Christianity, Islam, Oriental religions... whatever. All have been barriers to cultural and intellectual growth. Splitting hairs over which-reigned-when is like arguing over which is better for your car: the carburetor going bad, or the radiator breaking down?

Man's intellectual and social evolution has taken place despite the various dominances of these religions, certainly not because of them. Their sway over humanity has been at best an arbitrary concurrence to the rise of civilization; at worst an actual hindrance to it.

All of them -- Christianity, Islam, etc. -- evoke and promote the most primitive parts of human consciousness. They cater to emotion, not reason. They are "The Jerry Springer Show" with solemn stained-glass windows and unnatural physical postures like kneeling or crouching on the ground with your butt in the air.

The problem is that religion snags people at their most impressionable moments: as children, in most cases, or in the darkness of adult despondence, when we seek to escape reality. For most of the world through history, religion is injected into our consciousness as kids. That's a familiar comfort that's quite difficult to later relinquish.

It's too bad; almost depressingly so. Because we'd be a lot further along at this point if the fairy tales -- those myths invented back when humans didn't have real answers to the world around them -- hadn't kept getting passed down generation to generation.

Having:

"Because we'd be a lot further along at this point if the fairy tales -- those myths invented back when humans didn't have real answers to the world around them -- hadn't kept getting passed down generation to generation"

And just where exactly do you think we would be? A few details about nirvana, please.

Auntie Islam?

Delicious!

Peter

I wouldn't bother, if I were you. It's like talking to the Tar Baby: you can't make the least impression on mindsets of that ilk, whack at them as you may.

We'd be "further along?" Towards what? Is there a divinely demarcated line of progress we should be following? Who made it? Why is it there?

Man, these crazy religious nuts like Halibut worry me.

It's those damn occidentalists.

Larval stage Ayn Randism.. give him time.

Well, Halibut has a legitimate point about the ADMINISTRATION of religion - Which is why the Mormons and Baptists are less repressive than the Vatican is capable of being.
The latter are decentralized, while the former have no professional priests.

Absent the sarcasm, and the entirely speculative last paragraph, he seems pretty much spot on.

Index Prohibitum, anyone? (apologies for any misspelling)

Jeff:

Your spelling is great. It's your logic that is way off.

The Texas Mercury is great. A high standard of writing, stuff you'll read no where else (who even knew that people cared so much whether Southern culture was more Celtic than Anglo, or vice versa) and a useful reminder of how far left Brothers Judd Blog really is.

A seriously lame article. Copold claims, along with Karen Armstrong, that Islam insists on near-equal distribution of property, which is not true. He misunderstands the purpose of Bernard Lewis's book, which is to explore the cultural collision between Islam and the West and the panic felt by Muslims when the consider how badly the West outpaces them; Lewis was not trying to explain how the Muslim Golden Age ended. Copold makes huge generalization about the nature of Islam and the influence Al-Ghazali without backing them up. He concludes that Bernard Lewis simply isn't in error, but is either "an extremely sloppy thinker" or a coward incapable of "sqaurely confronting the danger". He finally concludes that the world is caught up in a civilizational war, which isn't really true; it's the Muslim world that's caught up in war, a civil war between extreme reactionaries like Osama bin Laden and their present governments.

A crappy article, long on extreme rhetoric ("Dr. Lewis' position is absolutely inexcusable"), short on thought.

Mr. Herdegen;

Islam is even more decentralized (there is no central authority at all) yet that hasn't prevented the almost uniform oppression of Islamic regimes.

AOG:

And, if any Christian church was also the government, the West would also be oppressed.

Which, after all, was basically Having's point.

Galileo and Copernicus, for two, would not have disagreed with the assertion that the dead hand of theocratic conformism impeded intellectual growth.

True, but it was European monasteries after all that kept classical knowledge and learning alive in the West.

Wouldn't have been much opportunity for intellectual growth without them.

Galileo and Copernicus have had their effect on western science. One can only imagine what would have happened had the Church really wanted them stopped. The western tradition has roots tracebale through the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the Rennaisance,the age of discovery, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the American Republic. Only one characteristic is constant and common to all eras and that is the Judeo/Christian tradition.

To speculate on the progress delayed because of Christianity, in light of the wonders produced by applied materialism/rationalism is pure presumption made more grotesque by its ignorance.

Tom:

That is a bit harsh. To speculate on the progress delayed by theocratic obscurantism is really just that: speculation.

Absent the Reformation, where do you think we would be?

Speaking speculatively, of course.

If Islam was dark, why would it follow that Christianity was less dark? Why couldn't both be dark?

As both were.

It is a fact that the Catholic Church pronounced on every facet of the natural world and was wrong every time. That must have had retarded progress at least somewhat.

The Dark Ages were dark enough to suit me. We don't throw suspect witches in water to see if they float any more. If the suspect drowned, she was innocent. Claiming light during the Dark Ages requires an adamantine resistance to history.

Well Harry, that is interesting. It wasn't just witches they dunked--they did it to everyone. It was called trial by ordeal and was based upon divine intervention as a method of proof. There were fun variations with fire and boiling water too.

Being more religious than legal ceremonies, they required priests in attendance to consecrate this and that, etc. In 1215, the Church abruptly refused to participate anymore on the basis that the whole ceremony was pagan, unreliable, unnatural, sacreligious and contrary to conscience. Thus the modern notions of trials began by necessity. I believe those beloved secularists of yours were very disappointed and resistant--conservative toadies one and all.

Another example: Jurisdiction in medieval times was personal--the church courts over some matters and the kings' over others. But the church had full jursidiction over everything with respect to priests and church officials. In the vying for authority that went on in that age, the concept was extended to include minor church officials, then the guys that cleaned the toilets, etc, and finally everyone who could read. It was called benefit of clergy, which had nothing to do with marriage, and was bitterly resented and opposed by kings (that's what Becket was largely about).

A close study of medieval legal records will show that benefit of clergy was a highly-valued status claimed by many. There are no records I am aware of of anyone resisting it or preferring the king's jurisdiction. I wonder why. Maybe it had something to do with savagery, torture and death. The church was on the humanistic, progressive and even compassionate side, trying to drag society from dark to light. Sanctuary is another example.

The other day you made a trenchant, wise comment about sweeping generalizations. Heal thyself, physician.

Harry:

They were witches.

Jeff-

That is the point. The West was capapble of what we call the reformation. Applied materialism/rationalism does not reform, it dies once the damage has been done and it meets the kind of resistance that eventually ended Marxist/Leninism and national Socialism. How many millions did those two versions of rationalist/materialism take along with them to the grave?

Tom:

But if only their rational theories had been applied a little more purely they'd have worked....

oj-

Interesting speculation. If only we could put the right folks in power. Listening to Halibut, Jeff, Harry and others, it seems we could find quite a few who would like to try, at least one more time.

Tom:

Unfortunately, there's always a next time.

Tom, OJ:

Every time you think to link the word "rationalism" and, say, Communism together in the same sentence, think "Lysenko."

Then try and use them in the same sentence again. You can't do it, because those two concepts don't track.

Universalist, salvationist ideologies are never rational. The bar to that designation is a bit higher than "on account of they said so."

Jeff-

How about eugenics or materialism or racialism or classism, feminism, free-love, socialism, dialectical materialism, radical egalitarianism, gramscism,keynesism....I could go on and on. But they are all rationalistic projects born out of an earlier century's love affair with science and its ability to free man from the superstions of earlier times and create the perfect world through the rigorous use of his "reason" alone. Just like Stalin's infatuuation with Lysenko's idiocy. Reason is all well and good if we acknowledge the weaknesses inherent in it being a characteristic of fallible and potentially foolish human beings.

Lysenkoism was wrong, not irrational.

Tom, OJ:

Next time you think to throw the word "rationalism" and, say, communism together in the same sentence, think "Lysenko."

Then try again. Rationalism and communism don't belong together, because the two concepts simply don't track. As they don't track for any other universalist, salvationist, belief system.

The bar to earn the "rational" merit badge is far higher than "on account of they said so."

Jeff-

Huh?

Jeff:

How did you do that more than an hour apart? Is that a chain letter?

How anyone could look at Chartres Cathedral and believe that the people who built it had nothing going for them intellectually, technologically, or economically is beyond me.

Peter:

Something weird. If I jump to the next window prior to the first posting completing, it doesn't show up for a long time. I had this happen last week.

This time I waited, well, an hour before retransmitting.

OJ

Of course Lysenko was wrong. That Communism insisted on its primacy is all the evidence one needs that communism and rationalism (two words: results count) don't mix.

Tom:

The qualities of rationalism make a fairly short list, and are easy to discern. Self-identification is not one of those qualities. E.g., Christian Scientist.

Wrong, but not irrational.

Carl:

William Buckley once wrote of a Russian aristocrat who fled the Bolshevic revolution penniless, and ended up in Paris. Although well-educated, he took a job as the bus driver on the regular Paris-Chartres run so he could gaze at the magnificance every day of his life. As I recall, Buckley asked rhetorically: "Where does one find such men?"

Peter, please read "English Constitutional History" by S.B. Chrimes on the issue of preferring the king's justice.

The drowned ones were not witches, Orrin. But they were stil dead.

And, despite what Peter may think, such tests had nothing to do with trial by ordeal, which was another branch of law, and were not abandoned by the church in 1215 nor for many more centuries.

The other day, I was challenged on the origin of our laws. I stated that most of our punishments came from the German, not the Judeo-Christian concept.

I forget now who claimed that fines were common in the OT. Not according to "Smith's Bible Dictionary," which has no entries for fine or mulct.

Harry:

For crying out loud, what straight lines are you trying to draw? Do you remember the early Christians in Rome under Constantine imposing trial by ordeal or throwing witches into the local pond? Do you remember them even talking about witches? Those was clearly pagan rites and pagan concepts, accommodated by the converting and weak Church in the Dark Ages, but rejected by it when society became more stable in the Middle Ages. Honestly, Harry, who are you trying to blame here?

You know you can pick and poke, but perhaps you can tell us what should have happened when Rome fell if only that darned Church hadn't grabbed all that theocratic power.

Harry, don't tell me to read Chimes. And don't give me any drivel about how witchcraft was somehow divorced from every other aspect of medieval religious/legal history. Boy, the U of Michigan feminists have really got to you! Tell me what he said and give me a reference.

OJ:

How rational?

Chrimes said justice is treated by consumers as a commodity, and when they have a choice, they go where they get the best deal. In England, that was the king's justiciars.

H.C. Lea, "Trial by Ordeal," covers the legal concepts involved.

The superstition that a water would reject a witch had nothing to do with the German concept of trial by ordeal. Nothing.

Now, you tell me the moral difference between the Church's treatment of witchcraft -- if you are accused, you will be murdered, whether you are guilty or not -- and Stalin's treatment of those denounced.

If you are going to stake a claim to superior morality, try to make it at least superior to Stalin. That's a low threshhold.

Harry:

How about they were superior to us, with our abortions for the entirely innocent, never mind Stalin, though you'd think scale might matter a little in these cases.

I wasn't aware the correctness of a given morality was dependent upon scale.

Each incident of pitching "witches" into rivers was every bit as evil as each incident of Stalinist denunciation.

In invoking their superiority, you conveniently forget their routine exposure of neonates.

A witch equals the Katyn massacre or the Doctors plot? So presumably an OJ is the moral equivalent of Hitler? That seems a tad rough, but I admire your moral absolutism.

How many murders do you have to commit before you're a murderer?

One.

The problem with the Church is that it endorsed an insane "morality" under which anyone accused was killed. And did this over and over for centuries.

It apparently never occurred to the giant brains in the Church that a system that required the innocent to drown to prove their innocence might have had a few holes in it.

This, in itself, disqualified the Church for all time from giving moral advice. That was true before Stalin was born and would have been true even if he had never been born.

I asked what was the moral difference between the two. You cannot say.

QED

What Harry said.

OJ:

You completely avoided my point.

Fun tidbits:

The heretic is always willing to remain in communion with the orthodox, and 99% of the time an observer unfamiliar with both sides can identify which is which by that fact alone.

Definition of excommunication: You can't eat dinner with me anymore

-----------

OJ: You're taking presuppositional apologetics too far. (Of course, you're not defending; you're attacking, which I actually enjoy quite a bit-- you do it with great wit and insight). The purpose isn't to beat atheists about the head and shoulders with how insufficient their "hollow and deceptive philosophies" are; it's simply to prove that they can't get here from there, which has been done, over and over and over, here, as long as I've read the comments.

A MUCH neglected Christian doctrine (even more so than predestination) is that of common grace. Harry and Jeff are inimitably good at recognizing common grace in the world about them, in peoples Christian and non-Christian alike. Acknowledge that more often.

Which was what?

The moral difference is the Church fell prey to superstituition in a few cases. Stalin knew exactly what he was doing.

Superstition, fear of the unknown, fear of power in general - all of these have afflicted every human organization (not just the church - sorry, Harry). Not all these organizations murder in response to such impulses, but many do.

But Stalin took all of these fears and embodied them, indeed exemplified them to the Russian people. He was the man of steel, he was Koba, he was the gentle peasant standing up for Russia, etc. But, as has been said, he knew exactly what he was doing (as did Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and all the rest of the lot). The church (Popes and other 'leaders') has been guilty of being human as well - so what?

The comments of those who summarily dismiss Christianity for not being perfect somehow resonate with hope and admiration for totally human systems/idealogies which have been much more destructive of individual life.

A conundrum indeed.

Harry

http://www.admin.northpark.edu/dkoeller/Classics/Sources/germaniclaw.html

Sorry, that was me. Harry, it appears Prof. Chrimes is a minor, secondary source academic whose specialty is the fourteenth century, several hundred years after the time of which we are speaking. The idea that medieval men "chose" their system of justice like shoppers in a market is charming, but unhistorical. One of incidents of feudalism was submission to the courts of the lord to whom one had sworn fealty. There were kings and church courts, but also baron's courts and other local courts. Not to submit was to break the oath of fealty, which had serious consequences to say the least. Just ask Robin Hood.

Justice as a commodity sounds suspiciously like the thinking of a modern materialist, so the anti-church animus isn't surprising. The idea that medieval English common law courts were the popular choice is absurd. Not only does that ignore benefit of clergy, it doesn't explain the rise of the courts of equity in the sixteenth century in response to desperate petitions to the king to do something to temper the severity and injustice of the common law.

And, BTW, who were the king's justiciars? Do you mean judges?

Jeff:

Sure, the Church has a long history of promoting the esposure of neonates.

Where do you come up with this stuff? You defend abortion on the basis that it is natural in some way or unobjectionable because you think people in days gone by exposed unwanted children. Then you turn around and express anguished horror at the practice and try absurdly to pin it on the Church. So, tell us, would you have been for or against the right of our ancestors to exercise their freedom of personal choice by exposing their children?

(P.S. I don't think The Golden Rule is going to help you much here.)

Peter:

My comment is in reference to OJ's assertion that "they," as in the people of the middle-ages in general, not the Church--were morally superior to us, with abortions being the evidence.

That is an ahistorical claim. They routinely exposed neonates, a fact which must be taken into account when making such a claim about the people of the time. I hope it is clear now that nothing I said had anything to do with the Church, or its teachings.

Similarly, you badly misread my position on abortion. I have never defended it any way, or excused it based on past practices. Rather, my position is simply based on acknowledging that there is nothing even remotely approaching societal consensus on the issue, and, therefore, the government doesn't belong in the decision. I freely acknowledge abortions will be the result; however, I find that price less bad than having people put in the position of negotiating with the government over the most intimate parts of their lives.

You may disagree with me on my assessment of relative costs. That is fine. But construing that argument as defending abortion is simply wrong.

Answer to your question: the neonate is a separate entity, no longer organically part of the mother, and is capable of separate existence. Therefore, I consider exposure to be murder.

Jim:

I trust you are referring to Harry and me.

My point, and I believe Harry's too, is the morality brush OJ uses to tar the deeds of 20th Century tyrants is an equal opportunity brush and had better be used accordingly.

Jeff:

YOU may consider exposure to have been murder, but don't you have to show there was a societal consensus to that effect in order to be consistent with your position on abortion today? I'm not sure you would have got it, which is why they had the much less serious crime of infanticide.

Surely our argument isn't about which crowd of hoi polloi was more moral--the modern or medieval. I think the point we are addressing is yours and Harry's assertion that the church was a tyrannical, theocratic oppressor of the common folk and that history just got steadily better ever since it was beaten back.

Peter:

So are you refusing to admit that roving gangs of priests used to expose babies by the millions in order to fulfill Christian doctrine? Poor credulous soul...

Orrin:

Shush! They haven't discovered that yet.

Jeff:

Not just you and Harry, but practically all of us. We all need to be consistent (as consistent as we can be).

One of the best things about this site is that the debate is clearer than the name-calling you find elsewhere. The continuity is much better as well. But the endless insistence on 'results' leaves me a little puzzled. Results are always going to be subjective, because only something transcendent would be totally objective. Even Mother Teresa had her critics (as foolish as they are).

But at some point, the heart of the matter has to matter. Christianity has a corpus whereby those who stray can be exposed and challenged. I do not think that modern political thought does - whether you are talking pragmatism or totalitarianism. Islam certainly does not - it is a rickety structure of angry conformity, which is why it is sidelined politically. Those of us who defend the 'religious' point of view do not ignore the sins of the church - we understand that they are bound to happen. But the foundation remains. I do not believe anyone could say the same about modern philosophical & political experience.

Jim:

Very well said and a very important point. A good example is the issue we debate here a lot--the role of Christianity in the Holocaust. The actions of the Church in several eastern European countries were shameful and impossible to discount as an aberration or negligence or even cowardice, but some of those same countries (esp. Poland) counted the most "righteous gentiles" who saved Jews and were in many cases inspired to such incredibly dangerous and heroic actions by their faith. Although it is possible to imagine a Nazi saving Jews or a Bolshevik saving landlords, it is not possible to imagine them so doing as an expression of a purer form of Nazism or communism.

I think our secular friends may see that as just a form of cheating or having it both ways, but it is not, as you point out.

Peter:

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0311/articles/rhonheimer.html

and the Nazis murdered one third of Poland's Catholic clergy.

Jim:

In theory, you are correct.

In practice, where the results are, your correctness is far less apparent.

Pick any significant moral issue of any time over the last two-thousand years, and you will find Christian sects taking strong positions on both sides.

To wit: slavery, miscegenation, justifiable war, abortion, homosexuality, the role of women in society or the clergy, to name just a few.

Who defines straying, who does the challenging?

Peter:

I didn't make the original assertion, OJ did.

Your point is spot-on, but that isn't the question you asked (or the way I interpreted it, since it mixed past tenst--"would you have"--with present--"ancestors." I took the present tense.

The church has often been oppressive; and before the Reformation, brutally so far more often than its advocates like to admit. I need not be an apologist for 20th century tyrannies to note there are few ways crueler to kill someone than burning at the stake. And, from my vantage point, few reasons more loathsome than doing so because of competing narratives unverifiable--except by force--in this world.

Jeff:

To the contrary. I've repeatedly said that I approve of those burnings and don't feel they need to be justified any further. Societies are entitled to treat those who diverge from the norm quite ruthlessly. The problem with Stalinism or Nazism isn't that they killed a bunch of people but that they did so to no good cause.

Jeff:

I'm not sure how far I would follow Orrin along that route, but c'mon. Of course numbers matter. To equate Joan of Arc with the Holocaust is obscene. To equate thousands of burnings of heretics over five hundred years with the gulag and Ukraine famine over thirty is too. Whatever was done in medieval times by whomever (and a lot of it was not the Church) it doesn't compare in its comprehensiveness, emotional detachment, methodical purpose, unwavering certainty, intentional lying, scientific cruelty and detachment from any sane concept of guilt or responsibility or of any fathomable notion of threat or danger, no matter how misguided. Bloodlust and terror of witches is not the same think as genocide.

If you keep up this line of argument you are going to find yourself squeezed into the European line on Iraq.

On the question of disposing of babies, John Boswell has an excellent study. In Classical times, there were parallel and opposite customs. So people are not consistent? Go figure.

Anyway, babies were exposed, but there was an elaborate system for foundlings, as well. The medieval Christian practice was essentially the Classical. No great surprise there.

Jeff states my position exactly -- morality is.

Just because I excoriate the crimes of the Church does not mean I simultaneously embrace the crimes of others (Communists, say) who also excoriate the Church. I'm an American. I like American ideals.

I detest Communism, but I'm glad the Russian Communists were there to beat Hitler for me.

Orrin remarks that the Germans murdered a third of the Polish priests. True. But not a third -- indeed, hardly any -- German priests.

As for the assertion that Stalin knew what he was doing and the Church didn't, I find that an odd way to praise an organization that claims to be the Teacher of Mankind.

In fact, if you read, eg, Hammer of Witches, you will find that the Church knew exactly what it was doing.

Chrimes may be a specialist in the 14th c., but his book covers all of English constitutional history. The argument regarding justice as a commodity is developed in his book (it was a text for the Open University) in the context of Henry I, so exactly the time frame you selected.

Henry's circuit-riders were known at the time as justiciars. The struggle over jurisdiction among the courts of King's Bench, the baronial and manorial courts and the ecclesiastical courts went on until the 17th century -- into the 20th in the cases of questions of personal status.

This is England only, of course. The development of legal systems was different in other places.

Harry:

What's wrong with persecuting witches?

Peter:

Never mind comparing Medieval Times to Stalin--compare them to the United States, which as: slaughtered the natives, enslaved blacks, fought an internecine war over that slavery, oppressed the "freed" blacks, fought fascists and communists because we disliked their political systems, collected Japanese-Americans so they'd be on hand if we were losing, ushered in an era of murdering the powerless--sick, unborn, etc., and had capital punishment for all but a few years of that time. Everybody claims for their own time the right to determine who is intolerable--the Medievals were mild even by comparison to us.

Does morality exist independent of humanity? If not, then is it determinitive with respect to life and death (instead of being totally arbitrary)? If so, then how are we doing? Not well, I would guess.

If religion becomes (or acts) immoral - by its own standards, by the standards of 'other' religions, even by the standards of enlightened secular humanism - then why bother to attack it as religion? Call it what it is - immorality.

I would never claim that the church didn't know what it was doing when it persecuted, harassed, and murdered. People always react in a limited number of ways when threatened - and all organized religion does as well. Circle the wagons, root out the dissenters, and so on. But that only proves that the church is human, not anything else. The Grand Inquisitor certainly knew what he was doing, and he accused God himself.

Even if there's nothing wrong with persecuting witches, there ought to be something wrong with persecuting people who are not witches.

I will agree with everything you just said, jim, but you prove my point: religion (and the Church as a particular case) has no more standing to preach morality than anybody else. Therefore, we don't need it, do we?

Peter:

The morality of an act is indepedent of the number of times it occurs. Evil is as evil does.

The repeated assertion here is that "rationalist" (scare quotes due to the repeated violence to the word here at BroJudd Industries) are uniquely evil. The allied assertion is that religion is a bulwark against that kind of evil

Well, evil they certainly were. Unique they were not.

The common thread is appealing to universalist argument from authority. God is no barrier to the kind of evil that sort of certainty spawns.

OJ:

Everything.

You accuse us poor areligionists of being completely unable to come up with a coherent morality.

Yet according to you, persecution borne largely of mysogyny is ok. And suicide (from a recent thread) is OK just as long as enough religious conviction underlies it.

You need to clean your finger before pointing out someone else's spots.

Jim:

Full points.

They didn't know witches wouldn't float.

Harry/Jeff:

The point isn't the morality of the killing but of the society you end up with once the heretics are killed. Christendom and the Us are preferable after the killing to the USSR/Nazi Germany, etc.

Jeff:

"The morality of an act is indepedent of the number of times it occurs. Evil is as evil does":

So, why was the US justified in Iraq? Killed people, no? And knowingly and with foresight.

Peter:

You are aware of (Justinian's?) elucidation of "Just War?"

You are religious. So is Pope John Paul. And you both come out on decidedly different sides of this issue.

In Desert Storm I killed people, knowingly and with foresight.

One of you two is mistaken, and according to one of you two I am evil.

The morality of my acts does not depend on how often I did them. And it appears that religion is not particularly useful in making that determination.

Jeff:

He opposed the war. He didn't say it was unjust. He was right.

OJ:

It sounds like you are splitting hairs to me. He actively opposed the war in such a way that he could hardly have believed it just.

In any event, my assertion is true: Pope John Paul, you and Peter came out strongly on both sides of this one, and undoubtedly used moral reasons to do so.

It's not splitting hairs at all--American participation in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War was not merely mistake but resulted in needless loss of life and enormous economic retardation, which has obvious moral implications, but does not make the wars unjust or immoral. Ends often justify means.

Desert Storm is an even easier case--by going into the war intent on leaving a vile dictator in power and with no other end but preserving our oil supply, which he in no way threatened, we obviously made a mistake. But it's never unjust to attack such a dictator and liberate even such a problematic society as Kuwait's.

OJ:

You made my point precisely. You and Peter agree that Desert Storm and invading Iraq were just wars. And you use morality to reach that conclusion.

The Pope reached the opposite conclusion in both those cases. And he used morality to get to that conclusion.

Hence my assertion that religiously based morality is capable of far less than you suppose.

BTW--our participation in Desert Storm was absolutely not intent on leaving him in power. Clearly, we hoped the result of the war--in the absence of invasion--would cause him to lose power. A mistaken hope, certainly. But just as certainly we did not go in to that war intent on leaving Saddam in power.

Jeff:

The Pope did not conclude the war was unjust or immoral--he said it was wrong.

You don't call that hair splitting?

Jeff:

You do know the difference between something that's a mistake and something that's immoral don't you?

Yes. But what I remember from his opposition, particularly to the invasion of Iraq, it went much farther than "mistake."

Besides--on what basis did he rest his position?

The Pope is amazingly consistent in his opposition to the taking of human life--abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, war, etc.--even where such things conflict with the explicit scriptural teachings.