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Copyright © 2015 by Wayne Stegall Silence of the LambsHow
the
ruthless
have made Christianity their scapegoat
Recently Barack Obama repeated an oft repeated maxim of humanism. And lest we get on our high horse
and
think this is unique to some
other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition,
people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home
country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name
of Christ.1
However this fallacy does not stand up to logic and reason. Instead the truth is self-evident that a group of people – who might be collectively called the ruthless – consisting of monarchs and other persons of real power have perpetrated the crimes of which the Church is so often accused in this way. Ordinary persons are just not positioned to commit political crimes. Christianity endured horrible persecution until Constantine converted to their ranks in the early fourth century. Although there was brief period of anarchy from the fall of Rome until the crowning of Charlemagne in 800AD, Christians were always under the rule of monarchs until the rise of Western Democracy in America. How logical is it to blame actual Christians for all these deeds? Given that Obama is involved as a king in combating ISIL and Islamic terrorism, he too is as much a Crusader as those kings of old. How hard it would be in light of current events to even blame them much less the Christianity usually scapegoated for them. As for the Inquisition, I noted that the Spanish inquisition occurred about the same time that the Moors and their king were driven out of Spain. Suspecting that the inquisition to be wartime thoroughness in finishing with the enemy, I studied to find my suspicions largely true. This is besides the fact that Christianity cannot be blamed for the behavior of rulers they do not control. So too when the Merovingian royal dynasty blasphemed by claiming descent from procreation between Jesus and Mary Magdalena there is no record that the Church answered back. Surely a Church alleged to be ruthless would have been able to answer such an evil. How many have seen Cardinal Richelieu made the villain for the crimes of the royal court of France in the Three Musketeers and other films and media while the king himself is spared the blame? The following citation repudiates this duplicity. Indeed, his contemporary
reputation was
one of supreme ruthlessness and arbitrariness in the application of
power. Yet he was never more than the king's creature, incapable of
pursuing a course of action of which Louis disapproved, always
vulnerable to the loss of royal favor and support.2
If Richelieu could not be held blame for the king's ruthlessness, it is also customarily known that he was only a figurehead for the power of another man: François-Joseph le Clerc du Tremblay. The former then became known as the red eminence and later as the gray eminence, terms now commonly used to represent the manipulation of a puppet by a hidden power. In the light these observations, Karl Marx's statement that "religion is the opiate of the people" is a misrepresentation: blaming the kindness of the followers of kind religions for their exploitation by those ruthless he opposed and those he later enabled. How can it be that an obvious deduction and self-evident truth of this sort could fail detection by the masses? Consider the following statements that I heard on television after the Democrats won Congress in 2006. First, it was said that "the victors write the history books." Elsewhere – on CNN, I believe – it was said by one that, "Christians should not be involved in politics." This raises the truth that the ruthless have always controlled the means of propaganda and also the means to render it as history. And so even now, Christianity is scapegoated by the media in defense of the ruthless with quite new vigor. On a documentary I saw that Girolamo Savonarola was maligned with a Renaissance lie that is refuted in by a reputable source this way: "The legend that he refused Lorenzo [de' Medici] absolution is disproved by documentary evidence."3 Later, in a similar documentary, I saw the sorcerer Gregory Rasputin represented as monk for the defamation of Christianity. Disturbing also are reports that the new Common Core curriculum now being taught in schools is replacing traditional American teachings with ones advocating socialism, the climate change agenda, and other politically correct topics seemingly meant to change the perception of America and its history. It seems they wasted no time to rewrite history for those who hold our future, America's children. If the today's humanists are rewriting history, and that against Christianity, it is plausible that a turn of favor toward humanism during the Renaissance also occasioned a rewriting of history, one now cited without evidence as being fact. Also don't forget that I have suffered at hand of the ruthless as well, something well attested in the elsewhere in my writings. Given the human capacity for evil and the large number of accusations, I possibly could not defend every accused Christian in history particularly where the witnesses and evidence is long gone. But neither can you prove their guilt in light of the way the ruthless have manipulated history to their benefit. Perhaps the benefit of the doubt belongs to the sheep of this world rather than those who would devour them. Resist
the
machine!
2"History of France," Encyclopedia Britannica 2002, Expanded Edition DVD, version 2002.0.0.0 domestic. 3"Girolamo Savonarola," Encyclopedia Britannica 2002. Document History March 13, 2015 Created. March 13, 2015 Corrected some grammar and added some extra text. |