Religion and violence, part 2,000

            I’m late to the party, I reckon, being sick for a week and such, but this whole President versus Christianity thing still is worth discussing.

            You couldn’t have missed it if you’ve been on social media, at all. At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5, Obama said that Christians, as well as Muslims have at times committed atrocities.

            His words: “Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

            I’m not certain, but the high horse comment might not have been the best use of the language. Condemning ISIS for burning humans alive or beheading them hardly seems like a high horse no matter what side of the aisle one comes from.

            Then the Internet universe imploded.

            Just as some examples, Jim Gilmore, former Republican governor of Virginia said “The president’s comments … at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve heard a president make in my lifetime.”

            Erick Erickson at RedState.com wrote, “Christ himself is truth. When we possess Christ, we possess truth. The President is a moral relativist.”

            Things got so crazy, some were defending the Crusades and the Inquisition. Bill Donohue of the National Catholic League said, “The Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen.”

            Donohue also said the Inquisition only killed 1,394 people, so how bad could it have been?

            The right accused Obama of empowering ISIS with his words, despite the fact he hammered ISIS as the murderers they are.

            Here’s the absolute truth as I see it: We have been grappling with these questions forever. We, Christians, have done some awful things in Christ’s name.

            But picking a fight at the National Prayer Breakfast wasn’t the time nor the place, it seems to me. For the life of me, I can’t see what was to be gained. I don’t think, for the most part, any of us, Christians, think all Muslims are bloodthirsty characters any more than for the most part, any of us, Christians think we are all perfect.

            As Robert Jeffress, the pastor of a large church in Dallas says, “When Christians act violently, they are acting in opposition to the teachings of their founder, Jesus Christ. They cannot cite a single verse in the New Testament that calls for violence against unbelievers.”

            According to one Website I looked at, the Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they are hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called hypocrites and warned that Allah will send them to hell if they do no join in the slaughter.

            Now, the Old Testament of the Bible is just about as graphic, (ask the Amelikites if you can find any of them), but the difference is the verse of violence are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historic context in which they were written.

            But it goes even deeper than that. In Dissent magazine last week, Michael Walzer concluded that Obama’s point 2as an intellectual one, not a jab at Christianity.

            “If I say that Christianity in the 11^th century was a crusading religion and that it was dangerous to Jews and Muslims, who were rightly fearful … would that make me anti-Christian? I know that crusading fervor isn’t essential to the Christian religion.”

            Even secular commentators had issues, though. “We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit,” wrote Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of the conservative National Review. “But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West’s high horse, because we’ve earned the right to sit in that saddle.”

            Look, I no earthly idea why Obama’s people thought this was a good idea, as almost a spanking of the right at one of “their” events, but other than some yakking back and forth, nothing has come from it. I can’t imagine that was the idea was in the first place.