Abstract
On December 29, 1170, four knights confronted Archbishop Thomas Becket before the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. They sought to cow Becket into submission to his former friend and confident King Henry II. They specifically demanded that he lift his excommunication and suspension of two bishops who had supported Henry in his quarrel with Becket. The archbishop, England’s highest ranking cleric, refused. The enraged knights set upon him, intending to drag him from the church, but his resistance led to first one, then another, dealing
If God defines what is good and what is evil, then those who follow God’s commands are morally justified to commit similar atrocities. History shows the results: holy wars, burning of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, the English Civil War, witch hunts, cultural genocide, brutal conquests of the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, ethnic cleansing, slavery, colonialist tyranny, and pogroms against the Jews eventually leading to the Holocaust.
—Victor Stenger1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Victor Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012), 254–55.
Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise ofFaith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Vintage, 2002), xvii–xviii.
William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portrait of an Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), xv–xvi.
Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: Norton, 2011), 257.
Philip Kitcher, “Seeing Is Unbelieving,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, March 23, 2012.
Will Durant, The Age of Faith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 1084.
Jeremy du Quesnay Adams, Review of A World Lit Only by Fire, Speculum: The Journal of the Medieval Academy of America 70:1 (January 1995): 173–74.
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Vintage, 2008), 12.
C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), 178.
Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 245.
For example, see Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1715, Second Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
For example, see the pioneering work of Lyn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)
Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Richard Carrier, “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science,” in John W. Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2009), 414. For a more balanced New Atheist view, see chapter 3, “The Rebirth and Triumph of Science,” in Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith, although he concludes the chapter quoting with approval the same passage from Carrier, “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science,” 99.
Robert Daniels, Russia: The Roots of Confrontation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 170–71.
For example, Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Copyright information
© 2014 Borden W. Painter Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Painter, B.W. (2014). Europe to 1600. In: The New Atheist Denial of History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137477699_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137477699_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58605-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47769-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)