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JulianTheApostate: Harris made an intriguing claim that the idea of the virgin birth arose from a mistranslation of certain Biblical verses from Hebrew. Are any of you familiar with the validity of that claim?

As I understand it, the passage in question is a prophetic passage in Isaiah. The Hebrew uses a word which means "young woman" or "girl", without any connotation of her being a virgin. The word used in the Greek translation, however, did evoke the connotation of "virgin", which allowed for the translation which emphasizes Jesus' supposed virgin birth.

That doesn't necessarily mean that a mistranslation is responsible for the virgin birth narrative. There are lots of passages in Isaiah that weren't cited as evidence of Jesus' Messiahship -- that the gospel writers chose this particular verse is likely because it allowed for the interpretation they were looking for. It's important to understand that the virgin birth narrative plays a distinct and deliberate role in the Messianic interpretation of Jesus' life. In particular, there is an apparant conflict between the claim that Jesus is the long-awaited Jewish Messiah and the fact of Jesus' rather ignomious death at the hands of the Roman state. Paul and others seem to have reconciled this contradiction by interpreting Jesus' life in reference to a cosmological scheme, that is, by literalizing the "Son of God" title. The virgin birth supports this cosmological scheme by providing a metaphysical avenue through which God could have incarnated as a full-realized human -- one that is born, lives and dies as any human does. The misinterpretation of the Isaiah verse may have lended the support of Judaic tradition to this interpretation, but I don't think it's likely to have been the origin of that interpretation.

riverc0il: These sure are great arguements against the church's past and do indicate that organized religion can make people do terrible things and can set humanity backwards on the path of progress.

I think it's over-stating the case to say that organized religion "can make people do terrible things". It certainly aides and abets atrocity from time to time, but more often than not, what you see is people appropriating religion to justify their own ends.

I think that is an inherent problem with organized religion, that it can be interpreted and people must follow blindly or be rejected, and is one of many reasons I reject organized religion.

This, as I see it, is an aspect of religion that arises from its function as a kind of community. All communities have their standards for belief and behavior (remember our little tangent on what it means to be "un-American?"), and all communities are prone to reject members who defy those standards. There's nothing particularly horrible about excommunication unless you sincerely believe that it prevents you from entering the Kingdom of Heaven, and for that reason, excommunication has lost its force since the Reformation called that capacity into doubt. Even in a secular community, exile or stigmatization can be far more devestating to a person, as we see with the masses of German Jews who betrayed their religious community or merely chose not to escape when they had every indication that it was prudent to do so.

Though did not Gallileo not get a pardon until just recently?

I don't believe Galileo was ever excommunicated. It was threatened, but he relented and lived with the penance they gave him, resentful though he may have been. I think the Church recently admitted that Galileo was right, though that was, of course, mere formality, as the Church has been behaving according to the Copernican model for centuries.

riverc0il: The correction on the "Age" is appreciated, but I think the point stands just in a different Age.

The point being that, anyone proposing scientific theories contrary to Church doctrine was burned at the state?

Even in a later age, I think the situation was often more complex than you make it out to be. For example, why did the Church threaten Galileo for arguing the validity of Copernicanism when it was content to tolerate, even praise, Copernicus himself? There's clearly more to Galileo's trial than what you might assume from a cursory examination of the fact that one occured. Giodano Bruno was burned at the stake, but what particular tenant of his philosophy made a capital charge necessary?

What's been rising to the top in a lot of my reading about the 16th and 17th centuries -- which is the period when religious persecution within European borders seems to have been most active -- is that a great deal of the situations that are most commonly associated with religious persecution have some roots in, or were severely aggrevated by, the rising force of nationalism. Because so much of the philosophy of the era is so elegant and organized, we tend to think that the period itself was rather enlightened. This is largely an illusion: Europe was in the midst of a social upheavel; the system that had maintained a certain kind of stability was collapsing, and the result was a welter of social and political pressures that often found their expression in religious fractionalism.

To understand it all, you have to put some emphasis on the fact that the Roman Catholic Church had been, for the better part of the medieval era, the only force that really unified Europe. You can almost match historical eras with the development of the Church -- the Dark Ages is roughly congruent with the rise of the Church as an organizational power, the Middle Ages finds the Church established and recognized but transforming itself to fit the needs of Christendom, and the High Middle Ages find the Church serving as a self-contained theocracy. At that point, the Church was as much a political institution as it was a spiritual institution, probably moreso, and the really spiritual aspects of Christianity were mostly the province of the monastaries rather than of the cathedral. The Renaissance finds Chuch power declining, and as a result, Europe parcelling itself off in violent ways, nationalism rapidly becoming the primary mode of separation and of establishing an identity.

To see how this plays out in understanding individual instances of religious persecution, take a specific example. H.R. Trever-Roper has examined the witch-crazes of the period as alternating outbreaks of sublimated Catholic and Protestant suppression. What appears on the surface as a rather unaccountable outbreak of superstition during an age that cherished reason was, in that sense, more likely a suspension of disbelief, a willful credulity on the part of the persecutor. It still looks like an instance of purely religious persecution until you reflect on the fact that most attempts to suppress one reform or Catholic party in a given area was closely related to the influence of nationalism. Reform churches weren't intent on crushing Catholicism altogether. Their interest was in having a unified region for the purpose of instituting a social and political order.

You might blame them for not making a more concerted effort to distinguish church from state, but bear in mind that such separations had been all but unheard of for more than a thousand years at that point. The people of the 16th century were, in fact, laying the groundwork that would make it possible for later generations to radically conceive of a state tolerant of all religions. To some degree, the Reform traditions were acting to limit the political nature of the Church. But in doing so, they really were threatening a social order that had functioned with some success for hundreds of years, and that resulted in real turmoil. Denying the transubstantiation of the sacrament was not so contentious an idea -- and if it was heresy, the usual method for dealing with heresy was the relatively peaceful decree of excommunication; the real source of the conflict lay in the decentralization of European society. To understand, you'd have to imagine the sort of turmoil that would inevitably arise if states started breaking off from the Union in the US. Even if you sympathized with their reasons for breaking off, you might still oppose the act itself, on the grounds that it could lead, as it has before, to Civil War.

The instance of post-Saracen Spain is also illuminating. As I read it, the Spanish Inquisition was a radical institution developed to secure the stability of a nation that was insecure by nature. The situation of Spain in the 16th century is not all that different from the situation of modern day Iraq -- it may even have been more volatile. Catholicism, in that sense, was not only a religious affiliation, it was also a sure marker that the citizen had not been a part of the old regime and would not serve to sow discontent by championing the ideals of a displaced political system. That does not excuse the Inquisition's methods, or even its intent, but it does go some way towards putting it into its proper context.

The problem of Medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, as I see it, is not a problem endemic to all religion. The problem is, quite specifically, that the Church was called upon to fill a political role in providing stability during the political and cultural crises of the Dark Ages, and that it continued to build itself according to the model of Imperial Rome long after those crises had passed, until it become a predominantly political institution. Taking events like the Inquisition and the Crusades as simple instances of religious violence ignores the greater, and sometimes more important context, which influenced their occurence.