Reading up a blogpost on the history of religious wars
>You see, real history is complicated and cannot be just divided into "opressors" and "opressed"! There is never a simple "Big Bad Empire attacks innocent fairy worshipping simple folks". It's complicated! For example, Ireland in the Middle Ages was a Catholic superpower aggresively sending missionaries to England. Britain breaking away from Catholic Church in 16th century was a geniune revolutionary act of rebellion against the millenia-old absolute hegemony of the Pope and his Divine Right. Just by existing, Protestant England had elicited a genocidal rage from a Catholic world, who for multiple centuries had been launching wars of cultural subjigation against it. And during all of these wars, Catholic Ireland was always looking for a nice opportunity to stab its distracted "heretical" neighbour in the back. We now remember British-Irish history as Big Bad Britain opressing the little guy, but we don't remember how the "little guy" was an ally to the bigger camp who wanted to exterminate Britain.
Me: Wow. Maybe I had been too harsh in my judgement of Protestants as, in general, the worst out of the big three branches of Christianity. Maybe I really need to treat Protestants more sympathetically. I should start reading more Protestant texts…
>You really can see a parallel between British-Irish and Isreali-Palestinian case. How many see only Big Bad Israel opressing the "little guy", but do not see that the "little guy" is an outpost of a locally hegemonic Muslim world wanting to exterminate "dirty Jewish kafirs"…
Me: *something snaps inside my head* I CRITICALLY SUPPORT THE POPE! AVE MARIA! BURN LUTHER! AVE MARIA! BURN CALVIN! HENRY VIII WAS A DISGUSTING PERVERT AND IS BURNING IN HELL NOW! AVE MARIA! ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S MASSACRE DIDN'T HAPPEN, BUT IF IT DID, THEY DESERVED IT! AVE MARIA! AVE MARIA! AVE MARIA!
Is this… a healthy reaction?
luther's most notorious quote is:
<"If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are in this world we have to sin…"the source is a letter to melanchthon in august 1, 1521 (in many compilations of luther's work it is even removed).
>>2268006luther was always a moderate. he is still the most fascinating figure in the reformation though. calvinism is the true radicalism, as you say, however.
engels also speaks on how calvinist predestination is a uniquely capitalist theology, in the same vein as smith's "invisible hand" (which is a formulation of humean "sympathy").