A BURN on Thomas More

Ok, it has been about five hundred years, and I know ALL of us are thinking the EXACT SAME THING: who in the HELL decided that Thomas More was some kind of great guy? Much less a saint or something?

Not only do I risk the wrath of the world's largest religion here, so I admittedly get some ice water in my veins as I type this, I also risk sounding like the idiot kid who points out the emperor has no clothes. This guy was one of history's most self righteous JERKS and here he has people in the twentieth century eulogizing his memory even in full presence of the terrible things he did?

I feel like this is some kind of 'Behind the Music' version of More but the evidence really speaks for itself. And not only am I doing the equivalent of posting grainy paparazzi photos of this terrible Tudor, it makes me look like some sort of meanie that should be exposing the real story behind Brittany Spears. Brittany Spears hasn't gone down in history, recent or ancient, as being some kind of 'Saint' or something, literally. This is a guy whose terrible cold-hearted grasp was only limited by his reach. In the brief period that Henry VIII decided he was deserving of the office of right hand man, the king gave him a free hand to deal with religious heretics as he saw fit.

So the end result was that this hypocrite was mincing words with the king about whether or not his royal divorce should be sanctioned to save his self righteous NECK while he was BURNING PROTESTANTS like Simon Fish, who normally gets the press of some type of composite protestant martyr (but whose story is still fairly illustrative of the types of terrible things More did).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Fish

Let's see what we might be missing. What is the REAL RAP on why we all think that this cruel bigoted monster is getting an overly sanitized reputation.

I really think that this self righteous hypocrite's actual character is NOT up for debate because among other egregious crimes he goes down in history saying that the only reason that he didn't go into the clergy even though he believed it was the only worthy profession is that he didn't want to look bad for not keeping his hands off the ladies.

This is why, for a lesser sacrifice, Tom More ended up with the movie about all the stupid 'Seasons' and Cardinal Fisher ended up with only obscure but dignified martyrdom. The only thing that I can think of is that Cardinal Fisher, who was actually LESS equivocal about Henry's divorce, didn't get much sympathetic press because he actually WAS a devout Roman Catholic who had never married or fathered children despite his better religious scruples.

And thus because Margaret Roper and his other WHINY, BRATTY descendants have had five hundred years to polish this thug's memory, his reputation looks a bit brighter than poor Cardinal Fisher's whose righteous celibate lifestyle resulted in no one really giving a damn about him at all. Fisher went to the block more valiantly than More, but no kids equals nobody really cared one way or the other.

What I think is a total BURN on Thomas More, though, (HAHA, pun intended) is that he wrote a lot of his legal argument stuff about five years too early. It was right before the Gutenberg printing press (which was really responsible, more than any person could, for successfully ending the hold of Roman Catholicism), standardized English spelling for GOOD!

So even though Thomas More was like the pinnacle of enlightened humanist thinking and education at the time, via historical accident he goes down on record looking like a kindergartner that can barely read or write!

LOL... Burn on Tom More.