I posted this nice medieval hymn this morning, Gaudete: “Rejoice, for Jesus Christ is born of Mary.” But I didn’t post the comments that came with it.
This one in particular: “All that burning and boiling people alive just for thinking freely–it makes me sick!”
Religious wars perpetrated by Christians, mostly against other Christians, were indeed a monstrous sin. But they’ve kind of gone out of fashion since the 1600s, and it’d probably be pretty hard to get one started up today. Like, we don’t do that anymore. And it never, never, never had anything to do with Jesus Christ or His teachings in the first place!
But just to set the record straight–Dude, move to China and try to do some “thinking freely” over there, and see what happens to you. See if your ignorance will protect you there.
In the 20th century alone, more people were murdered by their own socialist governments (“Nazi” is short for “National Socialist”; you could look it up) than were killed by all the world’s religions in all the preceding centuries put together. We don’t have an exact count, but demographers and historians are sure it’s more than 100 million–all done to death by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot–and in peacetime, no less.
There are many people still alive who saw it. But there’s no one left over from the Thirty Years War.
Europe’s religious wars of the 16th-17th centuries were sins against God, against His holy catholic church, and against the human race. You can blame them on bad Christians, but not on Jesus Christ or anything He said or did. We repent, and pray such things never happen again.
But when was the last time you heard a communist repent?
