Look at the whole record, Fred

I’m a big fan of Fred Reed, but he’s wildly off on this one:

The history of Christianity has been one of murder, torture, and Stalinism, of witless intolerance of things not intolerable and an utter refusal to mind its own business. Look at the record. Look at almost any part of the record. The question is how to choose.

During the witch hunts of 1450-1700, god knows how many tens of thousands of women were tortured savagely and then burned alive, for the sin of having a wart. This demonstration of God’s love and Christian charity was perpetrated not just by Christians, but by the church.

Fred obviously didn’t actually look at the record. Witch burnings almost never involved the church. As with the Inquisition, scholars will no doubt reduce the number of witches burned by several orders of magnitude once they stop relying on the fiction of the following era and dig into the local documentation. As for Stalinism, that was the end result of a revolution primarily made up of secular Jews, as a perusal of the Bolshevik roster will confirm.

Then there was the Inquisition, run by that infamous Jew Thomasberger Torquemadastein. (For recent graduates of American universities, there wasn’t really a Jew by that name.) For centuries countless people screamed for days as their shoulders were torn from their sockets, before they were burned alive, in Jesus’ name, amen. This too was a church operation, supported by such as their Most Christian Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella.

Countless? It’s really not that hard to count to 5,000, which is the high end of the well-documented estimates for the 345 years of the Spanish Inquisition. Fred would do better to complain about the evil lethality of backyard swimming pools and children’s bicycles. Furthermore, torture never lasted for days, one session that could not shed blood, cause death or inflict injury was permitted. Fred is more than fifty years behind the secular historical consensus here.

I’m making a list of thousands of Christians tortured to death by Jews. Wait. I’m thinking….

Again, Fred might want to have a closer look at Soviet history and the birth names of individuals such as Leon Trotsky. And given how Grigori Naumovich Voitinsky is listed in the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, the comparison might be even less favorable to Jews than one would think, as Voitinsky founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1920.

Much of this churchly barbarism has had Jews as its target. Christians were always trying either to kill Jews or to convert them.

Actually, far more often, they were kicking them out of their kingdoms. And despite this incessant evil treatment, Jews were always quick to return, so either they were significantly less intelligent than science indicates them to be, or their treatment wasn’t so awful for the most part.

Blaming hatred on jealousy is a shallow and thoughtless argument. When people are uniformly hated by everyone, there is usually a good reason for it. Being a Christian, I believe that anti-semitism is at root a spiritual issue, the desire of the prince of this world to destroy God’s chosen people. And being a habitual observer, I note that a small minority which has historically made a habit of attempting to obtain governing influence over much larger majorities is not one which is ever likely to be well-regarded.

If one considers the growing number of Jews in the House and US Senate combined with the increasing number of immigrants from countries with no historical love for them, one will discern that the patterns of history suggest the United States may be heading for some anti-semitic ugliness a few decades hence.