EXCERPT From abcnews.go.com: "After President Obama’s remarks comparing ISIS militants to medieval Christian crusaders ignited a firestorm of criticism on Thursday, ABC News wanted to know: how accurate is that comparison?"
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The articles I've posted claim that religion is not used very often as a cause for war and that President Obama was wrong to use The Crusades as a comparison to the ISIS terrorist attacks... I say to that, (using a statement Hillary Clinton made during the Republican Benghazi Smear Campaign against her)...
“WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?”
WAR and Territorial Disputes, are scourges on the human condition, we should have evolved long ago a desire for peace over war and use our intelligence to resolve differences with the objective use of words and understanding, instead of bombs and weapons that cause great suffering upon our own species.
It appears that Education, Facts or Reality (even Religion) cannot stop people from hurling that proverbial first stone at those they believe are evil and NOT A BIT like themselves, who must fight for what’s (delusionary) good for (only their own) humankind?
thinkingblue
If We Do Not End War - War Will End Us.
~H.G. Wells~
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“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” the president told an audience at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.
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Meanwhile, historians have been quick to discourage a link between ISIS and the Crusaders, who fought to reclaim holy lands in the Middle East nearly 900 years ago.
Excerpt from abcnews.go.com: The Crusades, which began in 1095 with the call of Pope Urban II to recover Jerusalem from Muslim rule, were a series of wars that lasted nearly two centuries. Although no reliable estimate of casualties caused by Crusaders exists, the massacre of over 2,700 Muslim prisoners by Richard the Lionheart outside Acre during the Third Crusade has been well documented and is remembered in the Middle East to this day.
Historical definition of “crusade”:
The crusades were a series of holy wars called by popes with the promise of indulgences for those who fought in them and directed against external and internal enemies of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defense of the Church or Christian people. Crusades were characterized by the taking of vows and the granting of indulgences to those who participated. Like going on pilgrimage, to which they were often likened, crusading was an act of Christian love and piety that compensated for and paid the penalties earned by sin. It marked a break in earlier Christian medieval conceptions of warfare in that crusades were penitential warfare. Crusades combined the ideas of: a) Holy War and b) and Pilgrimage to produce the concept of "indulgence" (remission of penance and/or sin granted by papacy for participation in sacred activity).
Where were crusades fought? This is a matter of dispute among historians. “Traditionalists” would limit true crusades to expeditions aimed at recovering or protecting Jerusalem. “Pluralists” (and I count myself as one) regard any expedition preached as a crusade in which the participants took crusading vows and received crusading privileges should be regarded as crusades. If so, crusades were fought not only in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, but in Spain, the Baltic (Latvia and Prussia), Italy, Sicily, and southern France.
When were the crusades? The first crusade was launched by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095. There is controversy over the last crusade. “Traditionalists” would end the crusades in 1291 with the fall of the last crusader castle of the Latin Kingdom, the city of Acre (on the northern coast of present-day Israel). “Pluralists” disagree, but one good candidate would be the Spanish Armada of 1588.
Difference between Augustinian “just war” and “crusade”:
The standard for a Christian “just war” as developed by Augustine (c. A.D. 400) is: “rightful intention on the part of the participants, which should always be expressed through love of God and neighbour; a just cause; and legitimate proclamation by a qualified authority.” (Quoted from J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Yale University, 1987.) The doctrine of holy war/crusade added two further assumptions: 1) Violence and its consequences–death and injury–are morally neutral rather than intrinsically evil, and whether violence is good or bad is a matter of intention. (The analogy is to a surgeon, who cuts into the body, thus injuring it, in order to make it better/healthier.) 2) Christ is concerned with the political order of man, and intends for his agents on earth, kings, popes, bishops, to establish on earth a Christian Republic that was a “single, universal, transcendental state’ ruled by Christ through the lay and clerical magistrates he endowed with authority.
It follows from this that the defense of the Christian Republic against God’s enemies, whether foreign infidel (e.g. Turks) or domestic heretics and Jews was a moral imperative for those qualified to fight. A Crusade was a holy war fought against external or internal enemies for the recovery of Christian property or defense of the Church or the Christian people. It could be wages against Turks in Palestine, Muslims in Spain, pagan Slavs in the Baltic, or heretics in southern France, all of whom were enemies or rebels against God.
Let's go back in time when George W Bush used the Crusades as the same comparison.
MORE HERE: http://www.csmonitor.com/...
Interesting opinion on using Religion as a cause for war. tb
Excerpt: When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, "Come on! The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, 9/11. Need I name more?"
Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, "Encyclopedia of Wars," authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.
History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion.
MORE HERE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Something To Ponder.
“If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything.”
―H. G. Wells