Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, Please Tell the Truth about Friedrich Spee

Friedrich Spee by Martin Mendgen Source

Dr. Steven Pinker

Dr. Michael Shermer

Penguin Books

Henry Holt and Company

Gentlemen:

I'm writing to request that you retract what appears to be false material published in both the 2011 Penguin Book Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Dr. Steven Pinker and the 2015 Henry Holt and Company book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by Dr. Michael Shermer. I request that you remove this material from any future editions of both books, and that you insert accurate material.

Both books repeat an unsourced anecdote that misrepresents Father Friedrich Spee, one of the first and most influential opponents of the witch craze that seized Europe during the Early Modern Period. This misrepresentation of a long dead priest matters for several reasons.

Friedrich Spee was a human rights hero and pioneer. He risked his life for others.

Spee is a figure of historical importance. Understanding him is key to understanding the witch craze, a significant period in Western history.

Spee's work is highly significant today. His biographers consider Spee to be among the first influential authors to work out an argument against the use of torture to obtain confessions. Spee "ranks among the most important authors of his time." His work "was one of the first sustained, detailed attacks…against the witch trials and use of torture" (Modras 27).

Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer self-identify as representational of atheist reason and truth, as opposed to the alleged obscurantism of persons of faith. That both gentlemen have disseminated unsourced material from a non-scholarly book undermines their self-identification.

Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer self-identify as representing a new and improved, science-and-reason-inspired path toward better lives for all humankind. Father Friedrich Spee should be assessed as an ally, and celebrated, by those interested in human rights. He should not be denigrated and slandered with the use of spurious material and unscholarly methodology.

Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer repeat Charles Mackay's anecdote about Friedrich Spee in their books. As Mackay would have us believe, a humanitarian secular leader, the Duke of Brunswick, "shocked" by the witch craze, which, presumably, is being carried out by Catholic clerics, summons Father Friedrich Spee. The Duke demonstrates to Spee that torture does not work in the extraction of confessions. Brunswick does this by torturing an accused witch into implicating Spee in witchcraft. Spee has an Aha moment and puts an end to the witch craze. Dr. Pinker uses this anecdote to prove that the "Age of Reason" and a "scientific spirit" ended the witch craze. Dr. Pinker places the witch craze in the Middle Ages, as does Dr. Shermer. Dr. Shermer uses the same anecdote to "prove" the same point.

The anecdote is almost certainly false.

I wrote to Dr. Pinker and he was kind enough to reply. He acknowledged that he found the anecdote in a book that cited Charles MacKay's 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Charles MacKay was a Scottish journalist, not a scholar. Delusions is not a serious history of the witch craze. It was written in a popular and sensationalistic style. I found no footnote for the anecdote in my copy of Mackay's book. The reference librarians at the Cheng Library found no footnote for Mackay's anecdote in their copy of Delusions.

Dr. Ronald Modras, author of a biographical sketch of Spee that appeared in a scholarly journal, and author of several other works on Jesuits and Catholic history, wrote to tell me that he has read at least eight works on Friedrich Spee and that none of them mention Mackay's Duke of Brunswick anecdote.

I find no mention of Spee, witches, or torture in one online biography of the Duke of Brunswick (here).

At the height of the witch craze, Friedrich Spee risked his life in writing an anti-witch craze book, Cautio Criminalis. There is no evidence in Cautio Criminalis that it was inspired by any shallow trick of any Duke. Rather, as Modras writes, "The Cautio is not a calmly argued essay on jurisprudence. It is a shrill cry to stop a travesty of justice" (Modras 29).

Cautio Criminalis was inspired by Spee's experience. "I myself have accompanied several women to their deaths in various places over the preceding years whose innocence even now I am so sure of that there could never be any effort and diligence too great that I would not undertake it in order to reveal this truth…One can easily guess what feelings were in my soul when I was present at such miserable deaths."

Cautio Criminalis' argument against the witch craze is not the argument Doctors Pinker and Shermer want it to be. Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer repeat what has since been proven false: that increasing scientific thought ended the witch craze.

In fact Spee does not use a scientific disbelief in witches to support his case against the witch craze. Modras argues that Spee is like a modern-day opponent of the death penalty. Realizing that banning the death penalty outright might be unattainable, death-penalty opponents focus on issues like the high cost of death penalty cases, and the lower cost of life in prison.

Spee's concession to popular belief notwithstanding, his insights about what causes witch crazes are in alignment with contemporary scholarship.

"It all begins with superstition, envy, and calumnies. Something goes amiss, and people clamor for an inquisition. All the divine punishments described in the Bible now come from witches. God and nature are no longer responsible for any mishap; witches do it all" (Modras 32, summarizing Cautio Criminalis).

That a Roman Catholic priest writing in the height of the witch craze offered insights that mirrors the most modern scholarship contradicts the notion that people needed to evolve into, or be tutored by, atheists, or scientists, or twenty-first century moderns.

Spee briefly concedes what his readers probably cannot be disabused of – that witches exist – but then Spee argues that guilt cannot be adequately ascertained, and torture is too cruel and unjust.

Spee uses the tools of his Catholic faith to make his point to his audience. Spee uses traditional Jesuit argumentation style and Biblical citations. He cites the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Just as a farmer allows weeds to grow with wheat, and separates one from the other at harvest, God allows sinners to live out their lives (Matthew 13). Just so accused witches should be allowed to live, Spee argues, in order that people might avoid the serious crime of killing innocents. In risking his life to save others and to cleanse the soul of his church and his wider society, Spee was following the example of his Lord, Jesus Christ.

Spee's traditional, Catholic, Jesuit argumentation style, his graphic descriptions of the cruelty and irrationality of torture, and his Biblical references worked.

Where and when Spee's book was translated and read by leaders, the witch craze ended.

The pattern of Spee's impact was repeated throughout Europe. It wasn't science that ended the witch craze.

I asked prominent witch craze scholar Brian P. Levack, "What ended the witch craze?"

On February 21, 2015, Levack wrote to me, "I address this question at length in the third edition of my book, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, and at great length in my essay on the decline and end of witch-hunting in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: the Eighteenth Century. This is a complicated issue, but my main argument is that the trials did not end because judicial authorities stopped believing in witchcraft but because they began to realize that the crime could not be proved at law."

In his other writings, Spee showed his special concern for women. He wrote a devotional book directed specifically at women's spiritual development. He used feminine metaphors for God. He was a brave and self-sacrificing man who entered primitive hospitals, malodorous, foul places he described in his writing. He died at the young age of 44 of an infection contracted while ministering to the sick.

Nowhere in the factual biography of Father Friedrich Spee does one encounter the silly anecdote deployed by both Doctors Pinker and Shermer to prove that ignorant Catholics required compassionate secular leaders to end the witch craze.

The old-fashioned, popular understanding of the witch craze runs something like this: In the Middle Ages or Dark Ages, the obscurantist, misogynist, all-male and omnipotent Catholic Church murdered millions of innocent, Goddess-worshipping wise women. Then the Enlightenment came along, people rejected religion -- especially Catholicism -- suddenly became very smart and scientific and atheistic, and stopped the witch craze.

Scholars have completely debunked everything about this narrative. The witch craze took place not, as Doctors Pinker and Shermer would have it, during the "Dark" or Middle Ages, but during the Early Modern Period.

In the real Middle Ages, the Catholic Church repeatedly rejected the concept of witchcraft. Societal stresses like the breakup of the Catholic Church during the Reformation, the Little Ice Age, and changes in the prices of basic goods and traditional patterns of almsgiving contributed to witch crazes.

The Inquisition actually sometimes suppressed local witch crazes. See, for example, Alonso de Salazar Frías, the witch's advocate, who was himself a Spanish Inquisitor, and who worked to stop the witch craze in his region. The demand for trials often came from below, from common people, rather than from church or secular leaders, and from women. Envy and petty malice was often the spark. Men as well as women were victimized.

In a metaphorical sense, witch crazes have never ended. During the Reign of Terror, devotees of the Enlightenment, dedicated to atheism and reason, managed to rack up a death toll in one year comparable to the entire number of witch craze victims over the course of three hundred years of trials.

We fool ourselves, and we squander an opportunity to learn how to be better people, when we rewrite the witch craze as something done by people wholly other who lived in a past we have overcome.

We benefit ourselves, and the cause of righteousness, if we recognize that the witch craze was carried out by people exactly like us.

We inspire ourselves to better things when we learn of lives like that of Father Friedrich Spee, what inspired him and what he accomplished.

Doctors Pinker and Shermer, please retract the unsourced and unscholarly anecdote you have disseminated and please change any subsequent editions of your books to reflect the true history, motivations, and impact of Father Friedrich Spee.

Thank you.

Danusha V. Goska, PhD. 

All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church by Christopher J. Kellerman, SJ. Book Review

 

All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church
Sometimes the best defense of Western Civilization is a thorough confession

When I was a kid, Western Civilization seemed as eternal as the ancient granite hills threading through my hometown. Christian churches were packed on Sunday. Even forms as minor and ephemeral as jokes and song lyrics assumed, in the hearer, proficiency in a cultural heritage from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare to NASA. You couldn't understand Cole Porter or Johnny Carson without having been baptized into this heritage. The day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and no one sat that out or even made rude comments or eye-rolls. Classroom walls featured silhouette profiles of Washington and Lincoln.

That everything had changed hit me hardest when I was teaching. I might casually allude to a line I assumed everyone knew, like, "In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Or, I might use a phrase like "ex nihilo," or "fiat lux." And I would be met with complete incomprehension. The Vietnam War. Nothing. The Greek Miracle. Blank stares. Normandy Beach. Huh?

Killing the Witches: Book Review

Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard

This book is just about a perfect read

St. Martin's Press released Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts on September 26, 2023. The book is 291 pages long, inclusive of an index. My copy has, strangely, no table of contents, and, unfortunately, no bibliography or endnotes. Killing the Witches is the thirteenth book in the "killing" series. The cover describes O'Reilly as the author of eighteen #1 bestsellers.

I never watched O'Reilly's Fox TV show. I'm a woman and a Catholic, and there are controversies in his career that trouble me. I mention my own feelings here because I want anyone who isn't an O'Reilly fan to know – I loved this book. It was pretty close to a perfect read. I wish there were more books like it. If you are at all interested in the Salem witch trials and their echoes, including down to the twenty-first century, and you want a reader-friendly account, buy the book right now. The rest of this review will encourage you to do just that.

Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts is a misleading title. The first 144 pages directly address the Salem witch trials. Pages 145-231 address colonial America, the Revolution, and the new United States, with a focus on the biography of Ben Franklin. In this portion of the book, the authors discuss how various Founding Fathers felt about the question of freedom of religion, and how the legacy of the Salem witch trials influenced their worldview. Pages 232-263 recount the alleged 1949 demonic possession and exorcism of 13-year-old Ronald Hunkeler of Cottage City, Maryland, and also William Peter Blatty's 1971 book The Exorcist, and the 1973 William Freidkin film of the same name. A three-page "Author's Note" relates witch hunts to contemporary cancel culture. A six-page "Afterword" describes Salem, the tourist destination, today. A six-age "Postscript" describes the final days of Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and John Adams.

All of this has been covered in other books. What makes Killing stand out? The book's style. Killing could be read by an intelligent eighth grader. The vocabulary is basic. There are no attempts at deathless eloquence. There is no attempt to manipulate the facts to support some overarching pet theory. There's minimal editorializing. The authors allow the facts to rattle, provoke, and horrify the reader; the authors don't tell the reader how to feel or how to interpret the facts. You could read this book on a train or in the smallest room in the house. These are not put-downs; they are compliments.

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium: Scholars and seekers explore new research

 

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium

Scholars and seekers explore new research

I recently had the great good fortune to attend the SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium in Florissant, roughly twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. This conference was held between July 30 and August 3, 2025 on the 284 acres of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. The campus includes lush woods, prairie restoration, walking paths to the Missouri River, and a two-story glass-walled dining room offering treetop views. Conference papers were presented by forty-nine speakers from at least seven nations with degrees from a variety of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, law, history, theology, medicine, mathematical modeling, crime lab analysis, and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.

The Shroud of Turin is an approximately fourteen-feet by three-feet piece of linen cloth that bears an image of a man crucified as Jesus was, as described in the Gospels. Image features include puncture wounds on the head, where a crown of thorns might have penetrated the scalp, a side wound consistent with the size and shape of a Roman lance, beard-plucking, facial injury, and scourge marks. Some believe that the Shroud of Turin served as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Others insist that the Shroud is a reprehensible hoax. Controversy surrounds the Shroud, often described as the single most studied artifact in history.

Bearing False Witness: Prize-winning Historian Rodney Stark Takes on Anti-Catholic Prejudice

Source

Even If You Are Not Catholic, To Understand Today's Culture Wars, You Must Understand Catholic History

Even non-Catholics will benefit from Rodney Stark's 2016 Templeton Press book Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History.  

This edifice, Western Civilization, of which you are both participant and beneficiary, has been under assault by cultural leaders for decades – see, for example, Keith Windschuttle's 2002 "The Cultural War on Western Civilization." Professors have been teaching students that horrors such as the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust are the only products that Western Civilization has to offer. In 1991, Lee Bass donated twenty million dollars to Yale to teach Western Civilization. "Yale teachers regularly bash the West and traditional American values and also ridicule and harass students who disagree," students reported. Bass protested; Yale returned his money, and was willing to sabotage a potential further grant of five hundred million dollars.

Cultural Relativism is dogma. To say that one culture is superior to another is to sin and invite punishment. Given how horrible The West is, other choices on the civilizational menu are presented as tastier and more nutritious. Alternatives include Communism, Islam, and multiculturalism. On May 6, 2016, Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard, declared that "The culture wars are over; they lost, we won." Tushnet wants liberals to "take a hard line" and treat conservatives, people with traditional understandings of gender, and persons of faith in the same manner that the victorious Allies treated defeated Nazis.  

Let's just throw out the past and start at year zero. The problem is, of course, that "clean slate" types, from French Revolutionaries to the Khmer Rouge, inevitably end up murdering large portions of their populations.

One cannot understand the West without understanding Catholicism, its oldest institution. One cannot understand hatred of the West without understanding anti-Catholicism. Read Rodney Stark's new book to discover your own true history – the history Yale would not teach you – the history that at least one Harvard prof might reduce to scorched earth – and to plot your own best future.

Counter-jihadis will benefit from Stark's book. Throughout jihad's history, in response to external threat, non-Muslims have turned on each other, inadvertently helping jihad. In 1937, another target misunderstood the enormity of his enemy because of his focus on anti-Catholic animus. Sigmund Freud was urged to flee Vienna to escape the inevitable Anschluss. He replied that he didn't fear Nazis; his "real enemy" was the "Roman Catholic Church." In a similar vein, superstar atheist Richard Dawkins says that "the Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world."

Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton deflected attention from jihad by dangling the bright shiny object of the Catholic boogeyman – ISIS is not that bad, nor was 9-11, because "the Crusades!" This diversion of attention occurs at all levels of society. In 2013, Nigeria's Boko Haram destroyed fifty Catholic churches. Some internet posters were not sympathetic. Rather than discuss how to address Boko Haram, posters denounced Catholicism as Satanic, citing age-old anti-Catholic material including the 1563 Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Similarly, on April 11, 2016, Jihad Watch reader Hugh quoted Luther and called Catholicism "the wretched devil," another poster wrote, "Muslim tolerance is not very distinct from the Catholic tolerance shown by the Spanish Inquisition."  

In their anti-Catholicism, liberal atheists nod in agreement with Protestant right-wingers. Christopher Hitchens smeared Mother Teresa; on May 15, 2016, a Baptist minister posted his "impression" of Mother Teresa screaming in Hell. A liberal blog referred to Catholicism as "mumbled incantations in front of a large statue of a mostly naked European bloke nailed to Roman torture implement and an act of ritual cannibalism." After The Guardian published an atheist protesting anti-Catholic rhetoric, the site was flooded – with anti-Catholic rhetoric. Samples: "F - - - the pope," "superstition and strange muttered incantations," The Catholic Church "does not truly allow for development, criticism, fallibility." As one poster put it, "thirty minutes and already all the comments entirely validate the point of the article."

Rodney Stark is a best-selling and prize-winning author. Bearing False Witness would make a fine beach book. His prose is rapid, authoritative, and utterly clear. Stark earned a Berkeley PhD. He is the author of thirty-eight books. He can pirouette from a sweeping summary of many centuries' arc to the intimate details of private moments that take place in hushed, anonymous corners and vivify remote eras. Stark is fearless; he quotes material, such as Peter Schafer's controversial work on the Talmud, that others might fear citing.

In recent years, many authors have chipped away at anti-Catholic myths. Henry Kamen published The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision in 1997. Scholars like Lyndal Roper have overturned every popular assumption about the who, what, when, where and why of the witch craze. After John Cornwell published the shoddy Hitler's Pope, Rabbi David G. Dalin published The Myth of Hitler's Pope. Indeed Rodney Stark himself has published previous rebuttals to anti-Western propaganda, including his 2010 book, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.

Professional historians have been saying among themselves for years that there actually never were any Dark Ages, and that the entire concept was invented to bash the Catholic Church. Bogus Dark Ages historiography has its own Wikipedia page. Historians' shop talk has not yet filtered down to the masses. Just the other day one of my Protestant Facebook friends mentioned her homeschooling lesson passing on to her student and son the Dark Ages / Age of Reason dichotomy.

The Big Lie dies hard even among PhDs. In their recent, well-received books, The Moral Arc and The Better Angels of Our Nature Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker repeat as true a foundationless anecdote about German priest Friedrich Spee. These atheist authors depict Spee as a Catholic nincompoop who requires tutoring by a secular leader. In historical fact, Spee, in the scrum of mob insanity, risked his own life by publishing Cautio Criminalis, an argument against witch trials. His book helped to end these trials.

Even if you've read other recent scholarly books addressing anti-Catholic myths, Bearing False Witness is worthy. It condenses and efficiently organizes a vast battery of material on a broad scope of topics. Debaters will not only want to buy this book, they are going to want to hand it to their opponents and say, "Do yourself a favor. Shut up and read this."

Stark is not Catholic. He was raised Lutheran, went through a period of agnosticism, and, in a 2007 interview, he described himself as an "independent Christian." He reports, "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history." The book makes no attempt to convert the reader.

After Protestantism broke from Catholicism in the sixteenth century, Protestants busily began cranking out lurid fantasies of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch trials. Protestants generated inaccurate accounts for the same reason that all identity groups demonize their other of choice. In the language of scholar Henri Tajfel, Protestants were maximizing positive distinctiveness. That is, to make membership in Protestantism more appealing, Protestants depict Catholic identity as utterly repugnant. Alas, Protestant propaganda plays into the hands of those who would smear all Christians, all Westerners, and indeed all people of faith as sadistic, irrational, triumphalist bigots.  

Anti-Catholic propaganda is hardwired into our neurons. We unthinkingly parrot the metaphors "witch hunt" and "inquisition." We are much less likely to turn to the French Revolution's "reign of terror" for our metaphor, though that anti-religious exercise killed about as many people in one year as died during the two hundred years of witch trials. We rarely resort to "show trial," though the Soviet government killed perhaps a million of its own citizens during just two years of the Great Purge.

Stark takes on ten mythologized topics: anti-Semitism, suppressed Gospels, persecution of Pagans, the Dark Ages, Crusades, the Inquisition, the development of science, slavery, authoritarianism, and modernity.

Stark grounds every assertion in peer-reviewed scholarship by the biggest names in their fields. Each chapter includes mini-biographies of these key scholars. He provides a bibliography of hundreds of books and articles, a good percentage published by university presses.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum refers to anti-Semitism with the conventional moniker of a "two thousand year hatred" – thus equating it with Christianity. Stark points out that those who insist that anti-Semitism has been temporally and geographically coterminous with Christianity can easily be proven wrong. Anti-Jewish persecutions predate Christianity, and Christians for many centuries were a minority sect without the power to persecute anyone. Christians in America today do wield power and show little interest in persecuting Jews. Western Christians did not murderously persecute Jews in any historically significant way until the eleventh century when "the conflict with Islam boiled over …" this "changed perceptions of religious threats." When anti-Jewish violence broke out, popes condemned it and bishops and knights protected Jews. In short, anti-Semitism is not essential to Christianity; rather, it is a phenomenon dependent on external factors.

In recent years theologians like Elaine Pagels have championed Gnostic Gospels and argued that the early Catholic Church learned to be violently oppressive of dissent by practicing on the Gnostics. No, Stark writes. The Gnostic Gospels were nothing more than marginal and "ludicrous." They died a natural death.

Similarly, Catholics are meant to have practiced their totalitarianism by viciously stamping out Classical Paganism. In fact, the switch from Paganism to Catholicism was gradual and blurry. As Stark puts it, "not even Saint Augustine could convince his flock that bountiful crops and good health" should not be "subcontracted to pagan gods." In Iceland, Helgi the Lean "believed in Christ, but invoked Thor in matters of seafaring." On the other hand, Pagans were willing publicly and gruesomely to torture Christians to death, even after Constantine accepted Christianity. A Pagan emperor forbade Christians from taking part in the education of the children of the elite. He'd be right at home today at elite colleges, where Christians are underrepresented among both faculty and students.

"The standard account of the Spanish Inquisition is mostly a pack of lies, invented and spread by English and Dutch propagandists in the sixteenth century during their wars with Spain and repeated ever after by the malicious or misled historians." Stark backs up this assertion with university press scholarship. One of the wilder facts: the Spanish Inquisition, in the person of Alonso de Salazar Frías, aka the Witch's Advocate, put a brake on the witch craze in Spain.

"No Catholic Church, No Scientific Method" is the title of a 2011 Scott Locklin article. Stark would agree. Stark grounds the scientific method in the Catholic approach to God and to knowledge, and contrasts both to those found in other belief systems such as Islam and Confucianism. Stark walks the reader through the development of scientific inquiry. He lists the most prominent figures. Many were not only devout Christians; many were clergy. "Just as there were no Dark Ages, there was no Scientific Revolution." Again, these are fighting words. Stark has the scholarly muscle to hit them home.

The Atlantic Slave Trade is a very tough topic; Stark discusses it with sang froid. He uses hard statistics to argue that, as hideous as slavery was, overall, slaves fared better in Catholic areas than in Protestant ones, and they were more likely eventually to be freed. Popes repeatedly condemned slavery, and it was their lack of temporal power, not their lack of conscience, that prevented their condemnations to result in an earlier end to the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Stark chides historians for not paying adequate attention to efforts by Jesuits to empower Native Americans to stand their ground against the Spanish and Portuguese colonial onslaught. Jesuits gave their life to this decades-long effort and achieved quite a lot. Surprisingly, Stark does not mention the 1986 film The Mission.

Very big names have condemned the Catholic Church as authoritarian. Reinhold Niebuhr said that the Catholic Church could not be part of a free society. John Dewey condemned the Church as a "reactionary world organization." Sidney Hook called the Church "the oldest and greatest totalitarian movement in history." Stark quotes Bernard Lewis' observation that separation of church and state "is, in a profound sense, Christian." Stark writes, "the Church made it possible to examine the basis of worldly power and the interplay of rights and rule." That's a pretty major accomplishment, one many societies, where religion and state are intertwined, could not make.

Max Weber attributed capitalism's success to Protestantism. Stark says that Weber is "obviously wrong." Stark traces the development of capitalism back through medieval times, to monasteries. He quotes Thomas Aquinas on the morality of pricing food sold in a famine zone.

Bearing False Witness does not whitewash Catholicism. With the same cool courage he displays with all controversial material, Stark acknowledges that some Jesuits did own slaves; some mobs did massacre Jews; some popes did father bastards. How, then, for two thousand years, has Catholicism produced priests willing to risk martyrdom in their attempts to empower the wretched of the earth, eloquent popes who articulated the evils of slavery, anti-Semitism, racism, and Nazism, women who transcended what society wanted women to accomplish? How did Catholicism nurture the intellectual life that gave the world the triumphs of Western science? Stark never strays from his laser focus. He does not attempt to answer this question. I will so attempt: because Catholicism is founded on the unique truth of an omnipotent and loving God who created all humanity and cares about the fate of each individual person, and who adjures us to love each other as He loves us, it was able to overcome the inevitable rot found in any human institution, and keep alive the spark ignited when Abraham first heard and obeyed the command to "Go!"

There are a few things I wish Stark had done differently. I wish his chapter on anti-Semitism had mentioned Edna Bonacich, as well as more recent work by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. Stark writes, "popular comedians no longer tell scurrilous jokes about priests or the pope, nor do many Protestant preachers still thunder on about the sins of the Vatican." Alas, Bill Maher has made a career of denigrating Catholicism (as documented by the Catholic League) and plenty of Protestants disseminate anti-Catholic propaganda. Chick Publications, which Stark does not mention, is going strong. In spite of a few small quibbles, this book has my highest endorsement, for everyone from Catholics to atheists who appreciate brave truth-telling on important topics.

Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete

This review appears on Front Page Magazine here. Be sure to read the comments under the article. 

Witch Craze Fact or Fiction? How Much of The Fake Witch Narrative Do You Think is True?

 

The Witch Craze: Fact or Fiction?
 
How Much of The Fake Witch Narrative Do You Think is True?
 

"From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!"

 

So runs a traditional prayer. This time of year, though, we swing the door open wide. We wear costumes, watch movies, and visit haunted houses populated by nightmares we normally shove under the bed. The queen of our revels is the witch. A long-nosed old woman in a conical hat, riding on a broom and accompanied by a black cat, the witch is a staple from Walmart displays to documentary films.

 

We all know her story. During the Middle Ages, the misogynist Catholic Church burned nine million women because they were practitioners of a peaceful, universal, goddess-worshipping religion that had existed since the Stone Age. The woman-hating Judeo-Christian tradition and bloodthirsty Western Civilization drove this Pagan religion underground. With the coming of the Enlightenment and the primacy of science over faith, the witch hunt stopped.  

 

The National Film Board of Canada documentary "The Burning Times" recounts this history. Dan Brown tells this very tale in "The DaVinci Code." You can read it on page 105 here. Neo-Pagans cling to this narrative because it provides a patina of ancient authenticity to their beliefs. Atheists recite it because it proves that religious people are violent, dangerous lunatics, and that it is only by rejecting religion that man can be moral. Some Protestants support it because it makes the Catholic Church look bad. Nowadays, our Woke superiors are grateful for the timeworn witch narrative. The Woke hope to replace Western Civilization with their Utopia. Europe's persecution of witches is just one of a litany of Western crimes, including the Inquisition and the Crusades, that prove how irredeemable the wicked West is.

 

Here's a fact that's even spookier than ghoulies and ghosties. Not a single element of the above-told witch narrative is true. Even scarier: because humanity hasn't faced up to the witch craze, we haven't learned the necessary harsh lessons, and we are all too likely to repeat the witch craze's demented destruction. In fact we may be all too close to that reenactment right now.

 

Tolerance: Islam v Christianity.

Slave Market. Jean Leon Gerome

This essay appears at Jihadwatch here

"Islam Was More Tolerant Than Christianity": Discuss

I received an email from "Stan," who wrote to respond to my article "Donald Trump and Counter-Jihad." Through Google I discovered that Stan is an Ivy-League-educated PhD. "Counter-jihadists," Stan wrote, "deny that Islam was indeed more tolerant from the end of the 11th century down to the 17th." Catholic Church teaching during that period "was far worse than dhimmitude … Jews and Christians could practice their religions … [There were] few forced conversions or massacres." Catholic Spain expelled Jews who fled to Muslim territory. I would recognize these facts, Stan kindly advised me, "If you pick up a history book." "No historian would consult with Robert Spencer," as I do, Stan sniffed. Stan listed sixteen books addressing Christian anti-Semitism. If I had any "interest in the subject" I would read them. Stan mentioned the 1209-1229 Catholic Crusade against Albigensians. "Would you rather have been an Albigensian in southern France or in Constantinople?" Please note: my article about Donald Trump never mentions Jews, Catholics, or Albigensians.

Counter-jihadis regularly confront variations of this: "Any intolerance that Islam shows today is the result of historical forces. Violence and intolerance are not inherent in Islam. Terrorism is caused by European colonialism, the recognition of the state of Israel, America's support for dictators, and American wars-for-oil. In the past, Christianity was a violent, intolerant religion. The passage of time reformed Christianity; in the same way the passage of time will reform Islam."

How can a counter-jihadi respond?  

• Differentiate between behaviors inspired by temporary historical circumstance and behavior inspired by canonical documents.
• Recognize that most conventionally educated Westerners believe extravagant falsehoods and aren't aware of important truths. 
• Be aware of events outside of Western Europe and North America. 

Differentiate between behaviors inspired by temporary historical circumstance and behavior inspired by canonical documents.

Scholars who describe medieval, Muslim Spain as relatively better for Jews than medieval, Christian Europe acknowledge that differences were inspired by temporary historical circumstance and not canonical scripture. Given that medieval socioeconomic conditions no longer exist, but canonical scriptures are still considered divine revelations, we should not expect medieval Muslim tolerance of Jews, or medieval Christian persecution of Jews, to recur. We should, rather, look to canonical scripture as inspiration for behavior.

Mohammed was an Arab, living in Arabia, among Arab Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Mohammed is al-Insan al-Kamil, the perfect human, worthy of emulation. Hostility to Jews is overt in the Koran, the hadith, and the biography of Mohammed. See, for example, here, here, here, and here. Mohammed wiped out a Jewish tribe. Mohammed inspected Jewish boys to determine if they had pubic hair as a precursor to slaughter. Mohammed supervised the torture-murder of Kinana, to rob him of gold and take his wife. Mohammed expelled Christians and Jews from the Arabian Peninsula, where they cannot live to this day. Bukhari 1:24 reports that Allah ordered Mohammed to make war on all mankind till Islam dominates the planet.

As part of daily prayer, Muslims repeat seventeen times a day that Jews anger God. Muslims commonly believe that the Koran is flawless, and that the Bible is corrupt. Merely possessing a Bible in Saudi Arabia is cause for imprisonment and torture.

In short, hostility to Jews is inextricable from Mohammed's biography, the Koran, the hadith, and mandated daily Muslim prayer. Muslims have long been inspired by the ostensibly divine Koran to do what the Koran tells them to do: hate, murder, torture, steal, and rape.

Jesus, on the other hand, was a Jew. He lived in Israel, the Jewish homeland. Jesus was knowledgeable about and respectful of Jewish scripture. Jesus' disciples and the authors of the New Testament were Jews. Christians accept Jewish scriptures as divinely inspired. Jesus declared that salvation is from the Jews. God continued to love the Jews and his promises to them are irrevocable. The Vatican cites these scriptures.

The harsh criticisms of some, not all, Jews in the New Testament were written by Jews as part of Jewish tradition. The most severe passages are less severe than those in the Torah. Compare Matthew 23, where Jesus excoriates the Pharisees for straining on a gnat and choking on a camel, to Exodus 32, where God orders Jews, immediately, to massacre thousands of their own "brothers, friends, and neighbors" for worshipping a golden calf.

Jesus specifically taught that his disciples were not to interfere with free will. If people chose not to be Christians, Jesus said, just move on. Jesus never ordered his disciples to make converts by force, or to oppress nonbelievers. In contradistinction to Bukhari 1:24, Koran 66:9, Koran 5:51 and many similar verses, Jesus, in the Good Samaritan episode, counsels his followers to treat all humanity, not just fellow believers, with compassion.

Spreading the faith by military conquest was not part of foundational Christianity; for its first three hundred years, Christianity was an outlawed and persecuted faith. The second century Greek Pagan Celsus described early Christianity as a marginal "religion of women, children and slaves." Every time a Christian violates a Jew or anyone else, that Christian violates his own professed belief system.

When Christians committed crimes against Jews, other Christians protested and attempted to intervene. During the medieval Rhineland Massacres of the Crusades, Catholic bishops attempted to protect Jews. Popes repeatedly condemned blood libel. When Jews were expelled from Western Europe, they were invited into Catholic Poland and protected by the 1264 Statute of Kalisz and the 1573 Warsaw Confederation.

Confession and repentance are Christian rituals and virtues. Jesus taught his followers to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." Christians have confessed their sins against Jews, and resolved to improve. This emphasis on confession and repentance is not found in Islam. Turkey, for example, prosecuted Orhan Pamuk, its own Nobel-Prize-winning writer, for merely mentioning the Armenian Genocide.

Why, then, have Christians committed horrible crimes against Jews? Why did Christians, including priests, twist the original Christian message into one of hatred against Jews? And why have Muslim states tolerated Jews?

One ray of light into this complicated topic is Edna Bonacich's work on middleman minorities. Jews in Europe occupied a particular socioeconomic niche. Jews were middlemen. Medieval Christians and Medieval Muslims viewed middlemen differently. That difference, not scripture, affected Jewish lives differently in medieval Christian and medieval Muslim countries.  

Mark R. Cohen, Princeton University professor emeritus, is the author of Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, a book frequently cited to support the "Islam was more tolerant" generalization.  

In his 1986 Jerusalem Quarterly article "Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History," Cohen acknowledges that Islam contains a "fundamental theological hostility towards the religion of Judaism … and towards Jews, stigmatized … as contemptible infidels." Various historical and socioeconomic factors trumped Islam's "fundamental theological hostility." One of those factors was how Muslims viewed middlemen.

Mohammed was a merchant. He was born and lived most of his life in Mecca, a trading center. "Islam was born with a positive attitude towards commerce … Mohammed's own life and … the Koran and other holy literature lent strong support to the mercantile life … Since many jurists in the early Islamic period were themselves merchants, Islamic law was shaped to meet the needs of a mercantile economy." In the Muslim world, both Jews and Muslims were both moneylenders.

Medieval Christian Europeans were mostly peasants – poor people who valued rootedness, labor, and land. Jesus was a carpenter who preached the virtue of poverty. He lived in Galilee, a region of country bumpkins. Markets, money, travel and banks were underdeveloped in much of medieval Europe. Jews traveled, handled money, and appeared not to labor, as peasants understood labor. The Jew as merchant and moneylender was more troubling to economically naïve European Christians than to more economically sophisticated Middle Eastern Muslims.

Further, Cohen points out, Jews in medieval Europe were not just economically and religiously alien, they were ethnically and geographically alien. Jews were comparatively familiar to Middle Eastern Muslims – they came from the same geographic region, they spoke a language related to Arabic, similarly written right to left, and they shared a similar physical appearance.

Cohen cites another flashpoint for Jews living in Christian lands. Christianity separates church and state. This separation is rooted in Jesus' saying, "Render unto Cesar what is Cesar's and unto God what is God's." Jews had to develop relationships with both secular and religious authorities. One might be friendly while the other might not be. Church and state might be in competition. The Jew was often stuck in the middle of that often violent competition.

In Islam, there is no separation of church and state. Jews had to cultivate fewer powers, and they did not have to worry about a non-existent competition between centers of power. Cohen says that it is this separation of church and state in Christianity, and the lack of same in Islam, that explains why, during the medieval period, Jews were sometimes expelled from Christian nations, but not from Muslim ones.

Another factor Cohen cites for Jews' position in Islam. "In Europe, the Jews nurtured a pronounced hatred for Christians, whom they considered to be idolaters subject to the anti-pagan discriminatory provisions of the ancient Mishnah … the Jews of Islam had a markedly different attitude towards" Islam. There was a "tolerant Jewish view of Islam."

In 2016, Dario Fernandez-Morera published The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. In 2013 he argued in Comparative Civilizations Review that Muslims favored Jews in Spain for tactical reasons. Visigoths, the rulers in Spain before the Muslim Conquest, discriminated against Jews. When Muslims invaded, significant numbers of Jews aided the Muslims as a way to improve their own lot. Muslims, he said, regarded Jews as "servants," not as friends, and thus avoided violating the Koran's admonition not to take Jews as friends. Muslim rulers feared betrayal from other Muslims. Elevating Jews to powerful positions protected the ruler's back. A Jew, as a member of a hated minority, could never usurp a Muslim.

Fernandez-Morera cautions contemporary Jews against romanticizing their forebears' lives in Muslim Spain. Islamic law mandated that Jews had to pay the jizya, could not build synagogues, had to keep their buildings shorter than Muslims' buildings, could not carry weapons or ride horses, and had to show deference to Muslims, including by wearing distinctive clothing. They could not testify in court against a Muslim. There were harsher court sentences for Jews than for Muslims. Jews could not criticize Islam. Capital punishment was prescribed for a Jewish man who had sex with a Muslim woman. (Compare this to the medieval Polish legend of Catholic King Casimir the Great and his Jewish companion, Esterka.) Even if these mandates were not always followed, Cohen writes, the "themes of segregation and humiliation" in "Islamic sources … rival if not exceed … the Christian West." Canonical Islamic prescriptions communicated to Jews their subordinate status and kept them in their place.

Fernandez-Morera quotes a satirical poem that refers to Jews as "apes," as does the Koran. Jews, the Muslim poet says, should be "the lowest of the low, roaming among us, with their little bags, with contempt, degradation and scorn as their lot, scrambling in the dunghills for colored rags, to shroud their dead for burial … hasten to slaughter…do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them."

Jews' middleman minority status and their alignment, however tactical and temporary, with Muslims, may have contributed to Christian antisemitism. A 1986 University of Notre Dame Press book, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism, addresses a Europe-wide association, by Christians, of Jews with feared Muslims. Daniel Pipes' mostly positive review of the book, that appeared first in Commentary, can be viewed here.

In any case, the twenty-first century understanding of the word "tolerance" should not be applied to Muslim Spain. A naive person might envision Jews and Muslims in Al-Andalus sipping cappuccinos and discussing philosophy while eating rainbow cake celebrating same-sex weddings and watching their daughters play on the boys' soccer team. "Tolerance" meant something very different in medieval Muslim Spain than it means in 2016.

Suppose someone told a black person that the antebellum South was a "tolerant" place because Jews were allowed to practice their religion without impediment. My reaction to discussion of Muslim Spain as "tolerant" is similar to that black person's. Muslim Spain relied on slave labor. Its slaves were my forebears, Slavs. The word "Saqaliba," derived from "Slav," occurs in Arabic in reference to Slavic slaves and to eunuchs. In 961, there were 13,750 Saqaliba eunuchs in Cordoba alone. Jews were often the slave traders who transported Slavic slaves to Muslim Spain. Saint Adalbert's attempt to liberate Slavs from Jewish slave traders is depicted on the bronze, twelfth-century Gniezno doors. Adalbert was later murdered by European Pagans. Christians were martyred by Pagans in Europe right up to the fourteenth century. Applying twenty-first century definitions of "tolerance" and twenty-first century conceptions of what it means to be a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian to this medieval narrative can only cause complete misunderstanding. Christians were not all-powerful in medieval Europe but were often quite vulnerable. Jews were not always helpless; some exercised the power that all slave-traders do. "Tolerant" Muslims were enjoying sexual access to female and castrated male slaves, not serving up rainbow cake.

Stan asked if I would rather be an Albigensian in Turkey or in France. I've traveled in Turkey and I loved it. Even so, I'd rather not live as a female Albigensian or a female anything else in any Muslim country. 

When Tariq ibn Ziyad invaded Spain in 711, he delivered a "sermon" promising his jihadis Christian women to rape: "In this country there are a large number of ravishingly beautiful Greek maidens, their graceful forms are draped in sumptuous gowns on which gleam pearls, coral, and purest gold." Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Athir describes another Muslim warrior in Spain, who "traversed this land in every direction, raping women;" another "carried off women." Yes, violation of women occurs in all wars, fought by men of every religion. Islam, though, sanctions rape in war, rape that Muslim chroniclers openly celebrate.  

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a million Jews lived in Muslim countries. Nine and a half million Jews lived in Europe. This was 57% of the Jews in the world. During the twentieth century, the Jewish population of the US rose from one to six million, and the Jewish population of Muslim countries shrank to near zero. Jews voted with their feet.

Jews living in Christian lands gave the world Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, Helena Rubinstein, Artur Rubenstein, Baal Shem Tov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bruno Szulc, Adam Michnik, Disraeli, Gustav Mahler, Franz Kafka, "The Jews who invented Hollywood" and the bulk of Nobel Prizes won by Jews. This is a very different contribution to civilization than the fruits of the brand of "tolerance" practiced in Muslim Spain.

Finally, no generalization about tolerance cancels out Muslim Spain's less tolerant moments. There is a widespread belief that Maimonides and his family feigned a conversion to Islam in order to survive persecution. Maimonides wrote in a letter that "On account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us … No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us." And one must also remember events like the Grenada Massacre of 1066, during which a Muslim mob crucified Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and murdered many Jews.

Recognize that most conventionally educated Westerners believe extravagant falsehoods and aren't aware of important truths. 

My World History is a widely used Pearson textbook. It informs American schoolchildren that Mohammed respected Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians in Muslim lands could practice their religion freely, the Koran has never been changed, and religious faith helped Islam spread peacefully. "Islam offered followers a direct path to God and salvation." And oh, yes – Islam improved conditions for women.

Even atheists need to understand politicization and bias in discussion of religion. Protestant England and Catholic Spain fought for world domination. Anti-Catholic propaganda played a role in that struggle. Much of what conventionally educated Americans think they know about Catholicism, and, by extension, Christianity, is simply wrong. Myths about Christianity are used to warp discussion of Islam.

Here's an example. Suppose you criticize gender apartheid in Islam. An Islam-apologist hits back with "common knowledge" about misogyny in the Catholic Church.

Everybody knows that the witch craze of the Middle Ages was promulgated by the all-powerful, misogynist Catholic male clergy against goddess-worshipping healing women, nine million of whom died before secularization stopped the slaughter. You can learn this history in The Burning Times a documentary funded by a Western government. You can learn this history from bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich, or NPR journalist Margot Adler.

Here's the problem. Every "fact" in the above sentence is false. The witch craze took place during the Early Modern Period and the Enlightenment, after the Catholic Church lost much of its authority. During the Middle Ages the Catholic Church adamantly condemned witch hunting. Accusers were often women themselves, and lay women insisted that clerics join in. Victims were not healers and they didn't worship the goddess; they were simply poor women past the age of fertility during the hungry times of the wars of the Reformation, the Little Ice Age, chaotic periods of confused authority, and skyrocketing food prices. Neither secularization nor science stopped the craze. It stopped largely because jurists stopped believing that they could prove accusations in a trial. Not nine million, but between forty and sixty thousand people were killed, over the course of two hundred years. Enlightened, anti-Christian, Revolutionary France managed to murder that many people in the eleven months of the Reign of Terror. Two Catholic priests – Friedrich Spee and Alonso de Salazar Frías – and believe it or not, the Spanish Inquisition – were key in stopping the witch craze.  

Prominent atheists Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer are both PhDs and highly respected public intellectuals. Both Pinker and Shermer champion truth, not convenient propaganda, above all. Both Pinker's 2012 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Shermer's 2015 The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People tell the same just-so story about a Catholic priest, Friedrich Spee, who was an eager participant in witch trials until an enlightened secular ruler stopped him and changed history.

There's a problem with this anecdote. It is extravagantly false. There is not a shred of evidence to support it; Spee's biographer, Ronald Modras, condemns it. In fact Father Friedrich Spee was a courageous hero who put his own life in danger by taking a stance against the witch craze. He did so because of his Catholic faith. His book, Cautio Criminalis, helped end witch trials and torture used to extract confessions.

The Catholic Church really wasn't the force behind the witch craze. Understanding of the Inquisition needs to be completely revised. The Crusades, too, have been misunderstood, and need to be reexamined.

Bernard Lewis has warned against the uncritical dissemination of convenient myths. In his 2001 book, Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East, Lewis wrote,

"The broad outlines of the story, in the simplified and dramatized form in which great historic events so often reach the popular imagination, were well defined. The Jew has flourished in Muslim Spain, had been driven from Christian Spain, and has found a refuge in Muslim Turkey. The reality was of course more complex, less idyllic, less one-sided. There had been times of persecution under the Muslims and times of prosperity under Christian rule in Spain – and many Christian states … had given shelter to the Spanish Jewish refugees … the golden age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians – and taken up by Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews."

Mark R. Cohen echoes Lewis' warning. "The Jewish-Islamic interfaith utopia" "a golden age of toleration, of political achievement, and of remarkably integrated cultural efflorescence" is a "myth invented by nineteenth-century European Jewish intellectuals frustrated by the tortuously slow progress of their own integration into gentile society." It was the companion to another myth, in "which Jewish life in medieval Christian Europe was one long chain of suffering."

The sloppy, popular insistence that Nazism = Christianity is one of the most depressing examples of smart people repeating empty myths for political reasons. In 2009, British celebrity Stephen Fry suggested that Polish Catholics were responsible for Auschwitz. The otherwise respectable Bernard Lewis writes in his Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, "There is nothing in Islamic history to parallel … the Nazi Holocaust."

One wishes that humanity had produced only one genocidal monster like Hitler. Tamerlane (1370–1405), "The Sword of Islam," killed a larger percentage of the world's population than that killed by Hitler or Stalin. He was famous for his signature pyramids of human heads. In his jihad against Hindus, he slaughtered a hundred thousand captive Indians. He buried four thousand Armenian Christians alive. He massacred Assyrian Christians; in the twentieth century, their descendants would be massacred by Muslims in the Assyrian Genocide, an event related to the Armenian Genocide. Historian Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava reports that Tamerlane left "pestilence caused by the pollution of the air and water by thousands of uncared-for dead bodies … for two months not a bird moved wing in Delhi."

Historian Rene Grousset reports that Tamerlane repeatedly cited Islam as his inspiration. "It is to the Koran to which he continually appeals." In the Malfuzat-i-Timuri, Tamerlane is quoted as saying that he opened the Koran at random to seek guidance and he found 66:9. While vanishingly few parents name their baby "Hitler," Muslim parents today – including Zubeidat Tsarnaev – name their children after this murderous monster. There are heroic statues of Tamerlane in Muslim countries; see here and here.

One of the books Stan recommended is Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History, by James Carroll, a former Catholic priest. Carroll misleads readers about the deaths of Catholic Poles under Nazism. He does so because he wants to emphasize how rotten Catholics have been to Jews. That Nazis murdered and tortured Polish Catholics doesn't fit neatly into Carroll's narrative. Carroll reports that 150 Catholic Poles died at Auschwitz. In fact, c. 140,000 Poles were imprisoned in Auschwitz, of whom half were killed. 

Critics of Christianity desperately want Nazism to be Christianity, or to be Christianity's spawn. As real historians know, Nazism's goal was to eradicate Christianity. In their own documents, Nazis cite neo-paganism, nationalism, and scientism as inspirations. In speeches justifying the shooting of "thousands of leading Poles" and the enslavement and mass murder of Czechs and Russians, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler did not cite Christianity as inspiration. He cited nationalism and science. He and his men were wiping out "bacteria." Christianity, to Himmler, was "the greatest of plagues."

Top Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg hated Christianity. He championed – wait for it – the very heretics Stan also championed – the Albigensians. Albigensians, Rosenberg wrote, "moved me deeply." Their "will and character … [were] essentially West Gothic … They rejected the Old Testament, avoided the use of any and all Jewish names … even the name of Mary. The crucifix to them appeared an unworthy symbol."

Consider: every sadistic, dehumanizing crime – short of genocide – that Nazis committed against Jews, they also committed against largely Catholic Romani, aka Gypsies, and Catholic Poles. Auschwitz was built for, and for the first 18 months of its existence inhabited by, Poles. Poles were mowed down by Einsatzgruppen. Rudolf Spanner manufactured soap from Polish corpses. Poles were subjected to medical experimentation. Polish priests were singled out for mass murder. Dachau was the "largest monastery in Germany." Even as Nazis were losing World War II, they committed the systematic destruction of Warsaw, as part of a cultural genocide. Zyklon B was first used to mass murder Soviet POWs. Handicapped Germans, not Jews, were the first and last victims of Nazi mass murder. Of Poles, Hitler stated, "I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness … with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language."

Mentioning what the Nazis did to the Poles, to the Gypsies, to the handicapped and to Soviet POWs is not to diminish the unique Holocaust of the Jews. I mention this horrific record to emphasize why the popular misconception of "Nazism = Christianity" or "Christianity produced Hitler" "does not withstand examination.

Finally, it must be mentioned, that it was largely Christians, including my father, who saw heavy combat in World War II, who defeated Hitler, de-Nazified Germany, and utterly revile Nazism.

In September, 2016, Richard Weikart will publish Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Weikart, author of Hitler's Ethic, will take on the popular misconception that Hitler was a Christian, or was inspired by Christian ideas.

Be aware of events outside of Western Europe and North America.

Stan insisted that Islam was tolerant when Christianity was not. Stan specified the years between 1000 and 1599. To support this generalization, Stan cited Spain.  

During the period Stan specified, Islam was driving into all but extinction the Zoroastrians of Persia. Citing ancient accounts, Fariborz Rahnamoon claims that Arab invaders festooned 24 miles of road with the bodies of hanging Persians. Arabs ran mills with the blood of slaughtered Zoroastrians. Zoroastrian scholars were murdered and libraries burned. Sultan Husayn (1668-1726) ordered the forced conversion of Zoroastrians; he slaughtered those who did not accept Islam. An English traveler's account describes the plight of the few surviving Zoroastrians in 1818: "They have nowhere to look for help and know no place to go where they would be free. They have made the desert their home and live with all the hardship that comes with it, just to preserve their religion in their ancient country. During the onslaught of conversion to Islam, some had taken to the mountain and others had fled to the bordering lands of India." The world's tiny remaining population of Zoroastrians live in India today.

During Islam's allegedly tolerant medieval period, Islam was persecuting the Christians of Egypt. In Cairo, in 1343, Muslims accused Christians of being arsonists. Christians "were seized in the street, burned or slaughtered by the mob as it left the mosques. Anti-Christian violence raged in the main towns. To enable the Christians to go out into the streets, Jews would sometimes lend them their distinctive yellow turban," writes Bat Ye'or.

Historian Philip Jenkins writes that in 1354, "Mobs demanded that Christians and Jews recite the Muslim profession of faith upon threat of being burned alive." Jenkins quotes a contemporary account by Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi:

"Many reports came from both Upper and Lower Egypt of Copts being converted to Islam, frequenting mosques and memorizing the Quran … In all the provinces of Egypt, both north and south, no church remained that had not been razed; on many of those sites, mosques were constructed. For when the Christians' affliction grew great and their incomes small, they decided to embrace Islam. Thus Islam spread among the Christians of Egypt and in the town of Qalyub alone 450 persons were converted to Islam in a single day … this was a momentous event in Egyptian history."

More on Islam's "tolerant" medieval period. In Jerusalem, in 1009 AD, Islam razed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, site of Jesus' burial and resurrection. In Egypt, in 1193, Al-Malik Al-Aziz Osman bin Salahadin Yusuf attempted to tear down the pyramids.

Also during Islam's "tolerant" period: Islam was savaging the Balkans, laying seeds for killing and hatred that would last for hundreds of years. Islam was taking millions of Poles and other Slavs slaves. The Islamic Slave Trade was dwarfing the Atlantic Slave Trade. And the Islamic Conquest of India would inspire a profoundly tragic quote from historian Will Durant, a man who had confronted much human misery:

"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." All this and more would take place during a period that Stan called a period of Islamic "tolerance."

Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete