"When have you heard Jews, or Christians ..."
You don't hear about it on the Mainstream News but I hear it and see it almost day in day out. If you need a dosage of it on SI, check out Brian's thread.
Subject 56764
Historically we have quite a legacy...
Pagan religion was first prohibited wholesale in 392 by emperor Theodosius. Heavy financial penalities were enacted, but it was not initially very effective. In Theodosius' code it was written:
"We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retributions of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with the divine judgment. "
And later, with regards to Pagan buildings:
“We command that all their fanes, temples, and shrines, if even now any remain entire, shall be destroyed by the command of the magistrates, and shall be purified by the erection of th sign of the venerable Christian religion.”
This resulted in further legislation, culminating in the death penalty for non-Christians in 435.
Following church traditions, Inquisitor Franciso Pena declared in 1578 that:
“We must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution is not to save “
Church leaders supported the suppression, enslavement and murder of native inhabitants - a 1493 papal Bull justfied declaring war on all non-Christian natives in the Americas. Jurist Encisco wrote in 1509:
“The king has every right to send his men to the Indies to demand their territory from these idolaters because he had received it from the pope. If the Indians refuse, he may quite legally fight them, kill them and enslave them, just as Joshua enlsaved the inhabitants of the country of Canaan.”
From 1618 to 1648 Europe experienced The Thirty Years' War which left Germany a wasteland after millions and millions were slaughtered. Catholic armies under the leadership of Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II kept defeating Protestant armies, but then made the mistake of trying to eliminate Protestantism completely, engaging in terrible repression and persecution.
Millions were tortured and slaughtered in the name of Christianity during the periods of the Arian, Donatist and Albigensian heresies
The Crusades: The European armies were saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs: “Kill them all, God will know his own.”
Europe's Reformation and Counter Reformation Era: Two thirds of the Christian population of Europe was slaughtered by Christians
wsu.edu
The African slave trade: Claimed the lives of 10 million
The Colonial Conquests: Estimates for the number of Native Americans slaughtered by the Europeans in North, Central and South America run as high as 20 million within three generations
The 20 th century's Western Civilization took warfare to new extremes: A conservative estimate puts the total number of brutal deaths in the 20 th century at more than 250 million. Of these, Muslims are responsible for less than 10 million deaths. Christians, or those coming from Christian backgrounds account for more than 200 million of these! The greatest death totals come from World War I (about 20 million, at least 90 % of which were inflicted by “Christians”) and World War II ( 90 million, at least 50% of which were inflicted by “Christians,” the majority of the rest occurring in the Far East). Given this grim history, it appears that we Europeans must all come to grips with the fact that Islamic civilization has actually been incomparably less brutal than Christian civilization. Did the Holocaust of over 6 million Jews occur out of the background of a Muslim Civilization?
In the 20th century alone: Western and/or Christian powers have been responsible for at least twenty times more deaths than have Muslim powers. In this most brutal of centuries, we created incomparably more civilian casualties than have Muslims in the whole of Islamic history.
In the 20th century, Rawanda, 1994: Witness the slaughter of 900,000 Rwandans in 1994 in a population that was over 90 % Christian
1992-1995 Bosnia: The genocide of over 300,000 Muslims and systematic rape of over 100,000 Muslim women by Christian Serbs
Western popular culture: It should also be mentioned that although Islam has the concept of legitimate war in self-defense (as does Christianity, and even Buddhism), nowhere in Islamic culture (or in other cultures that survive today) is there latent the idealization, and perhaps idolization, of violence that exists in Western Culture. Westerners think of themselves as peaceful, but in fact the gentleness and sublimity of the New Testament, and the peace-loving nature of the principles of democracy, are scarcely reflected in Western popular culture. Rather, the entire inclination of popular culture— Hollywood movies, Western television, video games, popular music and sports entertainment—is to glorify and inculcate violence. Accordingly, the relative rates of murder (especially random and serial murder) are higher in the Western World (particularly in the U.S., but even in Europe, taken as a whole) than they are in the Islamic world in counties that are not suffering civil wars, and this true despite the much greater wealth of the West.
Saint Augustine’s cognite intrare (“lead them in”—i.e. “force them to convert”). In fact the Qur’an says the exact opposite: There is no compulsion in religion ( 2:256 ). Augustine’s frightening idea that all must be compelled to “conform” to the “true Christian faith” has unleashed centuries of unparalleled bloodshed. Indeed, Christians have suffered more under the rule of Christian civilization than under pre- Christian Roman rule or any other rule in history.
islamicamagazine.com |
