RE: Is Christianity a Pacifistic Religion?
September 16, 2018 at 6:26 am
(This post was last modified: September 16, 2018 at 6:27 am by Fake Messiah.)
(September 16, 2018 at 6:08 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: Not in theory:
Quote:Matthew 5:46-48
46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
But very much in practice.
Except the parts where Jesus is angry Luke 19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me
And indeed take the time of forty-two years after Columbus's arrival, the Aztec and Inca empires had been destroyed, and their peoples enslaved or murdered. As Bartolomeo Las Casas noted Catholics killed children, slit open the bellies of pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and set fire to villages in the night. They trained dogs to go into the jungles where the Indians had fled and to tear them to pieces. Men were sent to work in gold and silver mines, chained together by iron collars. When a man died, his body was cut from the chain, while his companions on either side continued working. Most Indians did not last more than three weeks in the mines. Women were raped and disfigured in front of their husbands.
The favored form of mutilation was to slice chins and noses. Las Casas told how one woman, seeing the Spanish armies advancing with their dogs, hanged herself with her child. A soldier arrived, cut the child in two with his sword, gave one half to his dogs, then asked a friar to administer last rites so that the infant would be assured a place in Christ’s heaven.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"