Or the conflicts of the Early Church, or the brutality of the state-controlled Church of the Roman Empire, or Charlemagne, or the Crusades, or colonization in America, or the Thirty Years' War, or...
He's never heard of it. Because he's oblivious to history.
Oblivious to history, but still willing to flap his gums on it. Amazing how consistently that seems to be the case.
"If it was worth knowin, they'da taught it in school!"
My man should watch Sugarcane. I’d bet those poor kids wished the priests were only threatening them with knives.
You could name any time a Christian came to a new land. Guaranteed they did their best to dismantle the local everything in order to spread Christianity because why would they be peaceful when instead they could indoctrinate people?
Knife-point, sword point, gunpoint, gallows, guillotine, poison, several other more gruesome methods, Christianity has done it all.
No, you wouldn't have heard of it if you're willfully ignorant.
Or colonisation in Africa or South America, or in Australia and New Zealand, or basically everywhere xtians have gone. Amongst their mandates in the bible is to spread their beliefs to ‘lower’ cultures, after all. Ya know, to ‘save’ them.
Or the Holocaust – fun fact, Hitler wasn’t atheist, that’s just one more thing xtians lie about to distance themselves from it; the Nazis required prayers in school, included it in their oaths, and steeped their iconography in it.
It’s insane how many widespread genocides have their roots in this toxic mythology.
e: there are some extreme recent examples, too, like the guy who tried bringing Jesus to the North Sentinelese, with tragically predictable results. But he believed in the mission, just like the rest of the brainwashed. Unfortunately they’re going to kill us instead of themselves.
The Hitler thing is complicated. He was in broad terms a Christian early on (though a sect that denied Jesus as divine, and recast him as an aryan), but there is little evidence Hitler believed in anything in his whole life except for Nazism, his mother, and the Opera. This then was largely as a power play - he ultimately saw organised religion as a locus of control and later an existential threat to the authority of the Third Reich. When his proposed Reich Church failed to materialise, he lost interest in the religious angle, and by 1937 was foretelling the ultimate struggle between Nazism and Christianity, ending with the latter’s destruction. 2,700 members of the clergy were imprisoned in a special barracks at Dachau.
It’s really not complicated. Christians have just tried to make it so for a long time.
There’s overwhelming evidence that Hitler was a staunch Christian: the man himself said:
We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian.
I get annoyed when people denigrate reading or owning Mein Kampf – everyone should read it. The myths of Hitler have overshadowed the truths, and we need to learn from the truths.
His movement was one of a religious zealot taking those beliefs to extremes, which involved the decimation of another in the Abrahamic triad, as happens with alarming regularity.
Hardcore christians tend to be less educated. Not always. Some of them are highly educated, yet live in a state of delerium. But a lot of them are as stupid as Marjorie Taylor Green, who thought qanon posts about secret satanic cabals were pronounced "cables." We have absolute morons in the seats of power. Making consequential decisions. Forcing society to be worse and worse and worse. I hate the world. I especially hate the USA (my country).
Also, just being the wrong type of Christian in the 14th and 15th centuries was a good way to get burnt at the steak or hung if you weren't willing to convert to whichever was currently in fashion with the monarch.
I hate when Christians burn the steak.
Yeah, the Inquisition hated it too...
It never happened so long as you don't count the past 2000 years of history.
Oh buddy let me tell you about the Magdalene Laundries...
They're all the same God too which adds a level of "what the fuck?"
Yep, the Jewish/Christian/Muslim feud is second to weirdness only to the feuds inside each one of those 3.
Christianity is pretty much the main religion to have practiced swordpoint conversion. Heck, even the schisms within the faith loved to burn people to death for not renouncing/embracing the Pope.
By contrast, Islam often took a carrot rather than stick approach with a two-tier society where conversion bestowed additional rights.
they always told me that Islam spread by sword killing everyone who didn't convert,
then casually mention how much jews thrived in Al Andaluz, or how there were Jewish communities in Palestine that thrived there since the Roman empire collapsed. and Jews who were in Yemen for thousands of years. and Marroco....
Almost like despite a non Muslim tax, Islam was actually tolerant.
and it is modern Neocolonialism they pushes for theocratic dictatorships in arab countries to secure oil.
Both Islam and Christianity varied wildly in their approach by region. Islam certain has many 'conversion by the sword' incidents, some lasting centuries of brutality, and Christianity, likewise, has plenty of periods of co-existence.
One of the core issues, I think, is that we generally think of European Christianity, whose history is largely intolerant until the Protestant Reformation, and even after that often quite brutal; whereas Christianity in the East and in Africa very often included institutionalized coexistence with other faiths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden?wprov=sfla1
The time 4500 saxons were beheaded and thrown in a river during the Frankish forced conversion of the germanic pagans to christianity
Christopher Lee!!!
question, given that Christianity was forced on enslaved populations, why didn't freed slaves ditch Christianity and try to go back to their African traditions.
I know some black communities did that. but if expect that the majority of them would ditch Christianity, not a minority
Learn about Aretha Franklin. The reason is because black people developed large Christian networks that helped their communities. Back then, if you were black and wanted to travel to another state, not every town was safe and you couldn't stay at hotels. So they'd call their churches and stay with other members of the church, and get advice through their churches on which towns to avoid. To this day many black people stipp network through their churches, which gave them a lot of safety.
Christianity, interestingly enough, was not strongly forced on enslaved populations in the US. In the early Colonies, the concept that keeping Christians, specifically, as slaves was still a subject that was frowned upon, so many slavers actually took steps to prevent their slaves from converting, which directly led to several modern syncretic faiths as slaves attempted to keep their own traditions alive, while gleaning what they could from the religious standards of society around them.
By the foundation of the US, the Christianization of slaves had become a hot topic, with slavery supporters often coming out against it, either by the creation of a slaver pseudoclerical class which would 'interpret' it for the slaves (ideally in a way that kept them 'in their place') or by the total denial of resources of Christianity to enslaved peoples. By contrast, many abolitionists were strongly Christian, and one of the common illegal activities of abolitionists in the US was teaching slaves how to read, particularly the Bible, and organizing underground churches wherein slaves could operate their own services and lead their own congregations.
Christianity, as such, was seen by slaves largely as less of the enforced, slaver's faith, and more as simply the faith of the land that slavers denied slaves.
damn,
thanks, very interesting read.
appreciate it, and hope others with the same question read it
Do they mean it isn't said in the Bible that Christians are required to forcibly convert people?
Which why is this being limited to one inquisition from one nation?
The Spanish Inquisition is simply the best-known.
Protestants: "Ahh but that was Catholicism. And Catholicism isn't Christian."
picard-facepalm.gif
I totally get the satire in your comment but I just wanna say, the forced Christianization of indigenous Americans was definitely carried out by Protestants.
edit: I guess Protestants didn't have widespread, overt "accept baptism or we'll execute you on the spot" policies like some Catholic missions in the Americas, but the result of forced relocation and family separation was much the same. When they force people onto a reservation on an inhospitable plot of land half a continent away from their homes, and then withhold aid unless they accept Christ as their savior, they might as well be saying "convert or die." Same goes for using the natives' "heathenry" as part of the justification for wars and war crimes.
I'm basically a secular humanist, and I've heard the statement that Catholics aren't Christians, in person, a few times. The two times that come to mind were from very different people (a Chinese Christian that lives in Beijing, and a Canadian Christian that lives on an apple orchard in southern Ontario). Both of whom were coworkers I spent some time with while travelling for work (different jobs, about 10 years apart).
I've always shut it down as a wildly offensive thing to say, and not worthy of discussing. So I've never gotten a real explantion for why some Christians believe it. Is it a common opinion?
Evangelicals sometimes hold to it - basically, there's a whole 'thing' about nuda scriptura amongst certain protestant sects, especially those which gained prominence in the modern US in the 19th century. In the minds of these sects, by nuda scriptura - 'bare scripture' - there's only one authority on theology, and that is the Bible, interpreted literally. To them, then, the entire Old World church hierarchies and traditions are some bizarre Satanist plot to lead Christians astray by NOT following ONLY the Bible and nothing but the Bible.
Catholics tend to emphasize things like Church tradition, and even reason (gasp), as means of constructing theology, while Old World-originated protestants sects, like Lutherans, tend to view the Bible as the highest but not only source of theology (sola scriptura). To New World sect evangelicals, the latter is misguided but essentially harmless; the former is (though they would never use this term, instead preferring to denigrate their enemies as not Christians at all) heresy.
I grew up catholic in the Midwest. Yeah it's a thing some protestants believe. They think catholics worship Mary, the saints, and/or the devil. It's the sort of thing you see from the sorts of protestants who are fucking insane.
My great grandma's funeral was hijacked by the preacher to tell the catholic side of the family that we were all going to hell. She didn't even believe in that sect, my great aunt just abused her into it when she had dementia. It was the sort of sect where there's no drinking or dancing at weddings and women aren't allowed to wear panted garments.