History

Ancient Greece and Rome

The early fathers of the Church hated Greek civilisation and sought its destruction:

The philobarbarian attitude of Saint John Chrysostom [3rd-4th century]:
"The more a nation looks barbaric and is estranged from Greek culture, the more our teachings shine - this (faithful) barbarian has conquered the entire world and while all Greek culture is extinguished and destroyed, his (the barbarian's) shines brighter every day". [Link]

All over the empire, mobs of Christian monks went about destroying the many Greco-Roman works of art, libraries of antiquity, and pre-Christian temples:

The Greek called them "swinish black-cloths", because "they looked like men but lived like pigs".
A contemporary writer tells us

"armed with clubs or stones and swords they ran to the temples, some without these weapons only with their bare hands and feet"
-- (Libanios "Pro temples" 389 AD)

As soon as they had destroyed one temple, they dashed away to the next. They toppled over walls, smashed idols, statues and art-objects and altars, and stole the temples wealth for themselves. [Link]

From the time of Constantine, Rome's first Christian emperor:
from 314 CE all the way to 988 CE, the Hellenes (ancient Greeks) were persecuted and their civilisation destroyed. The Greeks were exterminated if they would not convert -

359 CE - In Skythopolis, Syria, Christians organise the first death camps for the torture and execution of arrested Gentiles [adherents of pre-Christian religions] from all around the Empire.
...
385 to 388 - Maternus Cynegius, encouraged by his fanatic wife, and bishop, "Saint" Marcellus with his gangs scour the countryside, sack and destroy hundreds of Hellenic Temples, shrines and altars. Amongst others they destroy the Temple of Edessa, the Cabeireion of Imbros, the Temple of Zeus in Apamea, the Temple of Apollo in Dydima and all the Temples of Palmyra. Thousands of innocent Gentiles from all sides of the Empire suffer martyrdom in the notorious death camps of Skythopolis.
...
950 to 988 - Violent conversion of the last Gentile Hellenes of Laconia by the Armenian "Saint" Nikon.
[Link]

The oldest and most renowned Churches are actually built on sites which previously had pre-Christian temples on them - which Christians had demolished. This happened all over the Roman Empire, to Syria in the East and North Africa and Palestine in the South.
And:

The cave of the Vatican belonged to Mithra until 376 A.D., when a city prefect suppressed the cult of the rival Savior and seized the shrine in the name of Christ, on the very birthday of the pagan god, December 25.
-- Barbara G. Walker

Until Constantine's time, the most favourable estimate (which many scholars consider too optimistic) of the Christian population in the entire empire was no more than 5%. About 2/3 of these were in Armenia, and much of the remainder in Syria and Asia minor.

According to Roman sources, the Christians ...in Rome ...were considered a small, uneducated group of religious troublemakers from the lowest social classes, operating in the shadowy sides of society. [Link]

The educated Romans disliked the religion. Some of them wrote books refuting Christianity, like the Epicurean Kelsos in his Alethes Logos, the last pagan emperor Julian in his Kata Christianon, and Porphyry's Against the Christians. The Church, unable to sufficiently counter their well-reasoned arguments (which it occasionally attempted), "won" the debate by destroying these works when it finally got into power. Even so, some scanty ancient literature against Christianity remains, pieced together from the unsuccessful attempts at responding by Christian Church fathers.

The ancient Romans: persecutors or persecuted?

Facts

No Christian was put to death in the Coliseum

All stories of Christians being exposed to lions in the Roman Amphitheater are bogus.

-- Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk

No claim that Christians had been "thrown to wild beasts in the Colosseum" was made until the 17th century – until the amphitheatre was being pillaged for building material to rebuild St Peters.

[Link]

How many persecutions? And why?

Not 10, as Christians claim, but no more than 2 or at most 3:

Decius (249-251), Valerian (257), and Diocletian (303) were the only general and systematic persecutors.
There is no doubt in the mind of any historian that in trying to suppress or check Christianity -- at first in each case by the lighter penalties -- they were consulting the welfare of the state, which was then sinking.
Professor Gwatkin himself remarks that many of the Christians, so far from being willing to defend the Empire, were "half inclined to welcome the Goths and Persians as avengers." The Pope insolently and openly defied Valerian at Rome: and Diocletian's decrees were torn down by Christians in his own palace who relied on the protection of his womenfolk.
Before Diocletian the Church had had forty years of peace, and it had grown sufficiently to make its anti-patriotic teaching a matter of concern. Yet in not one of the three decrees of Diocletian is the death sentence imposed.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

Facts: Historical truths vs Christian fictions

McCabe then states that scholars only recognise 2 general persecutions:

• Decian Persecution: no more than 5 or 6 were martyred in Rome and between 2 and 3 dozen (itself considered dubious) in the entire empire.
• Diocletian persecution: The Church claims 40,000 martyrs, many in Rome. Scholars have shown that there were only 20 genuine martyrs in the whole Roman Empire, and none in Rome. A few hundred were executed, where many perished in jail - and most of them were zealous Christians who demanded death in order to become martyrs.

The Acta of the martyrs (records of trials and execution) are entirely from fictitious lives or are forgeries. Pagan deities were sometimes used as martyrs and were turned into Saints.
The fraud led to the birth of the profitable relic industry.

Instead of a vast number martyring themselves for Christianity upon persecution, and inspiring pagans to convert, there was a vast apostasy as Christians left the faith in droves. One of these apostates was Pope Marcellinus, wrongly revered as a Saint and Martyr.

Find out the details

Did Christian virtue inspire the pagans to convert?

3rd century St. Cyprian's

letters to the pope describe how a large part of his clergy and bishops were unmitigated scoundrels: fornication, murder, embezzlement, and all the rest of it.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

St. Jerome was convinced that Christian men and women, including priests and nuns, could not be trusted. According to him the only women of virtue to be seen on the streets of Rome were not Christians but pagans.
All the early bishops from all over the empire - St Augustine, Bishop Optatus, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Hippolytus and others - insisted that their congregation of Christians were highly immoral and corrupt.

Why and how did the pagans of the empire convert?

The ... undisputed fact is that there was no "attraction" of the pagans at all. In the extant Theodosian Code we have ten decrees which the bishops got from the emperors suppressing all rival religions and sects under pain of fine, imprisonment, or death.
-- How Christianity Grew Out of Paganism, by Joseph McCabe

Beginning with Constantine, and under succeeding "Christian" emperors, there is a series of scores of laws which the Christians procured to be enacted for the suppression and persecution to death of Pagans, heretics and Jews. These laws and edicts are to be found in the Codes of Theodosius and of Justinian, the two famous codifleations of Roman Law.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

See details
The conversion of the ancient Greeks and Romans was achieved through violence and systematic destruction of the Greco-Roman civilisations

Christianity improved Rome?

Slavery

Professor Dill comes close to the facts when he says that "the slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class." It will not do, therefore, to identify Pagan with Christian slavery.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

By the first century the Stoics openly condemned slavery. Other Greek moralists besides the Stoics condemned it.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

Such was their influence that in still-pagan Rome:

the "manumission" of slaves -- the grant or sale of freedom to them -- was a daily occurrence.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, Joseph McCabe

It is an historical fact, supported by the most positive of evidence that slavery in the Roman Empire was mitigated by the noble philosophy of the Stoics and not by the teachings of the church fathers, who never thought of recommending the abolition of slavery.
-- History of Civilization, by historian Emil Reich

Emperor Constantine wasn't the only one who undid the humane laws enacted by the Stoic emperors.

in 541 C.E. the Council of Orleans required that the descendants of slaves should be re-enslaved.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, by J.G.R. Forlong

This was but one of many laws on slavery enacted during various Church councils.

Pope Gregory was the greatest slave-owner in the world in the sixth century. ... He would not allow any slave to become a cleric, and he expressly reaffirmed (Epp. vii, 1) that no slave could marry a free Christian.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

The early Church fathers, Saints, Popes, Protestant Reformers all condoned slavery - it was Biblical, after all.

The Abbey of St Germain des Prés owned 80,000 slaves, and that of St. Martin de Tours 20,000.
-- Faiths of Man Encyclopedia of Religions, by J.G.R. Forlong

Find out more facts about slavery before the trade in Africans

Education

The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Since Christianity regarded learning, mathematics and science as paganism, its followers went about the empire destroying all the schools as they had done the libraries, temples, hospitals and works of art.
Latin, taken over by the Roman Church, was ruined; even monks at the Vatican wrote in barbarous Latin, whilst most priests were illiterate. McCabe writes:

Rome under the Popes had sunk to an illiteracy that has no parallel elsewhere in the history of civilization.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by historian Joseph McCabe

So much so that by the 11th century:

The illiteracy of Europe had increased to more than ninety-nine percent.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Facts about "monks preserving knowledge"

Where the monks did spend any part of their time in "the writing room," they were, naturally, copying the Fathers of the Church and later Christian literature.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

Most of the ancient writings had been burnt on purpose, either along with the ancient libraries or in the Medieval auto-da-fes. A few were preserved wholly by accident when monks, desperate for papyrus which was expensive, collected old manuscripts and overwrote them. Among them:

Parts of the Iliad and the 'Elements' of Euclid were covered by monkish treatises.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Ancient works were never willingly preserved:

As for "monks constantly occupied in copying the classic texts," for the preservation and diffusion of Pagan culture, it is a joke! They couldn't read Greek nor good Latin, and nobody else could read at all, -- also, Holy Church and Churchmen loathed Pagan culture and literature.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Read more about the ignorant Dark Ages brought on by Christianity

More Christian fictions about Rome

• Blaming the northeners for the fall of Rome
• Medical Science and Unions
• Gladiatorial Games
• Roman versus Christian morality

Converting the rest of Europe to the True Faith

It is estimated that Europe was Christianised at a cost of about 8 to 10 million lives. [Link]

804 CE. The last heathen resistance in Saxony is put down. In thirty years of genocide, from 774 to 804, two thirds of the Saxons have been killed. [Link]

Sami people [the indigenous people of Scandinavia] were converted to Christianity by force and shamanic practices were forbidden. [Link]

And like in Greece and Rome, Christians demolished heathen shrines to build a Church over them. For instance, in

1083 CE The temple at Uppsala (Sweden) was destroyed, and construction of a church on the site is initiated. [Link]

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.
[Link, citing American Holocaust, by D. Stannard, 1992]

More
Eastern-Europe remained unconverted until the Crusades when pious Christian knights committed mass-murder and even complete genocide in the north-east.

Intolerance

"Unbelievers deserve not only to be separated from the Church, but also... to be exterminated from the World by death."
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1271

The early Church Councils

These volatile and often violent meetings were held during the 4th and 5th centuries, when bishops voted on which doctrines would be Christian orthodoxy ("divinely inspired") and which were to be considered heresy and persecuted. Disagreements were rife and gave rise to numerous Christian sects which were inimical to each other.

Among a countless host of disputants may be mentioned Arians, Basilidians, Carpocratians, Collyridians, Eutychians, Gnostics, Jacobites, Marcionites, Marionites, Nestorians, Sabellians, Valentinians.
Of these, the Marionites regarded the Trinity as consisting of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Virgin Mary; the Collyridians worshiped the Virgin as a divinity, offering her sacrifices of cakes; the Nestorians, as we have seen, denied that God had "a mother."
...But, though they were irreconcilable in matters of faith, there was one point in which all these sects agreed - ferocious hatred and persecution of each other.
-- History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, by John William Draper

The Arians had been persecuted to extinction, so too the Donatists, and the Nestorians killed or driven out of the empire. In the 5th century, the Pelagianists, the Priscillianists in Spain, and the Manichaeans in the whole Roman empire, were persecuted - mostly to extinction.
Read more about the early Christian sects victimised for heresy, and how murder and threats ("divine inspiration") during the early Church Councils determined the orthodox Christian doctrines of today.

Crusades

Besides the infamous Children's Crusade, and those against the Jews and Moslems and Eastern Orthodox Church, there were also:

Crusades to convert-or-kill the pagans of Eastern-Europe and the Balkans:

among such pagans were the Obotrites, Pomeranians, Wiltzi, Serbs, Letts, Livonians, Finns, and Prussians.
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

The Baltic (original) Prussians were completely exterminated in a mass genocide, as were the Stedingers of Germany. Heathen Lithuania also faced routine genocides of its population by Christians, and in the end lost out:

Crusades were undertaken against Livonia, Courland, Esthonia, and Prussia. In Lithuania Christianity did not win until 1368.
...
In Hungary, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, "the new religion was spread by the sword. ..."
-- Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless

Crusades to exterminate heretical Christian sects:

• The Catharan, Albigensian heretics: in the Albigensian Crusade half of France was exterminated. By the end of the 13th century one million of the French heretics had been massacred. [Link]
• In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII called for a Crusade against the French Waldensians, who had already been declared heretics in the 1184 Council of Verona. They were hounded and killed until the 17th century. [Link]

See more on the Crusades

Inquisitions and witch hunts

Then there were the three Inquisitions: the first was against heretics and witches mainly; 95% of the victims of the Second (Spanish) Inquisition were Jews; and the Third Inquisition went after Protestants and other heretics as well as witches again.
At the start of the First Inquistion, the victims were only burnt to death. But:

Torture of suspects was authorized by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, and thus inquisition chambers were turned into places of abject horror.
...Torture was not finally removed as a legal option for church officials until 1917 when the Codex Juris Canonici was put into effect. [Link]

Inquisitors were placed entirely above the law by Pope Innocent IV's bull Ad extirpanda. Most of the torturing was performed by members of the Dominican order, whilst many other inquisitors and torturers were monks of the Franciscan order. The inquisitors and the Holy Church became filthy rich from the assets of their victims.

The edicts that established the Inquisition have never been repealed. They are "officially still part of the Catholic faith, and were used as justification for certain practices as recently as 1969." [Link, see also here for more on this]

Historian Will Durant, in his History of Civilisation puts the number of fatalities of the witch hunts between 7 and 9 millions.

Entire villages and towns were depopulated of their women-folk.
For 5 centuries throughout Europe, both the Protestant and Catholic Churches went after "witches", especially those referred to as "good witches":

Even relatively permissive England killed 30,000 witches between 1542 and 1736. [Link]

More on the inquisitions and witch hunts

Reformation

Facts

• The Thirty Year War (1618-48) between the Protestants and Catholics, led to the deaths of more than a quarter of Europe's population. -- Ed Babinsky
• In Germany alone, the war resulted in an estimated drop of its population from 18 million to 4 million. [Link]
• In Bohemia, its 30,000 villages were reduced to 6,000 and its 3 million citizens slaughtered down to 780,000. -- Joseph McCabe
• In the Netherlands, Catholic Spain murdered more than a 100,000 men and women. -- Joseph McCabe

During the many Huguenot wars ravaging France, Huguenot soldiers hunted [Catholic] priests like animals and one captain is reported to have worn a necklace of priests' ears. [Link]

The Catholics butchered 30,000 Huguenots in one day: the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.

There was also utter intolerance and mutual persecution between the numerous Protestant sects that had sprung up all over the continent.

More on the Reformation, its intolerance and the Reformers

Women

Woman was merely man's helpmate, a function which pertains to her alone. She is not the image of God but as far as man is concerned, he is by himself the image of God.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430)

"Wife: Be content to be insignificant. What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born."
-- John Wesley (1703-91), Reformer, founder of the Methodist movement

More of what respected Christians have said about women, firmly basing their views on the Bible.
The Biblical Curse of Eve was used by clergy to prevent physicians from administering anaesthetics to relieve pain during child birth.

Fact

584 CE Council Of Macon: bishops gathered to vote on "Are women human?" By a narrow vote (of 1), women obtained human status in Christianity.
Apparently, the decision was not final, as the question had to be reconsidered by the Protestants too:

Lutherans at Wittenberg debated whether women were really human beings at all.
-- The Dark Side of Christianity, by Helen Ellerbe

Equality in Christianity today:

"A wife should submit herself to the leadership of her husband. Leadership in the church should always be male."
-- Southern Baptist Convention (2000) [Link]

Children

Since the birth-control policy of Christianity resulted in couples having many unwanted children, many of them were mistreated in the Middle Ages. In later times (like during the Industrial Revolution) they were still seen as just another mouth to feed and sent off to do gruelling work, even in mines, and were often kept illiterate. Besides hard labour, children of Christian families have also been subjected to severe mental abuse and have also suffered from physical abuse, as sanctioned by the Bible.

Fact

Several Christian denominations have brought back child-beating to chastise their erring children. There are Christian sites selling rods for this purpose, as specified by the Bible.

Christianity in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific

Convert and kill in the Americas

When in 1530 CE the Pope finally declared that the Indians were human, the pious Christians began converting the heathens:

"The [Catholic] Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven."
-- Bertrand Russell

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."

-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard [Link]

The Inquisition remained active until 1834, especially in Central and South America, where "heathen" natives were tortured and burned for crimes against the true faith, such as, "not believing in it". [Link]

Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs' waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed.
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard [Link]

Facts

• Christianity in the Americas: 60 million Native Americans had been exterminated by the end of the 16th century itself. [Link]
  For instance, good Christians from Spain

  "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."
  -- American Holocaust, by D.Stannard [Link]

• Christians went around burning down libraries of the Indians of Central America, demolishing shrines and burning books
• Convert or die: 19th century Christian missionaries exterminated the Californian Indians in the most gruesome manner.

More on the horrendous history of Christianity in the Americas

Africa: Christian slavery and colonialism

Facts

Estimates vary, but somewhere between 20 million and 60 million people were captured, enslaved and brought to the Americas. Millions more died in the slave raids, in the dungeons and in the Middle Passage.
-- Through slavery's darkest passages - Ghana's slave dungeons - Essence, Special Travel Section, October 1992

• Slave castles, with central Churches, were often built over the ancient shrines of the pagan Africans [Same Link]
• Slave ships often bore appropriate names, like those of the devout slave trader John Hawkins: Jesus, Solomon and John the Baptist. (-- Joseph McCabe)
• The Africans who survived the journey, were often worked to death:

  "The policy of the slaveholder," says Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, "was to kill off the negroes by overwork and buy more."
  -- Christianity Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

  This was even more so in South America:

  Brazil and the Caribbean were graveyards for Africans and their descendants.
  -- American Slavery, 1619-1877, Peter Kolchin

• The Bible was used to justify slavery and led to racism: the Curse of Ham, supposedly applicable to Africans, was the reason they "deserved to be slaves".

Chuches also went so far as arguing that slavery was all for the best of the pagan Africans:

...the most widespread and effective religious argument was the simple suggestion that slavery was part of God's plan to expose a hitherto heathen people to the blessings of Christianity.
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin

As Presbyterian minister (and Georgia slave owner) Charles C. Jones argued in The Religious Instruction of the Negroes (1842), blacks "were placed under our control...not exclusively for our benefit but theirs also," so they could receive moral and religious uplift; "we cannot disregard this obligation thus divinely imposed, without forfeiting our humanity, our gratitude, our consistency, and our claim to the spirit of christianity itself."
-- American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin

In 18th century France, Voltaire estimated that the [Catholic] Church held between 50,000 and 60,000 slaves.
-- Christianity, Slavery and Labour, by Chapman Cohen

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel employed slaves on its estates in the West Indies, and there were 80,000 black slaves in London as late as 1760 (Independent Review, October 1905). The American Churches, Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist, owned 600,000 slaves, and "the authority of nearly all the leading denominations was against the abolitionists," says J. Macy in the chief and impartial recent American work (The Anti-Slavery Crusade, 1920, p. 74). The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian authorities, he shows, expelled any minister who advocated abolition.
-- A Rationalist Encyclopaedia, Joseph McCabe

Find out who did and who (predictably) did not agitate for abolishing African slavery.

Fact

During the brutal Christian colonisation of the Congo, which was defended by the Catholic Church,

As many as 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of executions, unfamiliar diseases and hunger.
-- Leopold reigns for a day in Kinshasa - The Guardian, February 4, 2005

This and much more on the history of Christianity in Africa

Christian colonisation of Asia

Facts

• In China, Japan, Thailand: Here Christians of the Catholic Church implemented forced conversions, persecuted the followers of Buddhism and other pre-Christian religions, and attempted political take-overs of these countries. Christian converts became traitors to their own government, like those of ancient Rome had been. Fortunately, the end result in each case was that these countries expelled the Christian missionaries and closed themselves off to foreign (Christian) relations entirely.
• In Vietnam the situation was much the same, except that it did not succeed in expelling the missionaries, for which it paid the price later.
• In India and Sri Lanka, Christians from Portugal destroyed hundreds of indigenous shrines and built Churches over them (as usual). Once again, they went about violently converting the local population and exterminating any of the Hindus and Buddhists who did not convert. In India, Saint Francis Xavier got the Inquisition started in Goa which terrorised, tortured and gruesomely murdered many of the pagans.

Read the details on the ruthless Christian colonisation of Asia

The Pacific

Fact

In thirty years of despicable missionary rule in Tahiti, only 6,000 of the indigenous people remained from an initial 200,000. [Link, which cites The Missionaries, by Norman Lewis]

The Protestant missionaries then carried out the same conversion/extermination campaign in the rest of the Pacific.
Christians in Hawaii, had massacred most of the population:

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'."
-- American Holocaust, by D. Stannard

[Link]

More on Christian genocide in the Pacific

Missions and colonialism

Teurer Segen - Christliche Mission und Kolonialismus by Gert von Paczensky ("Costly blessing - Christian mission and colonialism"),
translation of the book summary and review at KirchenKritik:

Missions were in league with colonialism, often even gruesomely so.
They helped to destroy old cultures, to uproot people, to divide families and entire populations.
They supported and approved of a system that let countless of millions in three continents be reduced to poverty, bringing them hunger and sickness.
In the misdevelopment of Latin America, Africa and Asia - [which is] the major problem in the present - missionaries and Churches of all persuasions and confessions (denominations) were complicit.

Review from KirchenKritik:
This work lacks neither facts, nor references nor information handed down from the time of mission-work and colonialism.
It is established that the Church has to answer for the main share of the guilt of the impoverishment of the present 3rd world. Yes, one can even go so far and assert that without the Church everything would have turned out differently!
In light of this book, the numerous speeches of Pope John Paul II in impoverished countries appear hypocritical and cynical.
Moving historical literature at it's best. Parts of it are not for weak nerves.

More on this

Anti-Semitism before Nazism

The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews.
-- Saint John Chrysostom, Church Father, 4th-5th century C.E.

More of the highly anti-Semitic statements of the pious early fathers of the Church, Popes and Reformers.

Facts

• The centuries of Christian preaching against Jews was founded on the Bible - the New Testament in this case.
• Martin Luther's book On the Jews and their Lies inspired Nazis and Christian Churches in Nazi Germany.
• The Church invented most of the means of persecuting Jews which the Nazis later used

All the early non-Jewish Christian sects, like the Marcionites, were anti-Semitic.

As soon as the Greco-Roman empire was wrested from pagan hands, the Christians started persecuting the Jews. Christian Roman Emperor Justinian was the one

who legalized the burning and pillaging of Jewish synagogues by Christian bishops and monks (often canonized later). [Link]

Then in the Middle Ages, a great many extermination campaigns were enacted by Christians.

In the large scale pogroms of Orthodox Christian Russia and Ukraine, at least several hundreds of thousands of Jews were exterminated.

"But we must never forget that the Jews have crucified our Master [Jesus] and have shed His precious blood."
-- Czar Alexander III, affirming the eternal Christian doctrine

Fact

The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion, in which Jews supposedly conspired to bring down the western Christian nations, is a Russian forgery:

If The Protocols appeared outlandish, it may have been because they were a Russian forgery plagiarized from a 1869 German novel which, itself, was plagiarized from a 1864 French political satire. [Link]

The forger was Czarist agent Sergei Nilius whose

work was designed to deflect the misery of Nicholas II's policies onto a scapegoat: the Jews of Russia. [Link]

This forgery is still used by many pious Christians as additional "proof" of why Jews are to be hated.

More on anti-Semitism before Nazism

Roma (Gypsies)

When Gypsies first appeared, Christianity had shaped the doctrine of war between light and dark and personified the white angels against the black devils. To the church the Gypsy culture was non-acceptable and their dark skin exemplified evil and inferiority. Hence in western Christian Europe the dark-skinned Gypsies became victims of prejudice as a result of this Christian doctrine.
-- Gypsies: a persecuted race, by William A. Duna

The persona of the Romani as non-white, non-Christian outsider became incorporated into Christian European folklore, which served to justify and encourage the prejudice against him. Like Asahuerus, the Jew doomed to wander through eternity because he refused to allow Jesus to rest on his way to Calvary, Romanies were accused of forging the nails with which Christ was crucified. And while Jews were accused of drinking the blood of Christian babies in hidden rites to which no outsider was privy, Romanies were likewise charged with stealing and even eating those babies. Parallelling even more closely the Asahuerus myth is the belief that the original sin of the Romanies was their refusal to give Mary and the baby Jesus shelter during their flight from King Herod into Egypt (Scheier, 1925, vol. II, p. 77).
-- The roots of Anti-Gypsyism: To the Holocaust and After, by Ian Hancock

Of course, the Roma were nowhere near the Middle-East in the 1st century CE, and this libel was but another Christian fiction. Like Jews, the Roma were also attacked in sermons.

Fact

• Monasteries in Eastern-Europe kept large numbers of Roma as slaves until the the 19th century.
• Roma who converted to the Christian (and Islamic) faiths were not accepted or if they were, then they were still treated as outcasts.
• The anti-Roma prejudice which had been created and had long been fostered by Christianity would result in their persecutions and exterminations in Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and other countries during the Nazi era. In fact, the same continues today.

More on Romany and anti-Gypsyism

Fascism including Nazism

Nazism in Germany

Nazi Germany was a very Christian country. Its anti-Semitism was rooted in Church teachings:

according to historian Dagobert Runes, Hitler's methods were actually modelled on the Christian one:

Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horrible, unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches ... The isolation of the Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books and finally, the burning of the people - Hitler learned it all from the church. However, the church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas.

[Link]

And the anti-Semite Luther had written On the Jews and their Lies which inspired the Nazis as well as the Christian clergy.

"If I had to baptise a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over with the words 'I baptise thee in the name of Abraham'."
-- Martin Luther, "Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor" by Peter F. Weiner

Thus, it's not surprising that inspired by the the New Testament and centuries of Church tradition, Saints and Church fathers, Popes and Reformers, the clergy in Nazi Germany merely added to the existing Christian anti-Semitic literature:

Bishop Martin Sasse of Thuringia, a leading Protestant churchman ... edited a brochure for his ministers at the end of November 1938 titled, "Martin Luther and the Jews: do Away with Them!" He quoted extensively from Luther's book "On the Jews and their lies." (Wollenberg, p.73) [Link]

The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere.
-- Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit monthly publication, cited in John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" [Link]

Fact: Church, clergy & Christian involvement in Nazi Germany's extermination policies

• All German Churches, except the Confessing Church, were in line with Nazi Germany and its policies. Many clergymen and pious Church-goers were prominent Nazis. Most Germans were members of the mainstream German Churches, whilst the Confessing Church had but small numbers of members.
• The Catholic and Protestant Churches and their congregations actively helped the Nazi state in hunting down Jews. Both furnished racial data about Christian members in their own congregations who had Jewish ancestry. Neither Church accepted such Christians:

  After the Nazi party took over, Protestant Churches began to exclude Jews from jobs and schools and later to exclude baptized racial Jews from the Land churches and to force them to live completely by themselves. [Link]

  Catholic priests across Germany became part of an anti-Semitic attestation bureaucracy, supplying details of blood purity through marriage and baptism registries in accordance with the Nazi Nuremberg laws which distinguished Jews from non-Jews [Link]

  In fact, the German churches

  advocated composing an "Aryan Paragraph" in church synods that would prevent non-aryans from joining the Church, which of course included Jews. [Link]

• The small, dissenting Confessing Church did not oppose Hitler for his anti-Semitic policies. Many of the prominent Pastors in this Church were self-admitted anti-Semites. It turns out they opposed the "Aryan Paragraph" in order to retain Jewish converts, but

  For Jews who did not convert, they held strong anti-Semitic feelings. [Link]

• The Catholic and Protestant Churches helped in the murder of people with disabilities.
  There is nothing new in this, as the Church had for centuries taught that people with physical disabilities were devils and those with mental disabilities were possessed by devils. Throughout the Middle-Ages, handicapped children would be brutally murdered, often by their own Christian parents.
• Protestant and Catholic Churches used forced labourers during the Third Reich

Strangely, Christians today are surprised when faced with such facts, forgetting how, throughout Christianity's history, Churches, clergy and everyday Christians had been involved in extermination campaigns against Jews and others, murdered people with disabilities and had kept slaves for centuries.

Read more about Nazi Germany

Nazism in wartime Yugoslavia

It is a matter of historical record that the Croatian Catholic Church was closely entangled with the Ustashas. In the early years of World War II, Catholic priests oversaw forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs under the aegis of the Ustasha state; Franciscan friars distributed Ustasha propaganda. Several high Catholic officials in Yugoslavia were later indicted for war crimes.
-- A vow of silence - U.S. News and World Report, March 30, 1998

"Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and I will confess you and free you from sin."(54)
-- Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica Monastery, reassuring his fellow Ustashi prior to a massacre [Link]

Facts

• The Ustashe were the Catholic Nazis of Croatia
• They ruthlessly exterminated about 750,000 people: mostly Orthodox Christian Serbs and several tens of thousands of Roma and Jews.
• In the Catholic Independent state of Croatia that was formed during the Nazi era, clergy took part in great numbers in the massacres.
• The Italian fascists and even the German Nazis were horrified at how gruesomely they murdered their victims.

The Croatian clergy brought the Ustashe to power

While the Catholic Press in the country kept praising the rising Fascism in Europe:

Monasteries, parish houses, cathedrals, Franciscan high schools, seminaries, etc., throughout Croatia doubled as meeting places, recruiting centers, arms depots and staging areas for Croatian fascism and terror in the years prior to the war.
... Among the very first armed divisions of the Ustasha army were numerous Catholic priests. The military exploits of one priest, Ilija Tomas of Klepac, were hailed in the Croatian fascist publication "Hrvatski Narod" on July 25, 1941.(21) Another Catholic publication "Nedelja" praised the military exploits of dozens of priests, especially those in monastic orders such as the Franciscan Radovan Glavas, and the priest Ivan Miletic who led Croatian fascists in joint battle with Wehrmacht forces.
... The entire Catholic press in this period in Croatia was thoroughly pro-fascist, racist and supportive of the elimination of the "minorities." [the Serbs, Jews and Roma]
-- The Vatican's Holocaust, by former BBC commentator Avro Manhattan

Christian priests create racial theories again

Ustashi's leading racist theorists were Catholic clergy. ... priests were among the intellectual godfathers of Croatian fascism and racism.
... anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia was almost entirely the product of Catholic propaganda after World War I.
... The Catholic Press preached racial theories - e.g. the theory that the Croats were not of Slav descent, but were Gothic German. One of the founders of this race theory was a well-known Catholic priest, Kerubin Segvic, who as far back as 1931 wrote a book entitled, The Gothic Descendance of the Croats, with a view to creating racial odium against the Slavs, which was synonymous with "Orthodox."
-- The Vatican's Holocaust, by Avro Manhattan

The Vatican and communism united after WWII to whitewash history.

More on Nazism in Yugoslavia during WWII