Philippines War, American Christianity, and Islam

"It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths." — Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke

As part of my preparation (or really procrastination) for writing The U.S. War Against Asia (aka The Asian War) I recently completed the most excellent God's Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 by Susan K. Harris.

In tracing how an ostensibly democratic and anti-imperialist nation rationalized becoming an imperialist power by seizing Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the Philippines against the will of their inhabitants, Susan Harris goes into the details of the 19th century transformation of the United States into an overtly Christian nation. Part of that project (for it did not occur spontaneously) was a re-writing of the history of 18th century America, particularly the period between 1750 and the passing (marred by massive fraud) of the U.S. Constitution.

History is always a summation. We cannot study, even if we wanted to, what each American inhabitant did and thought, for instance, on each day of 1776, important as all those thoughts and actions in that particular year must have been. When doing a summary the acts of including or excluding may make for very different end products.

In the 19th century the Enlightenment, which was secular and non-religious, was largely erased from the story of the American Revolution and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Tom Paine was practically obliterated from history, not for writing Common Sense, which was acceptable to patriots, but for writing Age Of Reason, which was unacceptable to Christians. Thomas Jefferson could not be so easily obliterated, but his early atheism and later deism (which is just atheism with its ass covered) was quietly dropped from the discussion.

In the 19th century, despite the Abolitionists and Emancipation Proclamation, Christianity became deeply intertwined with racism in these United States. How did a doctrine that originated as anti-racialist, and explicitly welcoming all human beings, come to be deeply racist? It started long before the first Church of England member stepped foot in Virginia. [Note also the myth that our nation was founded by Puritans in Massachusetts. That is post-Civil war malarkey. Most Americans who bothered with religion before 1776 were Church of England, and Virginia was the first and most prominent English colony in America.]

Christianity became a European, or "white race," religion, because it was supplanted by Islam as a global religion between 700 and 1500 A.D. Christianity became the dominant religion in the "Near East" and in northern Africa by supplanting previous localist religious cults between 300 and 600 A.D. Islam was created specifically to correct obvious errors in Christianity, Judaism, and paganism. The idea that God (now Allah) needed a son for a co-god was replaced with the idea that Jesus Christ was a great prophet like Moses. Most of the Koran consists of retelling of Bible tales and early Christian fables.

Islam was remarkably successful as a philosophy, culture, and mode of governance. Pretty soon Christianity, already in its Dark Ages, had retreated to the core of Europe. Islam became a global, multiracial religion that extended from Spain across north Africa to Indonesia. When Christianity emerged again in the form of Portuguese and Spanish piracy in the late 1400's, it was incapable of seeing non-whites as full human beings. While some converting to Christianity did occur amidst the pillaging of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, in almost every case non-white Christians were supervised by white priests.

However, it is not fair to blame the destruction of the American Indian tribes in what is now the United States on Christianity alone. Greed played the major part, and it affected the subscribers to the Age of Reason. Nor were the Rationalists immune to racist sentiments. They simply rationalized their racism. For Christian slave owners God ordained the inferiority of the black race; for atheist slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, Nature ordained that same inferiority.

Sexism, too, seemed pre-ordained to almost all men, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, and atheist alike. The Roman Catholic church, to this day, teaches the inferiority of women as a major theological truth. Protestant sects have changed their minds, or not, sect by sect over time. Atheists have led in the women's liberation department, but for decades allowed practice to lag theory.

Apparently it was Robert Ingersoll who reminded Americans of the role of Thomas Paine in the American Revolution and the creation of our system of governance. Even as the Sugar Trust and its imperialist allies enslaved Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines at the turn of the century, the prestige of science was rising with the prestige of America's industrial might. The world of trains, telephones, and radio had not been foreseen by the prophets of the Bible or Koran. Americans became more secular, even as most tried to keep a gloss of Christianity as a cover. The racial barriers crumbled, gradually at first, and then in a great tumble in the 1960s.

The military-christian-political complex, however, regained a lot of momentum after the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 brought Islam to the fore as the new Enemy.

We seem to have come to an odd point in history. We have a not-entirely-white President of the United States who has been accused of being a Muslim because his absentee father was nominally an adherent of Islam. Barack Obama professes to be a mainstream Christian Protestant. He has proven he is just as good at killing non-white non-Christians as any prior American president. Half the nations of the world remain home to at least one American military base. Republicans in Congress demand war with Iran and Syria and Democrats keep their mouths shut for fear of Christian backlash.

Religious crazies of all sorts have become used to using the products of scientific reasoning. Soon crazies (other than Obama) will be sending out cheap unmanned drones to smite their enemies. Meanwhile, sects new and old can fish for converts with smartphones and Facebook.

I began this essay thinking about how resilient (and destructive) the Christian America myth has been. Now I am thinking: how do we know if we are in a period of stability? The elements of change could be in place already. Changes in allegiance as great as when Christianity swept over Eurasia in the 4th century, Islam swept over the world in the 7th century, and Communism swept over much of the world in the 20th century could be upon us. Some sect I have never heard of could be getting ready to conquer the world, without its members even being aware of their destiny.

Or perhaps the Age of Man is coming to a close just as surely as the Age of Dinosaurs once did.

Still, apocalypses are pretty rare. Like the rest of humanity tomorrow I will wake up and make the best of the situation at hand, just like any other day. I'm lucky I'm not not in Somalia or Mali or Afghanistan where Obama's henchmen fight it out with Islamic extremists and ordinary people get caught in the crossfire (including the economic crossfire).

Rick Santorum for Pope?

Republican Party presidential hopeful Rick Santorum clearly believes that he has a good chance to beat out Mitt Romney for the nomination. Then, presumably, he plans to rally American voters around him to defeat the incumbent, Barack Obama. Mr. Santorum is now polling well among Republicans, despite being almost unknown 6 months ago, before other rivals of Mr. Romney imploded.

Aside from knowing he was not all that popular in his home state of Pennsylvania, where he lost a re-election bid to the U.S. Senate in 2006, and knowing he was "conservative," like most of the public I paid little attention to his positions or record until lately.

Rick Santorum is not conservative: he is reactionary. Conservatives may argue against same-sex marriage (which is an innovation) and abortion (which is an ethical dilemma). They may deny the reality of global warming, which after all as a science theory is less than 100 years old. Santorum goes further. He wants to prohibit birth control, and abolish the public education system. Given his public agenda, it is fairly easy to surmise what his hidden agenda is: to restructure the United States of America to resemble European nations during the Dark Ages.

I hope that shining the light on Santorum's unstable mental world will insure that his campaign implodes like Herman Cain's, Michelle Bachman's and others before him. On the other hand, the issue may not be decided by the time of California's presidential primary this June 5th. It is time for California Republicans to consider whether they really want an to undermine what remains of American industry and military might by destroying public education.

Do California Republicans really want to risk a socialist revolution by making it impossible, rather than merely unlikely, for our working class children to have decent economic opportunities?

People used to say that Santorum was looking for the Vice President slot. I think, given the age of Pope Benedict XVI, who is 85, that Mr. Santorum would do us all a favor by declaring he is a candidate for Pope. If successful, he would be the first American Pope.

Whereas in America even our Founding Fathers would have found Rick Santorum to be an unenlightened reactionary, in the Vatican he would fit right in. Benedict XVI has been a staunch advocate of taking the Roman Catholic Church back to the Dark Ages, with Latin as the language of choice and burning scientists as good moral instruction and monarchy as the only practical form of government.

Rick Santorum does not even seem to realize he is unbalanced in a way that even most Tea Party activists should find disturbing. Rick Santorum's program is not within the American tradition of freedom (and liberty, and justice) for all.

Adolf Hitler (who was a Roman Catholic) used his power to force (while he was alive) the Lutheran Church in Germany into a unified organization with the Catholic Church. That one-religion-fits-all view really is the inevitable end of the line of logic Santorum espouses. There is only one way to think, and that is Santorum's way, the Roman Catholic way.

Protestant Christians beware. You may think that Santorum is an ally against secularism, and for a while he may be. But you will find that if he defeats the modern, secular Americans with his crusade, he will not be satisfied. He will put pressure on Protestants to submit to the authority of the Pope. With five Roman Catholic judges already forming a majority on the Supreme Court, in a nation where only 1 in 5 citizens is even nominally Roman Catholic, you may wish you had worked harder to preserve the separation of church and state, rather than trying to bring it to an end.

Vladimir Putin and the Atheist Holocaust

We almost never put personal faces on the atheist holocaust. Today a news item did just that, though of course it failed to remind people that there was an atheist holocaust during World War II and it was the result of careful planning and execution by the Roman Catholic Church, including Pope Pius XII (real name: Eugenio Maria Pacelli).

The face of the holocaust today is Viktor V. Putin, younger brother of Vladimir V. Putin, currently Prime Minister of Russia. Viktor was born in 1940, in Leningrad (now going by its prior name of St. Petersburg). In 1942 during the Battle of Leningrad, Victor Putin died, probably of starvation or disease caused by starvation. On January 28th, yesterday, Mr. Putin laid a wreath at Piskaroyvskoye Cemetery, which is a mass grave of about 470,000 civilians and soldiers who died in the battle or from the results of the siege. They were not all: the plaque there says over 640,000 people died of starvation between 1941 and 1944, when the Red Army finally got the upper hand and started rolling back the invaders.

The Atheist Holocaust was the idea of Pope Pius XII along with his predecessor Pius XI. It was executed by the fascist, Roman Catholic leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, with some help from other Catholic fascists, notably General Francisco Franco of Spain and Benito Mussolini of Italy. The Atheist Holocaust engulfed some 20 million people. Its most terrible phase began with the Germany occupation of the Eastern U.S.S.R. in 1941.

Of course we cannot be certain that Viktor V. Putin would have grown up to be an atheist. We unconsciously grant 2 year olds the religious status of their parents. His mother, Maria Ivanovna, was so starved that she was mistaken for dead and nearly buried before someone heard her moaning. His father was wounded and hospitalized in the war. Vladimir Putin is their only surviving child, having been born well after the war, in 1952.

Adolf Hitler saw himself as a new Holy Roman Emperor, who should be able to choose Popes and dictate to them. Pius XII saw himself, and the papacy, as the supreme leader of the entire world, to whom men like Hitler should subordinate themselves. They were united in a hatred of non-Catholics, socialists, communists, and even anyone advocating democratic or republican forms of government. Their plan was to conquer the world and impost a single state with a single religion upon it, the same ancient plan of "Saint" Constantine the Great [3rd - 4th centuries A.D.]

Most people are familiar with the fact that about 6 million jews died in their Holocaust. Most people don't know that most of those Jews were not religiously observant. They were modern jews, often socialists, and just as fairly described as agnostics or atheists. Add in the atheists killed by General Franco in Spain and you have a lot of dead atheists. But the really big numbers come from the invasion of the U.S.S.R. Some of the soldiers and civilians murdered in that invasion would have been Russian Orthodox, but the vast majority were atheists.

Why don't we know this, at least in the United States? American capitalists were happy to see Soviet soldiers chew up Hitler's armies. America emerged from the war as the only intact industrial power and proceeded to grab (in an economic sense, not by actual colonization) pretty much the entire world outside of the Soviet sphere. Americans were taught to hate communism. Critically, the U.S. had a large contingent of Roman Catholic voters who provided the balance of power for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.

As a result, for education and propaganda, there was an instant re-branding of what happened in World War II. Hitler, a Catholic, was called a pagan. Franco was made into an ally even as he continued to execute people for the offense of not being Roman Catholic. Soviet casualties went without mentioning, and the term atheist was never used to describe them. Pius XII suddenly switched from being Hitler's ally against communism to being America's ally against communism.

The American people need to know this story, whether they want to hear it or not. An honest appraisal of World War II would probably have prevented the Vietnam War, which resulted from a Catholic U.S. president, John Kennedy, supporting an unpopular, minority Roman Catholic regime in South Vietnam against a nationalist, non-Catholic popular revolt.

The Roman Catholic Church continues to deny what it has done. It is a package of lies born from Constantine's anti-pagan reign of terror. Millions of Protestant Christians were murdered by the Catholic Church in Europe from the middle ages until the 18th century.

We need to remind American (and global) Protestants that while they might agree with the Pope on certain issues, he is a dangerous bedfellow. Atheists and Protestants are traditional allies on at least one issue: freedom of religion. We may argue with some Protestants about how the concept of freedom of religion is applied in public places, including public schools. That should not separate us on the basic idea of freedom on conscience and religious choice.

We must also keep in mind that any sufficiently large group of people will be complex when we look at its individuals. History has seen intolerant Protestant sects at times, and too often atheist dictators have treated religious belief or practice as criminal. Many modern Catholics do not want to force their religion on others. Those of us who believe in religious tolerance must stick together on that issue. On the other hand, we must not excuse the complicity of churches, or non-religious institutions, in crimes against humanity.

See also: At Event, a Rare Look at Putin's Life [Ellen Barry, New York Times]

Good Friday, Socialism, and Acts 4

Even the heathen readers of my blog probably at least know that Good Friday is the day Christians around the world remember the death of their Lord Jesus of Bethlehem by crucifixion, the death penalty being carried out by Roman soldiers. According to the Christian Bible, two days later, on Sunday morning, this same Jesus rose from the dead.

Protestant Christian sects, once there were some that were not murdered by the Catholic Church, hold that the Bible is the best guide to Christianity. Fundamentalists hold that the Bible is literally true. Given all that, be sure to memorize the following passage. Feel free to recite it at Republican Party and Tea Party meetings, where Bible quoting is generally considered a good thing.

It is Acts of the Apostles, chapter 4, verses 31 to 37 (Acts 4:31-37). I quote from the Authorized King James Version, lest anyone accuse me of using some liberal translation of the Greek.

"32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all.

34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold.

35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus,

37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet."

If that is not socialism, it is communism. It certainly is not the free-market capitalism of the Christian Right. It looks like a welfare state to me. Those with property are taxed 100% and that money is used to take care of "every man according as he had need."

There have been a number of Protestant Christian sects that have tried to implement this Bible-mandated system, but apparently the Devil has whispered his free-market system in the ears of most Christian leaders. Political Christianity is nothing new. The Protestant movement was highly intertwined in the politics of the past. In the Middle Ages the economy was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church holdings and the landed Aristocracy. Starting in the 15th century Protestantism appealed to the merchants and manufacturers, who were growing in economic power and sought higher social recognition and political say.

In the struggle between those Protestants who wanted to re-create primitive Christianity, including Acts Chapter 3, and those who wanted to mold the Bible to support their own ambitions, the latter won out. Peasant rebellions (like that of 1381 in England) tended to focus on Acts Chapter 3, but peasants never gained social or economic power. Just as today Fundamentalism is obscured by the greed of those who want the literal Bible to not interfere with their hatred of immigrants and hopes of joining the billionaire boys club. (Speaking of which, read on to Acts Chapter 5).

Good Friday, too, has always been a problem for Christians. What kind of Dad has his son Crucified? Even the evil old Jehovah, tribal god of the Jews, did not make Abraham actually kill his own son Isaac. The sadomasochism of the Catholic Church, the tendency toward a homosexual priesthood, and the love of cruel punishments for heretics (especially female heretics) all. feed on the Crucifixion.

Perhaps the lesson of the Crucifixion is that Death is no big deal. For all its proclaimed Jewishness, the early Christian cult seems to have gathered more from pagan resurrection cults than from the Torah. Life and death were known to be part of a cycle. Living things must die so that other living things can eat. Life dies back in winter and returns in spring. To seek immortality is to wreck what Fate has ordained. And so Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead, but then he vanished into thin air, like a ghost, but with the promise of returning in the spring like the daffodils.

Perhaps He never came back because Christians never took his communist social system to heart. Perhaps only when Acts 4 is instituted on a global scale will we see the true return of the god of Spring, and the establishment of the true Zion.

Me, I'll stick with the more modest democratic form of socialism. I like my liberty, but I'm willing to temper it to a reasonable degree for the general good. Maybe Jesus would not have liked that, but then while I might take his advice into consideration, I don't feel at all bound by it.

On the other hand, since the Bible demands that we hold medicine in common, I think a little preaching might turn the corner in favor of Universal Health Care.

Creationism and Free Markets

Religion and politics can make even stranger bedfellows than politics alone.

One of my favorites is the Free Market and Creationism combo of the Christian Right. But then wasn't it transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?" The inconsistencies between free market ideology and creationism are seldom examined, but require a very, big mind to have room to keep them separate.

The benefits of free markets were first described by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. He showed how men and women, each individually selfish, could compete with each other in producing (and consuming) goods in an unregulated market. The result would be an improvement in the overall good of the community, just as if the individuals had been acting out of community spirit. This non-obvious result, that selfish behavior could have a positive result for the whole community, was called the Invisible Hand.

Right wing Christians, or at least pundits who pretend to be Christian, love free markets. They love private wealth, and their basic Christian doctrine can be summarized as "every man for himself." Out of the random transactions of free markets is born capitalism, and from capitalism comes everything good in the lives of free market pundits, Christian and pagan alike. They hate central planning by governments. They hate the strong-arm five year plans of the old Communist regimes. They even hate the gentler planning by Democratic governments that seek to ameliorate some of the situations where the Invisible Hand has not worked out quite so well for a few ten millions of American citizens.

Not all right-wing economic commentators are Christian, or even Creationists, but plenty are or pretend to be. Creationism is the opposite of free market ideology. Its mildest form, Intelligent Design theory, states that complex things, like the earth and its creatures, must have been created by an Intelligence, i.e. God. It rejects the scientific observation that complex things can be created over time by natural processes, also known as the theory of evolution (by natural selection).

The more fundamental Christian belief is that the world was created exactly as described in the Old Testament of the Bible: a particular God (not Allah or Zeus, or even Gunputty, mind you) created the world and all of its creatures in seven days. Since this has no basis in science, or even in pragmatic observation, Intelligent Design theory was designed to offer an alternative to the theory of evolution in U.S. public school system biology classes.

The difficulty of applying the Creationist mindset (the need for a dictatorial controlling intelligence to get anything done) to the economic system of the United States of America is a blessing. Things seem to happen in the economy without God sticking his nose into our business.

Adolf Hitler did not like quantum physics, but he was okay with natural selection. Hitler was Roman Catholic, and he did like controlling Germany's economy. I think the mutual hatred of Catholic and Communist leaders in that era had much to do with their mutual desires to run command economies. All the Catholic dictators of Europe of the 1930s and 40s, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Philippe Petain, and Hitler ran command economies, just like Joseph Stalin did in the U.S.S.R., then the only communist nation.

Protestant Christianity, in its diversity, has a long historical association with the merchant class. The Catholic Church mostly sided with the aristocracy during the formative centuries of the modern epic. The merchant class does not like to be dictated to. Hence its ideology of individualistic interpretation of the Bible and support for republics or, if necessary, democracies.

The divide, then, is not so wide. Creationism is an assertion of Biblical authority. Protestantism is associated with the idea that the business of Christianity is business. Christian businesses (including preachers and pundits) need to appeal to their target market. So they promote Creationism to further their own self interest. Free markets also promote their self-interest because the people with the most money to give (buying advertisements to sell over-priced gold on radio shows, for instance) are still mostly from the merchant (business people) class. It is all about self interest. If there were gods, they would probably want nothing to do with it.

Nazi Pope Blasts Islam, False Gods

The man called Benedict XVI, legal A.K.A. Joseph Alois Ratzinger, continues to prove he is the third in a line of fascist, and more specifically Nazi, Popes. According to accounts in the the Associated Press dated October 11, 2010, Pope Benedict recently "denounced terrorist ideologies that spur violence in God's name," adding that "these ideologies are based on false gods." [See Pope Denounces Terrorist Ideas]

Wow. Of course, Roman Catholics have been self-selecting and inbreeding for gullibility for 17 centuries now. The Catholic Church so cultivates ignorance of history and religion that it discourages its communicants from reading the Bible. Sadly, because of the nature of politics, even many Protestant Americans don't know we had to fight the Catholics in World War II because of the first two fascist popes, Pius XI and Pius XII. They used their servants Benito Mussolini, Philippe Petain, General Francisco Franco and, most useful servant of all, Adolf Hitler, to try to eliminate all rival religions from the earth. In the process they murdered roughly 20 million atheists, 6 million Jews, and about 1 million Protestant Christians between 1936 and their defeat in 1945.

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was just a child then, but he became a member of Hitler Youth. Later, trying to clean up his resume a bit, he claimed he was forced into Nazi Youth and actually opposed Hitler. But we know what happened to even middle class Catholic Germans who opposed Hitler, or failed to attend Hitler Youth meetings. They were put in concentration camps. So the opposing Hitler bit is just a bald lie.

The Catholic Church's idea that its God is the true god and all other Gods are false goes back to pre-Catholic Christianity. Christians essentially invented the idea of there being only one God, and that has brought the world untold grief. Recounting how many non-Catholics have been murdered over the centuries by Catholics in their God's name would take an encyclopedia. Even Google would pale at the thought of the cost of building a datacenter to hold all the data of the victims of the Catholic Church.

Islam is the original Protestant sect. There were lots of non-Catholic sects before Islam, but the Catholics wiped them out. Mohammed and his Moslem followers were the first to put forward a different theology and live to tell about it. In fact, they beat the Catholics at their own game of "conversion or death" for about a millenia. The Catholic Church looked ready for total defeat around 1500 A.D., but the discovery of America, and the working of Mexican and Peruvian natives to death in gold and silver mines, allowed the Catholics, led by Spain, to turn the tide. Catholic mercenary armies inspired not so much be faith as by payment in silver stopped and then turned back the advance of the Turkish, Islamic empire in Europe.

This weakness of the Catholic Church around 1500 also enabled the survival of what we now no as Protestant Christian churches. There were christian protestants before Martin Luther. Martin Luther was the just the first to call out the Popes on their bull and live to tell about. This allowed,over time, ever larger numbers of people to engage in rational thought, religous choice, and ethical behavior, a process that I hope will continue to grow.

The internal stuggles of the Catholic Church during the past 2 decades look like war preparations to me. Tolerant, pro-democracy persons within the Church have been systematically deprived of power. The Church's assaults on women's rights have become stident, including the recent announcement that it is heresy punishable by excommunication to even think about making women priests. The Church has become a right-wing dictatorship, just as it did before it engineered the rise of the fascist dictators to power during the 1930s.

Affirming its intent to restore fascist governments wherever possible, and ultimately make a bid for global domination again, is Benedict XVI's ongoing efforts to make saints of thousands of General Franco's supporters [See fascist saints]. General Franco was the Catholic dictator of Spain, highly praised and blessed by Pope Pius XII, who murdered millions of non-Catholics in Spain during his reign of terror, which lasted until his death in 1975.

False Gods indeed. The idea of One True God would seem to me to imply that the worst mistake a person could make is getting a poor signal from God. Like God is AT&T, and has never quite figured out how to make cell phones work right.

I denounce the use of violence to spread religion or philosophy of any kind. I admit to being anti-religion, preferring my Natural Liberation Philosophy. But the way to convert people is by example and argument, not force. Both Catholicism and Islam have also used, at time, economic policy to encourage conversions. Right now the Catholic Church is bankrupt. It's main weapon against Islam is the United States government, which it influences through Catholic voter blocks and lobbying. Americans should not allow the Pope to use our tax dollars to further his agenda of ignorance, superstition, and centralised dictorial governance.

Further reading:
Hitler's Pope: Pius XII by John Cornwell

The Vatican in World Politics by Avro Manhattan

On Good Works

In the arguments between Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians there are a number of big issues. One is whether the Pope, or whoever happens to be Bishop of Rome, was ever meant by Jesus Christ to be the dictator of the Christian faithful [see Was Peter the First Pope?]. Another is whether during the ritual of Communion the bread and wine are simply symbols, or are actually tranformed into the body and blood of Christ. Today, this year's Easter Sunday, I want to take on the Faith v. Works issue. Protestants, starting with Martin Luther, hold that man can enter Heaven by Faith alone. Catholics hold that people must have faith, but must also perform good works to go to heaven.

The controversy is a good example of people overreacting to a historical situation, and then setting their beliefs in cement. Martin Luther was not the first Protestant (or heretic, if you take the Catholic view); he was the first to live to tell about it. He did not like the Roman Catholic version of good works, which insisted that they consisted of cash payments to the Church. This took a variety of forms, including selling indulgences [see also Catholic defense of indulgences] but the money for all this seldom went to charity. Rather it supported the rather lavish life styles of bishops, cardinals, and the Pope.

Luther reacted by saying that Faith alone determined whether people were in God's grace and got into heaven. On the one hand this was an act of self-denial, for Luther was (or had been) a beneficiary of the heaven-for-sale system.

But Luther had misidentified the problem. The problem was not good works; the problem was the substitution of a system of extortion for a system of good works. And not only did Luther and his Lutherans fail to correct this initial reaction, it became worse with John Calvin and his followers. Protestant sects in the 1500's (most of them) adopted, as a theological position, that people with money had no obligation to give to charity. This, of course, appealed to certain people with money. It was the basis of the Protestant work ethic: work or starve, for there will be no charity for the unfortunate. In the most extreme Calvinist interpretation a man could behave rather badly and still get into heaven solely because he held the correct faith.

While the Catholic Church did little in the way of reforming its theology, during its internal reformation in the 1500's, in response to Protestant criticism, the Church did make an effort to do more genuine charitable work, and has continued supporting its charitable arms to this day. In the United States, Catholic Charities is a big organization.

Many modern Protestant churches have their own interpretation of the good works issue: good works may not be necessary to get into heaven, but they are a basic part of being good humans.

Islam, more than any other religion I know of, emphasizes the donation of money to charity by its wealthier members. This is one reason it is so popular in poorer communities around the world.

For those of us who know there is no heaven and no hell, the question is how we should act here in everyday reality. Most of us see a value in charity. Sometimes it is rationalized in social terms: feed the hungry, and they don't need to steal food. Modern economies have shown us that economic tragedy can happen to almost anyone. Feeding economic unfortunates creates a culture where, if you become unfortunate yourself, you can depend on others to feed you. But most of all, it just feels good to help other people. It makes you feel competent and useful. It is a basic human function; to not be charitable is to not be fully human.

I have met vitriolic American "Christians" who believe that they should not give to charity. The idea that God and Jesus Christ actually prohibit Christians from doing good works is bizarre and must reflect an underlying social or mental pathology.