Prague and Germany

The nation of the Czechs reaches farthest to the West of any of the Slavs. Their capital, Prague, is quite close to several major German cities: 91.2 miles from Dresden according to Google Maps, a drive of 1 hour and 55 minutes. Leipzig is a 158 mile drive, Munich is 238 miles away, Berlin 217 miles, Vienna -- the usual capital of the Holy roman Empire since the 15th century -- 207 miles. Other major Slavic cities are considerably farther: Prague to Warsaw is 396 miles, Dubrovnik 794 miles, 556 miles, Kiev 881 miles. 

The Slavic regions between Western Europe and Russia have been ruled by foreign powers for much of their history. Prague has the distinction of having been the capital of a foreign empire, in the 14th century under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, and then again from 1576 to 1612 under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.

 

The Czechs were, and are, situated between Protestant and Catholic Germany: most of Germany north of Prague was, and is, majority Ptotestant. Most to the south was, and is, majority Catholic. From the time of Jan Hus onward -- he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415 -- Protestantism among the Czechs tended to go with anegative view of the German Empire, and those Czechs who worked for the Empire tended to convert to Cathollicism. 

When the Prague defenestration is mentioned, most people think of the incident in 1618, but there have actually been three defenestrations in Prague, in 1419, 1483 and 1618. In German, the 1618 defenestration is called the Fensterstuerz, with the result that people actually know what is meant. Defenestration means being thrown out of a window. In all three Prague defenstrations, Protestants, followers of Hus, threw representatives of the Catholic Imperial occupation out of high windows, killing all of them in 1419 and 1483.

In 1618, surprisingly, the Emperor's representatives survived the 70-foot fall from a window in the Hradcany, the Prague Castle. However, the incident marked the beginning of the Thirty Year's War, in which millions died all over central Europe.

Prominent authors who lived in the Czech region and wrote in German range chronologically from Johannes von Tepl, who published der ackerman aus boehmen around 1400, to a remarkable amount of the very best German literature which was written in Prague in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by authors such as Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Rudolph Fuchs, Egon Erwin Kusch and many others.

The Nazis led up to their invasion of Poland and the beginning of WWII with a series of smaller-scales crimes including the occupation of Czechia in 1938 and 1939.

In 1989, Czechoslovakia opened its borders, and ten of thousands of East Germans per day went through Czechoslovakia into West Germany, one of the major factors which forced the end of East Germany and German reunification.

Misunderstandings, Controversies, Versions of History

In 1415, the Czech priest and and professor John Huss was tried, condemned and executed, burned at the stake, at the Council of Constance.

A little over a century later, in 1521, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, appeared before the young Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. Luther reminded some people of Huss. Luther himself said that he agreed with some aspects of Huss' teachings. Some people assumed that Luther would be condemned and executed as Huss had been, and were surprised when, after Luther has stood trial before him, Charles allowed Luther to leave the council under the same safe conduct which had protected him on his way there.

 

And ever since, people have wondered why Charles let Luther go. Perhaps Charles, and/or his advisors, were thinking of the situation in Prague and the surrounding Czech territory: Huss had been executed, but the Hussite church was very much alive. Perhaps Charles wondered whether Huss might have had less influence if he had been tolerated, ignored, treated as a well-meaning simpleton. 

I don't know why Luther was let go. Already in 1521 he was very popular, and the Lutheran church kept growing at an enormous pace. And, it seems to me, Luther was misunderstood from the start and is still misunderstood. For example, German peasants revolted in 1524 and 1525, and even a few nobles joined them. And these people in revolt called themselves Lutherans. As have many others to this day, they seem to have equated existing orders, and conservatism, with the Catholic Church, and Lutherism with all and any sort of protest or resistance to existing orders.  "Protest --" it makes up the first two syllables of the word "Protestant."

Luther did not sympathize with the revolts. He wrote and published a tract in which he advised the nobles to crush the rebellion thoroughly, to torture and kill the rebels. And indeed, they did exactly that. 

Would the powers that were have treated the rebels any differently if Luther had not said or written a word about the rebellion? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. I tend to doubt that this was one of Luther's most widely-read published works. Because people have not ceased to associate Catholicism with conservatism and Lutheranism with rebellion. Especially in Germany. Those who live in other parts of the world, and may be familiar with conservative Lutherans and Leftist Catholics, might be astonished, for example, to read, as I did, Schiller's history of the Dutch Revolution, where every imaginable sort of tyranny is associated with Catholicism, and every noble spirit of freedom with Protestantism, which in Germany meant Lutheranism. Except in painting and sculpture, where, Schiller said, it was all exactly reversed.

Schiller was an ignorant dingbat.

After the Diet of Worms, religious wars between Catholics and Protestants began, and did not cease for centuries. Luther condemned Lutheran peasants and championed Lutheran rulers, kings and dukes and counts. 

Decades after Luther had passed away, in 1576, a 24-year-old Habsburg king and archduke became the Emperor Rudolf II, and ruled until 1612. I wonder what Luther would've thought of Rudolph. Like every other Habsburg ruler before and after him, Rudolph was Catholic. Unlike many other Habsburgs, Rudolf did not dislike, distrust or disapprove of non-Catholics. His court in Prague became a center of artistic and intellectual activity. He valued individuals according to the abilities, their talents; if he cared at all about their religious beliefs, he gave little sign of it. 

A widespread belief about Rudolph at the time was that he was insane, and a very weak ruler, who did little to halt the gathering storm of religious conflict which exploded six years after his death at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. This view also tended to dominate among historians, until just a few decades ago. Now, it seems, an entirely different view of Rudolph is the mainstream, that of a wise and tolerant ruler far ahead of his time, who did nothing at all to fan flames of war, and whom many of his contemporaries feared simply because he was far ahead of his time in his habits and thought. Not a lunatic, but an enlightened monarch a couple of centuries before the Enlightenment. 

Who's right about Rudolph? Who's wrong? Or is everyone perhaps partly right and partly wrong? I don't know. 

Around 1600, Ferdinand's court, widely thought of at the time as a madhouse, was visited by an orphaned teenage Czech noble who would also go on to divide opinion -- Albrecht von Wallenstein. Raised a Hussite, Wallenstein converted to Catholicism and served the Habsburgs as a military leader,  and later also as a financier, until his death in 1634. 

Or did he? This is the most controversial point. The conventional view, challenged by Golo Mann's biography of Wallenstein published in 1971, is that, in the last couple of years of his life, he began to conspire against the Emperor, while pretending to still be his loyal Generalissimo. Having been born a baron and risen, through his extraordinary talent as a military leader and statesman, to count, then marquise, then duke, he was accused of wanting to rise, at the Emperor's expense, still higher -- and the only ranks in 17th-century Europe higher than duke were king and -- Emperor.

Mann and others maintain that there simply is no serious evidence that Wallenstein was unloyal to the Habsburgs, and that his rising power was inconvenient to certain thoroughly dishonest and ruthless politicians, who turned the mind of the Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-1637) against one of his best helpers. 

Who's right? I don't know.

"It's better to have no religion at all, just Jesus, himself, alone." -- ACTUAL QUOTE

Actual quote from a real person:

"It's better to have no religion at all, just Jesus, himself, alone."

My fellow atheists, this is a perfect example of why many of you are way too excited about all those polls claiming that "religion is in decline." Someone tells the pollster they're not religious, but what you don't see when you read the poll results is them saying, "I don't need religion -- just Jesus!"

But you should sense it, because quotes like the one above are now so common that nobody but me remarks upon them. Once again, I have to do everything by myself. (A perfect example of why I deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature.) It's the people who often call themselves SBNR or "spiritual but not religious," whom I often call "religious but in denial about it" or "the disorganized religious." And of course, these people who don't call themselves religious are finding each other and organizing into groups that they don't call churches or temples, led by people they don't call clergy -- place where they get together and talk about how great God is and discuss His plan.

Similar to religion? Gee, ya think?

Yes, it's identical to religion. Identical to early Protestantism in most cases: people leave their churches because the churches are "doin' it wrong," and start their own, more self-righteous and Bible-obsessed groups.

At the very least, those doofuses taking the polls should become aware of all this, and adjust their polls to distinguish between atheists and the disorganized religious -- but as I've said before, sociologists aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer either.

Stupid disorganized religious, stupid atheists, stupid pollsters -- I'm surrounded by idiots! And no, this doesn't make me feel smart. Not at all -- I've allowed a bunch of idiots to surround me!

The Battle Of Lepanto And The Sinking Of The Spanish Armada

I wonder how many of you have heard of one of the events mentioned in this post's title and not the other. In 1571 the combined naval forces of Spain, the Pope and Venice scored a great and unexpected victory over the navy of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras in the Ionian Sea. 17 years later, in 1588, the same Spanish navy, the dreaded Spanish Armada, suffered a great and unexpected defeat at the hands of the English navy when they attempted to invade England.

Both events have been written about at great length, but what strikes me is that, to the best of my recollection, I have never heard them mentioned in the same breath, as I am doing now. Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, an above-average book about the 1588 battle,



has 3 entries in its index under "Lepanto, battle of," but 2 of those references merely mention that Don Juan of Austria and the Marquis of Santa Cruz had been at Lepanto, and that Sultan Selim II had spoken disparagingly of the battle's significance. Mattingly actually says nothing at all himself about the battle.

The I Tatti Renaissance Library recently published an entire volume of poems in Latin written shortly after the battle of Lepanto and celebrating the Christian victory,



and nowhere in the poems, the index or introduction or well over 100 pages of notes about the battle and its background and significance is any English man or woman mentioned, let alone Elizabeth I, let alone the sinking of the Armada.

I thought that surely HG Wells, in his great 1-volume history of Earth, The Outline of History,



would prove an exception and discuss both battles. But no. And more surprisingly still, the battle he mentions is Lepanto. Maybe he was deliberately thumbing his nose at those of his countrymen who in his estimation went on and on at entirely too much length about the supposed significance for world history of the sinking of the Armada.

Which brings me meandering roundabout to my point: some historians have written at great length about either Lepanto or the sinking of the Armada, either because they felt that it was of great significance in world history, or that its significance had been greatly exaggerated by historians. Either one battle or the other -- and the other was barely worth a mention.

Surely many Spanish sailors and soldiers must have been in both battles, just 17 years apart. Surely they, if no-one else, often thought of both battles at the same time, and considered them to have some connection to each other. Such sailors and soldiers were themselves an obvious connection.

But individual historians have rarely -- if ever -- felt that both battles were worth writing about. Which is my point: the great subjectivity of decisions about what is "historically significant." Surely the treatment by historians of these 2 battles shines a very great light on the fact that objectivity is an illusion. Historians write about what is significant from the point of view of the entire world? No, they cultivate myths of significance. If they are especially sympathetic to Catholicism and/or Spain, they nurture the myth of the significance of Lepanto, they talk up the glorious nature of the Catholic, or Spanish (or Venetian, or Papal) victory, and don't mention the Spanish defeat in 1588. But if they happen to think that England is particularly glorious, they support that preconception by dwelling on the sinking of the Armada, and by making it seem as glorious as they can.

Objectivity, schmobjetivity. There is no such thing. Research these 2 battles and you will be shown objectivity's nonexistence in a particularly striking way.

Just What Could You Build With All The Fragments Of The True Cross?

Archaeologists excavating a 7th-century church in Turkey have found a reliquary with a piece of the True Cross in it.

John Calvin, the loveable, cuddly 16th-century founder of Calvinism, is quoted as saying that the pieces of the True Cross added up to a large ship-load of wood, while Charles Rohault de Fleury, a 19th century archaeologist, said that they added up to about 1/3 of a cross the size of one Jesus might have been crucified on. Was Calvin really in a position to judge how much wood was in all the fragments of the True Cross? I really doubt it. Was he fervently opposed to Catholic practices such as the veneration of relics? Oh yes. (To this day Calvinist churches are notable for Minimalist decor.) Was Charles Rohault de Fleury an expert archaeologist who wouldn't make a statement like that about True Cross fragments without basing it on reliable data? I don't know. Was he a fervent defender of the Catholic Church? I don't know that either.

Was Fleury counting differently than Calvin, excluding many pieces of True Cross which Calvin included? Again, I don't know. Do many people today repeat Calvin's line, or something similar ("If you put all the pieces of the True Cross together you could build an Ark," for example), not based on any clear idea at all about the number and size of Cross relics, but because they are grinding an anti-Catholic ax? (Or an anti-Orthodox ax. Let's not forget that although in the 7th century the split between Catholic and Orthodox still far from complete, "Orthodox" is a far more accurate term to describe a 7th-century church in Turkey than "Catholic.") I have absolutely no doubt about that, nor do I doubt that many Catholic apologists would gladly quote Fleury's remark without having any more idea about Fleury's competence and possible bias than I do -- that is to say, no idea whatsoever.

Once again, I feel I am on the sidelines, on neither of the two sides bickering over the theological significance of some archaeological find. The theological debate doesn't particularly interest me, and the historical significance of the find, which interests me, doesn't seem to interest very many others.

Do I think that any of the relics venerated as pieces of the True Cross really once were pieces of the cross on which Jesus was crucified? Well, I'm not convinced that Jesus existed. If He did, and if He was crucified, wearing a crown of thorns, and stabbed in the side with a lance by a Roman soldier while He was on the Cross, then it seems to me that it is possible that the wood and thorns and iron venerated by some Christians as pieces of the True Cross and of the Crown of Thorn and of the Holy Lance are actually objects which touched Jesus -- possible, but extremely unlikely, because I know of no reports of anyone preserving relics thought to have been associated with Jesus earlier than Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. And also because it would have been unusual for the Romans to have allowed Jesus' followers to have preserved the Cross or a part of it. (But it would have been unusual for them to have allowed Jesus' followers to remove his body from the Cross. Leaving the body there to rot away was a significant part of the horror and insult of that form of punishment. "Golgotha" means "place of skulls" because the remains of the victims of crucifixion were left there. And that is one of the many reasons why I have trouble believing the New Testament stories of Jesus.)

Nevertheless, a 7th-century artifact is interesting to me purely by virtue of its being as old as the 7th century. In this case, I would most likely find the reliquary much more interesting than the piece of wood within. Unless, that is, they date the piece of wood and it actually turns out to have come from a tree felled in the 1st century or earlier. (Did the Romans reuse one cross over and over?)

If they do actually date the wood, then as far as I know, that in itself would be newsworthy. As far as I know, Orthodox and Catholic authorities have allowed very few relics to be scientifically tested. The most famous exception has been the Shroud of Turin. That was subjected to carbon-14 dating and found to have been made in the 13th or 14th century. And ever since, the Catholic Church along with various crackpots and huckster authors and makers of silly documentaries and the so-called "History Channel" have being doing all they can to distract people from those carbon-14 test results and to discredit the scientists who performed those tests.

If traces of human blood are found on this wood, this 7th-century-or-older artifact found in Turkey, that in itself would not be significant in the search for the historical Jesus, because, sadly, crucifixions were still quite common in the 7th century.

Are The "Spiritual But Not Religious" Today's Jesus Freaks?

I've already often remarked that the large and remarkably self-important group which calls itself "spiritual but not religious" are Protestants who don't know what Protestantism is because they're ignorant of history. It just occurred to me that the "spiritual but not religious" may also have some characteristics in common with what decades ago were called "Jesus freaks." The term "Jesus freak" may well mean something very different to many or most people than it did in the early 1970's -- and perhaps earlier than that. I'm not sure, in part because I was only 8 years old on 1 January, 1970. But as a child I saw the Jesus-freak movement going on around me. These people were "freaks" in a sense of the term not entirely dissimilar to "hippies": they had very long hair, often wore tie-dyed shirts and went barefoot, and were Skeptical About Society. And they believed in Jesus. (Think Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.)

And unless I'm very much mistaken, very many of them attended seminaries and took part in shaping today's liberal Christian theology. And so, man, you know, they're like, way too laid back to get all radical if someone decides they're not religious anymore even though they still love Jesus and believe in the Bible, okay man? Because they like realize that the true message of the Bible has been distorted by thousands of years' worth of patriarchy and homophobia.

I'm against patriarchy and homophobia. But I'm also against nonsense -- no, check that. I'm against patriarchy and homophobia because they are nonsense. Same reason I'm against religion, and against the claim that the "spiritual but not religious" aren't actually religious. They may be against some manifestations of organized religion, but 1) disorganized religion is still religion, and 2) as we speak, enterprising individuals are busy organizing these allegedly "spiritual but not religious" people, these religious people with Daddy complexes having theological disputes with others, into flocks and shearing them. The "spiritual but not religious" movement is just sad in the way that Christian rock has always been sad: they want so bad to be cooler than the other Christians and it just makes them dorkier. And like their claim that they're not religious, their claim that patriarchy and homophobia are distortions of Christianity is nonsense. There never was a matriarchal and gay-friendly Christianity until they invented one. Full rights for women and gays are worthy goals, worthy of fighting for. But they're not traditionally christian. And that is so obvious that it makes it obvious that these people are oblivious of the history of the religion they claim to embrace. And discouragingly but hardly surprisingly, trying to point this out to them is like trying to nail a blob of mercury to the wall. Religion, most definitely including the "spiritual but not religious," continues to provide a haven for people who, to paraphrase Jack Gibbs, are tenaciously fighting off the very idea of trying to think.

I Wouldn't Call Myself A Human --

-- because there's so much unpleasantness associated with the human species and I'd like to distance myself from that.

What's that you say? I'm being ridiculous? Maybe so. But more ridiculous than the spiritual but not ridi -- I almost wrote "spiritual but not ridiculous," ha. Am I being more ridiculous than the spiritual but not religious? No. Less so, I'd say, because I knew I was being ridiculous and I did it for a laugh and to make fun of spiritual but not religious people such as Marcus Mumford, a Christian musician, but be careful if you call him one. He says, I don't really like that word. It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn't call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don't really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was. ... I've kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.

Uh-huh. Not from his fixation on Jeebus Christ Himself though, of course, which is where the Gosh-darn word "Christian" comes from...

Now, of course, religion has never been about being logical or consistent. And perhaps Christianity has never been about a rudimentary knowledge of the history of Christianity, because anybody with that rudimentary knowledge must surely see the striking similarities between the Protestants separating themselves from the Christian herd, and the SBNR doing it again all around us today: the dissatisfaction with institutions, the effort to have a more direct connection with Gosh and Jeebus, the emphasis on "what Jeebus really did and said" (which today is flying in the face of scholarship which is coming more and more to the conclusion that we don't know what Jeebus really did and said, although the mainstream still recoils from considering the obvious question: did he really actually exist at all? Not that the answer to that one matters so much, it's just an interesting, obvious question), the holier-than-thou attitude wrapped in that very diaphanous Christian cloak of stupid arrogance which is the repeated insistence that one is not holier-than-thou, but very very humble... I don't think it'll come to full-scale warfare like it did between Catholics and Protestants for most of the 16th and 17th centuries, but other than that I think we've pretty much got the entire nine yards. If these people knew that history perhaps they'd begin to see what a hamster-wheel they're on, and stop focusing so intently on one imaginary friend and one thick boring volume of ancient lore as if all the answers were in there and as if every attempt at good sense had to be measured against it -- as if any one volume were justified in such an absurd claim -- and become good sensible atheists and begin to open up more to the entire, real world. But how long, O Gosh, how long yet before we get there?