BR__Christianity Is Not Great By John Loftus Flashcards
P. 01
John W. Lotus is considered the world’s most iconic free thinker.
Between the fifth and the tenth century CE is best described as the Dark Ages, a period during which “almost all the best values, technologies, knowledge, and achievements of the Greco-Roman era were forgotten or abandoned, and had to be relearned and reinvented all over again many centuries later.”
MN: This shows the dark ages began right after Christianity was mandatory and opposition was punished for Heresy! Normally always in death, whether guilty or not. Example, the crusades!
Recounting the Catholic Church’s child-molestation scandals and their subsequent cover-ups, Phelps concludes there is no justification for the continued existence of that church.
Chapter 01:
MN: My quote on religion: “Religion is a very popular psychology that turns its ‘participants’ into prisoners of their own mind.”
The amount of murder, massacre, etc. for 2,000 years is appalling. Religious madness is the theme. Christians murdering Jews and being murdered and both murdering Muslims and being murdered in their turn. WHY? Because Christ was crucified here, Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac here, and Mohammed rode a horse with a human face aerially around the city, receiving insights as he went. So the murders and massacres are about the places where religious events are believed to have taken place.
Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check.
The thing that uniquely defines religion is belief in supernatural entities. Without that belief, it’s not religion. And with that belief, the capacity for religion to do harm gets cranked up to an alarmingly high level—because there’s no reality check.
more wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day. In somewhat different ways, leaders and combatants continue to depict their war as a holy cause…. Declaring war “holy” is a sure sign of a corrupt religion. 22 Retired bishop John Shelby Spong additionally contends in his book The Sins of Scripture that “the moment any religious tradition claims certainty, it turns demonic.” 23 More specifically, “when certainty combines with zeal in religious matters, horror always results.” 24 Spong echoes Kimball, saying: Embarrassing as it may be to those of us who call ourselves Christians, the fact is that more people have been killed in the history of the world in conflicts over and about religion than over any other single factor. Religion has so often been the source of the cruelest evil. Its darkest and most brutal side becomes visible at the moment when the adherents of any religious system identify their understanding of God with God. 25 Bertrand Russell, probably the premier atheist of the last century, previously wrote about the evils of certainty, saying, “one of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.”
D’Souza and others will go on to tell us Christianity is great because it was the main motivator in starting most early American universities, most of our hospitals, and most food kitchens. But these things would have been started anyway, if for no reason other than necessity. Other non-Christian cultures have them. It just happened that Christianity has been the dominant religion in America for several centuries, that’s all. Besides, these things were started by Christians who were motivated to some degree by the desire to convert people. After all, who are most vulnerable to the Christian message? They are the sick (hospitals), the poor (food kitchens), and young people leaving home for the first time to enter colleges or universities, which were mostly started to train preachers. Turning next to the societal harms of Christian faith, it depends this time on which type of Christianity we’re talking about. The more that Christians embrace reason and science, the less they cause harm. The less that Christians embrace reason and science, the more they cause harm.
Faith helps individual Christians as well. Faith helps Christians because faith is just like a placebo prescribed by a doctor, the intent of which is to deceive patients into thinking it will solve their ills. Doctors will prescribe these sugar pills if they conclude the ills are psychosomatic ones. If patients believe the prescribed pills will heal them, then they do. The healing is therefore self-caused. Faith helps people through the difficulties of life just like a placebo helps in the healing of people with psychosomatic illnesses. 34 So what can be harmful about this? There are several things. Let me just mention three of them. First, faith is just a placebo. It helps believers only by providing them with a false hope, a false comfort, and a self-induced illusionary strength to live their lives. It provides them with an artificial and unnecessary motivation to do good to their neighbors, providing they are actually doing good deeds. Since faith in a placebo heals believers rather than the placebo itself, the object of one’s faith doesn’t do any healing. So any placebo will do. If the doctor prescribed eating unleavened bread, or a certain diet, or drinking a small cup of wine, or not eating fish on Friday, it would work just as well. It could be wearing a certain type of hat, magic underwear, or a medallion or moonstone hung around one’s neck. It could be performing different kinds of rituals, like genuflecting, lighting candles, or kissing statues. It could be praying with a rosary in hand, or facing toward Mecca five times a day, or in front of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. It could be almost anything.
So because believers mistakenly perceive their placebos as having been helpful, they will take the perceived healing effects of their placebos as evidence that their particular religious faith is the one true cure for what ails people. And they will act accordingly in various ways, like donating to their religious causes, and voting for politicians who will support them locally and globally with potentially dire consequences for society and the world at large. This leads to a second reason why faith can be harmful. A misdiagnosis where the placebo of faith is prescribed rather than the correct drug prescription or a needed surgery can kill people. Since having faith in faith is living one’s life in a make-believe fantasy world divorced from reality, it can lead to dangerous consequences.
Furthermore, so long as believers think faith actually does something to help them, they remain vulnerable to any absurd possibility, scam artist, or TV preacher. It will also cause people of faith to deny or discredit science to that same degree. It can be dangerous whenever believers opt out of reality in favor of faith in faith.
A third reason why one’s faith can be harmful is that faith is of no help to us in arriving at truth. Faith stunts one’s intellectual growth. Faith forever produces immature people. We must learn instead how to think exclusively in terms of the probabilities based on the available evidence. Faith doesn’t add to the probabilities, so faith should be rejected by all reasonable, thinking, emotionally healthy adults, 35 including Christians like Charles Kimball and John Shelby Spong. Human beings have a very strong tendency to believe what we prefer to believe. We seek out confirming evidence rather than disconfirming evidence. That’s why reasonable people must instead seek evidence, disconfirming evidence, sufficient objective evidence for what we think. We must learn to question everything if we want to know that which is true, as Guy Harrison has argued. 36 In order to combat this faith-based mentality Peter Boghossian is trying to change how we view faith. He defines faith as “pretending to know things you don’t know.” He says that when we hear the word faith we should think of that definition. Why? Because that’s what believers are doing. They’re playing a childish but also potentially dangerous game of make believe without sufficient evidence, and they are in denial by arguing the evidence is sufficient to believe.
Christians should trust in their own abilities rather than their religious faith. Many of us do just fine without faith in magical, invisible, supernatural beings and/ or forces to help us, and in many cases we do much better without it.
(MN: Do you know what the definition of faith is? It is that Religion is a psychology that makes people believe in make BELIEVE fantasies that hold no place at all in reality.
GREAT Definition.
From the book, the con game, “The majority of people being conned have not a clue they are victims of a con psychology!”
I also like the phrase, “Reality checks don’t bounce!”
My quote on religion: “Religion is a very popular psychology that turns its ‘participants’ into prisoners of their own mind.”)
To argue Christianity causes more harm than good is a larger claim to make and therefore harder to defend, even if I think it’s probably the case. So this isn’t our claim, nor does it need to be. For even if the Christian faith has been better overall for the world, the harm it causes still needs to be explained rather than explained away. For example, we wouldn’t consider someone to be a good person if after saving a child from a burning vehicle he subsequently kicked that child in the teeth. Saving the child’s life would be considered the greater deed and better for the child overall. But that good deed would never exonerate such a person from the crime of kicking the child in the teeth afterward. We would still demand an explanation for why he kicked the child in the teeth.
The chapters in this book clearly show such a God is not the author of the Christian faith, which is based in the Bible with its terrible track record in history. The Christian faith can be empirically tested by the amount of harm it has done and continues to do in our world. Jesus reportedly said: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7: 20). When we evaluate the fruits of Christianity, the result is that it fails miserably.
What we see instead is a manmade religion that has evolved with the times exactly as we would expect of any other religion that has had such a long history. The history of the church makes it look indistinguishable from a manmade religion without any divine inspiration at all. Then, too, the so-called revelation we find in the Bible looks exactly like it was written by men of their times. The God who is supposedly the greatest of all communicators, with a foreknowledge that far exceeds anything human beings could ever have, could not foresee how his so-called revelation would be discredited by its “cultured despisers” as century followed upon century. He didn’t know it would be so culturally tied to the ancient superstitious world, so barbaric, so prescientific, that modern people could not believe because of it.
Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and defeated Maxentius in the year 312 to take the Roman throne. Then in 313 he decided to solidify his rule under one religion, the Christian one represented by the cross he “saw” in the sky prior to the battle. So he insisted that the church come to an agreement about doctrine. The one doctrine the church wrestled with the most was that of the nature of Jesus. The Council of Chalcedon in the year 451 finally decided the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation.
(MN: It took the Catholic Church 451 years to decide who Jesus was! A preacher, a rabbi, a divine being, a savior?
It took them until the middle of the 5th century before they could make up their mind. And still they didn’t do it. Constantine made the proclamations Jesus was part of a trinity god system, just like some other popular pagan gods.)
Horror stories about Christian violence abound in other eras, with the Crusades and Inquisition as prime exhibits; but the intra-Christian violence of the fifth-and sixth-century debates was on a far larger and more systematic scale than anything produced by the Inquisition and occurred at a much earlier stage of the church history… vicious civil wars still reverberated two hundred years after Chalcedon. 41 The winners of these wars decided orthodox doctrine for the next fifteen hundred years, including the beliefs of people in the Anabaptist tradition: When we look at what became the church’s orthodoxy, so many of those core beliefs gained the status they did as a result of what appears to be historical accident, of the workings of raw chance…. This was not the case of one side producing better arguments in its cause…. What mattered were the interests and obsessions of rival emperors and queens, the role of competing ecclesiastical princes and their churches, and the empire’s military successes or failures against particular barbarian nations. 42 When Protestants rejected the religion of the Roman Catholic Church, there was even more religious violence beginning in the sixteenth century. In France (1562–1598) there were a series of eight wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants (primarily Calvinist Huguenots), known as the French Wars of Religion. The infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre took place during one of them. It started on the eve of the feast of Bartholomew, August 23, 1572, when a group of Huguenot leaders were slaughtered by Catholics. Lasting several weeks, the massacre extended across the countryside, where up to ten thousand Protestants were slaughtered.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive wars in European history. It pitted Christians against each other. This war was fought primarily in Germany, but other countries got involved as well. Roman Catholicism and Protestant Calvinism figured prominently in the opposing sides of this conflict. So great was the loss of life from this war that estimates show one-third of the entire population of Germany was killed. Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population. Brandenburg suffered the loss of half of its population, as did Marburg and Augsburg, while Magdeburg was reduced to rubble. Outside Germany, nearly one-third of the Czech population died as well. 44 Christian apologist Paul Copan admits that “denominational differences were a matter of life and death.” 45 That’s a gross understatement. We’re talking about a bloodbath between what most Christians today would call their brothers and sisters in Christ.
Chapter 2
Whom, what, should we thank? Should we thank the church? Christianity has controlled Christendom for at least fifteen hundred years. During these centuries what good has the church done? Did Christ or any of his apostles add to the sum of useful knowledge? Did they say one word in favor of any science, of any art? Did they teach their fellow-men how to make a living, how to overcome the obstructions of nature, how to prevent sickness—how to protect themselves from pain, from famine, from misery and rags?
From the very first it taught the vanity—the worthlessness of all earthly things. It taught the wickedness of wealth, the blessedness of poverty. It taught that the business of this life was to prepare for death. It insisted that a certain belief was necessary to ensure salvation, and that all who failed to believe, or doubted in the least would suffer eternal pain. According to the church the natural desires, ambitions and passions of man were all wicked and depraved.
To love God, to practice self-denial, to overcome desire, to despise wealth, to hate prosperity, to desert wife and children, to live on roots and berries, to repeat prayers, to wear rags, to live in filth, and drive love from the heart—these, for centuries, were the highest and most perfect virtues, and those who practiced them were saints.
Did they find the medicinal virtue that dwells in any weed or flower? Did they teach us the mysteries of the metals and how to purify the ores in furnace flames? Did they show us how to improve our condition in this world? Did they give us even a hint as to any useful thing? Did they discover or show us how to produce anything for food? Did they produce anything to satisfy the hunger of man? Did they tell us anything about chemistry—how to combine and separate substances—how to subtract the hurtful—how to produce the useful? What has the church done? For centuries it kept the earth flat, for centuries it made all the hosts of heaven travel around this world—for centuries it clung to “sacred” knowledge, and fought facts with the ferocity of a fiend. For centuries it hated the useful. It was the deadly enemy of medicine. Disease was produced by devils and could be cured only by priests, decaying bones, and holy water. Doctors were the rivals of priests. They diverted the revenues. The church opposed the study of anatomy—was against the dissection of the dead. Man had no right to cure disease—God would do that through his priests. Man had no right to prevent disease—diseases were sent by God as judgments. The church opposed inoculation—vaccination, and the use of chloroform and ether. It was declared to be a sin, a crime for a woman to lessen the pangs of motherhood. The church declared that woman must bear the curse of the merciful Jehovah. What has the church done? It taught that the insane were inhabited by devils. Insanity was not a disease. It was produced by demons. It could be cured by prayers—gifts, amulets and charms. All these had to be paid for. This enriched the church. These ideas were honestly entertained by Protestants as well as Catholics—by Luther, Calvin, Knox and Wesley.
It taught the awful doctrine of witchcraft. It filled the darkness with demons—the air with devils, and the world with grief and shame. It charged men, women and children with being in league with Satan to injure their fellows. Old women were convicted for causing storms at sea—for preventing rain and for bringing frost. Girls were convicted for having changed themselves into wolves, snakes and toads. These witches were burned for causing diseases—for selling their souls and for souring beer. All these things were done with the aid of the Devil who sought to persecute the faithful, the lambs of God. What has the church done? It made the wife a slave—the property of the husband, and it placed the husband as much above the wife as Christ was above the husband. It taught that a nun is purer, nobler than a mother. It induced millions of pure and conscientious girls to renounce the joys of life—to take the veil woven of night and death, to wear the habiliments of the dead—made them believe that they were the brides of Christ.
Did they give us even a hint as to any useful thing? Did they discover or show us how to produce anything for food? Did they produce anything to satisfy the hunger of man? Did they tell us anything about chemistry—how to combine and separate substances—how to subtract the hurtful—how to produce the useful? What has the church done? For centuries it kept the earth flat, for centuries it made all the hosts of heaven travel around this world—for centuries it clung to “sacred” knowledge, and fought facts with the ferocity of a fiend. For centuries it hated the useful. It was the deadly enemy of medicine. Disease was produced by devils and could be cured only by priests, decaying bones, and holy water. Doctors were the rivals of priests. They diverted the revenues.
The church opposed the study of anatomy—was against the dissection of the dead. Man had no right to cure disease—God would do that through his priests. Man had no right to prevent disease—diseases were sent by God as judgments. The church opposed inoculation—vaccination, and the use of chloroform and ether. It was declared to be a sin, a crime for a woman to lessen the pangs of motherhood. The church declared that woman must bear the curse of the merciful Jehovah. What has the church done? It taught that the insane were inhabited by devils. Insanity was not a disease. It was produced by demons. It could be cured by prayers—gifts, amulets and charms. All these had to be paid for. This enriched the church. These ideas were honestly entertained by Protestants as well as Catholics—by Luther, Calvin, Knox and Wesley. What has the church done? It taught the awful doctrine of witchcraft. It filled the darkness with demons—the air with devils, and the world with grief and shame. It charged men, women and children with being in league with Satan to injure their fellows. Old women were convicted for causing storms at sea—for preventing rain and for bringing frost. Girls were convicted for having changed themselves into wolves, snakes and toads. These witches were burned for causing diseases—for selling their souls and for souring beer. All these things were done with the aid of the Devil who sought to persecute the faithful, the lambs of God. What has the church done? It made the wife a slave—the property of the husband, and it placed the husband as much above the wife as Christ was above the husband. It taught that a nun is purer, nobler than a mother. It induced millions of pure and conscientious girls to renounce the joys of life—to take the veil woven of night and death, to wear the habiliments of the dead—made them believe that they were the brides of Christ.
The church was opposed to fire insurance—to life insurance. It denounced insurance in any form as gambling, as immoral. To insure your life was to declare that you had no confidence in God—that you relied on a corporation instead of divine providence. It was declared that God would provide for your widow and your fatherless children. To insure your life was to insult heaven. What has the church done? The church regarded epidemics as the messengers of the good God. The “Black Death” was sent by the eternal Father, whose mercy spared some and whose justice murdered the rest. To stop the scourge, they tried to soften the heart of God by kneelings and prostrations—by processions and prayers—by burning incense and by making vows. They did not try to remove the cause. The cause was God. They did not ask for pure water, but for holy water. Faith and filth lived or rather died together. Religion and rags, piety and pollution kept company. Sanctity kept its odor. What has the church done? It was the enemy of art and literature. It destroyed the marbles of Greece and Rome. Beauty was Pagan. It destroyed so far as it could the best literature of the world. It feared thought—but it preserved the Scriptures, the ravings of insane saints, the falsehoods of the Fathers, the bulls of popes, the accounts of miracles performed by shrines, by dried blood and faded hair, by pieces of bones and wood, by rusty nails and thorns, by handkerchiefs and rags, by water and beads and by a finger of the Holy Ghost. What has the church done? Christianity claims, with great pride, that it established asylums for the insane. Yes, it did. But the insane were treated as criminals. They were regarded regarded as the homes—as the tenement houses of devils. They were persecuted and tormented. They were chained and flogged, starved and killed. The asylums were prisons, dungeons, the insane were victims and the keepers were ignorant, conscientious, pious fiends. They were not trying to help men, they were fighting devils—destroying demons. They were not actuated by love—but by hate and fear. What has the church done? It founded schools where facts were denied, where science was denounced and philosophy despised. Schools, where priests were made—where they were taught to hate reason and to look upon doubts as the suggestions of the Devil. Schools where the heart was hardened and the brain shriveled. Schools in which lies were sacred and truths profane. Schools for the more general diffusion of ignorance—schools to prevent thought—to suppress knowledge. Schools for the purpose of enslaving the world. What has the church done? It has tried to protect the people from the malice of the Devil—from ghosts and spooks, from witches and wizards and all the leering fiends that seek to poison the souls of men. It has endeavored to protect the sheep of God from the wolves of science—from the wild beasts of doubt and investigation. It has tried to wean the lambs of the Lord from the delights, the pleasures, the joys, of life. According to the philosophy of the church, the virtuous weep and suffer, the vicious laugh and thrive, the good carry a cross, and the wicked fly. But in the next life this will be reversed. Then the good will be happy, and the bad will be damned. It gave us fiends and imps with wings like bats. It gave us ghosts and goblins, spooks and sprites, and little devils that swarmed in the bodies of men, and it gave us hell where the souls of men will roast in eternal flames. Shall we thank the church? Shall we thank them for the hell they made here? Shall we thank them for the hell of the future? P. 48.
The Christians of the Middle Ages, the men who were filled with the Holy Ghost, knew all about the worlds beyond the grave, but nothing about the world in which they lived. They thought the earth was flat—a little dishing if anything—that it was about five thousand years old, and that the stars were little sparkles made to beautify the night.
(MN: the stars were holes in heaven’s floor so we could see it was really there. Also, the planets and universe revolved around the earth. Then again, angels moved the planets round and round in their orbits.)
They have found that Christianity is like the rest—that it was not a revelation, but a natural growth—that its gods and devils, its heavens and hells, were borrowed—that its ceremonies and sacraments were souvenirs of other religions—that no part of it came from heaven, but that it was all made by savage man. They found that Jehovah was a tribal god and that his ancestors had lived on the banks of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges and the Nile, and these ancestors were traced back to still more savage forms. They found that all the sacred books were filled with inspired mistake and sacred absurdity.
I thank the inventors and makers of the numberless things of use and luxury. I thank the industrious men, the loving mothers, the useful women. They are the benefactors of our race. The inventor of pins did a thousand times more good than all the popes and cardinals, the bishops and priests—than all the clergymen and parsons, exhorters and theologians that ever lived. The inventor of matches did more for the comfort and convenience of mankind than all the founders of religions and the makers of all creeds—than all malicious monks and selfish saints.
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Chapter 3
P. 57.
Faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence and even in the light of contrary evidence.
Science has earned our trust by its proven success. Religion has destroyed our trust by its repeated failure. Using the empirical method, science has eliminated smallpox, flown men to the moon, and discovered DNA. If science did not work, we wouldn’t do it. Relying on faith, religion has brought us inquisitions, holy wars, intolerance, and antiscience. Religion does not work, but we still do it.
So far we see no proof that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads.
Surely it is no coincidence that the onset of the Dark Ages coincided with the rise of Christianity. It was only with the revolts against established ecclesiastic authorities in the Renaissance and Reformation that new avenues of thought were finally opened up allowing science to flourish.
When geologists showed that Earth was much older than implied in the Bible, and Darwin provided both the evidence and the theory for how life evolved without the need for God, the foundations of religious belief began to crumble.
Faith is a folly. It requires belief in a world beyond the senses with no basis in evidence for such a world and no reason to believe in it other than the vain hope that something else is out there.
Magical thinking and blind faith are the worst mental system we can apply under these circumstances. They allow the most outrageous lies to be accepted as facts. From its very beginning, religion has been a tool used by those in power to retain that power and keep the masses in line.
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Chapter 4 and 5.
How could someone’s beliefs determine what’s true?”
Christianity is exceptional among the major religions for beginning with a killing and for keeping killing central to the faith ever since.
This chapter will focus on two episodes of Christian violence, violence that was not only protracted but officially authorized and highly institutionalized—namely, the Crusades and the Inquisition.
Almost as soon as the Church stopped being persecuted, it began persecuting, now with the machinery of state on its side. Official orthodoxy branded all other interpretations unorthodoxy and heresy, and already in 385 Priscillian, the bishop of Spain, and six others were tortured and killed. The religion of peace and love had turned deadly.
The year 476 is commonly given as the official fall of the Roman Empire, although Rome continued to be a significant power center, and the eastern empire based in Constantinople survived for another millennium. The so-called Dark Ages ensued, with tribal wars and petty squabbles. Meanwhile, Muhammad began receiving his revelations from Allah (merely the Arabic al-Lah for “God”)
Inside the house of Christendom, all was not well either. The bishop of Rome (known today as the Pope) continued to declare his authority over all Christians, even after the displacement of imperial power from Rome to Constantinople, which was renamed Byzantium. Almost as the Viking threat was subsiding, the eastern and western branches of Christianity finally formally separated in 1054 over doctrinal and power disputes; known as the Great Schism, the break left Christianity permanently divided into a supposedly global Catholic Church and an assortment of national Orthodox Churches.
The author of the Crusades, Pope Urban II (reigned 1088–99), seized the crisis in eastern Christendom as his chance to fulfill Gregory’s wish, calling upon Christians to rise to the holy cause of resisting the Turks; at the Council of Clermont, which convened on November 18, 1095, Urban “preached a sermon on the suffering of the Christians in the East and concluded with a passionate appeal for volunteers to enlist under the sign of the Cross of Christ.”16 But Michael Köhler insists too that “the conquest of the Holy Places was seemingly not a primary objective” of the Pope, and the War of the Cross as a program to take Jerusalem “was not presented to the Crusaders from the outset”; indeed, for many of the combatants, military action was “little more than an extensive conquering expedition” dressed up in Christian garb.17 Make no mistake, whatever its original mixed motivations, the Crusades were sponsored by the Church (recall, in order to be a just war, it had to be declared by a rightful authority) and thoroughly painted in religious terms. Crusaders frequently swore a vow to the Pope’s plan, and they had crosses sewn on their clothing. Crusading was construed as an opportunity to do penance and earn a spiritual indulgence or remission from sin.
(MN: Fighting in the Crusades was a penance for forgiveness of sin!)
In fact, the whole endeavor was not referred to as a “crusade” at all at the time but was rather understood in terms of the Christian concept of penance and pilgrimage:
This is especially and painfully true for the first enthusiasts to arrive, the so-called People’s Crusade, led by a figure known as Peter the Hermit. Roaming from village to village encouraging the common folk to defend their religion, Peter stirred up a mob of fifteen thousand, which even the Catholic New Advent online encyclopedia characterizes as “disorganized, undisciplined, penniless hordes, almost destitute of equipment, who, surging eastward through the valley of the Danube, plundered as they went along and murdered the Jews in German cities.”21 Of various peasant armies, Peter’s was the only one to reach Byzantium, where several thousand of its numbers were killed by Christian officials out of fear for the threat they posed. The survivors trekked on to Turkish territory, where they “pillaged the Turkish countryside, killed and tortured even the Christian inhabitants,”22 and were wiped out by a Turkish army at a “battle” at Nicaea on October 21, 1096.
Perhaps one hundred thousand soldiers and camp followers reached Byzantium and then marched on to confront the Turks. After several stunning victories, the crusaders commenced their siege of Jerusalem on July 14, 1097, which was not actually controlled by the Turks but by other Muslim rivals, the Fatimids. But such distinctions were insignificant to the Christian soldiers, as were distinctions between Muslim, Christian, and Jew inside the city. Once the walls were breached, blood-crazed crusaders were streaming over the walls and through the streets of the northern part of the city slaughtering every living thing that crossed their path. No banner was going to save lives in this shambles, while the Jewish population of the city were cut down—man, woman, and child—where they stood hoping for sanctuary in their chief synagogue…. It is doubtful whether any other of the inhabitants of Jerusalem on the dreadful day survived. The native Christians had been expelled from the city before the siege began; they were lucky, for in the mayhem of sacking they too no doubt would have perished. The slaughter lasted the best part of two days.
For many pilgrims, their task was complete, and they returned to Europe. A small contingent of Westerners remained in the East, where, if their presence “did not constitute a project of colonization,” then “the most important princes of the crusading army used the opportunity for the establishment of lordships and social climbing.”25 In other words, the just and holy war rapidly morphed into a mundane territorial conquest and political occupation. P. 94.
Even the Catholic New Advent online encyclopedia confesses that there was “ruthless plundering of its churches and palaces…. The masterpieces of antiquity, piled up in public places and in the Hippodrome, were utterly destroyed. Clerics and knights, in their eagerness to acquire famous and priceless relics, took part in the sack of the churches.”30 Some of that plunder still adorns Western sites, like the celebrated horse sculptures on display in Venice. Triumphantly, a Western/Latin/Catholic regime was installed in the East, but it collapsed within a couple of generations.
Christian troops brought the true religion at the point of a sword to the Wends, Sorbs, and Obotrites of Central Europe, and the Finns were attacked in 1154. Pope Celestine III announced a crusade in the Baltic region against the Livonians (Latvia today) in 1195; after various setbacks and rebellions, the Livonians were largely converted to Christianity by force around 1212.
In 1320, Pope John XXII authorized the Inquisition to expand its mission into investigations of witchcraft and sorcery, and theologians at the University of Paris in 1398 pronounced witchcraft and other forms of magic to be a type of heresy.
Queen Isabella received permission from Pope Sixtus IX to operate an independent inquisition against Jews. Specifically, the target of this Spanish Inquisition was Jews who had, under the duress of continuous discrimination and violence, converted to Christianity. By 1415 as many as half of all Spanish Jews had become conversos or Christian converts. While this conversion ideally bought them peace from persecution, it unfortunately brought the force of the Church upon them. The conversos were widely suspected of being insincere Christians; it was feared that they practiced their old religion in secret and even seduced other Jews away from the true faith, while a few actually did deconvert and resume their ancestral religion. In 1482, the notorious Tomas de Torquemada was appointed Grand Inquisitor of Spain; his inquisitorial courts scoured the kingdom for apostates and heretics and killed more than two thousand people by the year 1500. The threats of the Spanish Inquisition were those of the previous version, varying from fasting and pilgrimage to confiscation of property, whipping, imprisonment (sometimes disguised as temporary monasticism), forced labor, exile, and of course public execution.
Persecution of Protestants continued in Spain, and the Huguenots met a terrible fate at the hands of French Catholic society. As early as 1547 King Henri II condemned their heresy and ordered them to be burned at the stake. Twelve hundred Huguenots were massacred at Vassey and Sens in 1562, which ignited a war between the two sects that persisted on and off for more than thirty-five years, with intense fighting from 1562 to 1572. Then on the night of St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572, Huguenot homes were attacked, leading to days of rioting and three thousand Huguenot casualties.
By the mid-1700s, the Spanish Inquisition had spent most of its energy, although it was not formally ended until 1834—but not before this “daughter of faith and fanaticism”40 had accumulated forty-nine thousand arrests and as many as ten thousands deaths.
For thirty years, religion-enthused armies crisscrossed Europe in the aptly named Thirty Years’ War, which blended the crusading spirit with political and territorial ambition to produce the “biggest of all the wars of religion.”50 Flaring first in Bohemia, the old battleground of the Hussites (just as much of the Huguenot war had been fought in former Albigensian strongholds), after a few years of religious fervor the conflagration devolved into a succession struggle and political competition, with non-German armies of French, Spanish, and Swedish soldiers tramping through German land. In fact, although the fundamental religious questions were settled by 1622, each side carried along its religion and suppressed rival religions: Catholic King Ferdinand banned Lutheranism and Calvinism, while Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden intervened to support the Protestants. It is estimated that seven or eight million Christians lost their lives to fellow Christians during those three decades,
The era of Christian wars certainly did not end before the Protestant civil war in England in the 1640s. Catholicism had been overthrown a century earlier by Henry VIII, but the Puritans, the Christian fundamentalists of their day, were not satisfied with the anti-Catholicism of the new Anglican church or Church of England. An uprising that cost Charles I, the divine-right king of England his head, placed Puritans in power. What Dunn called “the last and grandest of Europe’s age of religious wars”51 left Oliver Cromwell in charge of republican and Puritan England from 1643 to 1658. He saw his rule as a mandate for “godly men” to renew English society. Among the memorable achievements of the godly government was the invasion of Catholic Ireland, initiating a religious and political competition for that little island that persists to this day.
Chapter 6: (MN: This chapter is full of witch hunts, torture and Crusades. Next time someone insists the Bible is true, tell them, so you believe in witches? And show them these references of witches being real!
The Bible was written at a time when people thought the planets were moved around by angels, that the earth was the center of the entire universe and the universe was completely for the joy of the earth. They also believed that the world was flat and that all the 12 million animal species; counting both male and female got on one 400 foot boat called an ark.)
The witch mania in Europe was the most persistent and widespread instance of extraordinary social behavior in human history. Though the myth that sustained it was delusionary to the point of absurdity, it seemed to those involved to possess sufficient plausibility to authorize appalling perversions of justice and the infliction of horrific cruelties over a period of three centuries…. The European witch mania was all the more extraordinary in that witchcraft, in the organized form which it was perceived as so great a menace, simply did not exist…. The witch culture against which the Christian Church took up arms was an artificial construct created by their theologians.
Killing tens of thousands of supposed witches over the course of hundreds of years by Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) is especially egregious for at least three reasons. First, a perfectly good, all-knowing, all-powerful God would surely not allow the Christian Church as an institution to torture and kill so many innocent people for being witches (and they were all innocent). If the Christian God could have done something to stop these killings from happening, and didn’t do it, then this makes God’s inaction inexcusable to the point where the best explanation is that he doesn’t exist.
No reasonable, scientifically minded person in today’s world should believe that the devil (or Satan), who commands a host of demons and empowers witches who cause great harm using their black-magic spells and potions, actually exists. The burden of proof is on Christian believers who say witches are so empowered, just as it’s on those who believe other claims, such as the existence of fairies, elves, and trolls. There just isn’t any objective evidence for such claims. If anyone thinks otherwise, then that person should try to win the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) million-dollar prize. The whole concept of a supernatural personal devil originated in the ancient, superstitious, mythical past, and it has no basis in fact. So if we took the Christian religion with its devil and demons out of the mix of factors that cause people to kill each other, then there would be no justification to kill witches for casting black-magic spells, none. With no devil, no demons, and no witches, no one would ever be killed for the crime of witchcraft, ever.
Due to space limitations, my focus here is on the European witch hunts. But since witch hunts continue in Sub-Saharan Africa, carried out by Bible-believing Christians, the earlier witch hunts are not merely a historical anomaly. Witch hunts could arise on Christian soil whenever conducive conditions arise. Between 45,000 and 60,000 people, 75 to 80 percent of them women, were killed as witches during the early-modern witch hunts that took place in Europe. Untold millions of others suffered the shame of false accusations (even if no arrests resulted), arrests (even if no convictions resulted), pornographic body searches for the devil’s mark (see Revelation 13:17), sadistic tortures, and living in constant fear. While little could be universally said about all these witch hunts, the common denominator is the Christian belief in the devil and the black witchcraft arts. Don’t think so? Then heed C. S. Lewis, one of the past century’s greatest Christian apologists: If we really thought there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings [i.e., traitors] did.11 There are several Old Testament texts that serve as the justification for witch hunts.
In Deuteronomy 18:10–11 we find the most inclusive list of the magical arts in the Old Testament: “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead.” In Exodus 22:18 God is quoted as saying: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”
We’re told the witch of Endor, who was a medium (or even a necromancer), could actually summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel from the dead (or Samuel himself) at the request of King Saul (1 Samuel 28:3–25).
As Brian P. Levack, the foremost historian of witchcraft tells us: “The belief in magic, even harmful magic, exists in almost all cultures, but the belief in the Christian Devil, defined as he was by generations of medieval theologians, is unique to Western civilization and its derivative cultures.”13 The evidence in the Bible for the reality of both the devil and the power of witchcraft is so strong that John Wesley, the cofounder of the Methodist denomination, wrote: Giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible. With my latest breath I will bear testimony against giving up to infidels one great proof of the invisible world; I mean that of witchcraft and apparitions, confirmed by the testimony of all ages.
The Black Death, which killed around one hundred million people in the known world. In Europe, twenty-five million people died between 1348 and 1350—about one third of the entire population. People in the fourteenth century didn’t understand why so many people were dying horrible deaths, and one of the scapegoats was the black-magic spells cast by witches.
This is horrible. It’s not that evidence wasn’t sought though. If a husband believed his wife was not a virgin when he married her, she would be required to produce the bed sheet containing the dried blood from her wedding night before the elders at the gate. However, how could she prove this blood was from her wedding night, and what if she lost the bed sheet? If she could not produce it, for whatever reason, she would be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:13–21).
The accused would be made to suffer horrific pain to see if they were innocent or guilty.
Trial by ordeal:
An example was used by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages in the following manner:
The accused had to hold rocks shoveled out of a fire pit. Three days later a priest would see if the hand was starting to heal. If innocent, the priest would declare the person was innocent. If the priest saw no evidence of healing, the accused was guilty and normally put to a horrific death!
Up until the thirteenth century European criminal trials largely followed the rules of evidence we’ve just seen in the Bible. It was an accusatory system in which the accuser must prove the accused is guilty before a judge. If he or she couldn’t do this, the court would look to some sign from God, not unlike what we find in the Bible. The most common method was trial by ordeal. The accused would carry a very hot iron or be forced to stick one’s hand in very hot water, then, after a few days, the accused would be declared innocent if God had healed the hand. Accused people could also be tied up and cast into water. If they sank they were considered innocent (and then pulled up), but if they floated they would be considered guilty. Some innocent people drowned from this, of course. Accused people could also be forced to swallow a big morsel of food in one gulp. If they didn’t choke, they were considered innocent. Or, the accuser and the accused would be forced to engage in a duel or challenge of some kind. The winner of the contest would be judged correct in the court case.
There were tortures that were specifically sexually sadistic in nature. The Judas Cradle was a tall, thin stool with a pointed wooden or metal pyramid on top. The victim would be stripped and suspended above it, then lowered onto it, making the pyramid enter the vagina or anus, or crush the scrotum. Victims could be dropped onto it, and weights could be hung from their legs. There was the Pear of Anguish, which was a pear-shaped device inserted into the vagina for women or the anus for men. It consisted of four metal leaves that spread open from each other as the torturer turned the screw at the bottom. There was the Breast Ripper, a four-clawed device that would usually be heated. The torturer would then use it to tear apart or rip off a woman’s breast.
The most extreme tortures killed their victims. They were used mostly after the witch was sentenced to death. The Wheel involved tying the victim’s limbs to the wheel’s spokes, then slowly turning it while the torturer smashed the victim’s limbs with an iron hammer, breaking them in many places. Or the victim could be tied to the outer rim of a wheel, which would then be rolled down a rocky hillside or rolled over fire. Sometimes small spikes were added to the wheel, causing pain to come from all directions. Impalement was a method of torture where a sharp pole was pushed up from the vagina or anus though the body of a victim. The ultimate torture was burning the victim at the stake while still alive, although most of the time convicted witches were strangled before being burned.
The case of the Pappenheimer family in Bavaria, Germany, in 1600 is one of the most horrific cases ever recorded. It is indicative of the kind of behavior that otherwise good people can descend to when such behavior is sanctioned by their faith. The Pappenheimers were vagrants who were accused of witchcraft. Under torture they confessed. They said that they had flown on broomsticks to the witches’ Sabbath, had sex with the devil, produced magic potions that they used to cause storms, cannibalized corpses, and committed many robberies, arsons, and murders. Brian Pavlac comments: “Any rational accounting of the numbers would have recognized the impossibility of these confessions, but with witchcraft the impossible becomes credible.”38 On July 29, 1600, a crowd of thousands came to witness their executions. The executioners ripped at Paul and Anna’s flesh with red hot pincers and cut off both of Anna’s breasts. Then they rubbed them in her face and the face of her two oldest sons. At the place of execution the bones of Paul and his two older sons were broken on the Wheel. Paul was subsequently impaled, and they were all tied to stakes and burned alive. The youngest of the three boys was forced to witness this, and several weeks later he was also burned at the stake.
One can only wonder why God had to wait while thousands were brutally tortured and killed. Why couldn’t God enable Christians to reach these conclusions before the witch hunts even began? Instead, he watched as the Pappenheimer family was brutally tortured and killed. Could he not have clearly and unambiguously condemned the killing of witches? Did he not know that these witch hunts would be written about centuries later to discredit Christianity? Could he not have intervened at the very minimum, in the most egregious cases, by answering the prayers of these victims for an acquittal.
The rise of modern science, and with it the Enlightenment that originated in the seventeenth century, was probably a factor. With the discovery of the laws of motion, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) could explain the movements of both the planets in the solar system and objects on earth. The universe could thus be understood as a perfectly working clock, a machine, with its gears operating by the laws of physics. The intervention of God or the devil in this machine-like universe was regarded as increasingly unlikely. In the case of God, it was thought that if he had to intervene in the world, then he didn’t make a perfect clock in the first place.
All this shows is the willingness of Christians to revise their beliefs due to the changing times and harsh realities of life, just as they have always done, and just as they will continue to do. They’ll never give up on faith. They’ll never give up on God. They’ll just change what they believe.
Chapter 7:
Bn
Chapter 7: (MN: our missionary program begins for the savage new world. This part explains why the expansion of missionary work was so important. We wanted to make this savage country like our country in Europe.)
While the Qur’an may admonish believers to spread religion by the sword, no religion has wielded more swords—and muskets and rifles and machine guns—in the service of conversion than Christianity.
In short, Western Christians were just so darned superior, it was their obligation to bring civilization and Christianity to those whom even Kipling recognized as “captives.” The rationalization for colonial conquest and Christian conversion began with “legal fictions” like terra nullius and the right of conquest. Terra nullius, literally “empty land,” maintained that Europeans were free to occupy any territory that was uninhabited or void of “civilized” humans, that is, people who did not recognize private property, farm the land, and believe in God. Once such territory was taken by force, the right of conquest established the authority to rule and settle it. In the process, native peoples were often simply dispossessed or exterminated.
But Western-Christian colonial powers did not want total depopulation, for the natives were a valuable source of labor, taxes, and political cooperation in territories where natives often greatly outnumbered the settlers and administrators.
For those who survived the initial onslaught of invasion, their fate was to be “civilized” in the model of Western society, acculturated to its/our practices of life and labor such as “the seven-day week, the special status of the Sabbath, new modes of dress and conduct, the value of literacy and numeracy, and so on.”
To refurnish the natives’ world, specifically, to resemble the proper Western-Christian lifestyle. In this process, missionaries were crucial; few other Western-Christian invaders lived in such close contact with the indigenous people.
The missionaries literally and intentionally modeled civilized life for the natives. For instance, the mission garden provided the prototype of “civilized cultivation,” which often entailed the undermining of traditional gender roles, in which women did the bulk of horticultural work.
The missionary home became the epitome of civilized domestic space, with right angles, specialized rooms for different functions, doors and locks for privacy, and modern furniture. Situated on the broad streets and square blocks, marked by fences, the mission settlement “became a diorama” for “teaching [the natives] to build a world.” In this world, women were consigned to the “domestic” sphere, where they could sit and sew and serve like Western-Christian ladies.
Savage nakedness was covered with clothing that marked Western-Christian shame as well as class and gender distinctions. And of course the locals were put to work: modern labor and cash transactions were seen as part of a new “moral economy,” stigmatizing idleness and “primitive production” and promoting “the kind of upright industry and lifestyle that would dissolve [paganism’s] dirt.”
This Christian-colonial complex served not only the interests of the missionaries, who felt quite keenly that they were helping the benighted barbarians, but also the interests of settlers, traders, and colonial administrations. Western-Christian colonists wanted a subdued, pacified, and pliant local population—when they wanted a local population at all. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, in their introduction to their edited volume on settler colonialism, argue that, when indigenous societies were small and weak, occupation of their land was “founded on a commitment to annihilate native or indigenous peoples” who “were considered inferior, scarcely human—closer to animals than to civilized people” and who could be eradicated with the same love and justice that was applied to heretics and infidels.
The first region to feel the righteous fury of colonial Christianity was the Caribbean islands and Central and South America.
At the very moment when the crusade against the Moors of Spain was complete, and in the throes of the Spanish Inquisition, the crusading inquisitorial zeal of Spain was thrown at the New World. The Americas were hardly free of their own horrors, including empire and human sacrifice, with priests donning the flayed skins of victims, but the inhabitants of the continent had never seen the likes of the atrocities that were about to befall them.
Christopher Columbus led the assault, for gold, glory, and God. Landing famously on October 12, 1492, it took just three months until the first intercultural bloodshed occurred on January 13, 1493. After capturing a few natives to carry to Europe, Columbus returned in 1493 with a letter from King Ferdinand, granting Spain possession of islands and mainland alike by authority of the Pope, and issuing this warning to the “Indians”:
Should you fail to comply, or delay maliciously in so doing, we assure you that with the help of God we shall use force against you, declaring war upon you from all sides and with all possible means, and we shall bind you to the yoke of the Church and of Their Highnesses; we shall enslave your persons, wives and sons, sell you or dispose of you as the King sees fit; we shall seize your possessions and harm you as much as we can as disobedient and resisting vassals. And we declare you guilty of resulting deaths and injuries, exempting Their Highnesses of such guilt as well as ourselves and the gentlemen who accompany us.
Having duly blamed the indigenous people for their own fate, violence broke out during this voyage, including killing, rape, and enslavement: sixteen hundred prisoners were taken, of whom more than five hundred were shipped off to Spain.
Columbus found his colony at Navidad burned and its inhabitants dead, reportedly because the Christians had abused the native’s wealth and women. By 1495, Columbus discovered that his men on Hispaniola had been “kidnapping boys for slaves, women for sex, beating and maiming at will, raping, pillaging.” Columbus’s brother, Fernando, chronicled that they “found the island in a pitiful state, with most of the Christians committing innumerable outrages for which they were mortally hated by the Indians.” Bartolomé de las Casas, who would later emerge as a champion of the Indians, likewise wrote that the natives viewed the invaders as “intolerable, terrible, fierce, cruel, and devoid of all reason,” voracious of both food and sex, “abhorrent” for “mistreating them and causing them anguish.”
Rather than repent, a force of two hundred Christians marched on the natives, killing hundreds and capturing hundreds more. The vanquished people were ordered to pay tribute, and by 1498 Indian land was being expropriated and granted to Spanish soldiers, with the native occupants attached as peasants and serfs to that land.
Within two decades of first contact (1514), the genocide of indigenous people on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic) reduced the population of several hundred thousand to just thirty-two thousand.
Stopped p. 138.
