Continued from last week
Scroll down a few centuries to 1398 and we find Timur destroying the city
of Delhi, but before the battle, Timur executed
more than 100,000 captives from the city of Tulamba. A century later, Timur’s descendant,
Babur, founded the Mogul dynasty that ruled most of India as a Muslim domain until
1862.
Certainly such wholesale slaughters are a thing of the past! Look again.
In 1971 well after independence and the partition of India,
West Pakistan tried to stamp out an independence movement in East Pakistan by
initiating a crackdown on Bangladesh’s
aspirations for independence. Pakistani military and supporting militias killed
as many as 3,000,000 people and raped as many as 400,000 Bangladeshi women. One
million fled to India.
This is admittedly political violence, but can you conceive of a current
western army raping 400,000 women?
These are certainly not isolated incidents. Just three months before this
writing, in November 2014, Jihadists killed around 5,000 people in Syria, Africa
and elsewhere, according to best estimates. THAT’S FIVE THOUSAND (5,000) IN ONE
MONTH. ONE MONTH!!! A good rule of thumb
is that Muslim armies and individuals kill 170 people a day in obedience to
what they claim is the command of God. There are about 25 wars currently raging;
21 involve Muslims. These things are all easily verifiable. Look it up. Let’s
look at the score.
There has been only one Islamic war against the rest of the world. It has
lasted 1,400 years. In the 1,400 years of continuous Jihad 80 million Hindus,
60 million Christians, 10 million Buddhists and 120 million Africans have
perished for a grand Islamic total of 270 million.
In the Crusades 1096 - 1272, perhaps 3 million died. That’s it, 3,000,000 in 2,000 years. These are the only
wars waged by Christians as religious wars against non-Christians. The other
wars of Christianity have been mostly directed against fellow Christians and
have been largely political. In the
peasants’ revolt in reformation Germany
approximately 150,000. In the Thirty
Years war between German Protestants and German Catholics, maybe 6 million
died. The French wars of religion killed just short of 3 million. In the
English Puritan war against fellow Protestant and the Catholics of Ireland
(1642–1651) about 700,000 died and let’s throw in the witch burnings for good
measure (about 50,000 in the 1600’s) and the ever popular Spanish Inquisition
which comes in at a disappointing 3,000 in the four centuries of its existence
between 1478 and 1834. Incidentally the Spanish Inquisition burned almost no
witches. They mostly thought it was nonsense. (I have not included the
Indigenous American Holocaust in the total. It is impossible to sort out the
horrific death toll, but the vast majority of it was due to disease brought by
European contact with indigenous Americans who had no resistance to European
disease. It can be argued that, in most cases, in Latin
America, Catholic missionaries struggled to save the indigenous
populations from economic and political oppression. The same cannot be said of
English speaking America.
So the death toll of all Christian religious wars whether waged against
non-Christians or fellow Christians comes to a grand total of 12,953,000.
So, by the numbers it seems that Islam is 20 times more violent than
Christianity. I am not trying to say
that we Christians, having the lower score have won as if in a horrific game of
golf. I am horrified that almost 13 million people have been killed to defend a
religion that had no armies and fought no wars for its first four centuries.
These numbers horrify me because I am a Christian and I deplore unnecessary
violence. The Gospel of Christ was
spread very successfully by an evangelism that involved preaching, teaching,
exorcisms and charismatic healings. Violence was abhorrent to the first
followers of Jesus and was never part of the first spreading of the Gospel. It
was most certainly NOT abhorrent to the first followers of Mohammed.
Religiously motivated violence seems integral to the development of Islam.
Muhammad had about 100 followers until he took up the sword in Medina to spread his new faith.
I resent being told that Christianity is as violent as Islam. It just
isn’t true. Muhammad was a conqueror. Jesus was a carpenter. I suspect that
non-Muslim apologists for Islam say what they wish were true, as if saying it
made it so. When will we stop kidding ourselves?
Rev. Know-it-all
P.S. As to the general horribleness of the human species I refer you
to: “Rev. Know-it-all “Isn't religion
the reason for war?”
Next week: a handy guide to Christian wars of religion
Posts
