Part Three: Holy Crap

 Holy Crap - Part Three

By God, those religious zealots sure do know how to do the tiorture, maim and kill thing, don't they?

Now, on with the show, the last of three parts of organized religion and you.

— In 1723 the bishop of Gdansk, Poland, demanded that all Jews be expelled from the city. The town council declined, but the bishop’s exhortations roused a mob that invaded the ghetto and beat the residents to death.

— Islamic jihads (holy wars), mandated by the Koran, killed millions over 12 centuries. In early years, Muslim armies spread the faith rapidly: east to India and west to Morocco. Then splintering sects branded other Muslims as infidels and declared jihads against them. The Kharijis battled Sunni rulers. The Azariqis decreed death to all “sinners” and their families. In 1804 a Sudanese holy man, Usman dan Fodio, waged a bloody jihad that broke the religious sway of the Sultan of Gobir. In the 1850s another Sudanese mystic, ‘Umar al-Hajj, led a barbaric jihad to convert pagan African tribes — with massacres, beheadings and a mass execution of 300 hostages. In the 1880s a third Sudanese holy man, Muhammad Ahmed, commanded a jihad that destroyed a 10,000-man Egyptian army and wiped out defenders of Khartoum led by British general Charles “Chinese” Gordon.

— In 1801 Orthodox priests in Bucharest, Romania, revived the story that Jews sacrificed Christians and drank their blood. Enraged parishioners stormed the ghetto and cut the throats of 128 Jews.

— When the Baha’i faith began in Persia in 1844, the Islamic regime sought to exterminate it. The Baha’i founder was imprisoned and executed in 1850. Two years later, the religious government massacred 20,000 Baha’is. Streets of Tehran were soaked with blood. The new Baha’i leader, Baha’ullah, was tortured and exiled in foreign Muslim prisons for the rest of his life.

— Human sacrifices were still occurring in Buddhist Burma in the 1850s. When the capital was moved to Mandalay, 56 “spotless” men were buried beneath the new city walls to sanctify and protect the city. When two of the burial spots were later found empty, royal astrologers decreed that 500 men, women, boys, and girls must be killed and buried at once, or the capital must be abandoned. About 100 were actually buried before British governors stopped the ceremonies.

— In 1857 both Muslim and Hindu taboos triggered the Sepoy Mutiny in India. British rulers had given their native soldiers new paper cartridges that had to be bitten open. The cartridges were greased with animal tallow. This enraged Muslims, to whom pigs are unclean, and Hindus, to whom cows are sacred. Troops of both faiths went into a crazed mutiny, killing Europeans wantonly. At Kanpur, hundreds of European women and children were massacred after being promised safe passage.

— Late in the 19th century, with rebellion stirring in Russia, the czars attempted to divert public attention by helping anti-Semitic groups rouse Orthodox Christian hatred for Jews. Three waves of pogroms ensued — in the 1880s, from 1903 to 1906, and during the Russian Revolution. Each wave was increasingly murderous. During the final period, 530 communities were attacked and 60,000 Jews were killed.

— In the early 1900s, Muslim Turks waged genocide against Christian Armenians, and Christian Greeks and Balkans warred against the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

— When India finally won independence from Britain in 1947, the “great soul” of Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t able to prevent Hindus and Muslims from turning on one another in a killing frenzy that took perhaps 1 million lives. Even Gandhi was killed by a Hindu who thought him too pro-Muslim.

— In the 1950s and 1960s, combat between Christians, animists and Muslims in Sudan killed more than 500,000.

— In Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, followers of the Rev. Jim Jones killed a visiting congressman and three newsmen, then administered cyanide to themselves and their children in a 900-person suicide that shocked the world.

— Islamic religious law decrees that thieves shall have their hands or feet chopped off, and unmarried lovers shall be killed. In the Sudan in 1983 and 1984, 66 thieves were axed in public. A moderate Muslim leader, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was hanged for heresy in 1985 because he opposed these amputations. In Saudi Arabia a teen-age princess and her lover were executed in public in 1977. In Pakistan in 1987, a 25-year-old carpenter’s daughter was sentenced to be stoned to death for engaging in unmarried sex. In the United Arab Emirates in 1984, a cook and a maid were sentenced to stoning for adultery — but, as a show of mercy, the execution was postponed until after the maid’s baby was born.

— In 1983 in Darkley, Northern Ireland, Catholic terrorists with automatic weapons burst into a Protestant church on a Sunday morning and opened fire, killing three worshipers and wounding seven. It was just one of hundreds of Catholic-Protestant ambushes that have taken 2,600 lives in Ulster since age-old religious hostility turned violent again in 1969.

— Hindu-Muslim bloodshed erupts randomly throughout India. More than 3,000 were killed in Assam province in 1983. In May 1984 Muslims hung dirty sandals on a Hindu leader’s portrait as a religious insult. This act triggered a week of arson riots that left 216 dead, 756 wounded, 13,000 homeless, and 4,100 in jail.

— Religious tribalism — segregation of sects into hostile camps — has ravaged Lebanon continuously since 1975. News reports of the civil war tell of “Maronite Christian snipers,” “Sunni Muslim suicide bombers,” “Druze machine gunners,” “Shi’ite Muslim mortar fire,” and “Alawite Muslim shootings.” Today 130,000 people are dead and a once-lovely nation is laid waste.

— In Nigeria in 1982, religious fanatic followers of Mallam Marwa killed and mutilated several hundred people as heretics and infidels. They drank the blood of some of the victims. When the militia arrived to quell the violence, the cultists sprinkled themselves with blessed powder that they thought would make them impervious to police bullets. It didn’t.

— Today’s Shi’ite theocracy in Iran — “the government of God on earth” — decreed that Baha’i believers who won’t convert shall be killed. About 200 stubborn Baha’is were executed in the early 1980s, including women and teenagers. Up to 40,000 Baha’is fled the country. Sex taboos in Iran are so severe that: (1) any woman who shows a lock of hair is jailed; (2) Western magazines being shipped into the country first go to censors who laboriously black out all women’s photos except for faces; (3) women aren’t allowed to ski with men, but have a separate slope where they may ski in shrouds.

— The lovely island nation of Sri Lanka has been turned hellish by ambushes and massacres between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils.

— In 1983 a revered Muslim leader, Mufti Sheikh Sa’ad e-Din el’Alami of Jerusalem, issued a fatwa (an order of divine deliverance) promising an eternal place in paradise to any Muslim assassin who would kill President Hafiz al-Assad of Syria.

— Sikhs want to create a separate theocracy, Khalistan (Land of the Pure), in the Punjab region of India. Many heed the late extremist preacher Jarnail Bhindranwale, who taught his followers that they have a “religious duty to send opponents to hell.” Throughout the 1980s they sporadically murdered Hindus to accomplish this goal. In 1984, after Sikh guards riddled prime minister Indira Gandhi with 50 bullets, Hindus went on a rampage that killed 5,000 Sikhs in three days. Mobs dragged Sikhs from homes, stores, buses and trains, chopping and pounding them to death. Some were burned alive; boys were castrated.

— In 1984 Shi’ite fanatics who killed and tortured Americans on a hijacked Kuwaiti airliner at Tehran Airport said they did it “for the pleasure of God.”

And on and on.  Hey, if you think the religious guys are out for blood, you should see the heinous atrocities of the ones who aren't:  Communist China, Stalinist Soviet Union, Cambodia's Pol Pot.  First off, man's inhumanity to man is endless.  We are without question barbaric savages.  When Klaatu deactivates Gort, somehow a part of me wishes he'd told it to go ahead and destroy earth.  But then Day the Earth Stood Still was made in 1951 and I wouldn't have been born yet.  So no me.  I recall to this day looking at a Newsweek magazine at the Mary and seeing a series of pictures of a Nicaraguan rebel soldier being slowly stabbed during their Revolution.  Lots of time to reflect on his fate as the knife slowly went in. He was on his back in his soon-to-be-grave as a guy on the ground is pushing the knife down while the poor guy in the hole is pushing it up.  He lost the fight.  It was a three or four panel thing at I remember it to this day. We are base, cruel, unforgiving and murderous.  And yet we have had religion for some 2000 years - everyone has.  All major ones were hatched, more or less, in ancient times.  Has it had an impact, any bearing at all on our conduct?  Our approach to each other?  

I am not denigrating religion, far from it.  For millions upon millions it has made personal lives maybe a little better.  A balm of sort.  It has made their subservience, their poverty, their diseases, their impending deaths a little easier to bear.  The hope of everlasting life sure beats eternal nothingness, so religion says.

The problem isn't religion.  The problem is using religion as a means to an end.  We can justify almost any inhumane act through the prism of theology.  The Bible, a conglomeration of stories and histories, was authored by at least 40 people and likely many many anonymous ones as well.  Each had their own slant or bias.  Each is colored by their times and culture.  Cherry picking a single sentence to back your personal or organization bias is rampant.  Name any modern subject and you can likely enhance or denigrate.  All of the torturous acts listed in this piece were backed by Biblical, cultural or theological tenets.

I have problems with aspects of religion but beware anyone who quotes the Bible to reinforce their particular stance.  There is likely another that refutes it.  It takes a critical eye and open mind to see the differences.