Explain, please? However sincere ITR champion may be in his beliefs, he has offered a very disappointing argument that basically says, My group is tops and I can prove it by reciting a historical record that is rather removed from the facts. In structure (and adherence to facts) it sounds very much like a Creationist “debunking” of Evolutionary theory or very much like the sort of thing one would expect from the lady in Florida who wanted history classes to teach that “America is the best country, ever” and use only a simplified telling of the good points of U.S. history to be presented in class.
Do you have an example of my demonstrating ignorance in the context of the historical discussion in which I have engaged in this thread?
Protestantism is a branch of the tree, but I can’t imagine how anyone would not say that Catholicism (and the Orthodox Church) are the two trunks. I know some Protestants seem to claim that they were the real Christians all along and Catholics somehow split off from them.
"Thomas Kyd was arrested by the Privy Council as writer of the seditious notices. Kyd was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower of London when he implicated Marlowe who was branded an Atheist
A warrant was issued by the Church’s Star Chamber for the poet’s arrest on charges of heresy, which carried the death penalty."
Now, Tomndeb, if you want to split hairs until they scream like a heretic in the hands of the Inquisition, you can argue that the law was against heresy and not against atheism per se.
But my original comment was that 500 years ago, I would have been put to death for being an atheist.
Admittedly, I could also would have been put to death in the England of James I and VI for being a Catholic Priest who said mass. I believe the procedure was to hang them up in front of a cheering crowd and then before they were dead, to cut them down, cut out their entrails and show them to the dying man.
But my original comment was simply that I would have been put to death for being an atheist. I did not specify the particular legal nicities under which I would have been prosecuted.
To argue otherwise is like saying that Americans persecuted in the 1950s were not persecuted for being leftists and Communists, but for “unAmerican Activities”.
Sorry, Zoe, but that is not precisely the origin of the word “Protestant”. It was originally used in a very limited and *ad hoc * application at the Diet of Spires in 1529, at which Lutheran princes said they “protested and affirmed” in relation to a specific proposal. It would be like referring to a group at a conference as “the dissenting faction.” For some reason the name stuck and became a general description of a type of Christian. I doubt if the people drawing up the statement of protest realized it would become a permanent label for the Reformed Churches.
The information you see here also confirms what I have read in several different books about the Reformation.
Perhaps we’ll simply have to agree to disagree in this thread, since there appear to be gaps in our ways of thinking that just can’t be bridged. Voyager says that I have declared a few Viking raids to be worse than the Holocaust and the pogroms. His proof of this is a sentence I wrote that does not mention Viking raids or the Holocaust or pogroms or make any moral comparisons at all. Yet he has three times insisted that I owe him an apology because I said nothing about a topic that isn’t related to him. (My ancestors also fled Russia to escape the pogroms; do I owe an apology to myself?) I suppose this is yet another example of the famous atheist “rationality” that just isn’t comprehensible to irrational non-atheists.
That Christianity has outlasted most of its rivals is a historical fact. Historical facts cannot be insults. Those who would have it so obviously are looking for a means by which to avoid facing historical facts.
I like that ITR champion suggests he’s trying to stick solely to fact and historical accuracy… and then quotes only one example where he thinks there’s an emotional flaw and ignoring history, rather than, say, debating with tom on historical accuracy.
Somewhat like in the other thread, where he moaned that no athiest has ever actually got into Aquina’s five proofs…until one did, at which point he appears to have bowed out of the thread.
He’s opening arguments, then closing or ignoring them when he doesn’t like the truth. Not opinion - we’re all perfectly able to disagree with opinion - but actual fact and logic. Hmm.
You claimed that Christianity withstood greater challenges than any other religion, and gave as examples two cases where religion had nothing to do with the issue, and one where it might have. You also brought up internal squabbling as a challenge. While Europe did get attacked by Moslems, Islam got attacked by Europeans during the Crusades. We call call that one a draw. Most of Christianity was not affected by the Moslem attacks. However, I think it is safe to say that every Jew in Europe was affected by the attacks of Christians.
The bottom line is that your claim has not been demonstrated.
How were Viking raids any different from internecine warfare inside of Europe, among Christians?
BTW, both Hinduism and Judaism have outlasted Christianity, but I wouldn’t claim they were better.
Yes, a claim that Christianity has outlasted most of it’s rivals is not an insult. But that is not what posters are objecting to. It’s the claim that since Christianity is more “succesful” than other religions, it is therefore more likely to be the truth. That is insulting because Christians have perpetrated genocide on Jews, Aztecs, Native Americans, and others with non-Christian beliefs. This is like saying that OJ Simpson is more valid than Nicole Brown Simpson since he outlasted her.
I’m not even objecting to the claim of success. I think that both Christianity and Islam were successful because they were in competition with other religions who didn’t really care how many outsiders joined, and that they were both effective in gaiing recruits at the point of a sword. There was also some effective marketing involved.
I’m objecting to the claim of worth based on success against stresses and attacks that a) were not that bad, and didn’t have much to do with religion and b) were not nearly as bad as that suffered by other religions.
Look at LDS. Not only did they have to survive the death of their founder, they had to trek across very hostile terrain and thrive in the middle of the desert. Now that’s real stress.
However, it tends to detract from your message when one notes that the England of Elizabeth and James used the term “atheist” to indicate Roman Catholics as well as the “impious” and thoase who might actually not believe in a god. (The actual warrant against Morley indicated that he had denied the divinity of Jesus without actually specifying that he denied the existenceof God. This consideration of marlowe’s death by Peter Farey notes that the actual accusations of atheism:
So I would still be interested in seeing an actual law that specified that it was illegal to fail to believe that there was a god. (And while it is fun to point out that the words atheism and atheist have no recorded use in English 500 years ago–atheist is 430 years old and atheism is 420 years old–I would settle for some law in the range of 416 years ago (the time of Marlowe’s death) that actually made “atheism” a “capital crime” as you stated.
Will in the World the excellent biography of Willie the Shake, has an extensive section on Catholicism in England at the time, and another on the Tavern Poets, including Marlowe. Do you have a cite that the Jesuits who were sent to England (many of them exiles,) caught and executed were charged with atheism? Considering that at the time of Mary Catholicism was again made the state religion, I would find it odd that they could convince anyone that Papistry was any form of atheism. James’s mother was Catholic also, so I doubt he’d make that mistake either. Do you have any evidence that Marlowe was Catholic? My impression is that he came from a Protestant background - unlike Shakespeare. Marlowe was enough of an iconoclast that the charge of atheism seems at least plausible. And yes, it was 420 or so years ago, not 500. As the cite said, the charge was heresy, of which atheism was considered a variety. Or do you doubt that not believing in god would be considered heresy?
How and why Marlowe died is a big mystery - all we know is that it almost certainly wasn’t as shown in Shakespeare in Love. And whether or not you could have gotten off with just torture by recanting and converting is not an issue. I suspect Catholics could have escaped the gallows or the axe by doing the same thing. That does not mean that either atheism or Catholicism wasn’t a capital crime. Really, didn’t the nuns teach you this stuff? Elizabeth created a whole bevy of martyrs around this time.
I have no citation for a statement that I have not made.
My statement was that the word atheist was occasionally used when identifying persons who were either Catholic or “impious,” not that the word was ever used in law to indicate a crime–and certainly not used to identify Catholics as criminals.
Valteron posted the claim in another thread that atheism was a capital crime. He then claimed (changing his claim a bit) in this thread that he still knew it to be true. He then cited a Wikipedia article that I have demonstrated makes no such claim–particularly in terms of medieval or Renaissance Christian law.
I have challenged the claim that atheism, per se, was specifically illegal, although I am willing to accept evidence that I am mistaken. Nearly all the references to Marlowe’s “atheism” are in gossip or anecdotal testimony and do not actually cite any law that would be broken. It is in this context that it is interesting that some of the statements about Marlowe as an atheist show up contemporaneus with other statements that he was a papist. The Baines letter appears to be an attempt to sic the authorities on Marlowe, but it has neither corroborating testimony nor an explicit reference to a law against atheism attached to it and the warrant sworn out against Marlowe does not actually indicate atheism as a crime.
You have now twice pointed to what appears to be my ignorance of the persecution of Catholics in England. I’m really not sure what you are implying or why you bring this up. I am well aware of that persecution. I do not choose to make an issue of it, here, because I am not trying to set up any claims regarding who hurt whom most often. I am simply trying to find evidence of Valteron’s claim in the face of anachronism and a serious lack of solid evidence.
Have a cite about them being charged with atheism? Impiety I can believe, since they did not follow the head of the church in England. They were definitely charged with treason for that very reason. The reason I bring it up was to show that there were plenty of things Catholics were charged with, which are easily discoverable. Atheism, as far as I can tell, wasn’t one of them.
Would evidence that an atheist would be executed for heresy be sufficient for you, or are you going to hold out for being charged and executed directly for atheism? If the latter, I won’t bother looking for more cites. I can certainly believe that the number of people suicidal enough to announce that they were atheists was so small that a specific law was never enacted. It sounds like, and I might be wrong, that you somehow doubt that an avowed atheist would not be keeping company with his head for very long. True, or is this whole thing nitpicking?
My cite specifically stated that the crime was heresy, but the offense atheism. What Marlowe actually believed is irrelevant to his treatment as whether the inhabitants of Gitmo are actually terrorists. They’re still incarcerated. If he was a spy he might have gotten away with something others would not have.
Considering the number of heads on pikes by the entrances to London in Shakespeare’s day, I hardly see why you consider the death penalty for atheism (even if levied for heresy, say) is an extraordinary claim.
And I doubt that an atheist would last long in 1507 either, but I don’t have handy information about that.
to which I originally replied that such a person might be convicted of heresy, but that atheism was not defined as a crime. He then came back in this thread with his odd Wikipedia link. I am looking for something to support his claim that atheism, itself, was a crime. I am sure that various groups persecuted unbelievers of various kinds under a range of accusations.
Here is George Holyoake, the last person in England to be charged with atheism (1842,) No death penalty.
Here is a link from PBS Frontline from a professor who says Marley was killed because of his atheism. He was not tried because:
The article also mentions the concern that atheists and Catholics would team up - not that Catholics were called atheists. Here we have him accused of atheism, perhaps tried for blasphemous speech, but killed instead of being tried for fear his advocacy of atheism would be reported. (The evidence of Elizabeth ordering the assassination appears later in the article.) The desire to kill Marlowe seems to be more of a way to not give him a platform than a way of increasing the penalty, though that is far from certain.
Whether atheism was a crime per se is not clear. However, anyone practicing it, either explicity through speech or writing or implicitly by refusal to attend church, was guilty of associated crimes. In my first link it is mentioned as an explicit crime, though the author of the article is no longer around for further questioning.
Good heavens, no! I am envious of your grasp of history and of fine points of distinction.
Some of your commentary has jogged my memory of Sunday School classes that I had access to through the Anglican Church. Your comment gives SS a bad name not totally deserved.
The Dict of Spires was part of the protest that began when Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door a few years earlier. I wonder what the German word for “Protestant” is. At any rate, I agree with you that they probably weren’t aware that the name would stick. Thanks for the more specific information.
The trunk of the tree is “The Church.” If there are two trunks, we call it two trees. I’m talking about one tree.
The Church had Popes and Peter was the first. Eventually, the Church branched into two parts with Roman Catholicism continuing one way and the Orthodox Church continuing another. Both had existed from the beginning. They were two parts of a whole and both reasonably claimed to be part of “The Church” that had its roots in Peter. The same is true when Protestantism emerged. Both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants were two parts of the part that made up a whole. Protestantism was a continuing part of the whole that had its roots in Peter.
Even in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church, priests are ordained by someone whose own ordination leads back in succession to Peter.
In the small Cumberland Presbyterian denomination, they affirm that they believe in one catholic and apostolic church. They don’t exclude anyone from their communion table. They have every reason to believe that they too are part of the whole – part of the church universal.
You are much more likely to find that attitude in Protestant churches than you are exclusiveness.
