Scarabus

Billo, at least in this instance, is a perfect emblem of right-wing logic. (I’ve heard the same logic from Bill Donohue on the RC side, and from countless others on the evangelical Protestant side.) Here’s what he said: “No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the net, but he is certainly not of that faith.”

Get it? By definition, a Christian could never do X or Y. You have evidence that a person who considers and identifies herself or himself as a Christian, and is identified by others as a Christian, has done it? Then clearly they all are mistaken, and that person actually isn’t a true Christian. You challenge that? Good luck! Dishonest, disingenuous, fanatical conservatives like Billo get to define what counts as observable evidence of spiritual belief, and get to judge whether evidence you offer truly qualifies.

Nice, right? Guys like Billious Billo get to define the rules and criteria; determine which evidence will be considered; and, acting as judge, pronounce the results of a game they themselves rigged.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Anyhow, here’s a guy who identified himself as a Roman Catholic (the Roman is not gratuitous: given where he lived, this guy might very well have been an Orthodox Catholic). He built at least one Catholic church. He fought against Muslim aggression. Oh, his name? Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, perhaps the most important historical figure after whom Bram Stoker modeled his fictional character Dracula.

So how did this prince who shared your own variety of Christianity behave, Billo?

If you ask a Snagov or Comana monk about Vlad the Impaler they proudly tell you Vlad Dracula’s religion was orthodox but he was also a great Christian because he fought against Ottomans invasion.

“In the year 1460, on the morning of St Bartholomew’s Day, Dracula came through the forest with his servants and had all the Wallachians of both sexes tracked down, as people say outside the village of Humilasch [Amlas], and he was able to bring so many together that he let them get piled up in a bunch and he cut them up like cabbage with swords, sabers and knives; as for their chaplain and the others whom he did not kill there, he led them back home and had them impaled. And he had the village completely burned up with their goods and it is said that there were more than 30,000 men.”

Bill Maher mocks all religions. I don’t. Violence isn’t restricted to any one religion or race or nationality. (What was the religion of the guy who — encouraged by Bill O’Reilly’s violent rhetoric, by the way — murdered Dr. George Tiller while the latter was serving an usher in his Christian church? What was the religion of the guy who shot and killed Ghandi? Hint: The last was neither Christian nor Muslim.) Violence and terrorism are promoted by political, racist, xenophobic, alienated, hating and fearing in equal measure sects or individual ideologues.