Nonsense on stilts, Edwin. Catholics get repeated corrections from our brothers and sisters when we get the least bit discourteous or uncharitable. You can see it directly in the threads. It also occurs via PM.
That has nothing to do with what I was saying. I agree that there are many Catholics here who rebuke their fellow-Catholics when they get rude. However, you are not in the best position to evaluate just how effective this is, because you are in the majority. You aren’t going to hear the tone of this forum the way people who swim against the stream hear it.
I am actually not complaining about this. As forums go, this is a really courteous and reasonable one. The problems with the forum are inherent in the medium. My problem was with qui est ce imposing a standard of behavior on Protestants that is not in fact suited to a debate forum, and which the Catholic posters (rightly) feel no need to accept.
Asking people to make arguments and support them with evidence is not discourteous,
I agree entirely, and that is what I was doing, and what qui est ce referred to as “acting like a warrior.”
nor is making moral judgments about historical figures and their actions.
There I disagree. I think Herbert Butterfield had it right in “Moral Judgments in History.” Such judgments really serve no purpose except to make us feel superior. Of course we have to decide which actions in the past are good role models for us to follow today. But there is no need to decide which historical figures were good or bad (admittedly in some cases, such as Hitler, judgment is practically forced on us by the historical record–but that is not true of Luther, or good and reasonable people would not differ on the subject, as they do). Luther was a complex figure with many good qualities and many terrible faults. Trashing him and idolizing him are equally futile. I am trying to have a conversation about the historical record, not about whether Luther was a good guy.
Since you are a seeker of Truth,
I’m first and foremost a seeker of truth. Plain old lower-case historical truth. Any big ultimate Truth that leads people to disregard this humbler version of truth (for instance, to say that people were forced to convert to Lutheranism under pain of death while being unable to point to a single example of this) is not really Truth at all, or at least has been very imperfectly grasped as such.
why not spend less time defending the truly indefensible (such as Luther’s hatred of the Jews once they rebuked Lutheranism)
This would be hard to do, since so far I have spent absolutely no time doing this.
and more time calling attention to what good he did accomplish?
I am not particularly interested in doing that in this thread. You assume that my agenda is to defend Luther, but it isn’t.
I admit that’s a tough sell to Catholics, but you really kill your credibility by attempting to justify the man’s deep hatreds on some sort of “everybody did it” claim you can’t really support in light of the man’s extant paper trail.
This sentence is problematic in so many ways! First of all, I’m not justifying anything. In the second place, obviously Luther’s paper trail has nothing whatever to do with what other people did. And finally, the historical context really does matter if we are discussing Luther’s historical significance (including his responsibility or lack thereof for the Holocaust).
