A friend of mine once told me that Religion has done more harm than good to the world and that It has been used as an excuse for committing some of the worst atrocities imaginable.
The list below highlights 7 of this atrocities
7. BUDHISM BURMA
When the capital of Burma was moved to Mandalay, 56 “spotless” men were ordered to be buried beneath the new city walls to sanctify and protect the city, as if that was not bad enough, when two burial spots was discovered empty, the royal astrologers decreed that 500 men, women, boys, and girls must be killed and buried at once, or the capital must be abandoned.
About 100 were actually buried before British governors stopped the ceremonies
6. SHARIA LAW
Islamic religious law decrees that thieves shall have their hands or feet chopped off, and unmarried lovers shall be killed.
In the Sudan in 1983 and 1984, 66 thieves were axed in public.
A moderate Muslim leader, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was hanged for heresy in 1985 because he opposed these amputations of the criminals.
In Saudi Arabia a teenage princess and her lover were executed in public in 1977.
In Pakistan in 1987, a 25-year-old carpenter’s daughter was sentenced to be stoned to death for engaging in premarital sex.
In the United Arab Emirates in 1984, a cook and a maid were sentenced to stoning for adultery — but, as a show of mercy, the execution was postponed until after the maid’s baby was born.
5. MAYAN PAGAN SACRIFICE
Maya culture was the ritual offering of nourishment to their gods; Due to its redness, blood was viewed as a potent source of nourishment for the Maya deities, and the sacrifice of a living creature was a powerful blood offering. By extension, the most important Maya rituals culminated in human sacrifice.A number of methods were employed by the Maya, the most common being decapitation and heart extraction. Additional forms of human sacrifice included ritually shooting the victim with arrows, hurling sacrifices into a deep sinkhole, entombing alive to accompany a noble burial, tying the sacrifice into a ball and disembowelment.
4. ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE
In 1209 pope innocent III launched an armed crusade against catharism in southern frnace.
When the besieged city of beziers fell, soldiers reportedly asked their papal adviser how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel amongst the captives. He commanded “kill them all. God will know his own”. Nearly 20,000 people were slaughtered on that day.
3. ISLAMIC JIHADS (HOLY WARS)
Mandated by the Koran, Islamic jihads killed millions of people over 12 centuries.
For the first century of its existence, Islam was absolutely soaked in blood. The killing only slowed down as the Islamic empire finally ran into boundaries in the 8th century, after about a century of expansionist, imperialist, unprovoked Islamic aggression.
2. THE INQUISITION (CHRISTIANITY)
The Inquisition is a group of institutions within the Roman Catholic Church. Tracing back to the 12th- century, the goal of the institutions was to combat secular sectarianism.
Aimed at keeping it’s own members “faithful” the Catholic Church began holding trials for those with non-mainstream beliefs within the church and for a long period of time, engaging in torture to coerce the individual to conform.
In cases where no repentance was received, the death penalty was used as punishment.
All in all there were an estimated 300,000 people put on trial with about 6,000 being executed.
To sum it up, those who didn’t follow what the church said, including Muslims, Jews, and Protestants, pagans etc were found, questioned, and killed.
1. THE CRUSADES (CHRISTIANITY)
The Crusades were a series of conquests undertaken by various Christian groups ranging from 1095 AD to 1453 AD. Though the numbers aren’t conclusive there were an estimated 1 to 3 million deaths from these campaigns. While some historians see the Crusades as a defensive action against Islamic conquest, most see them as a papal-led expansion attempt by Western Christendom.
