The Aztecs were not alone, although they were
the undisputed champions, murdering 20,000 victims each year to
appease their gods. Religious human sacrifice was carried out
in ancient Phoenicia, Gaul, Tibet, Africa (the Ashanti), and Borneo.
The Mayans and Incas also regularly sacrificed humans to their
gods, the Incas executing as many as 200 children at once during
major ceremonies.
In Alexandria in the year 415, the great female
scientist and head of the Alexandria Library, Hypatia, was beaten
to death by Catholic monks who considered her scientific work
heretical.
Since the 7th century the number of people
killed in "jihads" or "holy" wars waged by
various factions of Islam can only be vaguely guessed at. Several
million would not be out of the question, and the number is increasing
as this is being written.
In 1095 when Pope Urban II launched the first
Crusade to take the Holy Land from the Muslims, the German Crusaders
decided to first "kill the infidels among us" and slaughtered
thousands of German Jews on the way to the Holy Land. The same
thing happened to Jews in Prague, massacred by Christian Crusaders.
In 1208 Pope Innocent III decreed that a Catholic
sect known as the Albigenses should be destroyed, all murdered,
because they held heretical views such as the idea that Jesus
was only an angel. The Crusading soldiers swept through southern
France searching for these heretics. When they got to the city
of Beziers, that was known to host many of the Albigenses, they
asked a papal representative how they could distinguish the heretics
from the truly faithful. The answer: "Kill them all. God
will know His own."
In the 14th century tens of thousands of Jews
were killed by Christians for "causing" the Black Death
(bubonic plague). Reason? Because so many Jews survived the plague.
Reason? Probably the Jewish rituals that include weekly cleansing
of the body and changing into clean clothes.
In the 1500s when the Spanish invaded the
Americas they brought the Inquisition with them. Demanding "instant"
conversion to Catholicism from all the native inhabitants, backsliders
were naturally common. And they were then killed by the Inquisition.
Thousands of Protestants fled France to avoid
persecution and some of them ended up in what is now St. Augustine,
Florida. In 1565 Catholic Spaniards discovered one such colony
and killed almost every single person there. They then erected
a sign that said the people had been executed "not as Frenchmen
but as Lutherans."
On August 24, 1572, in France, the Catholics
murdered thousands of Protestants in a single bloody day. It came
to be known as the St. Bartholomew Day massacre.
In the 17th century the Church of England
tried to eliminate the Puritans, using torture and sometimes hanging
to achieve their ends. Then Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, rose to
power and led the Puritans into a backlash, resulting in civil
war. When Cromwell died there was a backlash against Puritans
again and Cromwell's body was exhumed, hanged and then decapitated.
Death toll uncertain.
On July 1, 1766, in Abbeville, France, a teenage
boy was decapitated for singing irreligious songs, marring a crucifix,
mocking the Virgin Mary, and refusing to remove his hat when a
religious procession passed. *
Up until the 1800s the Hindus in India sacrificed
a male child every Friday evening for the goddess Kali. Other
Kali followers killed an estimated 2 million people over 300 years.
In the mid-1800s a Buddhist king in Burma
ordered 500 people to be sacrificed to "sanctify" the
new city walls of Mandalay.
In 1857 the East India Company incautiously
armed themselves with rifle cartridges that were greased with
animal fat. This enraged both Muslims and Hindus, the former finding
pigs to be evil and the latter considering cows to be holy. Violence
broke out leaving thousands dead.
In 1915 Christian Armenians and Turkish Muslims
waged war on each other leaving an estimated 3 million dead.
Beginning in 1955 in the Sudan, Muslims and
Christians waged a "holy" war lasting seventeen years
and killing a half million people. In 1983 the same war flared
up again, this time with the final result of one million dead
in 24 years.
Up until 1965 the Roman Catholic Church's
liturgy contained the words, "…and protect us from the
perfidious Jews." In the Church's history scores of thousands
of Jews were killed for (1) Murdering Christian children and drinking
their blood; and (2) "Host-Nailing" meaning that they
stole the communion wafers that represented the body of Jesus
and drove nails through them, thereby crucifying Jesus a second
time. [I am not making this up.]
In the fifty years of Israel's existence,
over 3,000 Israelis died as a result of Muslim suicide bombers,
thousands more during various wars, and the religious clashes
between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims continue to this
day, as does the dying—on both sides.
In 1978 more than 900 people of the religious
group, the Peoples Temple, died as victims of suicide/murders
at their own hands, in Jonestown in Guyana, South America.
In the 1980s Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini ruled
by means of cruel torture and killings. Secrecy surrounds the
number of victims, but thousands are certainly dead because of
his religious oppression.
In 1980 at Moradabad, India, a riot broke
out between Muslims and Hindus because the former believed the
latter had intentionally driven a pig to walk over Muslim holy
ground. 200 died.
In the 1980s Iran's Shi'ite theocracy killed
around 200 Baha'i believers who would not convert to Islam.
In 1993 a secretive religious cult, the Branch
Dividians, led by David Koresh, armed themselves to the teeth
and fought with Federal Agents, leaving 83 dead in Waco, Texas.
On June 17, 1993, a six-year-old girl died
after being struck by a moving train in Dania, Florida. She was
thrown 20 feet and suffered a broken neck. Her brother had pushed
her to safety, but she rushed back onto the tracks to die so she
could be in heaven, waiting for her terminally ill mother. [AP]
On January 13, 1999 in Ahmedabad, India, Hindu
mobs attacked and set fire to two Christian chapels in an ongoing
religious struggle. [Reuters]
On October 28, 2000, in Nablus
on the West Bank, an angry mob of Muslims ripped up Jewish prayer
books and stomped on their sacred scrolls, protesting their right
to be on the West Bank. [The Washington Post]
On September 11, 2001 nineteen Muslims flew two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth one crashed, leaving over 3,000 dead. This act was to please Allah and achieve Paradise by killing "Infidels."
This year, 2002, we all learned
the horrific scale of a problem that we had always known existed
in the Roman Catholic Church—pedophilia. Now and again we'd read
about priests raping young boys, but the extent of the obscenity
was hidden from most of us by a vile, crass, CYA policy followed
by Cardinals and Bishops all over the USA. They just moved the
rapists from one diocese to another and/or paid off the victims'
families so they'd keep silent about it. Making it worse is the
callous attitude shown by the American Bishops and Cardinals summoned
to Rome to consider the outrages. They used words like "offenders"
and "mistakes" and other weasel words, as if they had
been caught with their hands in a cookie jar instead of molesting
children. Those priests are not offenders. They
are criminals and should be treated as such. This abomination
should have been addressed decades ago. But of course Popes have
other things to think about in their busy world.
On October 27, 2000, in Rome, at his weekly general audience in front of 50,000 in St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II gave thanks to 2,000 pizzamakers gathered from around the world to celebrate World Pizzamakers' Day. "We appreciate so much your professional work," said the 80-year-old Pope. "I pray for your families and your particular profession," he added. [Reuters]