Clearing up confused history

I cannot help noting that Mr John Guillaumier has never really lost his acerbic irreverent take on the Catholic sentiments of the majority of the Maltese. His insensitivity towards anything uplifting and religious, and aggressive anti-Catholic bias has spurred him on to unleash similar stuff for a number of years.

I quote excerpts from a review of a book “Bearing False Witness” written by Rodney Stark, a historian of religion and sociologist who is not a Roman Catholic but wrote this book, not in defence of the Church but in defence of history.

We all know, and any mainstream textbook would agree, that the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history, and the Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power etc. But what if these long-held beliefs were all wrong? Why have we held these wrong-headed ideas so strongly and for so long?

In fact some of our most firmly held ideas about history, ideas that paint the Catholic Church in the most negative light are, in fact, fiction. The false accounts of Christian anti-Semitism, persecution of pagans, the Dark Ages, crusading for land, loot and converts monstrosity of the Inquisition, scientific heresies, slavery etc. were all scrutinized soundly, debunked and majestically argued in a stunning powerful and ultimately persuasive way in this book.

Egotism, false ideology and deep-rooted prejudice often work together to give us a false truth.

John Azzopardi, Zabbar

New power station, but little peace of mind

One seems to forget the pollution generated by the Marsa power station, when it was operated by coal and the storage place for coal was the quay nearby. In the 70s up to 1987 no consideration for the health and safety of the inhabitants was taken into account. The government of the day boasted about the plant, while the people over the years have and are still suffering the consequences.

We are again being brainwashed with propaganda, to justify the investment of the new state-of-the-art power station, with a storage tanker of liquid gas, afloat nearby. Again, the authorities gave no consideration for the health and safety of the inhabitants living on this island. The people simply have to wait and suffer the health consequences and/or of a major catastrophic accident, that the new clean state-of-the-art power station brings upon the island.

If the money spent had been invested in the pipeline, the government would have limited the risk and gave peace of mind to the inhabitants living around that area.

Joseph Aquilina, Bahar ic-Caghaq