Religious apologists are fond of using examples of what they call "state atheism" as evidence that God provides absolute morality and so anyone who does not believe in God has no moral compass, which is why "atheist societies" are violent and oppressive. The French Revolution is often used as an example (even though its leaders were deists).
This of course ignores the "swift and brutal slaughter" by Christian regimes of those who were considered non-Christian or the wrong type of Christian. Religion, or lack of, is not the issue. Perhaps the apologist will eventually admit that the atrocities of his faith are no worse than others, but at least the numbers of victims were less. But if we honestly calculate the victims of theistic and religious sacrifice across the entire planet: the number of witches burned and drowned across Europe and America; the genocides of Pacific Islanders by missionary organisations; the dismembered bodies of the Inquisition in Goa;the disembowelled remains of the Anabaptists in Europe; the men, women and children murdered by Islamic conquerors from the Middle-East to Spain; the stoned and strangled blasphemers in Christian states of the past and Islamic ones today; and all of the unmarked graves of all of the victims of religion from the dawn of time, then this unedifying numbers game provides to be a dead end for the desperate apologist.
The apologist argument is sometimes extended to try and show that democracy is only possible because of Christianity! This argument fails for 3 reasons:
The apologist argument is sometimes extended to try and show that democracy is only possible because of Christianity! This argument fails for 3 reasons:
(a) The examples of so called "state atheism" are cherry picked - they ignore the atrocities, violence and oppression commanded by church authorities and/or committed in the name of Christianity
(b) State atheism is just as dangerous as state theism and both are symptoms of dictatorships
(c) The common theme to all the examples of the state murdering or torturing its citizens is not religion (or lack of it), but dictatorships.
I do realise that there are prominent atheists who assert that religion is responsible for much of the violence and hatred in the world, but I would disagree. I blame the dictators who enforced that religion on their populations. But similarly, when reviewing the atrocities perpetrated by dictators, we shouldn’t ignore those who are atheists or those who are theists. We should consider both.
But to redress the balance when Christian apologists cherry pick the non-religious dictators for special mention, are examples from Christian societies. Note again - this is not to criticise Christianity - but rather to make the point that religion (or lack of it) cannot be blamed for the actions of dictators.
Early days
Pagan temples were systematically destroyed by Christian mobs. Pagan priests were killed and thousands of pagan believers were slain. Notable examples include the Sanctuary of Aesculap in Aegaea, the Temple of Aphrodite in Golgatha, Aphaka in Lebanon, and the Heliopolis. Notable Christian "temple destroyers" during this time were Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa and Cyrill of Heliopolis.
Pagan services became punishable by death and pagans were declared void of all rights.
Christian Emperor Theodosius had children executed, because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. According to Christian chroniclers he "followed meticulously all Christian teachings..." The philosopher Sopatros was executed on demand of Christian authorities. The world famous female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was torn to pieces with glass fragments by a hysterical Christian mob led by a Christian minister named Peter, in a church, in 415.
Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded.
13th century Germany. Peasants of Steding were unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children slain near Altenesch/Germany.
15th century Poland: At least 1,000 churches and 17,000 villages plundered by Knights of the Order. Victims unknown.
17th Century
English troops "pacified and civilized" Ireland, where only Gaelic "wild Irish", "unreasonable beasts lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing." One of the more successful soldiers, a certain Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, ordered that "the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies... and should bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie", which effort to civilize the Irish indeed caused "greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds on the grounde". Tens of thousands of Gaelic Irish fell victim to the carnage.
The Crusades (1095-1291)
Note: All figures according to contemporary (Christian) chroniclers.
In 1095 on command of pope Urban II. Thousands slain in Hungary (Semlin and Wieselburg). Thousands more in Nikaia, Xerigordon (Turkey). 40 capital cities and 200 castles conquered (number of slain unknown). Antiochia conquered, between 10,000 and 60,000 slain. In 1098 100,000 Turks (incl. women & children) killed. Here the Christians "did no other harm to the women found in [the enemy's] tents—save that they ran their lances through their bellies," according to Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. Thousands more killed in Maraat an-numan . Because of the subsequent famine "the already stinking corpses of the enemies were eaten by the Christians" said chronicler Albert Aquensis.
Jerusalem was conquered in 1099 and more than 60,000 victims (jewish, muslim, men, women, children). In the words of one witness: "there [in front of Solomon's temple] was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes", and after that "happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Saviour's tomb, to honour it and to pay off our debt of gratitude"
The Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished."
Christian chronicler Eckehard of Aura noted that "even the following summer in all of palestine the air was polluted by the stench of decomposition". One million victims of the first crusade alone. At the Battle of Askalon in 1099, 200,000 heathens slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". In 1204 Constantinople was sacked, number of victims unknown, numerous thousands, many of them Christian. Fall of Akkon in 1291 resulted in around 20 million victims in the Holy land and Arab/Turkish areas alone.
Heresy
In 385, the Spanish Priscillianus and six followers, were beheaded for heresy in Trier/Germany - the first Christian heretics to be put to death by the Christian Church.
During the Middle Ages, several movements emerged which were collectively described as "Manichaean" by the Catholic Church, and persecuted as Christian heresies. They included the Cathar churches of Western Europe, the Paulician movement, which arose in Armenia and the Bogomils in Bulgaria. They were exterminated in huge campaigns all over the Roman empire between 372 C.E. and 444 C.E. Thousands of victims.
The Albigensians viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept Roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. On the command of pope Innocent III in 1209 the town of Bezirs was destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbours and friends) 20,000-70,000killed.
In 1209 in Carcassonne thousands of Cathars - a Christian movement - were slain by Christian armies for alleged heresy. Other cities followed during 20 years of violence until nearly all Cathars (probably half the population of the Languedoc, today southern France) were exterminated. After the war ended (1229) the Inquisition was founded to search and destroy surviving/hiding heretics. The last Cathars were burned at the stake in 1324. An estimated one million Cathar victims in total.
Other sects that were destroyed by Christian authorities were... Waldensians, Paulikians, Runcarians, Josephites, and many others. Estimated at least one hundred thousand victims in Europe.
Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada alone was allegedly responsible for 10,220 burnings. John Huss, a critic of papal infallibility and indulgences, was burned at the stake in 1415. University professor Balthasar Hubmaier burned at the stake 1538 in Vienna. Giordano Bruno, Dominican monk, after having been incarcerated for seven years, was burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo dei Fiori (Rome) in 1600.
Witches
Hundreds of thousands of women were killed during witch hunts between the 4th century right up to the 18th century. Most were burned at the stake or hanged.
Religious Wars
15th century: Crusades against Hussites, thousands slain.
1568 Spanish Inquisition Tribunal ordered extermination of 3 million rebels in (then Spanish) Netherlands. Thousands were actually slain.
1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee.
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 middle of the fourth century the first synagogue was destroyed on 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.
Council of Toledo 694: Jews were enslaved, their property confiscated, and their children forcibly baptized.
The Bishop of Limoges (France) in 1010 had the jewish population who would not convert to Christianity, expelled or killed.
First Crusade 1096: Around 12,000 Jews slaughtered throughout Germany and in Prague.
Second Crusade1147. Several hundred Jews were slain across France.
Third Crusade 1189: English Jewish communities sacked 1189/90.
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) around 10,000 Jews killed.
1337 Starting in Deggendorf/Germany a Jew-killing craze reaches 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria, Poland.
1348 All Jews of Basel/Switzerland and Strasbourg/France (two thousand) burned.
1349 In more than 350 towns in Germany all Jews murdered, mostly burned alive.
1389 In Prague 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.
(too many examples to list here...)
Destruction of American Native Peoples
Beginning with Columbus the conquest of the New World began 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 "idolators" 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."
Likewise in the words of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "justifieinge the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England ... to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, ... and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of the Ante-Christ."
On 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, 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."
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.
The conquest of North America was just as appalling. Although none of the European settlers would have survived winter without native help, they soon set out to expel and exterminate the native population. In the spring of 1612 some English colonists found life among the (generally friendly and generous) natives attractive enough to leave Jamestown - "being idell ... did runne away unto the Indyans," - to live among them. Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed: "Some he apointed (sic) to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some shott to deathe." Of course these elegant measures were restricted for fellow Englishmen: This was the treatment for those who wished to act like Indians. For those who had no choice in the matter, because they were the native people of Virginia methods were different: 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 "Peqout War". The killers were New England Puritan Christians, refugees from persecution in their own home country England. When however, a dead colonist was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians, the Puritan colonists wanted revenge. Despite the Indian chief's pledge they attacked. Somehow they seem to have lost the idea of what they were after, because 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. So the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their land for an inheritance".
Mason's comrade Underhill recalled how "great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of the young soldiers" yet reassured his readers that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents". 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 Mastives to seaze 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 "were 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'."
Other tribes were to follow the same path. Comment the Christian exterminators: "God's Will, which will at last give us cause to say: How Great is His Goodness! and How Great is his Beauty! Thus doth the Lord Jesus make them to bow before him, and to lick the Dust!"
Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them: when the Indians "grow secure uppon (sic) the treatie", advised the Council of State in Virginia, "we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, & cutt downe theire Corne"
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 6000 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 actually had 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.
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 in 1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church ("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 in Hawaii the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those 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, somewhat equivalent to "the amputation of diseased members of the body'"
20th Century Atrocities
The Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Christian Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveli, a practising Christian and regular visitor to the then 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 Christian Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive. But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain or shot to death, the number of them being 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.
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. 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. Meanwhile some of the prison camps, which in the meantime were filled with Protestant and 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.
In 1994 in the small african country of Rwanda, several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently a conflict of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. In 1996 it was reported that: "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 again and again two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom have fled into a Belgian monastery 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...
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