Michael Coren, an English-born journalist from Canada, has written a book called Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread about Christianity; the Amazon blurb describes it like this:
Michael Coren explores why and how Christians and Christian ideas are caricatured in popular media as well as in sophisticated society. He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. In a climate that is increasingly as ignorant of Christianity as it is good at condemning it, Coren gives historical background, provides examples of how these attacks are made, and explains the reality of the Christian response, outlining authentic Christian beliefs.
It’s not something I’ll be reading soon, particularly because Coren has written an excerpt from the book at The Catholic Register called “Christianity and Science do go together for Michael Coren” (yep, the title’s in the third person). The bulk of it is an attempt to show that there’s no conflict between Christianity and science using the lamest tactic of accommodation: showing that some famous scientists were or are religious. Kepler, Newton, Louis Pasteur and their ilk are trotted out to buttress Coren’s conclusion that “the Christian Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery.” He even argues that secularism has held back science, because the Big Bang theory, proposed by the priest Georges Lemaître,
was opposed by the secular, scientific world when it was first discussed, because it sounded too Christian. Who, then, had the open minds and who the closed?
That’s bogus. Hubble had already produced evidence for an expanding universe around the time Lemaître proposed the Big Bang, and the physics community was divided for a few decades between the steady-state and Big Bang theories. Fred Hoyle, who coined the name “big bang” as a derisive phrase, may have disliked it partly because of his atheism, but it’s simply not true that the “secular, scientific world” opposed Lemaître’s theory because it implied a creator.
But I digress. The vacuous quote of the week is simply the beginning of Corren’s piece (the emphasis is mine):
The idea that Christianity is somehow opposed to science, and that individual Christians cannot reconcile their faith to scientific discoveries, is a relatively modern canard, but successfully and damagingly promulgated, usually by people who know very little about science and its history, or about Christianity and Christians. It’s a part of the larger, “Christians are stupid” approach, usually offered by people who are inspired by talk shows rather than texts, and assume that because a television mini-series or popular novel has depicted Christians as being superstitious, foolish, reactionary and frightened of change, such must be the case. The science aspect of all this is particularly nauseating, not only because it is fundamentally untrue, but that it is thrown at Christianity at a time when society is arguably experiencing one of its most credulous and naïve stages and is only too willing to embrace any and every kind of non-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense, from alien invasion stories to ghost myths, and from conspiracy theories to supernatural animals. To paraphrase the great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in something else, they believe in anything else.
Yes, we have to support Christianity because it’s our bulwark against all those other myths that aren’t true.
Oh, for a chaser go see Coren’s lovely editorial, “Church can’t be bullied into accepting homosexuality.“
When I read the first quote, where Coren says that it is a myth to think Christianity is “racist, sexist, homophobic” etc., I assumed he was one of those disingenuous, not-really-religious liberals who garners their morality from wider culture and then finds trivial post-hoc quotations in the Bible to support it. But then there was the link to his article on homosexuality, where he says it is also a myth that gay children are bullied in school – instead, he says teachers have a pro-gay agenda and the faithful are made to feel evil. Well so they damn well should when there are school districts like Anoka-Hennepin where the only agenda is to pretend homosexuality doesn’t exist, leading to higher LGBT suicides.
And who does he think he is proclaiming what is and is not authentically Christian? Does he not know that non-believers know his religion better than the people he’s defending? I’m tired of people claiming there’s a ‘true’ version of any faith – the only real version that actually matters is the one that currently resides in the delusional minds of religious people, and as much as wishy-washy religious idealists can invoke some platonic religious perfection, it doesn’t and won’t exist, and would still be harmful if it did.
No, no, see, you are supposed to post the thread win later.
Heh, the church is so accostumed to be given special treatment that being treated like anyone else (as in “it has to follow the law now”) feels like bullying.
If I’m not mistaken, this Michael Coren is the guy who partnered a Muslim apologist in a debate with Dan Barker and Richard Carrier. He’s a piece of work, indeed, rubbing his hands with glee when the Muslim apologist elicited a round of applause for some inanity or other from a largely Muslim crowd of male fanatics and subjugated women. The violent tone and sneering demeanour of the two ‘moralists’ was something to behold.
He’s a tv personality from the christian network who regards himself as an important influential Canadian intellectual. I find him to be narcissistic, narrow-minded, condescending, and overall… putrid.
Your last word is just about right…that’s exactly the impression he gives.
He’s an IICI? Is that pronounced icky?
When performing their ludicrous Christian/Muslim double act in the debate I mentioned, in their haste to deride their opponents, I think they must have temporarily forgotten that BOTH of them can’t be right, and that the smirk would be wiped off the face of at least one of them, whilst the other watches them writhe in agony in hell.
I just came across this English medico posing 20 questions that he says atheists can’t answer.
http://pjsaunders.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/twenty-questions-atheists-struggle-to.html
I have been posting all day so I can’t be bothered trying today.
In any case, I think I have seen this list of ‘questions’ before – not sure but it rings a bell of sorts:-)
Richard Carrier just dealt with those.
WP doesn’t see to like the URL… Format this: freethoughtblogs.com carrier archives 1365 (insert /s). Or Google it.
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Thanks Ant. Got it, posted the link on the Telegraph blog just now.
When credulous people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in something else, they believe in anything else.
Chesterton needed a copy editor.
To paraphrase the great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in something else, they believe in anything else
Or they can use their brains and employ evidence-based thinking.
It’s like that stupid argument that relatively nonreligious parents offer for taking their children to church: “So they don’t join a cult or something!” For some reason, this is supposed to work better than taking the kids to the natural history museum…
I remember in high school (nominally “protestant” at the time, but really fairly secular and religiously diverse amongst the parents of the children) in Quebec, one day we had a visit from some organization or other (“Info-culte” or something). A bunch of us thought after the presentation that they hadn’t said anything that didn’t apply to the religions they weren’t covering … at least to some degree. I do agree there are differences of degree, but …
It’s like that stupid argument that relatively nonreligious parents offer for taking their children to church: “So they don’t join a cult or something!”
I actually don’t think it’s stupid at all if you’re nonreligious but not atheist. You take the kid to some mainstream church, give them some idea of what religion is like, and then let the kid make up their own mind about it. They’re going to learn about religion eventually – better to learn about it from a parent instead of from one of their classmates (or worse – some boy/girl that their hormones are raging over who happens to belong to some extremist fundamentalist group).
LOL- that’s what my brother did in high school. He got over it and married a mainline Protestant but now he ignores the whole religion thing with his own kids, so you may have a point.
I was taken to the museum lots, and I still became a fundamentalist (though not a creationist!) as a teenager. My (agnostic) Dad once remarked that they should have taken me to church as a child so I would know what it was all about.
I have no idea whether that would have worked. A better prophylactic would have been inculcating the rule that you shouldn’t believe people’s accounts of their own strange experiences: half them are just plain lying, and even the sincere ones are distorting and confabulating.
Well, to put it simply: Chesterton was flat out wrong, regardless of the exact wording. The statement is as arrogant and offensive as it is untrue. The irritating thing about quotes is that their popularity has nothing to do with their truth value, and everything to do with the attraction of the word play. But many people of the book don’t seem to know the difference.
It seems that Chesterton never wrote that, though he did write similar things.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2005/12/rjn-123005-one-more-word :
“And so, we here at the American Chesterton Society are convinced that the source of the fugitive quotation is Emile Cammaerts, whose ambiguous typography misled Christopher Hollis and through him others (including, at last, all of the rest of us) …”
OT, I think yours is the busiest (Gr)avatar I’ve seen!
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‘He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. ‘
He forgot to debunk the claim that Christianity is false.
I wonder why…..
Gee, Christianity hasn’t been antisemitic in the past? I guess that Coren has never heard of Martin Luther.
Martin Luther, Torquemada, and many before. In more recent times there was Pius XII, though the catholic church would deny that and as evidence present the actions of decent catholics who did oppose the extermination of the Jews. Typical management – blame others for the bad things and take credit for the good things your underlings have done.
There already was enough anti-Jewish sentiment in Paul’s epistles and John’s Gospel, but to reach its most glorious and vitriolic expression, one has to turn to Chrysostom’s 8 homilies “Against the Jews” (“Adversus Judaeos”) delivered in Antioch in 386-387 AD. They cannot be outdone by anybody (“Chrysostom” means “with a golden mouth).
You can sample this incendiary prose at
http://www.preteristarchive.com/ChurchHistory/0386_chrysostom_adversus-judeaus.html
James Parkes called Chrysostom’s sermons “the most horrible and violent denunciations of Judaism to be found in the writings of a Christian theologian”.
They were enough to feed all Christian sermons for centuries to come.
Martin Luther added his grain of caustic salt with “On the Jews and their lies” (1543). This very Christian text can be sampled at
http://www.weirdcrap.com/recreational/luther.html
Both authors, Chrysostom and Luther were widely used by Nazi propagandists.
Christianity, which started as a Jewish Messianic sect, turned against the mother figure, and became its most virulent enemy.
He also forgot to bunk the claim that Christianity is true.
Why can’t apologists understand that beginning by assuming something is true and then defending it isn’t actually a valid … oh, wait, if they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be apologists. Disregard.
All of those things are true about some segments of Christianity at some times. And all of them are false about other segments of Christianity at some times.
The existence of the latter does not cancel out the former.
More importantly, though, are all those things true of some segments of Christianity at the present time? But if not, are those things things that contemporary Christians are actually accused off?
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Well Ant – it’s meaningless to say Christianity is guilty of this that or the other – as there is no Christianity per se but a gazillion differing sects all calling themselves Christianity and some or all of those things are true at any given time of one sect or another.
If I read this right (English is only my second language), the blurb of Mr Coren’s book asserts that the Church is not homophobic, while his article asserts that the Church cannot be “bullied into accepting homosexuality.” Are the writers of these two pieces the same Mr Coren?
The same “will lie for my zombie” Coren.
yes, Coren is quite the attack dog for Jeebus. His vomitus often appears in the national Car & Electronics Advertiser tabloid (like its UK namesake it had a Pg3 Girl, but not topless and later moved to the back pages, like a serious newspaper)
He did get two naturoquacks to laugh at homeopathy on a show aboot alternative medicine once.
Coren lambasted chiroquackery, lumping it in with ‘crystal healing’ and homeopathy. One of the naturopaths is responsible for the 2nd year curriculum at their local Hogwarts.
Unfortunately, the skeptics on the show didn’t run with homeopathy being a pillar of naturopathy, so why the laughter?
Otherwise Coren’s religious bigotry is plain for all but himself. These types never get the irony dripping from their use of language to justify their hatred inspired by The Great Celestial Bully.
“intrinsically disordered” – Pope Ratzo
“intrinsic moral evil” – Pope Ratzo
Not “discriminatory or insensitive” (a woman defending the Ol’ Boys Club in the Gnat Post) in the least
Coren, like Fr. de Souza in the Gnat Post, disingenuously writes as if the guvmint just came up with this out of the blue.
I read/reviewed a similar book by a nicer religionaut who was slightly more sophisticated than Coren and said he had the verses and science to back him up.
Soft evangelism via warm and fuzzy cherry picking
But, there’s another book by a guy who says there’s no free will – it’s all doG, everything under Her control. And he has the verses to back him up.
Oh, the church isn’t afraid of them – the church only hates them because their loving god tells them to. They need to hate the homosexuals because that’s how god loves them – by hating them – because god’s not gay – if he were, then he’d simply be loving them. So although they hate the homosexuals, that’s really because they love them and so they’re not homophobes. Or was it that they’re not homo-fearers, they’re homo-haters? Maybe the latest book on sophisticated theology will make it as clear as mud.
I’ve talked to other Christians who claim they aren’t homophobic, they just think gay people shouldn’t have the same rights as straight people. And they seem to actually believe it.
As far as I know, nobody is arguing that “individual Christians cannot reconcile their faith to scientific discoveries.” Of course they can. The argument is over whether the supernatural is a.) supported by science and b.) ought to be supported by science. Turn skeptical scrutiny and an honest commitment to be consistent on the supernatural and paranormal claims of religion/spirituality and watch what happens.
Otherwise, giving religious claims a free “pass” on the need to satisfy rational criteria means that it’s just as easy as pie to reconcile your faith to scientific discoveries. It’s just as easy as it is to reject scientific discoveries because of faith. Faith allows you to approach reality like a giant game of Calvinball, making up rules and limits and drawing the line between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” wherever you freakin’ want.
Apologists like Coren forget one logically inescapable fact of “defending the Faith” against outside criticism: everything in your religion which makes sense to outsiders — cannot be unique to your religion.
Of course it is easy as pie! Of course said rationalization will have about as much congruence with reality as leprechauns leaving a pot of gold with my name on it at the end of a rainbow.
Everything in religion is as easy as pie. That’s why to them pi = 3. What’s easier than lopping off a few infinite decimal places? QED.
Can we please go back to discussing the amazing compressive stress resistance of hydroxyapatite? Please?
Anything worth learning, worth knowing?
The effluvia of all those god-bothered fools and liars are nauseating.
” Hubble had already produced evidence for an expanding universe around the time Lemaître proposed the Big Bang”
It’s a bit more interesting. LeMaitre (and not only him) had proposed an expanding Universe on the basis of instabilities in General relativity applied to a static Universe, and FWIW beat Hubble to the punch in using data collected by others to show the expansion, but by an accident of what got published where and translated when, we think of the appeal to experiment as being primarily Hubble’s. (Am I allowed to advertise my newly published book, From Stars to Stalagmites, which goes into this among other things?)
Yes. Standard practice for religious apologists. Such contradictions are motivated by fear. People like Coren are afraid of gay people, and they are afraid that they may expose themselves as the bigots that they really are.
It really cracks me up how afraid people like Coren are of so many things. They pretend to be “all that” but in truth they are afraid almost all the time. That can be kind of cute in a young child but in an adult it is pathetic.
The constant fear drives people like Coren to be desperately committed to their religious beliefs. They are constantly devising rationalizations for their beliefs that sound convincing to themselves, and they really have no clue how contrived, simplistic and just plain silly they sound to people who are not also desperately committed to their religious beliefs.
Damn, did it again.
This was intended as a response to अहंनास्मि (Ahannāsmi) at comment number 6.
To unapologetically paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, “When people stopped believing in Zeus and Jupiter and Woden and Osiris, they didn’t start believing in something else; they started believing in anything else…like Christianity and Islam.” Thing have turned out quite well since then, duncha tink?
Chesterton’s quote is quite a diss. He must have held a very low opinion of Christians’ rational faculties.
On the other hand, there’s a social analogue which seems to be more true. For example, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the people there seem to have drastically increased their “consumption” of many unsupported superstitions, including religious revivals. Presumably this is in part due to the “social system vacuum”, created by the total destruction of the social system and having it replaced by a rapacious power grab of another sort and a wreck of job security, incomes, etc.
Ironically, or perhaps not, this is related to what Marx seems to have been most right about – the “opium of the people” thing. However, rather than simply being religions proper, many flummeries are …
Lesson, then, seems to be, to reduce superstition and nonsense, provide better lives for people. This doesn’t work completely – witness things like psychoanalysis in France or homeopathy in the UK, but …
Early in the 20th century, a few physicists (Einstein was one) realized that a static universe is unstable unless something else is going on.
It’s gravity. The long range force that all matter has. In a static universe, gravity will inevitably result in a Big Crunch.
Einstein originally put in the Cosmological constant to stabilize the universe.
Another way to stabilize the universe is the Big Bang.
It now appears that the Big Bang, Cosmological constant, and/or Dark Energy is what does it.
Einstein also thought it “his biggest mistake” since it is gives a quasistatic equilibrium.
In the later part of the comment you seem to leave equilibrium situations and discuss expansion, which is a nice, “stable” (robust) solution indeed.
Quasistatic, as in eventually it starts to collapse or expand anyway unless some active process keeps it close to the equilibrium.
‘Church can’t be bullied into accepting Homosexuality’
Aaah..thankyou for my daily dose of sweet, sweet irony that I’m enjoying with my morning coffee 🙂
Me thinks that concepts such as irony, sarcasm & satire should be taught to kids in school, from an early age
Yeah, it can’t possibly be due to the daily deluge of news reports showing that this is exactly the case. It must be all those popular anti-Christian novels and TV miniseries, like…um, like…hmm.
Xians have been making atheists since 33 CE.
The fundies are stupid and uneducated.
That is just a fact from surveys and polls. Dennett cites a summary of 46 surveys.
Needless to say, Coren is simply lying here. Xianity is all of that. Except irrelevant. When crazed xian terrorists are threatening to kill us, scientists and MD’s, which they do a lot, they are relevant. They’ve got the bullets, bombs, and dead bodies to prove it.
To cite just one example, slavery is all through the bible. Jesus the godman even gives instructions on how to beat your slaves, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there might be something wrong with the whole idea.
The Southern Baptists and the other sects with Southern in their name, split before the civil war over slavery. They supported it with the aid of the bible.
The Catholic church used to own slaves themselves in their religious orders. They were one of the last sects to condemn slavery, long after everyone had abolished it. Typical. The RCC rarely leads social justice programs, they use stand in the way and oppose them.
And as for the anti-semitic part – Mel Gibson and his dad are accused of being in their own catholic cult, but the truth is the hatred of Jews promulgated by Mel and his dad are absolutely typical of catholic teaching before ~1966. The Lutherans also teach (or taught) that the Jews killed their god (in fact, I think Martin Luther denied that Jesus was himself supposedly a Jew – there’s sophisticated theology), and I bet the Baptists/Pentecostals still teach the same crap (in fact, it’s hard to imagine the Baptists moving out of the 12th century – which is funny considering they were founded much later).
Just as a side-note…my atheist sister has struck a deal with our creationist brother; He reads Why Evolution is True and she has to read Darwin on Trial. (he’s read alot so far, she’s only got thru one chapter).
Watch this space 🙂
I made a similar deal with an old high school chum rediscovered on Facebook. I had forced his hand when pointing out that all of his statements about evolution were profoundly ignorant… he had never read a single book on the subject, except Creationist nonsense. I recommended WEIT but I think he stopped reading because he couldn’t handle the dissonance of having his faith challenged. He no longer tries to convert me on Facebook, so at least some progress was made.
Religious and/or right wing associates and relatives are why the “Block” function is a vital part of the FaceBook experience.
That’s interesting, because I’m expecting that result at the very least..
Oh…. and now, the check box…
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I wonder if Professor Ruse will bless us with his take on Mr. Coren?
I don’t get that, society believes in other nonsense therefore claims about the incompatibility of science and Catholicism are nonsense? Does not follow…
Michael Coren is infamous in Canada for an insulting diatribe he wrote about a casualty in the Afghan war. In Canada women can serve in all the combat arms if they pass the same tests as men. (The brass and rank-and-file fought tooth and nail against this, now most of them admit that they were totally and absolutely wrong.) A woman died in combat and he dismissed her as a ‘girl dressed like a soldier’. He was roundly condemned as the sexist pig he is. He is a knuckle-dragging dork who has made a career out of making outrageous, stupid statements.
Sounds a lot like Bill Donohue of the Catholic league. Or WL Craig, another pathological liar.
Donohue has made a career and a nice living out of being the Rush Limbaugh of Catholics.
I suppose you have to be sociopathic or a sadist to defend religion in general and the Catholic church in particular.
Speaking of Donohue, he’s one of the guys who wrote a positive review of Coren’s book here
“There are few Catholic writers in North America who are as appealling as Michael Coren, and when it comes to demonstrating wit on TV, he is in a league of his own. His new book, Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity, is as entertaining as his previous work, Why Catholics Are Right. Indeed it is a gem.” Bill Donohue, Catholic League
Yeah, xianity is not anti-semitic…yet it’s the same Donohue who recently made and ass oh himself with his remarks to the Jewish community.
Damnit, old keyboard leads to spelling fail.
I always get a laugh then Christians try to include Isaac Newton. This is especially amusing when Roman Catholics do this, considering that Newton was vehemently anti-Catholic. In actually, Newton was an Arian who considered the concept of the Trinity to be a concoction of the evil (to him) Catholic Church.
But they never seem to include Gregor Mendel as a religious person who did science.
Actually, my investigations (such as they are – I’m only an amateur historian of science at best) is that virtually all the figures of the scientific revolution are heretics (which doesn’t make them non-religious or non-theists, just that their views were at odds with those of the various denominations). Disclaimer: I’ve still to read about and more from Copernicus. (Being a clergyman doesn’t exempt one from heresy, in case that isn’t obvious.)
Boyle is about the only “big name” guy (from such folks as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Huygens, Hooke, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, etc.) who is perhaps not. And *he* seem to have been terrified about his scientific work branding him one. BTW, this is not my idiosyncratic view, either, at least in some cases: recent biographies of Descartes and Galileo are in agreement that they were not Christians. Galileo in particular (wonderful writer) does things like (paraphrasing) “But sir, I protest, that view you say I hold is a heresy!”
But he doesn’t *deny* he holds it … Sneaky!
Oh, the poor marginalized christian majority! I think christians should be more like Newton and revel in the occult – I mean the non-christian occult.
His entire piece was full of vacuous statements. How about this one: “Mind you, in my experience most of the people who insist on mentioning Galileo can’t actually spell his name correctly, and they certainly have no idea about what actually happened to him or why it happened in the first place. His case is used over and over again because critics can’t think of any other scientists who were mistreated by either the Catholic or Protestant churches.”
Obviously this idiot believes that he can assert anything he wants to assert and no one will know much of anything to tell the difference.
And his treatment of “bullying” was just nauseating. The man is obviously intellectually damaged.
Ironic, makes you suspect he doesn’t know the man was Galileo Galilei.
Especially as he is using the given name instead of the family name.
So good, they named him twice.
As was the style at the time.
He knows his target audience well.
Even given that Hoyle was a confused man in his later years, I don’t think it is well established that he was an atheist?
– Hoyle certainly spoke of “a superintellect [that] has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature” when describing his anthropic work on the triple-alpha process. (Hoyle assumed that this produced the carbon necessary for life, and deduced the necessary conditions involved.)
– Hoyle’s motivation for working on a steady-state universe was panspermia, but it isn’t clear to me that he believed in Monod’s small chance for life.* Maybe he needed the time for a single creation to result in humans somewhere, seeing that he was accepting evolution and knew about contingency.
He was definitely creationist in his “Boeing 747 in a junkyard” fallacy and his protein sequence strawman.
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* Which, when you look at it, is a similar incorrect “large phase space, small probability” error. Small prior probabilities say nothing on the size of posterior likelihoods.
Hoyle himself said that he was atheist earlier in his career; I have no good reason to doubt his claim on that (unlike many contemporary Liars for Jesus who like to claim that they were once atheist but …)
We are big fans of demonic and satanic movies and the standard trope is that christianity is the defense — or at least those are the symbols and “hooks” that are used to add conflict and hope.
“He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant.”
OK, myth no. 1: slavery. In 1018, The Synod of Pavia decreed that the children of ecclesiastics should be “slaves, the property of the church, and never to be enfranchised.” … and “incapable of succeeding to their fathers’ benefices.”
Myth no. 2: racist. In 1209, Pope Innocent III’s Albigensian crusaders, led by Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, massacred the inhabitants of Béziers in an effort to stamp out the Waldensian and Albigensian heresies. Thousands of the residents of Béziers were blinded, mutilated, dragged by horses, and used for target practice. Papal legate Arnaud Amaury said, “God’s wrath has raged in wondrous wise against the city.” At the fall of Béziers, an underling asked the papal legate how they could tell true believers from the heretics. Amaury said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”
Myth no. 3: sexist. In 906, the Canon Episcopi (“church law”) decreed that belief in witchcraft was heretical. In 1484, the Church made disbelief in witches heretical.
Myth no. 4: homophobic. The Vatican distinguishes between “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” and the “expression of a transitory problem”, in relation to ordination to the priesthood; saying in a 2005 document that homosexual tendencies “must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate.”
Myth no. 5: anti-intellectual. In 1109, Crusaders destroyed the Banu Ammar library in Tripoli, said to be “the finest in the Moslem world.” Crusaders under King Baldwin burned the library at Dar al-Iim, which contained more than 100,000 books. The Moslems of the city were exiled or sold into slavery. (Second entry for myth no. 1).
Myth no. 6: anti-Semitic. In 428, the prohibitions against any and all heresies in the Roman Empire (35 were specifically named) was renewed. In addition, the law decreed that “they shall also be deprived of all aid, whether military or civil, of the law courts, the defenders and judges….”
Myth no. 7: provokes war. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War engulfed all of Europe and killed more people numbered in the millions than any other religious war in history. Central Europe became a wasteland and Germany’s population was reduced by 25-40%. The war was the result of the Catholic Holy Roman Empire attempts to stamp out Calvinism. There was no clear winner; the war ended because the combatants were exhausted. The Peace of Westphalia also recommended an end to the Vatican’s temporal power.
Myth no. 8: resists progress. In 1864, Pope Pius IX, in Syllabus Errorum, condemned rationalism, liberalism, modern civilization, and the idea of progress. Other errors he included were the state’s not excluding all religions other than Roman Catholicism, and stating that the pope should accept modern civilization.
Myth no. 9: repressive. From 1942 onwards, ample documentation exists which shows that Pope Pius XII and his closest advisers were well-informed throughout the war about the atrocities committed by the Croatians.
• The World Jewish Congress sent a letter to the Pope asking for help.
• Archbishop Stepinac of Croatia and the pope’s personal representative in Croatia, Monsignor Ramiro Marcone, both regularly reported to him about the conditions in Croatia.
• Francis D’Arcy Osborne, London’s Minister to the Vatican monitored and translated BBC broadcasts for the Pope.
• Prvislav Grizogono, former Minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, wrote an official letter to Pius XII listing the atrocities in Croatia.
Notwithstanding these reports and postwar documented stories in the international press, Pius XII did not censure the Ustashi, the Franciscans, or any member of the clergy who commited the Croatian atrocities, which appalled even some local Nazis.
Myth no. 10: irrelevant. A value judgement, a category error, ultimately immune to definitive factual contradiction, and therefore ‘irrelevant’.
Sources: 666 Christian crimes and Wikipedia for ‘homophobia’.
No doubt others can have a lot of fun citing other examples of the venal history of crimes committed not ‘in the name of God’, but because their perpetrators were convinced that they were doing God’s will.
Oh, but these are not real™ Christians and Christian ideas!
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Oh, those are just isolated incidents of people misunderstanding True Christianity.
Great list! Please post them as user comments at Amazon for his book.
Yeah, but that’s the religion as fallible humans practice it. Go the biblical source to find the actual promotion of slavery, homophobia, misogyny, etc. It’s all there in the foundational documents, however “sophisticated” the interpretation of them is. It’s a lot harder to ignore the presence of this stuff in the bible itself, or at least it should be. Of course it gets ignored, sidestepped and explained away all the time.
The massacre at Béziers was not racist, unless the inhabitants were racially different from the attackers. Better examples might be found – but I’m too lazy to do so – in the many pro-slavery sermons which referenced the curse of Ham.
Well, I could have cited loads of other cases, like virtually any page from Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ re: the conquering of the Americas, or the Spanish Inquisition or Rwanda, but everyone knows about them; the Crusade against Béziers at least has the merit of being more obscure and therefore more likely to touch the outrage bone.
By the way, Pope Innocent III who ordered the butchery, was Italian, the victims lived in what is now France. As a cardinal, Innocent wrote ‘On the misery of the human condition’, a state he appears to have significantly added to. You can argue this was racism on his part, if you want; I don’t find it difficult to imagine his dehumanising contempt for the good burghers of Béziers and that hatred’s ancestral relation with the idea of Untermenschen. But hey, who in the end cares what heading it comes under? Christian cannibalism, perhaps? Christianity, like Pop, Will Eat Itself.
Your comment, David, raises an interesting point. Can one be racist towards one’s own ‘race’ – biologists, please forgive the terminology. Others have pointed out how dictators often come from the fringes of their empire; Napoleon from Corsica, Stalin from Georgia, Mao, while not from the western edges of China, was relatively provincial. And in no case was there a question of their homelands’ secession from the big centre; they donned the mantle of Great Russia, Great France etc. and discarded the rags of their peripheral self-determination.
“The Pope will eat himself”?
Well, it’ll make a change from eating Christ.
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And Frankenberger was from Austria.
“Your comment, David, raises an interesting point. Can one be racist towards one’s own ‘race’ – biologists, please forgive the terminology.”
Now, or 800 years ago? Societies have changed a lot in that time. Most Europeans at that time would have had no contact with people from any part of Africa. Their ways of classifying people by appearance and ethnic heritage would have been much different from ours.
I had no idea JAC was inspired by talk shows. He hides it well.
Looking at some of this man’s bile on YouTube, it seems that part of his spiel is to defend the bigoted by saying that a truly tolerant populace would allow faith-based hatred to go unquestioned. You don’t have to agree with it – I don’t even know if he agrees with all of it – but you have to respect hateful opinions because they’re based on faith.
Fuck that.
Ahh, the cry of the bigot. “You’re intolerant for saying my bigotry is hateful and dangerous!”
“Myth no. 3: sexist. In 906, the Canon Episcopi (“church law”) decreed that belief in witchcraft was heretical. In 1484, the Church made disbelief in witches heretical.”
But how does any of that have anything to do with sexism?
Cuz only icky girls are witches, silly. And they have cooties, too!
“non-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense, from alien invasion stories”
[Mary impregnated by a celestial being]
“to ghost myths,”
[See 1/3 of the Trinity; Jesus as zombie]
“and from conspiracy theories”
[“It’s a part of the larger, “Christians are stupid” approach”]
to supernatural animals
[Angels, devils, magical Jesus, God, Mary, holy spirit etc.]
Perhaps he can tackle the issue of psychological projection next, to maintain that irony-rich diet.
“The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive … but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born.”
— Mark Twain, from Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed, “Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources”
Twain got it right, I think.
So, according to Coren, “the world of science bursts, bulges, with Christians.” That is not a good thing, and it is also not a good thing that the world bursts and bulges with Christians like Michael Coren.
Thanks for the great article.
In this regard, we should note that only 8% of the membership of the National Academy of Sciences believe in an intervening god. Not much Christianity there.
What Coren fails to mention in his editorial about the *Church* being forced to accept homosexuality is that in Ontario the Catholic school system is supported by tax dollars, a privilege extended to no other religious group.
The Church is not being ‘bullied’ into accepting anything, the *publically funded* Catholic school system in Ontario is being forced to allow students who want to form “Gay-Straight Alliances” to use the word ‘gay’ in their name, just as in all other publically funded schools.
The ugliest form of apologetics is the kind that whitewashes Church history and/or has an air of desperation about it. The fellow has blinders on.
I read part of chapter two while shopping for other books and took some notes. The chapter was called “There is no god, bad things happen to good people, and so on”. It certainly read like there were many printed words but they didn’t say much. It reminded me of Sheldon making fun of Leonard in the sitcom “the Big Bang Theory”, “Blah blah blah, hopeless Penny delusion blah blah”. But in this case it would be “blah blah blah, my invisible friend delusion, blah blah”. The author starts with a reworded version of Euthyphro’s dilemma and falls into a trap by saying:
“The critic of Christianity would respond that God is either not all-knowing, not all-powerful, or not all-good. Which, of course, implies that God exists in the first place. I would say that the question and even the problem are actually more of a difficulty and a conundrum for the non-believer than for a Christian”
To me like all the other apologetic stuff I’ve come across before, it reads like they pulled their assertions out of their asses, because there is no way that a anyone trying to be intellectually honest can come up with this crap.
I think that’s a pretty standard Christian ‘gotcha’ argument. A disbeliever questions God’s existence, the believer insists they want to talk about Gods properties instead. So you point out an inconsistency in properties, and they claim your willingness to discuss them must mean you’re on board with existence.
Since existence is the most important property of all – without it you’re literally nothing – one surely has to start with a plausible existence discussion first.
This can then get into a discussion of properties, because those are “earmarks”, but …
“The science aspect of all this is particularly nauseating, not only because it is fundamentally untrue, but that it is thrown at Christianity at a time when society is arguably experiencing one of its most credulous and naïve stages and is only too willing to embrace any and every kind of non-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense, from alien invasion stories to ghost myths, from conspiracy theories to supernatural animals, and [MY RELIGIOUS BELIEFS].
It’s always funny when people list absurd ideas and completely gloss over their own.
Good grief. I won’t be reading Coren, either, but it’s because he’s a TERRIBLE writer.
Michael: The period is your friend. It’s under the “l” on the keyboard.
Kepler, Newton, Louis Pasteur and their ilk are trotted out to buttress Coren’s conclusion that “the Christian Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery.”
.
(roll-eyes) If you have to go per-Darwin to make your case about scientists, yo’ve already lost. None of those three accepted relativity nor quantum mechanics.
I was in an online “conversation” with someone who claimed that Darwin was wrong because he couldn’t use a computer and didn’t know what DNA was.
Yeah. Facepalm.
Gee, neither did Newton so the inverse square law of gravity and the laws of motion must be wrong.
“the Christian Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery.” … (roll-eyes)
Actually they have been – at least at a few stages in their evolution, notably the era of Scholasticism (1100-1500) – or maybe degeneration. But, for example, Richard Tarnas, in his The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, makes these relevant observations:
Under these circumstances [the Scholastic awakening], the Church began to sponsor a tradition of scholarship and education of extraordinary breadth, rigor, and profundity.
Characteristic of this change in intellectual climate was the development of a school in early twelfth-century Paris at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-Victor. Although working wholly within the tradition of monastic mysticism and Christian Platonism, Hugh of Saint-Victor proposed the radical educational thesis that secular learning, focused on the reality of the natural world, constituted a necessary foundation for advanced religious contemplation and even mystical ecstasy. [pg 174]
It was a short step to [the conclusion of Albertus and Aquinas] that the more the world was explored and understood, the greater knowledge and reverence for God would result. [pg 179]
A complex interplay between a desire to understand nature as revealing the “mind of God” and a subsequent fear that that would “contradict theological doctrine”. Unfortunately the Vatican of later years in its commitment to the latter, as was and is the case with Islam, tended and still tends to enforce the dogma by way of anathematizing the former. And has, as a result, gone badly off those twin rails.
Anyone who has ever watched his show knows that he is a racist, pseudo intellectual pretender
Heh, the only time I’ve ever watched Coren was when he had on Justin Trottier from CFI Canada and a YEC called Lawrence Tisdall. Coren, being at least that much non-stupid, was giving the Tisdall a hard time — “Do you seriously believe THAT?”. The result was I got a better impression of Coren than he probably deserves ;-).
I find it amusing that your criticism of his piece draws 40 comments, while the original draws only one. (It would have drawn two, but I seem to have been banned by the Catholic Register — I wonder why?)
Your mention is probably the most exciting thing that will ever happen to their stats.
… but I seem to have been banned by the Catholic Register — I wonder why?
Curious thing, that. Remarkable how many people take offense when you question their dogmata, when you suggest that the Emperors they have been following are actually looking a little threadbare – at least in some embarrassing places. A case in point being that it is, somewhat regrettably, showing up even in the skeptical community.
Although it’s probably an occupational hazard of being human.
As a Torontonian, I’ve had to put up with seeing and hearing Michael Coren in all facets of our media for decades. He’s one of these frothing conservative commentators who loves a fight, loves going against the grain, saying something outrageous to get an argument going.
BTW, this Michael Coren who is apparently trying to say Christianity is compatible with science is the same guy I once heard on radio state that Evolution was a ridiculous story no rational person could believe.
Nothing like being exhibit A for the very problem you are trying to hide.
Vaal