Violence and Religion #

Religions tend to arouse deep passions, strong convictions and assumptions of righteousness that justify entitlements of power to impose their views on others. Most conquer territory by a combination of coercion and conversion forcing the indigenous inhabitants, as part of their hegemony, to adhere to their teachings and practices - Catholics in South America, Protestants in North America and Africa, Muslims in North Africa and in the Balkans, later India and Afghanistan and the Hindus vied the Buddhists for hegemony in the Orient.

Primitive myths of most ancient civilisations in depicting the interactions of gods and humans, include instances of divine violence against mortals. Ovid’s The Metamorphoses often reads like a catalogue of Jove’s violent offenses: Jove transforming himself into a bull in order to abduct Europa, Jove becoming a swan to get at Leda, Jove taking the form of an eagle in order to snatch up Ganymede.

Maggie Nelson, NYT, has her laments about violent representations, but in “The Art of Cruelty” she refreshingly aims them largely up the cultural ladder, at the fine arts, literature, theater — even poetry. What interests her is the “full-fledged assault on the barriers between art and life that much 20th-century art worked so hard to perform,” often by enlisting violence and cruelty, simulated or actual, including cruelties inflicted physically on the person of the artist, or affectively on the psyches of the audience.

Nelson delves into the varieties of cruelty perpetrated on us bourgeois for our supposed betterment, what the art critic Grant Kester has called the “orthopedic aesthetic.” The art of cruelty aestheticizes violence, in not necessarily scrupulous ways. It can be reckless and scattershot, provoked by the desire to make others feel as bad as the sufferers of injustice and trauma whose experiences are vicariously borrowed by artists shopping for shocks. It bludgeons audiences into getting the point. It’s responsible for a century of art-world Nurse Ratcheds, wielding jolts of aesthetic electroshock therapy and taking unseemly pleasure at rubbing people’s noses in pain. New York Times

The Old Testament depicts a violent struggle between warring nations for home territory. After fleeing Egypt, Moses and his peoples had to fight to re-occupy thier land of milk and honey. Many descriptions indicate the total destruction of enemies. When Joshua finally conquered Jericho, the Israelites killed every man and woman of every age, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys.

Genocide?

Psalm 137 the singer urges the destruction of Babylon:

Desolate Daughter Babylon, you shall be destroyed,
blessed the one who pays you back
what you have done us!

Blessed the one who seizes your children
and smashes them against the rock.

Christ, however, in the Sermon of the Mount, preached a gospel of hope, love, and peace through conversion; He promised to return and usher in a millenium of peace.

Christ warned his disciples that many false prophets would use his name in vain. All idealistic movements tend towards dystrophy, where founding values and principles become turned on their heads.

Militant Churches prefer coercion.

Robespierreobserved: Nobody likes armed missionaries”.

Graham Greene’s epigram for his Vietnam novel The Quiet American, quotes Byron:

This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions.

Hilary Mantel from ‘Wolf Hall’

“‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Cromwell says. ‘A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided Church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.’”

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land.

They said, ‘Let us close our eyes and pray.’ When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land.

Thomas Jefferson acknowledged that:

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.

Denis Diderot claimed " Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest".

“The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and …people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion”.

Nietzsche thought “Christianity was a disastrous, two thousand-year-long mistake”.

He also famously said: “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything”.

W.B.Yeats maintained the fact that over 200 babies were killed in Bethlehem; an attempt to eliminate the baby Jesus – the “King of the Jews” and the brutality of his eventual crucifixion gave rise to a violent age. From The Second Coming, the lines:

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

are perplexing; appear accusatory. Yeats, as many others sees Christianity as a malign force in supressing open minded scientific inquiry by its demands of faith – the scholastic logic of Don Scotus that prefers a priori thinking. The “nightmare” could refer to the blood soaked Holy Wars that ravaged the Western World from the time of the Innocents of Bethlehem through to the First WW.

Harry Lime’s quotation from The Third Man illustrates the paradox:

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

T.S. Eliot, too twice refers to “Christ the tiger” instead of “Christ the Lamb” in his poem Gerontion.

Christians and Muslims purport to be based on the peace teachings of Jesus Christ and Mohammed, while Hindus and Buddhists, espouse non-violence, but much of history belies that. First Christians were brutally persecuted by the Jews, then fed to the lions for Roman entertainment. Nero used them as scapegoats, blaming them for the fire he started so he could rebuilt Rome in his image. Despite this, the Church grew stronger and spread widely throughout the Roman Empire.

Constantine eventually accepted their ideas, finding it useful to improve his image and soon began to persecute others. Christ advocated

“do unto others as you would have them do to you”,

but most religions learned to,

“do as they did to you”.

Yeats. In “Songs from a Play” contrasts the reaction to the violent death of Dionysus to that of Christ’s death.

I saw a staring virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side,
And lay the heart, upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God’s death were but a play.

The Greeks celebrated the death of their god with a Drama Festival each year at Athens. Some of the greatest art of the classical world originated from these festivals of tragedy. In contrast Christ’s death brought anguish and breakdown. Greek historians claim that Christians rejected empirical science in favour of dogmatic faith. Christians soon gained a closed mind reputation to investigative methods with an aggressive attack on intellectuals.

Christ came from a poor marginalised people, illegal rebels, who threatened the power of Rome. Oppressed with extreme violence, early Christians preached a gospel of peace, non violence and social justice.

Pope Benedict insisted that the idea of absolute Human rights is enshrined in the roots of Christianity and to try to get the fruits of them without the roots, all you get is the shrill special intervening rhetoric.

He may be right, however it was the conversion of Constantine, when the Catholic Church becoming so powerful, that apostacy set in and the Church lost Christ’s message of peace, service and humility, by adopting the Roman Army’s hierarchical system together with its callous disregard for human dignity. Roman Catholicism is the most imperial and tyrannical system in the world, and the least Christian. Yet, at times the laity has managed to fulfil Christ’s mission with great humanitarian service. Unfortunately its institutions frequently fell into their antipathies, became Orwellian, like the Sisters of Mercy, showing none. Orphanages and Nunneries showed little compassion or humanity.

Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted,”

Hammurabi attempted to provide just ways to enhance the well being of all the people the land.

Genghis Khan insisted on laws holding rulers as equally accountable as the lowest herder.

Darwin’s theories of “survival of the fittest”, pointed out how unnatural such a concept is in the light of evolution, observing that “philanthropy and care for the poor must be highly injurious to the race of man”.

Himmler, who had a 50-year plan to eradicate Christianity, believed the strong had both a duty and obligation to eliminate the weak. Under the Nazi’s the weak and infirm were simply eliminated.

Christians have indeed been oppressors and exploiters, although the backlash against that has also been Christian. There are many embarrassing aspects, from crusades to pograms, the Inquisitions, hoarding of wealth leading to corruption, and especially the totalitarian idea of truth that justifies persecuting those who differ.

“Although the army of Genghis Khan killed at an unprecedented rate, the Mongols did not torture, mutilate, or maim. The irony is that we call them barbarian, and western religions civilised. We devised at least ten different devices to torture, mutilate, and maim people, before we bloodily, brutally, and savagely killed them.

In an August 1228 battle with Jalal al-Din, the son of the sultan, four hundred Mongol prisoners fell into enemy hands, and they knew well that they would die. The victors took the Mongol warriors to nearby Isfahan, tied them behind horses, and dragged them through the streets of the city to entertain the city’s residents.

“All the Mongol prisoners were thus killed as public sport and then fed to dogs. Because of this public torture, the Mongols never forgave the civilized people of that city.

When the Byzantine Christian emperor Basil defeated the Bulgarians in 1014, he had fifteen thousand Bulgarian war captives blinded. He left one man out of each hundred with one eye in order that he might lead the other ninety-nine homeward and thereby spread the terror. When the Christian Crusaders took cities such as Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099, they slaughtered the Jews and Muslims without regard for age or gender, but merely because of their religion.

“Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who ranks as one of Germany’s greatest historical and cultural heroes, best exemplified the use of terror in the West. When he tried to conquer the Lombard city of Cremona in the north of modern Italy in 1160, he instituted an escalating series of violent acts of terror. His men beheaded their prisoners and played with the heads outside the city walls, kicking them like balls. The defenders of Cremona then brought out their German prisoners on the city walls and pulled their limbs off in front of their comrades. The Germans gathered more prisoners and executed them in a mass hanging. The city officials responded by hanging the remainder of their prisoners on top of the city walls. Instead of fighting each other directly, the two armies continued their escalation of terror. The Germans then gathered captive children and strapped them into their catapults. which were normally used to batter down walls and break through gates. With the power of these great siege machines, they hurled the living children at the city walls. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.

The heresy hunters of the inquisition survive today in the self-righteous “woke” fanatics, who no longer have the power to burn people at the stake but try to end careers, ruin reputations, and close down discussions.

Hindu intolerance #

During ‘Operation Blue Star’, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, ordered an attack on the Sikh Golden Temple in June 1984. The aim was to silence demands for Sikh religious and political autonomy, and resulted in the deaths of 492 civilians. In retaliation, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards. The events that followed represent one of the darkest periods of modern Indian history.

The assassination of Indira Gandhi led to the retaliatory 1984 Sikh Genocide. Within a period of three days, almost 3000 Sikhs were murdered, and the human rights of thousands more were violated.

The 2005 Nanavti commission described the ‘systematic’ nature of the attacks, whereby men were beaten before being burnt alive.

Spirituality #

Christ’s life affirming message of hope, love and forgiveness is often hi-jacked by its antithesis; life denying, religious rigidity of institutional codes, rules, dogmas and doctrines. These man-made strictures entrench the power of the Patriarchy keeping the faithful tribal, submissive, dependent and often infantile.

Gibbon attributes the Romans’ unfortunate habit of killing Christians because they were interested, principally, in good governance and in maintaining the civic order that the unruly Christians imperilled by their religious zealotry to impose rigid orthodoxy. Constantine provided the Church the coercive power to practice intolerance.

Once the Church became allied with the state through Constantine, these outlaws morphed into exalted oppressors, disconnecting themselves from that message and the disadvantaged to one of bulwark coercive power. Church and State became one. Constantine appointed church officials to all his administrative offices, citizens were given tax breaks for converting. The Church was granted tax free status. The Church in turn based its system of hierarchies on the Roman Army.

In the late 4th century, persecution of pagans by Christians had reached new levels of intensity. In 391, Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all pagan temples. The Serapeum of the Great Library was destroyed, possibly effecting the final destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

Early Christians began persecuting many innocent people who rejected their beliefs for sorcery; as wizards, warlocks or witches.

The first recorded victim was Hypatia, a renowned Greek mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Students flocked to her lectures from far and wide including many Christians, (including Synesius who became a bishop in the Christian church and incorporated Neoplatonic principles into the doctrine of the Trinity.) Her association with Alexandria’s governor, Orestes, eventually lead to her death.

Theophilus, the archbishop who destroyed the last of Alexandria’s great Library, was succeeded in 412 by his nephew, Cyril, who continued his uncle’s tradition of hostilities toward other faiths. It is believed she was murdered by a Christian mob in 415 ADS because of sorcery and witchcraft by Cyril’s wishes..

Catherine Nivey in The Darkening Age, accuses militant zealots of deliberately extinguishing the teaching of the Classical Age ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to the one true faith. The Roman Empire had been generous in embracing and absorbing new creeds. When Christianity became established, everything changed. The new faith, despite preaching peace, became violent, ruthless and intolerant. Its zealots set about the destruction of the old gods. Altars, temples, statues were smashed, hacked and demolished. Books and libraries were annihilated.

Nixey, Shenoute claims a contemporary of Hypatia’s, lived further south, in rural Egypt, where he became the abbot of the complex now known as the White Monastery. Shenoute is now considered a saint in the Coptic church, but his piety manifested itself in a particularly ugly guise: he was part of a gang of thugs who would break into the houses of locals whose theological views they felt to be unsound, and smash up any property they objected to on religious grounds.

No one can deny that Christianity has a profound influence on Western Civilisation. It has produced some of the great Art, Architecture, Music and Literature of the world.

Many reputable credentialed scholars claim that Christianity lost its bearings by the fourth century. The apostasy was radical. Through systematic Machiavellian machinations, distortions, dishonesty, lies and suppression, Christianity denied its pagan antecedents.

There are many things that are true which it is not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things which though they are false, it is expedient for the people to believe otherwise. St Augustine, City of God

This sums up the ruses used to con the masses into accepting Christianity as a distinct and self-perpetuated belief system. Rather than esoteric knowledge, officials relied on exoteric stunts.

Gregory of Nazianzen (329 – 389) writing to Jerome:

“Nothing can impose better on people than verbiage; the less they understand, the more they admire…we don’t say what we think, but what circumstances and necessity forces us to”. Priests attribute to their opponents absurd opinions they never held – simply to disgrace them”. Higgins

Treating the laity with utter disdain, they dumbed down the message to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It is of little wonder that the Churches have lost members in the enlightened countries, while growing strongly in lowly educated ones.

The German scholar, John Laurence von Mosheim, writing about the Gospel of Hermas, (140 – 155 BCE)

“It was an established maxim it was pardonable in an advocate for religion to avail himself of fraud and deception if it might attain considerable good”.

Who needs Machiavelli?

Sir Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of Rome is highly critical of early Christians frauds, deceptions, and forgeries.

Eusebius, already described by Waite as “the most conspicuous liar”, is euphemistically called the “gravest” of historians, “indirectly confessing to glorifying anything, and suppressing all that could tend to disgrace Christianity”.

Gibbon found everything about Christian History until 250 ADS, totally untrustworthy and suspicious. “The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church”. As long as they contributed to the glory of the church, the legends and forgeries were lauded by the mob, welcomed by the hierarchy and supported by the dubious evidence of alleged ecclesiastical history. Quoting the Twelfth Book of Anselm,

“How it may be lawful and fitting to use a falsehood as a medicine and for the benefit of those who want to be deceived”.

No wonder Jesus warned us of false prophets. Allegations of scriptures being “censured and corrected” under orders by Emperor Anastasius (Constantinople 506). Bishop Dionysius complained his writings “had been falsified by apostles of the devil…the Scriptures too were falsified”.

Anyone opposed was quickly labelled a heretic, pagan or nonconformist. Inconvenient manuscripts were burned. Inquisitions began early, perhaps the most salient in southern France. Indefensible vandalism by fanatical crusaders of all Hebrew scrolls, including

Girolamo Savonarola who was a complex and conflicted fiery Florentine Friar preaching against art as a contributing factor to the spread of vice and spiritual decay – particularly overt same sex activity prevalent in Enrique’s court in Sergovia. His prophetic fire and brimstone preaching exhorted the masses to reject the secular materialism and corruption of Rodrigo Borgia’s Papacy. He was known for the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule and the exploitation of the poor.

His attacks on the openly dissolute Papacy of Alexander VI found many adherents throughout Europe, including Queen Isabella from 1492.

The Pope tried to appease him by offering to make him a Cardinal, which he rejected.

With the death of Lorenzo de’Medici in 1496, Florence was hit by drought and starvation, which Savonarola attributed to the sybaritic ways of the Church. He instituted the Bonfires of the Vanities, where all were bring and burn all objects that represented human vices and luxuries – rich clothing, mirrors, playing cards, paintings and books – representing the sensuality of the Italian Renaissance.

Pope Alexander initially ignored him, then ex-communicated him but finally called on the Church: “this little worm had to be put to death”. He was charged with the serious crime of Heresy.

Despite Savonarola’s appeals to various crowns of Europe to convene a council to overthrow an openly corrupt Papacy, it was Savonarola who faced an Inquisition, He was tortured, confessed that” his sermons were acts of pride for personal glory” and having given the Church what it needed, was hanged and his body burned. Even his supporters abandoned him as Florentines threw gun powder on the fire to make the blaze hotter. Dissenters seldom prosper.

The Borgia Pope Alexander VI, who by the time he bribed his way into office had fathered eight children by at least three women, is credited with keeping the imperiled papacy alive by capable administration and astute diplomacy, “however questionable his means of doing so.”

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull – Inter Caetera which divided the world, discovered and to be discovered between the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

The Bull justified the taking of land from barbarous nations if they didn’t know Jesus Christ, exhorting the spread of Christianity, sanctioning the invasion of lands and the enslavement of non- Christian peoples if they disagreed with the invaders’ opinion about gods and spirituality.

So much for Christian tolerance.

The Christian message of hope, brotherly love, tolerance, monotheism and social harmony is said to enhance societies. Its social welfare and disaster relief gives hope to many. However, many principles became more “honored in the breach than the observance”. Most religions profess belief in non-violence, yet the Church, first a victim became a perpetrator, converting the whole Roman Empire coercively into a Christian hegemony. It is said that Charlemagne (Charles the Great) 686 - 741, vastly extended Christianity by warfare, pushing the Muslims out of Spain. He also changed Christianity from a faith of the crucified to one with the power to crucify.

Who knows the precise date that the first Christian killed another Christian because they had a different belief?

The Didascalia Apostolorum forbade the acceptance of money from soldiers who had shed blood without judgment. However Agustine of Hippo advised that with the sanction of government, wicked men could be put to death without viiolating the commandment, Thou shalt not kill.

Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, 3rd Century, upright in many ways - During a plague in Carthage, Cyprian urged Christians to help everyone, including their enemies and persecutors - maintained murder a crime if committed singly, but could be justified “en masse”. Perhaps this is where Stalin derived his view that the death of one is a tragedy, the death of 50 million is a statistic?

Though there may have been previous instances, once Constantine converted, attributing his success over the Eastern Empire through a vision of Christ, he proclaims the Edict of Milan, 313, ending the persecution. Later Christianity became the mandatory religion of the Roman Empire. Soon hair splitting on doctrinal matters emerged. Constantine foresaw the demise of Rome so began the shift of most of the Roman Empire’s power to the East, the metropolis Byzantium – which he renamed Constantinople.

Because it was out of reach of the marauding barbarians and virtually impregnable, it became a strong and extremely rich outpost of Western Civilisation including Christianity for another 1000 years.

Constantine’s Council of Nicaea in 325 resolves the main doctrinal disputes by issuing the Nicene Creed declaring one statement of faith, that Christ was both man and divine; born of a woman but immaculately conceived. This temporarily put an end to internecine disputes..

Mohammed and the rise of Muslim #

The rise and rise of Muslim began in the 7th C. mainly because Christianity had become weakened by the fall of Rome by the Goths, Visigoths and other barbaric tribes of North eastern regions of Europe and Asia. Early Muslims were exemplary in many ways.

Accepting traditional Hebrew beliefs, Christ as a prophet, they continued his philanthropic caring and kindness to each other and others. They, like the Jews believed in personal cleanliness, devout, tolerant and believed in respecting the equality of women. Initially both Jews and Christians felt very safe living under Muslim rule. Homosexuality was openly tolerated. Tolerance was central to Mohammed’s message.

As the West went into decline, the Muslim world flourished. The astrolabe was created for Jaafar, son of the Abbasid caliph al-Muktafi, in Baghdad in the 10th century AD. The teachings of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and the other great thinkers and scientists of Greece fell into obscurity west of Constantinople and north of Morocco. In Baghdad, however - the now war-shattered capital of Iraq, then the seat of the Abbasid caliphate - there rose a remarkable institution known as the House of Wisdom. With Europe into its so-called Dark Ages, the Islamic world was entering its Golden Age. The House of Wisdom, between the 8th and 13th centuries, attracted Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars from throughout the known world to study and translate the tracts that had underpinned modern thought to that time into Arabic. Every important and available book and paper known to exist was collected for translation from Greek, Latin, Persian, Indian and even Chinese sources.

By the 9th century, the House of Wisdom contained the world’s largest library, and up to 500 scholars worked feverishly on their own discoveries. The idea that the Earth was round, its circumference measurable, was no stranger here. Physicians investigated the causes of infection. The number zero, invented as a useful concept in India, reached Baghdad somewhere around AD 770 and became a crucial element in mathematics. Without zero there would never have been a computer, let alone Google.

The pleasure of harnessing knowledge spread rapidly across Arab North Africa, through refined cities like Fez, and beyond.

Meanwhile, in AD 711, those Muslims known in the West as Moors began pouring across the Strait of Gibraltar and took over the Iberian Peninsula. By AD 1000, most of what we now know as Spain was occupied by the Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba.

Eventually the Spaniards conquered Cordoba and plonked a cathedral in the heart of its main mosque. With the city of Cordoba at its centre, here rose the most enlightened and cultured area of Europe.

Cordoba, with its magnificent Mezquita (mosque) spreading over 2½ serene hectares, was a world centre of learning. Its main library, one of more than 70 in the city of half a million inhabitants, was said to contain 400,000 books. Christians and Jews were permitted to live in relative peace alongside the Moors, contributing to the cultural vibrancy of Andalusia. It took about 600 years for this to degenerate.

The Goths, though Christianised, were considered barbarians because they had little centralized organized governments, lack of the rule of law and “might is right” attitude; the weak had no protection. Islam spread rapidly in the Middle East, across Northern Africa and across the narrow straits into Spain. Islam at first appeared to be quite tolerant of other religions inhabiting their lands.

According to Val Badham *The habit of scientists to offend the “common sense” standards of their times with research has historically proven quite dangerous. Rhazes, the medical pioneer of ninth century Baghdad, was beaten blind with his own compendium by a priest.

The humanist Michael Servetus, a 16th century physician credited with discovering pulmonary circulation, was tortured and burned along with his books on the shores of Lake Geneva at the personal behest of John Calvin. In the 17th century, Galileo spent his last years under house arrest, forced by the church to recant the heretical belief that the earth orbited the sun.* It wasn’t until 1992 that the Catholic Church finally acknowledged that Galileo may have been right.

These were the precise experiences abjured by the proponents of the 18th century Enlightenment – a historical movement defined by its spirit of unrestricted inquiry, freedom and liberalism.

French nobles assisted the Spanish in the Reconquista in a 400 year battle to consolidate the power of the Catholic Monarchs. This was done by brutal conquest.

St James was canonised as “the “Moor Slayer” because he appeared in a vision to help destroy the Moors.

Today, if you suffer visions, you are committed to an asylum and medicated with lithium.

Under attack by the barbaric Lombards, Pope Adrian also sought the assistance of Charlemagne’s armies to regain the power of Christian forces. Pope Leo declares Charlemagne a “defender of the faith” and the first Holy Roman Emperor.

Mary Jo Anderson writes in the Catholic World Report, Jan. 2, 2019: "

Charlemange, the warrior emperor was to liberate the roadway that ran to St James’ tomb. In Galicia, James’ burial crypt had been rediscovered in 813 and a small chapel was built (by Bishop Teodomir) to protect it. Myth or miracle, a rout now known as the Battle of Clavijo was fought in the year 844 by desperate Christians with their backs against the mountains, led by Ramiro I of Asturias.

Suddenly, there appeared a heavenly horseman, sword aloft, who slew every Muslim in his path: Santiago Matamoros. Inspired by their champion, the faithful began the reconquest of Spain.

Seven hundred years later Queen Isabella finally recovered all of Spain from Muslim rule. She immediately pawned her jewels to finance Christopher Columbus. Isabella, who built hospitals for pilgrims along the Camino, knew that Christianity must evangelize any lands beyond the horizon, lest Mohammed’s forces domine the world. Today’s politically correct agenda overlooks Isabella’s urgent hope. But there is confirmation of her intent in a letter from Columbus to an official:

“Treat the Natives with the utmost kindness. Protect them from all wrong and insult…and ever bear in mind that their majesties are more desirous of the conversion of natives than any riches to be derived from them.” *

This was short lived as the Spanish Conquistadors spread the Catholic faith throughout the Americas by the sword.

If you are looking for suspects, you need go no further than the Crusades, especially the first and the fourth. A series of Crusades allowed the Popes to raise and control huge armies used to fight all opponents of the Church. It was Pope Urban II. in 1194, responding to Alexis of Constantinople cries for help against expanding Islam who becomes the main culprit. In a rousing speech, instilling imaginative power, Urban called for violence against the infidel in the name of Christ, for the one true religion, amidst prayers for peace . Through this act of piety Urban raised an army of 40,000 crusaders to destroy all enemies of Christ. His first, most infamous atrocity was to go north to the Rhineland to destroy the Jews. Only then did they proceed to retake Jerusalem in 1099, in one of the most violent and bloody raids in history, involving mass rapes of women and murders of children and destruction of many towns. Decrees went out excluding Muslims from living in Christian lands. Muslim temples were transformed back into Cathedrals.

In contrast, when Saladin reclaims Jerusalem in 1187, he proclaims a policy of co-existence; The Holy Sepulchral of Jerusalem must remain open to all religions.

In 2014, Pope Francis II’s visit to Jerusalem he aplolgises for previous violence and intolerance.

Before we get too doey eyed about the sanctity of the Muslims, we should consider its aggressive expansion under the Ottoman Turks. They learned the lesson that religion can be spread by blood and iron more effectively than by simple evangelism.

By the late 16th century the Turks began to spread Islam by predation with the objective of world hegemony. It became a perpetual war machine with all out military operations and expansion threatening the Mediterranean sea ports. As Christians nations had demonstrated the greatest motivating force for soldiers was booty, including capturing human fodder for other conquests and women as sex slaves.

Continuous Holy War (gaza) became the norm. (Turkish Historian Halil Inalcik)

It is worth noting that both the Moors in Spain and later Saladin in Jerusalem tolerated the Jews and Christians under a policy of co-existence. It was Queen Isabella who expelled Jews and Muslims and later Pope Urban III’s exclusionary policy waged a war against the Jews of Rhineland and refused to allow Muslims to live in Christian controlled territories. Isabella was reacting to the barbaric spread of Islam by the Ottoman Empire, whose soldiers were motivated by promises of virgins and pillage. Urban also called for violence to restore Christianity in Europe and the Middle East. Saladin appears much more chivalric.

Many periods in the history of mankind demonstrate man’s barbaric inhumanity to their fellow human beings. The period known as the Middle Ages, which gave rise to the religious wars, (1525 - 1648) stands out as one of the most violent, blood soaked eras in history. This epoch, lasting roughly 1,000 years, from the 5th century to the 15th, was a time of great inequality and brutality in much of Europe.

What really sets this time apart is the ghoulish inventiveness that gave rise to a plethora of torture methods. There were many grounds for torture during the Middle Ages – religious fervor and criminal punishment come to mind – but why would a person take the time to invent a device designed to maim?

Most crusades and later wars were perpetrated with licenced killing, looting and the rape and slavery of women. Pope Innocent III set the terms promised in the Crusades against Islam – remission of sins and unrestricted looting which implied rape.

Once the Catholic Church began its resurgence in Spain and later in Rome, and the Italian city states of Florence, Milan and Venice regained their power, fierce rivalry surfaced between the Roman Catholic Church of Rome and its eastern counterpart of Greek Orthodox Church of Constantinople. Instead of focusing their energy and resources combating the rise and spread of the Muslims; the Ottoman Empire, the Christian church bickered amongst itself about petty small time heresies. Christians have been killing each other for centuries because of intolerance and the power of the Church over the people was unlimited. Individuals had no basic rights. Once denounced as a heretic or an unorthodox thinker - you were more or less condemned to a painful, torturing and excruciating death after implicating your loved ones. If you were rich, or offended anyone, you were likely to dobbed in simply to confiscate your property or for reprisal.

Inquisitions, originating in southern France about 1200, devised at least ten ingenious devices to torture your neighbors - it wasn’t enough just to confiscate their property and kill them.

Partly retribution, but largely as an incentive to soldiers, the abasement of women became a hallmark of all war booty. From barbaric raids by hordes of Vikings, Mongolians, to Christian attacks on each other, or on Muslims, or Muslims on Christian, or Hindus on Muslims, rape has become an integral reward for risking your life in conquest.

Mary Jo Anderson writes: By 800, Christians had been backed into the northernmost region of Spain by the Moors and a humiliating tribute of a 100 virgins per year was demanded of local governors.

Noted political philosopher Fr. James Schall, SJ, summarized the tumult: He addressed an issue that did, to be sure, come to world attention because of Islamic militancy. This issue was stated succinctly:

‘Is it reasonable, or does God will, to spread one’s religion by violence?’

This was a question asked by practically everyone in the world who thought of the implications of “suicide bombings,” or about the earlier holy wars — jihad — in Islamic history, wars largely, though not exclusively, against Christian lands. The issue is the deliberate choice of violent means as the proper way to propagate a religion, together with a theological justification to do so.

When the Roman Crusaders were welcomed into Constantinople, they betrayed their hosts by raping and killing Greek Orthodox Nuns in the Cathedral of Haigia Sophia.

When Russian troops began their advance into Hitler’s Germany, Officers stood leisurely by as their troops took turns raping any German women they came across. War sanctions man’s bloody sadistic brutality. Women usually bore the brunt of men’s violence.

Soldiers were repeatedly rewarded with promises of booty and sexual conquest.

Recurring motifs of the debasement of women first - stripped naked to parade in victory marches, and as sexual slaves to lust filled and sex starved soldiers.

In April 1947, in the Punjab, a large group of Muslim women was stripped naked, paraded through the streets, then raped by a Sikh mob.

The Fourth Crusade #

In the early summer of 2001, the Pope made a historic visit to Greece, and was met with thousands of angry demonstrators holding signs, yelling epithets. The Greeks were angry about something that had happened eight hundred years ago: The Fourth Crusade had stopped off in Constantinople, sacked the city, and weakened it for the later overthrow by the Turks.

And they’re angry today, eight hundred years later.

The fourth Crusade, of the 11th Century, was actually spawned spontaneously by a group of knights on a whim following the euphoria of a successful tournament. To prepare themselves, they engaged in a few practice runs or if you will some “curtain raisers” including the ones above and below. Another one began as one of the darkest, bloody and brutal periods in Medieval Europe.

First they dealt with the Cathars in Southern France. An estimated 200,000 to one million people died during the twenty year campaign, which began in earnest in Béziers in July

After assembling the papal troops, these marched to Béziers, where they ordered that 222 people, suspected of being Cathars, were handed over to them by the citizens of the town. When this was refused, the papal troops decided to attack.

One of the crusaders asked their leader, the Papal Legate Arnaud-Amaury, how to distinguish between the 222 heretics and the thousands of faithful Catholics that lived in the city.

“Kill them all,” was the abbot’s alleged reply. “God will recognise his own!”

The number of dead that day was between 7000 and 20,000, the latter figure being the one quoted when Arnaud-Amaury reported back to the Pope.

Pope Innocent III supported the Fourth Crusade, which led to the wild sacking of Constantinople, “the most unspeakable of the many outrages in the whole hideous history of the Crusades.” The Roman Catholics, after being welcomed into the city, in order to demonstrate their superiority attacked and slaughtered hundreds of their Greek Orthodox brethren.

Drunken Roman Crusaders rampaged the Haigia Sophia, raped the Greek nuns and trashed the Church smearing the walls and floors with carnage and blood.

The Greek Orthodox Church believes this weakened Constantinople, allowing the Turks to eventually overrun the city in 1453. It was one of the few fortress cities to survive the Persian invaders and the Muslim hegemony of the Ottoman empire the longest.

By this time, the Crusaders had spent their blood lust, had little zeal, energy or resources left to fight the Muslims.

The cause of this intra-faith feuding stems from conflicting claims of religious supremacy and doctrinal issues. The western Catholics based in Rome had suffered the indignity of subjugation by barbarian invasions, while the eastern thrived under the Classical Byzantine tradition, retaining its orthodoxy. The western Roman centred Church felt the eastern Orthodox could contribute more financial support to the Crusaders.

The Religious Wars #

After a number of Huguenots assembling for worship in a barn at Vassy were massacred by soldiers of the Roman Catholic Guise family, Condé declared that there was no hope but in God and arms.

At Orléans on April 12, 1562, the Huguenot leaders signed the manifesto in which they stated that as loyal subjects they were driven to take up arms for liberty of conscience on behalf of the persecuted saints.

The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day occurred on the night of Aug. 24/25, 1572, after a council at which the queen mother Catherine de Médicis, King Charles IX, the Duke d’Anjou (later Henry III), and the Guises were present.

During the massacre Coligny and almost all the leading Huguenots in Paris were slain. The Paris massacre was repeated throughout France, and Protestants were slain in thousands. The Protestant survivors resolved upon a desperate resistance, and a Huguenot political party was formed at Milhaud, near Nîmes, in 1573 by Philippe de Mornay. The Huguenots at first hoped that the crown of France would pass to a Huguenot; when that became obviously impossible, they fought for full religious and civil liberty within the state.

Henry IV’s promulgation of the Edict of Nantes (April 1598), gave them a charter of their religious and political freedom.

The Huguenots were allowed to retain their freedom of conscience but lost all their military advantages. No longer a political entity, the Huguenots became loyal subjects of the king. Their remaining rights under the Edict of Nantes were confirmed by a royal declaration in 1643 on behalf of the infant king, Louis XIV.

The French Roman Catholic clergy, however, could not accept the Huguenots and worked to deprive them of their rights. General harassment and the forcible conversion of thousands of Protestants were rampant for many years. Finally, on Oct. 18, 1685, Louis XIV pronounced the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. As a result, over the next several years, France lost more than 400,000 of its Protestant inhabitants. Many emigrated to England, Prussia, the Netherlands, and America and became very useful citizens of their adopted countries. Many were urban people in commerce and industry, and their absence would hurt France in the coming Industrial Revolution.

The Thirty Years War in Germany, 1618 - 48, left central Europe devastated, as did the Irish Protestant Catholic conflict. Religious and ethnic tensions between the Rhohingya Muslims and the Rhahine Buddhists, accused of attempted genocide, do little to foster faith in the power of religion to provide world peace. Perhaps because organised Religions tend to appeal to partisan passions rather than the intellect. Unyielding loyalty to sectarian religion is elevated over reason.

While the French Revolution disestablished the Catholic Church, Napoleon, soon appreciating its power of control over the masses, re-institutionalized it with his concordat in 1802. Putin has done similar in Russia.

This power structure negates Christ’s message of the power of pacifism and love. This power structure has justified many atrocities through the past two thousand years. Former Cardinal George Pell used it to justify his utterly callous disregard for all victims of sexual abuse by priests. He informed Christine Foster, mother of two abused daughters, that her conscience had no influence on him as he was only guided by Rome. Any accusations had to be proven in court. She described his sociopathic lack of empathy as utter arrogance and hypocrisy.

Editing In progress