In case you're not listening, a recorderis...
Victims of Christianity How many people have been killed by Christians? Listed are events that occurred by the command of church authorities or were committed in the name of Christianity. Of course, this list is far from complete. Note: All figures are listed according to contemporary Christian chroniclers. Pagans * As soon as Christianity was legal (315,) pagan temples were destroyed by Christian mobs. Pagan priests were killed. * Between 315 and 600, thousands of pagan believers were slain. * Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa and Cyrill of Heliopolis were famous and praised as “temple destroyers.” * Pagan services became punishable by death in 356. * Christian Emperor Theodosius (408-450) had children executed because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. According to Christian chroniclers, he “followed meticulously all Christian teachings.” * In the 6th century, pagans were declared void of all rights. * In the early 4th century, the philosopher Sopatros was executed on demand of Christian authorities. * The world famous female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria was torn to pieces with glass fragments by a hysterical Christian mob led by a Christian minister. * Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) had 4500 Saxons beheaded in 782 because they were unwilling to convert to Christianity. * English troops “pacified and civilized” Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries, killing “unreasonable beasts who lived without any knowledge of God.” Thousands of Gaelic Irish fell victim to the carnage. Crusades (1095-1291) * First Crusade: 1095 on command of pope Urban II. * Until January 1098, a total of 40 capital cities and 200 castles were conquered by Christian armies. (Number of slain unknown) * During the Battle of Askalon, 200,000 “heathens” were slaughtered “in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ." * Until the fall of Akkon in 1291, nearly 20 million victims were claimed in Arab/Turkish areas alone. Heretics * In 385 C.E., the Spanish Priscillianus and six followers were beheaded for heresy in Trier/Germany * Under command of Pope Innocent III, Bezirs (today France) was destroyed in 1209, and all the inhabitants were slaughtered. 20,000-70,000 victims were claimed (including Catholics who refused to turn in their heretic neighbors and friends). It was the greatest single pre-Nazi mass murder in recorded history. * After 20 years of war, all Cathars (probably half the population of the Languedoc, today southern France) were exterminated. * After the war ended in 1229, the Inquisition was founded 1232 to find and destroy surviving/hiding heretics. The last Cathars were burned at the stake in 1324. * The Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada alone was responsible for 10,220 burnings. * John Huss, a critic of papal infallibility and indulgences, was burned at the stake in 1415. * University professor B. Hubmaier was burned at the stake in Vienna in 1538. * Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, was burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo dei Fiori (Rome) in 1600 after having been incarcerated for seven years. Witches * From the beginning of Christianity to 1484 more than several thousand innocent people were killed for witchcraft. * In the era of witch hunting (1484-1750) several hundred thousand villagers (about 80% female) were burned at the stake or hanged. Religious Wars * 15th century: Thousands slain in the Crusades against Hussites. * In 1538, Pope Paul III declared Crusade against apostate England and declared all English residents as slaves of the Church. * In 1568, The Spanish Inquisition Tribunal ordered the extermination of 3 million rebels in The Netherlands. Thousands were actually slain. * In 1572, about 20,000 French Huguenots were killed under the command of pope Pius V. * 17th century: Catholics slay Gaspard de Coligny, a Protestant leader. After murdering him, the Catholic mob mutilated his body, “cutting off his head, his hands, and his genitals… and then dumped him into the river […but] then, deciding that it was not worthy of being food for the fish, they hauled it out again [… and] dragged what was left … to the gallows of Montfaulcon, ‘to be meat and carrion for maggots and crows’.” * 17th century: Catholics sack the city of Magdeburg/Germany. Roughly 30,000 Protestants were slain. “In a single church fifty women were found beheaded,” reported poet Friedrich Schiller, “and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers.” * 17th century: 30 years’ war (Catholic vs. Protestant): at least 40% of population decimated, mostly in Germany. Jews * In the 4th and 5th centuries, synagogues were burned by Christians. Number of Jews slain unknown. * In the middle of the 4th century, the first synagogue was destroyed under the command of bishop Innocentius of Dertona in Northern Italy. The first synagogue known to have been burned down was near the river Euphrat, on command of the bishop of Kallinikon in the year 388. * 17. Council of Toledo 694: Jews were enslaved, their property confiscated, and their children forcibly baptized. * In 1010, The Bishop of Limoges of France had the cities’ Jews expelled or killed if they refused to convert to Christianity. * First Crusade: Thousands of Jews slaughtered in 1096 - maybe 12,000 total. Places: Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Neuss, Altenahr, Wevelinghoven, Xanten, Moers, Dortmund, Kerpen, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, Prag and others * Second Crusade: 1147. Several hundred Jews were slain in Ham, Sully, Carentan, and Rameru (all locations in France). * Third Crusade: English Jewish communities were sacked * Fulda/Germany 1235: 34 Jewish men and women slain. * 1257, 1267: Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Lincoln, Cambridge, and others exterminated. * 1290: in Bohemian Poland, allegedly 10,000 Jews killed. * 1337: Starting in Deggendorf/Germany a Jew-killing craze reached 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria, and Poland. * 1348: All Jews of Basel/Switzerland and Strasbourg/France burned (approx. 2,000 people). * 1349: In more than 350 towns in Germany, all Jews murdered, mostly burned alive (in this one year, more Jews were killed than Christians in the 200 years of ancient Roman persecution of Christians). * 1389: In Prag, 3,000 Jews were slaughtered. * 1391: Seville’s Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored “badges of shame” that all Jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear. * 1492: In the year Columbus set sail to conquer a New World, more than 150,000 Jews were expelled from Spain. Many died on their way. * 1648: Chmielnitzki massacres: In Poland, about 200,000 Jews were slain. Native Peoples * Beginning with Columbus (a former slave trader and would-be Holy Crusader) the conquest of the New World began, as usual understood as a means to propagate Christianity. * Within hours of landfall on the first inhabited island he encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six native people who, he said, “ought to be good servants … [and] would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion.” While Columbus described the Indians as “idolaters” and “slaves, as many as [the Crown] shall order,” his pal Michele de Cuneo, Italian nobleman, referred to the natives as “beasts” because “they eat when they are hungry,” and made love “openly whenever they feel like it.” * On every island he set foot on, Columbus planted a cross, “making the declarations that are required” - the requerimiento - to claim the ownership for his Catholic patrons in Spain. And “nobody objected.” If the Indians refused or delayed their acceptance (or understanding), the requerimiento continued: “I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter in your country and shall make war against you … and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church … and shall do you all mischief that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.” * In average, two thirds of the native population were killed by colonist-imported smallpox before violence began. This was a great sign of “the marvelous goodness and providence of God” to the Christians of course, e.g. the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, as “for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.” * On Hispaniola alone, on Columbus visits, the native population (Arawak), a rather harmless and happy people living on an island of abundant natural resources, a literal paradise, soon mourned 50,000 dead. * The surviving Indians fell victim to rape, murder, enslavement and Spanish raids. * As one of the culprits wrote: “So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous.” * The Indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As they were tying him to the stake, a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell.” * What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness: “The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties … They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles… then straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.” Or, on another occasion: “The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts…Vasco [de Balboa] ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.” * The “island’s population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out.” Eventually all the island’s natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were “forced” to import slaves from other Caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus “the Caribbean’s millions of native people [were] thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century”. “In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated.” * “And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitln [Mexico city] was next.” * Cortez, Pizarro, De Soto and hundreds of other Spanish conquistadors likewise sacked southern and Mesoamerican civilizations in the name of Christ (De Soto also sacked Florida). * “When the 16th century ended, some 200,000 Spaniards had moved to the Americas. By that time, probably more than 60,000,000 natives were dead.” Of course, no different were the founders of what today is the US. * In the spring of 1612, some English colonists found life among the generally friendly and generous natives attractive enough to leave Jamestown. Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed. When an Indian was accused by an Englishman of stealing a cup and failing to return it, the English response was to attack the natives in force, burning the entire community down. * On the territory that is now Massachusetts, the founding fathers of the colonies were committing genocide in what has become known as the “Pequot War”. The killers were New England Puritan Christians, refugees from persecution in their own home country England. * When a dead colonist was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians, the Puritan colonists wanted revenge. Despite the Indian chief’s pledge, they attacked. When they were greeted by Pequot Indians (long-time foes of the Narragansetts) the troops nevertheless made war on the Pequots and burned their villages. The puritan commander-in-charge John Mason after one massacre wrote: “And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished … God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven … Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies”: men, women, children. * Other Indians were killed in successful plots of poisoning. The colonists even had dogs especially trained to kill Indians and to devour children from their mothers’ breasts. In the colonists’ own words: “Blood Hounds to draw after them, and Mastiffs to seize them.” (This was inspired by Spanish methods of the time.) In this way, they continued until the extermination of the Pequots was near. * The surviving handful of Indians “was parceled out to live in servitude. John Endicott and his pastor wrote to the governor asking for ‘a share’ of the captives, specifically ‘a young woman or girle and a boy if you thinke good’.” * Like today, lying was okay to Christians back then. Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them. * In 1624, sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenseless Indian men, women, and children. * In a single massacre in “King Philip’s War” of 1675 and 1676 some “600 Indians were destroyed. A delighted Cotton Mather, revered pastor of the Second Church in Boston, later referred to the slaughter as a ‘barbeque’.” * Before the arrival of the English, the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had numbered 12,000. Less than half a century later about 250 remained alive - a destruction rate of 98%. The Pocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000. Fifty years later, they were down to 920 - 95% destroyed. The Quiripi-Unquachog people had numbered about 30,000. Fifty years later, they were down to 1500 - 95% destroyed. The Massachusetts people had numbered at least 44,000. Fifty years later, barely 6,000 were alive - 81% destroyed. These are only a few examples of the multitude of tribes living before Christian colonists set their foot on the New World. All this was before the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678 had occurred. And the carnage was not over then. * All the above was only the beginning of the European colonization. It was before the frontier age had actually begun. * A total of maybe more than 150 million Indians (of both Americas) were destroyed in the period of 1500 to 1900, as an average two thirds by smallpox and other epidemics. That leaves some 50 million killed directly by violence, bad treatment and slavery. * In many countries, such as Brazil and Guatemala, this continues even today. * Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of New England’s most esteemed religious leaders, in “1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of dogs ‘to hunt Indians as they do bears’.” * Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado: Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church (who was quoted as saying "I long to be wading in gore”) had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs’ waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed. From an eye-witness account: “There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed …” * By the 1860s, the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced the Hawaiian Islands’ native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy. “The expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural,” this missionary said. “It's somewhat equivalent to ‘the amputation of diseased members of the body’.” 20th Century Church Atrocities * Catholic extermination camps: Surprisingly, few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943, numerous extermination camps existed in Croatia, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveli, a practicing Catholic and regular visitor to the Pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children! In these camps - the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar. Orthodox Christian Serbians (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis, the Catholic Ustasha burned their victims alive in kilns (the Nazis were decent enough to have their victims gassed first). But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain, or shot to death. The number of deaths was estimated between 300,000 and 600,000, in a rather tiny country. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The atrocities were appalling enough to induce bystanders of the Nazi “Sicherheitsdient der SS”, watching, to complain about them to Hitler (who did not listen). The pope knew about these events and did nothing to prevent them. * Catholic terror in Vietnam: In 1954, Vietnamese freedom fighters - the Viet Minh - had finally defeated the French colonial government in North Vietnam, which by then had been supported by U.S. funds amounting to more than $2 billion. Although the victorious assured religious freedom to all (most non-Buddhist Vietnamese were Catholics,) due to huge anticommunist propaganda campaigns, many Catholics fled to the South. With the help of Catholic lobbies in Washington and Cardinal Spellman, the Vatican’s spokesman in U.S. politics, who later on would call the U.S. forces in Vietnam “Soldiers of Christ,” a scheme was concocted to prevent democratic elections which could have brought the communist Viet Minh to power in the South as well, and the fanatic Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem was made president of South Vietnam. Diem saw to it that U.S. aid, food, technical and general assistance was given to Catholics alone. Buddhist individuals and villages were ignored or had to pay for the food aids which were given to Catholics for free. The only religious denomination to be supported was Roman Catholicism. The Vietnamese McCarthyism turned even more vicious than its American counterpart. By 1956, Diem promulgated a presidential order which read: “Individuals considered dangerous to the national defense and common security may be confined by executive order, to a concentration camp.” Supposedly to fight communism, thousands of Buddhist protesters and monks were imprisoned in “detention camps.” Out of protest dozens of Buddhist teachers - male and female - and monks poured gasoline over themselves and burned themselves. (Note that Buddhists burned themselves. In comparison, Christians tend to burn others). Meanwhile some of the prison camps, which in the meantime were filled with Protestant and even Catholic protesters as well, had turned into no-nonsense death camps. It is estimated that during this period of terror (1955-1960) at least 24,000 were wounded - mostly in street riots - 80,000 people were executed, 275,000 had been detained or tortured, and about 500,000 were sent to concentration or detention camps. To support this kind of government in the following decade, thousands of American GI’s lost their lives. * Christianity kills the cat: On July 1, 1976, Anneliese Michel, a 23-year-old student of a teachers college in Germany died: she starved herself to death. For months, she had been haunted by demonic visions and apparitions, and for months two Catholic priests - with explicit approval of the Catholic bishop of Wrzburg - additionally pestered and tormented the wretched girl with their exorcist rituals. After her death in Klingenberg hospital - her body was littered with wounds - her parents, both of them fanatical Catholics, were sentenced to six months for not having called for medical help. None of the priests was punished: on the contrary, Miss Michel’s grave today is a place of pilgrimage and worship for a number of similarly faithful Catholics (in the seventeenth century Wrzburg was notorious for its extensive witch burnings). This case is only the tip of an iceberg of such evil superstition and has become known only because of its lethal outcome. * Rwanda Massacres: In 1994, in the small African country of Rwanda, several hundred thousand civilians were butchered in just a few months, apparently because of conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. For quite some time, there were only rumors about Catholic clergy being actively involved in the 1994 Rwanda massacres. Odd denials of involvement were printed in Catholic church journals, before even anybody had openly accused members of the church. Then, in the newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany - a station not at all critical to Christianity - the following was stated: “Anglican as well as Catholic priests and nuns are suspect of having actively participated in murders. Especially the conduct of a certain Catholic priest has been occupying the public mind in Rwanda’s capital Kigali for months. He was minister of the church of the Holy Family and allegedly murdered Tutsis in the most brutal manner. He is reported to have accompanied marauding Hutu militia with a gun in his cowl. In fact, there has been a bloody slaughter of Tutsis seeking shelter in his parish. Even two years after the massacres, many Catholics refuse to set foot on the threshold of their church because to them the participation of a certain part of the clergy in the slaughter is well established. There is almost no church in Rwanda that has not seen refugees - women, children, old - being brutally butchered facing the crucifix. According to eyewitnesses, clergymen gave away hiding Tutsis and turned them over to the machetes of the Hutu militia. In connection with these events, two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom have fled into a Belgian monastery in the meantime to avoid prosecution. According to survivors, one of them called the Hutu killers and led them to several thousand people who had sought shelter in her monastery. By force the doomed were driven out of the churchyard and were murdered in the presence of the nun right in front of the gate. The other one is also reported to have directly cooperated with the murderers of the Hutu militia. In her case, again witnesses report that she watched the slaughtering of people in cold blood and without showing response. She is even accused of having procured some petrol used by the killers to set on fire and burn their victims alive…” How much longer can we allow this to happen? Some may say that this kind of barbarism is no longer practiced or endorsed by real Christians, but all you have to do is turn on the news or read in the paper about the homosexuals, pagans, atheists, gothic high school kids, and countless others who were beaten or killed because of christian propaganda. I assure you that every blood-thirsty pope has been familiar with the Sermon on the Mount. Even the christians who claim to be loving and peaceful hurt people indirectly by allowing their religion to affect their political beliefs. We can’t let this sort of irrationality and delusion engulf this country, or it will certainly mean the downfall of human civilization. So, before we find ourselves oppressed in the shadow of a doctrine that should have been phased out in the Dark Ages, we need to rise up and fight back. We need to form a government based on reason and science, not religious superstition. The Christians have been holding us back for thousands of years, and I’m tired of it.
XOXO
Comments
Post a Comment
Go ahead, give it to me.