And so, it came to be that people of Western Civilization found in the variants of Judaism all the evil justifications and discriminatory doctrine they sought to aid in enforcing their will upon others. Beyond justification, the Abrahamic traditions even inspired evils among future generations, with Jews, Christians and Muslims seeking to destroy each other and everyone else that didn’t share their allegiance. Jonathan Swift was prompted by religious intolerance to write: “We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough religion to make us love one another.”
There should surely be little wonder at the hateful state of past and present affairs. The Jewish Tanakh is overflowing with tales of great slaughter, threats of grave evils, social domination, hatred, and calls to violence. And from it sprang Christianity and Islam. Hate and violence born of religion isn’t the root of all evil, but it is very much an important accomplice; a very useful tool for those so inclined to malevolence. And that instrument of discord and deceit is aided in its course by the human desire for self aggrandizement that fully embraces the argument of competition. Though people say they stand for principle, often they’re actually projecting themselves into ideas and then undertaking their own defense.
After separating from Judaism, the dominant group of Christians, the Roman Catholics, set about unifying their control of Christianity. They waged war on Gnostics, Arians, Adoptionists and others that tried to make sense of the conflicting Christian myths. Some unorthodox thinkers went so far as say Yahweh of the Old Testament was the evil creator god, and the New Testament god was the pure god of love.
That concept wasn’t widely accepted, but Christianity as a whole may have been better served to adopt the belief of Marcion of Sinope. Marcion rejected Jewish scripture and the evils that came with it. He also discarded most of the writings that would be adopted as the New Testament by other Christian groups, choosing to minimize the extraneous material and concentrate on a positive message; in a manner reminiscent of the message of Matthew 7:12: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
Unlike Gnostics, for instance, who could attain salvation individually, the Roman Catholic Church convinced people that no one could attain heaven but through the Church. Such a ploy was no more than an instrument to grab power by greedy priests and those that held influence in the church, but it’s success has been proven for thousands of years of recorded history. And with the aid of terroristic force, Christianity, and its sister faith Islam, were wildly successful.
At the Christian Council of Elvira in 306 marriage and social interaction with Jews was prohibited. At the time, the Catholic Church didn’t have the power to physically punish people, having to rely instead on withholding communion, preventing sinners from receiving salvation. Communion was essential to salvation according to the Church, and one group singled out for punishment was women that left their husbands without acceptable cause and joined another man; they couldn’t receive communion even when death approached. Parents and other Christians who sold their own bodies were also barred from receiving communion even at death. In fact, to engage in any of numerous sexual activities, or leave a husband under all but a few circumstances also warranted the eternal death penalty; which, though not at all real, was very frightening to those that believed in that sort of thing. In addition, Christian girls were prevented from marrying pagans, Jews or heretics; yet for all the strictness, slavery was still sanctioned.
Slavery was one of the more heinous practices that persisted into modern time. Like an evil time capsule, customs recorded in sacred writings were locked in place by tradition; able to withstand even the highest moral arguments. And as has been the case with so many evils, many of those repugnant souls that sought profit through slavery readily pointed to biblical heroes doing the same.
Mankind had lowered itself to inventing gods, no longer to explain the unknown, but to justify abominable practices. Prior to the Civil War, United States senators argued that slavery was destined by God, and no man had a right to separate what God hath joined. Such sentiment resounded with the president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, who proclaimed slavery to be established by decree of Almighty God and sanctioned in the Bible. Leading the Union forces in the fight against the slave states was Abraham Lincoln, who stated he could never assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
Even a conquering king could see the evil of slavery, as previously mentioned of Cyrus the Great. Some words of wisdom attributed to a man with control of an Empire the size of Persia more than two thousand years ago are worth repeating: “…And while I am the monarch, I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of the others by force or without compensation. While I am alive, I prevent unpaid, forced labor. Today, I announce that everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate other's rights. No one could be penalized for his or her relatives' faults. I prevent slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such traditions should be exterminated the world over …”
But the wisdom attributed to Cyrus wasn’t to prevail. Slavery returned to prominence under the Greeks and successive rulers of the land that was the Persian Empire. Men rule empires, but ideas rule men, and unfortunately, centuries after Cyrus’ lifetime, leaders of various Christian denominations included much of the Jewish Tanakh, in the form of a Greek translation from Alexandria known as the Septuagint for their Old Testament.
And like the Jewish collectors and editors before them, they picked among the multitude of religious writings popular at the time to set the New Testament which was generally fixed by the third century, though the various denominations have never been in complete agreement over which books to include. The result was again a conflicting mix of hate and love, practicality and mysticism, and fantastic illusions that continued to be called the pure, infallible word of God. As Mark Twain said in Letters from the Earth: “It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”
Calls for tolerance and moderation were overruled by long term leadership in the Roman Church. Then, as now, there was considerable debate as to the role of religion; was it to be a free gift or was it to be a burden forced upon everyone? In 308 a Church scholar named Lactantius, who opposed rigorous science, nonetheless advocated freedom of choice in Divine Institutes when he wrote: “If you attempt to defend religion with bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defense, but desecration and insult. For nothing is so intrinsically a matter of free will as religion.”
But the culture of the time was one of conflict, and as Christians gained power they quickly moved to solidify that power by adopting strong methods of suppression. But, to be fair, it may be accurately stated that the mechanisms of suppression already present in the Roman Empire were converted to Christianity. However, by the time Theodosius declared Catholic Christianity to be the official Roman religion in 380, the Empire was falling apart at the seams. The Visigoths sacked Rome in the year 410, and opportunity existed for Christianity to fill the growing power vacuum.
Once government favor had been gained, official persecution wasn’t the only means of quelling dissent. Near the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th centuries, Christian mobs burned the famed Library of Alexandria and slayed Hypatia, an early female mathematician and teacher. At the time, the Library of Alexandria contained the most important collection of cultural and scientific documents in the world. But the Christian battle against science was just beginning. Anything not in agreement with the archaic views of the ancient Jews and early Christians was deemed heretical, and subject to attack. Christian attitude toward learning and discovery was characterized by Peter Damian, chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the 11th century when he declared all world sciences to be absurdities and fooleries.
Certainly, Christianity has warred against more than science. The battle of Christians and Jews that culminated in the murder of six million Jews by Hitler and his Nazis, has been ongoing for almost two millennium. Initial Jewish success in suppressing Christianity was soon offset by Christian proselytizing outside of the Jewish community. And since the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the battle has been decidedly one-sided. However, prior to Constantine, both religions were at times persecuted by Rome.
From the beginning of the second century the two groups had shunned each other as demonstrated by the prohibitions of the Council of Elvira of 306. Late 4th century Tirades of John Chrysostom, who would become archbishop of Constantinople, helped to fuel even the Nazi anti-Semite fire more than 1600 years later. He ranted about the evils of the Jews, claiming they were lustful, rapacious murderers who killed their children and offered them to the devil. Of course, Christians shared the same scripture, wherein God commanded men to offer him their firstborn children, that was the source of such claims which were to be repeated over and over through the centuries.
About a century after the Visigoth King Reccared of Spain was converted from Aryanism to Catholicism, the 12th Council of Trent decreed forced conversions of Jews in 681. Five-and-a-half centuries later, in 1218, the Catholic Church compelled Jews to wear distinctive clothing so that they were easily identified and marked as outsiders. And in 1482 relations took a turn for the worse when the Pope authorized inquisitors to prevent the practice of Judaism, Islam and other strains of religion.
In Spain, Jews and Muslims had to convert or leave, but in time the Jews and Muslims that had converted to Christianity were still perceived as a potential threat and they too became targets of the dreaded inquisition, with many hundreds burned at the stake. By 1555 the pope confined Jews in Rome to a ghetto and restricted Christian and Jewish contact. Throughout Europe in the second millennium Jews were periodically restricted in their occupations, treated as a lower class of people, forced into ghettos, attacked by mobs, expelled from cities, and even expelled from entire countries including England, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal.
But even the ongoing fight against Judaism and Islam couldn’t keep Christians united, as disputes of theology led to numerous schisms over the years that created the major branches of Christianity including Nestorian, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anabaptist, Protestant and Anglican. But, much more importantly, Christian insecurity and disputes over theology are overshadowed by the ugly Christian institution of inquisition and related witch hunts.
The cowardly fight of heresy pre-dated Yahweh’s war with Baal; as people have always sought their own position of dominance, both physically and ideologically. And the persecution of alleged witches goes back almost as long as people have been believing in spooks, spirits and demons. Inquisition as a legal institution was popular with Romans in the early days of the Republic. Anyone suspected of using witchcraft to stunt crops was sacrificed to the goddess of agriculture Ceres more than 400 years before the birth of Jesus. The Christians accused Priscillian of Avila of heresy within a few years of becoming the official state religion; and following trial and imprisonment he and six of his followers were executed in 385.
Some were murdered by the Church for their beliefs in the first millennium, but inquisitional executions mushroomed in the second millennium. Beginning in the 12th century, increased persecution was largely in response to theological disputes with those who were called Cathars and Waldensians in what is now Southern France and Northern Italy. Pope Innocent III initiated a crusade against the Cathars of Languedoc which terrorized the region with wholesale slaughter of Cathar cities. When organized resistance to the power of the Pope was killed off, an Inquisition was set up to mop up remaining dissenters. Inquisitors roamed from town to town demanding Cathars to punish, and like modern prosecutors they offered some leniency to accused Cathars that would cooperate by accusing additional people of being Cathars. In the ensuing years of terror as many as 200 Cathars were reported murdered in a single burning.
After failing to peacefully restore the Cathars to Papal subjugation, Dominic, who would later be declared Saint Dominic, founded the Dominican Order. He intended his monastic sect to be every bit as zealous, ascetic and righteous as any future dissenters; but, he conceded, “In my country we have a saying. Where words fail, blows will avail …” Afterwards prosecution of inquisitions was assigned to the Dominican Order. And during the military crusade against the Cathars, before the massacre of one Languedoc town called Arnaud-Amaury the papal legate in charge of the crusade, was reported to have quipped the now infamous phrase “Kill them all, the Lord will recognize his own.”
Peter Waldo was a wealthy merchant in Lyon, France, and the father of the Waldensian sect. It was his devotion to Christianity that led to persecution by the Catholic Church. Having been deceived since a child that the Bible was the infallible word of God, Waldo gave away his wealth and walked about preaching the gospel as the Bible directed. But the Church and Pope Alexander III forbade him to preach because he wasn’t a member of the Roman Catholic clergy. Waldo faced a painful, yet simple, decision; he was forced to choose between heeding the calling of God or the orders of power-lusting men. Because he chose to stand true to his beliefs the Waldensians were tortured and executed with unrelenting zeal.
The collective mind of Roman Catholics was so infected with superstitious ignorance that Waldensians were portrayed as witches literally flying around on broomsticks. In fact, the affliction of dullardry that shadowed Europe wasn’t nearly so incapacitating in the latter half of the first millennium when Church leaders and influential statesmen such as Charlemagne rejected the notion of witchcraft and the fantasy that the devil was working through humans to wreak havoc on the world. Ironically, in the first millennium it was heretical to believe in witchcraft.
Proving successful in suppressing Cathars and Waldensians, inquisitions quickly spread throughout Europe to solidify Catholic control. And in the Colonial Age, inquisition was even exported to the Americas and Asia, where it ravaged native populations and to some extent settlers. Catholic inquisition was such a successful institute of political intimidation that it served as a useful model for future strong armed organizations such as Stalin’s secret police organizations and the storm troopers of Adolf Hitler. In Spain, in particular, the target of inquisition gradually evolved from perceived threats to the Church, to threats to the State. The targeting of political opponents in Spain became apparent, but it should be remembered that the impetus for the monarchy to establish the inquisition in the beginning was to create a homogeneous political state.
Roman Catholicism was a political machine disguised as religion worthy of the envy of the most ambitious of politicians. Only power was respected by the Catholic Church, which even allied itself with Genghis Khan, and cowered to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Hitler was raised a Catholic, but Genghis Khan wasn’t a Christian, though many in his horde were Nestorian Christians. The Catholic Church could burn people for the pretend crime of witchcraft, but wouldn’t risk a fall from power by standing up to genocide. Catholics fervently opposed Nestorius when they ousted him from their ranks, but they lost their antimony toward his later followers when they were seen as a common link to the great army of the Khan. As for the Church’s tyranny, it thrived on its own vicious cycle; as Church cruelty increased, more people sought other teaching, which triggered ever more oppression. The cycle expanded to the point that the Church was the principal source of fear among the people of Europe.
The perverseness of Christian dogma would eventually be challenged by the one thing that it feared most and had most successfully suppressed since the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The prescription for putrid beliefs of religion was rational thought and the truth associated with it. Intelligence was the principal casualty of the Christian Dark Age.
From the time Greek philosophy and science was suppressed in the Christian realm, until the time it was re-discovered in the Italian Renaissance, Christianity had succeeded in debasing reality. Christianity alone held human civilization back for more than a thousand years. “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense,” Voltaire wrote in the Philosophical Dictionary in the 18th century, adding, “If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” Any blossoming of creativity, learning or artistic expression made the Church more vulnerable to change, and Church officials were in no mood to let that happen.
Martin Luther was one reformer the Catholic Church was unable to burn to death, though he was condemned as a heretic and marked for death. But Luther was fortunate to have something most dissidents did not: the protection of powerful German princes. Luther’s teachings were quite popular in Germany and other European countries. The principal that first divided Luther and the Catholic Church was the selling of indulgences by the Church. Indulgences were purchased in lieu of other temporary punishments for sin. The practice reinforced the position of the Catholic Church that salvation couldn’t be obtained but through the Church and gave the impression that forgiveness and salvation were for sale by the Church. Whatever the impression, the Church wasn’t eager to give up the income of indulgence. Luther took the common contrary position that salvation came through belief in Jesus, not through the Church.
Another Catholic dissenter that proved beyond papal control was the English King Henry VIII. When Henry assumed control of the Church of England after being denied a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the Roman Catholic Church no longer seemed so mighty. Others broke free of the Roman Catholic Church, but they didn’t break free of the evils of the Abrahamic religions. Though enlightenment was spreading, the masses were still slaves to religious dogma. And their leaders were fighting not for free will, but for their own version of the evil empire. In fact, the depths of depravity were still being explored, and Protestant witch hunts would rival Catholic inquisitions for merciless barbarity. Eighteenth century French author Denis Diderot put it bluntly when he said “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Christians obsessed about demons and witches; finding witches among men and women; but some held that women were inherently more vulnerable to vexation. Abrahamic religions have always institutionally degraded women, for women, it was taught, introduced sin, suffering and death into this world that was paradise. Wives were created from man to serve man, as man was created by God to serve him. Women were described as evils from which men were free to seek pleasure; and their highest use was receiving the seed of men to bear male heirs. The Quran states that men who fear desertion by women should admonish them, leave them alone in the sleeping places and beat them. The Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of Witches, completed in 1486 by two German inquisitors, was a leading reference to other judges of inquisition, and held that: “All wickedness, is but little to the wickedness of a woman.”
Superstition took such a hold on the feeble minded Christians that they had completely reversed from proclaiming people that believed in the existence of witches as heretics, to proclaiming people as notorious heretics if they denied the existence of witches. The mindset of those that felt themselves important for torturing people for a living may be partially revealed in the passages of Malleus Maleficarum.
To wit: women, the evil of nature and inescapable punishment, were more susceptible to the lures of the devil because women were more carnal than men and therefore more desirous of copulation with an incubi than men were desirous of fornication with a succubus. It was noted that women are imperfect animals that always deceive due to defect in the first woman from the bent rib of a man. Midwives, in particular, had a bad rap from witch hunters. Witches often masqueraded as midwives, when they didn’t kill newborn children they blasphemously offered them to the devil. As soon as the child is born, the midwife, if the mother herself is not a witch, carries it out of the room on the pretext of warming it, raises it up, and offers it to the Prince of Devils, that is Lucifer, and to all the devils.
Children of witches and devils were more powerful than other men. This was known because the mighty men of old mentioned in the Book of Genesis were the stock of angels, and devils are fallen angels. Devils also knew how to ascertain the virtue in semen, best matching it between the men they obtained it from and the women best fitted to receive it. And devils knew what constellation was most favorable for the desired effects. Witches were also said to kill newborn babies and roast them in ovens so as to use their ashes in potions.
For idiots like inquisition judges, equally powerful magic had to be employed to counter witchcraft such as carrying blessed salt and herbs in blessed wax worn around the neck. Techniques such as blind-folding the victim or making her walk into the room backwards were devised to prevent the accused witch from touching or making eye contact with the judges, and in that way giving the devil some power over the decision of the judges. And because witches were so feared, judges weren’t obligated to publish names of accusers. In that manner the accusers were safe from retribution from witches, especially poor witches, who were alleged to have many evil accomplices.
A witch may have been led to suppose she would be exiled or receive another mild punishment for supplying evidence which would lead to conviction of other witches. But she would afterwards be imprisoned for life on bread and water, or kept for a period of time and then burned. If the witch could not thus be tricked into confessing, or talked into confessing by influential treatment, she was to be tortured for up to three days, longer if it was still believed she might confess. However, before being tortured, she was to be stripped naked and shaved, ostensibly to look for marks or tools of the devil, but in reality to further break the will of the accused and humiliate her, so that she might be quivering in fear and discomfort before ever being tortured by the pious henchmen.
The authors of Malleus Maleficarum noted as example the trial by red-hot iron of Cunegonde, by her husband, the Sainted Emperor Henry, who suspected the virgin Cunegonde of adultery. The Malleus Maleficarum was considered a book of authority on a number of topics it addressed, such as: the way witches copulate with devils; how devils enter the human body; how witches make men think they're beasts or that their manhood is missing; how witches cause hail storms and other calamities and cause lightning to blast men and beasts; and many more fanciful topics.
In the aftermath of Protestant reformation continental Europe was gripped by tension of heresy concerns of both Catholics and Protestants. The doctrinal tug of war stirred up anxious suspicions and the witch hunts, or Burning Times, reached a peak in the federation of German Kingdoms in the 16th century. As the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said, “Religion is based mostly on fear… Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand.”
Germany was an excellent example of hysteria feeding on itself. Like a frightened child at a horror movie, when one person started screaming witch, it seems the whole neighborhood did. But that hysteria wasn’t merely the result of word of mouth, it was fed by sensationalist press. Sixteenth century Germany provided a market saturated with books and pamphlets on witches, each trying to out-compete the others by proclaiming more horrific and thrilling deeds of witchcraft.
Still today people lacking the mental capacity or desire to distinguish right from wrong are over-abundant. Fools persist in holding meaningful such nonsense as the words of Mark 16:17-18: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” That’s why people continue dying from snake bites in churches, and gibbering nonsense in Pentecostal revivals in attempts to demonstrate a participation in the spirit world. But yet, nobody is healing the sick by laying on of hands.
But delusion is certainly more dangerous than people making fools of themselves and handling poisonous snakes. Even in the 21st century hundreds of people have been murdered in Africa, India and other areas by men engaged in witch hunts. As an example, in 2002, members of the Oraon tribe in eastern India were arrested for killing five witches. The victims, all women, were accused of being responsible for illnesses including malaria and diarrhea. Many other suspected witches were burned or hacked to death in east-central India in 2002.
And in Africa, news reports from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2001 described the murder of as many as 300 people for suspected witchcraft. The reports stated that Ugandan troops were required to stop the killing spree because Congolese officials were hesitant to intervene because witch killings were a part of life in the DRC. Victims were said to have been beaten into confessing and then hacked with machetes or further bludgeoned with clubs until dead. One victim was forced to “confess” to killing people and using their blood to travel around at night at superhuman speed. In order to continue the carnage, victims were made under torture to accuse other witches before being killed.
But stories of rural Africans and Indians hacking each other to death in morbid sorcery anxiety is little different than Muslim men hacking women to death for failing to keep their faces covered. Islam, one of those illegitimate children of the religion of the Jews that Cyrus freed from Babylon more than two millennia ago, is still a major menace to world society. Islam today is where Christianity was a few hundred years ago, still firmly gripped by archaic tradition and obsessed with superstition and ritual.
Most Christians wouldn’t want to admit the commonality of Islam and Christianity, but they’re remarkably similar; differing more in their modern practice than in their traditional doctrine. Few realize that Joan of Arc was executed for violating the Catholic dress code of the day. It’s true that the dress code charge was an excuse for the English to burn the French hero at the stake, but the dress code and official charge that led to her execution were real. And most of those hateful references and barbaric practices the more zealous Muslims have associated with Islam in public perception is a true reflection of its Jewish roots. People familiar with the the Bible or Tanakh would notice the remarkable similarity with the Quran and vice-versa.
The Taliban, Hamas, Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups are throwbacks to the dark ages that demonstrate the danger of the false fantasy that is religion. The members of such groups are fooled into thinking that they will receive a “mighty reward” from Allah in return for fighting for him. They’re commonly under the archaic sexist illusion that Jihadists, or Allah’s warriors, will be delivered to a paradise full of “high bosomed virgins” upon death.
Whatever the chosen fantasy, it’s a testament to how vacant the human mind is at birth and how it can be polluted with absurdities to see how society has been misled into a firm belief in gross mythology. Friedrich