Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Harold Berman’s ‘Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition’, clearly credits the medieval Church for building the foundations and structures of Western secular law. From the time of Constantine to the 11th century, the legal constructs of church and state were intermingled. There was no clear separation between the ecclesiastical and the secular.
This changed in the 11th century with Pope Gregory and the ‘Gregorian’ reforms. Pope Gregory identified that a King was a lay person and had no power to interfere with church affairs including appointing bishops or priests. The boundaries between church and state were clarified. Out of this division, based on a common foundation, arose separate legal edifices.
Church law possessed the most coherent body of legal codes in the world, much of it based on the 6th century Byzantine emperor Justinian and his ‘codex’. From the 5th to 11th centuries however, church law could not be termed a systematic and comprehensive legal code. It was instead a set of scattered commentaries, Biblical references, various exhortations, papal demands and it was regional in nature.
Over time, church canon law was produced to regulate ecclesiastical affairs and this in turn became the model for secular laws. Western church canon law became systematised after the Gregorian reforms in the 12th and 13th centuries. Prior to this creation of canon law in the high middle ages, legal codes per se did not exist in a coherent or logical manner in Europe. In most areas law was intimately linked with custom and even pagan practices (eg trials by fire or water).
By the 12th century canon law was taking shape. The monk Gratian produced ‘A Concordance of Discordant Canons’, written around 1140. This was the first systematic legal code in Western Europe. It was an enormous body of work. Gratian’s work was premised on reason and conscience, along with natural law and God-granted rights. These principles allowed a coherent legal structure to be shaped.
From Gratian and succeeding works, all aspects of society came under canon laws. Property, marriage, inheritance, rational trials, the discontinuance of pagan rites such as trial of ordeals by fire or water, the development of equality before the law, protection given to the poor and dispossessed, can be found in Gratian’s work. In essence the barbaric ‘law codes’ of Western Europe were replaced by canon law based on principles and reason. Universities which began in the 12th century had departments dedicated to the law and these scholars began to construct national legal codes based on canon law.
Canon lawyers were produced who used the canons to determine the criminality of a particular act, using legal principles still in use today. These lawyers were concerned with the intent of the act, various kinds of intent, and with moral implications of acts. Extenuating factors in criminal acts were also developed, including insanity and intoxication. Accidental and deliberate actions were separated. Contract law was also developed which is still with us today, enshrining and enforcing the legality of contractual consent.
Criminal law was another area of innovation during the 12th and 13th centuries within canon law and served as the basis for the secular equivalent. These were also deeply impacted by Saint Anselm’s 11th century exposition Cur Deux Homo, where he explains the rationality in the mediation of the God-man ending in atonement for our sins through the crucifixion. This doctrine of atonement rested on the concept that a violation of the law was an offense against justice and the moral itself. Punishment was necessary to restore both. Atonement is a central feature of all modern legal systems.
There is no doubt that the entire corpus of Western law is based on the medieval canon law. Almost every area of modern jurisprudence can trace its lineage to the canon law of the 12th century. The very foundation of Western law in its philosophy, is entirely Christian and Catholic including the principles of law, punishment, atonement, forgiveness, morality and justice.
In the early 4th century, during the reign of Constantine, at the time of Christianity’s great expansion, a famine struck the Roman world. About 30-40% of the population might have been Christian in AD 320. The famine caused plague to spread. The Romano-Christian response was charity. Without discrimination and with great energy, Christians brought food and medicine to the afflicted. What sort of religion would be so selfless thought non-Christian Romans? Many converted once they understood the faith.
Catholic charitable works would take several volumes to express. The list of those involved includes parishes, dioceses, monasteries, convents, monks, friars, nuns, and a long list of lay organisations. There is no peer in world history to Catholic charity. In fact, it is an obvious truism to state that Catholics invented the entire concept of charity and welfare. Stoicism for example, which contains echoes and similarities with Christianity never established any sort of charity and welfare. It demanded emotionless detachment and acceptance of fate. It was a fatalist philosophy.
Oblations to the poor developed at the very beginning of Church history. In the early church offerings to the poor were placed next to the altar at mass. On certain fast days there was a collection for poor relief. Fasting often induced wealthier Christians to invest money in poor relief. Saint Justin the martyr commented that the rich were not only converting but becoming ‘poor in spirit’ by sacrifices and donations to the poor.
Saint Augustine established a hospice for pilgrims, one of thousands in the Romano-Christian world. The early church ransomed slaves and had clothing ‘banks’ for the poor. Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Ephrem organised relief efforts during the waves of plague and famine. Christians, unlike pagans, never left the sick and wounded during times of plague, including burying the dead. Widows and orphans were taken care of by the early church, along with hospitals being built for the sick in the 3rd century AD.
Eusebius the 4th century ecclesiastical historian comments that the Christian's great deeds for the poor, sick and dispossessed led to many conversions. The pagans wondered what animated Christians to such works of charity and gentleness. The would make ‘inquiries about a religion whose disciples are capable of such disinterred devotion.” Julian the Apostate the mid-3rd century Roman emperor who persecuted Christians admitted, “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them to their agapae, they attract them, as children are attracted with cakes.”
By the 4th century the church began to sponsor the large-scale deployments of hospitals. Every major city possessed a hospital. They served two purposes, namely to take care of strangers and pilgrims; and to treat the sick and suffering. This ministering to human needs and illness on such a scale was absolutely unique in world history.
In places like Rome the Christian woman Fabiola, would go into the streets looking for the poor and sick and take them to the first large public hospital ever seen in Rome – the one she founded. Saint Basil the great in the 4th century established a hospital for lepers in Caesarea. No such institution had existed before anywhere in the pagan world. Throughout the mediterranean, monasteries played the role of medical institution and pharmacy. They became sites of medical learning and scholarship.
Catholic military orders like the Hospitallers became famous during the crusades and after for the size of their hospitals and the quality of their care – given to anyone Christian or not and free of charge. In Jerusalem alone, the Hospitaller hospital contained over a thousand beds, arguably the largest hospital ever constructed in a single location until the 19th century. The Hospitallers and other orders placed a premium on the care for the sick and injured. Their hospitals came to resemble the modern equivalent and delivered babies, surgeries, daily care, physician visits, food, baths and a regime of hygiene that would not be replicated until Semmelweis in the mid-19th century, namely cleanliness, the washing of hands and the endless changing and washing of sheets and bedding.
The entire premise of Western civilisation’s ‘welfare state’ is based on the Catholic Church’s massive investment in hospices, hospitals, orphanages, leper sanitoriums and the like. The scale and scope of the investment over 2000 years is unknown but it is certainly the largest investment in history by an institution until the modern welfare state. Lives were saved, souls converted, and society humbled and softened. The entire ethos of Western culture was improved. Yet, few if any today could be bothered to credit the Catholic church with this most important legacy and innovation – charity, love, succour and support.
“The word “virus” is derived from the Latin word for poison. Viruses are associated with all forms of life (bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). Viruses are infectious, obligate intracellular parasites whose genomes consist of either DNA or RNA. Virus genomes direct their own replication and the synthesis of other viral components, using cellular systems in appropriate host cells. Virus particles (known as virions) are formed by assembly from newly synthesized components within the host cell. Virions are the vehicle for transmission of the genome to the next host cell or organism.”
(Pellett et al, ‘Basics of Virology’, 2014, offering the standard description of a ‘virus’)
Note: Viruses are 250-400 nanometers in size. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter…a small fraction of a bacteria. Not a single isolated and purified virus can be shown. To satisfy your own curiosity you can send FOI requests to various health and governmental agencies and demand to see an example of a purified, isolated virus. They will reply that they don’t have such examples to show you.
One of the claims to support the worldview that ‘contagious diseases’ are spread by ‘germs’, is the ‘genocide’ of Ameri-Indians post-Columbus. It has long been established that the evisceration of Ameri-Indian culture, society and people was perpetrated through a mixture of war, slavery, and disease. Depending on your source, the weighting of war, slavery and disease in this catastrophe varies. ‘Virus hunters’ routinely invoke the post-Columbine era of Ameri-Indian civilisational destruction as ‘proof’ of ‘contagious’ diseases, passed on by White humans and their livestock, to Ameri-Indian natives. This theory is most certainly wrong and is entirely unproven and unsupported by facts or common sense.
Since the 1990s, it has become standard fare to vastly inflate the numbers of pre-Columbine (before 1492) Ameri-Indians in North and South America. The more rancid and extreme population estimates now range between 80-100 million Ameri-Indians in the Western hemisphere pre-1492 A.D. with a general scholarly agreement that 60 million might be a correct estimate. This number is however a conjecture and given the paucity of proofs, more likely a fiction, generated to impress and overawe the reader with the colossal scale of human genocidal destruction, initiated by Christian Europeans upon pagan Ameri-Indians. In this story some 50 million or more Ameri-Indians perished mostly through ‘germs’ over 3 centuries, or the same number who died in Europe from the Black Death in the 14th century, a plague caused by bacteria.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the estimate of the pre-Columbine population in the Western Hemisphere was 8-12 million. This is a more reasonable figure and less tainted by political motives and secular theology than post-modern estimates which provide no proof of numbers ranging from 60-100 million. Ameri-Indian society was a stone-age culture, with settled agriculture existing only in parts of Central America and the Andes ranges. There was no possibility that Central and South America, with a somewhat limited and primitive agricultural base, or North America, with a hunter-gatherer-foraging culture absent of urban centres, could have supported 60-100 million people. Claiming such population figures is unreasonable and unproven.
By contrast Europe in 1500 was a far wealthier, more advanced, civilised and agriculturally innovative culture and possessed maybe 60 million people. The 14th century episode of the Black Death or bubonic plague had erased about half the population. Even despite this catastrophe, it is unreasonable to posit that in 1492, the primal societies of the Western Hemisphere had a similar or even a greater population than a Europe which was littered with small-scale cities and complex agriculture and trade. The less advanced, pre-modern societies of the Americas could never have supported such a mass of people.
The best estimates are that maybe 1 million natives existed north of the Rio Grande pre-1492, some 3-5 million in Mexico and Central America and a further 4-5 million in South America. No cities or advanced agriculture existed north of the Rio Grande. The Aztec and Incan empires were slave-empires, with conurbations comprising the capitals of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco. Advanced agriculture outside of the capital territories were sparse and would never have supported some 50-90 million people. Contrary to historical rewriting there is no proof that massive farming or agriculture was endemic in the Western Hemisphere in the pre-Columbine period.
The Spanish conquered the Aztec and Inca empires with fewer than 1000 men. The annihilation of the Aztecs for example, was accomplished by the Spanish leading a ‘native’ army who had tired of Aztec tyranny, slavery, human sacrifice and exploitation. A few hundred men with guns cannot unseat an empire of some 5 million, or for the revisionist Marxist, the false claim of 30-40 million people. The same was true of the Spanish destruction of the Inca’s, a much-hated elite-aristocratic group, famous for brutality and savagery. It is simply not credible that a handful of Spaniards overthrew a region teeming with neo-Marxist figures of 30 millon or more people. The population of the Americas must have been in the 8-12 million range. ‘Native’ revolts as much as Spanish steel and guns overthrew the two principal empires of the Americas.
Guns and steel were important, but they can’t explain a population reduction of some 75-90% or 6-10 million, over a few centuries. The ‘consensus’ is that disease destroyed these societies far more completely than war and anarchy. For the ‘virus’ hunters the Ameri-Indians were decimated by ‘contagious’ diseases and are thus a totem and proof for the virus faithful. In this belief system, the Whites brought ‘new’ and novel ‘pathogens’ which the Ameri-Indians had no defence against, and they perished en-masse allowing the Spanish to seize power as the population was reduced and enfeebled through contagion.
As colonisation progressed, the carnage by disease accelerated until by 1900 only 10-25% of the baseline pre-1492 Ameri-Indian population remained. It is thus believed and promoted that ‘germs’ effaced 75-90% of the native populations. In particular the smallpox ‘virus’, along with flu and measles explain why the Ameri-Indians were largely exterminated.
Do any parts of these ‘agreed narratives’ make any sense? Did the advent of Whites, with their horses, cows, pigs and ‘infectious’ diseases really initiate ‘smallpox’ and other ‘great killers’, or were other factors at work? Have we got the entire history of ‘disease’ wrong? Do smallpox ‘viruses’ even exist for example? If not, what happened in the post-Columbine Americas?
According to ‘The Science’, the origination of the smallpox ‘virus’ is from bovines or cows, though the quack Jenner believed that ‘horse grease’ from the hoofs of horses, passed to cows from farm workers, was to blame. We are told that ‘influenza’ (Corona viruses) jumped from pigs to humans. Birds and fowl are also alleged to spread ‘influenza’, named ‘bird flu’. It is agreed that horses generated the ‘tuberculosis virus’. Livestock thus creates contagious diseases. When these were introduced into the Americas, so the theory states, contagions were unleashed on the native populations.
The theory around smallpox is:
· Bovines including dairy cows, supposedly suffer from Cowpox
· The ‘cowpox’ in the cow is a part of the genus orthopoxvirus
· The cowpox virus is zoonotic, meaning that it is transferable between species
· This ‘virus’ is supposedly related to the vaccinia virus causing ‘smallpox’ in humans
· In humans the smallpox ‘virus’ is called the variola virus
· Humans contract ‘variola virus’ from exposure cows in any form (milking, farming, slaughtering)
Smallpox has always been seized upon as a great killer of the Ameri-Indians. Smallpox as a virulent disease was supposedly passed on from bovines to humans through the activity of farming, including milking. Close contact is believed to be sufficient for the ‘orthopox virus’ to ‘jump’ species. Ingesting meat, dairy, skin, urine, faeces, or any animal detritus can lead to ‘smallpox’ in humans. Signatures of the disease include pustules or poxes on the hands and face.
For many with immature or compromised immune systems including young children, death can follow. The infection-to-death rate in the 19th century in the slums of the UK from ‘smallpox’ was low at around 0.4-1%. As many doctors commented in the 18th and 19th centuries, smallpox was not a particularly deadly disease if proper non-chemical treatment was given. Why then would the Ameri-Indians die in such numbers? The answer is always ‘lack of immunity’ due to not spending thousands of years with cows. Is this theory validated?
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