"Several years ago I went to St. Petersburg, Russia, where some of my family was from, and I felt as if I didn’t belong at all. It didn’t look as if it had changed much since the early 1900s, when the pogroms there convinced my family to get the hell out. In these pogroms, organized gangs of Russians terrorized and killed more than a few Jews. My Aunt Sonia suffered six saber wounds during one of these attacks. Luckily, her sister, my grandmother, had come to America at the age of sixteen and made enough money to bring her here before a seventh saber wound could be delivered. I can’t even imagine a time when people used sabers, let alone what would possess the Russians to go after my ancestors, who weren’t what one would call practicing Jews."
~ Lewis Black
~ Lewis Black
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"