Earlier this month the head of France’s king Henri IV, which had been missing since his tomb was vandalized in 1793, was returned to his descendants. This would be a trivial curiosity, if Henri had been just your run-of-the mill monarch. In fact, he is one of the most important humanists in the past 500 years of western civilization, and the return of his head is one more tiny step toward the tolerant, humane world he tried to foster.

When the Protestant Reformation broke out in Germany in the 16^th century, it quickly spread to France. But the French Protestants faced more difficulty than their German counterparts, because France had a stronger central monarchy. Germany was divided into dozens of little principalities, and by winning over individual princes the Protestants could assure themselves safe havens. This was not the case in France, though, and the result was a series of bloody civil wars.

Ultimately, a deal was worked out, involving the marriage of the leading Protestant prince, Henri of Navarre, to the sister of the Catholic king. Everyone who was anyone, on both sides of the divide, attended the lavish wedding amidst hopes for lasting peace. Those hopes were not shared, though, by the Jesuit-inspired “Catholic League,” heavily influenced by the thinking of the Jesuit Father Juan Mariani: “It is a glorious thing to exterminate the whole of this pestilential and pernicious [Protestant] race from the community of mankind. Limbs, too, are cut off when they are corrupt, that they may not infect the remainder of the body.” The Jesuits refused to administer the sacraments to those who would not support the League.

St. Bartholomew’s Day

The plan was simple: with every prominent Protestant leader present in Paris, just kill them all, in one fell swoop, in what became known as the “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.” The killings of the leaders went so smoothly that King Charles IX then ordered the immediate extermination of every Protestant in France. The Jesuits did their part; in Bordeaux, the slaughter was kicked off by the sermons of the Jesuit Father Auger: “Who executed the divine judgments at Paris? The angel of God. Who in Orleans? The angel of God. Who in a hundred cities of this realm? The angel of God. And who will execute them in Bordeaux? The angel of God, however man may try to resist him.” Though there is no accurate body count, historians put the number of victims in the tens of thousands. The Pope wrote to Charles that “We rejoice with you that with the help of God you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics.”

Charles was succeeded by another staunch Catholic, Henri III, who vigorously enforced laws keeping Protestant survivors out of all positions of preferment. That didn’t satisfy the League, though; a Dominican friar named Jacques Clement assassinated Henri III in 1589. Catholic school grammars thereafter included the theme “Jacques Clement has done a meritorious act inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

The thinking behind this assassination may well have been to reignite a war that could result in a “Final Solution” for French Protestantism – for next in line to the throne was Henri of Navarre, the same Protestant whose wedding had occasioned St. Bartholomew’s Day. Civil war began again in earnest, with the Catholic League desperate to avoid the calamity of a Protestant on the throne of France. Unfortunately for the Pope, the man now known as Henri IV proved to be a capable soldier, and after a bitter war against the Spanish-backed Catholic League was able to bring most of France under his control. Paris, though, proved a tough nut to crack; thousands died of starvation rather than yield to the siege of a heretic. The legend that Henri actually said “Paris is well worth a Mass” may be apocryphal, but he in fact decided to end the bloodshed by publicly converting to Catholicism, thus ushering in a period of peace and prosperity for his devastated country. In fact, Henri simply never cared much about religion, and was endlessly flummoxed by those who did. Instead he devoted his efforts to draining swamps, building roads, bridges, and canals, professionalizing state financial systems, inviting artists and craftsmen to live and work at the Louvre, and keeping internal peace by paying off nobles rather than fighting them. In his spare time, he launched the French Empire in North America and India.

Assassination

True Catholics (correctly) doubted the sincerity of Henri’s conversion, and feared that he lacked the necessary zeal in persecuting his former Protestant companions. Assassination attempts inspired by the Jesuits occurred at the rate of about one per year. In 1594, a Jesuit pupil managed to stab Henri in the face before being subdued. The recently rediscovered skull reveals a healed bone fracture in the left jaw, corresponding to this wound; this is one of the principal clues that the skull in fact belongs to Henri IV, since no DNA is salvageable. (Thirty other indicators also point in the same direction.)

This caused Henri to expel the Jesuit order from France; a few years later, though, he relented, and even chose a Jesuit for his own personal confessor. But in 1598, Henri confirmed the Catholics’ worst fears by signing the “Edict of Nantes,” granting nearly complete freedom of worship to France’s Protestants in perpetuity. The Church was stunned. “I am the most grieved and disconsolate person in the world,” wrote the Pope. “I see the most the most cursed Edict that I could imagine, … whereby liberty of conscience is granted to everyone, which is the worst thing in the world … I shall become the laughingstock of the world.” Unfortunately, “perpetuity” didn’t last very long.

Exactly 400 years ago last May, a former Jesuit named Francois Ravaillac succeeded where so many others had failed, murdering Henri IV by stabbing him in the throat during a procession. Henri’s son caved in to Catholic pressure by tightening the screws on France’s Protestants wherever he could. One favored technique, called the dragonnade, involved the forced quartering of French soldiers, who were often not nice young men, in the homes of Protestants, until their hosts would agree to convert to Catholicism. Henri’s grandson, Louis XIV, revoked the Edict of Nantes altogether, cheekily announcing that there were no Protestants left in France to protect. The exodus of 200,000 talented, hardworking Protestants that followed crippled France economically for decades. It was left to Voltaire, whose epic poem Henriade celebrated the life of Henri IV, to rescue French Protestantism through his brilliant efforts on behalf of the wrongly executed Jean Calas in 1762.

During the French Revolution, mobs desecrated the graves of many monarchs at the royal chapel of Saint-Denis, and Henri’s head disappeared. It was apparently bought at auction in the early 1900s, and then sold again privately in 1955 for a few hundred dollars. The purchaser, now in his 80s, recently donated the skull to Henri’s descendant the Duke of Anjou, the fellow who would be king of France today had not a few revolutions intervened.

A ceremony will be held sometime next year at which Henri’s head will be restored to its tomb at Saint-Denis. France is a country that still has issues with tolerance, as its recent expulsions of Roma Gypsies and overheated anti-Muslim rhetoric demonstrates. Let’s hope they do this up right, and properly celebrate a leader who put humans, rather than God, at the center of his attention.

Luis Granados

Did all the holiday shopping get you down? Depressed that you can’t afford all the gifts that were bought, wrapped and distributed to family and friends? There’s a way out. It’s called “borrowing money.” Borrow every penny you can, and spend it as fast as you can. Just make sure the loans come due after October 21, 2011. Since the world is going to end that day, you’ll never have to repay those loans. Thus says Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio, who is urging his followers to pay for signs and billboards all over America reminding people to “Save the Date!”

You can even shop at a jewelry store in Superior, Wisconsin which is advertising a special half price sale on all merchandise – far better than a mere “Going out of business” sale, it’s a “Second Coming” sale. When asked why he wasn’t just giving his wares away, owner Larry Falter explained that he had creditors to take care of before the Rapture, and didn’t want to have to explain how he stiffed them on Judgment Day. If you’re reading this article, though, chances are you’re already so far gone that just paying off a few bills isn’t going to do you any good, so you may as well go ahead and borrow all you can now.

The Calculation

According to Camping, the “Rapture” for good Protestants will arrive on May 21. Five months later, on October 21, “God will destroy this world.” This information is contained in the Bible itself; all you have to do is read it correctly, the way Camping does. First, he starts with the “fact” that the Great Flood occurred in 4990 BC. Then he combines Peter’s comment that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years” with God’s warning to Noah that the earth would be flooded in 7 days. Since each day is a thousand years, 7000 years from 4990 BC lands you right in the middle of 2011. Mathematical formulae far more complicated than I can understand measure 722,500 days from the date of the Crucifixion (April Fools’ Day, 33 AD) to reach an even more precise result, of Rapture on May 21, 2011. How he gets the five months from the May 21 Rapture to the October 21 end of the world isn’t clear, but if he gets the first one right I think we’ll all give him the benefit of the doubt.

Camping is spreading his message on rolling billboards and even park bench advertising. His impact is not nearly as great, though, as that of America’s leading 19^th century prophet of doom, William Miller.
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Anyone who watches the television show House on Fox for more than one episode knows that Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie with a great American accent) is a cynical, sardonic, crotchety character who delights in snide comments, rude and inappropriate banter at work, and, frequently, crushing idealism. These traits are why viewers love him; in its seventh season, House has a dedicated fanbase, and despite the somewhat formulaic  layout of episodes, people find it clever, intriguing, and thought-provoking. I keep up with the show fairly regularly, and am impressed by the spread of issues raised in the medical drama.

The November 22 episode titled “Small Sacrifices” was particularly relevant and provocative. In the opening scene a young, shirtless man with olive skin and a beard struggles under the weight of a large cross, which some others then plant in the ground and to which they crucify him. Spewing blood from the mouth, the man is then rushed to Dr. House’s diagnostics team at Princeton Plainsboro hospital. There, the man reveals that he made a deal with God: if God were to cure his daughter of terminal brain cancer, he would self-crucify every year she was in remission.

House listens to this incredulously, letting loose a string of derision on the thirty-three-year-old carpenter (the actor is meant to resemble Jesus, by the way) who insists that his faith has kept his daughter cancer-free. Starting here, in the first five minutes of the episode, House rails against faith in God, prayer, and supernaturalism as strongly as would Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens (“When we don’t find a logical answer, we find a stupid one,” he chides when discussing why the daughter’s cancer mysteriously disappeared after the “deal.” “Ritual is what happens when we run out of rational.”) A man of science, House counters a claim by a co-worker that prayer has been known to aid recovery with “only if the person knows they’re being prayed for.”

House really channels Dawkins (“The God Delusion”) when he ponders that the man’s beliefs of dealmaking with God could be a symptom of schizophrenia, a disease for which delusions of grandeur are a hallmark. When the patient insists that House has come “to see if your medicine turned me into an atheist,” House says “I’d settle for agnostic.” “Faith is not a disease,” the man replies. “No, of course not, ” House says. “Then again, it is communicable, and kills an awful lot of people.”

Littered with other references to House’s rational beliefs in science, such as suggesting his patient see Inherit the Wind (about the Scopes Monkey trial), and calling out the hypocrisy of the claim that God is wrathful and wants suffering while also being completely loving and compassionate, the episode really struck me as a blatant parallel to the New Atheists that shape the anti-religion debate these days. House spends much of the episode espousing truth: that medicine can heal sickness better than praying, that reason will solve more problems than blind faith, that love is more important than ideology.

Whether humanists and the New Atheists (and characters like House) completely agree on tactics and specifics of the anti-religion perspective is a debate for another day. But seeing the atheist argument espoused by one of television’s most popular characters (even one known for cynicism) is refreshing, and potentially could open up debate in living rooms and around water coolers that may have previously been ignored.

You are what you eat. You also pay for what you eat. And chances are, if you’re not already paying Muslim God experts for the privilege of eating, you will be soon.

Plans are well underway in Europe to expand the availability of “halal” food, i.e., food that meets the standards of Muslim dietary laws, just like “kosher” food for jews. Nothing wrong with that; generally speaking, people should be able to eat or not eat whatever they want. The trouble arises because halal food is now being thrust on the rest of us, without our even knowing it.

The problem is worse in England, though just like Sharia law it is beginning to infect America as well. A newspaper investigation in September revealed that Britain’s biggest supermarkets are selling halal meat, without marking it as such on the packaging. Fast food chains Domino’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Subway are all doing the same thing. Not just fast food, either: members of the British Parliament were shocked to discover that they were being served halal poultry as well, without being told about it.

The reason this is happening is not because these corporations have converted to Islam. The reason is that it’s easier and cheaper to manufacture one kind of food rather than go to the hassle and expense of separately tracking and packaging two different kinds of otherwise indistinguishable product. So they just make everything halal, and go about their business. This is the exactly the agenda of a Muslim outfit called the “World Halal Forum”: “As Halal food and products are not only for Muslims, but rather for everyone in the world regardless [of] their religious affiliation, [this] makes Halal a perfect match for Europe’s multicultural consumer market.”

What’s wrong with halal?

So what’s wrong with halal food? Certainly not its taste or nutritional value, which are not in question. Some people object to the halal rules about the manner in which animals must be slaughtered. These procedures vary from expert to expert, but it seems to be necessary to slit the animal’s throat and drain all its blood while reciting: “In the name of God, God is the greatest.” Moreover, many Muslim (and Jewish) God experts adamantly resist the modern practice of “stunning” the animal first, so that he or she will not consciously experience the agony of having his or her blood gush out. Many countries have laws that require the humane stunning of animals before slaughter; but the seemingly endless list of special legal exceptions for God experts includes these laws as well, allowing them to inflict as much pain on the animals as their hearts desire.

I should probably care about the process of killing the animals I eat more than I actually do. Truth is, I avoid thinking about it altogether, because if I worried about it too much I might wind up eating celery. What I do think about a lot, though, is the fact that the single most important element of both the kosher and halal regimes is the necessity for a God expert to oversee the selection and preparation of the food to certify its acceptability, while resolving occasional tough theological questions—and these guys don’t work for free.

The fast-growing halal food market worldwide is now estimated to be worth more than $640 billion a year ($67 billion in Europe and $13 billion in the U.S.) — around 16% of the entire food industry. Even though only a small fraction of these revenues go to pay certification fees, a small fraction of $640 billion is still a lot of money. It irritates me no end to realize that some of that money came from me.
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John Lennon was shot dead in front his apartment building
across from Central Park in New York City thirty years ago today.

He’d just returned from the recording studio.

His music and his mark on our culture are indelible,
his most famous song undoubtedly humanist:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

WE MISS YOU!