Monday 9 February 2015

Obama's Take on History

1) In Answer to Mr. Obama's question from a long time ago, 2) Obama's Take on History

We already knew he had a collectivist view of schools.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well.

Obama said that even though religion is a source for good around the world, there will always be people willing to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.”

“Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”


He summed up a certain ideology. Note he did not say - unless misquoted - that under Crusades and Inquisition [some] have committed terrible deeds, but that people committed, which will be taken as people who managed the affairs were each time or so committing terrible deeds. Is this true?

Before bringing up Crusades, what about asking whether they were agressive or retaliative wars?

As to Inquisition, the English one was the worst - and it was not in the name of Papacy, but in the name of the English Parliament, decision from 1401. It continued past the Reformation. Bloody Mary was not acting on behalf of either Pope or husband King Philip - but on behalf of that law. James I (as he was in England), who was not a Catholic, applied it in 1611 or 1612 against a Baptist who was burnt on the stake. At a time when Inquisition had no point any longer either as to Orthodoxy nor as to hope of retaining religious unity in England.

As to "slavery and Jim Crow", I think at least Jim Crow laws were from a XIXth C. already very secularised in the élite - in fact an élite the secularism of which he continues himself. Slavery was starting - under less bad initial premises - under Cromwell, notoriously an Anti-Catholic, notoriously one of the believers in Foxe's Book or Martyrs which attacks Inquisition and Catholicism over and over again.

And if you shift perspective from slaves exploited for labour to Amer-Indians treated worse than slaves, or Esquimeaux, take a look at Canada and at pretty secularised United Church of Canada. Catholics were off the really guilty decisions there.

As to continued slavery, it is ditinct from slave hunt and slave trade. Pope Gregory XVI condemned these latter, Pope Pius IX said there were some real cases for someone being slave - meaning apart from personal crime, or from voluntary self sale, the case when one is already a slave and is not being either mutilated or seduced to sin by one's master. That is why he supported Confederacy. It was, as you may know, no longer involved in slave trade.

And in Africa, slave hunt was being perpetrated by several small peoples against each other, so that at least sometimes the ones who were captured and partly sold to Europeans had been guilty of the crime of slave hunt first. Even if Kunta Kinte was not such a case, he was simply a victim of inter-African slave hunt.

As to the consecutive history of his family, some misadventures, as I recall, would under Spanish, i e under fully Catholic, rule have implied the master would have been legally forced to free the slave.

At least this was the theory of the Spanish legislation and barring episodes of secularism, it was even applied.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
St Cyril of Alexandria
9-II-2015

Breitbart : Obama At National Prayer Breakfast: ’People Committed Terrible Deeds In The Name of Christ’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/05/obama-at-national-prayer-breakfast-people-committed-terrible-deeds-in-the-name-of-christ/

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