Sentilong Ozukum
Post 9/11, the secular writers in the west along with the media have successfully implanted the false idea in our mind that religion is responsible for all the evils in the world.Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes, “Religions have given us stonings, witch-burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, and abortion clinic gunmen." Columnist Robert Kuttner spells out the case against Christianity: "The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries." I cannot speak for Islamic extremism but I can confidently say that the crimes of Christianity have been unfairly exaggerated and don’t even come close compared to the crimes committed by secular fanatics.
Let’s begin with the crusades. The crusades were nothing but Christians trying to defend their land against Islamic fundamentalism. Before the rise of Islam the area which is known today as the Middle East was predominantly Christian. In fact the sacred places of Christianity (The birth place of Christ and his crucifixion) are all in this part of the world. Inspired by Islam’s call for Jihad, the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, the entire Middle East, Africa, Asia and northern Europe and were preparing to bring the whole of Christendom under the rule of Islam until the Christians fought back. More than two hundred years after the Islamic armies conquered the Middle East, the Christians headed by the Pope tried in vain to recapture the heartland of Christianity. These events are known today as the crusades. So serious was the Islamic threat that the English historian Edward Gibbon speculates that if the Christians had not fought back, perhaps the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford.
The first crusade was launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 and the Christians captured Jerusalem in 1099 and held it for several decades. But the Muslims regrouped and routed the crusaders. Jerusalem was back in the hands of the Muslims by 1187. Subsequent crusades were a failure and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule. So the crusades can be understood as an effort by the Christians to defeat Islamic Imperialism. Historically the crusades are important because they represented the fight for the survival of Europe. Perhaps the western world today would have been under Islam without the crusades. But this is no way to justify the terrible crimes and atrocities committed during the crusades. What the Christians did is still wrong and can never be reconciled with the teachings of Christ. For instance, in1215, Pope Innocence III actually instructed people that if they went on the Crusades, this could earn their salvation. And if they sent someone to fight in their place, this, too, would earn their salvation. This counsel was an obvious distortion of true Christianity.
The Inquisition began in 1163 when Pope Alexander III instructed bishops to discover evidence of heresy and take action against the heretics. Therewere basically three waves of Inquisitions. The second one began in 1472 when Isabella and Ferdinand helped establish the Spanish Inquisition, which also had the Pope's authority behind it. The third wave began in 1542 when Pope Paul III started to hunt down Protestants, especially Calvinists.Contemporary historians have now established the fact that the horrific images of the Inquisition are largely a myth concocted by the political enemies of Spain. Henry Kamen’s voluminous study titled The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision interestingly has a chapter titled ‘Inventing the Inquisition’ in which he lays out the fact that much of the modern stereotyping of the Inquisition is fiction. For example, the idea that the Inquisition targeted the Jews is a myth. How many people were killed in the inquisition? Henry Kamen puts the figure at around 2000. Other contemporary historians make estimates of between 1500-4000. We must remember that these deaths happened over a period of 350 years which is roughly around six deaths in a year.
The witch trials which took place in Europe over a period of three hundred years are often cited as a kind of Christian hysteria. Secular writers have always magnified the horrors of the trials. Carl Sagan writes in The Demon- Haunted world, “No one knows how many were killed altogether—perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions." That's one big ‘perhaps’.His modern counterpart Sam Harris puts the figure at around 100,000. However modern scholarships have termed these figures as ‘fantastic exaggerations’ and puts the figure to around 45000-60000. The notoriously famous‘Salem witch trials’ which took place in the United States in the 15th century executed a total of 19 witches and a few died in captivity. Ironically it was a Christian voice that silenced this madness. A Puritan leader named Increase Mather spoke out forcefully against what was happening and that was the beginning of the end.
I am not in any way trying to justify these horrific atrocities. They were horrible crimes committed in the name of Christianity and can never be justified. (In fact the Catholic Church under the leadership Pope John Paul II in 1995 made a historic public confession and askedGod's forgiveness for sins committed or condoned by the Roman Catholic Church during the last two millennia.) But my point is that the atheists are today shedding crocodile tears over the crimes of religion which happened a thousand years ago while completely ignoring the blood bath that successive atheist regimes have unleashed in recent memories.
It is interesting to note that the Nietzsche, the German philosopher was very prophetic when he declared the ‘Death of God’ at the end of the 19th century. He predicted that the death of God would erode all values and the next two centuries would be cataclysmic. Since values no longer came from God, they would now be made up by man.He was right. The 20th century turned out to be the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. Mao Zedong’s atheist regime in China was the most murderous in the world history and recent studies attribute to his regime a staggering seventy million deaths. Stalin in Communist Russia killed nearly around twenty million people. Hitler wiped out ten million in a span of less than ten years, six million of them Jews. This list of murderous atheist regimes is endless – Pol Pot in Indo-China, EnverHoxha in Albania, Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Kin Jong-il in North Korea, to name a few. First they killed my father by LoungUng (a Cambodian author and survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime) is a very painful account of how Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime in a span of four years wiped out nearly two million people in Indo-China. The crimes of Christianityarejust a drop in the ocean of blood that the atheist regimes have shed.
When confronted with such historical facts, secular writers normally respond by saying, “But while Christians committed those crimes in the name of Christianity but Communist rulers certainly didn’t commit those crimes in the name of atheism.” Richard Dawkins proudly declares, "Individual atheists may do evil things but theydon't do evil things in the name of atheism." Dawkins is simply mistaken here. Can anyone today deny that communism was an atheist ideology? Communism calls for the elimination of the exploiting class, it extolsviolence as a way to social progress, and it calls for using any means necessary to achieve the atheist utopia. The whole idea in Marx was that religion is the opium of the people and the aim was to build a modern utopia free from the shackles of religion. Nazism too was a secular anti-religious ideology. While the Communists wanted to empower the proletariat,the Nazis wanted to empower a master race.For the Communists the enemy was the capitalist class; for the Nazis the enemy was the Jews and other races deemed inferior.
The atheist bloodbath is the product of a hubristic modern ideology that sees man, not God, as the creatorof values. In rejecting God,man becomes scornful of thedoctrine of human sinfulness and convinced of the perfectibility of his nature. Man now seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth.It is interesting to quotephilosopher Daniel Dennett at this juncture. "It is true that religious fanatics are rarely if ever inspired by, or guided by, the deepest and best tenets in those religious traditions. So what? Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorism is still Islam's responsibility and abortion clinic bombing is still Christianity's responsibility." (Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett). I agree with him. If crimes are committed in the name of an ideology, the people who share that ideology should accept some responsibility for them. But if that is true of religion, it is also true of atheism. The fact is that the crimes of all the religion put together in over three thousand years don’t even come close to the crimes born out of an atheistic ideology in the past decades. Atheism, not religion, is the mass murderer in history.
