De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

David waged a sacred war of extermination against the Amalekites This Sunday , (29th in Ordinary Time, year C) the first reading is about the Israelites conflict with the Amalekites. In a new video, Fr. Robert Barron addresses the claims of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al ) that the God of the Bible is a dreadful entity because of the violence in the Old Testament, which seems so out of step with the God of the New Testament. Of course, this is not a new problem in the Church. The Marcionites, founded in 144 AD, thought that there were two gods, the horrible god of the OT and the cuddly god of the NT and they jettisoned the OT from their Canon of Scripture. They taught that Christ was not the Son of the God of the Jews, but the Son of the good God, who was different from the God of the Ancient Covenant. They anticipated the more consistent dualism of Manichaeism and were finally absorbed by it (both were condemned as heresy of course). Fr. Robert here state...

I have long held a fascination with Islam; the people, the culture, the Kaba, the texts. This has led to a lot of reading. Reading Al Qur'an , commentaries, histories and polemics. Trying to understand the complicated interplay of Islamic culture and philosophy. What Islam preserved and gave us; Averoes, the Alhambra, Avicenna, Aristotle even. What it represented to us in the West; wresting the Holy Land away from us in the Muslim conquests of the Levant (632–661), Al-Andalas and the Caliphate of Cordoba (711), the fall of the Byzantine Empire (1471),  Reconquista in 1492,  the Great Seige of Malta (1565),   the Battle of Lepanto (1571). Does that seem like a lot of war? Today, Islam is still deeply controversial throughout the world. Islamic countries are restless. The Arab spring seems to be disintegrating into anarchic violence. In this country, on the 22nd May, we had the horrific incident where a British Soldier was knocked down in the street, in broad dayli...