Christian history…101

When Alfred North Whitehead was the Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University he made this observation: “Christian theology has been the greatest disaster in the history of the human race.” Was he correct?

A brief review:

• 391 A.D. Christians burn down one of the world’s greatest libraries in Alexandria that housed over 700,000 scrolls.
• 1099: Christian crusaders take Jerusalem and massacre Jews and Muslims. In the streets were piles of heads, hands and feet. Millions were killed as a result of the Crusades.
• 1208: Pope Innocent orders a Crusade against the French Cathars. Over 100,000 were killed by Arnaud’s men at Beziers.
• 1231: Pope Gregory 1X establishes the Inquisition. Inquisitors were given license to explore every means of horror and cruelty. Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive. Ovens built to kill people, made famous by Nazi Germany, were first used in the Christian Inquisition of Eastern Europe. The gruesome tortures used on hundreds of thousands of non-Christians were so repugnant and horrible that I cannot even describe them to you.
• 1377: The Pope’s army descended on the Italian town of Cessna. For three days and nights beginning on February 3, the slaughter continued. The squares were filled with blood. Women were raped, ransom was placed on children, and priceless works of art destroyed. Over 3000 were butchered.
• 1497: The Church began an enormous burning in Florence. The works of Latin and Italian poets, illuminated manuscripts, women’s ornaments, musical instruments, and paintings were all burned.
• 1500′s: The witch hunts are going full speed ahead. Members of the clergy proudly report how many they have killed. The Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov bragged that he had killed over 20,000 of the horrible “devil worshippers.” Historians estimate that more than nine million (NINE MILLION) persons were executed after 1484, mostly women. This was as brutal as anything that happened in the Nazi’s 20th century holocaust.
• 1572: On St. Bartholomew’s Day, over 10,000 Protestants are slaughtered in France. “We rejoice that you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics.” wrote Pope Gregory X111.

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The torpid, mindless mass

The question for today is at the heart of the problem we face as a nation. It is exactly the same question that was requested for my lectures at the University of Alabama Conference Center several years ago. I was asked to explore Carl Jung’s question: “Why are so many millions willing and eager to turn their lives over to outside authorities?”

Why are so many today, without thinking, willing to turn their mind/brain…soul/spirit…over to outside individuals, institutions, authorities and ideologies? Whether it be to Osama bin Laden or whether it be to Christian, Muslim and Jewish authorities of dogma, or whether it be to Republican or Democratic dogma…or whatever the outside authority or institution might be that is telling you what to think, what to believe and how to live your life.

Carl Jung put it this way in his essays: “It is a delusion when the Christian churches try to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce him or her to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him or her out of the torpid, mindless mass and making it clear that he, or she, is the one important factor. Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man, or woman, who is as well organized in his/her individuality as the mass itself.”
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Free of the biblical God

Blessed are the Atheists, Agnostics, Deists, Mystics, Humanists, Free Thinkers, Taoist, Buddhist and all others who do not have an archaic, primitive God in their mind/brains.

Blessed are they for they do not believe that a God is on their side.
Blessed are they for they do not participate in holy wars, Jihads or Crusades.
Blessed are they for they would never be martyrs for the “Glory of God”.
Blessed are they for they do not condemn others as heretics or infidels.
Blessed are they for they do not conduct inquisitions nor slaughter millions of women as “witches”.
Blessed are they who do not participate in sectarian violence, nor harass little Catholic school girls walking through their neighborhood.
Blessed are they who do not twist biblical words to condemn homosexuality as a sin, nor to condemn a woman’s right to choose.
Blessed are they who would never say that a terrorist act is God’s punishment against those who do not believe or think as they do.
Blessed are they who know that the only hell that exists is right here on earth created by man. And that it is in man’s hands alone to create a heaven here on earth through intelligence, empathy and love.
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