A World Transformed…how…by the power of UKIP?….or through the love of Jesus?
Is religion political?
The church continues to have the power to transform society, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today in his inauguration ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral.
‘For more than a thousand years this country has to one degree or another sought to recognise that Jesus is the Son of God; by the ordering of its society, by its laws, by its sense of community.…..Slaves were freed, Factory Acts passed, and the NHS and social care established through Christ-liberated courage. The present challenges of environment and economy, of human development and global poverty, can only be faced with extraordinary courage.
The society ……was healthy because it was based on obedience to God, both in public care and private love.
Today we may properly differ on the degrees of state and private responsibility in a healthy society. But if we sever our roots in Christ we abandon the stability which enables good decision making.
Internationally, churches run refugee camps, mediate civil wars, organise elections, set up hospitals. All of it happens because of heeding the call to go to Jesus through the storms and across the waves.
Let us provoke each other to heed the call of Christ, to be clear in our declaration of Christ, committed in prayer to Christ, and we will see a world transformed.’
I guess not. The BBC, Cameron and all those commentators are right…the ending of slavery, social provision and welfare, worker’s rights, schooling, health services and Bishops in the House of Lords….all those political acts had nothing to do with religion.
Never mind the Reformation, and Cromwell’s Taliban Puritans (abridged)….
‘Puritans were dissatisfied and bent on the destroying of the dregs of Popery. They were a group of literate and often highly articulate people acting like a fifth column to undermine and radically change the Church of England through sympathisers and activists in parliament. Some aimed to reform by peaceful means others wanted to turn England to their religion completely and join their co-religionists in Europe. Up and down the country they took over parishes and imposed a new belief…that they were the chosen ones and everyone else was excluded and was damned. Where the godly would get a foothold in a parish they would often tear it apart. They disrupted peaceful communities with their preaching and efforts to discipline those they regarded as godless resulting in bitter divisions and denouncements of sinners.’
No, nothing political there. No religiously inspired violence there…. however the Crusades of course were different…they were a terrible Christian assault on peaceable Muslims…and Muslims are still suffering the consequences of that appalling foreign policy all those centuries ago!
In BBC Two’s new three-part documentary series, The Crusades, Dr Thomas Asbridge of the University of London asks his viewers to make that same leap of imagination – to understand a world in which faith was so important that in 1095, Pope Urban II was able to convince anything up to 100,000 people to forsake their family lives and homes and answer his call to reclaim Jerusalem, even though the holy city had fallen to the Muslims centuries earlier. So alien is the devotion – the fanaticism – that was displayed that Asbridge has to spend almost a third of the opening episode easing us into the medieval mindset, making us understand how the Pope’s promise of salvation could outweigh any worldly good or blessing.
Yet even though Asbridge resists the temptation to make pat comparisons with the modern world, the themes raised by the series are utterly current. Today, the terms “crusade” and “crusader” are shorthand for the post-9/11 clash of civilisations, invoked first by President Bush in the wake of the attacks, and then by his enemies.
Eh? what are you on about now?
“Take more water with it” is probably the answer.
Whoosh, this one went straight past me
Getting very inventive with those names Colditz.
If you put as much effort and creativity into reading and making intelligent comments on a post I might take you seriously.
But seeing as David Vance banned you when you lurked here as Nicked Emus I think I’ll not waste too much time on you.
I should just delete you as you waste everyone else’s time…but you make me look good…so I’ll keep you as my little pet troll.
That’s not colditz. He’s the other one. I hope he’s not Nicked emus because he said a while back that he’s not a journalist, which Nicked is. I’d be very disappointed, but would have some questions for him in any case.
Nothing like a bit of BBC ‘sophistication’ to stimulate meaningful debate in the comments section.
Whoosh! What went by? A commenter’s overdeveloped sense of self-regard from what I caught of it. …
What you will never hear from the left wing fascists is the invasion of Europe by Muslims.
827 – 902 invasion & conquest of Sicily
709 Muslim invasion of Spain, they stayed until 1614
732 Muslims have invaded France and are defeated at the battle of Tours. They are within a days march of Paris.
831 invasions / incursions & conquest of Southern Italy.
840 invasion of Crete
So before anyone criticises the Christians over the crusades they’d better have a pretty good knowledge of the Muslim conquests which took place far earlier.
Good to remind people of these facts from time to time.
There is also a credible argument that Islam is a cult rather than a religion.
I’m sure I’ve heard Islam referred to in terms of “2000 years”. Wish I could remember where.
In reading the Telegraph article I was struck by the following passage : “we have proper, old-fashioned narrative history of the sort that TV has almost forgotten how to do, starting at the beginning and continuing until the end.”
Is what Colvile describes as “a new BBC Two series telling the real history of the crusades” really an example of bias?
As thoughtful points out above, history didn’t begin with the crusades.
Isn’t it a bit like starting a history of the Gulf War with the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait by Coalition forces in 1991?
Who financed Cromwell from the narrow streets of Amsterdams diamond quarter. What group of people did Cromwell immediately invite back into the country after centuries of enforced exile? Answers on a postcard.
The Salvation Army.
It’s wearing off – increase your dose.
Flemish crossbowmen?
Surely we in the west have become more secular and religious leaders would struggle to get us to go to war on behalf of their cult no matter what they promised we would get on the other side of the gates. The problem is that the Muslims still believe all that stuff.