[Index of Prohibited Books]





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• "The first
  official censorship had come in 1559 with the publication of the Index auctorum et
  librorum prohibitorum under the direction of Pope Paul IV. The Pauline index, as it
  became known, was the first in a long succession of papal indexes, forty-two in all. The
  purpose of these indexes was to guide censors in their decisions of what publications to
  authorize and which to disallow, for printers were not free to publish books without
  official permission.

At seven in the morning on May 20, 1631, 18,000 soldiers loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II stormed the ancient German city of Magdeburg. The Protestant city was in rebellion against its Catholic overlord but had only 7,000 defenders, almost half of whom were armed children. Plague had weakened the populace, and ammunition was low. By mid-morning, Magdeburg was overrun. By noon, it was ablaze. The thousand citizens who huddled in the cathedral were saved; but outside the flames lit hellish scenes of murder and rapine. Twenty-thousand corpses were eventually heaved into the Elbe River. Of 2,000 city buildings, only 200 survived. A year later, the ruins of Magdeburg sheltered less than 500 souls. The city's destruction would go down as the most notorious atrocity of the Thirty Years War.

The war fought between 1618 and 1648 remains, by many measures, the most destructive in Europe's history. During those years the Holy Roman Empire—which governed most of the European continent east of the Rhine—lost as many as eight million subjects, or a staggering 20% of its population. This amount to three times Europe's death rate during World War II. Whole swaths of central Europe were depopulated, abandoned to wild pigs and wolves.

Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory,

The Thirty Years War began, to be sure, as a religious civil war within the Holy Roman Empire—a ramshackle collection of dukedoms and bishoprics ruled by the Catholic Hapsburgs, who sought, nostalgically, to govern all of Christendom as universal monarchs. Since the Reformation, their Protestant subjects had proved unenthused about this project. In 1617, Bohemian Protestants revolted against the empire, announcing their rebellion with the notorious "defenestration of Prague," in which three imperial officials were flung out of a palace window. Crying out to the Virgin Mary as they fell, they were saved by landing in a dung heap.

The empire struck back, crushing the Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. It required four axes for the executioner to behead the 28 condemned "defenestrators." But the war did not end. A glutted market of mercenaries conspired to prolong it. Eventually foreign powers intervened, eager to profit from the empire's mayhem. The most important of these was Sweden, which became, under Gustavus Adolphus, the empire's unlikely scourge. Gustavus fell in battle in 1632 but not before he had scythed his way across central Europe. France, although Catholic, was eager to sabotage its Hapsburg rivals and fought alongside the Swedes.

An epic stalemate developed. At the war's peak, a quarter-million men were under arms. Although they fought with everything from medieval pikes to crude poison-gas shells, their most lethal weapons were the plague, typhus and dysentery that marched with them. For every combat death, three soldiers died of disease. Rural areas were particularly ravaged. In 1636, English travelers along the river Main encountered "a wretched little village" inhabited only by corpses. "We spent that night walking up and down with carbines in our hands," one traveler wrote, "listening fearfully to the sound of shots in the woods around us."

You all probably have seen the Gallup Poll that gets asked every year -- given the choice among three options, what do people say? That first option, that God guided a process that happened over millions of years -- 38 percent; the second option, that God had no part, that being a deist or an atheist perspective -- 13 percent. But the largest number -- 45 percent, almost half -- choose the third option, that God created human beings in their present form in the last 10,000 years. You can't arrive at that conclusion without throwing out pretty much all of the evidence from cosmology, geology, paleontology, biology, physics, chemistry, genomics and the fossil record. Yet that is the conclusion that many Americans prefer.

There are a lot of forces trying to encourage that view. If you've been to the Creation Museum -- I haven't, but I gather some of you have -- it will show you this perspective of humans and dinosaurs frolicking together in a way that's consistent with the 6,000-year-old Earth. Again, many children going to see this are probably walking away thinking, yeah, that makes sense.
I get e-mails practically every week from people who were raised in this tradition -- many of them home schooled or schooled in a Christian high school where young Earth creationism is the only view that they're exposed to. Then they get to university and they see the actual data that supports the age of the Earth as 4.5, 5 billion years old, and they see the data that supports evolution as being correct, and they go into an intense personal crisis.

It's important to realize
that the Pentateuch contains three versions of the Decalogue. And there
are differences among them. The Decalogue is going to be repeated in
Deuteronomy, chapter five. And there are some minor variations.
Specifically you'll see that the rationale for observing the Sabbath is
different. God's name in Deuteronomy 5 is not to be used in a vain oath
as opposed to a false oath. There are differences in the meaning. And
there are some more differences too in language. So what are we to make
of this?

One scholar, Marc Brettler, whose name I've mentioned before, he
says that what we learn from this, these variations, is something about
the way ancient Israel preserved and transmitted sacred texts. They
didn't strive for verbatim preservation when they transmitted biblical
texts. And they didn't employ cut and paste methods that might be
important to us in the transmission of something. Texts were modified
in the course of their transmission. Verbatim repetition was not valued
in the way that it might be for us. So that even a text like the
Decalogue, which is represented as being the unmediated word of God,
can appear in more than one version.

There's a more surprising variation that occurs, however, in Exodus
34. After smashing the first set of tablets that were inscribed with
the Decalogue--the tablets in Exodus 20, those are smashed after the
golden calf incident--Moses is then given a second set of tablets. And
the biblical writer emphasizes in the story at that point that God
writes on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets that
were broken. The same words. So we expect now a verbatim repetition of
Exodus 20. And yet we don't have it. The Decalogue that follows in fact
has very little overlap with the earlier Decalogue. There's really only
two statements that even have the same content.

Some religious right activists and far-right lawmakers, led in large part by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R), are outraged that the visitor center is largely secular. For example, near the center's entrance, there's an engraving: "We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution." The quote comes from Rufus Choate, who served in the House and Senate in the 1830s, and DeMint described the quote as "offensive."

This week, Roll Call reported that some GOP lawmakers are pushing a bill that would spend $150,000 in taxpayer money to etch a reference to "In God We Trust" as the national motto into stone, and placed prominently in the Capitol Visitor Center.

"There are number of references or appropriate religious references in the Capitol Visitor Center, but this is something I think is important," said Rep. Dan Lungren (Calif.), the bill's lead sponsor and the top Republican on the House Administration Committee. "We do have 'In God We Trust' over the rostrum in the House ... [and] it has a relationship to the Founding Fathers' documents."

Actually, Lungren's wrong; "In God We Trust" doesn't appear in any of the "Founding Fathers' documents." Literally, not one. In fact, the nation's founders chose "e pluribus unum" as a national motto -- a reference to the nation's unique diversity -- and Lungren, the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives want references to it replaced.

Lungren's bill, submitted last Wednesday, currently has four co-sponsors in the House. Expect that number to grow.