News Stephan Hawking Declares There is No God

Nonsense. It is inline with Rick Santorum's campaign, many conservative websites, and the Scandinavian sociopath Anders Brevik. It mixes spiritual and physical geographies.

The Holy Land was never Christian. Hell, it has never been entirely anybody's. Just a very long series of historical invasions and occupations. It was Jewish, then Babylonian, then Greek, then Phillistine, then Jewish, then Roman, then Byzantine, then Persian, then Arab, and now Jewish again. Muslims had ruled the Holy Land for over 400 years before the first Crusade. Medieval historians do not agree with this new and very revisionist view.

Professor of Medieval History Jay Rubenstein puts it well:

Did the crusaders view their war in these terms? Was it a defensive war?

The answer is a resounding "no."

The crusaders had one goal in 1096: to capture the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb of Christ, in Jerusalem. Christianity at this time was less about ideas and more about things--places, objects and bones. The highest devotional practice was the pilgrimage, a journey to a holy site, to pray before the body of a saint. The model saint whom all others imitated was Christ, and His tomb was the most sacred one imaginable even though, unlike other saints' shrines, Christ's was empty.

The First Crusade, then, was not about turning back centuries of Muslim expansion. It was about seizing control of sacred landscapes. It was, in modern parlance, "a war of choice" or "an act of aggression." On July 15, 1099, this willfully chosen campaign ended victoriously when the crusaders conquered Jerusalem.

Later crusades, arguably, were defensive, in that they sought to preserve or restore the fruits of this victory. But their defensive goals served to reaffirm that earlier act of aggression.

Many crusaders would add one proviso to this argument. It was a war of vengeance. The Christians were out to avenge the sufferings of their Savior, the humiliations He was forced to endure every day as unbelieving pagans soiled the places that He had made sacred through his touch.​

 

There is no scientific evidence that telepathy is a real phenomenon.

I believe that a certain percentage of wild-ass guesses will turn out to be true. This is neither telepathy nor prescience.

And how many hundred times have you guessed a score wrong?

It's an interesting scenario, but no proof will exist about alien civilizations until evidence emerges, if ever. However likely it is that other civilizations exist, the vastness of the universe, even the vastness of the galaxy may prevent contact between them impossibly remote. Until then it is science fiction, Buck.

 

“All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."

"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy​

 

This call from Urban was to come to the defense of European Constantinople and Romania not to take back Jerusalem. Read it HERE. But the Crusades did exactly that. They were toally focused on the Holy Land, not Constantinople. They did not go to root out the Moors in European Spain or liberate Romania, North Africa or other Muslim strongholds. They went to conquer Jerusalem which had been Muslim for 400 years. The Christians remaining in Jerusalem were not Europeans, they were locals. The notion that an invasion and occupation of Jersusalem from people 2000 miles away was somehow "defensive" just because someone has declared some tenuous kinship with local Christians does not hold water. If it did, then Russia is fighting a defensive war in Ukraine because they are invading to defend the local Russians in Ukraine.

 

Then so is your entire thesis, even thought you have linked no evidence at all.

The Orthodox Christians were in Constantinople, not in Jerusalem. It is not generally accepted that the Crusades were defensive. That is a huge stretch and dates from very recently. It is generally accepted that the Crusades were about the conquest of Jerusalem.

cru·sade noun

A medieval military expedition, one of a series made by Europeans to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries​

 

You are really not helping yourself with this sad comparison, Winston.

Look, the point is that the crusades were not "defensive" in any way. They were just one on dozens of major conquests of Palestine that have occurred in the last 3,000 years. The Crusades have no special place among these wars as being "Defensive". Each supplanted a previous owner through invasion and occupation. That is how conquests work.