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!!!
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?
It never happened so long as you don’t count the past 2000 years of history.
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.
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.
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.
No, you wouldn’t have heard of it if you’re willfully ignorant.
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.
My parents’ church went at it from a ‘the saints are demons’ angle. Something about how praying to the saints for intercession was somehow in violation of the ‘no gods before me’ commandment. But this was the NAR, which is just fuckin weird to begin with.
I’ve heard it coming from hardcore Mormons, which I found hilariously ironic - seeing as how pretty much every other Christian Church/denomination doesn’t see them as Christians.
Mormonism rejects the Trinity and you get your own magical planet/become like God when you die. I think most Christians would find that profoundly heretical.
The church has mostly been doing a propaganda campaign to present themselves as just another denomination of Christianity, but Adam-God and the spirit wives is just gross and weird.
“Hey ladies! The best afterlife you get is pumping out babies with all of your husbands other wives for all of eternity!”
Yeah, that pivot they are attempting is wild. They are trying to cozy up to all the evangelicals and think they can pull some Jeff mind truck to make them forget all the crazy shit they taught from bygone years.
Do they really think the other churches will forget about the golden tablets, Adam-God, moon quakers, sun people, ‘elders’ becoming gods of their own planet/Galaxy/universe, rocks in hats, weird salamanders, etc etc. Because they won’t. (I didn’t mention polygamy or the underage girl hoarding because I’m pretty sure that’s an objective quite a few evangelical leaders hope to achieve eventually.)
The other churches are at best using them in the short term and will ditch them as soon as the LDS Church serves no further purpose. But the church leaders are so high on their own farts that they can comprehend that fact.
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.
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!”
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.
That quote comes from a speech in 1928, which is indeed the period in which he was trying to use religion to bring about a rise to power. Relatively soon after this, however, he realised his consolidation of religion wasn’t going to happen, and moved on to other things. By the end of the 1930s, the Reich was pretty anti-religion.
I’m sorry, but this reads as the many, many coping ‘readings’ that try to downplay his overt Christianity.
I get it, and I’m not trying to attack you, but this is just wrong.
He did not convert in the years after this quote, as can be evidenced by his favouring of the church up to the end days, the Catholic Church supporting his efforts due to mutual reciprocity, his integration of christian teachings and outright requirements into the Nazi requirements (including requirements for medals), continued iconography, etc.
I’m sorry if it hurts, but Hitler was a Christian, and you can’t say his own words don’t matter because a quote is from a few years before he took power.
By the end of the 1930s, the Reich was pretty anti-religion.
They objectively weren’t. Can I ask where you’re getting that impression?
I’m sorry if it hurts, but Hitler was a Christian, and you can’t say his own words don’t matter because a quote is from a few years before he took power.
Do his words and actions which contradict that after he took power not matter by comparison?
Hitler was only a Christian insofar as he revered a figure called Jesus Christ to some degree. That he rejected nearly every common theological thread of Christianity, from Biblical authority, to the divinity of Christ, to the authority of any church, to questions of salvation of the soul, to pacifism, to Jesus’s very existence as a Jew, should very much cast into question any characterization of Hitler as a Christian in any serious sense.
Do his words and actions which contradict that after he took power not matter by comparison?
Which words and actions? Do you have sources?
Every time I’ve heard this, nobody can give actual sources. I can, though, for everything from a sanctioned christian state to the individual regulations for official Nazi groups and the delegation of medals. For instance:
Before 1933, in fact, some bishops prohibited Catholics in their dioceses from joining the Nazi Party. This ban was dropped after Hitler’s March 23, 1933, speech to the Reichstag in which he described Christianity as the “foundation” for German values. The Centre Party was dissolved as part of the signing of a 1933 Concordat between the Vatican and Nazi governmental representatives, and several of its leaders were murdered in the Röhm purge in July 1934.
Do you have sources to refute this?
E: sorry, I just saw you’re not my original interlocutor. I’m not trying to be adversarial here.
Which words and actions? Do you have sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler
296 citations there.
That Hitler used Christianity, and that Christians supported Hitler in exchange for preferential treatment and asspats, is not the same as saying that Hitler was a Christian in any realistic sense. Like Mussolini converting to Catholicism and persecuting atheists after a lifetime of personal atheism, fascists will use anything and anyone, and likewise say anything in public, to get their slimy hands on the power to brutalize more people.
I’m an enemy of Christianity on multiple levels, and Christians, both the protestant conservatives and Zentrum Catholics, were an instrumental part of enabling Hitler, and many became enthusiastic Nazis, but Hitler himself was not, realistically speaking, a Christian.
Knife-point, sword point, gunpoint, gallows, guillotine, poison, several other more gruesome methods, Christianity has done it all.
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
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
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.
Which why is this being limited to one inquisition from one nation?
The Spanish Inquisition is simply the best-known.
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).
Oh buddy let me tell you about the Magdalene Laundries…
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…
