The Church started killing unbelievers as early as the 4th century.
The killing (often with torture)
of heretics, church splinter groups, dissenters, atheists, agnostics, deists, pagans, infidels
and unbelievers was supported by almost all mainstream
Christian theology for over a thousand years,
starting with the intolerant
St. Augustine (died 430 AD).
Yes, the Crusades were in part a response to
centuries of Islamic jihad
and persecution and slaughter of Christians
in the Middle East.
But the Christians then (unlike today) were no better than their Islamic adversaries.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
(see search)
said when launching the Second Crusade:
"The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified."
In 1209, Pope Innocent III
(also here)
called for a crusade to exterminate the Cathar people of France
(the Albigensians),
simply because they had different superstitious beliefs to his own
stupid beliefs.
Men, women and children were butchered
by the Pope's forces.
Rudolph J. Rummel
estimates they butchered 200,000 innocent
men, women and children.
In 1233, Pope Gregory IX
encouraged the extermination of the Stedinger people of Friesland,
on the imaginary grounds that they were in league with the (equally-imaginary) Devil.
"The devil appears to them in different shapes",
said his holiness,
"sometimes as a goose or a duck".
The entire people were exterminated.
Witch-hunting
(also here
and here)
- perhaps Christianity's worst crime.
Think how many poor innocents have been killed for God;
how few have ever been killed for Satan.
Many people think
1 million innocents were killed by the witch-hunters,
though
Rudolph J. Rummel
thinks 100,000.
The Papacy's crimes of witch burning
were based on the grossest superstitions -
for example,
the weather cannot have natural causes
but must be caused by witches.
This would be comical provided we do not think about what happened
to the utterly innocent victims of these delusions -
men, women and little children
picked from the populace at random
and tortured and put to death.
The Papacy
should hang its head for ten thousand years
in shame for what it did.
Pope Innocent VIII
- probably the most evil of all the Popes,
in the number of innocent men, women and children
killed because of his words.
Read his moronic
declaration against witches
in 1484.
Essentially, because the causes of disease, bad weather, and other problems
were not known in those dark times,
their causes were attributed to imaginary witches
who must be hidden in the populace.
Protestantism
had no problem with the witch-burning,
and continued the
butchery of innocents long after the Reformation.
For example, the "King James Bible"
comes from one of these murderers.
Luther, Calvin and Wesley
supported the killing,
just as they opposed
science.
The burning alive of a man accused of "witchcraft".
From
The Devils (1971).
In fact, this is mild.
The Christian religious maniacs burnt women and children alive too.
The post-medieval period
The Peasants' War, 1524-5,
could be seen as an early
communist revolution,
complete with "cleansing" slaughter.
Thomas Muentzer said
(see here
and here):
"curse the unbelievers ...
don't let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn away from God.
For a godless man has no right to live if he hinders the godly.
The sword is necessary to exterminate them
... if they resist let them be slaughtered without mercy
... the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allow them
... Now, go at them
... it is time ... The scoundrels are as dispirited as dogs
... Take no notice of the lamentations of the godless! They will beg you
... don't be moved by pity ... At them! At them! While the fire is hot!
Don't let your sword get cold! Don't let it go lame!"
Fox's Book of Martyrs
(see contents,
also here)
may have helped encourage
centuries of persecution
and killing of Catholics
(which continues in Ulster today),
but it also documents
a long history of violence and murder against free thinkers by Rome.
The last Catholic martyr in Britain was
Oliver Plunkett,
executed
in London in 1681.
The last atheist martyr in Britain was
Thomas Aikenhead,
executed
in Edinburgh in 1697.
Atheists continued to be persecuted,
and by the 19th century atheists in Britain
were jailed rather than executed.
In 1883,
George Foote, editor of the Freethinker,
was jailed
for blasphemy.
Apparently the
church
in England no longer believes that those who
disagree with it should be jailed.
Catholics were denied the right to representation in Parliament until
1829.
Atheists were denied the right to representation in Parliament until
1886.
The Dominicans
produced the mass murderer of innocents
Torquemada,
and they authored one of the most evil books in history,
the Witch Hammer,
which caused the cruel death of perhaps 1 million innocent
men, women and children.
I agree that much of the democide and slavery in
the Americas and Africa after the 15th century
was driven by politics and profit
as much as by religion.
I am not blaming Christianity for all of it.
Rudolph J. Rummel
estimates that
14 million
native North and South Americans were killed by Europeans
(and their American-born descendants)
in democide in the conquest of the Americas.
Much of this, especially in the Caribbean and South America,
was driven by European Roman Catholicism.
Vatican support for this, 1455.
Here, Pope Nicholas V supports the killing, forcible conversion
and enslaving of unbelievers found in the new lands.
Spain's Roman Catholic bishops want to canonise
Queen Isabella,
who started the Inquisition to torture and kill heretics,
ethnically cleansed the Jews and Muslims,
and brought genocide to the Americas.
This vile murderer
burned alive heretics and reformers, just because their superstitious beliefs
differed from his own stupid beliefs.
The fact that he himself was killed for the same reason
does not suddenly absolve him of his crimes.
Indeed, it seems like justice.
Pius IX
was the last Pope to have temporal power,
and to be able to abuse
those unlucky enough
to live in the Papal States.
In 1858, Pius IX's police brutally
removed a 6 year old Jewish boy,
Edgardo Mortara,
from his parents
and forcibly raised him as a Catholic.
The pleas of Edgardo's distraught parents
counted for nothing.
They never got their little boy back.
This is minor compared with the brutality of the church throughout history,
but the sheer cruelty of it
makes Pius IX
a disgusting figure that no decent person should respect.
Judaism and Christianity are not real,
the soul and baptism are not real,
but a mother's love is real.
A mother's pain is real.
St. Maximilian Kolbe,
who was martyred by the Nazis in Auschwitz in 1941,
was, it is sad to say, a high-profile
Polish anti-semite
before the war.
He
wrote for a large audience
on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the alleged Jewish-Zionist-Masonic-Communist conspiracy,
and so on.
While Kolbe himself went on to save, not kill, Jews,
who knows what brutal acts during the war were inspired by his pre-war words?
Pius XII,
Pope during the Holocaust
- in line for beatification.
As it sheltered Nazi and Croat war criminals after WW2,
so the Vatican sheltered war criminal
Fr. Athanase Seromba
for months
after the Rwandan genocide.
War criminals still hiding,
Jon Swain, Sunday Times, Aug 13, 2006
- The Vatican is believed to be
still sheltering other war criminals.
In Zimbabwe,
the marxist-authoritarian Mugabe is also Catholic,
and his murderous regime has long been protected by the Zimbabwe
Catholic church.
Excommunicate Mugabe
- Tony Allwright says:
"in permitting Mr Mugabe to remain a Catholic, the Pope is demeaning the whole Church".
If only more Catholics were like him.
If only the Catholic hierarchy
stood up for human rights internationally,
and clearly differentiated between good and evil.
The
World Council of Churches
(also here)
supported Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe.
They are also (predictably) anti-Israel.
The National Council of Churches in the US
are anti-Israel, anti-American, and have
supported
Castro
and
the PLO.
Bishops Against Iraqi Freedom
- The United Methodist Church in the US
is led by useless whining anti-Americans from whom
one can expect no serious moral guidance.
96 United Methodist bishops
called the liberation of Iraq
"unjust and immoral".
Another bishop called the liberation
"morally lamentable" and "theologically reprehensible."
There has been a lot of focus (rightly) on the appalling reaction of the Catholic church
to cases of child abuse by Catholic priests.
But there are two other guilty parties:
1. The parents, for complaining to the church rather than to the police,
and:
2. The state and police, for many times asking the church to deal with it
rather than arresting the priests and prosecuting them.
Compared to the failure by these two parties,
the failure by the priests' employers seems the minor part.
The hopeless moral failure by the priests' employers is only shocking if you believed
they had serious moral integrity to begin with.
And since I didn't,
I am not shocked.
I am more shocked by the behaviour of the parents and the state/police.
Since 1995.
