What the right doesn't get about Obama and religion

[cbayer]

http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/7/71/365120/right-doesnt-get-obama-religion

Posted: 02/12/2015, 04:57pm | Gene Lyons

Because I’m not running for anything, I can give it to you straight: Christianity pretty much got out of the genocide business when church and state became separated in the United States and Europe following the American Revolution. As a consequence, all of the truly impressive mass murders in living memory were carried out by secular ideologues worshiping the nation state — a superstition to which millions of Americans are not entirely immune.

More about that directly. Meanwhile, yes, President Obama was a bit tone-deaf and smug in his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast last week. A band of primitive fanatics beheads innocent captives, burns an Allied POW alive and sends out a slickly produced video of the atrocity, and the president says we shouldn’t “get on our high horse” about it? He references the Crusades, a regular feature in ISIS propaganda? I suppose we can be grateful he didn’t call ISIS “folks.”

Mr. President, the Crusades took place 1,000 years ago. Better to cite Oliver Cromwell, who was slaughtering my Irish Catholic ancestors a mere 350 years ago. Or the French King Louis XV’s persecution of Protestant Huguenots a half century after that. Along with the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, the examples of these religiously motivated genocides persuaded Jefferson and Madison to build their famous wall between church and state.

Indeed, I shall vigorously applaud the first president who gives these prayer breakfasts a pass — assuming I live that long, which ain’t likely. Leave them to NASCAR drivers.

more at link

[Fumesucker]

1. Yeah, there were better examples and I'm sure Obama knows of them

But not very many Americans would be conversant with any of that while at least some reasonable number are aware of the Crusades, albeit only as a good thing.

[cbayer]

2. Agree that he had to use examples that your average citizen would

at least recognize.

Do not agree that most think the crusades were a good thing.

[Fumesucker]

3. Someone should have told the developers of the F8...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_F-8_Crusader




I mean I've never heard of a plane named Dunkirk or Waterloo...

[cbayer]

5. The word crusade has a general meaning not directly associated with

"The Crusades", even if that is where it originated.

I think if you asked most people about "The Crusades", they will think of brutal wars fought in the name of religion over land.

[Fumesucker]

7. As I said, Crusade has a positive meaning for most Americans

Even Dubya used it talking about the War On Terra..

I'm waiting for the General Dynamics F51 Pyrrhus myself, or maybe they could just rename the F35...

[cbayer]

8. But Obama spoke about "The Crusades", which referenced

a specific event. While the word may be embraced positively, I do not think the specific event is.

[Fumesucker]

9. It's kind of like Vietnam..

The general feeling is that if the peaceniks hadn't gotten all wimpy everything would have turned out fine in the end and the Holy Land would be in Christian hands today.

The only problem with the Crusades is that the Papal legate was too gentle and lenient at the sack of Béziers.

[cbayer]

10. Wow, that's not the general feeling in any community I have lived.

The general feeling in my experience is that the people stopped the war in Viet Nam.

I've never heard this argument made for the Crusades.

But then we already knew that you and I have lived in very, very different environments.

[Fred Sanders]

4. ISIS is to foreign terror as the KKK is to domestic terror. And it is real and it is present.

[cbayer]

6. I think his point was that terrorism is not the sole purview of Islam.

[Igel]

11. Christianity got into the warfare business only after the merger of church and state.

Even then, in most places as long as the state wasn't interested in more control and wasn't challenged by outside armies, it didn't do much genocide. Except the quiet genocide of cultural adaptation and infiltration, but that's happened for tens of thousands of years pretty much everywhere.

The problem with most discussions of the Crusades is this: They were a response, and an organized response. They were, in effect, a reverse jihad, a reverse Islamic Conquest, and they failed. (That their targets were a bit unrealistic certainly helped; that their cultural practices were different also didn't help--capitulation and submission is the name of the game for one side--quite literally, even if we typically don't translate the word--but for the other it was a reconquista, and those killed were already infidels.) Some of the Crusaders were religious; some weren't; but they all did largely the same things with different motivations. They were also seeking revenge for a lot of desecrations that had happened, often distorted by history and rumors. Even the communalist approach to violence and vengence wasn't natively as European as it was Middle Eastern, and that kind of a communalist approach to justice gradually diminished until fairly recent memory when it became a kind of landslide in the West. (It's still fairly common in the Middle East.)

Even with the Islamic Conquest, in most places as long as the populations capitulated the harsh imposition of Islamic rule wasn't brought to bear immediately. Just ruling the population was enough, but as Muslim rights needed to be respected, as the power of individual Muslims became more pervasive, then suddenly ghettos were more needed and the more onerous provisions of shari'a extended. Then, as long as the subjugated peoples remained subjugated, things weren't that bad; but if they got uppity, there were pogroms and the uppity folk were treated harshly. This might be governmental, as happened in the Balkans, or mob-based, as happened in Syria when Russia (those uppity Xians) dared to beat those who ought to have won a battle.

[cbayer]

12. I suddenly realize exactly how little I actually know about this event.

Thanks for the synopsis. Much appreciated.