Killing For Your God

"The summary of seven hundred years of Christian expansion on northern Europe is that the work was mainly done by the sword, in the interests of kings and tyrants, who supported it, as against the resistance of their subjects, who saw in the Church an instrument for their subjection. Christianity, in short, was as truly a religion of the sword as Islam.

"The heathen, broadly speaking, were never persuaded, never convinced, never won by the appeal of the new doctrine; they were either transferred by their kings into the Church like so many cattle, or beaten down into submission after generations of resistance and massacre.

The misery and the butchery wrought from first to last are unimaginable. If the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, with their Church-based policy of suppressing heathenism, be added to the record, the total of evil becomes appalling: for the Spanish Priest Las Casas estimated the total destruction of Native life (in South America) at twelve millions.

"All this slaughter took place by way of expansion, and is exclusive of the further record of the slaughters wrought by the Church within its established field."
A Short History of Christianity. John M. Robertson

Humbly he came,
Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape
Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard
Save by the rabble of his native town,
Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace,

In semblance; but he lit within their souls
The quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the sword
He brought on earth to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom his malignant soul.

At length his mortal frame was led to death.
I stood beside him; on the torturing cross
No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense;
And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed
The massacres and miseries which his name
Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried

"Go! Go!" in mockery.
Shelley. From The Christ by John E. Remsberg

A study of the history of Christian civilisation, between the time it came into being in 381 CE until the Renaissance in the 15th century, reveals an arid desert of thought and intelligence. Little literature of any value was produced. There was no education, and all knowledge was considered sinful. Anyone who had an opinion different from that prescribed by the Church was looked upon as a heretic.

Consequently, Jovinian, a Christian Monk of the 4th century, was condemned and flogged by the Church Council because he stated that the virgin Mary ceased to be a virgin after the birth of Jesus. After the flogging, he was excommunicated and banished to desert island.

Religion is always hailed as the cure for the world's evils. But, too often, it's the problem, not the solution and has been used all too often to justify all manner of atrocities.

"So it was determined to exterminate all the Protestants, and the plan was approved by the queen. They discussed for some time whether they should make an exception of the king of Navarre and the prince of Conde. All agreed that the king of Navarre should be spared by reason of the royal dignity and the new alliance. The duke of Guise, who was put in full command of the enterprise, summoned by night several captains of the Catholic Swiss mercenaries from the five little cantons, and some commanders of French companies, and told them that it was the will of the king that, according to God's will, they should take vengeance on the band of rebels while they had the beasts in the toils. Victory was easy and the booty great and to be obtained without danger. The signal to commence the massacre should be given by the bell of the palace, and the marks by which they should recognize each other in the darkness were a bit of white linen tied around the left arm and a white cross on the hat."
From: The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day

Getting rid of religion won't stop us killing each other but it will give us one less reason to kill our fellow humans.

The charge of murdering children and especially infants, occupies a very prominent place among the recriminations of religionists. The Pagans, as we have seen, brought it against the Christians, and the orthodox against some of the early heretics. The Christians accused Julian of murdering infants for magical purposes, and the bed of the Orontes was said to have been choked with their bodies. The accusation was then commonly directed against the Jews, against the witches, and against the mid-wives, who were supposed to be in confederation with the witches. Epiphanius of Salamis Adversus Haereses

The Aztecs murdered upto 20,000 victims each year to appease their gods. Religious human sacrifice was carried out in ancient Phoenicia, Gaul, Tibet, Africa (the Ashanti), and Borneo. The Mayans and Incas also regularly sacrificed humans to their gods, the Incas executing as many as 200 children at once during major ceremonies.

In Alexandria in the year 415 CE, the great female scientist and head of the Alexandria Library, Hypatia, was beaten to death by Catholic monks who considered her scientific work heretical. They then burnt down the library ~ the greatest depository of books, literature and the acculated wisdom of centuries and helped to bring in the 'Dark Ages'.
Mangasar Mugurditch Mangasarian: The Martyrdom of Hypatia or The Death of the Classical World

Since the 7th century the number of people killed in "jihads" or "holy" wars waged by various factions of Islam can only be vaguely guessed at. Several million would not be out of the question, and the number is increasing as this is being written.

In 1095 when Pope Urban II launched the first Crusade to take the Holy Land from the Muslims, the German Crusaders decided to first "kill the infidels among us" and slaughtered thousands of German Jews on the way to the Holy Land. The same thing happened to Jews in Prague, massacred by Christian Crusaders.

Human sacrifice blossomed in the Mayan theocracy of Central America between the 11th and 16th centuries. To appease a feathered-serpent god, maidens were drowned in sacred wells and other victims either had their hearts cut out, were shot with arrows, or were beheaded. Elsewhere, sacrifice was sporadic. In Peru, pre-Inca tribes killed children in temples called "houses of the moon." In Tibet, Bon shamans performed ritual killings. In Borneo builders of pile houses drove the first pile through the body of a maiden to pacify the earth goddess. In India, Dravidian people offered lives to village goddesses, and followers of Kali sacrificed a male child every Friday evening.

In the Third Crusade, after Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3,000 captives -- many of them women and children -- taken outside the city and slaughtered. Some were disemboweled in a search for swallowed gems. Bishops intoned blessings. Infidel lives were of no consequence. As Saint Bernard of Clairvaux declared in launching the Second Crusade: "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified."

The Assassins were a sect of Ismaili Shi'ite Muslims whose faith required the stealthy murder of religious opponents. From the 11th to 13th centuries, they killed numerous leaders in modern-day Iran, Iraq and Syria. They finally were wiped out by conquering Mongols -- but their vile name survives.

Throughout Europe, beginning in the 1100s, tales spread that Jews were abducting Christian children, sacrificing them, and using their blood in rituals. Hundreds of massacres stemmed from this "blood libel." Some of the supposed sacrifice victims -- Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, the holy child of LaGuardia, Simon of Trent -- were beatified or commemorated with shrines that became sites of pilgrimages and miracles.

In 1208 Pope Innocent III decreed that a Catholic sect known as the Albigenses should be destroyed, all murdered, because they held heretical views such as the idea that Jesus was only an angel. The Crusading soldiers swept through southern France searching for these heretics. When they got to the city of Beziers, that was known to host many of the Albigenses, they asked a papal representative how they could distinguish the heretics from the truly faithful. The answer: "Kill them all. God will know His own."

In the 14th century tens of thousands of Jews were killed by Christians for "causing" the Black Death (bubonic plague). Reason? Because so many Jews survived the plague. Reason? Probably the Jewish rituals that include weekly cleansing of the body and changing into clean clothes.

In the 1500s when the Spanish invaded the Americas they brought the Inquisition with them. Demanding "instant" conversion to Catholicism from all the native inhabitants, backsliders were naturally common. And they were then killed by the Inquisition.

Take this also for a general Rule, that the Spaniards upon what American Coasts soever they arrived, exercised the same Cruelties, Slaughters, Tyrannies and detestable Oppressions on the most innocent Indian Nation, and diverting themselves with delights in new sorts of Torment, did in time improve in Barbarism and Cruelty; wherewith the Omnipotent being incensed suffered them to fail by a more desperate and dangerous lapse into a reprobate state. A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. By Bartolome de las Casas

Thousands of Protestants fled France to avoid persecution and some of them ended up in what is now St. Augustine, Florida. In 1565 Catholic Spaniards discovered one such colony and killed almost every single person there. They then erected a sign that said the people had been executed "not as Frenchmen but as Lutherans."

On August 24, 1572, in France, the Catholics murdered thousands of Protestants in a single bloody day. It came to be known as the St. Bartholomew Day massacre.

In the 17th century the Church of England tried to eliminate the Puritans, using torture and sometimes hanging to achieve their ends. Then Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, rose to power and led the Puritans into a backlash, resulting in civil war. When Cromwell died there was a backlash against Puritans again and Cromwell's body was exhumed, hanged and then decapitated. Death toll uncertain.

Oliver Cromwell was deemed a moderate because he massacred only Catholics and Anglicans, not other Protestants. This Puritan general commanded Bible-carrying soldiers, whom he roused to religious fervor. After decimating an Anglican army, Cromwell said, "God made them as stubble to our swords." He demanded the beheading of the defeated King Charles I, and made himself the holy dictator of England during the 1650s. When his army crushed the hated Irish Catholics, he ordered the execution of the surrendered defenders of Drogheda and their priests, calling it "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches."

Ukrainian Bogdan Chmielnicki was a Cossack Cromwell. He wore the banner of Eastern Orthodoxy in a holy war against Jews and Polish Catholics. More than 100,000 were killed in this 17th-century bloodbath, and the Ukraine was split away from Poland to become part of the Orthodox Russian empire.

The Thirty Years' War produced the largest religious death toll of all time. It began in 1618 when Protestant leaders threw two Catholic emissaries out of a Prague window into a dung heap. War flared between Catholic and Protestant princedoms, drawing in supportive religious armies from Germany, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France and Italy. Sweden's Protestant soldiers sang Martin Luther's "Ein 'Feste Burg" in battle. Three decades of combat turned central Europe into a wasteland of misery. One estimate states that Germany's population dropped from 18 million to 4 million. In the end nothing was settled, and too few people remained to rebuild cities, plant fields, or conduct education.

When Puritans settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s, they created a religious police state where doctrinal deviation could lead to flogging, pillorying, hanging, cutting off ears, or boring through the tongue with a hot iron. Preaching Quaker beliefs was a capital offense. Four stubborn Quakers defied this law and were hanged. In the 1690s fear of witches seized the colony. Twenty alleged witches were killed and 150 others imprisoned.

In 1723 the bishop of Gdansk, Poland, demanded that all Jews be expelled from the city. The town council declined, but the bishop's exhortations roused a mob that invaded the ghetto and beat the residents to death.

Islamic jihads (holy wars), mandated by the Koran, killed millions over 12 centuries. In early years, Muslim armies spread the faith rapidly: east to India and west to Morocco. Then splintering sects branded other Muslims as infidels and declared jihads against them.

The Kharijis battled Sunni rulers.

The Azariqis decreed death to all "sinners" and their families.

In 1804 a Sudanese holy man, Usman dan Fodio, waged a bloody jihad that broke the religious sway of the Sultan of Gobir.

In the 1850s another Sudanese mystic, 'Umar al-Hajj, led a barbaric jihad to convert pagan African tribes -- with massacres, beheadings and a mass execution of 300 hostages.

In the 1880s a third Sudanese holy man, Muhammad Ahmed, commanded a jihad that destroyed a 10,000-man Egyptian army and wiped out defenders of Khartoum led by British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon.

In 1801 Orthodox priests in Bucharest, Romania, revived the story that Jews sacrificed Christians and drank their blood. Enraged parishioners stormed the ghetto and cut the throats of 128 Jews.

When the Baha'i faith began in Persia in 1844, the Islamic regime sought to exterminate it. The Baha'i founder was imprisoned and executed in 1850. Two years later, the religious government massacred 20,000 Baha'is. Streets of Tehran were soaked with blood. The new Baha'i leader, Baha'ullah, was tortured and exiled in foreign Muslim prisons for the rest of his life.

Human sacrifices were still occurring in Buddhist Burma in the 1850s. When the capital was moved to Mandalay, 56 "spotless" men were buried beneath the new city walls to sanctify and protect the city. When two of the burial spots were later found empty, royal astrologers decreed that 500 men, women, boys, and girls must be killed and buried at once, or the capital must be abandoned. About 100 were actually buried before British governors stopped the ceremonies

On July 1, 1766, in Abbeville, France, a teenage boy, Chevalier de La Barre, was decapitated for singing irreligious songs, marring a crucifix, mocking the Virgin Mary, and refusing to remove his hat when a religious procession passed.

Up until the 1800s the Hindus in India sacrificed a male child every Friday evening for the goddess Kali. Other Kali followers killed an estimated 2 million people over 300 years.

In the mid-1800s a Buddhist king in Burma ordered 500 people to be sacrificed to "sanctify" the new city walls of Mandalay.

In 1857 the East India Company incautiously armed themselves with rifle cartridges that were greased with animal fat. This enraged both Muslims and Hindus, the former finding pigs to be evil and the latter considering cows to be holy. Violence broke out leaving thousands dead.

In 1915 Christian Armenians and Turkish Muslims waged war on each other leaving an estimated 3 million dead.

Beginning in 1955 in the Sudan, Muslims and Christians waged a "holy" war lasting seventeen years and killing a half million people. In 1983 the same war flared up again, this time with the final result of one million dead in 24 years.

Up until 1965 the Roman Catholic Church's liturgy contained the words, "help and protect us from the perfidious Jews." In the Church's history scores of thousands of Jews were killed for

(1) Murdering Christian children and drinking their blood; and

(2) "Host-Nailing" meaning that they stole the communion wafers that represented the body of Jesus and drove nails through them, thereby crucifying Jesus a second time. [I am not making this up.]

In the fifty years of Israel's existence, over 3,000 Israelis died as a result of Muslim suicide bombers, thousands more during various wars, and the religious clashes between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims continue to this day, as does the dying-on both sides.

In 1978 more than 900 people of the religious group, the Peoples Temple, died as victims of suicide/murders at their own hands, in Jonestown in Guyana, South America.

In the 1980s Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini ruled by means of cruel torture and killings. Secrecy surrounds the number of victims, but thousands are certainly dead because of his religious oppression.

In 1980 at Moradabad, India, a riot broke out between Muslims and Hindus because the former believed the latter had intentionally driven a pig to walk over Muslim holy ground. 200 died.

In the 1980s Iran's Shi'ite theocracy killed around 200 Baha'i believers who would not convert to Islam.

In 1993 a secretive religious cult, the Branch Dividians, led by David Koresh, armed themselves to the teeth and fought with Federal Agents, leaving 83 dead in Waco, Texas.

On June 17, 1993, a six-year-old girl died after being struck by a moving train in Dania, Florida. She was thrown 20 feet and suffered a broken neck. Her brother had pushed her to safety, but she rushed back onto the tracks to die so she could be in heaven, waiting for her terminally ill mother. [AP]

On January 13, 1999 in Ahmedabad, India, Hindu mobs attacked and set fire to two Christian chapels in an ongoing religious struggle. [Reuters]

On October 28, 2000, in Nablus on the West Bank, an angry mob of Muslims ripped up Jewish prayer books and stomped on their sacred scrolls, protesting their right to be on the West Bank. [The Washington Post]

On September 11, 2001 nineteen Muslims flew two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth one crashed, leaving over 3,000 dead. This act was to please Allah and achieve Paradise by killing "Infidels."

This year, 2002, we all learned the horrific scale of a problem that we had always known existed in the Roman Catholic Church-pedophilia. Now and again we'd read about priests raping young boys, but the extent of the obscenity was hidden from most of us by a vile, crass, CYA policy followed by Cardinals and Bishops all over the USA. They just moved the rapists from one diocese to another and/or paid off the victims' families so they'd keep silent about it.

Making it worse is the callous attitude shown by the American Bishops and Cardinals summoned to Rome to consider the outrages. They used words like "offenders" and "mistakes" and other weasel words, as if they had been caught with their hands in a cookie jar instead of molesting children. Those priests are not offenders. They are criminals and should be treated as such. This abomination should have been addressed decades ago. But of course Popes have other things to think about in their busy world.

On October 27, 2000, in Rome, at his weekly general audience in front of 50,000 in St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II gave thanks to 2,000 pizzamakers gathered from around the world to celebrate World Pizzamakers' Day. "We appreciate so much your professional work," said the 80-year-old Pope. "I pray for your families and your particular profession," he added. [Reuters]

For more details on many of the above events, see Holy Horrors by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1990.

Instead of religion being a peaceful unifying force, it's been used far too many times as an excuse for war, death, destruction, rape and pillage.

While the Christians viewed with too much exultation the calamities that fell upon the prostrate people, whose cup of bitterness they were destined through long centuries to fill to the brim, the Jews laboured with unwearied hatred to foment by calumnies the passions of the Pagan multitude. On the other hand, the Catholic Christians showed themselves extremely willing to draw down the sword of the persecutor upon the heretical sects. In a few years the language of doubt and insinuation was exchanged for that of direct assertion; and, if we may believe St. Irenæus and St. Clement of Alexandria, the followers of Carpocrates, the Marcionites, and some other Gnostic sects, habitually indulged, in their secret meetings, in acts of impurity and licentiousness as hideous and as monstrous as can be conceived, and their conduct was one of the causes of the persecution of the orthodox.
Merivale's History of Rome volume vii

Civil Wars in Christian Europe:

Roman Civil Wars (68-394) 45 years
Byzantine Civil Wars (1094-1355) 30 years
German Civil Wars (1077-1411) 66 years
English Civil Wars (1138-1646) 25 years
Hungarian Civil Wars (1301-1321) 15 years
Bohemian Civil Wars (1390-1471) 38 years of wars between Kings and nobles of Europe
Russian Civil Wars (1425-1921) 40 years
Swiss Civil Wars (1436-1450) 14 years
Portugese Civil Wars (1449-1827) 5 years
Polish Civil Wars (1454-1466) 13 years
Austrian-Netherlands (1477-1492) 15 years
Italian Civil Wars (1494-1530) 18 years
French Religious/Civil Wars (1562-1598) 36 years
Northern Europe (1655-1721) 26 years
Danish Civil Wars (1737-1757) 20 years
Northern Ireland (1969 onwards)

Religious Wars Amongst Christians:

Roman Empire/Papal Holy Wars (1081-1250) 23 years
Albigensian Papal Crusades (1208-1229) 21 years
War of the Eight Saints (1375-1378) 3 years Wars of Religion (1562-1598) 36 years
Bohemian-Palatine War (1618-23) 5 years
Thirty Years’ War between the Churches (1618-1648) 30 years

Over 1,000 Years of Wars by the Christian Powers of Europe:

Bulgarian-Byzantine Wars (755-1265) 91 years
Viking Raids (793-1079) 200 years
Franco-Austrian, Burgundian, German, Chinese, Prussian, Spanish Wars (978-1885) 40 years
Scandinavian Wars (1026-1471) 27 years
Anglo-Scottish Wars (1079-1560) 34 years
Anglo-French Wars (1109-1628) 83 years
Russian-Afghan, Finnish, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Swedish, Turk (1240-1940) 114 years
Bohemian-Hungarian Wars (1260-1478) 20 years
Hundred Years Wars in Europe (1337-1457) 120 years Austro-Hungarian Wars (1439-1457) 18 years
Danish-Swedish Wars (1497-1679) 23 years
Portugese Conquests (1500-1545) 45 years
Spanish Colonialisation-Africa and the Americas (1508-1860) 55 years
Eighty Years War (1568-1648) 80 years
Spanish-Portugese Wars (1580-1762) 26 years
Anglo-Spanish Wars (1587-1729) 23 years
Portugese-Dutch Wars over East Indies (1601-1641) 40 years
Anglo-Portugese Wars (1612-1630) 19 years
Dutch-British Wars (1652-1784) 7 years
Anglo-America Wars (1763-1815) 52 years
Austro-Prussian Wars (1756-1763) 7 years
British Colonial Wars in Africa (1900-1915) 15 years
The Balkan Wars (1912-1913)
World War I (1914-1918) 4 years
World War II (1939-1945) 6 years

Summary
The Christian powers of Europe were involved in more than 1700 years of wars and acts of violence, civil and religious wars in Europe, and wars of power/expansion in Europe, Asia and Africa.