Funny Hat Day at Hit and Run Blog.

Of course, any discussion of the role of the Catholic church over course of history eventually boils down to "the Pope wears a funny hat." Tim took something like four posts to move to the anti-Catholic equivalent of the JDAM bomb. He also trotted the same list that has been canonized by the grand tradition of the Know Nothings, the Klan, Bob Jones University and Ian Paisley. Here's his rejoinder:

Of course, the Catholic church transmitted Aristotle to the West. Read a biography of Thomas Aquinas some day."

My initial (and future) digs against the Pope were based on the fact that he wears a funny hat and is, like all absolute authorities, hilarious. And long experience has taught me that there is nothing more boring or depressing than a serious discussion of Catholicism. At the risk of giving a straight answer, however, five centuries before St. Thomas, Plato and Aristotle had been translated into Arabic by the Pope's original enemies: Syrian Christians. In the period after that they were widely circulated, commented on and improved upon by Al Kindi, Ibn Sina, Al Rushd (Averroes) and various other heretics. I have no illusions about the glory of the Muslims. But it was no accident that for centuries classical ideas penetrated everywhere around the Mediterrenean except Christian Europe. I'm sure the church is blameless in that, because you know how irreligious people were in those days.

I realize that from the Code of Constantine right up through Pius XII's concordat with Hitler, the Catholic Church has been hitting home runs for human dignity, knowledge and freedom. But rather than explain how the war on vernacular bibles, Pope Clement V's stellar reign in Avignon, burning Giordano Bruno at the stake, the destruction and looting of Constantinople, the Spanish Inquisition, Cardinal Law's kid-happy employment policy, and countless other achievements helped secure the freedoms we all enjoy today, I'll leave that to somebody with more patience for pointless conversations.

Posted by: tim on May 22, 2003 06:53 AM

Here's my counter:

Great. I was waiting for the "funny hat" comment. Likewise, the ideological laundry list of half-fact/half myths regularly trotted out by anti-catholic bigots, including the Klan and the Know Nothings, was overdue. You're right, though, I have no patiences with someone so locked into a hateful worldview that he goes through history collecting his "show stopping" list of irrelevant citations. You cite the Concordat but not Mit Brennender Sorge, which was read in German Catholic churches after the Concordat and declared Nazism as non-Christian. Why? Could that omission be bigotry or ignorance? Try to broaden your knowledge base.

As for your view of the mechanism of the transmission of classical knowledge to the West. Jeepers, you're right. Aristotle became a key element in the development of a scientific method because of Syrian monks, not Thomas Aquinas. You should write a book. It would be revolutionary. Those Syrian monks probably occupied all of the top teaching spots at the University of Paris. Likewise, no one disputes the contribution of Averroe, but science died in the Islamic world and not in the west. Why? I didn't know that Roger Bacon, Copernicus or Gregor Mendel were Syrian but anythings possible. Maybe, Otto, Plato was Belgian.

Likewise, and more germane, what does any of this have to do with your initial charge that John Paul II - who has done more for the cause of human liberty than all the Libertarians stacked together - is a "Roman Dictator." Your approach to reasoning seems to be a continuous appeal to the genetic fallacy. You should read Aristotle, Aquinas, or any random Syrian monk someday to see how reasoning is actually done.

By the way, what is it about Catholicism's view that humans are individually ontologically unique and valuable that so offends you? I would think that a person devoted to a natural rights worldview would at least recognize where that worldview was formalized. Or, is it that you never learned that from your Jack Chick comic books?

By the way what does your demonstration of your deep reading of the collected works of Jack Chick have to do with the question of "are libertarians bigots" except to answer the question in the affirmative?

Posted by: Peter Sean Bradley on May 22, 2003 12:45 PM

You all recognize, of course, my clever homage to "A Fish Called Wanda" in the second paragraph. And do you like the "war on vernacular bibles" claim. Lane Core succinctly describes this as "A plain & simple lie. Just one of the innumerable anti-Catholic slanders that Catholics have had to put up with from Protestant polemicists for nearly five centuries." Libertarian polemicists too, it appears.

Let's move off the history and sociology for the moment and consider libertarian philosophy. Back when I was libertarian, I understood that the essential teachings of libertarianism was "every man for himself." No, wait. That's also from A Fish Called Wanda. The actual teaching was that state coercion was illegitimate. People should be given freedom from state coercion. After that, they were pretty much on their own to do whatever stupid thing they wanted to do so long as it didn't violate the natural rights of their neighbors.

Under that formulation, the RC church - most any church - is not a target of libertarian attack. No one today, and certainly not in America, is drafted at gunpoint by agents of the state into the Catholic church. People become Catholic or remain Catholic as a matter of free choice. It's all very libertarian because none of it involves state coercion.

But Tim, who apparently writes for Reason, is on a crusade against the Pope because he is, or purports to be, an "absolute authority." Now, given the fact that the Pope has no ability to use state mechanism to coerce compliance with his "absolute authority," why would any libertarian be concerned merely with the Pope's assertion of moral authority? The answer would seem to be that the Pope is - properly - viewed as a moral authority and that just ticks Tim off. However, the last time I looked libertarianism wasn't opposed to the authority of ethos or logos, but only to the authority that came out of the barrel of a gun. In sum, the interesting thing is that Tim's publication of slurs and half-truths is not a logical development of his libertarian principles - it's obviously a cultural issue reinforced by a chorus of like-minded individualists. The fact that bigotry passes for deep thought over at Reason's blog is truly sad.

Lane Core has pulled his link to Hit and Run. I'm going leave mine up for now, but I may take it down under the "life is too short" philosophy. Hit and Run isn't very interesting to begin with and I have too many things on my plate than to spend time on smug purveyors of prejudice.