American Daily, OH
Aug 11 2004
Slander – Liberal Lies About Christianity
By Bruce Walker (08/28/2003)
Ann Coulter wrote a magnificent book describing how liberals slander
conservatives. This deliberate campaign of defamation also describes
how liberals approach traditional Christianity. Belief in a Creator
whose moral authority transcends every conceivable ideology or
institution of man is anathema to the secular dogmatists of the Left.
Consequently, Leftism is hostile to any serious ethical monotheism.
But Christianity is to Leftists what America was to the Soviet Union:
the `Main Enemy.’ Why? Because Christianity teaches us that though we
are born with murder in our hearts, God can replace that murder with
love.
The good news of Christianity contradicts all the bad news of class
exploitation theories, racial hatred, sexism, and any other social
pathology which poisons people against other people. Christianity
says that material accomplishments will never change the world,
conquering armies will never change the world, and only divine love
can change the world.
This threatens everyone who craves power, prestige and popularity –
those tokens of value which Leftists crave like addicts crave drugs.
No fame, fortune or power; no hordes of people screaming hoarse cries
to the Fuhrer or the Vozd can ever do what the simplest prayer of a
ordinary, trusting soul to his Creator can do.
Leftism pretends to be new and fresh, but it is ancient and foul.
Leftism was antiquated long before Marx or the revolutionaries of
France had their say. It is no more than envy, pride and lies dressed
in finery.
Leftists once whispered to Alexander the Great that more conquests
and slaughter would make him a god. It proclaimed to the brutally
efficient Romans that aqueducts and roads – `infrastructure’ –
justified the enslavement, the slaughter, and the conquest of
millions.
Leftism whispered to the Bourbons of France that the exquisite art of
Versailles made up for callousness toward the poor, and it guided
Robespierre to decapitate people with the `crime’ of noble birth
based upon the greater good of the masses.
Leftism led Hitler to Marxism, then to National Socialism and always
away from a loving God. Leftism guided the hand of Mussolini in his
first political essay – `God Does Not Exist’- and guided his life
according to that atheistic dogmatism. Leftism has guided every
Marxist leader in the Twentieth Century to casual democide,
capricious torments and blase corruption.
Leftism says above all else that the end justifies the means and that
the proper ends are no more than what men who with truncheons say
that those ends should be. Recoiling at Jesus is the instinct of all
Leftism. Redwood forests may be holy to Leftists. Academia may be
infallible truth to Leftists. Savagery in the vindication of old,
presumed wrongs may be the sacrament of Leftism. But Jesus is the
negation of these and every phantom of meaning in the ultimate
nihilism that is Leftism.
Christianity is an unparalleled force for good in human history –
whatever one believes about the metaphysical validity of Christian
doctrine – and this very success in transforming the world for the
better makes vicious slander of true Christianity is indispensable to
Leftism. Recall the motto of revolutionary socialism: `The worse, the
better.’
The defamation of Christianity is not important to other faiths.
Religiously serious Jews and Moslems, like Christians, are anchored
in transcendent values. Franz Rosenzwieg, probably the most important
Jewish theologian of the Twentieth Century, considered Christianity
to be the Judaism of non-Jews – an equally valid path to the Holy
One. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian of equally great repute,
considered Jesus as `my brother’ and as a great Jewish teacher.
Islam considers Jesus to be a great prophet – equal in stature to
Abraham and Moses. Slandering and mocking Jesus in strictly Islamic
countries is a very serious criminal offense. No one could produce
Last Temptation of Christ in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Pious Jews and Moslems, of course, hold different beliefs than pious
Christians. But pious Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, Mormons and
Russian Orthodox Christians hold differing beliefs regarding
Christianity as well.
All three major monotheistic religions – Jews, Moslems and the
various denominations of Christianity – believe absolutely in a
Blessed Creator of the Universe. Each submits himself to moral laws
which transcend man and mankind. Indeed, Islam roughly translates as
`submission to the will of the One Lord.’
Leftists, however, fancy themselves gods. They will always be the
worst and most emphatic slanderers of Christianity. How is this
ancient slander manifested? Not by some different version of the
absurd anti-Judaic fraud, like the Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion, but rather by repeating factual inaccuracies about Christians
which over time become accepted as fact.
How deeply have these slanders infected modern consciousness?
Consider some of the following `facts’ which most of us consider as
true without thought or reflection.
Christopher Columbus, we learn in history books, proved that the
world was round by traveling to what he thought was India (and was
actually the Western Hemisphere) – right? Wrong. Christians never
proposed the absurd proposition that the world was flat. Until the
1830s, no one believed that Christians in medieval Europe had ever
thought that the world was flat.
One French and two American writers – Antoine-Jean Letronne, John
Draper, and Andrew Dickson White – schemed to create a non-existent
schism between Christianity (which these men loathed) and science
(which these men thought our secular salvation). They simply said
that medieval Christians believed something that was never believed
by these Christians at all.
If anything, Christian science and Christian theology at the time of
Colombus explained the spherical nature of the Earth better than
other systems of thought. The journey of Colombus was not about
discovering the roundness of the Earth, but about finding another
route to Café and India. Why invent this myth? The purpose was to
make Christians, whose intellectual achievements were transforming
human thought, appear ignorant and childish: pure slander.
The Earth revolves around the sun, but most of us have been taught to
believe that Christians uniquely resisted this cosmological fact.
This proposition is so absurd that malice against Christianity is the
only conceivable motive for it. Every scientists involved in proving
the heliocentric theory – Copernicus, Kepler, Napier and Galileo –
were Christians. Yet the trial of Galileo is reflexively assumed as
evidence of Christian bigotry toward science. Was it?
Galileo was not tried based upon theological objections to his
theory, but rather upon scientific objections to his theory. These
scientific objections showed intellectual rigor, not laziness. The
Ptolemaic theory, which was accepted not just by Christians but by
Moslems and Jews, worked. The sophisticated system of concentric
circular orbits accurately predicted eclipses and accurately guided
ship captains across oceans.
The heliocentric theory that was proposed by Galileo, by contrast,
did not work. If his theory was true, then we should have been able
to perceive stellar parallaxes. Galileo himself acknowledged this
problem and that he could not explain the absence of such evidence.
Centuries later, a stellar parallax was observed – but this remained
a serious defect in his theory at the time of his trial.
Galileo said that the planets circle the sun. They do not. The
planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun, which is a
critically important fact in how the bodies of the solar system move
in space.
Galileo proposed a heliocentric theory of the universe rather than a
geocentric theory of the universe. He was completely wrong. The sun
travels through the cosmos, just like the Earth. It is not, as
Galileo insisted, the unmoving center of the universe.
Galileo could not answer these scientifically serious problems with
his theory, but the Catholic Church did not even demand that Galileo
stop expounding his heliocentric theory. He could even proposed that
his theory of how the heavenly bodies moved was superior to the
Ptolemaic theory. The trial of Galileo resulted in a verdict
directing that he cease teaching his theory as fact.
Education, at this time, was taught in religious institutions
throughout the world. Consequently, the Catholic church had a duty to
protect students from intellectually false studies. That was all
which the trial purported to address, and the Church was right and
Galileo was wrong: the theory he proposed was wrong in two critical
areas and was unprovable as fact in those areas in which his theory
contained some scientific truth.
These two misrepresentations of Christian intellectual understanding
were calculated slanders. Even worse have been those slanders which
paint Christians as bigoted and immoral. How often have we been
warned about the horrors of the Salem Witch Trials? Hollywood and
every other vehicle for Christophobic venom has painted this as one
of the darkest chapters of religion and justice in human history.
This episode is important because it is the worst example that
anti-American Christophobes can find of religious injustice in
America, but consider the actual facts of the cases.
In 1692 a total of twenty people were executed for witchcraft. Within
five years of these executions, the Massachusetts general court
offered public repentance for these actions. It also deplored the
action of the judges in these cases. One of these judges publically
confessed his sin from the pulpit. The jurors who convicted the
alleged witches signed a statement of regret. Member of the families
of those who had been executed were offered indemnities.
The Salem Witch Trials were an example of religious hysteria leading
to tragic results, but human history is filled with endless examples
of such punishment of the innocent. What should amaze serious
historians is the unprecedented, total and timely repudiation of this
crime by the very people who perpetrated it. When else in history has
this happened?
Moslem Turkey today does not recognize its genocide of 1.5 million
Armenian Christians in the Twentieth Century. China does not
acknowledge any fault in its genocide of Tibetan Buddhists. The
Soviet Union never apologized for its extermination of millions of
believing Christians.
But Christians in New England, over three centuries ago, took their
miscarriage of justice very seriously and did precisely what Jesus
instructed them to do: repent quickly and completely. Why does
Hollywood and history books make so much of this event?
The answer to that question is easy: how many of you knew only about
the witch trials themselves, often in great detail, but knew nothing
at all about the utter and absolute repudiation of this sad episode
by the Christians of Massachusetts Bay Colony within five years of
the trials?
Why do most people know nothing about the 1.5 Million Polish
Christians stuffed into cattle cars and sent to concentration camps
by Soviets between September 1939 and June 1941? Why do most people
not know that Germans joining the Schutzstaffel or `SS’ – the
monsters who perpetrated the Holocaust – were required to renounce
their Christianity?
Christians are blamed for the Holocaust. This horrific slaughter of
more than six million Jewish men, women and children is rightly
condemned as among the worst crimes of the Twentieth Century or,
indeed, of human history.
But the very first people who voluntarily opposed Hitler and his Nazi
Regime out of religious conscience were the Protestant clergy of
Germany. Had they simply ignored the evil of Nazism, they could have
lived in relative comfort and safety. Most did not.
The political ruler in Europe who risked the most to save Jews, who
did so with no hope for any earthly reward, and who saved at least
forty thousand Jews from extermination, was also the most profoundly
religious political ruler on the continent of Europe: Francisco
Franco of Spain.
When Tsarist Russia began its last round of pogroms at the end of the
Nineteenth Century, the loudest voices in opposition were Christian
church leaders from around the world. When the long exile of Jews
from England ended, this was the result of the only governor of
England who owed his power specifically because of the utter support
of pious Christians, Oliver Cromwell, the great Puritan commander.
When Jews first found a real home after the diaspora, the safety and
security of America, it was George Washington, who embraced
Christianity more seriously than perhaps any president in American
history, who wrote his famous `Letter to the Jews of Newport.’
This document, which is still read every year in some synagogues,
goes far beyond simple toleration, which cynical and irreligious
European rulers of the Enlightenment had often offered Jews, but
protection against bigotry and persecution. The letter is not
legalism, but morality – Christian morality – that welcomed Jews to
America.
Leftists lie about Christianity. Leftists slander Christians because
as look as people worship a loving God in a gentle theology, they
will never worship the secular gods of a hateful misology.
Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a
sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce
has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared several
professional and political periodicals.