The Burning Crusade Quotes

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania. “She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—” “Where did she get it from?” “Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.” Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.” Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound. He was barely breathing. “The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure, told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage, to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

War has always followed libraries, my apprentice. History has made no effort to hide that truth from us. Look at Rome; look at the Crusades. Vanquishing an enemy and taking his books was just as strategic as taking his cannons. Books are knowledge weaponized. And what weapons you cannot steal, you must burn.

But those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun." Suddenly his voice sounded to Will very strong, and very Welsh. "At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders -- oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe." His warm, deep voice ended, and there was only the roar of the engine. Will looked out over the grey-misted fields, silent. "There was a great long speech, now," John Rowlands said awkwardly. "But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends.

There is no greater jihad than to help the helpless - there is no greater crusade than to bring hope to the hopeless - there is no greater advancement than to lift the fallen - there is no greater humanity than to burn oneself for others to have warmth.

The Memorabilia, the abbey's small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and soidisant crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey's books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knightsfriars would have burned many of them as "heretical" according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope.

This was something new. Or something old. I didn’t think of what it might be until after I had let Aubrey go back to the clinic to bed down next to her child. Bankole had given him something to help him sleep. He did the same for her, so I won’t be able to ask her anything more until she wakes up later this morning. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them. Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. Witches! In 2032! A witch, in their view, tends to be a Moslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or, in some parts of the country, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, or even a Catholic. A witch may also be an atheist, a “cultist,” or a well-to-do eccentric. Well-to-do eccentrics often have no protectors or much that’s worth stealing. And “cultist” is a great catchall term for anyone who fits into no other large category, and yet doesn’t quite match Jarret’s version of Christianity. Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.

Religion, with its metaphysical error of absolute guilt, dominated the broadest, the cosmic realm. From there, it infiltrated the subordinate realms of biological, social and moral existence with its errors of the absolute and inherited guilt. Humanity, split up into millions of factions, groups, nations and states, lacerated itself with mutual accusations. "The Greeks are to blame," the Romans said, and "The Romans are to blame," the Greeks said. So they warred against one another. "The ancient Jewish priests are to blame," the early Christians shouted. "The Christians have preached the wrong Messiah," the Jews shouted and crucified the harmless Jesus. "The Muslims and Turks and Huns are guilty," the crusaders screamed. "The witches and heretics are to blame," the later Christians howled for centuries, murdering, hanging, torturing and burning heretics. It remains to investigate the sources from which the Jesus legend derives its grandeur, emotional power and perseverance. Let us continue to stay outside this St. Vitus dance. The longer we look around, the crazier it seems. Hundreds of minor patriarchs, self-proclaimed kings and princes, accused one another of this or that sin and made war, scorched the land, brought famine and epidemics to the populations. Later, this became known as "history." And the historians did not doubt the rationality of this history. Gradually the common people appeared on the scene. "The Queen is to blame," the people's representatives shouted, and beheaded the Queen. Howling, the populace danced around the guillotine. From the ranks of the people arose Napoleon. "The Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians are to blame," it was now said. "Napoleon is to blame," came the reply. "The machines are to blame!" the weavers screamed, and "The lumpenproletariat is to blame," sounded back. "The Monarchy is to blame, long live the Constitution!" the burgers shouted. "The middle classes and the Constitution are to blame; wipe them out; long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the proletarian dictators shout, and "The Russians are to blame," is hurled back. "Germany is to blame," the Japanese and the Italians shouted in 1915. "England is to blame," the fathers of the proletarians shouted in 1939. And "Germany is to blame," the self-same fathers shouted in 1942. "Italy, Germany and Japan are to blame," it was said in 1940. It is only by keeping strictly outside this inferno that one can be amazed that the human animal continues to shriek "Guilty!" without doubting its own sanity, without even once asking about the origin of this guilt. Such mass psychoses have an origin and a function. Only human beings who are forced to hide something catastrophic are capable of erring so consistently and punishing so relentlessly any attempt at clarifying such errors.

But why?" Gabriel asks. "Why do they wish to cause such pain to another human?" "Why does the Spanish Inquisition do what it does?" I ask. "Why does our own Church burn witches at the stake? Why did our own crusaders punish the Moors so exquisitely?" Gabriel thinks about this. He knows I don't beg answers for these questions. "Of course it's easy to say that we mete out punishment to those who are an abomination in God's eyes," I say. "But it's more than that, isn't it? I think we don't just allow torturers but condone them as a way to excise the fear we all have of death. To torture someone is to take control of death, to be the master of it, even for a short time.

This is the God of the Crusaders and jihadists, of the inquisitors, misogynists, and homophobes. This is the God we talk about when we stand around a burning pyre, hurling stones and abuses at the heretics being grilled there.

It’s not like I could kill Curran now. Should. It’s not like I should kill Curran now. I could always try. Later. The Beast Lord crossed his arms on his chest. His face looked placid. Calm before the storm . . . The jaguar at my feet tensed and tried to look smaller. Nick needed a bit of a distraction while he rode like a bat out of hell on the horse commandeered from the Pack stables. I’d provided that distraction by leading Jim and his posse of pissy shapechangers on a merry chase through the countryside. “Just so we’re clear,” Curran said. “You did understand that I didn’t wish you or the Crusader to leave Keep?” “Yes.” “That’s what I thought,” Curran said. He grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall. My feet felt no floor. His fingers crushed my neck. I clasped the hand that held me and jammed a long silver needle into his palmar nerve between the index finger and thumb. Curran’s fingers trembled. His hand opened releasing me. I slid to the floor, dropped, and swiped at his legs. He fell. I rolled away and came to my feet. On the opposite side of the room Curran rose to a half crouch, his eyes burning gold. The whole thing took maybe two seconds. The stunned audience never got a chance to react. Curran reached for the needle, pulled it out, and dropped it to the floor, never taking his eyes off me. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I have more.

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

Only recently has tolerance become an emblem of Western civilization, an emblem that identifies the West exclusively with modernity, and with liberal democracy in particular, while also disavowing the West’s savagely intolerant history, which includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burnings, centuries of anti-Semitism, slavery, lynching, genocidal and other violent practices of imperialism and colonialism, Naziism, and brutal responses to decolonization.

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.

One wonders why no one in church history has ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved. Yet if love is to be placed above all other considerations (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8), if nothing has any value apart from love (1 Cor. 13:1–3), and if the only thing that matters is faith working in love (Gal. 5:6), how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetrated such things were not only not deemed heretics but often were (and yet are) held up as “heroes of the faith”? If there is an answer to this question, I believe it lies in the deceptive power of the sword. While God uses the sword of governments to preserve law, order, and justice, as we have seen, there is a corrupting principality and power always at work. Much like the magical ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the sword has a demonic power to deceive us. When we pick it up, we come under its power. It convinces us that our use of violence is a justified means to a noble end. It intoxicates us with the unquenchable dream of redemptive violence and blinds us to our own iniquities, thereby making us feel righteous in overpowering the unrighteousness of others. Most of the slaughtering done throughout history has been done by people who sincerely believed they were promoting “the good.” Everyone thinks their wars are just, if not holy. Marxists, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Islamic terrorists, and Christian crusaders have this in common.

The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire. The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name. Godfrey of Bouillon took off his sword and with a small entourage circled the city and prayed, before making his way to the Holy Sepulchre. Next morning, to Tancred’s fury, Raymond’s men nervously climbed onto the roof of al-Aqsa, surprised the huddled Muslims and beheaded the men and women in another spasm of killing. Some of the Muslims leaped to their deaths.

Whoever believes in the myth of ‘peaceful coexistence that marked the relationships between the conquered and the conquerors’ should reread the stories of the burned convents and monasteries, of the profaned churches, of the raped nuns, of the Christian or Jewish women abducted to be locked away in their harems. He should ponder on the crucifixions of Cordoba, the hangings of Granada, the beheadings of Toledo and Barcelona, of Seville and Zamora. (The beheadings of Seville, ordered by Mutamid: the king who used those severed heads, heads of Jews and Christians, to adorn his palace). Invoking the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation or hanging or impalement. Ringing a bell, the same. Wearing green, the colour of Islam, also. And when a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside. To bow. And mind to the Jew or the Christian who dared react to the insults of a Muslim. As for the much-flaunted detail that the infidel-dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam, not even encouraged to do so, do you know why they were not? Because those who converted to Islam did not pay taxes. Those who refused, on the contrary, did.

Watching eyes That later become waiting enemies Vanquished with the cross On holy ground Spear of Michael and Barbed arrow Of St. Sebastian —- Flies tipped with flame through skin And burns though all human sin. Retribution lands With the blunt weight of a blessed two handed hammer Into the side of a helmeted skull and into bruised clavicle. Now in this battle of the ages, we invoke the Unmovable resolve of St Joan To deliver a victory against all odds And at all costs. Patron of the soldier And witness to the faith Dirt-covered Gauntlet of the Paladin, Light of the soul that overpowers disbelief and disdain, You are the clerics of tomorrow. Wearing the crown of creation Anointed by this prayer And this anthem. - Glory of The Long Forgotten Crusader

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER JESUS DIED ON A ROMAN cross, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, who had once been persecuted by the empire, became the empire, and those who had once denied the sword took up the sword against their neighbors. Pagan temples were destroyed, their patrons forced to convert to Christianity or die. Christians whose ancestors had been martyred in gladiatorial combat now attended the games, cheering on the bloodshed. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On July 15, 1099, Christian crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem, then occupied by Fatimite Arabs. They found a breach in the wall and took the city. Declaring “God wills it!” they killed every defender in their path and dashed the bodies of helpless babies against rocks. When they came upon a synagogue where many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge, they set fire to the building and burned the people inside alive. An eyewitness reported that at the Porch of Solomon, horses waded through blood. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Through a series of centuries-long inquisitions that swept across Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women accused of witchcraft, were tortured by religious leaders charged with protecting the church from heresy. Their instruments of torture, designed to slowly inflict pain by dismembering and dislocating the body, earned nicknames like the Breast Ripper, the Head Crusher, and the Judas Chair. Many were inscribed with the phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “Glory be only to God.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. In a book entitled On Jews and Their Lies, reformer Martin Luther encouraged civic leaders to burn down Jewish synagogues, expel the Jewish people from their lands, and murder those who continued to practice their faith within Christian territory. “The rulers must act like a good physician who when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow,” he wrote. Luther’s writings were later used by German officials as religious justification of the Holocaust. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

Scientific works and entire libraries were set to torch kindled by the insane religious fanatics. We have already mentioned the Bishop of Yucatan, who burned the entire native literature of the Maya in the 1560's, and Bishop Theophilus, who destroyed much of the remnants of the Library of Alexandria (391). The Christian Roman emperor Valens ordered the burning of non-Christian books in 373. In 1109, the crusaders captured Tripoli, and after the usual orgy of butchery typifying the crusades (through this one did not yet include the murderous Teutonic Knights), they burned over 100,000 books of Muslim learning. In 1204, the fourth crusade captured Constantinople and sacked it with horrors unparalleled even in the bloody age of the crusades; the classical works that had survived until then were put to the torch by crusaders in what is generally considered the biggest single loss to classical literature. In the early 15th century, Cardinal Ximenes (Jimenez), who succeeded Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor and was directly responsible for the cruel deaths of 2,500 persons, had a haul of 24,000 books burned at Granada.

No surprise, pharmaceutical interests launched their multinational preemptive crusade to restrict and discredit HCQ starting way back in January 2020, months before the WHO declared a pandemic and even longer before President Trump’s controversial March 19 endorsement. On January 13, when rumors of Wuhan flu COVID-19 began to circulate, the French government took the bizarre, inexplicable, unprecedented, and highly suspicious step of reassigning HCQ from an over-the-counter to a prescription medicine. Without citing any studies, French health officials quietly changed the status of HCQ to “List II poisonous substance” and banned its over-the-counter sales. This absolutely remarkable coincidence repeated itself a few weeks later when Canadian health officials did the exact same thing, quietly removing the drug from pharmacy shelves. A physician from Zambia reported to Dr. Harvey Risch that in some villages and cities, organized groups of buyers emptied drugstores of HCQ and then burned the medication in bonfires outside the towns. South Africa destroyed two tons of life-saving hydroxychloroquine in late 2020, supposedly due to violation of an import regulation. The US government in 2021 ordered the destruction of more than a thousand pounds of HCQ, because it was improperly imported. “The Feds are insisting that all of it be destroyed, and not be used to save a single life anywhere in the world,” said a lawyer seeking to resist the senseless order.

However, if the moneylenders are not some other country but are situated within your own kingdom, and you’ve borrowed what you feel is too much money from them, you can play a very dirty trick. This dirty trick has indeed been played, and quite often. It’s called “Kill the Creditors.” (Please don’t try this at your local bank.) Consider, for instance, the sad fate of the Knights Templar. They were a religious order of fighting knights who’d amassed a great store of capital through gifts given to them by the pious, as well as through various treasures they’d acquired during the Crusades, and they acted as Europe’s major moneylenders to kings as well as to others for more than two centuries. It was unlawful for Christians to charge for the use of money, but it wasn’t unlawful for them to charge “rent” for the use of land, so the Templars charged so-called “rent” for the use of money, which you paid at the same time you got the loan, rather than after you’d used it. But you still had to pay the principal amount back at the stipulated time. This could be a problem for those who’d borrowed the money, as it still is today. In 1307, Philip the Fourth of France found he owed a cumbersome lot of money to the Templars. With the aid of the Pope and of torture, he accused them falsely of heretical and sacrilegious activities and had them rounded up and burned at the stake. As if by magic, his debts disappeared. (So did the vast wealth of the Templars, which has never been adequately accounted for since.)

Hoover wanted the new investigation to be a showcase for his bureau, which he had continued to restructure. To counter the sordid image created by Burns and the old school of venal detectives, Hoover adopted the approach of Progressive thinkers who advocated for ruthlessly efficient systems of management. These systems were modeled on the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer, who argued that companies should be run “scientifically,” with each worker’s task minutely analyzed and quantified. Applying these methods to government, Progressives sought to end the tradition of crooked party bosses packing government agencies, including law enforcement, with patrons and hacks. Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“ the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I. As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age. The fact that he didn’t fire a gun only burnished his image. Reporters noted that the “days of ‘old sleuth’ are over” and that Hoover had “scrapped the old ‘gum shoe, dark lantern and false moustache’ traditions of the Bureau of Investigation and substituted business methods of procedure.” One article said, “He plays golf. Whoever could picture Old Sleuth doing that?

The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

No Big Deal or the End of the World? Here’s something that should be obvious: People don’t like to have their grievances downplayed or dismissed. When that happens, even the smallest irritation can turn into an obsessive crusade. Imagine you’re staying at a hotel, and the air-conditioning isn’t working right. You call the front desk to mention it, and they say, oh yeah, they know about that, and someone is going to come fix that next week (after you’ve left). In the meantime, could you just open a window (down to that noisy, busy street)? Not a word of apology, no tone of contrition. Now what was a mild annoyance—that it’s 74F degrees when you like to sleep at 69F—is suddenly the end of the world! You swell with righteous fury, swear you’ll write a letter to management, and savage the hotel in your online review. Jean-Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other. The hotel staff in the example above clearly took the “It’s no big deal” token and as a result forced you to take the “It’s the end of the world” token. But they could just as well have made the opposite choice. Imagine the staff answering something like this: “We’re so sorry. That’s clearly unacceptable! I can completely understand how it must be almost impossible to sleep when it’s so hot in your room. If I can’t fix this problem for you tonight, would you like me to refund your stay and help you find a different hotel room nearby? In any case, while we’re figuring out the solution, allow me to send up a bottle of ice water and some ice cream. We’re terribly sorry for this ordeal and we’ll do everything to make it right.” With an answer like that, you’re almost forced to pick the “It’s no big deal” token. Yeah, sure, some water and ice cream would be great! Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn. Keep that in mind the next time you take a token. Which one are you leaving for the customer?

The first Crusade taking on Jerusalem: "The next day, the carnage continues. The crusaders ignore Tancred's protective banners and slaughter all the Moslems in the Al-Aqsa Mosque; men , women , children, and a large number of imams ( religious leaders ) and Islamic scholars , devout and ascetic men who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the Holy Place. The Jews who've remained in Jerusalem are treated in a similar manner. They remain in the chief synagogue where they plead for shelter and protection . The crusaders respond by burning the synagogue to the ground with the Jews inside . NO one questions this action. Jerusalem is to become a Christian City. The blood letting continues even though all the infidels are dead. The crusaders slice open the bellies of the corpses and extract the intestines in search of gold coins the Sarcans might have swallowed. At sunset, the victorious crusaders gather at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in a spirit of praise and thanksgiving.

Since September 11, 2001, we have constructed and identified a new satanic enemy, radical Islam. Rather than concentrate on those who perpetuated the horrors of 9/11, a broad brush was employed to demonize all who stood in the way of Empire. Not surprisingly, former president George W. Bush gave us, during his 2002 State of the Union address, the term "axis of evil," which included the countries of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It would take only a few months before the list was expanded. Warning that the U.S. stood ready to take action, then Under Secretary of State and future U.S. representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, added three more countries to the "axis of evil" list in his May 2002 speech, "Beyond the Axis of Evil." The countries added were Cuba, Libya, and Syria. Yet enemies of Empire and God need not be the only ones defined as evil. Anyone who questions U.S. exceptionalism or supremacy finds themselves labeled as Satan's mouthpiece. Academics, liberals, and politicians (including presidents) have all been portrayed in demonic terms for going against the prevailing mindset that equates America with that "shining city upon the hill." Unfortunately, such characterizations only stifle constructive discourse. [...] [W]e are left wondering whether humanity would have been better served if there had been no such figure as Satan, the personification of absolute Evil. How many so-called witches might not have been burned? How many holy crusades to rid the world of evil would have been averted? What if, instead, Satan was to be understood differently? What if Satan, or absolute Evil, played a different role in determining moral agency?

In 1871, much of the city of Chicago was on fire, hundreds of people died, and four square miles of the city burned to the ground. The Great Chicago Fire was one of the worst disasters in America during the nineteenth century. One Chicago resident, Horatio Spafford, was a good friend of D. L. Moody and a man who lived out his faith. Despite great personal loss in property and assets, Horatio and his wife, Anna, dedicated themselves to helping the people of Chicago who had become impoverished by the fire. After years of hard work helping others recover from their losses, the Spaffords decided to take a well-earned vacation to help Moody during one of his evangelistic crusades in Great Britain. Anna and their four daughters went on ahead while Horatio planned on joining them in a few days after tending to some unfinished business matters. One night en route, the ship that Anna and the girls were traveling on collided with another ship and sank within minutes. Anna and the girls were thrown into the black waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and only Anna survived. As hard as she tried, she could not save even one of her daughters. Anna was found unconscious, floating on a piece of wreckage. After her rescue, she sent a heartrending telegram to Horatio in Chicago that simply said, “Saved alone.” Horatio boarded the next ship to Europe to be reunited with his wife. As he was en route, the captain called Horatio to the bridge when they reached the spot where his daughters had drowned. As Horatio stood looking out into the blackness of the sea, heartbroken and no doubt with tears running down his face, with only his faith sustaining him, he penned the words to one of the greatest hymns ever written: “It Is Well with My Soul.” When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul Chorus It is well with my soul, It is well, it is well with my soul! My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part, but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul! How can a man who has just lost his four little girls praise the Lord? Where does a person get that kind of strength? The answer: by being deeply rooted in the Word of God. Horatio Spafford was a man of the Word, so when tragedy stuck, he could face it with strength and confidence. The centrality of God’s Word plays a critical role in the life of every believer, and this emphasis serves as the Big Idea throughout Psalms 90—150.

Despite Israel’s great religious and historical importance, at that time it had few significant Jewish communities—by the mid-twelfth century, only a few Jews remained in Israel. The Jews suffered from the invasion of the Christian crusaders, who burned synagogues and killed or forcibly converted some Jews. Many towns no longer had Jews, but there were a number of small communities left, ranging from twenty to two hundred families. There were about two hundred families in Jerusalem, and Benjamin described Jews praying at the Wailing Wall.

The building is rather like a medieval Castle and was established in the Sixth Century and soon afterwards, as the Moslem armies advanced Westwards from the Arabian Peninsula, somebody had the prescience to build a small Mosque in its courtyard to guard against it being burned or demolished. At the time of the Crusades it was the turn of the Monastery to protect the Mosque, and so it has been down the ages, each House of God extending its shelter to the other as opposing armies came and went.

However, many of the Baptists in attendance were impressed with Hitler’s conservative politics and crusades for “social morality.” After his return to the U.S. from Berlin, Boston’s John Bradbury said: “It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold, where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown. The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries.” And the Fifth Baptist World Congress itself pronounced that “Chancellor Hitler gives to the temperance movement the prestige of his personal example since he neither uses intoxicants nor smokes.”[134]

The Catholic Church had murdered more people during the past two thousand years than any other institution devised. my man. It systematically suppressed knowledge and fought scientific progress. Across time, at one point or another, it actively supported slavery, racism, fascism and sexism. It published the Hammer of Witches, detailing how to torture and murder innocent women. It jailed and burned scientists at the stake in a futile attempt to keep the masses ignorant. It terrorized Jews and Muslims for centuries, torturing and murdering during the Inquisition and crusades, all in the name of a supposedly loving God. It ignored eyewitness accounts that Jews were being slaughtered by Nazis. It systematically covered up tens of thousands of cases involving sexual misconduct by priests. It even had the audacity to absolve fault that had not yet been committed, thanks to indulgences bought with wealth.

In 1209 a Crusade for a different purpose was set on foot, and all temporal forces at the disposal of Rome were directed upon the Albigenses, under the leadership of Philip of France. At this time the burning of heretics and other undesirables, which had been practised sporadically in France, received the formal sanction of law.

Even as the flames raged, Baybars sent a triumphant letter to Bohemond, who had not been present at the siege. He mocked him for having lost his right to call himself “Prince,” then described the atrocious punishment that had befallen his city. Had Bohemond been present to defend his people, said Baybars, “you would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters . . . your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen the Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars . . . you would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next . . . Then you would have said ‘Would that I were dust, and that no letter had ever brought me such tidings!’”20 This was more than mere rhetoric. Antioch’s days as a leading city of the Syrian northwest were over.

O my Beloved! this was but the prelude of graces yet greater which Thou didst desire to heap upon me. Let me remind Thee of them to-day, and forgive my folly if I venture to tell Thee once more of my hopes, and my heart's well nigh infinite longings—forgive me and grant my desire, that it may be well with my soul. To be Thy Spouse, O my Jesus, to be a daughter of Carmel, and by my union with Thee to be the mother of souls, should not all this content me? And yet other vocations make themselves felt—I feel called to the Priesthood and to the Apostolate—I would be a Martyr, a Doctor of the Church. I should like to accomplish the most heroic deeds—the spirit of the Crusader burns within me, and I long to die on the field of battle in defence of Holy Church. The vocation of a Priest! With what love, my Jesus, would I bear Thee in my hand, when my words brought Thee down from Heaven! With what love would I give Thee to souls! And yet, while longing to be a Priest, I admire and envy the humility of St. Francis of Assisi, and am drawn to imitate him by refusing the sublime dignity of the Priesthood. How reconcile these opposite tendencies? Like the Prophets and Doctors, I would be a light unto souls, I would travel to every land to preach Thy name, O my Beloved, and raise on heathen soil the glorious standard of Thy Cross. One mission alone would not satisfy my longings. I would spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, even to the most distant isles. I would be a Missionary, not for a few years only, but, were it possible, from the beginning of the world till the consummation of time. Above all, I thirst for the Martyr's crown. It was the desire of my earliest days, and the desire has deepened with the years passed in the Carmel's narrow cell. But this too is folly, since I do not sigh for one torment; I need them all to slake my thirst. Like Thee, O Adorable Spouse, I would be scourged, I would be crucified! I would be flayed like St. Bartholomew, plunged into boiling oil like St. John, or, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, ground by the teeth of wild beasts into a bread worthy of God. With St. Agnes and St. Cecilia I would offer my neck to the sword of the executioner, and like Joan of Arc I would murmur the name of Jesus at the stake. ...Open, O Jesus, the Book of Life, in which are written the deeds of Thy Saints: all the deeds told in that book I long to have accomplished for Thee.

Republicans are the Taliban of the West. But please don't hate them. Now more than ever they need our help, for they are ill, terribly ill. They are suffering from a condition, I call, Clinical Caucasianitis, or White Supremacy Syndrome. So next time you see one, offer them a flower and say - get well soon! In a way (sarcastically speaking), no other political party on earth has done more to eliminate Islamophobia than the republican party, by boldly revealing themselves to the world as the face of new age christian terrorism. Finally, thanks to the republicans, the people of planet earth get to relive the atrocious days and ominous nights of the roman catholic crusades - which by the way, is the very antithesis of Christ's "love thy neighbor" - just like it is the antithesis of something Mohammed said - that Muslims should help their neighbors rebuild their churches, synagogues and monasteries if they burn down (22:40 Quran). The point is, one who has integration in their heart, will find integration everywhere, but those who have nothing but hate in their heart, will remain hateful no matter how many messengers of love come and go.

The next morning the newspapers carried the news that while our meeting was being held there had been staged in Paris, Texas, one of the most awful lynchings and burnings this country has ever witnessed. A Negro had been charged with ravishing and murdering a five-year-old girl. He had been arrested and imprisoned while preparations were made to burn him alive. The local papers issued bulletins detailing the preparations, the schoolchildren had been given a holiday to see a man burned alive, and the railroads ran excursions and brought people of the surrounding country to witness the event, which was in broad daylight with the authorities aiding and abetting this horror. The dispatches told in detail how he had been tortured with red-hot irons searing his flesh for hours before finally the flames were lit which put an end to his agony. They also told how the mob fought over the hot ashes for bones, buttons, and teeth for souvenirs.

Have you been burning within for a particular cause, organization, ministry or crusade? Allow nothing to stop you. Rise up and fulfil your purpose.

Doctor Girdon Face, and his American Crusade. Oh, it’s very big lately. Lectures and tent shows and local television and so on. And special phone numbers to call any time of day or night. The liberal-socialist-commy conspiracy that is gutting all the old-time virtues. It has a kind of phonied-up religious fervor about it. And it is about ten degrees to the right of the Birchers. The president is selling the country down the river with the help of the Supreme Court. Agree with us or you are a marked traitor. You know the sort of thing, all that tiresome pea-brained nonsense that attracts those people who are so dim-witted that the only way they can understand the world is to believe that it is all some kind of conspiracy. The most amusing thing about it is the way Dr. Face keeps plugging for virtue and morality. He wants to burn everything since Tom Swift, and he is not too certain about Tom. He wants a big crackdown on movies, books, plays, song lyrics, public dancing. And he wants to be the one to weed out the evil.

The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they'd wrecked it.

They occasionally turned up in Tudor inventories and linens would often be recorded in wills as bequeathed to others. Goodman tells us how she followed a Tudor body cleansing regime for a period of three months while living in modern society. No one complained or even noticed a sweaty smell. She wore natural fibre on top of the linen underwear but took neither a shower nor a bath for the whole period. When she recorded The Monastery Farm for television, she only changed her linen smock once weekly and her hose three times over six months and she still did not pong.9 Tudor England was not a place where everyone smelled as sweetly as most people who shower daily today but its people generally managed not to stink. Of course, the past did smell differently but being clean and sweet smelling certainly did matter to many Tudors. In 1485 only a few hundred people in England could afford essential oils which arrived during the Crusades. Perfume for most people originated from natural sources such as posies of violets, lavender bags and smoke from herbs burning over a fire. Sir Thomas More is known to have had a rosemary bush planted beneath his study window so its pleasant scent wafted up towards him as he worked. Lavender was often placed in bedrooms, tucked into the straw of a bolster or hung in bunches on bed posts so that its calming nature might induce relaxation. Rue and Tansey were known as insecticides and

I should like to accomplish the most heroic deeds—the spirit of the Crusader burns within me, and I long to die on the field of battle in defense of Holy Church.

Less to burn in the event a rogue gender-fluid camper decides to go on a flaming crusade against the binary, I guess

WAS A WIDOWER and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.

That South occupied by our population of color, sir. Our Negroes. They say you are the rare white lawyer who is fair to the man of Negro blood.” “Well,” said Sam, somewhat taken aback, “if by that they mean that as a prosecuting attorney I laid the same force of law against white as against black, then they are correct. I believe in the law. But do not understand me too quickly, sir. I am not what you might call a race champion. I am not a hero of the Negro, nor do I ever mean to be. I believe history has dealt our American Negroes a sorry hand, as do many people. But I also believe that sorry hand will have to be corrected slowly. I am not one for tearing things down in service to various dubious moral sentiments, which in fact would turn my own race against me, which would unleash the savagery of the many embittered whites of the South against the poor Negro, which would in fact result in destruction everywhere. So, Mr. Trugood, if you thought I was someone to lead a crusade, change or challenge a law, throw down a gauntlet, burn a barn, sing a hymn, or whatever, why, I am not that man, sir.

Look at Rome; look at the Crusades. Vanquishing an enemy and taking his books was just as strategic as taking his cannons. Books are knowledge weaponised. And what weapons you cannot steal, you must burn.

opposite number, Andrea Dandolo—a relative of the old doge Enrico Dandolo who had burned Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

Bee’s Wings This washed-out morning, April rain descants, Weeps over gravity, the broken bones Of gravel and graveyards, and Cora puts Away gold dandelions to sugar And skew into gold wine, then discloses That Pablo gutted his engine last night Speeding to Beulah Beach under a moon As pocked and yellowed as aged newsprint. Now, Othello, famed guitarist, heated By rain-clear rum, voices transparent notes Of sad, anonymous heroes who hooked Mackerel and slept in love-pried-open thighs And gave out booze in vain crusades to end Twenty centuries of Christianity. His voice is simple, sung air: without notes, There's nothing. His unknown, imminent death (The feel of iambs ending as trochees In a slow, decasyllabic death-waltz; His vertebrae trellised on his stripped spine Like a 'xylophone or keyboard of nerves) Will also be nothing: the sun pours gold Upon Shelley, his sis', light as bees' wings, Who roams a garden sprung from rotten wood And words, picking green nouns and fresh, bright verbs, For there's nothing I will not force language To do to make us one — whether water Hurts like whisky or the sun burns like oil Or love declines to weathered names on stone. George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls (1990)

the possibility of contemplative renewal in the evangelical movement, especially in America, could make this a particularly exciting time to be an evangelical. I can only hope that the American evangelical movement's cultural compromises to corporate leadership styles and power politics have been exposed for their crass moral bankruptcy and antipathy toward the Kingdom values of love and mercy. We are ripe for a change of course, and even if the majority stick to their culture wars and power hungry political crusades, a sizable minority can embody a hopeful, loving, and Spirit-directed path forward that will serve those in search of God and even evangelicals who inevitably burn out from the anxious defensiveness of their movement. In fact, if evangelicals have any hope as advocates for those suffering from poverty, injustice, racism, or xenophobia, we will especially need the inner transformation of contemplative prayer so that our activism is compassionate and merciful.

The Crusades. In 1095 Pope Urban 11 called for the knights of Europe to unite and march to Jerusalem to save the Holy Land from the rule of the Islamic infidels. Just decades earlier, Pope Gregory VII had declared, "Cursed he the man who holds back his sword from shedding blood," and now his wishes were coming to pass. The Crusaders rode into battle with the cry Deus volt-"God wills it!" Raymond of Agiles accompanied the Crusaders as a representative of the church during the first Crusade. He documented the taking of Jerusalem with these words: Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of Saracens (Muslims) were beheaded.... Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days, then burned with flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the temple of Solomon.... What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much at least, that in the temple and portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and the bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, when it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.5

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

When I hear from people that religion doesn't hurt anything, I say, really? Well besides wars, the Crusades, the Inquisitions, 9-11, ethnic cleansing, the suppression of women, the suppression of homosexuals, fatwas, honor killings, suicide bombings, arranged marriages to minors, human sacrifice, burning witches, and systematic sex with children, I have a few little quibbles. And I forgot blowing up girl schools in Afghanistan

Not surprisingly, the crusaders developed an intense hatred of Greek fire. One unfortunate Turkish emir thus paid a heavy price when wounded in a skirmish beside a Frankish siege tower. He had been carrying a container of Greek fire, hoping to destroy the engine, but now a Latin knight ‘stretched him out on the ground, emptying the contents of the phial on his private parts, so that his genitals were burned’.

This morning I happened to think of the possibility that a virulent outburst of fanaticism may precede the death of a faith. Southern fanaticism on the issue of slavery was at its height when slavery became untenable, and the same is true of the present segregationist fervor. The fanaticism of the Crusades preceded the coming of the Renaissance, and the religious fervor of the Thirty Years' War was followed by the skepticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is also true that the rabid chauvinism of the second quarter of the twentieth century is followed by a considerable cooling of the nationalist spirit in the West. The question is how fast do burning problems burn themselves out.

When the price of oil on the world market began to fall, the American business community and the public lost interest in the great energy crusade. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, removed the solar panels from the White House roof and scrapped the wood-burning stove in the living quarters. America went back to business as usual, buying even larger gasguzzling vehicles, and using ever greater volumes of energy to support a wasteful, consumer-driven lifestyle.

Lois Lane was part of the Superman dynamic from the very start. The intrepid star newspaper reporter had made her first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics #1, the same issue where Superman made his debut. She was infatuated with the powerful, godlike Superman, while repulsed by his meek pantywaist alter ego, her rival reporter Clark Kent. Lois’ 1940s persona of tough crusading reporter was in the mold of Hollywood dames like Rosalind Russell. Lois’ tireless effort to get her next headline, along with her impulsive personality, often put her in danger, from which Superman would have to rescue her. But the 40s Lois was no pushover. She was a modern career woman, and her dream was to get her greatest scoop: Superman’s secret identity. The Superman/Lois Lane relationship had many complicated factors that would prevent a romance from ever reaching fruition, while still providing the right tension to sustain the relationship for decades. First off, they were literally from different worlds. Superman was the last survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, and was raised by simple midwestern farm folk. Lois Lane was very much a woman of 20th century America: emancipated, headstrong, and unwilling to take “no” for an answer. Superman’s timid farm boy Clark Kent persona crumbled before Lois’ ferocious, emasculating temperament, while his heroic Man of Steel found himself constantly confounded by her impetuous nature. Meanwhile, the very issue of Superman’s secret identity always threw a wrench into his romance with Lois. Besides the basic duplicity, Superman becomes his own rival, squelching any chance for a healthy relationship. Superman loves Lois Lane, but tries to win her heart as meek Clark Kent, with the rationale that he wants to be sure Lois really loves him for himself, not for his glamorous superhuman persona. But since he’s created a wallflower persona that Lois will never find attractive, he sabotages any chance for love. Lois, for her part, is enamored with Superman, yet has a burning desire to discover his secret identity. Lois never considers that she risks losing Superman’s love if she learns his secret identity, or that the world may lose its champion and protector. (...) If the Lois Lane of the ’40s owed much to the tough talking heroines of that decade’s screwball comedies, the Lois of the ’50s was defined by the medium of the new era—television.

him at the door, vocal and upset at being left alone all night. Mathew gathers him in his arms and perches on the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, stroking him, but really he is comforting himself. Upstairs, he showers, goes directly to his bedroom and logs on to the Blackweb as he walks. There is a tech support advert waiting for him. He accepts. “Greetings. You are Burning Crusade. I am the Lich King.

I am sorry, little one, that you had to endure such a thing.” He carried her into his house and made for the library. Köd jutasz belső. Raven could hear soft words in his own language muttered under his breath. He was swearing, and it made her smile. “What does that mean?” He blinked down at her. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Literally, ‘Shadow take you.’ That old woman is evil.” “She isn’t evil, Mikhail, she’s twisted, fanatical. It was like touching the mind of a burning crusader. She believes what she’s doing is right.” She rubbed the top of her head against the rigid set of his jaw. “She is beneath contempt.” He spat the words. “She is obscene.” Very gently Mikhail deposited Raven in the comfort of his armchair. “She came to test me, to bring a priest into my home and try to outwit me. Her brush in my mind was clumsy and inept. She uses her gift to mark others for murder. She read only what I allowed.” “Mikhail, she believes in vampires. How could she possibly think you’re a walking corpse? You have unusual gifts, but I can’t see you murdering a child to keep yourself alive. You go to church, you’re wearing a cross. The woman is nuts.” She rubbed at her pounding temples in an effort to relieve the pain. Mikhail loomed over her, a dark shadow holding one of his herb concoctions in his hand. “And what if I was a mythical vampire, little one, holding you captive in my lair?” She smiled up at his serious face, absorbing the pain in his brooding eyes. “I would trust you with my life, Mikhail, vampire or not. And I would trust you with the life of my children. You’re arrogant and sometimes overbearing, but you could never be evil. If you are a vampire, then a vampire is not the creature of the legends.” He moved away from her, not wanting her to see how much her total, unconditional acceptance meant to him. It didn’t matter to him that she didn’t know what she was saying. He felt the truth of her words.

It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.

It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.