"The crimes of Christianity"

The two standard lines of attack against the Bible come from science and higher criticism.

These, in turn, boil down to the possibility of miracles. If you don’t believe in the miraculous, then you don’t believe in divine inspiration or revelation or any event which would “violate” the “laws” of nature.

However, it’s a tall order to make a case against the possibility of the miraculous.

So the final line of attack consists in a stereotypical litany of charges against the track-record of the church.

This, in turn, has driven the effort to secularize the state and disestablish the church.

And that effort has been quite successful, but with ironic consequences.

There are different ways of addressing this charge.

1.According to Christian theology, Christians are sinners. So documenting the fact that Christians may be guilty of sinful conduct is a confirmation rather than disconfirmation of Christian theology.

2.The unbeliever also faces the challenge of coming up with a moral framework of his own. Many secular thinkers admit that atheism has no foundation for moral absolutes.

But, in that event, they are in no position to indict the church.

3.Another response is to point out that many of the paradigm-examples of ecclesiastical malfeasance are largely urban legends. A member of the CADRE has done a very illuminating series on that subject.

http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2005/04/many-crimes-of-christianity-refuted.html

4.Finally, I want to go back to the “solution.”

The argument against the church was more persuasive back in the days of Voltaire and Thomas Paine.

After all, the church was often a pretty venal place.

Mind you, that’s really not the fault of the church.

If Louis XIV or Henry VIII wants to make some ne’re-do-well nephew the bishop of York or Amiens, who’s going to stop him?

He has an army. Interdicts are no match for swords and canon balls.

The church was often the consolation prize for second-born sons of the nobility.

Since they weren’t first in line to inherit the crown or the paternal estate, a plum, ecclesiastical preferment was a nice way of buying off a potential political rival.

Likewise, these were the days of a state religion, in which more-or-less everyone was a baptized member of the church.

But the process of secularization has had an unintended consequence.

On the one hand, it hasn’t done away with atrocities of one kind or another. Indeed, they’ve been on the rise.

On the other hand, by driving the Christians from the public square, the privatization of faith has had the effect of separating the sheep from the goats.

Not entirely, of course, but to a far great degree than was possible in the past.

And it’s not the Christians committing the mass atrocities.

With the benefit of hindsight, this raises the retrospective question of who was most responsible for past atrocities.

If, when you succeed in segregating the believers from the unbelievers; and if, when you succeed in empowering unbelievers while disempowering believers, the atrocities not only continue, but escalate (e.g. Maoism, Nazism, Stalinism, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia), then the logical inference to draw from this historical experiment is that it was the closet infidels in a society without church/state separation who were primarily responsible for past atrocities.

So the very success of modern-day secularism undercuts the original premise of modern-day secularism.