Lying By Omission of Facts

The president’s declaration that Christians should get off their high horse should have been placed in historical perspective…but it wasn’t!

Heaven knows, a a Non-Believer it is not up to me to defend Christianity, but I am a Non-Believer, not Anti-Christian, so I’ll take a view more Christian than did the president.

The president surely knows that the Crusades were designed, at least in theory, to re-Conquer Jerusalem, the most sacred of Christian sites which had been seized by the Muslims. Certainly the Crusaders, at least some of them raped and pillaged on the way to recapture the “Holiest of Cities.”

Now exactly why the Crusaders wanted Jerusalem is not clear, since the Romans had reduced it to ruins in the First Century, but I look on the Crusades as sort of a Tulip Craze, and I lump Japan’s Attack on the U.S. IN 1941 in the same boat — sort of mass insanity that becomes even more contagious as it rolls.

Anyway, I put little blame on the Crusaders because they were of their time, and readers of this blog know that I am very much an anti-Presentism, Presentism being the belief that you can place todays morals and ethics upon people who never had those morals and ethics.

History is absolutely filled with wars, plots, poisoning, incest, rape, murder,,,in fact that is the way we study history…the French and Indian Wars, the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Civil War…

So the Crusades were history by men of their time, as was the Inquisition of the 15th Century, and US slavery, which had a history going back into pre-history.

To the credit of Christians, they have evolved. While they no longer rape and pillage in the name of their faith, no longer support slavery, no longer burn Heretics at the stake, ISIL does. Not only do they do 12th Century atrocities here, more than a Millennium later, they relish in their inability to conform to 21st Century norms.

Yes, Christians once did terrible things. Even our early generations treated Heretics, Witches, and Indians badly, but they too were of their day. The president made no attempt to place his remarks about Christians in their proper historical light. I suspect he did that purposely because he wants to bring his heritage — both his American and his Christian heritage down a peg or two, because he wants to normalize if not equalize everyone and everything.

It is not quite Socialism, but it moves in that direction.