Mike Flynn, on religious violence:

This raises the interesting question of what is religious violence. This is not as easy as it sounds. Pinker notes (with an apparent rhetorical smirk):

World War I, as I recall, was a war fought mostly by Christians against Christians.

That "as I recall" bit is pretty cute, and he seems to have written it as if it were meant seriously. But if that is his criterion then gandersauce requires us to count all the black men who were lynched by Democrats in the 1910s-1940s. World War I was also fought mostly by modern scientific Europeans against modern scientific Europeans. So what? It remains to be shown that Imperial Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, England, et al. went to war because they were Christian or modern scientific Europeans, or that mobs of Democrats lynched black men because the lynch mob were Democrats.

Pinker seems impressed with what people call themselves or he would not have made that fatuous remark about WW1. North Korea calls itself a democratic republic, but need we take the claim seriously? If the Europeans of 1914 were Christians, they were simply members of the State Established Churches. Worship of the Nation had by then long submerged worship of God. War posters like the one on the left cited the State or the Folk, but not the Church.

Or as our old buddy Tommy Aquinas put it, there is a difference between a human act and the act of a human. The former is what a man does because he is a human; the latter is merely something that he does. In the same way, a scientist (e.g., Fritz Haber) might devise a new means of mass murder (poison gas) for the Great War; but does he do it because he is a scientist or because he is a patriotic German? I don't mean his technical skills, but his motives. 

Even when there seems to be a "because-ness," closer inspection reveals greater complexity. Sure, there was a time when you could gin up a crowd to lynch someone because he was a dirty stinking Calvinist and this here is Lutheran land. But there are times and places when you could do the same thing using race or ethnicity or even economic commitments. If human beings are prone to violence, then it may not matter much what is used to incite them.

Thus when we examine the Huguenot wars in France, what we discover is that three Great Houses were fighting for control of the French throne, and they swung back and forth between Calvinism and Catholicism as the needs of state dictated. "Paris is worth a Mass," Hank Bourbon famously declared as he shed his Calvinism for convenience. A more accurate title would be the War of the French Succession.

Even the Thirty Years War is iffy. The German princes did not declare themselves independent of the Empire because they had become Protestant; they became Protestant because they wanted to declare their independence of the Empire. And can a war in which the Pope and the French crown supported the "Protestant" side really be called a religious war? It was really a war between Bourbon and Hapsburg, with both Protestant and Catholic princes on both sides.

Heresy was often a surrogate for political disloyalty, which is why heretics were more severely persecuted by the secular power. The church authorities were derided as "soft-hearted" (clericalem verens mollitiem) because they preferred persuasion.

Take another look at Pinker's list of the top nine [destructive atrocities of all time], above. Note that the top six are all pre-Christian and non-Christian events. And the last three date from after the subordination of the Church to the secular State; that is, after the Concordances, the English nationalization, and cuius regio, eius religio.

To read the whole post (on a more general topic) that this is extracted from, click here

The devil Screwtape on prayer:

Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never led them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (Letter IV)

Many otherwise well-educated people have long taken this picture for granted. [Complete lack of science in the Middle Ages] No one has diffused it more widely than astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996), whose television series Cosmos drew an audience estimated at half a billion. In his 1980 book by the same name, a timeline of astronomy from Greek antiquity to the present left between the fifth and the late fifteenth centuries a familiar thousand-year blank labelled as a “poignant lost opportunity for mankind.” The timeline reflected not the state of knowledge in 1980 but Sagan’s own “poignant lost opportunity” to consult the library of Cornell University, where he taught. In it, Sagan would have discovered large volumes devoted to the medieval history of his own field, some of them two hundred years old. He would also have learnt that the alleged medieval vacuum spawned the two institutions in which he spent his life: the observatory as a research institution (Islamic civilization) and the university (Latin Europe).

-The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 2 Medieval Science, ed. David C. Lindberg & Michael H. Shank, CUP, New York, ppb. 2015 pp.9-10

H/T Mike Flynn

The 50 Greatest Yogi Berra Quotes

Popular sins are never regarded by the people as sins ; they are never called sins. Terms are invented to describe them, which fall upon the ear without harshness, and which, whenever uttered, give no alarm to the moral sense. This is what is called in Scripture, the transformation of Satan into an angel of light.

-Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Llyod Garrison

[H/T Nicole DeMille]

Thus, it is not unusual to meet people who think that "not to believe in any," or "not to adhere firmly to any assertion as unshakably true in itself," is a primary condition required of democratic citizens in order to be tolerant of one another and to live in peace with one another. May I say that these people are in fact the most intolerant people, for if perchance they were to believe in something as unshakably true, they would feel compelled, by the same stroke, to impose by force and coercion their own belief on their co-citizens. The only remedy they have found to get rid of their abiding tendency to fanaticism is to cut themselves off from truth.

-Jacques Maritain, Truth and Human Fellowship

[H/T St. Thomas Aquinas Facebook page]

"Each citizen has a private philosophy and a private code. That's the trouble. And when you've invented the code or the philosophy for yourself, you suddenly find at some moment of emergency that it doesn't bind you. How could it? The stream doesn't rise higher than the source."

-Fr. Ronald Knox

" [...] principles will develop themselves, beyond the arbitrary points of which you are so fond, and by which they have hitherto been limited, like prisoners on parole [...]"

-John Henry Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, Volume One (1871)

"If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired."

I am also miffed by the use of "person" for "man," since it denies rational thought to women and reserves it exclusively to weremen. (cf. in English men-tal, min-d, also mankind, etc.; in German mann as the genderless pronoun. Hence, "a rational being.") Adult males were once referred to as "wera," see also Latin vir, Irish fir, words like vir-ile, vir-tue, etc. Instead of changing every word with the suffix -man, just give males back their prefixes and give them a unique designator of their own.

-Mike Flynn

Our understanding of the medieval period has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Although one occasionally still hears a self-important scientist speak of the Dark Ages, modern views have long since overthrown such simplicities. An age that was once thought to be static, brutal and benighted is now understood as dynamic and swiftly changing: an age where knowledge was sought and valued, where great universities were born, and learning fostered; where technology was enthusiastically advanced; where social relations were in flux; where trade was international; where the general level of violence was often less deadly than it is today. As for the old reputation of medieval times as a dark time of parochialism, religious prejudice and mass slaughter, the record of the twentieth century must lead any thoughtful observer to conclude that we are in no way superior.

In fact, the conception of a brutal medieval period was an invention of the Renaissance, whose proponents were at pains to emphasize a new spirit, even at the expense of the facts. If a benighted medieval world has proven a durable misconception, it may be because it confirms a cherished contemporary belief- that our species always moves forward to ever better and more enlightened ways of life. This belief is utter fantasy, but it dies hard. It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

-Michael Crichton (Acknowledgements", Timeline, 1999)

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic"
That can be turned into today's world:
"School shooting is a tragedy; baby killing is a statistic"

-Commenter Darrin on this article

Meanwhile, the religious world little thinks whither its opinions are leading; and will not discover that it is adoring a mere abstract name or a vague creation of the mind for the Ever-living Son, till the defection of its members from the faith startle it, and teach it that the so-called religion of the heart, without orthodoxy of doctrine, is but the warmth of a corpse, real for a time, but sure to fail.

-John Henry Newman