Again from Jacques Barzun's 2000 From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present:
Earlier miscreants were seduced by the Devil and must be rescued from his toils. Nowadays the so-called whistle-blower, he who denounces falsehood or fraud in his workplace, is similarly persecuted for the good of the firm, and the Devil is not even blamed. In other words, religious persecution is a health measure that stops the spread of an infectious disease -- all the more necessary that souls matter more than bodies. Since God expects his faithful to defend every detail of His revelation, persecution is a duty; as well as self-defense against a spiritual invasion; it is the domestic form of religious war.
When this outlook is aggressive it is a crusade, as in the religious and political fundamentalisms of our century. It is a mistake to say that because fundamentalists suppress free thought they are anti-intellectual. On the contrary, they over-intellectualize, like all literalists; they interpret a text as a judge does a statute. In Soviet Russia, deviationists (as the West learned to call them) were condemned for straying from the sense of some sentence by Marx or Lenin.
Tags: Barzun, Dawn to Decadence, Faith
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