"To such heights of evil has religion been able to drive men."
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
This is part five about the love of violence and suffering that Catholicism conditions its followers to worship as a form of "love" for a God who requires an innocent man to suffer and die - rather than simply punishing or banishing a devil who is guilty as hell - in order for Him to forgive us for being using our "free will" to be the sinners he created us with a preference for being. The article was posted on CatholicExchange. com (at
https://catholicexchange.com/gods-punishment-is-just-restorative-and-medicinal/), and claims that god's punishment is just, restorative, and medicinal. Catholics who "believe" such an idea are why the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius agreed with the Catholic theologian Blase Pascal that "men never commit evil so joyfully and fully as when they do it for religious conviction."
In his book, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, historian Perez Zagorin reveals how the great St Augustine laid the foundation stone for such homicidal blood lust. Zagorin "takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy."
In fact, “from Augustine onward, and for well over a
thousand years, virtually all Christian theologians agreed that heretics should
be persecuted, and most agreed that they should be killed.”
As Zagorin points out:
After his "conversion to
coercion", Augustine became a leading proponent and even a theoretician of
persecution,” even insisting that “emperors
and political authorities had the God-given right to crush the sacrilege and
schism of the Donatists, since they were as obligated to repress false and evil
religion as to prevent the crime of pagan idolatry." [p.28]
Zagorin also states that "Augustine
elaborated his position in favor of coercion in religion in a number of
letters. In a lengthy epistle to the Donatist Vincent, he argued for the
utility of coercion in inducing fear that can bring those who are subject to it
to the right way of thinking." [p.29]
As far as Augustine was concerned, “[M]any must first be
recalled to their Lord by the stripes of temporal scourging, like evil slaves,
and in some degree like good-for-nothing fugitives.”
In 408 CE, in a letter to Vincentius, Bishop of Cartenna and
a Donatist, Augustine explained further:
“I have therefore yielded to the evidence
afforded by these instances which my colleagues have laid before me. … . [For
example,] there was set over against my opinion my own town, which, although it
was once wholly on the side of Donatus, was brought over to the Catholic unity
by fear of imperial edicts, but which we now see filled with such detestation
of your ruinous perversity, that it would scarcely be believed that it had ever
been involved in your error.”
“Let us learn, my brother, in actions
which are similar to distinguish the intentions of the agents …. In some cases
both he that suffers persecution is in the wrong, and he that inflicts it is in
the right. In all these cases, what is important to attend to but this: who
were on the side of truth, and who on the side of iniquity; who acted from a
desire to injure, and who from a desire to correct what was amiss?”
And nearly a decade later, in a letter to Boniface (Epistle #185),
c. 417: De Correctione Donatistarum, Augustine went on to argue for the use of
torture by saying:
"Thou shall beat him with the rod,
and shall deliver his soul from hell;" and elsewhere he says, "He
that spareth the rod hateth his son." For, give us a man who with right
faith and true understanding can say with all the energy of his heart, "My
soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before
God?" and for such a one there is no need of the terror of hell, to say
nothing of temporal punishments or imperial laws, seeing that with him it is so
indispensable a blessing to cleave unto the Lord, that he not only dreads being
parted from that happiness as a heavy punishment, but can scarcely even bear
delay in its attainment.
Why, therefore, should not the Church use
force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others
to their destruction? Although even men who have not been compelled, but only
led astray, are received by their loving mother with more affection if they are
recalled to her bosom through the enforcement of terrible but salutary laws,
and are the objects of far more deep congratulation than those whom she had
never lost. Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have
left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender
words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master
when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show
symptoms of resistance;
The necessity for harshness is greater in
the investigation, than in the infliction, of punishment’: and again: ‘…it is
generally necessary to use more rigour in making inquisition, so that when the
crime has been brought to light, there may be scope for displaying clemency…’
Basically, Augustine looked at it this way: If a man “sees that it is unrighteousness for
which he suffers, he may be induced, from the consideration that he is
suffering and being tormented most fruitlessly, to change his purpose for the
better, and may at the same time escape both the fruitless annoyance and the
unrighteousness itself … .”
He went on to argue that since “our motive is Christian
love, torture is simply the means by which we therefore “love the sinner and
are concerned for his salvation. Hence, he continued, "we must not ignore any methods, however
distasteful, when seeking with a mother’s anxiety the salvation of them all.”
After all, Augustine continued, “What then is the function
of brotherly love? Does it, because it fears the short-lived fires of the
furnace for a few, therefore abandon all to the eternal fires of hell?” Hence, coercion
was not seen by Augustine as being intrinsically right or wrong; but as
depending upon “the nature of that to which he is coerced, whether it be good
or bad.”
Hence, for Augustine, the quintessential nature of the
"Christian theory of persecution," summed up in that letter to
Boniface, the Roman governor in Africa, was that "There is the unjust
persecution which the wicked inflict on the Church of Christ, and the just
persecution which the Church of Christ inflicts on the wicked."
And he summed this up in a pithy rhyme that clothed such
evils with all the eloquence of a Shakespearean sonnet, when he wrote, "Unless
by pain and suffering thou art taught, Thou canst not guide thyself aright in
aught."
Christians love to preach that "Jesus loves you," but as Fr Emmett Carter both illustrates and boldly claims, that "love" requires punishment, allowing Christians to "love" others the same way the God showed His love for us by torturing and murdering Jesus. With that kind of "love," which God promises to inflict on his sinful children for all eternity, Christians are indistinguishable from the very devils they love to accuse everyone else of being, simply for doubts that Christians are as "infallible" in their uses of punishments as the Roman Catholic Church claims it is, even when it supported the brutal torture and murder of women the Church labeled "infallibly" as "witches" and heretics.
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