In the name of God(s)...

[tumbleweed41]

Religious belief has often been used as an excuse to start wars, slaughter those of different beliefs, and to 'appease' a gods blood-thirst.

While the Old Testament alone accounts for millions of deaths in the name of God, the historicity of these events is doubtful.

But in the last thousand years alone, we can easily see the atrocities committed 'In the name of God(s)...

• The First Crusade [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] was launched in 1095 with the battle cry "Deus Vult" (God wills it). Thousands of Jews in the Rhine Valley were dragged from their hiding places and hacked to death or burned alive. 2000 miles later, nearly every inhabitant of Jerusalem was slaughtered. According to [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Cleric Raymond of Aguilers "In the temple of Solomon, one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses' bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God."[/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] The Mayan theocracy of Central America[/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] appeased a feathered-serpent god, maidens were drowned in sacred wells and other victims either had their hearts cut out, were shot with arrows, or were beheaded.[/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In Peru, [/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] pre-Inca tribes killed children in temples called "houses of the moon."[/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In Tibet, Bon shamans performed ritual killings. In Borneo builders of pile houses drove the first pile through the body of a maiden to pacify the earth goddess. In India, Dravidian people offered lives to village goddesses, and followers of Kali sacrificed a male child every Friday evening. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In the Third Crusade, after Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3,000 captives -- many of them women and children -- taken outside the city and slaughtered. Some were disemboweled in a search for swallowed gems. Bishops intoned blessings. Infidel lives were of no consequence. As Saint Bernard of Clairvaux declared in launching the Second Crusade: "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified." [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Throughout Europe, beginning in the 1100s, tales spread that Jews were abducting Christian children, sacrificing them, and using their blood in rituals. Hundreds of Jews were massacred stemming from this "blood libel." [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In 1209, Pope Innocent III launched an armed crusade against Albigenses Christians in southern France. When the besieged city of Beziers fell, soldiers reportedly asked their papal adviser how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel among the captives. He commanded: "Kill them all. God will know his own." Nearly 20,000 were slaughtered -- many first blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, or used for target practice. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 proclaimed the doctrine of transubstantiation: that the host wafer miraculously turns into the body of Jesus during the mass. Soon rumors spread that Jews were stealing the sacred wafers and stabbing or driving nails through them to crucify Jesus again. Reports said that the pierced host bled, cried out, or emitted spirits. On this charge, Jews were burned at the stake in 1243 in Belitz, Germany -- the first of many killings that continued into the 1800s. To avenge the tortured host, the German knight Rindfliesch led a brigade in 1298 that exterminated 146 defenseless Jewish communities in six months. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In the 1200s the Incas built their empire in Peru, a society dominated by priests reading daily magical signs and offering sacrifices to appease many gods. At major ceremonies up to 200 children were burned as offerings. Special "chosen women" -- comely virgins without blemish -- were strangled. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Also during the 1200s, the hunt for Albigensian heretics led to establishment of the Inquisition, which spread over Europe. Pope Innocent IV authorized torture. Under interrogation by Dominican priests, screaming victims were stretched, burned, pierced and broken on fiendish pain machines to make them confess to disbelief and to identify fellow transgressors. Inquisitor Robert le Bourge sent 183 people to the stake in a single week. [/FONT][/FONT]

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[tumbleweed41]

(continued)

• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] In Spain, where many Jews and Moors had converted to escape persecution, inquisitors sought those harboring their old faith. At least 2,000 Spanish backsliders were burned. Executions in other countries included the burning of scientists such as mathematician-philosopher Giordano Bruno, who espoused Copernicus's theory that the planets orbit the sun. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]When the Black Death swept Europe in 1348-1349, rumors alleged that it was caused by Jews poisoning wells. Hysterical mobs slaughtered thousands of Jews in several countries. In Speyer, Germany, the burned bodies were piled into giant wine casks and sent floating down the Rhine. In northern Germany Jews were walled up alive in their homes to suffocate or starve. The Flagellants, an army of penitents who whipped themselves bloody, stormed the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt in a gruesome massacre. The prince of Thuringia announced that he had burned his Jews for the honor of God.[/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The Aztecs began their elaborate theocracy in the 1300s and brought human sacrifice to a golden era. About 20,000 people were killed yearly to appease gods -- especially the sun god, who needed daily "nourishment" of blood. Hearts of sacrifice victims were cut out, and some bodies were eaten ceremoniously. Other victims were drowned, beheaded, burned or dropped from heights. In a rite to the rain god, shrieking children were killed at several sites so that their tears might induce rain. In a rite to the maize goddess, a virgin danced for 24 hours, then was killed and skinned; her skin was worn by a priest in further dancing. One account says that at King Ahuitzotl's coronation, 80,000 prisoners were butchered to please the gods. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In the 1400s, the Inquisition shifted its focus to witchcraft. Priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they were witches who flew through the sky and engaged in sex with the devil -- then they were burned or hanged for their confessions. Witch hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations. Estimates of the number executed vary from 100,000 to 2 million. Whole villages were exterminated. In the first half of the 17th century, about 5,000 "witches" were put to death in the French province of Alsace, and 900 were burned in the Bavarian city of Bamberg. The witch craze was religious madness at its worst. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The "Protestant Inquisition" is a term applied to the severities of John Calvin in Geneva and Queen Elizabeth I in England during the 1500s. Calvin's followers burned 58 "heretics," including theologian Michael Servetus, who doubted the Trinity. Elizabeth I outlawed Catholicism and executed about 200 Catholics. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Protestant Huguenots grew into an aggressive minority in France in the 15OOs -- until repeated Catholic reprisals smashed them. On Saint Bartholomew's Day in 1572, Catherine de Medicis secretly authorized Catholic dukes to send their soldiers into Huguenot neighborhoods and slaughter families. This massacre touched off a six-week bloodbath in which Catholics murdered about 10,000 Huguenots. Other persecutions continued for two centuries, until the French Revolution. One group of Huguenots escaped to Florida; in 1565 a Spanish brigade discovered their colony, denounced their heresy, and killed them all. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Members of lndia's Thuggee sect strangled people as sacrifices to appease the bloodthirsty goddess Kali, a practice beginning in the 1500s. The number of victims has been estimated to be as high as 2 million. Thugs were claiming about 20,000 lives a year in the 1800s until British rulers stamped them out. At a trial in 1840, one Thug was accused of killing 931 people. Today, some Hindu priests still sacrifice goats to Kali. [/FONT][/FONT]

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[tumbleweed41]

(continued)

• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The Anabaptists, communal "rebaptizers," were slaughtered by both Catholic and Protestant authorities. In Munster, Germany, Anabaptists took control of the city, drove out the clergymen, and proclaimed a New Zion. The bishop of Munster began an armed siege. While the townspeople starved, the Anabaptist leader proclaimed himself king and executed dissenters. When Munster finally fell, the chief Anabaptists were tortured to death with red-hot pincers and their bodies hung in iron cages from a church steeple. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Oliver Cromwell was deemed a moderate because he massacred only Catholics and Anglicans, not other Protestants. This Puritan general commanded Bible-carrying soldiers, whom he roused to religious fervor. After decimating an Anglican army, Cromwell said, "God made them as stubble to our swords." He demanded the beheading of the defeated King Charles I, and made himself the holy dictator of England during the 1650s. When his army crushed the hated Irish Catholics, he ordered the execution of the surrendered defenders of Drogheda and their priests, calling it "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches." [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Ukrainian Bogdan Chmielnicki was a Cossack Cromwell. He wore the banner of Eastern Orthodoxy in a holy war against Jews and Polish Catholics. More than 100,000 were killed in this 17th-century bloodbath, and the Ukraine was split away from Poland to become part of the Orthodox Russian empire. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] The Thirty Years' War produced the largest religious death toll of all time. It began in 1618 when Protestant leaders threw two Catholic emissaries out of a Prague window into a dung heap. War flared between Catholic and Protestant princedoms, drawing in supportive religious armies from Germany, Spain, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France and Italy. Sweden's Protestant soldiers sang Martin Luther's "Ein 'Feste Burg" in battle. Three decades of combat turned central Europe into a wasteland of misery. One estimate states that Germany's population dropped from 18 million to 4 million. In the end nothing was settled, and too few people remained to rebuild cities, plant fields, or conduct education. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Islamic jihads (holy wars), mandated by the Koran, killed millions over 12 centuries. In early years, Muslim armies spread the faith rapidly: east to India and west to Morocco. Then splintering sects branded other Muslims as infidels and declared jihads against them. The Kharijis battled Sunni rulers. The Azariqis decreed death to all "sinners" and their families. In 1804 a Sudanese holy man, Usman dan Fodio, waged a bloody jihad that broke the religious sway of the Sultan of Gobir. In the 1850s another Sudanese mystic, 'Umar al-Hajj, led a barbaric jihad to convert pagan African tribes -- with massacres, beheadings and a mass execution of 300 hostages. In the 1880s a third Sudanese holy man, Muhammad Ahmed, commanded a jihad that destroyed a 10,000-man Egyptian army and wiped out defenders of Khartoum led by British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] In 1801 Orthodox priests in Bucharest, Romania, revived the story that Jews sacrificed Christians and drank their blood. Enraged parishioners stormed the ghetto and cut the throats of 128 Jews.[/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]When the Baha'i faith began in Persia in 1844, the Islamic regime sought to exterminate it. The Baha'i founder was imprisoned and executed in 1850. Two years later, the religious government massacred 20,000 Baha'is. Streets of Tehran were soaked with blood. The new Baha'i leader, Baha'ullah, was tortured and exiled in foreign Muslim prisons for the rest of his life. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Human sacrifices were still occurring in Buddhist Burma in the 1850s. When the capital was moved to Mandalay, 56 "spotless" men were buried beneath the new city walls to sanctify and protect the city. When two of the burial spots were later found empty, royal astrologers decreed that 500 men, women, boys, and girls must be killed and buried at once, or the capital must be abandoned. About 100 were actually buried before British governors stopped the ceremonies. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]When India finally won independence from Britain in 1947, the "great soul" of Mahatma Gandhi wasn't able to prevent Hindus and Muslims from turning on one another in a killing frenzy that took perhaps 1 million lives.[/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, followers of the Rev. Jim Jones killed a visiting congressman and three newsmen, then administered cyanide to themselves and their children in a 900-person suicide that shocked the world. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]In 1983 in Darkley, Northern Ireland, Catholic terrorists with automatic weapons burst into a Protestant church on a Sunday morning and opened fire, killing three worshipers and wounding seven. It was just one of hundreds of Catholic-Protestant ambushes that have taken 2,600 lives in Ulster since age-old religious hostility turned violent again in 1969. [/FONT][/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Hindu-Muslim bloodshed erupts randomly throughout India. More than 3,000 were killed in Assam province in 1983. In May 1984 Muslims hung dirty sandals on a Hindu leader's portrait as a religious insult. This act triggered a week of arson riots that left 216 dead, 756 wounded, 13,000 homeless, and 4,100 in jail. [/FONT][/FONT]

etc, etc, etc

Source; [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Verdana][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]James A. Haught: Holy Horrors (1990) [/FONT][/FONT]

 

[tumbleweed41]

This is not about the evils of religion. It is about the evils done by those holding a dogmatic belief in the unreasonable and inhumane.

 

[Photonic]

There is so much more that is missing here. D:

 

[tumbleweed41]

There is so much more that is missing here. D:

Indeed...

 

[The Sum of Awe]

Amen, brother! But it is not just religious reasons there are wars

 

[idav]

While the Old Testament alone accounts for millions of deaths in the name of God, the historicity of these events is doubtful.

Their motives are just excuses for their actions.

 

[crocusj]

As an atheist I do not believe that God killed anybody though it is fun and a reasonable argument to assert that He did. And while it might seem reasonable - on the face of it - to offer lists of how many have died because of religion I'm not convinced of the importance of such a list if its assumption is that these people would be alive otherwise. Politics and power have replaced religion in many cases but the slaughter goes on, indeed it seems to me that only the labels change. I would agree that the voice of religion is too loud and that its position far outweighs its mandate but if we were not killing each other over god then we would be killing each other over
almost anything else.

 

[Quintessence]

I think that this list needs to be balanced with kind and benevolent acts committed with religion as an excuse.

Both lists perhaps need to be balanced with more ordinary, every day events in addition to grandiose historical examples.

If, that is, we want a clearer big picture of what is going on. Still, this is interesting, nonetheless, both from a historical standpoint and as to examine human moral standards. Thanks for the share.

 

[Acim]

This is not about the evils of religion. It is about the evils done by those holding a dogmatic belief in the unreasonable and inhumane.

The unreasonable being that killing is ever justified (includes self defense)? Or some other unreasonable idea(s) that can be clearly noted in each situation?

And to be clear, if we can find other 'evils' and 'inhumane' acts by humans who are not overly religious, would that in any way offset the claims being stated here? As in, could we conclude that it is ongoing misunderstanding of nature of self within existence?

 

[the-jesusist]

Well, we all have to die of something. Wonder why there are no Christians or Catholics commenting on this thread?

 

[tumbleweed41]

The unreasonable being that killing is ever justified (includes self defense)? Or some other unreasonable idea(s) that can be clearly noted in each situation?

And to be clear, if we can find other 'evils' and 'inhumane' acts by humans who are not overly religious, would that in any way offset the claims being stated here? As in, could we conclude that it is ongoing misunderstanding of nature of self within existence?

I would say that the dogmatic and irrational beliefs that can be displayed by both the religious and non-religious reflect a lack of reason and common sense.