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Stephan Hawking Declares There is No God
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  1. Nonsense. It is inline with Rick Santorum's campaign, many conservative websites, and the Scandinavian sociopath Anders Brevik. It mixes spiritual and physical geographies.

    The Holy Land was never Christian. Hell, it has never been entirely anybody's. Just a very long series of historical invasions and occupations. It was Jewish, then Babylonian, then Greek, then Phillistine, then Jewish, then Roman, then Byzantine, then Persian, then Arab, and now Jewish again. Muslims had ruled the Holy Land for over 400 years before the first Crusade. Medieval historians do not agree with this new and very revisionist view.

    Professor of Medieval History Jay Rubenstein puts it well:

    Did the crusaders view their war in these terms? Was it a defensive war?

    The answer is a resounding "no."

    The crusaders had one goal in 1096: to capture the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb of Christ, in Jerusalem. Christianity at this time was less about ideas and more about things--places, objects and bones. The highest devotional practice was the pilgrimage, a journey to a holy site, to pray before the body of a saint. The model saint whom all others imitated was Christ, and His tomb was the most sacred one imaginable even though, unlike other saints' shrines, Christ's was empty.

    The First Crusade, then, was not about turning back centuries of Muslim expansion. It was about seizing control of sacred landscapes. It was, in modern parlance, "a war of choice" or "an act of aggression." On July 15, 1099, this willfully chosen campaign ended victoriously when the crusaders conquered Jerusalem.

    Later crusades, arguably, were defensive, in that they sought to preserve or restore the fruits of this victory. But their defensive goals served to reaffirm that earlier act of aggression.

    Many crusaders would add one proviso to this argument. It was a war of vengeance. The Christians were out to avenge the sufferings of their Savior, the humiliations He was forced to endure every day as unbelieving pagans soiled the places that He had made sacred through his touch.    ​
  2. There is no scientific evidence that telepathy is a real phenomenon.

    I believe that a certain percentage of wild-ass guesses will turn out to be true. This is neither telepathy nor prescience.

    And how many hundred times have you guessed a score wrong?

    It's an interesting scenario, but no proof will exist about alien civilizations until evidence emerges, if ever. However likely it is that other civilizations exist, the vastness of the universe, even the vastness of the galaxy may prevent contact between them impossibly remote. Until then it is science fiction, Buck.
  3. The vastness of the galaxy might make it impossible to contact them given that according to our current state of scientific knowledge we believe that faster than light travel is impossible but superior beings may have been able to circumvent that. They may have found the flaw in our reasoning.
  4. “All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."

    "No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”

    ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy​
  5. Professor of Medieval History Thomas Madden disagrees.

    "From the time of Mohammed, Muslims had sought to conquer the Christian world. They did a pretty good job of it, too. After a few centuries of steady conquests, Muslim armies had taken all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and most of Spain. In other words, by the end of the eleventh century the forces of Islam had captured two-thirds of the Christian world. Palestine, the home of Jesus Christ; Egypt, the birthplace of Christian monasticism; Asia Minor, where St. Paul planted the seeds of the first Christian communities: These were not the periphery of Christianity but its very core. And the Muslim empires were not finished yet. They continued to press westward toward Constantinople, ultimately passing it and entering Europe itself. As far as unprovoked aggression goes, it was all on the Muslim side. At some point what was left of the Christian world would have to defend itself or simply succumb to Islamic conquest. The First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in 1095 in response to an urgent plea for help from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Urban called the knights of Christendom to come to the aid of their eastern brethren. It was to be an errand of mercy, liberating the Christians of the East from their Muslim conquerors. In other words, the Crusades were from the beginning a defensive war. The entire history of the eastern Crusades is one of response to Muslim aggression."
  6. This call from Urban was to come to the defense of European Constantinople and Romania not to take back Jerusalem. Read it HERE. But the Crusades did exactly that. They were toally focused on the Holy Land, not Constantinople. They did not go to root out the Moors in European Spain or liberate Romania, North Africa or other Muslim strongholds. They went to conquer Jerusalem which had been Muslim for 400 years. The Christians remaining in Jerusalem were not Europeans, they were locals. The notion that an invasion and occupation of Jersusalem from people 2000 miles away was somehow "defensive" just because someone has declared some tenuous kinship with local Christians does not hold water. If it did, then Russia is fighting a defensive war in Ukraine because they are invading to defend the local Russians in Ukraine.

  7. Not sure if you know this, but there are five written versions of Urban's bull. All of them were written after the conquer of Jerusalem, and they all differ wildly in tone and content. What you are linking is spurious at best. None of the bulls carry weight in Crasade history. It is generally accepted based on several of Urban's preachings after the Council of Clermont that the main goals of the crusade were to aid the Orthodox Christians and to re-open the Pilgrim trails that the Seljuqs had closed.
  8. Then so is your entire thesis, even thought you have linked no evidence at all.

    The Orthodox Christians were in Constantinople, not in Jerusalem. It is not generally accepted that the Crusades were defensive. That is a huge stretch and dates from very recently. It is generally accepted that the Crusades were about the conquest of Jerusalem.

    cru·sade noun

    A medieval military expedition, one of a series made by Europeans to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries​
  9. Red55 a mixture of myth and distortion. Wikipedia offers a nice brief discussion of the times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

    The Holy Land was a part of the Roman/Byzantine empire to about 700 when the first Islamic expansion burst out of the Arabian peninsula. It had become Christian through a gradual conversion from the polytheism of classic times to Christianity. After Constantine I it became the official religion of the Roman state. At that time the leading theologians were Egyptian and the adoption of the Nicene Creed is the result of argument between 2 Egyptian bishops. St Augustine was African as was St Jerome (I think). The middle east was a key part of the Empire and center of Christian thought.

    The Muslim expansion swept across Africa to Spain where it wasn't stopped until they reached the Pyrenees. In the east only Istanbul was the bulwark that prevented expansion into Europe for 800 years. The loss of the Holy Land to another religion was very traumatic to a Christian Europe already devastated by the fall of Rome and collapse of that civilization. Until 1000 or so the Catholic & Orthodox churches were unified.

    To ignore the fact that the Arabs had not only conquered the Holy Land from the Christians but the Reconquista was a stated religious and civic goal of the Church the Holy Roman Empire and all of the states in Europe is to ignore history. In view of that all the crusades could be considered defensive. The early crusades were in Spain pushing back the Arab invasion and those participating in it were provided all the dispensations later crusaders were. Likewise the attempts to capture Jerusalem and the Holy Land were attempts to take back what was lost. That is one reason the Byzantine emperors supported them. The Emperors also wanted to reconquer the Holy Land as it was a reservoir of wealth and manpower. Wealth as it was a center of commerce and trade with the east and manpower to fill the army.

    The Islamic world (Arab and Turk [after about 1075 I think]) was the aggressor throughout the period. Only one crusade was successful and the 100 years of Outremer was of limited impact. The Turks were still gaining territory in the 1500s and were assaulting the walls of Vienna in the late 1600's.

    To call the Crusades a simple attempt to reclaim the holy sites is misleading similar to claiming the invasion of Iraq was only about WMDs.
  10. You are really not helping yourself with this sad comparison, Winston.

    Look, the point is that the crusades were not "defensive" in any way. They were just one on dozens of major conquests of Palestine that have occurred in the last 3,000 years. The Crusades have no special place among these wars as being "Defensive". Each supplanted a previous owner through invasion and occupation. That is how conquests work.
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