(July 28, 2023 at 11:53 pm)Nishant Xavier Wrote: I gave the example of those Native Indians in America who had never heard of Christ but were sincerely serving God and loving their neighbor before Missionary Priests met with them. Then they heard about the True God who loves them with Perfect Love and wants to give them Eternal Happiness and became Christian.
This is beyond horrible watering down of history and atrocities committed on Native Americans in the name of Christ.
When missionaries came to the Americas, the Aztecs and Inca were destroyed, and their peoples were 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"