Free Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran

the religious Orders [rediscovering the Greeks, thanks to the Arabs], and in the triumphant enlistment of the best talents of Christendom in the service of the Holy See.” 15 The spirit of science and exploration began to shift back westward, but with an allowance for diversity and competition that would rapidly lead to cumulative advances and breakthroughs in knowledge and technology, warfare and commerce on a scale vastly greater than anything that had ever come before. Like the Greek city-states that first inspired Western civilization, the dynastic and territorial states of Christian Europe formed a creative brew of cultural unity and cooperation, fervent competition and variety that would eventually drive the entire world on to a new level of interaction and innovation.

GOD WITHDRAWS
     
Upon the establishment of vast overseas empires, beginning in the fifteenth century, kings and princes started to gain the upper hand over the Church. With the resources of these new empires and the help of the merchant class to manage and distribute these resources, the great nobles of northern Europe fanned a Protestant Reformation that challenged the moral dominion of the Catholic Church. The Reformation, which began in 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, fractured Western Christendom, shaking the foundations of faith. This was barely half a century after the fall of Constantinople.
The popularization of Protestantism through the printing press compelled papal authorities to institute the Holy Inquisition to regain control by brutally forcing the genie of free and critical inquiry back into the bottle. Tortures such as breaking bodies on the rack and water-boarding (pouring water down a person’s gullet until he felt he was drowning) were favorite techniques to enforce literal belief in God’s word, as the Church chose to interpret it. Smart men—like Italy’s Galileo, France’s René Descartes, and England’s Thomas Hobbes—granted that God’s word is always true but only if never taken literally.
After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the religious wars in Europe, it was resolved that every king or prince could choose the religion to follow in his own kingdom. In 1685, the “Sun King,” France’s Louis XIV, ruler of Europe’s most powerful and populous country, declared Protestantism illegal. This did not rekindle the wars of religion, but hundreds of thousands of Protestants fled. The exodus of the French Huguenots, especially to England and Holland, coincided with the rise of scientific thinking and experiment, such as Isaac Newton’s explanation of the heavens and Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms. From Holland, which published about half of Europe’s books, French exiles delighted in freewheeling attacks on church and monarchy, particularly through humor and, for the first time in Christian Europe, through pornography. A ceaseless flow of tracts wound back to France calling for religious tolerance and disdain for dogma, removal of royalty from national affairs, and admiration for science, reason, and the practical achievements of industrial technology. Soon Voltaire and the French philosophes were urging the public to read Newton, chuck the Bible, and think for itself.
In the West, particularly in science-minded circles, God was on His way to becoming a sort of lazy couch potato. Having set the world in motion, He then withdrew to watch. This distant deity would become the official Supreme Being of the French Revolution and also of Thomas Jefferson’s Unitarian religion. But a lazy God left a moral void that science and reason could never seem to fill, even to our day. Science, for example, is not particularly well suited to deal with people’s existential anxieties—death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness, or longing for love or justice—for which there is either no reasonable or no definitive solution.