This post is to just get on record some numbers about the Spanish Inquisition. A good summary is this one via Strange Notions, take note of the last bullet point:
• The Inquisition was originally welcomed to bring order to Europe because states saw an attack on the state’s faith as an attack on the state as well. • The Inquisition technically had jurisdiction only over those professing to be Christians. • The courts of the Inquisition were extremely fair compared to their secular counterparts at the time. • The Inquisition was responsible for less than 100 witch-hunt deaths, and was the first judicial body to denounce the trials in Europe. • Though torture was commonly used in all the courts of Europe at the time, the Inquisition used torture very infrequently. • During the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, between 3,000-5,000* people were sentenced to death (about 1 per month). • The Church executed no one.
[….]
In recent years, however, the Vatican opened up its secret archives for historical investigation. Inquisition records that were made by and for the Inquisition were allowed to be researched for the first time in history. Since then, the above facts have been generally discoverable in modern history books (whether Catholic or not). Corrected Inquisition history can be found in sources such as Inquisition by Edward Peters and The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision by Henry Kamen. Comparative secular documentaries include The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition (BBC) and the more sensationalistic The Spanish Inquisition (History Channel).
(*See Kamen death totals below.)
Okay, the Catholic Church didn’t suppress science from Galileo, they didn’t kill him either, he died of old age. And in 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, they killed about 3,000-to-5,000 people people due to it. here is this better understood history used in a debate between atheist
The above will play into another aspect of this story as well… that is, this was largely a secular movement. Continuing. The years in which the Inquisition was extremely active was between 1480 and 1530. Henry Kamen estimates about 2,000 executed, based on the documentation of the autos-da-fé, the great majority being conversos of Jewish origin. He offers striking statistics: 91.6% of those judged in Valencia between 1484 and 1530 and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish origin. (WIKI, and Kamen’s book).
Here is Kamen’s commentary on the death toll:
In Castile the incidence of executions was probably higher. In the auto de fe at Ciudad Real on 23 February 1484, thirty people were burnt alive and forty in effigy; in the auto at Valladolid on 5 January 1492, thirty-two were burnt alive. The executions were, however, sporadic and concentrated only in the early years. In rounded terms, it is likely that over three-quarters of all those who perished under the Inquisition in the three centuries of its existence, did so in the first half-century. Lack of documentation, however, makes it impossible to arrive at totally reliable figures. One good estimate, based on documentation of the autos de fe, is that 250 people were burnt in person in the Toledo tribunal between 1485 and 1501 . Since this tribunal and that of Seville and Jaen were among the few in Castile to have had an intense level of activity, it would not be improbable to suggest a figure five times higher, around one thousand persons, as a rough total for those executed in the tribunals of Castile in the early period. Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1530, it is unlikely that more than two thousand people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition.
Dennis Prager Comments on “Religious Violence” Via Prager’s “Masters Program.” (DAILY WIRE)
This is KEY!
Using Kamen’s numbers, about 6[-] people were killed a year by the Spanish Inquisition over its 350-year long stretch. If you use the high numbers, you get about 14[+] people killed a year. Below is Dinesh D’Souza referencing this information in a debate with an atheist
Secularism More Dangerous!
The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainly. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law — materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law.
A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict. So, what atheists have considered to be ‘most’ really amounts to less than 7% of all wars. It is interesting to note that 66 of these wars (more than 50%) involved Islam, which did not even exist as a religion for the first 3,000 years of recorded human warfare. [That means that 2.6% of all wars fought are split up between Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the like.]
Even the Seven Years’ War, widely recognized to be “religious” in motivation, noting that the warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional lines as much as along secular interests. And the Thirty Years’ War cannot be viewed as “religious” either…read more
Dennis Prager makes a point that one of the common traits with the mass shooters is that they are never regular church goers. They are more likely to be secular… not taking into account the Judeo-Christian concept of God and the ethics that follow such a belief.
Not only that, the inquisition was largely secular. Ahhh, too bad history has a way of proving pop-theories of history and peoples use of misconception to tarnish the church when it was mainly secular authorities that did these horrible acts.wrong:
“The Inquisition had a secular character, although the crime was heresy. Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers. The investigation was rule-based and carefully kept in check. And most significantly, historians have declared fraudulent a supposed Inquisition document claiming the genocide of millions of heretics…. But the grand myth of thought control by sinister fiends has been debunked by the archival evidence….. he approach is purely historical, and therefore does not delve into ecclesial issues surrounding religious freedom. But perhaps this is proper. Because the crime was heresy, the Church is implicated, but the facts show it was a secular event……
…Sixtus IV promulgated a new bull categorically prohibiting the Inquisition’s extension to Aragon, affirming that,
▼ many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves and other low people—and still less appropriate—without tests of any kind, have been locked up in secular prisons, tortured and condemned like relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and given over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.
In 1482 the pope was still trying to maintain control over the Inquisition and to gain acceptance for his own attitude towards the New Christians, which was generally more moderate than that of the Inquisition and the local rulers….
All this is to note the idea that skeptics have a distorted view of history precisely BECAUSE this view fits their presupposition that the “Church” (Christianity) is bad. Keep in mind it was still bad, Kamen notes right after the toll numbers: “The final death toll may have been smaller than historians once believed, but the overall impact was certainly devastating for the cultural minorities most directly affected.” We must keep in mind many were displaced and peoples faith were shaken as well as honed in trial and tribulation.
This is merely a side note and has nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition as much as merely pointing out another time in history that is often overblown. Sensationalized in the aspect that mob mentality will quickly spread rumors and innuendo and act on IT rather than truth (ahem, Furguson), as was the case for the beginning of the Frech Revolution… which was opportunism taken by radicals in that society.
Dennis Prager interviews Ann Coulter in regards to her new book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. Ann points out a fact that I wasn’t aware of in regards to the mob mentality that set the standard for the French Revolution. Much like the misunderstanding in regards to the Crusades, the witch trials, and the like, numbers are not the forte of the left… nor is putting into context meaning behind them.
For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to join Pragertopia: http://www.dennisprager.com/
✦ “As we’ve seen more people in this country have been killed by rightwing extremists that radical Islamist extremists.” (Gateway Pundit)
Elliot Rodger (“UCSB” shooter): Fan of the left-wing political talk show, The Young Turks.
James von Brunn (Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter): von Brunn hated Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Nidal Hasan (Ft Hood Shooter): Reg¬istered Democrat and Muslim.
Aaron Alexis (Navy Yard shooter): black liberal/Obama voter.
Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter): Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat.
James Holmes: the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occu¬py guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians.
Amy Bishop: the rabid leftist, killed her colleagues in Alabama, Obama supporter.
Andrew J. Stack (IRS bomber, flew plane into IRS building in Texas): Leftist Democrat, hated Bush and capitalism.
James J. Lee (who was the “green activist”): leftist took hostages at Discovery Channel – progressive liberal Democrat.
John Patrick Bedell: (Pentagon Shooter) registered Democrat, talked about economic justice.
Nkosi Thandiwe (Shooting spree targeting white ppl): Accepted “white priveledge.”
Floyd Corkins (LGBT Chic-Fil-A shooter): hated conservative and Christians.
Karl Pierson (school shooter): loved communism, self-avowed Keynesian, hated Adam Smith and supported gun-control.
(For a list of LEFT-WING murderers/killers, see this article.)
A great story on some of these and more can be found at The Blaze, and excoriates the media for their participation in this smear.
Okay, I have been wanting to do this for a while, which is, transfer some info from a cadre of old blogs to update the topic into one post that I can reference in the future. Keep in mind that some of the links are long dead. Blogs come-and-go. I am trying to stay. I will continue to post “bios” like this… it was at first a refutation of the legacy media who were immediately connecting many of these shooters to the T.E.A. Party, but an interesting pattern emerges. Also, when dealing with the media we are dealing with THIS type of bias:
Elliot Rodgers (May 2014)
The newest addition to this crappy list, is Elliot Rodgers. Elliot is the the son of Hunger Games assistant director Peter Rodgers. Now of course Elliot didn’t go on a killing spree in the name of liberalism. And I believe that he, like many of the others, had a screw loose. But, I bet he came from a secular, liberal, Hollywood style upbringing that offered him nothing greater outside himself to battle the “natural man.” In fact, the ONLY political affiliation he chose to associate himself with both on his YouTube and FaceBook is the left-wing political talk show, The Young Turks.
The Young Turk describes itself as “a young progressive or insurgent member of an institution.”
The host of the channel Cenk Uygur is a far left political activist and former MSNBC host.
All I am saying is that Fox News wasn’t on his list. I looked both at his FaceBook and YouTube “likes,” and there were no religious or conservative interests in this young man. Nothing greater than nature challenging him to reign in feelings and test them with ethical religious mores. Moving on… and now I will go from the older posts to the more recent ones I have posted on over the years. I will concentrate mainly — but not exclusively — to murderers the media almost immediately blames the right on.
James Lee, the man police identified as the gunman who entered the headquarters of the Discovery Channel and took a group of hostages, was a self-styled eco-warrior and author of a manifesto describing humans as “the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures” destroying the planet.
Lee waged a one-man campaign aimed at forcing the Discovery Channel to run programmes encouraging human sterilisation and wildlife preservation….
Here’s a sample of Lee’s manifesto:
Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive [sic] creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.
For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!
It is the responsibility [sic] of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES!
James von Brunn (June 2009)
Now isn’t this fascinating. James von Brunn , the white-supremacist suspect in the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in which the guard who was shot has now tragically died, describes the relevance of evolution to his sick thinking. He’s obsessed with “genetics.” He writes in his manifesto (emphasis added):
Approval of inter-racial breeding is predicated on idiotic Christian dogma that God’s children must love their enemies (a concept JEWS totally reject); and on LIBERAL/MARXIST/JEW propaganda that all men/races are created equal. These genocidal ideologies, preached from the American pulpits, taught in American schools, legislated in the halls of Congress (confirming TALMUDIC conviction that goyim are stupid sheep), are expected to produce a single, superintelligent, beautiful, non-White “American” population. Eliminating forever racism, inequality, bigotry and war. As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels. Throughout history improvident Whites have miscegenated. The “brotherhood” concept is not new (as LIBERALS pretend) nor are the results — which are inevitably disastrous for the White Race — evident today, for example, in the botched populations of Cuba, Mexico, Egypt, India, and the inner cities of contemporary America. (Here’s the PDF version of Von Brunn’s “manifesto.”)
This wacko despises Christianity, too, though not quite as much as he does Judaism. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf, he draws lessons from his interpretation of Darwinism.
The below is some more news on James von Brunn. As they sift through his life more and more of his reasoning (or lack thereof) is coming to light and I feel I must share it with you. The following is from NewsBusters:
The perpetrator, James von Brunn, has far more in common with Rosie O’Donnell’s conspiracy theorist views of the world than say the politics of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News fans (emphasis mine):
While Mr. von Brunn is currently being made out to be the poster child of the Republican Party, even a cursory look at his professed views shows he is the avowed enemy of the GOP in its current incarnation. Among many others, Mr. von Brunn hates Rupert Murdoch, Fox News (that means you, too, Shep!), George W. Bush and John McCain.And according to the FBI, Mr. von Brunn even had in his vehicle the address of the Weekly Standard, home base of the dreaded “neo-cons.”
Seems Mr. von Brunn wasn’t a big fan of the Iraq War and also believed that 9/11 was an “inside job.” Given this political sketch, Mr. von Brunn would feel at home at Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan’s antiwar outpost in Crawford, Texas, and at the Daily Kos convention, rather than partaking in a National Review cruise with pro-Israeli war hawks Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson.
It’s not Charles Lindbergh’s Republican Party any more. And it hasn’t been for more than a half-century. But don’t tell that to the facile minds at the DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] and CNN.
An interesting aside. Dr. George Tiller, who was a women’s health physician, and performed legal abortions. was gunned down in his church by an anti-abortion zealot. Here is how NewsBustrers wrote about the story then:
First Day Contrast: Keith Olbermann Called Tiller Shooting ‘Terrorism’ And A ‘Jihad,’ But Avoided Those Terms For Fort Hood.
On June 1 of this year, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann devoted most of his hour of Countdown to his withering outrage at the shooting of late-term abortionist George Tiller in Kansas (and how it was caused by Fox News).
The tone was dramatically different than his tone on November 5, the night of the Islamic terrorist shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas. Here’s Olbermann’s very dry opening: “Nightmare at Fort Hood: How could a soldier kill at least 12 other soldiers and wounded at least 31 more? And why?”
….Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces, and had questioned the circumstances behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up.
The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”
That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., for cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting….
After the Christian Science Monitor and Talking Points Memo (TPM) connected Bedell to the Tea Party… real evidence started coming out in which I asked this question: “How many Tea Partiers or conservatives…”
Shoot at the Pentagon and hate the military?
Are registered Democrats?
Hate George Bush and the whole Bush family?
Think 9/11 was perpetrated not by Muslims but by Republicans?
Grow and smoke marijuana?
Read left-wing anti-Bush books?
Are anti-war?
Talk about “economic justice”?
Think the Vietnam War and the Iraq War were not merely mistakes but were part of a government conspiracy?
…Michelle Malkin uncovered a key inconvenient fact which doesn’t quite fit this predictable “right-wing extremist” narrative — that Bedell was a registered Democrat.
Patterico has now posted a full transcript of one of Bedell’s internet rants — the same one cited by Talking Points Memo as evidence of his right-wing leanings — which has Bedell uncorking phrases like “economic justice” and paragraphs like (writing in 2006 during the Bush presidency) “This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens in an event such as the September 11th attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control. This collection of gangsters would find it in their interests to foment conflict and initiate wars throughout the world in order to divert attention from their misconduct and criminality. The true nature of such a regime would find its clearest expression in Satanic violence currently ongoing in Iraq.” and anti-war conspiracy theories like “The political and military disasters such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq that an illegitimate coup regime uses against the people…”.
Ooops!
Add all that to the previous discovery already linked above that Bedell’s Amazon “Wish List” featured the the left-wing conspiracy-theory books The Immaculate Deception: The Bush Crime Family and Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America.
So, which state-run media outlet will be the first to claim this Bush-hating Truther is a tea party activist? …We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, the Christian Science Monitor was the first to call the pot smoking, Bush-hating, Truther a right wing extremist. For the record, 35% of democrats believed Bush knew about the 9-11 attacks in advance. 99.9% of the left were Bush-haters.
UPDATE: So… Will the state-run media report this? The Pentagon shooter is linked to several gay rights groups along with PETA, NPR, various drug legalization orgs, Greenpeace and Al Franken. Hmm. So when was the last time you ran into a “right wing extremist” who was a big fan of Al Franken?
Another guy the press immediately tried to connect to the T.E.A. Party. It was pointed out that much of what the IRS Joseph “the bomber” Stack talked about was directly from Michael Moore movies.
The man suspected of intentionally crashing an airplane into a Texas office building today appears to have posted a lengthy online diatribe attacking the Internal Revenue Service and declaring that, “I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand.”
The things said in his manifesto seem to all be taken straight from Michael Moore movies?
Anti-health care system= Sicko
Anti-Capitalism= Capitalism, a Love Story
IRS cronyism with businesses= Capitalism, a Love Story
Anti-Bush= Fahrenheit 9/11
Blames Big Corporations for job issues= The Big One
Stephanolpoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.
After a day of the media investigating James Holmes, the mass murderer at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater, a profile is emerging of someone who did not have any overt political agenda or affiliation.
Yet once again, the Tea Party was injected into the crime through a media which immediately looked for a Tea Party connection.
In this case it was ABC News led by Brian Ross which linked the gunman to a Tea Party profile it found online of “Jim Holmes.” That Tea Party Jim Holmes was not, in fact, the gunman.
Perhaps what distinguishes this case is that there was no full-blown media attempt to link the murders to the Tea Party, unlike in the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords by the deranged apolitical Jared Loughner, and so many other cases. This time other networks and even most of the left-blogosphere did not jump on the ABC News bandwagon.
With good reason. There is a recent yet long history of false accusations in the minutes and hours after a high profile act of violence trying to link the perpetrator to the Tea Party and/or to the “right-wing,” including:
Why look for a Tea Party connection? What violent crimes have been committed by Tea Party members, much less on behalf of or with the knowledge of Tea Party groups?
If there is a high profile act of violence, the Tea Party is the last place to which attention should be directed, as the list of false accusations of Tea Party involvement shows. ….
Former security guard Nkosi Thandiwe was found guilty of murdering a woman and wounding two others during a shooting spree in July of 2011 and has been sentenced to life without parole, CBS Atlanta reports.
He confessed to the crimes during his testimony last week, adding some chilling details about his motivation. And prosecutors argued that Thandiwe was fueled by racist hate against whites.
“My mind was blank at the time,” he said — but he still remembers what prompted the violence by his own twisted rationale. He cited anti-white ideas he learned at university.
During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University of West Georgia.
“I was trying to prove a point that Europeans had colonized the world, and as a result of that, we see a lot of evil today,” he said. “In terms of slavery, it was something that needed to be answered for. I was trying to spread the message of making white people mend.”
He said the night before the shooting, he attended a so-called “Peace Party” intended to address his concerns about helping the black community find equal footing, but two white people were there.
“I was upset,” Thandiwe said. “I was still upset Friday. I took the gun to work because I was still upset from Thursday night.”
He even admitted to earlier that day getting angry enough on the job to shoot his supervisor.
“What my boss said to me …,” he told the jury, “that rage almost made me pull out my gun on him.” [Emphasis added]
…Thandiwe took the liberal propaganda the entire country has been marinating in for decades at face value. Like Colin Ferguson, he was sufficiently unstable to be set onto a maniacal killing spree by the vile poison of politically correct ideology.
Floyd Corkins
This deranged far left shooter. A LGBT volunteer carrying bag of Chick-fil-A sandwiches shot up the conservative Family Research Center in August 2012. The armed man who walked into the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council and shot a security guard was later identified as Floyd Corkins, 28, of Virginia. Fox News reported that Corkins posed as an intern and was carrying a Chick-fil-A bag with him during the attack. He admitted he got his information from the far left Southern Poverty Law Center website.
Corkins said he intended to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” The prosecutor said they reviewed the family computer and found that he identified his targets on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s web site.
….Militant atheism may also be a factor in the shooter’s motives. Nietzsche is the well-known atheist philosopher who decried the “slave morality” of Christianity and proclaimed “God is dead”. The shooter in the Garielle Giffords case (Jared Lee Loughner) was a militant atheist. Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and the American Atheists group have even called for the eradication of Christianity. But the vast majority of atheists are not violent.
On the other hand, aggressive violence is forbidden to authentic Bible-believing Christians because Jesus did not shed anyone’s blood. Authentic Christians debate and persuade using evidence, because that’s what Jesus did. The most we could do is participate in a just war like the Korean War or the Gulf War. Christians stopped slavery. Christians save unborn babies. We’re for strict non-violence.
American Power Blog has more on the left’s continued smearing of the Family Research Council as a “hate group”:
At this point, I think that anyone who uses the word “hate” to describe supporters of traditional marriage should be careful that they are not inciting anyone to violence. We have to do more to promote tolerance and oppose anti-Christian / anti-conservative bigotry on the extreme left. Almost no one on the right calls people who disagree with them names like “hater”. …
Chris Dorner
What is being reported as Mr. Dorner’s manifesto not only endorses Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and vigorously defends Barack Obama and the Democrats’ current gun control push; he also savages the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre while expressing all kinds of love for some of the biggest stars in the left-wing media — by name.
Nope, not a T.E.A. Partier.
Karl Pierson
Wait. I don’t understand… if Sarah Palin draws targets on a map for important Democratic races, and she is tied with violence via the shooter of Gabrielle Giffords (via the flyer to the right). Then at what point is the press responsible for the wild accusations they make?
“These teabag bastards, who by the way, I just wish they would all go away, or like in Passover, I just wish there was an angel of the Lord that would pass over, instead of killing the first born in all the households of Egypt, just wipe out all the teabaggers. Just, you know, the terrible swift sword, just (Malloy emulates sound of sword cutting repeatedly through the air) lop their heads off.” — Mike Malloy
“They want to put y’all back in chains!” — Joe Biden
“The land on which they [the Founders] formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class….This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we’ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.” — Melissa Harris-Perry
“That really bothered me. You notice (Romney) said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us. I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is ‘niggerization.’” — Touré
So MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry said conservatives romanticize the Confederacy as a time “where black people knew their place.” Olbermann accused conservatives of “sanitizing secession” to ignore slavery. Matthews suggested that opposition to ObamaCare had “Republicans on the right talking like antebellum southerners,” and called appeals to federalism as “code” for racism. Lawrence O’Donnell characterized Arizona legislation as a “new sort of secession bill.” Maddow stressed that it was “important that Republican governors keep” commemorating Virginia’s role in the Civil War, and guest Julian Bond wondered at Virginia’s “canine-like affection for the Confederacy.”
Breitbart starts to paint a picture for us about the shooter
…The Denver Postreports that Pierson had “very strong political beliefs” and that one Facebook post he authored tore into Republicans as the political party that wanted to let people die:
“[Y]ou republicans are so cute” his post reads, with an image that says: “The Republican Party: Health Care: Let ’em Die, Climate Change: Let ’em Die, Gun Violence: Let ’em Die, Women’s Rights: Let ’em Die, More War: Let ’em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?”
Pierson also described himself in a Facebook post as “Keynesian” when it came to economic thinking, and criticized free market thinkers:
In one Facebook post, Pierson attacks the philosophies of economist Adam Smith, who through his invisible-hand theory pushed the notion that the free market was self-regulating. In another post, he describes himself as “Keynesian.”
Pierson’s classmates described the suspected gunman’s political beliefs as “outside the mainstream,” and Pierson as “an outspoken kid about what he believed and a good political thinker.” Another classmate said Pierson held “very strong beliefs about gun laws.”
The Los Angeles Times quotes friends who described Pierson as an advocate for gun rights. In its lengthy report, The Los Angeles Timesdoes not, however, include the information about the Facebook posts wherein Pierson describes himself as Keynesian or mocks Republicans as wanting people to die…
[….]
More bad news for the media came in the gunman’s weapon of choice: a shotgun, which is also Vice President Joe Biden’s weapon of choice….
And Gateway Pundit begins to paint a picture of the media:
After thinking things over, the Denver Post decided to delete the fact that Arapahoe School shooter Kark Pierson was a committed socialist from their news report. This is from the original article:
And, here is the updated article, sans “socialist.”
Of course this goes with the LONG list of violent leftists shooters, as my “BIO’s” at my old site and my new site show. Here are more examples of edited parts of the story that has been built about this shooter… why edit this stuff out? Unless you are shamed that the shooter is giving what you believe in (as most journalists and editors at major newspapers do) a bad name.
…Robert Lewis Dear, the suspect in the shooting at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, appears to have posted religious rants and solicitations for women on the website Cannabis.com, and also had a dating ad at SexyAds.com.
Dear’s posts on the Cannabis.com message board were first uncovered by the New York Times. A dating profile on SexyAds.com has the same username Dear used when posting online….
The pictured voting gender below is from IJReview:
The “white Christian terrorist” refrain has been a constant drumbeat among the activists who smell blood in a terrible story that seems to confirm every outlandish bias they hold about pro-life Americans.
[….]
In addition, there is the question of why the supposed anti-abortion activist John Lewis Dear is identifying as a “female.” Via the Gateway Pundit:
Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. from Hartsel, Colorado is registered to vote in Park County, Colorado as a woman.
The Colorado Springs authorities confirmed the Hartsel, Colorado address. Furthermore, Dear is not a registered Republican:
Maybe society will deal with the instability of people who suffer GID (gender identity disorder)? I pray for the families involved of the death of their loved ones.
Elliot Rodger (“UCSB” shooter): Fan of the left-wing political talk show, The Young Turks.
James von Brunn (Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter): von Brunn hated Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Nidal Hasan (Ft Hood Shooter): Registered Democrat and Muslim.
Aaron Alexis (Navy Yard shooter): black liberal/Obama voter.
Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter): Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat.
James Holmes: the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occupy guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians.
Amy Bishop: the rabid leftist, killed her colleagues in Alabama, Obama supporter.
Andrew J. Stack (IRS bomber, flew plane into IRS building in Texas): Leftist Democrat, hated Bush and capitalism.
James J. Lee (who was the “green activist”): leftist took hostages at Discovery Channel – progressive liberal Democrat.
John Patrick Bedell: (Pentagon Shooter) registered Democrat, talked about economic justice.
Nkosi Thandiwe (Shooting spree targeting white ppl): Accepted “white priveledge.”
Floyd Corkins (LGBT Chic-Fil-A shooter): hated conservative and Christians.
Karl Pierson (school shooter): loved communism, self-avowed Keynesian, hated Adam Smith and supported gun-control.
But — this site (beyond the compassion felt for lost loved ones) is also a site to defend against the craziness out there. I have seen stupid posts by people who hate Planned Parenthood saying they do not care if a worker at PP lost their lives, to the media saying this is a right-wing motivated attack. All of it dumb. But when the media (not bloggers or tweeters ~ see one example below) hops in on this, then I post rebuttals like this one below.
Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. from Hartsel, Colorado is registered to vote in Park County, Colorado as a woman. And his party affiliation is UAF!
Unite Against Fascism (UAF) is an anti-fascist pressure group in the United Kingdom, with support from politicians of the three largestpolitical parties in the House of Commons, including the current Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and the late Labour politicianTony Benn. It describes itself as a national campaign with the aim of alerting British society to a perceived threat of fascism and the far right— in particular the British National Party (BNP) — gaining a foothold at local, national and European elections, arguing that “there is a real danger that the BNP could get a significant platform in elected institutions.” (Wiki)
Example from Jezebel… this site blames in part the undercover videos released. Even claiming these are edited — even though they have been released in full [without any edits] for the skeptics to watch.
The shooting comes as Planned Parenthood faces national criticism and statewide investigations over a series of deceptively edited videos released by the Center for Medical Progress. Those videos have spurred even more protests of the organization and, in the last few months, a number of clinics have been targeted by arsonists; a truly stark reminder of the high price of “protecting women.”
Of course there many “false flag” (not in the conspiratorial sense that is used) arson, poop swastikas, and graffiti against lesbians ~ by those who then claim “hate” has been used against them or their community.
One of the commentators on Jezebel’s site said the following:
Thanks for the simple act of listing this under terrorism. The gymnastics people are displaying to avoid that word/ definition of this act staggers my mind.
This man is an actor in an invisible war. The resistance to calling him what he is, a terrorist, is the embodiment of white, christian ideological supremacy. The constant refrain of ‘we need to know more!’ but what more could we possibly need to know?
Dumb!
I respond:
Um, he is registered as UAF (United Against Fascism) for political party, and identified as female as well (in [registartion documents]). Not a “white, Christian ideology of supremacy”… but quite the opposite. I wonder how long the story will have legs if the mental illness he has underscored his GID (gender identity disorder). I will place him in my “crazed gunmen bio” as more info comes out… unfortunately he will join a very long list of leftist [in lifestyle and ideology] shooters
The following details a conversation that never really finished. The reason is because many who claim the mantle of Christianity (whether truly saved or not, only God knows) often times do not accept the words or positions given to them ~ clearly ~ in the Bible. And while we do not know the heart of those who claim to be Christ followers, when they start to rip out parts of Scripture, not accepting others, thinking portions of it has been changed over time, allegorizing still other portions of it… you can tell that someone else is sitting on the throne of their heart and not their savior.
To wit,
I have a couple of neighbors who are dear friends, but one can only try to talk about baseball and movies and TV shows so much. Engaging in challenging discussions about worldviews and Christian accountability, is what I like. These lack of deeper conversations has really kept us neighbors, not sojourners to a better place.
I finally bit-the-bullet due to the many “interventions” on my FaceBook via this neighbor’s brother (who himself is a friendly acquaintance). I have become more bold with my neighbor and her brother in regards to topics that do not deal with cute, fluffy kittens. The internet already has enough of those.
Being a “Christian” means something… and it has never been a libertarian island of self. Never. So, one of these important worldview discussion came by way of the Pope recently saying — at least in sensationalized headlines — that God is not “a magician, with a magic wand.” I guess there was no “magic wand” involved in Jesus’ Resurrection either? CBS even went further to note that,
“Galileo Galilei could have used Pope Francis. The church branded the astronomer a heretic for arguing that the Earth revolved around the sun.”
I swear, people do not know history well. But that dumb historical statement on part of CBS is-neither-here-nor-there.
Another side-note is the Church’s activity in the “staus-quo” of accepting secular science (via Creation.com):
The heliocentric (from Greek helios = sun) or Copernican system opposed the views of the astronomer-philosophers of the day, who earned their livelihood by teaching Aristotle and Ptolemy, and so were biased against change. They therefore either ignored, ridiculed, destroyed, or hostilely opposed Galileo’ ’s writings. Many Church leaders allowed themselves to be persuaded by the Aristotelians at the universities that the geocentric (earth-centred) system was taught in Scripture and that Galileo was contradicting the Bible. They therefore bitterly opposed Galileo to the extent of forcing him on pain of death to repudiate his findings.
This was because:
The Church leaders had accepted as dogma the belief system of the pagan (i.e. non-Christian) philosophers, Aristotle and Ptolemy, which had become the worldview of the then scientific establishment. The result was that Church leaders were using the knowledge of the day to interpret Scripture, instead of using the Bible to evaluate the knowledge of the day.
They clung to the ‘majority opinion’ about the universe and rejected the ‘minority view’ of Copernicus and Galileo, even after Galileo had presented indisputable evidence based on repeatable scientific observations that the majority was wrong.
They picked out a few verses from the Bible which they thought said that the sun moved around the earth, but they failed to realize that Bible texts must be understood in terms of what the author intended to convey. Thus, when Moses wrote of the ‘risen’ sun (Genesis 19:23) and sun ‘set’ (Genesis 28:11), his purpose was not to formulate an astronomical dictum. Rather he, by God’s spirit, was using the language of appearance so that his readers would easily understand what time of day he was talking about.3 And it is perfectly valid in physics to describe motion relative to the most convenient reference frame, which in this case is the earth. See the sub-article Sunspots, Galileo and heliocentrism.
This plain meaning (the time of day) is perfectly satisfied by the language of appearance and does not demand the secondary deduction that it is the sun itself which moves. Indeed, this is exactly the same thing that scientists do today in weather reports when they give the times of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. They are using the language of appearance, and using the earth as the reference frame. A convenient figure of speech does not invalidate science; nor does it invalidate the Bible.
Likewise verses such as Psalm 19:6 and 93:1, which the writer(s) clearly meant to be poetic expressions, were given a literal meaning…
Theistic evolution is not compatible with the Bible. It just isn’t. And much like atheists and skeptics I deal with, I have come to the firm conclusion that while they have read an uncountable number of fiction books, they have never walked into a Christian book store and bought and read a single book by a person who specializes in making proper distinctions between Intelligent Design, theistic evolution, and evolution. Because neo-Darwinian theory is not compatible with the Christian faith, no matter H-O-W much one tries to fit the square peg through the round hole.
A Longer Presentation That Hash Out Theistic Evolution/Neo-Darwinian Failures
At any rate, I engaged in conversation to try and get a person[s] who is not use to having meaningful conversation about personal subjects such as faith to engage and engage in a way that their stated beliefs would have to have a logical conclusion. A consequence. If they cannot follow this deduction, then there is a cog in the wheel somewhere. You will see where.
What follows is that discussion [minus names to protect privacy and edited for aesthetic purposes and ease of use here ~ with commentary] where I try and get the people involved to latch onto the ideas of the Author of the universe, CLEARLY presented in the Bible. Here is the conversation, and note that if you are regular church goer how this conversation would have gone differently in your mind:
ME
RT, I will do this here instead of on your Facebook. It will be a series of pretty easy questions. There is a point… but it requires honest dialogue. It may seem too simple and come across as demeaning… it is not meant to be. LKD may want to watch or be involved as well. It is partly based on this point in an aforementioned book, here is the page[s] I am thinking of (click to enlarge):
We ~ as Christians ~ should enjoy deep conversation about our Savior that yes, may even challenge our own opinions. It may not change them, but for heaven’s sake (*said like a gray haired older grandma with care and concern*), to insulate oneself from the basics of The Way that challenge assumptions presumed is not the road to growth.
SO, here is the first question: “Who is the founder of Christianity?”
Here is the first response, and it is one I am use to from atheists and skeptics, but I think pride plays more of a role here — something we all exemplify ourselves:
LKD
Paul.
ME
Nope. I am a Christian because I am “what” like?
LKD
You must think we are retarded. I said Paul because I heard a debate on that once.
Let me say that if I were to have this conversation face-to-face, LKD would realize how monotone and calm I am in asking this question. The keyboard is an amazing thing, something my wife (for instance) is not immune to. She will read an email to me but put here emotional assumptions or current feelings onto the text that the original sender probably had not in any way meant to convey. (We are reprobate creatures and battle tirelessly with our dual nature with guidance from the Holy Spirit… it is natural we put onto others this emotional state we are experiencing and not the best of intentions.) In previous conversations I have shared my “legal statement” to get this point across, I will place that here for clarity, then back to the conversation:
“By-the-by, for those reading this I will explain what is missing in this type of discussion due to the media used. Genuflecting, care, concern, one being upset (does not entail being “mad”), etc… are all not viewable because we are missing each other’s tone, facial expressions, and the like. I afford the other person I am dialoguing with the best of intentions and read his/her comments as if we were out having a talk over a beer at a bar or meeting a friend at Starbucks. (I say this because there seems to be a phenomenon of etiquette thrown out when talking through email or Face Book, lots more public cussing and gratuitous responses.) You will see that often times I USE CAPS — which in www lingo for YELLING. I am not using it this way, I use it to merely emphasize and often times say as much: *not said in yelling tone, but merely to emphasize*. So in all my discussions I afford the best of thought to the other person as I expect he or she would to me… even if dealing with tough subjects as the above. I have had more practice at this than most, and with half-hour pizza, one hour photo and email vs. ‘snail mail,’ know that important discussions take time to meditate on, inculcate, and to process. So be prepared for a good thought provoking discussion if you so choose one with me.”
I think the same thing is happening here so I circle back to my original introduction to reintroduce this idea:
ME
I have already written in the OP (original post): “There is a point… but it requires honest dialogue. It may seem too simple and come across as demeaning… it is not meant to be.” I asked for honest dialogue. Do you feel like talking about Christ is a trap of some sort?
And no, I do not think you are retarded (nor do I think RT is dumb). But do I think some people, rather than coming to logical conclusions about important issues in a faith they aspire to in some way (even if it disagrees with their own opinions), obfuscate the issues at hand? Yes. Mark 8:38:
“For whoever is ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous and sinful generation,the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
I know this is VERY simplistic — again — it is NOT meant to be demeaning. Professor Jay Wegter? You want to join in for some very simple talk about the faith? The question is “Who is the founder of Christianity?” A hint from H.G. Wells:
“I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. ____ _____ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.”
Who was this mystery person Wells was talking about?
LKD
I’m going with The Trinity. God the Father, the Son Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior and the Holy Spirit aka Ghost which I never cared for as a child.
ME
Okay… I don’t don’t know why you won’t give a simple answer, but you sorta answered the second question. (the H.G. Wells quote did not encompass the doctrine of the Trinity, but simply placed Jesus Christ as this person.)
The next question is “who did Jesus claim to be, which eventually got Him crucified?
LKD
The only way to God. The Romans crucified anyone who they deemed as false kings.
ME
He claimed to be God in fact. Right?
LKD
That takes me back to the Trinity which is God.
ME
The Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God.
In Matthew 22:43, citing Psalm 110, Jesus said, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’ [Messiah]?” Jesus stumped his skeptical Jewish questioners by presenting then with a dilemma that blew their own neat calculations about the Messiah “Lord” (as he did in Ps. 110), when the Scriptures also say the Messiah would be the “Son of David” (which they do in 2 Samuel 7:12.)? The only answer is that the Messiah must be both a man (David’s son or offspring) and God (David’s Lord). Jesus is claiming to be both God and human, at the same time!
See also John 8:58 and 8:59 — they were gonna kill Jesus for claiming equality with YHWH (God of the Old Testament)….
Theology 101 is fun.
LKD
I learned ALL of this starting 50 years ago and actively studied via Zion Lutheran Church and the Navigators for 20 years, you don’t forget this stuff.
[There was some small talk back-and-forth.]
ME
Okay, continuing along the dialogue — and keeping it simple. Jesus is God, which is classically defined as:
▶ God is often conceived as the Supreme Being and principal object of faith. The concept of God as described by theologians commonly includes the attributes of omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence.(Wiki)
He is part of the Trinity, was involved with creating man in “Our” image (Genesis 1:26), was part of the convo with YHWH [that is the Hebrew designation for God that practicing Jews cannot say, they will put in something else there, like Adonai] on earth speaking to YHWH in heaven (“Then the LORD [YHWH] rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD [YHWH] out of heaven.” Genesis 19:24) all the way to Christ Himself in John 8:58 saying he is the Great “I Am” from Exodus (Exodus 3:14), getting Himself “dead” eventually.
So yes, Jesus is God (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenevolence) — correctly defined by LKD as part of the Trinity, God proper because of that.
Now, here are some Scripture, where God proper is commenting on nature. I do not want to focus on them all, but rather, want to, as people who understand who Jesus CLAIMED to be — and PROVED it by resurrecting his own body…
A SIDE-NOTE FOR THE WINNER OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL (@LKD) POP QUIZ:
Here is the Trinity involved in raising Jesus from the dead: God raised Jesus from the dead: “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.” (Acts 2:32 KJV); The Spirit raised Jesus from the dead: “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” (Romans 8:11 KJV); Jesus raised his own body from the dead: “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body.” (John 2:19-21 KJV)
…Okay, here is the portion… and I want you to ignore the age issue, but focus on Adam and Eve. And we can get to the depth in our understanding of where you differ from evolution in believing in where we came from (rocks, or the Creative Hand of God):
….Now, when we search the New Testament Scriptures, we certainly find many interesting statements Jesus made that relate to this issue. Mark 10:6 says, “But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’” From this passage, we see that Jesus clearly taught that the creation was young, for Adam and Eve existed “from the beginning,” not billions of years after the universe and earth came into existence. Jesus made a similar statement in Mark 13:19 indicating that man’s sufferings started very near the beginning of creation. The parallel phrases of “from the foundation of the world” and “from the blood of Abel” in Luke 11:50–51 also indicate that Jesus placed Abel very close to the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning. His Jewish listeners would have assumed this meaning in Jesus’ words, for the first-century Jewish historian Josephus indicates that the Jews of his day believed that both the first day of creation and Adam’s creation were about 5,000 years before Christ…. (http://tinyurl.com/n6eahjy)
[Added info of the prevailing views around Jesus and Moses: “In Christ’s day, the prevailing philosophy on origins included evolution and long ages of earth history. Their view, of course, was not Darwinian evolution, but it held that the earth and the universe, acting on itself by the forces of nature (which were given names by some) had organized itself into its present state, and was responsible for all of life. The same was true for the philosophy of Moses’ day, as he prepared the book of Genesis.”]… (ICR)
The most basic thing I want to glean from God’s (Jesus’) own lips is that he believed in a literal Adam and Eve — again, whether you think mankind (homo-sapiens) are millions of years old or thousands, Jesus makes clear that they were created, as He did in Genesis (making them in Our own image). I do not want to debate all the nuances you RT or LKD may have. Jesus Himself believed “a”, so you ~ by understanding ~ this have already tweaked the classical evolutionary story of “goo-to-you.”
SO THE QUESTION IS THIS: “Did Jesus believe in a historical Adam and Eve?”
This is where the conversation effectively ended. Many people do not want to submit all parts of their thinking under God. Jesus believed in a literal Adam and Eve. This goes against evolutionary theory as many understand it. They have no idea what Intelligent Design is and how it responds to many of the issues in an acceptance of an unBiblical theistic evolution.
An Aside for those that LOVE the Bible and their Creator — In talking to Dr Edgar Andrews (see his bio) he points out some verses as well:
…If you want to limit yourself to the words of Jesus Himself (as distinct from NT testimony as a whole) you have I think only two specific texts to argue from:
1) Matt 19:4 ‘And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ (repeated in Mark 10:6 “But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’) In Matt. 19 it is important to notice the words that follow; “and SAID ‘For this reason …“, quoting Genesis 2:24. But this latter text doesn’t say ‘God said’ … which means that Jesus attributes the simple statement of Gen. 2:24 to God, thus testifying to the divine authorship of this verse and by implication the whole book of Genesis.
2) The other useful text is Mt 24:38 “For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, etc”. Here Jesus testifies to the historical reality of the flood, Noah and the ark. Most theistic evolutionists believe that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are mythology and not to be taken literally or as historically true. (But this may not apply to everyone who accepts macro evolution).
I will end with this interview of Dr. Andrews via Apologetics 315:
…let’s move to Columbus and the charge of genocide. The historical Columbus was a Christian explorer. Howard Zinn makes it sound like Columbus came looking for nothing but gold, but Columbus was equally driven by a spirit of exploration and adventure. When we read Columbus’s diaries we see that his motives were complex: he wanted to get rich by discovering new trade routes, but he also wanted to find the Garden of Eden, which he believed was an actual undiscovered place. Of course Columbus didn’t come looking for America; he didn’t know that the American continent existed. Since the Muslims controlled the trade routes of the Arabian Sea, he was looking for a new way to the Far East. Specifically he was looking for India, and that’s why he called the native peoples “Indians.” It is easy to laugh at Columbus’s naïveté, except that he wasn’t entirely wrong. Anthropological research has established that the native people of the Americas did originally come from Asia. Most likely they came across the Bering Strait before the continents drifted apart.
We know that, as a consequence of contact with Columbus and the Europeans who came after him, the native population in the Americas plummeted. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of the Indians perished. This is the basis for the charge of genocide. But there was no genocide. Millions of Indians died as a result of diseases they contracted from their exposure to the white man: smallpox, measles, cholera, and typhus. There is one isolated allegation of Sir Jeffrey Amherst (whose name graces Amherst College) approving a strategy to vanquish a hostile Indian tribe by giving the Indians smallpox-infected blankets. Even here, however, it’s not clear the scheme was actually carried out. As historian William McNeill documents in Plagues and Peoples, the white man generally transmitted his diseases to the Indians without knowing it, and the Indians died in large numbers because they had not developed immunities to those diseases. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not genocide, because genocide implies an intention to wipe out a people. McNeill points out that Europeans themselves had contracted lethal diseases, including the pneumonic and the bubonic plagues, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn’t have immunities, and during the “Black Death” of the fourteenth century one-third of the population of Europe was wiped out. But no one calls these plagues genocide, because they weren’t.
It’s true that Columbus developed strong prejudices about the native peoples he first encountered—he was prejudiced in favor of them. He praised the intelligence, generosity, and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting these qualities with Spanish vices. Subsequent explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci (from whom we get the name “America”), and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions. So where did Europeans get the idea that Indians were “savages”? Actually, they got it from their experience with the Indians. While the Indians Columbus met on his first voyage were hospitable and friendly, on subsequent voyages Columbus was horrified to discover that a number of sailors he had left behind had been killed and possibly eaten by the cannibalistic Arawaks.
When Bernal Diaz arrived in Mexico with the swashbuckling army of Hernán Cortes, he and his fellow Spaniards saw things they had never seen before. Indeed they witnessed one of the most gruesome spectacles ever seen, something akin to what American soldiers saw after World War II when they entered the Nazi concentration camps. As Diaz describes the Aztecs, in an account generally corroborated by modern scholars, “They strike open the wretched Indian’s chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets.” Huge numbers of Indians—typically captives in war—were sacrificed, sometimes hundreds in a single day. Yet in a comic attempt to diminish the cruelty of the Aztecs, Howard Zinn remarks that their mass murder “did not erase a certain innocence” and he accuses Cortes of nefarious conduct “turning Aztec against Aztec.”
If the Aztecs of Mexico seemed especially bloodthirsty, they were rivaled by the Incas of South America who also erected sacrificial mounds on which they performed elaborate rites of human sacrifice, so that their altars were drenched with blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed from exhaustion from stabbing their victims.
Even while Europeans were startled and appalled at such bloodthirstiness, there was a countercurrent of admiration for what Europeans saw as the Indians’ better qualities. Starting with Columbus and continuing through the next few centuries, native Indians were regarded as “noble savages.” They were admired for their dignity stoicism, and bravery. In reality, the native Indians probably had these qualities in the same proportion as human beings elsewhere on the planet. The idealization of them as “noble savages” seems to be a projection of European fantasies about primitive innocence onto the natives. We too—and especially modern progressives-have the same fantasies. Unlike us, however, the Spanish were forced to confront the reality of Aztec and Inca behavior. Today we have an appreciation for the achievements of Aztec and Inca culture, such as its social organization and temple architecture; but we cannot fault the Spanish for being “distracted” by the mass murder they witnessed. Not all the European hostility to the Indians was the result of irrational prejudice.
While the Spanish conquistadores were surprised to see humans sacrificed in droves, they were not shocked to witness slavery, the subjugation of women, or brutal treatment of war captives—these were familiar enough practices from their own culture. Moreover, in conquering the Indians, and establishing alien rule over them, the Spanish were doing to the Indians nothing more than the Indians had done to each other. So from the point of view of the native Indian people, one empire, that of Spain, replaced another, that of the Aztecs. Did life for the native Indian get worse? It’s very hard to say. The ordinary Indian might now have a higher risk of disease, but he certainly had a lower risk of finding himself under the lurid glare of the obsidian knife.
What, then, distinguished the Spanish from the Indians? The Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa offers an arresting answer. The conquistadores who came to the Americas, he concedes, were “semi-literate, implacable and greedy.” They were clearly believers in the conquest ethic—land is yours if you can take it. Yet these semi-literate greedy swordsmen, without knowing it, also brought with them something new to the Americas. They brought with them the ideas of Western civilization, from Athenian rationalism to Judeo-Christian ideas of human brotherhood to more modern conceptions of self-government, human rights, and property rights. Some of these ideas were nascent and newly developing even in the West. Nevertheless, they were there, and without intending to do so, the conquistadors brought them to the Americas.
To appreciate what Vargas Llosa is saying, consider an astonishing series of events that took place in Spain in the early sixteenth century. At the urging of a group of Spanish clergy, the king of Spain called a halt to Spanish expansion in the Americas, pending the resolution of the question of whether American Indians had souls and could be justly enslaved. This seems odd, and even appalling, to us today, but we should not miss its significance. Historian Lewis Hanke writes that never before or since has a powerful emperor “ordered his conquests to cease until it was decided if they were just.” The king’s actions were in response to petitions by a group of Spanish priests, led by Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas defended the Indians in a famous debate held at Valladolid in Spain. On the other side was an Aristotelian scholar, Juan Sepulveda, who relied on Aristotle’s concept of the “natural slave” to argue that Indians were inferior and therefore could be subjugated. Las Casas countered that Indians were human beings with the same dignity and spiritual nature as the Spanish. Today Las Casas is portrayed as a heroic eccentric, but his basic position prevailed at Valladolid. It was endorsed by the pope, who declared in his bull Sublimns Deus, “Indians… are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possessions of their property… nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen it shall be null and of no effect.” Papal bulls and even royal edicts were largely ignored thousands of miles away—there were no effective mechanisms of enforcement. The conquest ethic prevailed. Even so, over time the principles of Valladolid and Sublimus Deus provided the moral foundation for the enfranchisement of Indians. Indians could themselves appeal to Western ideas of equality, dignity, and property rights in order to resist subjugation, enforce treaties, and get some of their land back….
[….]
The white men who settled America didn’t come as foreign invaders; they came as settlers. Unlike the Spanish, who ruled Mexico from afar, the English families who arrived in America left everything behind and staked their lives on the new world. In other words, they came as immigrants. We can say, of course, that immigration doesn’t confer any privileges, and just because you come here to settle doesn’t mean you have a right to the land that is here, but then that logic would also apply to the Indians.
Former vice president Al Gore compared climate skeptics to apologists for old-time Bull Connor-style racism and urges that the appropriate response, in order to “win the conversation” on climate change, is to shame and shun them.
The former vice president [in an interview] recalled how society succeeded in marginalizing racists and said climate change skeptics must be defeated in the same manner.
“Secondly, back to this phrase ‘win the conversation,'” he continued. “There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won.”
Hmm, “winning a conversation” with science skeptics by treating them as miscreants, caught in the act of justifying “gross and evil” attitudes. Where have we heard this strategy before? Ah yes….
When university professors teach that race, class, gender (the liberal/progressive “Trinity”) is the lens to look through at history, socio-economics, horticulture, climate, and the like… are you really surprised about the following?
Claim: Global warming skepticism is a ‘white phenomenon’’
….Hispanics (41 percent) and African-Americans (36 percent) were both twice as likely to reply that climate change will harm them directly; 18 percent of white Americans predicted climate repercussions will hurt them personally.
Within religious groups, members of three Caucasian religious sects — out of the eight religious affiliations the survey analyzed — were the least likely to be highly or somewhat concerned about climatic changes. And those who identified as white evangelical Christians were the least likely to worry about climate change: 64 percent were either “somewhat” or “very” unconcerned, and 18 percent were “very” concerned.
Jewish Americans (66 percent), Hispanic Catholics (61 percent) and black Protestants (50 percent) said they believe in climate change, as did 57 percent of Americans without religious ties. Ï Regarding the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, those surveyed were about as divided as Congress: 52 percent said they supported the project, and 37 opposed it. Nearly 6 out of 10 (57 percent), however, favored measures that limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants even if the policies ramped up prices.
Self-identified members of the tea party were highly unlikely to believe in climate change (23 percent), and a majority (53 percent) were skeptics. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats said they believe in climate change, and 22 percent of Republicans said they are climate believers, while 46 percent said they are skeptical.
“More than three-quarters of climate change skeptics are white. So it’s really a white phenomenon,” Cox said. “We found a pretty significant racial divide.”
Climate Activists: ‘White America’ condemned to Hell!? — Warmist Bill McKibben laments ‘White America’ has failed: ‘White America has fallen short’ by voting for ‘climate deniers’
Flashback: 1846, in Australia, Aborigines blamed the bad climate on the introduction of the White man in Australia
“…blacks kill blacks seven times more than whites kill whites. Only eight percent of the murders in New York City are white; 75 percent are black. So, there’s a vast difference” ~ Giuliani
This use of the Race-Card is used to hurt the maturing of the black community. It is used to insulate any consequence of actions by the community. It hurts both the gravity of the real meaning of racism, and it hurts young men that otherwise would look at attacking life in a constructive manner. Via NewsBusters:
Rudy Giuliani fired back at Michael Eric Dyson on CNN’s New Day on Tuesday for the MSNBC analyst’s “white supremacy” attack on the former New York City mayor. When anchor Alisyn Camerota raised Giuliani’s supposedly “controversial comments” from Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, the former Republican politician underlined that he had “said the same thing the President of the United States said, and I was accused of being a racist.”
Giuliani continued by paraphrasing President Obama’s Monday night speech, where the Democrat asserted that “nobody needs good policing more than poor communities with higher crime rates.” The one-time mayor added, “When he [Obama] said it, he wasn’t accused of being a racist. When I said it, my adversary [Dyson] said I was a racist.”…
Other things said by white people who are said to be racist for saying it but the president says it as well as Tupac Shakur is this:
Obama & Tupac
“We know the statistics,” said President Barack Obama, “that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves.”
The Journal of Research on Adolescence found that even after controlling for varying levels of household income, kids in father-absent homes are more likely to end up in jail. And kids that never had a father in the house are the most likely to wind up behind bars.
Tupac Shakur, the rapper killed in an unsolved and possibly gang-related murder, once said: “I know for a fact that had I had a father, I’d have some discipline. I’d have more confidence.” Tupac admitted he began running with gangs because he wanted structure and protection: “Your mother cannot calm you down the way a man can. Your mother can’t reassure you the way a man can. My mother couldn’t show me where my manhood was. You need a man to teach you how to be a man.”….
[….]
….In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action.” At the time, 25 percent of blacks children were born out of wedlock, a number Moynihan called alarming. Fast forward to the present, 72 percent of black children are now born out of wedlock. In fact, 36 percent of white children are born out of wedlock. Of Hispanic children, 53 percent are born outside of marriage.
In “Boyz n the Hood,” Tre, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., has an active father in his life. Doughboy, played by Ice Cube, was raised without a father. His mother resents him because she dislikes his father. On the other hand, Gooding’s hardworking, responsible father, played by Laurence Fishburne, stays on his son. He warns him against hanging out with the wrong people and that becoming a street criminal was a trap. He lectures his son that “any fool with a [penis] can make a baby, but only a real man can raise his children.”
Studies show that children of divorced parents can have outcomes as positive as those coming from intact homes, provided the father remains financially supportive and active in his children’s lives….
Can you imagine the polluted, destroyed world we would have if the left had their way with green energy?
Environazis, like all progressives, care about two things: other people’s money and the power entailed in imposing their ideology. Prominent among the many things they do not care about is the environment, as demonstrated by a monstrosity planned for Loch Ness:
A giant 67 turbine wind farm planned for the mountains overlooking Loch Ness will be an environmental disaster thanks to the sheer quantity of stone which will need to be quarried to construct it, according to the John Muir Trust. In addition, the Trust has warned that the turbines spell ecological disaster for the wet blanket peat-land which covers the area and acts as a huge carbon sink, the Sunday Times has reported.
According to global warming dogma, carbon sinks are crucial in preventing human activity from causing climatic doom.
The planet isn’t the only victim of this ideologically driven enterprise:
Around one million people visit the picturesque Loch Ness, nestled in the highlands of Scotland each year, bringing about £25 million in revenue with them. Most are on the lookout for the infamous monster, but if Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) get their way the tourists will have something else to look at: the Stronelairg wind farm – 67 turbines, each 443ft high, peppered across the Monadhlaith mountains overlooking the Loch.
Remember what the two top Google scientist in charge of their renewable energy program just said?
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
[…..]
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
But asking someone who has swallowed this story is like beating a dead horse. They will tell me — to my face — that mankind releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is driving weather changes.
I will point out a graph that shows in the past couple of decades man has produced more CO2 combined from the previous 100-years, overlayed to the temperature staying the same for over 18-years (in fact, falling a bit since 2005), and this MAJOR, FOUNDATIONAL belief being shown false doesn’t sway their “belief” towards rethinking their previously held paradigm.
The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) cabinet approved a comprehensive list of 83 designated terrorist organizations Saturday, the WAM Emirates News Agency reports. The list includes various al-Qaeda affiliates and the Islamic State.
In a statement, CAIR said it and MAS “peacefully promote civil and democratic rights and … oppose terrorism whenever it occurs, wherever it occurs and whoever carries it out.”
But FBI policy since 2008 has prohibited communicating with CAIR outside of criminal investigations. That decision was based on evidence in a terror-financing prosecution in Dallas which placed CAIR and its founders in a Muslim Brotherhood Hamas support network called the Palestine Committee. “[U]ntil we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS, the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner,” Assistant FBI Director Richard Powers wrote in 2009.
The Muslim American Society (MAS) also serves as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. A 2004 Chicago Tribune story describes how MAS was formed as the Brotherhood’s U.S. arm after a debate about whether to stay underground. In 2012 testimony, Abdurahman Alamoudi, once the most politically influential Islamist activist in the country, said the connection between MAS and the Brotherhood was well known in Islamist circles….
…This photo comes from Hamas-linked CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa yesterday, courtesy of an anonymous reader who was at the banquet. It is not the first time Hamas-linked CAIR, designated a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates, has discouraged Muslims from talking to the FBI…
Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer explains the connections between the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the jihad terror group Hamas. (H/T – Creeping Sharia)
