Not an intellectual feast but a nice summary of Jehanne’s trial:

The trial was a very testing experience for Joan. Initially the trial was held in public, but, her responses were much sharper than her prosecutors expected. She held her own and produced some strong rebuttals, which gained her public sympathy. For example, the prosecution tried very hard to get her to blaspheme. She was asked:

Question at Trial: “Do you know if you are in the grace of God?”

“If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me? ”

Not bad, not bad at all.  It reminds me of Someone about 1431 years before that, give or take 30 years who also gave those sorts of answers to officials trying to catch Him out.  And He ended up the same way.

It’s quite annoying when the ignorant try to reduce all religions to parity, as if they all say the same thing.   Scrutiny of the histories of true believers like Jehanne or Bede, Catherine of Siena etc, shows them to be the kindest and yet internally strongest of people.  Not a trace of, “You will believe or I’ll slit your throat.”

Jehanne even had her moment of weakness, as did her Role Model but both got over it, the former with the latter’s assistance.  What always amuses me is the way her Visions were explained away:

Analysis of her visions is problematic since the main source of information on this topic is the condemnation trial transcript in which she defied customary courtroom procedure about a witness’s oath and specifically refused to answer every question about her visions.  Some historians sidestep speculation about the visions by asserting that her belief in her calling is more relevant than questions about the visions’ ultimate origin.

Documents from her own era and historians prior to the twentieth century generally assume that she was both healthy and sane. A number of more recent scholars attempted to explain her visions in psychiatric or neurological terms. Potential diagnoses have included epilepsy, migraine, tuberculosis, and schizophrenia.

In response to another such theory alleging that she suffered from bovine tuberculosis as a result of drinking unpasteurized milk, historian Régine Pernoud wrote that if drinking unpasteurized milk could produce such potential benefits for the nation, then the French government should stop mandating the pasteurization of milk.

That’s always going to be the way with those who have a mental blockage to belief – they’re never going to be able to comprehend or accept what is; they will always have to search for alternative explanations, on the grounds that the real explanation simply cannot be.

That’s their starting point.

Me, I’m not shackled, fettered and blinkered by those constraints and would like to suggest an outrageous hypothesis – she actually did have the visions and not only that, the words were put in her mouth and her ability to lead an army and strategize as she did, with veteran commanders eventually conceding she was pretty darned good, indicates a similar sort of thing to when the Son of a carpenter also confounded officialdom with His wit and repartee.

The essential difference, of course, is that Jehanne did not heal individuals, only a nation and she didn’t walk on water.  Via Methodius, here’s the Hitchens piece and I’d love to have seen the looks on the faces of Mail readers at that.

Some excerpts:

But I can certainly recall the way the words of the Church of England’s marriage service, at St Bride’s in London, awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed. I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being. It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done.

The swearing of great oaths concentrates the mind. So did the baptisms first of my daughter and then of my wife who, raised as a Marxist atheist, trod another rather different path to the same place.

Word spread around my trade that I was somehow mixed up in church matters. It was embarrassing. I remember a distinguished foreign correspondent, with a look of mingled pity and horror on his face, asking: ‘How can you do that?’

Hitchens makes the same error as others in confusing “religion” with “Christianity” – completely different things:

It is a strange and welcome side effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now overcome this.  Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now?

There isn’t, Peter – there is fury against Christianity but they try to blur it into fury against ALL religion. In their minds, global socialism is not a religion, despite the fervour but it looks very much like a religion to me.

He’s right about this though:

[Christianity] is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power.

In an age of power worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

Yes but how to get anyone to see that?   As you say, it comes down, in the end,  to this decision:

As he has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more convinced we cannot know such a thing in the way we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not.

I think it better by far to believe.

I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by their failure to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. It is also my view that, as with all atheists, he is his own chief opponent.  As long as he can convince himself, nobody else will persuade him.

If you wish to see the results of godless socialism, go to Russia and observe the human cost, even two generations on. If you wish to see the results of Christianity, look at the western societies before they lost their souls to the new global federalism which now grips the world.

One is full of zombie-like people who don’t care and the other was full of tolerant people who saw something in their nation to be proud of, a nation once respected in the world.

Anyway, that was the post and most of you got through it relatively unscathed.  But let’s put a sting in the tail and mention a word I almost never use on this blog:

Jesus Christ

Now why would that immediately get people’s backs up?  After all, He seemed a pretty cool dude in His day, walking about healing people and preaching sermons on hills.  He even overturned some tables once.  I mean, why do people get apoplectic about that and even nauseated?  Let’s see if I get the same reaction when I mention this name:

Fred White

No?  No reaction?  No nausea?

Wonder why.

Filed under: Life issues & people