Let's suppose -- for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise -- that you're right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.

It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.

Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration -- even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy's time -- was not such a bad thing?

From your first link:

The massacre of the Rhineland Jews by the People's Crusade, and other associated persecutions, were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church. The bishops of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms had attempted to protect the Jews of those towns within the walls of their own palaces, but the People's Crusade broke in to slaughter them. Fifty years later when St. Bernard of Clairvaux was urging recruitment for the Second Crusade, he specifically criticized the attacks on Jews which occurred in the First Crusade. [...] Albert of Aachen's own view was that the People's Crusade were uncontrollable semi-Christianized country-folk (citing the "goose incident", which Hebrew chronicles corroborate), who massacred hundreds of Jewish women and children, and that the People's Crusade ultimately got what they deserved when they were themselves promptly slaughtered by Muslim forces as soon as they set foot in Asia Minor.

So your ancestors were killed by stupid peasants, not the Church.

Few remember the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the complete destruction of the Cathars.

What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. "Kill them all, God will know His own." And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can't just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don't kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.

Peasants who were Catholics, taught by Catholic doctrine and engaged in a Crusade started by the Catholic Church. Yet you don't see such mobs systematically destroying entire Jewish villages in Protestant areas, and you don't see it in Russian Orthodox areas until the 1500s.

Protestantism didn't even exist until the 1500s. I don't see why/how you're making the comparison.

A bunch of peasants got out of hand, directly went against the wishes of the Church, and killed some people. (Not very many, either, in the grand scheme of things.) When it comes to crimes against humanity, this is about a 1.1 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the Church, maybe about 3 for the peasants.

There may be an illusion of transparency here. Very few people remember where that phrase came from even if they've heard some version.

Hm, fair enough, but I was under the impression that most intelligent people at least knew that the Church had killed all the Cathars, and that's why Cathars don't exist anymore.

And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them.

Somehow a lot of other religions have managed ok without doing that.

Managed what okay? No religion has managed to be as awesome as Catholicism, either. Catholics are responsible for universities.

I'm wondering if I'm misreading what you are saying here.. Are you arguing that the Catholic Church should kill Catholic heretics and groups that disagree because otherwise other groups who will be more violent will arise?

Well, they shouldn't do it anymore, for obvious reasons. But at that time it was a good idea. The Reformation led to a shift in values and political structures that reached one climax with the French revolution, heights never before seen with the Nazi camps and Soviet gulags, and will likely reach yet another climax with uFAI. The rise of atheism was the rise of sheer unadulterated Evil. It might have been better had the Church just killed all the protesters when they had the chance. But this is idle political speculation about counterfactual histories, so I mean, I'm probably horrifically wrong. But I could be horrifically right. It's hard to tell.

(ETA: By the way, I basically never get into "my side is better than your side" fights, and this fight is clearly inconsequential, so I'm mostly just having fun with it. Apologies if you were expecting me to be serious.)

but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true - there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn't notice the world he's describing isn't our own.

That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.

Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don't rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.

It would be helpful if you narrowed down to a specific claim which you consider to be gratuitously and obviously wrong.

For instance, your quote contains the claim that, of the regimes described, only Israel has survived to this day. Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived? If that is not your contention, then you do not, after all, object to the whole quote, but object to only part of it. And yet you dropped the whole thing into your comment, apparently expecting your reader to know what section of the quote you object to.

Sorry, but that sounds like motivated stopping to me. Coming up with ways by which blind evolution and guiding divinity might be compatible isn't really hard at all.

For one, a gene mutation can only be selected for once it exists. Whether a mutation comes into existence or not is a random process. God could influence the mutations that come into existence.

Secondly, the course of evolution is determined by the environment. Put life in a cold environment, and it will evolve to have adaptations for the cold. God could manipulate the environment to select for the adaptations He wants. There are a lot of papers arguing that the evolution of intelligent, tool-using life requires a very specific environment, which God could have helped arrange.

Thirdly, in addition to choosing the environment, God could influence what happens in the environment, for instance by causing catastrophes that lead to population bottlenecks, helping select specific traits by influencing who survives.

This is consistent with the Toba catastrophe theory that suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 15,000 individuals[4] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change.

Fourthly, there's genetic drift, again essentially a random process.

Vigorous debates occurred over the relative importance of natural selection versus neutral processes, including genetic drift. Ronald Fisher held the view that genetic drift plays at the most a minor role in evolution, and this remained the dominant view for several decades. In 1968 Motoo Kimura rekindled the debate with his neutral theory of molecular evolution, which claims that most instances where a genetic change spreads across a population (although not necessarily changes in phenotypes) are caused by genetic drift.

...and these were just ones I could come up with off the top of my head.

There's still no shortage of Christians making metaethical arguments for Christianity, or at least for theism. Sure, such arguments should be dead -- they should always have been dead, evo psych or no evo psych -- but alas, what should be and what is are quite different things.

The idea that destroying the environment will make the remaining species "better" by making sure that only the "fittest" survive betrays a near-total misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is just the name we give to the fact that organisms (or, more precisely, genes) which survive and reproduce effectively in a given set of conditions become more frequent over time. If you clear-cut the forest, you're not eliminating "weak" species and making room for the "strong" — you're getting rid of species that were well-adapted to the forest and increasing the numbers of whatever organisms can survive in the resulting waste.

Evolution is no threat to religion. Natural selection, explaining and predicting evolution is a threat to religion.

Indeed, one can usefully define any belief system as quasi religious if it finds natural selection threatening. If that belief system piously proclaims its admiration for Darwin while evasively burying his ideas, attributing to him common descent, rather than the explanation of common descent, then that belief system is religious, or serves the same functions and has the same problems as religion.

The trouble is that natural selection implies not the lovely harmonious nature of the environmentalists and Gaea worshipers, but a ruthless and bloody nature, red in tooth and claw, that is apt to be markedly improved by a bit of clear cutting, a few extinctions, and a couple of genocides, and of course converting the swamps into sharply differentiated dry land with few trees, and lakes with decent fishing, by massive bulldozing. And a few more genocides. Recall Darwin's cheerful comments about extinction and genocide. It is all progress. Well, if not all progress, on average it will be progress.

Why would abolition of political parties make politics better? Look at politics before modern democracy and political parties. I personally can't imagine something more mind-killing than court intrigues in, say, 18th century.