[crusades] wolves in doves’ clothing

There are a few lines in that much-misinterpreted, misused [by devotees] and maligned [by detractors] document, that chronicle of tales of yesteryear gathered together in two volumes and called the Bible, which concerns whom one can trust.

In the 7th chapter of Matthew, in the course of a lecture given [as far as any historical source can determine] on a hill on the north end of the Sea of Galilee, near Capernaum, a fine place to address a gathering I should have thought – in the course of that lecture, the following words were uttered by the Nazarene carpenter’s son:

16: Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17: Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18: A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19: Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20: Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

What often escapes both the maniacally abusive fanatic and the most blindly sceptical atheist is that there is a lot of good common sense in there, as witnessed in what we’ve just read.

It’s a good rule of thumb which one does not need to be religious to accept and it does explain an awful lot of what’s happened in the world in the millennia preceding that lecture and subsequently.

In the best [or worst] Cromwellian manner, let me beseech thee, “Think it possible you may be mistaken,” those who attribute the Crusades and the Inquisitions to any form of Christianity. For a summary of the precepts of that faith, see Matthew chapters 5-7.

Now compare those to the actions against “wrong thinking people” and dissidents taken in the name of the faith but which actions more closely resemble those of, say, a Walsingham or an Ayatolla. In simple English, this faith does not allow of such actions and it is a slur on all the good people who have read those words and done what they could to keep their nose clean and their powder dry [seeing as we’re mixing metaphors this morning] to attribute subsequent actions of the warring states to Christianity.

Clearly, a number of things went wrong along the way, not least being human nature, which is, in the first place, all that the scripture of this faith tried to address and the reason, if one accepts the presence of the Logos on earth at that time [not necessary in order to support this argument] why this loose collection of precepts for living were delivered to a fractious and malcontented people.

Those precepts, if followed to their logical conclusion by voluntary acceptance and not imposition, can only lead to a natural regulation of society, something which, if you cast your eye over the western world in 2009, is just not happening.

The Crusades

There is much literature [a lot of it on the web too] which supports the contention that it was in no way a “Christian” crusade which saw troops slaughter all. A monk named Fulcher, who was supposedly on the First Crusade, described it thus:

Fulcher claimed that once the Crusaders had managed to get over the walls of Jerusalem, the Muslim defenders there ran away. Fulcher claimed that the Crusaders cut down anybody they could and that the streets of Jerusalem were ankle deep in blood. The rest of the Crusaders got into the city when the gates were opened.

The slaughter continued and the Crusaders killed whomever they wished. Those Muslims who had their lives spared, had to go round and collect the bodies before dumping them outside of the city because they stank so much. The Muslims claimed afterwards that 70,000 people were killed and that the Crusaders took whatever treasure they could from the Dome of the Rock.

Those antipathetic to the Christian faith point to this as one of the crowning arguments against it but anyone who is a Christian in the sense of having committed and received, as promised [a very few in terms of total numbers] know full well that the Crusades were anything but Christian, for the reasons given in the sermon on the mount.

Any student of history knows what happened when Constantine adopted the faith as a useful tool for his plans at that time [that link just now is anything but Christian and yet it holds water] and the Romanization of Christendom then led to other “Christian States”, an oxymoron if ever there was one and inevitably to bloodshed and oppression, not least of women [yes, even that].

Once again, to return to the original document, there is no exhortation in those lines to follow the direction "Christendom" did follow, reaching its lowest point perhaps around the time of Chaucer and in the time of the Borgias although their were many other questionable times along the way as well.

Whether intentional or unintentional, Byron’s view, from Don Juan [1819-24] that:

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded
That all the apostles would have done as they did

… contains both a fallacy and a truth. The fallacy is that “Christians” did the burning. No Christian, in the sense of an accepter of the Logos, would ever burn another. The gospels don’t allow it and the gospels are the central tenets of the faith. We’ll come to who did do the burning later.

Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, Pt 1 [1794], wrote:

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.

By and large he’s right though a child may be shocked by many things, real or imaginary. The point is though, that the precepts of this faith do not allow of such a thing – for example the “turn the other cheek” and the admonition not to seek revenge because “revenge is mine, saith the Lord”.

Now if you stop for one minute and think that last one through, imagine that we no longer seek revenge because we can control the impulse. The person who uttered those words was well aware of the over-riding spell which grips a person once revenge is on his/her mind. A modern allegory is the revenge of Anakin Skywalker when he slaughtered a whole village and thus weakened, he went on to much worse things, having progressively fallen under the influence of the Emperor.

If you give way to your base instincts, then you tend to the bestial and eventually become worse, as we have destructive instincts the other members of the animal world don’t.

So that little system, the Christian precepts, are a damn good platform on which to base a society.

Back to the Crusades

Who then did all the slaughter, the inquisitions, the inhumanity, man on man? Daniel Defoe wrote, in The True Born Englishman [1701]:

Wherever G-d erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ’twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the larger congregation.

The twisted version of the faith relied on one thing in particular – no one getting to see the original script and that was achieved by having the Bible chained to the pulpit and written in Latin, the learning of which was denied to the poor and downtrodden in mediaeval and earlier times.

Hence a golden opportunity for the worst excesses, in the name of Christianity.

I ask you to pause once more and be honest. A lie on this scale is no less believable than the giant lie of the Enlightenment, which scholars now know to have been a recipe for the breakdown of society – this point has been made by commenters on at this blog a few times.

It is no less believable than the lie of the Ayatollahs and Mullahs that interprets jihad as a call to slaughter. Let’s not get into that whole religion at this point.

Look – if I put on chainmail in 1097, sharpen my sword to a razor edge and with a gleam in my eye march off to the Holy Land to slaughter infidels, on the strength of the Bishops and Barons [the Christian Druids] telling me I’m doing it for Christ, a fact unable to be attested, due to lack of access to the scripture which supposedly exhorted that, if I work myself up into a fervour, a holy hysteria at their beconing, then what else am I to think and while I stand ankle deep in blood and look down on the deed I’ve just done, if some sort of remorse and feeling that not all is ship shape and Bristol fashion here [love mixing those metaphors] grips me, I sure as hell am not going to complain about it as I’ll be the one lying in the street slaughtered or something even worse in the hands of the fiends at the top.

So, does putting a white robe with a red cross over my chainmail, as I grasp the soon-to-be-bloodied sword convert me to a Christian?

As a Christian, if I get into dark clothing, with balaclava, kidnap an ageing aid worker in Iraq, read him a few lines of the Koran on film, cut his throat and say, “G-d is Great,” does this make me a Muslim terrorist?

Is Voltaire, philosopher in the age of reason, whose influence has been well claimed to have had immense effect on the doings of the Jacobins, on his repution as an Enlightened man - is he actually an enlightened advocate for the peace and happiness of mankind or is he something altogether different?

Just because you dress up in the garb of the enemy and sprout your rhetoric in a semi-biblical manner, does that make you a godly man?

Just because you can fool your party members that you are actually right-wing in your policies, party members believing this because true Labour people would never have wrecked the society as Brown has, does that make you right wing or are you, in reality, a Mandelson type international socialist?

Just because you have convinced the west that the bankers [who have always colluded by the way, Tiberius – read Jackson] who have brought society to its knees, are a prime example of the evils of capitalism when, in fact, there is no free market [the true sign of capitalism in its best form] in operation anywhere in the west [read Tim Worstall and others], then does that make you, Mr. Federal Reserve, capitalists or are you, in fact, globalists of the worst ilk, globalism and its desire for a one world state being socialism in its most extreme form?

Was the Democratic Republic of Germany democratic?

Can people see that the labels claimed by people who perpetrate atoricities and human misery are so vague and inappropriately assumed that entirely different labels might be more fitting?
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