progress achieved during the "Dark Ages" was not limited to technology. Medieval Europe also excelled in philosophy and science. As Lynn White pointed out, by "the late 13th century Europe had seized global scientific leadership."
  In many ways the term "Scientific Revolution" is as misleading as "Dark Ages." Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a "Scientific Revolution" has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Columbus and the flat earth. First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science. Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been carefully nurtured by devout Scholastics in that most Christian invention, the university. As Alford W. Crosby pointed out, "in our time the word medieval is often used as a synonym for muddle-headedness, but it can be more accurately used to indicate precise definition and meticulous reasoning, that is to say, clarity" (his emphasis). Granted that the era of scientific discovery that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was indeed marvelous, the cultural equivalent of the blossoming of a rose. However, just as roses do not spring up overnight but must undergo a long period of normal growth before they even bud, so, too, the blossoming of science was the result of centuries of normal intellectual progress, which is why I am unwilling to refer to a "Scientific Revolution" without putting the term in quotation marks.

Flat Earth:

The myth that people believed that the earth was flat until Columbus proved them wrong began with Washington Irving, best known for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." Irving published a three-volume History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), which included a fabricated confrontation between Columbus and a churchman who argued that the earth was flat. Columbus biographer Samuel Eliot Morison says that Irving's story is "misleading and mischievous nonsense, . . . one of the most popular Columbian myths. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Co., 1942), 89. The myth became popularized around the turn of the twenthieth century by proponents of evolution, such as Andrew D. White in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christiandom (1896), a book filled with misinformation about the relationship between Christianity and science.
The calculations of the ancient Greek mathematician Ptolemy concerning the circumference of the earth continued to be relied upon throughout the Middle Ages. The Bible and Aristotle were also used to support the view that the earth is round: "Scientific demonstration of the earth's rotundity was enforced by religion; God made the earth a sphere because that was the most perfect form [per Aristotle - M.W.]. In the Old Testament there is a reference to this in Isaiah xl:22: 'It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.' — 'circle' being the translation of the Hebrew khug, sphere." Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Norther Voyages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 6.
There were a few Christians in the Middle Ages who claimed that the earth is flat, but there are few references to their work in later medieval writing. One was sixth-century Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes; medieval scholar Jeffrey Russell writes that he "had no followers whatever: his works were ignored or dismissed with derision thorought the Middle Ages." Jeffery Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991), 4.
For more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth and http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods46.html


Dissection:

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 144-46:

• Human dissection was not permitted in the classical world, which is why Greco-Roman works on anatomy are so faulty. Aristotle's studies were limited entirely to animal dissections, as were those of Celsius and Galen. Celsius claimed that three centuries before his time, several Greek physicians in Alexandria may have dissected a few slaves and criminals. Otherwise "in the classical period the dignity of the human body forbade dissection." Human dissection was also prohibited in Islam. Then came the Christian universities and with them a new outlook on dissection. The starting assumption was that what is unique to humans is a soul, not a physiology. Dissections of the human body, therefore, are not different from studies of animal bodies and have no theological implications. From this assumption two additional justifications of dissections were advanced. The first was forensic. Too many murderers escaped detection because the bodies of their victims were not subject to a careful postmortem. The second concerned human welfare—that no adequate medical knowledge could be acquired without direct observation of human anatomy. . . .
  Nevertheless, A.D. White wrote indignately about how the great physiologist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) "risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church" by conducting human dissections. White went on to claim that anyone who dissected a human body at this time risked "excommunication," but the heroic Vesalius "broke without fear" from "this sacred conventionalism" and proceeded "despite ecclesiastical censure . . . No peril daunted him." All this was alleged to have taken place two centuries after human dissection began at universities where Vesalius learned and practiced his anatomical craft! This is not a fact only recently brought to light. Writing in the early 1920s, Charles Singer, one of the first historians of medicine, thought it so well known as to need no documentation that "although Vesalius profoundly altered the attitude towards biological phenomenon, he yet prosecuted his researches undisturbed by ecclesiastical authorities."
  White also failed to convey the immense fame and recognition Vesalius's work received immediately upon publication. Nor did White deign to report that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, responded to Vesalius's "sacrilege" by ennobling him as a count and awarding him a lifetime pension. Thereafter, the young anatomist took up residence at the court of Phillip II of Spain, and this during the most active period of heresy-hunting by local inquisitors! As for Vesalius's religious views, he died while returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Thus we uncover another of White's bogus accounts of the unrelenting religious opposition to science. And, like the tale about Columbus, it has had a deep and twisted effect on our intellectual culture.

The cases of Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus:

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 127:

• Consider the execution of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), often cited as one of the most shameful examples of the religious repression of science. A.D. White claimed that Bruno "should be mentioned with reverence as beginning to develop again that current of Greek thought . . . [which the] doctors of the Church had interrupted for more than a thousand years." In fact, Bruno was not really a scientist, although he engaged in some speculative astronomy. Rather, he was a renegade monk, a Hermetic sorcerer, and something of a philosopher. His troubles had to do entirely with a heretical theology involving the existence of an infinite number of worlds—a work based entirely on imagination and speculation. The same is true of the other equally infamous case, that of Michael Servetus (1511-1553), put to death in Geneva with the acquiescence of John Calvin. Although Servetus did a bit of early work in physiology, he specialized in theology, and it was only for his theological writing that he was condemned.

Luther and Calvin against Science:


R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdsmans Publishing, 1972), p. 121-22:

• Here again prejudice has blinded historiographers: it would not fit with the current image of Calvin if he opens the way to anything but intolerance and biblicism. According to A.D. White, "Calvin took the lead (against Copernicanism) in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not the centre of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third psalm, and asked, 'Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?' White evidently borrowed this latter quotation from Farrar's 'History of Interpretation'.

• 'There is no lie so good as the precise and well-detailed one', and this one has been repeated again and again, quotation-marks included, by writers on the history of science, who evidently did not make the effort to verify the statement. For fifteen years, I have pointed out in several periodicals concerned with the history of science that the "quotation" from Calvin is imaginary and that Calvin never mentioned Copernicus; but the legend dies hard. It seems strange that Farrar, who in the body of his work did full justice to the scholarly character of Calvin's method of exegesis, could go so far astray in the Introduction. I became suspicious of his statement because it does not fit in with Calvin's exegetical principles and because a parallel quotation allegedly from the Independent divine John Owen could immediately be proven to be spurious.

Concerning the Luther quote, Hooykaas continues:

• Much stress is often laid on Luther's attitude in order to corroborate the statement that the Reformers and the Protestants, because of their biblicism, were in general less favourably inclined towards Copernicus' system than the Roman church before the condemnation of Galileo. Luther indeed in one of his table-talks rejected the opinion of an astronomer according to whom the sun was standing still, as a mistaken effort to be original: "I believe Holy Scripture, for Joshua told the sun to stand still, not the earth". But in his authorized works, Luther never mentioned the problem; it was just a commonsense remark, made when only rumours about Copernicus' work (not even his name is mentioned in the reminiscence of the reporter) were circulating (1539), and it was only printed (from the memory of one of his guests) twenty-seven years afterwards (1566). So this attitude could hardly have exerted much influence, the more so as it does not play a role in Lutheran doctrine.

Finally, the remarks of Hooykaas on Melanchthon:

• Only Melanchthon, who always remained faithful to Aristotelian philosophy, at first condemned the doctrine of the motion of the earth, and said that the magistrates ought to punish its proclamation. But one year afterwards, in his second edition, this passage was omitted. Melanchthon was on very friendly terms with Petreius, the printer of Copernicus' work, and in an oration (1549) on his lately dead friend Caspar Cruciger (1504-1548), he mentioned that the latter was an admirer of Copernicus. Moreover, he gave protection to Rheticus, Copernicus' only immediate pupil.

Donald H. Kobe, "Luther and Science"
http://www.leaderu.com/science/kobe.html

Gary DeMar, "Martin Luther and Copernicus"
http://www.americanvision.org/articl...e/12-18-06.asp
Gary DeMar, "The War Between Science and Religion"
http://www.americanvision.org/articl...e/11-14-06.asp
Gary DeMar, "Questioning History—Part I"
http://www.americanvision.org/articlearchive2007/11-05-07.asp



A paper written by two liberals on the myth that the historical relationship between Christianity and science has typically been one of warfare: David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Lindberg.html




Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 356:

• What made it possible for Western civilization to develop science and the social sciences in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer, I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages. With the exception of revealed truths, reason was enthroned in medieval universities as the ultimate arbiter for most intellectual arguments and controversies. It was quite natural for scholars immersed in a university environment to employ reason to probe into subject areas that had not been explored before, as well as to discuss possibilities that had not previously been seriously entertained.

David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 363:

• [I]t must be emphatically stated that within this educational system the medieval master had a great deal of freedom. The stereotype of the Middle Ages pictures the professor as spineless and subservient, a slavish follower of Aristotle and the Church fathers (exactly how one could be a slavish follower of both, the stereotype does not explain), fearful of departing one iota from the demands of authority. There were broad theological limits, of course, but within those limits the medieval master had remarkable freedom of thought and expression; there was almost no doctrine, philosophical or theological, that was not submitted to minute scrutiny and criticism by scholars in the medieval university.

Class Conflict the Cause of Religious Movements

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to the Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 61-62:

• Many scholars, perhaps possessed of excessively active sociological imaginations, have claimed that these great heretical movements were not really about doctrines and moral concerns. Instead, they argue, the religious aspects of these movements masked their real basis, which was “class conflict.” Frederick Engels set the example followed by many others when he dismissed the religious aspects of these clashes as “the illusions of the epoch” and claimed that the “interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen.” . . .

• Attributing the major medieval religious movements to poor peasants or proletarian townsfolk flies in the face of clear evidence of the substantial overinvolvement of the wealthy and privileged in most, if not all, of them. Moreover, even if it could be shown that the majority of followers in these movements were poor peasants, that carries little force when we recognize that nearly everyone in medieval Europe was a poor peasant. It is also essential to see that the emphasis placed on the virtues of poverty by so many of these groups was not a rationalization for being poor but a call for Christians to embrace “holy poverty” as the means of overcoming worldliness. The stress was on choosing poverty—an option not given to the poor—which may account for the special appeal of asceticism to those in a position to choose. It is frequently observed that wealth fails to satisfy many of those born into privilege, and that seems to have been especially so in this era when it was mainly the children of the upper classes who received of religious education (or any education), and whose interests and concerns were thereby aroused.
  
  Myths about Past (Quasi-)Christian Civilization