RESPONSE:
By Bruce N. Shortt, J.D., Ph.D.
The internet is used to spread information and disinformation alike, and certainly, one of the groups that has embraced the internet as a means of using disinformation as a means of creating a "useful narrative" is the secular humanists. This post is a museum quality example of a drive-by smear that mixes some facts with falsehoods, distortions, and a lack of context to promote a blood libel against Christianity.
The difficulty in responding to this sort of thing – which is common among the internet secular humanist crowd – is the same as the task of cleaning a carpet after a vandal has thrown ink on it; the vandalism takes but a moment, but cleaning up after it is a very lengthy undertaking.
In this case, we are dealing with a crude, disjointed effort at defamation that on its face probably strikes most readers as suspect. Nevertheless, responding to all of the factual errors, correcting all of the distortions, and providing all of the missing context would be a massive and pointless undertaking. The author plainly has no interest in getting to the truth. Catholics would call this form of spiritual disorder "invincible ignorance".
Consequently, rather than try to respond to every snippet included in this odd exercise in cutting and pasting, I will limit myself to a discussion of a couple of the post's particular claims to illustrate its grotesque intellectual irresponsibility by considering the posts claims about Charlemagne and Hypatia. Much of the rest involves either muddle or insinuation. So, rather than try to impose order on the muddles or an interpretation on the insinuations, I'll just briefly discuss the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Nazi regime to illustrate further why this post can scarcely be taken seriously.
We start with Charlemagne and the beheaded Saxons.
CHARLEMAGNE
1. One of the advantages to claiming that Charlemagne had 4,500 Saxons beheaded because they wouldn't convert is that very few people today have even heard of Charlemagne, let alone know anything at all about this very important historical figure. This particular smear, however, combines outright falsehood with a thorough lack of context.
The Saxons of the 8th Century were not the phlegmatic, German engineers and craftsmen of today. Rather, they were a people who delighted in incessant warfare, human sacrifice, and ritual cannibalism. One of their principal forms of entertainment in the late 8th and early 9th Centuries was raiding Charlemagne's eastern territories.
Naturally, Charlemagne's subjects objected to having their towns and farms burned, their men, women, and children killed (and, in some instances, carried off to be sacrificed and eaten), and their property stolen. As their liege lord, Charlemagne had a legal and moral obligation to defend his subjects. Therefore, he conducted 18 military campaigns against various Saxon bands over the course of 32 years.
Now, the falsehood that Charlemagne had 4,500 Saxons beheaded because they wouldn't convert arises out of events that began around 777 A.D. At that time, a Saxon named Wittekind (alternately, "Widukind") roused a very large number of the then-pacified Saxons to resume their campaigns of murder, rapine, theft, and abduction against Charlemagne's people. This resulted in Charlemagne again returning to Saxony and militarily crushing Wittekind's forces. Wittekind, however, escaped and fled to Denmark.
In 782 A.D., or shortly thereafter, Wittekind returned to Saxony, mocked and humiliated the Saxon nobles who had submitted to Charlemagne and who were now living peacefully with their Frank neighbors, and fomented a general Saxon rising. Back across the Rhine went Wittekind with his thugs, which is said to have included armed Saxon women, to resume the grand sport of killing, raping, and eating Franks. In this instance, however, Wittekind made of a point of burning village churches and torturing and killing nuns and priests.
And, in response, back came Charlemagne, who, as he passed through the areas visited by Wittekind's Saxons, saw yet again the destruction wrought by the Saxons, including, in village after village, burned churches and the savagely mutilated corpses of nuns and priests. Across the Rhine went Charlemagne in pursuit of the Saxon killers, but, as was so often the case with Saxon raiders, Wittekind and his followers disappeared into the forest.
Charlemagne, not being a sensitive New-Age kind of guy, explained to the Saxon nobles that if they wanted peace, THEY would identify and arrest Wittekind and his gang of merry murderers. The Saxon nobles complied, although Wittekind again escaped. Subsequently, the members of Wittekind's band who had been caught were beheaded.
Although the number hardly matters, you should be aware that chroniclers from this period didn't share our present-day concern with numerical precision. "4,500" undoubtedly was used to indicate a large number. It might have been 5,500 or 2,500 or some other number. In any event, it was quite a few. If you now feel moved to shed tears for the Saxon murderers who were beheaded at the direction of that mean old Christian king, Charlemagne, feel free. As for myself, I think it is a pity that the Saxon nobles didn't catch them all.
I should mention that in one of history's ironies, within two years following the foregoing events, Wittekind surrendered himself to Charlemagne and converted. Charlemagne, for his part, pardoned Wittekind.
The larger point, however, is that Charlemagne, through imposing Christian cultural standards, did substantially advance civilizing the Saxons, and he deserves much of the credit for the fact that Saxons today build Mercedes and Audis and eat sausage instead of eating Frenchmen.
For those who are interested in Charlemagne, warts and all, Derek Wilson's Charlemagne is a good place to start.
HYPATIA
2. Very little is actually known about Hypatia, but feminists and secular humanists have created a cottage industry of inventing "narratives" to advance their ideology by portraying her as a great mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, who was martyred by a Christian mob because she was a pagan.
Unfortuantely, if you look at feminist "biographies" of Hypatia you will find the liberal use of words like "probably" to describe her achievements because none are recorded. Not a single theorem, novel philosophical doctrine, or scientific discovery can reliably be attributed to Hypatia (feminists try to explain this profound lack of any record of her alleged achievements by saying that all of her works were destroyed when the library at Alexandria was burned.).
The only written works that she is believed to be associated with, however, were those of her father, a well-known mathematician. Whether she collaborated with her father in some of his works is completely unknown. Nevertheless, because her father was a well-known teacher of mathematics and other subjects, the claims that she was intelligent, well educated, and a gifted teacher are quite plausible.
Now, what of Hypatia's alleged martyrdom because she was a pagan? Hypatia, the feminists notwithstanding, was not a major figure, so there is relatively little material about her life and death.
The most reliable sources indicate, however, that she fell victim to a political dispute. At the time of Hypatia's death, Hypatia, rightly or wrongly (no one knows), was seen to be involved in a political disagreement between the Imperial Prefect and the Patriarch Cyril. The population of Alexandria was eager to have the dispute ended, but Hypatia was believed, through her relationship with the Prefect, to be actively impeding a reconciliation. This ultimately led to her murder by a mob believed to have been led by the Parabolani, an order of male nurses.
There is no evidence that the Patriarch was in any way involved in the murder of Hypatia or that her paganism figured in her death. To reiterate, to the extent that anything can be known about the matter, it appears that the reasons for her death had to do with a political dispute and her relationship with the Imperial Prefect.
INQUISITION
3. Which brings us to that secular humanist oldie-but-goodie: "The Inquisition". What today's secular humanists have seized upon here is – sorry to say – a great deal of Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda that was later appropriated and embellished by Enlightenment secularist humanists. Rather than provide a coherent argument regarding the Inquisition, the poster simply casts upon the water several disjointed, alleged facts about the Inquisition, evidently in the hope that they will evoke the usual, widely held exaggerated beliefs about its evils.
For anyone who is interested in the actual history of the Inquisition, the two best scholarly works are Henry Kamen's The Inquisition (Yale Unversity Press) and Edward Peters' Inquisition (University of California Press).
Although Kamen, for example, provides a wealth of detail about the Inquisition, one of his principal points is that the popular understanding of the Inquisition is at bottom a by-product of the political disputes of the times: "From its very inception, the Inquisition in Spain provoked a war of words. To its opponents through the ages contributed to building up a powerful legend about its intentions and malign achievements. Their propaganda was so successful that even today it is difficult to separate fact from fiction….The printing-press, one of the most powerful weapons taken up by the Reformation, was used against the tribunal….Wherever Catholicism triumphed, they claimed, not only religious but civil liberty was extinguished. The Reformation, according to this interpretation, brought about the liberation of the human spirit from the fetters of darkness and superstition. Propaganda along these lines proved to be strikingly effective in the context of the political conflicts of the period…"
Peters makes a similar point in his scholarly study: "There was never, except in polemic and fiction, 'The Inquisition', a single all-powerful, horrific tribunal, whose agents worked everywhere to thwart religious truth, intellectual freedom, and political liberty. That is 'The Inquisition' of folklore, martyrology artwork, and post-Enlightenment fiction."
Of course, the point these and other scholars make is not that the Inquisition committed no wrongs, but rather that there is little actual understanding of the motives and actions of the Inquisition and that its wrongs have been greatly exaggerated. To put things in perspective, it would be interesting to compare the number of persons put to death over the 400 years or so of the Spanish Inquisition with the number of babies murdered annually by abortion mills, say, in Chicago. You might be surprised.
BNS

Bruce N. Shortt, J.D., Ph.D., is a practicing attorney in the Houston area. He is a committed home educator and member of Exodus Mandate. He is also chairman of the board and unofficial historian of VBM, Inc.