POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
This is a celebrity circus, not a debate and certainly not any kind of intellectual event. It is pseudo-intellectual nonsense posing as significant discussion.
Religion is the opposite of logic, and centuries ago philosophers discovered that you cannot argue with logic about religious matters.
The Munk Debates might just as well be an arm of Garth Drabinsky Showboat Enterprises.
The two people involved, while celebrities indeed, are both people who have done no service to humanity.
Blair is a war criminal, pure and simple, and a kind of nasty idiot to boot.
Hitchens is a very clever, eloquent man but one who worked hard to make the criminal invasion of Iraq seem acceptable.
There really is a special place in hell for each of these gentlemen.
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How easily we forget that the history of organized Christianity provides almost certainly the bloodiest tale in all of human history.
The Crusades, that dark saga of Christianity written in blood and terror, continued sporadically over hundreds of years. They served little other purpose than gathering wealth through spoils and sacking cities and easing the periodic domestic political difficulties of the papacy and major princes of Europe.
We hear of the treatment of women under Islam in certain places, not remembering that Christian women were left locked in iron chastity belts for years while their husbands raped their way across the Near East. And the character of Saladin, hard warrior that he was, shines nobly in history compared to the moral shabbiness of Richard Lionheart.
Europe wove a remarkable tapestry of horrors in the name of Christianity from the beginning of the modern era. There was the Holy Inquisition, the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War, the St Bartholomew Massacre, Cromwell's slaughter in Ireland, the enslavement and widespread extermination of native peoples in the Americas, the Eighty Years' War in Holland, the expulsion of the Huguenots from France, the pogroms, the burning of witches, and numberless other horrific events right down to The Holocaust itself, which was largely the work of people who considered themselves, as did the slave drivers of America's South, to be Christians.
Over and above the conflicts motivated by religion, European and American history, a history dominated by people calling themselves Christian, runs with rivers, lakes, and whole seas of blood. Just a sampling includes the Hundred Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the slave trade, the French Revolution, the Vendée, the Napoleonic Wars, the Trail of Tears, the Opium War, African slavery in the American South, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the massacre in the Belgium Congo, the Crimean War, lynchings, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II.
