American Minute with Bill Federer
Edmund Burke is considered the most influential orator in the British House of Commons in the 18th century.
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Edmund Burke is considered the most influential orator in the British House of Commons in the 18th century.
Born January 12, 1729, one of his first notable writings was an anonymous publication A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756, which was a satirical criticism of the deism promoted by Lord Bolingbroke:
“Seeing every mode of religion attacked in a lively manner, and the foundation of every virtue, and of all government, sapped with great art and much ingenuity …
the same engines which were employed for the destruction of religion, might be employed with equal success for the subversion of government.”
Burke criticized how a deist “every day invents some new artificial rule.”
He described the “unalterable relations which Providence has ordained that every thing should bear to every other. These relations, which are truth itself, the foundation of virtue, and consequently, the only measures of happiness.”
Burke wrote in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, author of the satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
Swift also wrote in 1712, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, in which he defended Christianity against deists, freethinkers, atheists, anti-trinitarians, and socinians (unitarians).
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Edmund Burke stands out in history because as a member of the British Parliament, he strongly opposed the slave trade.
He also defended the rights of the American colonies.
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When America’s Revolutionary War began, Edmund Burke addressed Parliament with “A Second Speech on the Conciliation with America,” March 22, 1775:
“The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.
This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it …”
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Burke continued:
“All Protestantism … is a sort of dissent.
But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
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New York University Professor Emeritus Patricia U. Bonomi wrote in her article “Religious Pluralism in the Middle Colonies” that “… the colonists were about 98 percent Protestant.”
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Edmund Burke is quoted in The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, Volume VI:
“The Scripture … is a most remarkable, but most multifarious, collection of the records of the Divine economy;
a collection of an infinite variety of theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, allegory, legislation, carried through different books, by different authors, at different ages, for different ends and purposes.”
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Upon receiving news of the beginning of the French Revolution, Burke wrote October 10, 1789:
“This day I heard … the portentous state of France — where the elements which compose human society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of monsters to be produced in the place of it.”
On November 4, 1789, Burke wrote to Charles-Jean-François Depont in France:
“You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover’d freedom.”
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He publicly condemned the French Revolution in Parliament, February 9, 1790:
“The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world.
In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures …
There was a danger of an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy …
In religion, the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from Atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction.”
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In 1789, the French Revolution began with idealistic motives and a vaunted motto “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.”
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Robespierre led the “Committee of Public Safety” — France’s version of a Department of Homeland Security.
When citizens resisted the new secular order, Robespierre implemented subversive tactics.
He gave a Speech to the National Convention , February 5, 1794, titled “Terror Justified”:
“Lead the people by means of reason and … by terror … Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice; it flows, then, from virtue.”
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Incredulously, the government actually planned and carried out terrorist attacks upon its own people it order to get them to submit.
Robespierre’s Reign of Terror resulted in over 40,000 French citizens being beheaded in Paris, and over 300,000 massacred in the Vendée, a rural, very religious, Catholic area of northwest France.
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French General Francois Joseph Westermann reputedly wrote a report to the Committee of Public Safety:
“There is no more Vendée, Republican citizens.
It died beneath our free sword, with its women and its children. I have just buried it in the swamps and the woods of Savenay.
Following the orders that you gave to me, I crushed the children beneath the horses’ hooves, massacred the women who, those at least, will bear no more brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I have exterminated them all.”
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During the French Revolution:
- churches were closed or used for “immoral … lurid … licentious … scandalous … depravities.” The Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg was made into a Temple of Reason;
- crosses were forbidden as being offensive;
- Christian religious monuments and statues were destroyed;
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- graves were vandalized, ransacked and desecrated, including those of Good King Henry IV, and Ste. Genevieve, who had called Paris to pray to avert an attack of Attila the Hun in 451AD;
- public and private worship, as well as Christian religious education, was outlawed;
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- treaties were broken resulting in the capture of 300 American ships headed to British ports.
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Talleyrand, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, demanded the U.S. pay millions in bribes to stop France from raiding American ships.
A politician skilled in the art of obfuscation (intentionally obscuring the truth), Talleyrand stated: “We were given speech to hide our thoughts.”
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A more recent example of obfuscation was at press conference, December 3, 2019, at a NATO summit.
With the backdrop of hundreds of cemeteries, churches, and cathedrals being vandalized or damaged, including the historic Notre Dame Cathedral, President Trump asked French President Emanuel Macron if he wanted more ISIS fighters in France.
After Marcon’s lengthy, evasive response, President Trump quipped:
“This is why he is a great politician because that was one of the greatest non-answers I have ever heard.”
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The French Revolution intentionally campaigned to de-christianize French society, replacing it with a secular civic religion of state worship.
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