A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester

To Jerry Falwell and all those who believe in a "veil of protection" being removed by God:

Consider this quote from William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire):

"Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican partices, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he could afford the lifestyle of a Renaissance prince; as vice chancellor of the Roman Church, he had amassed enormous wealth. As guests approached the papal palace, they were excited by the spectacle of living statues: naked, guilded young men and women in erotic poses… One [fete] known to Romans as the Ballet of the Chestnuts, was held on October 30, 1501… [According to Burchard's Diarium] After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city's fity most beautiful whores danced with guests, "first clothed, then naked." The dancing over, the "ballet" began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, "which," Burchard writes, "the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles." Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. "The coupling took place," according to Burchard, "in front of everyone present." Servants kept score of each man's orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man's machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes - cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those "who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times." [p. 79]

This sort of activity, unthinkable today, is part of the church's legacy. The point is not that papal leaders were any more depraved than the rest of society - they probably weren't, although they were certainly more wealthy and powerful.

It is also important to remember that the church forbade the teachings of Galileo (and in his time all the teaching of Copernicus) until 1822! In other words, the church was wrong - patently and openly and demonstrably wrong - in its belief in a geocentric universe and took about 300 years to admit its error. It was also wrong about the age of the earth, the time it took to create it, and a number of other technical issues, but my point is that if they were wrong about these issues (as they later admitted), could it be possible that they are wrong about birth control, family planning, and abortion? We have a precedent for the church taking a stand - a very harsh stand punishable by death at the stake - then later admitting (unfortunately far too late for its victims) that it was wrong.

Religious leaders throughout history have modified what they considered to be unforgivable sins. Why should now be any different? Sir Thomas More, whom catholics view as such a paragon of virtue (standing up to King Henry VIII did take courage), thought that reading the Bible in English was a damnable offense. He would have had William Tyndale burned to death for heresy for translating the Bible to English. If he were alive today, he would think any modern catholic should be condemned to hell for reading the Bible in English. You would have argued with him about this the way you argue with me about abortion and no doubt, he would have been as unyielding.

Consider this quotation from historian William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire):

"In argument [More] was bitter, vituperative, given to streams of invective. And although as a writer he celebrated religious tolerance in his Utopia, in practice he was a rigid Catholic, capable of having a servant in his own home flogged for blasphemy. He believed that heretics, atheists, and disbelievers in a heareafter should be executed, and as chancellor he approved such sentences."

Adultery in medieval times was also a capital offense, but of course only if women were found guilty.

Cesare Borgia as pope probably had an incestuous affair with his 17-year-old daughter, as he later acknowledged when he legitimized her child via a secret bull. (Earlier, to the sound of open laughter, the canonical judges declared her intacta - a virgin - although she was clearly 6 months pregnant at the time.) He may have arranged the murder of his brother, Juan.

In the name of Christ, millions (adjusted for today's population levels) perished in the petty religious wars that raged through Europe. The Roman Inquisition was particularly cruel:

"The Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign of terror [than the Spanish Inquisition]. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny. As a consequence, the advocates of reform, who had proposed the only measures which might have healed the split in Christendom, fell under the dark shadows of the hereticators' suspicion. No Catholic was too powerful to elude their judgment… Pietro Carnesecchi, who had been the pope's secretary was cremated in a Roman auto-da-fe. [burned alive] … Possession of Protestant literature was a felony; advocacy of heretical ideas was a capital offense; and informers were encouraged by assigning them, after convictions, one-third of the condemneds' goods. Trials were conducted by a special commission, whose court came to be known as … the burning room. In less than three years, the commission sentenced sixty Frenchmen to the stake. Anne du Bourg … suggested that executions be postponed until the Council of Trent defined Catholic orthodoxy. [French King ] Henry [II] had him arrested… He meant to see him burn, too, but … the King was killed in a tournament. [pp. 201-2]

And of course the Spanish Inquisition was also savage:

"Torquemada's methods reveal much about one of the age's most unpleasant characteristics: man's inhumanity to man. Sharp iron frames prevented victims from sleepig, lying, or even sitting. Braziers scorched the soles of their feet, facks stretched their limbs, suspects were crushed to death beneath chests filled with stones, and in Germany the very mention of die verfüchte Jungfer - the dreaed old iron maid - inspired terror. The Jungfer embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hold of revolving knives and sharp spears…

Jewry was luckier - slightly luckier… If the pogroms of the time are less infamous than the Holocaust, it is only because anti-Semites then lacked twentieth-century technology. Certainly they possessed the evil will. In 1492, … Spain's Jews were given three months to accept Christian baptism or be banished from the country. Even those who had been baptized were distrusted; Isabella had fixed her dark eye on converted Jews suspected of recidivism - Marranos, she called them; "pigs" - and marked them for resettlement as early as 1478. Eventually between thirty thousand and sixty thousand were expelled. Meantime the king of Portugal, finding merit in the Spanish decree, ordered the expulsion of all Portuguese Jews. His soldiers were instructed to massacre those who were slow to leave. During a single night in 1506 nearly four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword. Three years later the systematic persecution of the German Jews began." [ p. 35]

You should probably multiply these figures by several thousand to make them proportional to the population of the time.

Yet God did not condemn European society to poverty and misery; far from it - He (if one uses such a puppet master model) raised Europe and its progeny, the United States in particular, to levels of unprecedented wealth, not just in materialistic things, but in intellectual achievement, technological prowess, and scientific discovery. If anyone deserved punishment for their collective sins, it was surely medieval Europe, but if that punishment is waiting, God sure its taking his time.

This is not to say that civilizations won't fall and decline. I just don't think it has anything to do with the intervention or lack thereof of some heavenly hand.

God killed far more infants from disease through the beginning of this century than man ever did through abortion. Who knows how many died throughout Europe because of the church's misappropriation of capital and continued opposition to the scientific method.

My own belief, for all its worth (and in my belief system what you or I think or believe is not that important), God speaks to us, if at all, through the language of mathematics, science, and economy. There are certain rules for us to follow, and if we follow them, we prosper. If we don't, we starve and live short, miserable lives. The fact that we have a longer life expectancy by far that at any point in human history, that we have a higher quality of life than ever before, that we have freed ourselves from the astonishingly high infant mortality and maternal mortality of the pre-scientific, church-governed age, is prima facie evidence that we are doing something right, and, if one is to endorse the belief that God rewards societies that are following his laws or whatever, that we must be pleasing him or her.

At any rate, the number of abortions has been going down in the United States; why were we not hit with a terrorist attack in 1980, when the 1,297,606 abortions worked out to a rate of 359 per 1,000 live births, than more recently, when the rate dropped to 314 per 1,000 live births (1,221,585 total in 1996) if this attack has anything to do with abortion?

If you view abortion as death, it is one of only many causes of death. The fact that our population is growing, and has surged even since mid-century, means that our birth and survival rate must exceed all causes of death combined.