Historic Religious Prejudice: For Whom the Bell Tolls

 I've borrowed the title from the great American writer Ernest Hemingway who wrote the classic novel in 1940.  The book deals with the Spanish Civil War and its consequences for society in general. 

Religious prejudice is like acid on metal, it will eventually destroy the metal.   In recent days there has been renewed riots in Northern Ireland.  This time the riots are not because of religion, but for other political factors involving the EU and Brexit. Which brings me to the question, why are they not aligned politically with their brothers in Ireland instead of Britain?  The British have oppressed them for half a millennium.  This, to me, sounds very much like the Stockholm Syndrome.  Most would say that it is for religious purposes.  Catholics against Protestants.  That is the simple answer.

Religious prejudice and bigotry have been with us since the beginning of time.  We've often heard the prejudices between Catholics and Protestants; some of them are very critical of the other. In a Catholic Bible Study, I've heard the leader refer to Evangelicals as some kind of radical fringe group.  Equally, I've heard Protestants refer to Catholics as some sort of anti-Christ non-Christian cult.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In the 1990s I attended two Protestant Churches for about eight years.  I never once heard anything contradicting the Bible.  There are differences in applying the faith, but no major deviation from scripture.  I believe the problem is the misinterpretation or the misunderstanding of what is the core belief in both Catholics and Protestants.

Religious prejudice has some real fatal consequences.  It all started in the mid 11th Century with the schism between the Roman and the Easter Orthodox Church.  Because of the rancor that followed, Christians lost a large part of the Christian world to the Moslem Turks.  Greece itself, the home of the Eastern Church, was itself swallowed up by the Turks.  What is now Turkey was the original Biblical lands; the first seven churches of the Bible, such as Smyrna, Laodicea, Ephesus, Pergamum and others were there.  This is where Christianity started.  Within 400 years of the schism, the entire Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as the Byzantine Empire totally collapsed.  A very fine history of the Byzantines was done by historian, Lars Brownworth in his book, "Lost to the West." The obvious question comes up as to why Western Europe failed to help their Christian brothers, the Byzantines.?  The answer is religion.  They so despised each other that they would not help each other.  The result was the Moslem conquest of the entire Byzantine Empire by 1453, with the final conquest of the city of Constantinople.  Imagine if you will, that the free world had failed to help defeat Nazi Germany because we had religious differences.  For whom do the bells toll?  They toll for all of us, sooner or later.