Freedom and Islam

[Johnathan]

Don't you know that those of the Jews who rejected the fact that Jesus is Messiah are struck off as rejecters until they believe?

My understanding from the New Testament is that God may have blinded some faithful Jews to the Gospel, so they couldn't sin against it.

Rom 11:8 (According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear unto this day.

That verse was penned a couple decades after the Messiah was revealed to the world.

 

[Johnathan]

Hi Jonathan,

A heinous crime? I don't think so. A tragic error, more like.

That's all we are trying to say in a nutshell. . .most of us, in the nicest possible way. ;D

eace:

I put the word in quotes because that is the way it is phrased in the Quran. Perhaps Yusuf Ali's translation isn't a good one, or maybe someone in here can explain why it doesn't really say, what it seems to say (and what Muslims claim it says):

Sura 4.48 Allah forgiveth not that partners should be set up with Him; but He forgiveth anything else, to whom He pleaseth; to set up partners with Allah is to devise a sin Most heinous indeed.

So according to Islamic internet sites for example:

"The sin of shirk is to associate partners with Allah, basically this means to set up idols and false deities alongside Allah, granting them equal status to Allah, and to give them actions which are only reserved for God alone, such as worshipping them, making oaths to them, having fear and hope in them, and to sacrifice things in their name. All of this constitutes shirk, an example is the case of Jesus, those who set him up as a God, and invoke on him and pray to him are guilty of shirk, they are guilty of setting up a partner to the true God Allah."

Christians have recognized Jesus is the Son of God (as revealed in the Gospel), and have prayed in Jesus' name (as instructed through the Gospel), for nearly 2,000 years.

So are those Islamic websites wrong, or do Muslims presume that each and every Christian for nearly 2,000 years, has been condemned to hell forever from living and dying in a state of committing Islam's only unforgivable sin?

 

[Johnathan]

Does what Muslim believe annoy you?

No. I simply asked a question that nobody seems to want to answer.

I can understand if you feel annoyed. But I never feel annoyed with what the Christians believe that those who does not follow Jesus (pbuh) will go to hell.

Every religion teaches that only the believers of this religion who will go to heaven while other people outside this religion will go to hell. Then, is it a problem?

While the Roman Church might have taught such a thing, the scriptures certainly don't seem to (and I would suggest, nor would a just God).

Rom 4:15 Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression.

So for example if someone lives in a remote tribe and has never been brought the Gospel or otherwise quickened by the Spirit of God, or if someone is too young or mentally challenged or for some other reason doesn't understand it, they would not be guilty of transgressing it.

I don't see it as a problem. My relationship with my non-Muslim friends and my Christian relatives is always good. We always respect each other belief.

Must be a lot left unsaid, since they are living in a state of committing Islam's only unforgivable sin, even when simply thanking Jesus while saying a prayer of thanks around the dinner table.

Yes, some people in my mother family are Protestant Christians. And they are still my relatives although they embrace other religion.

I myself studied in Catholic elementary school and educated by nuns, from Franciscan orde. And to be honest, from them I learned something that very important, religious tolerance. This is why I have great respect to the nuns, whatever other people tell about them.

Yes, there are many different view between one religion and other religions. But should these difference become the reason for conflict?. Or these difference become the base to build an understanding between believers from all religions?.

 

[Abz2000]

Listen mate,
The Quran has been revealed in truth and has explained the facts to you, you just clearly demonstrated that you know the verses and accept them as being the uninterpretable and unchangeable words of what we have told you is revealed by the Creator of the Heavens and the earth, are you trying to understand and accept the truth or aee you just trying to dispute?

It's amazing,
Jesus comes with clear signs to the Jews and tells them to repent and some of them foolishly ask him if he's calling them sinners.
Why are you doing the same thing?

God hears you at the dinner table ok? Thank Him, He gets angry when you commit shirk and get Jesus into trouble.
Jesus is a servant who is a witness over people as to what he can see when he dwells among them, please, he's going to get pulled up on the day of judgement coz of certain foolish people who wrongly exalted him, God doesn't have headaches ok? I got a headache, i gonna go sleep inshaAllah.

 

[greenhill]

Must be a lot left unsaid, since they are living in a state of committing Islam's only unforgivable sin, even when simply thanking Jesus while saying a prayer of thanks around the dinner table.

That is just it. Thanking Jesus for the blessings of dinner is very much like thanking Muhammad for our meals. It is Allah that we should thank. Not His prophets.

to set up partners with Allah is to devise a sin Most heinous indeed.

It is heinous because of what you do to yourself as a result. Denying Allah as your Lord which is a great error.

No. I simply asked a question that nobody seems to want to answer.

About this, I take that it is about every Christian for the 2000 years committing the error of the Trinity? As we believe in islam, our place in the hereafter is entirely dependent on the Mercy of Allah. He has given guidelines of what it takes to be rewarded and what will incur punishment. It is not us, as humans, who condemn anything, but merely following His words and guide. We cannot answer this question but can only hazard a guess based on the message given. The message says there is only One God, He is Allah.

eace:

 

[David Sims]

The Muslims believe that God is unitary and that Jesus is a prophet, similar to Isaiah.

The Christians believe that God is a trinity of Father (usually called God), Son (Jesus), and Holy Spirit (sort of a spiritual essence that calls for men to repent their sins).

The Muslims consider what the Christians believe about God to be blasphemy.

The Christians to not regard what Muslims believe about God to be blasphemy, but they do become angry when their own beliefs are called blasphemy.

I wonder whether you see that theological differences of this sort often lead to wars, with guns shooting, armored fighting machines rolling across the land, missiles flying to kill people, and bombs being dropped on cities. So far, not nuclear bombs, due credit to the restraint of the countries that have them, but the possibility exists.

 

[greenhill]

Just this one line for now, Jonathan..

Your last quote..... "for there is one God; and there is none other but he:"..

What is His name?

Why go through an intermediary? We don't go through an intermediary. Allah is for all of us. The message of the prophets are only to call us to worship Him. The Jews don't worship Moses or Abraham for that matter. In fact they claim to worship the God of Abraham, Allah. So do the Muslims, then why do we have suddenly something different in Jesus? Even Solomon who had tremendous blessings and power had no one worshipping him. Instead, they worshipped Allah.

The only glaring inconsistency in the all the messages. The rest are minor(ish) differences in laws and interpretations.


eace:

 

[David Sims]

I was not able to discover how to edit my posts here, and I wanted to add something more.

The Muslims believe that God is unitary and that Jesus is a prophet, similar to Isaiah.

The Christians believe that God is a trinity of Father (usually called God), Son (Jesus), and Holy Spirit (sort of a spiritual essence that calls for men to repent their sins).

The Muslims consider what the Christians believe about God to be blasphemy.

The Christians to not regard what Muslims believe about God to be blasphemy, but they do become angry when their own beliefs are called blasphemy.

The subject of this discussion is "Freedom and Islam." The implicit question is "Will Islam permit people freely to believe as they choose?" If the answer is Yes, then people who are not Muslims will be more welcoming to Muslims.

But if the answer is No, then people who are not Muslims will desire to keep Muslims away from themselves. There might even be hostility between the Muslims and the non-Muslims, and then fighting, and then war: like the Crusades or the Jihads or maybe something even worse.

The Christians will never accept that their own beliefs are blasphemy. Muslims can lecture them forever, and it will all be to no avail.

And the reverse is probably true also. The Muslims will never accept that their beliefs are incorrect, and no matter how long the Christians preach at them, the Muslims will continue to be Muslims.

However, the Christians of today are not like the Crusaders. They will talk about the divinity of Jesus, but they don't fight for the idea anymore. They will offer what they believe to be necessary for the salvation of the non-Christian, but they will not cut off the heads of those who reject the offer. The Christians leave the non-Christians free.

Today it is the Muslims who are acting like the Crusaders. They don't just talk about God and His Prophet; they will fight and kill for the idea. The offer that the Muslims make is often accompanied by a threat that rejection will not be suffered in peace. The Muslims do not leave the non-Muslims free. Instead, they find the use of threats and violence as acceptable tactics of persuasion.

The violence carried out by the United States government isn't motivated by Christian proselytism. It is motivated by the greed of US corporations and by the political maneuvering of the Jews, both in Israel and in New York. The invasions by the west, with its soldiers and bombs and missiles, are not part of a theological war between Christianity and Islam. The reasons have to do with greed. The corporations want profit. The Jews want your land.

So it would be incorrect to assign the blame for recent violence in the middle east to Christianity. Whenever a bomb explodes in a city in Iraq or in Syria, the Christians in America aren't saying "God is Great" or "Praise God" or anything similar. But this is the kind of thing that the Muslims say when they are able to strike back at the West.

 

[David Sims]

The West has a pagan tradition of free inquiry that pre-dates Christianity, having emerged in Greece about 2500 years ago. Its pioneers were men such as Aristotle (deductive logic) and Euclid (plane geometry). The pagan tradition was suppressed by the Christian Church for about 1000 years during the middle ages, but it made a return with the European Renaissance.

I believe that Westerners aren't really compatible with Christianity, and even less so with Islam or Judaism. The quality of the Western man's personality is such that he instinctively rejects the idea that truth is something that you can obtain by consulting authority, whether it is the government or holy writings. Also, the Westerner doesn't really accept, though he might pretend to do so, that truth can be found by the method of voting on what the truth is. The pagan never really left the souls of the white people. It is still there, however it might be suppressed by political considerations.

There are exceptions, of course. These generalizations are very fuzzy ones. The contrast is low. But those are the patterns as I've recognized them.

 

[David Sims]

The quality of the Western man's personality is such that he instinctively rejects the idea that truth is something that you can obtain by consulting authority, whether it is the government or holy writings. Also, the Westerner doesn't really accept, though he might pretend to do so, that truth can be found by the method of voting on what the truth is.

Likewise for negotiation: the Westerner does not accept that the truth is something that can be obtained by agreement, as an item of trade might be.

 

[David Sims]

So it is that whenever a Christian points to the Bible and says, "Because these words are written there, I know truth, and you are wrong" the atheist does not find himself to be convinced. Not in the slightest.

So it is that whenever a Muslim points to the Quran and says, "Because these words are written there, I know truth, and you are wrong," the Christian does not find himself to be convinced. Not in the slightest.

These arguments from authority do not work. Particularly, they do not work with Westerners. You waste your time by writing them as if they were going to accomplish something. You waste your breath by speaking them.

There are authorities that Westerners have learned to respect, and even these authorities, the typical Westerner will still question, will still check after to the best of his ability.

The authorities respected by Muslims, however, are not among those that Westerners respect. Demands for respect are rejected. A fight might get you some hypocritical pretenders of converts, but one fight tends to lead to another, and another, and another, until one side or the other joins with the Australopithecus and the Neanderthals.

 

[جوري]

The authorities respected by Muslims, however, are not among those that Westerners respect. Demands for respect are rejected. Blah blah .

your alleged tantrums against western law or ''authority' has no leverage, it's obvious all they do is throw you bones to trifle over while robbing you of half your earned money to further their personal interests anyway.
***** as you may over the inflation, war policies, the billions yearly to israel etc. And all you'll manage is to land on their **** list while believing yourself to have some sort of freedom and false sense of importance and grandiosity .
Youre holding on to the beliefs they've fed you the same way any person in any spot of the world grows suckling at the breast from which they're fed and then regurgitate it back in the form they know best much like what you're doing here peppered with the usual tiresome atheist condescenion!
best,

 

[David Sims]

David sims theres a lot of crap there but racism shouldnt be tolerated on this forum.
So the mods can handle the rest.

Pft. Racist does not mean the same thing that false means. A place where one cannot speak an unpopular truth is not a place worth speaking in anyway.

your alleged tantrums against western law or ''authority' has no leverage, it's obvious all they do is throw you bones to trifle over while robbing you of half your earned money to further their personal interests anyway.

That is true. I did not say that the government of the United States is a bunch of good people. They are not. They're as arrogant and as evil as people can be. And they lie like the Devil, thinking Americans too stupid to notice that they are lying. Unfortunately, maybe 3/4 of Americans ARE too stupid to notice it, especially when the Jewish-owned mass media continually endorses the lies that the government likes to tell. And the lies that the government likes to tell are the lies that bring profit to the corporations and to Israel. For obvious reasons that I need not mention again, I hope.

Having said that, however, I will say again that the Christians will not be persuaded by any arguments from authority that Muslims use, with reference to the Quran. This is not a winning strategy, since any argument from authority you can make, the Christians can mirror it back at you. It's a useless game of rhetorical ping-pong that never results in a score.

***** as you may over the inflation, war policies, the billions yearly to israel etc. And all you'll manage is to land on their **** list while believing yourself to have some sort of freedom and false sense of importance and grandiosity.

Yes, yes. That is true. The Jews sneaked into our country and, in time, they hijacked our government away from us in such a way that many gentile Americans still haven't heard about it. Their method was taking over the mass media for news and entertainment, and using them to distract us with trivia, confuse us with political misdirection, mislead us with a continuous abuse of emphasis and omission, and glorify countless perversions so that they became a part of our popular culture (e.g. pornography, homosexuality, trans-genders, trashy music, and so on). Then they replaced our original money system with a kind of usury scam, in which the Jewish bankers do no work but end up with all the money and property because of interest charges.

And the US government supports the Jews, and not the Americans, because the Jews are able to decide, using the media and the financing of elections, who can have a career in politics, and who will be excluded.

All of that is correct. But it is not what I was trying to say about the futility of the argument from authority as a means of converting Christians into Muslims. Or vice versa, of course.

Was I condescending? I did not think so. I was just telling you that the Christians are no more likely to be persuaded by Islamic sources of authority than Muslims would be were Christians to refer to Christian sources of authority. I saw stern pronouncements of authority being used as if their speakers were assured that they would accomplish something thereby. They won't.

 

[sister herb]

The West has a pagan tradition of free inquiry that pre-dates Christianity, having emerged in Greece about 2500 years ago.

Now you forget one thing - those you call as pagans or the pagan time people weren´t without religion or believing the God/Gods. Calling them as pagans and thinking they were without religion is misleading.

Also, if you believe that "Westerners aren't really compatible with Christianity, and even less so with Islam or Judaism", should they then be pagans, from the pre-Christianity era? In the ancient Creek they believed to the gods and goddesses like Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Demeter, Hestia, and Hera. In other parts of the Europe people had gods of the nature they worshipped.

Do you know those cave paintings in many parts of the world, also in Europe? People whose lived in the caves didn´t draw them for fun but for worship purposes.

Religion and the civilization of the people have always walked hand by hand.

 

[جوري]

Pft. Racist does not mean the same thing that false means. A place where one cannot speak an unpopular truth is not a place worth speaking in anyway.


That is true. I did not say that the government of the United States is a bunch of good people. They are not. They're as arrogant and as evil as people can be. And they lie like the Devil, thinking Americans too stupid to notice that they are lying. Unfortunately, maybe 3/4 of Americans ARE too stupid to notice it, especially when the Jewish-owned mass media continually endorses the lies that the government likes to tell. And the lies that the government likes to tell are the lies that bring profit to the corporations and to Israel. For obvious reasons that I need not mention again, I hope.

Having said that, however, I will say again that the Christians will not be persuaded by any arguments from authority that Muslims use, with reference to the Quran. This is not a winning strategy, since any argument from authority you can make, the Christians can mirror it back at you. It's a useless game of rhetorical ping-pong that never results in a score.


Yes, yes. That is true. The Jews sneaked into our country and, in time, they hijacked our government away from us in such a way that many gentile Americans still haven't heard about it. Their method was taking over the mass media for news and entertainment, and using them to distract us with trivia, confuse us with political misdirection, mislead us with a continuous abuse of emphasis and omission, and glorify countless perversions so that they became a part of our popular culture (e.g. pornography, homosexuality, trans-genders, trashy music, and so on). Then they replaced our original money system with a kind of usury scam, in which the Jewish bankers do no work but end up with all the money and property because of interest charges.

And the US government supports the Jews, and not the Americans, because the Jews are able to decide, using the media and the financing of elections, who can have a career in politics, and who will be excluded.

All of that is correct. But it is not what I was trying to say about the futility of the argument from authority as a means of converting Christians into Muslims. Or vice versa, of course.

Was I condescending? I did not think so. I was just telling you that the Christians are no more likely to be persuaded by Islamic sources of authority than Muslims would be were Christians to refer to Christian sources of authority. I saw stern pronouncements of authority being used as if their speakers were assured that they would accomplish something thereby. They won't.

it doesn't aggrieve me personally what Christians do or don't do.
i don't care who believes in what.
That being said, why are they hanging on an Islamic forum soliciting one type of behavior? Seems like a waste of everyone's time!

 

[Johnathan]

Today it is the Muslims who are acting like the Crusaders.

You have it backwards. The Crusades were a REaction to the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land of 639AD (as well as Islamic imperialistic conquest of much of northern Africa and all the way up into France and Austria). The Crusaders were acting like Muslims had for hundreds of years before them:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests

 

[Johnathan]

So it is that whenever a Christian points to the Bible and says, "Because these words are written there, I know truth, and you are wrong" the atheist does not find himself to be convinced. Not in the slightest.

That would certainly be understandably unconvincing, if that were how poorly the case were presented, since archaeological evidence ever increasingly confirms the scriptures as a reliable record of ancient history, while fulfilled Bible prophecy makes the case even more convincingly, including even the mathematical precision thereof.

If that is the way the case for God was presented to you I recommend you consider the testimony of former atheists like Randall Niles, who set out to make the case that God does not exist, but not through their own hollow presumptions but by considering the evidence. "Forged in the fires of Georgetown, Oxford, and Berkeley, Randall's peers knew him as a "practicing atheist.":
allaboutthejourney.org/

 

[جوري]

Jonathan I noticed you didn't take the bible quiz regarding the accuracy of your bible measured against itself of all things!
why do you parrot nonsense and ignore subjects of core importance regarding your middle Eastern god?

http://exchristian.net/3/
here it's again in case you missed it

all the best,

 

[جوري]

You have it backwards. The Crusades were a REaction to the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land of 639AD (as well as Islamic imperialistic conquest of much of northern Africa and all the way up into France and Austria). The Crusaders were acting like Muslims had for hundreds of years before them:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests

no christians have had a long history of barbarity.
the holy lands were never theirs- not sure what those Odin/thor westerners have to do with the Middle East do you?

[TABLE="align: center"]
[TR]
[TD]WONDERFULEVENTS THATTESTIFY TOGOD'S DIVINEGLORY"Listed are only events that solely occurred on command of church authorities or were committed in the name of Christianity. (List incomplete)
Ancient Pagans

• As soon as Christianity was legal (315), more and more pagan temples were destroyed by Christian mob. Pagan priests were killed.
• Between 315 and 6th century thousands of pagan believers were slain.
• Examples of destroyed Temples: the Sanctuary of Aesculap in Aegaea, the Temple of Aphrodite in Golgatha, Aphaka in Lebanon, the Heliopolis.
• Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa or Cyrill of Heliopolis were famous as "temple destroyer." [DA468]
• Pagan services became punishable by death in 356. [DA468]
• Christian Emperor Theodosius (408-450) even had children executed, because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. [DA469]
  According to Christian chroniclers he "followed meticulously all Christian teachings..."
• In 6th century pagans were declared void of all rights.
• In the early fourth century the philosopher Sopatros was executed on demand of Christian authorities. [DA466]
• 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.
  [DO19-25]

Mission

• Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) in 782 had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded. [DO30]
• Peasants of Steding (Germany) unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children slain 5/27/1234 near Altenesch/Germany. [WW223]
• Battle of Belgrad 1456: 80,000 Turks slaughtered. [DO235]
• 15th century Poland: 1019 churches and 17987 villages plundered by Knights of the Order. Victims unknown. [DO30]
• 16th and 17th century Ireland. 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. [SH99, 225]

Crusades (1095-1291)

• First Crusade: 1095 on command of pope Urban II. [WW11-41]
• Semlin/Hungary 6/24/96 thousands slain. Wieselburg/Hungary 6/12/96 thousands. [WW23]
• 9/9/96-9/26/96 Nikaia, Xerigordon (then turkish), thousands respectively. [WW25-27]
• Until Jan 1098 a total of 40 capital cities and 200 castles conquered (number of slain unknown) [WW30]
• after 6/3/98 Antiochia (then turkish) conquered, between 10,000 and 60,000 slain. 6/28/98 100,000 Turks (incl. women & children) killed. [WW32-35]
  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. [EC60]
• Marra (Maraat an-numan) 12/11/98 thousands killed. Because of the subsequent famine "the already stinking corpses of the enemies were eaten by the Christians" said chronicler Albert Aquensis. [WW36]
• Jerusalem conquered 7/15/1099 more than 60,000 victims (jewish, muslim, men, women, children). [WW37-40]
  (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." [TG79]
• 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. [WW41]
• Battle of Askalon, 8/12/1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". [WW45]
• Fourth crusade: 4/12/1204 Constantinople sacked, number of victims unknown, numerous thousands, many of them Christian. [WW141-148]
• Rest of Crusades in less detail: until the fall of Akkon 1291 probably 20 million victims (in the Holy land and Arab/Turkish areas alone). [WW224] Note:All figures according to contemporary (Christian) chroniclers.

Heretics

• Already in 385 C.E. the first Christians, the Spanish Priscillianus and six followers, were beheaded for heresy in Trier/Germany [DO26]
• Manichaean heresy: a crypto-Christian sect decent enough to practice birth control (and thus not as irresponsible as faithful Catholics) was exterminated in huge campaigns all over the Roman empire between 372 C.E. and 444 C.E. Numerous thousands of victims. [NC]
• Albigensians: the first Crusade intended to slay other Christians. [DO29]
  The Albigensians (cathars = Christians allegedly that have all rarely sucked) viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. [NC]
  Begin of violence: on command of pope Innocent III (greatest single pre-nazi mass murderer) in 1209. Bezirs (today France) 7/22/1209 destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbours and friends) 20,000-70,000. [WW179-181]
• Carcassonne 8/15/1209, thousands slain. Other cities followed. [WW181]
• subsequent 20 years of war until nearly all Cathars (probably half the population of the Languedoc, today southern France) were exterminated. [WW183]
• After the war ended (1229) the Inquisition was founded 1232 to search and destroy surviving/hiding heretics. Last Cathars burned at the stake 1324. [WW183]
• Estimated one million victims (cathar heresy alone), [WW183]
• Other heresies: Waldensians, Paulikians, Runcarians, Josephites, and many others. Most of these sects exterminated, (I believe some Waldensians live today, yet they had to endure 600 years of persecution) I estimate at least hundred thousand victims (including the Spanish inquisition but excluding victims in the New World).
• Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada alone allegedly responsible for 10,220 burnings. [DO28]
• John Huss, a critic of papal infallibility and indulgences, was burned at the stake in 1415. [LI475-522]
• University professor B.Hubmaier burned at the stake 1538 in Vienna. [DO59]
• Giordano Bruno, Dominican monk, after having been incarcerated for seven years, was burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo dei Fiori (Rome) on 2/17/1600.

Witches

• from the beginning of Christianity to 1484 probably more than several thousand.
• in the era of witch hunting (1484-1750) according to modern scholars several hundred thousand (about 80% female) burned at the stake or hanged. [WV]
• incomplete list of documented cases:
  The Burning of Witches - A Chronicle of the Burning Times

Religious Wars

• 15th century: Crusades against Hussites, thousands slain. [DO30]
• 1538 pope Paul III declared Crusade against apostate England and all English as slaves of Church (fortunately had not power to go into action). [DO31]
• 1568 Spanish Inquisition Tribunal ordered extermination of 3 million rebels in (then Spanish) Netherlands. Thousands were actually slain. [DO31]
• 1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee. [DO31]
• 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'." [SH191]
• 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." [SH191]
• 17th century 30 years' war (Catholic vs. Protestant): at least 40% of population decimated, mostly in Germany. [DO31-32]

Jews

• Already in the 4th and 5th centuries synagogues were burned by Christians. Number of Jews slain unknown.
• 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. [DA450]
• 17. Council of Toledo 694: Jews were enslaved, their property confiscated, and their children forcibly baptized. [DA454]
• The Bishop of Limoges (France) in 1010 had the cities' Jews, who would not convert to Christianity, expelled or killed. [DA453]
• First Crusade: Thousands of Jews slaughtered 1096, maybe 12.000 total. Places: Worms 5/18/1096, Mainz 5/27/1096 (1100 persons), Cologne, Neuss, Altenahr, Wevelinghoven, Xanten, Moers, Dortmund, Kerpen, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, Prag and others (All locations Germany except Metz/France, Prag/Czech) [EJ]
• Second Crusade: 1147. Several hundred Jews were slain in Ham, Sully, Carentan, and Rameru (all locations in France). [WW57]
• Third Crusade: English Jewish communities sacked 1189/90. [DO40]
• Fulda/Germany 1235: 34 Jewish men and women slain. [DO41]
• 1257, 1267: Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Lincoln, Cambridge, and others exterminated. [DO41]
• 1290 in Bohemian (Poland) allegedly 10,000 Jews killed. [DO41]
• 1337 Starting in Deggendorf/Germany a Jew-killing craze reaches 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria, Poland. [DO41]
• 1348 All Jews of Basel/Switzerland and Strasbourg/France (two thousand) burned. [DO41]
• 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 200 years of ancient Roman persecution of Christians). [DO42]
• 1389 In Prag 3,000 Jews were slaughtered. [DO42]
• 1391 Seville's Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. [DA454] 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: 6/30/1492. [MM470-476]
• 1648 Chmielnitzki massacres: In Poland about 200,000 Jews were slain. [DO43]

(I feel sick ...) this goes on and on, century after century, right into the kilns of Auschwitz.
​

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." [SH200]
  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." [SH204-205]
• 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." [SH66]​

• 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." [SH235]
• 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." [SH109,238]
• 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. [SH204]
• 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." [SH69]
• 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." [SH70]
• 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." [SH72]
  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." [SH83]
• 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". [SH72-73] "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." [SH75]
• "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." [SH75]
• 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." [SH95]

Of course no different were the founders of what today is the US of Amerikkka.

• Although none of the settlers would have survived winter without native help, they soon set out to expel and exterminate the Indians. Warfare among (north American) Indians was rather harmless, in comparison to European standards, and was meant to avenge insults rather than conquer land. In the words of some of the pilgrim fathers: "Their Warres are farre less bloudy...", so that there usually was "no great slawter of nether side". Indeed, "they might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men." What is more, the Indians usually spared women and children. [SH111]
• 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 (that probably solved a sex problem).
  "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'." [SH105] 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. [SH105]
• 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": men, women, children. [SH113-114]
• So "the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their land for an inheritance". [SH111].
• Because of his readers' assumed knowledge of Deuteronomy, there was no need for Mason to quote the words that immediately follow:
  "Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them..." (Deut 20)
• 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". [SH114]
• 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. [SH107-119]
• 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'." [SH115]
• 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!" [TA]
• Like today, lying was OK to Christians then. "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'." [SH106]
• In 1624 sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenseless Indian men, women and children. [SH107]
• 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'." [SH115]
• To summarize: 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. [SH118] 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.
• In many countries, such as Brazil, and Guatemala, this continues even today.

More Glorious events in US history

• 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'." [SH241]
• Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 11/29/1864. 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 ..." [SH131]
  More gory details.
• By the 1860s, "in Hawai'i 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'." [SH244]

20th Century Church Atrocities

• Catholic extermination camps
  Surpisingly 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 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveli, a practising Catholic 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 Catholic Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive (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 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. [MV]
• 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. [MW16ff]
  
  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. [MW76-89].

To support this kind of government in the next decade thousands of American GI's lost their life....
​

• Rwanda Massacres
  In 1994 in the small african country of Rwanda in just a few months several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently a conflict of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.

For quite some time I heard only rumours about Catholic clergy 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, 10/10/96, 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 again and again 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..." [S2]
​

As can be seen from these events, to Christianity the Dark Ages never come to an end....
References:

[DA] K.Deschner, Abermals krhte der Hahn, Stuttgart 1962. [DO] K.Deschner, Opus Diaboli, Reinbek 1987. [EC] P.W.Edbury, Crusade and Settlement, Cardiff Univ. Press 1985. [EJ] S.Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, Madison 1977. [LI] H.C.Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, New York 1961. [MM] M.Margolis, A.Marx, A History of the Jewish People. [MV] A.Manhattan, The Vatican's Holocaust, Springfield 1986.
See also V.Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Buffalo NY, 1992. [NC] J.T.Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Cambridge/Mass., 1992. [S2] Newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany, 10/10/96, 12:00. [SH] D.Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press 1992. [SP] German news magazine Der Spiegel, no.49, 12/2/1996. [TA] A True Account of the Most Considerable Occurrences that have Hapned in the Warre Between the English and the Indians in New England, London 1676. [TG] F.Turner, Beyond Geography, New York 1980. [WW] H.Wollschlger: Die bewaffneten Wallfahrten gen Jerusalem, Zrich 1973.
(This is in german and what is worse, it is out of print. But it is the best I ever read about crusades and includes a full list of original medieval Christian chroniclers' writings). [WV] Estimates on the number of executed witches:

• N.Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt, Frogmore 1976, 253.
• R.H.Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York 1959, 180.
• J.B.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca/NY 1972, 39.
• H.Zwetsloot, Friedrich Spee und die Hexenprozesse, Trier 1954, 56

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[Johnathan]

no christians have had a long history of barbarity.

As I pointed out the last time you posted this, unregenerate men will be unregenerate men. In order to make the case that men that who engaged in UNChristian behavior, were Christians, the burden would be on you to show us where the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or emulating the behavior of Jesus Christ, is responsible for inciting such behavior. As your own post even reveals, Roman Church torture and murder was perpetrated against Christians as well.