“We Americans have not, since the Revolution, suffered the endless European wars of religion in large measure because we have agreed that we will not seek to use the lever of state power to force others to support or adhere to our religion.”
R. Scott Idiot
R2K Novice Historian
Bret Responds,
I won’t take the time to unravel this but if the reader will reference the book by William T. Cavanaugh titled “The Myth of Religious Violence,” one will learn from Cavanaugh that the claim that “religion is … essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state (p. 4).” In other words, of course R. Scott Idiot would seek to perpetuate this myth since their myth perpetuates his religious advocacy for the religion that outlaws the supremacy of Jesus Christ as King of Kings. Cavanaugh goes on to say that “It is this claim (the presence of wars of religion) that I find both unsustainable and dangerous (p. 6).”
Cavanaugh shreds our beloved Dr. R. Scott Idiot by writing of different variants of this view that “They all suffer from the same defect: the inability to find a convincing way to separate religious violence from secular violence (p. 8.)” Such arguments in fact “immunize themselves from empirical evidence (p. 8.)” Cavanaugh argues on the contrary that “so-called secular ideologies and institutions like nationalism and liberalism can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrational as those called religious (p. 8.)”
Cavanaugh in fact organizes the different variants of Clark’s claim in Chapter 1 under the three categories of claims that “religion” is 1) absolutist, 2) divisive and 3) irrational. Cavanaugh concludes the chapter, indicating “The point is that the distinction between secular and religious violence is unhelpful, misleading, and mystifying, and it should be avoided altogether (p. 56).”
Now either Dr. R. Scott Idiot doesn’t know this and so is stupid or else he does know it and is seeking to deceive people into his position. So, either he is an idiot or he is a deceiver. You decide which is worst.
