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).
Much (but not all) of Christianity's killing is in the past.
Christianity had a long run as the world's most violent religion.
But I think it is clear that the world's most violent religion is now Islam.
"Burn the witch!"
This hilarious scene from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
perfectly captures the "logic" of the centuries of
"witch" torturing and killing
by Christianity.
This crime was supported at the highest levels, up to
The Papacy.
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.
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.
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.
Search for more.
Thomas Muentzer said:
"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!"
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
(1563)
may have helped encourage
centuries of persecution
and killing of Catholics
in Britain and Ireland,
but it also does document
a long history of violence and murder against dissenters 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.
By the 19th century atheists in Britain
were jailed rather than executed.
In 1883, atheist
George Foote
was jailed
for blasphemy.
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 New World 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.
The West has changed for the better.
And the Christian churches have changed for the better.
I am interested in the failure of the Christian West to recognise the rights of non-Europeans,
the failure of the Christian churches to condemn it,
the slow awakening of both church and society,
and the long road towards the West becoming today the greatest defender on earth
of universal human rights.
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.
Democide and the church
The papal bull
Romanus Pontifex, 1455.
In this, Pope Nicholas V
supports the killing, forcible conversion
and enslaving of unbelievers found in the new lands.
The Spanish executing the last Inca Emperor
Atahualpa
in 1533.
He was threatened with death by burning, which, in his beliefs,
would prevent his soul going to the afterlife.
He was offered death by strangling
if he would convert to Catholicism.
He agreed, and was killed that way.
Image from here.
An edited version of this famous
painting
depicting the presentation of the Declaration of Independence to Congress.
The red dots show everyone who owned slaves.
Absolutely shocking.
See full size.
From here.
A lady being carried by her slaves in
Brazil,
c.1860.
From here.
"An Atheist Reads the Bible - 4 - Slavery".
Support for slavery in the Bible.
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.
Sir Thomas More
is killed for his beliefs.
He himself burned alive people for their beliefs.
Bishops Against Iraqi Freedom, Mark Tooley, January 13, 2006.
96 United Methodist bishops
called the liberation of Iraq
"unjust and immoral".
Another bishop called the liberation
"morally lamentable" and "theologically reprehensible."
In my lifetime, the Catholic church has suppressed even basic freedom of religion.
In Franco's Spain
(up to 1975)
non-Catholics were subject to severe restrictions on worship and speech
(rather similar to the status of dhimmis under Islam).
In my lifetime,
the Catholic church in Ireland supported the denial of civil liberties in Ireland:
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 2006:
"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.
Giles Muhame, editor of the Ugandan newspaper Rolling Stone,
the face of modern Christian sharia law.
An American Christian fanatic,
Jason "Molotov" Mitchell,
actually defends the death penalty for Ugandan gays.
He produces an incredibly strange,
slick, trendy video with a brutal medieval worldview.
Apparently we should be impressed that some
ancient book
of a primitive tribe
called for gays to be killed.
Having spread his hate,
he is now trying to hide the video.
Try search.
This nutcase comes from the
"straight edge"
movement
(Christian punk).
Maybe it's
just a pose
and he doesn't really want to see gays killed,
but he does remind us that
the old Christianity
was very like modern Islam.
Christianity looks fairly disgusting, as portrayed by him.
