"If Thine Enemy Offends Thee, Rub Him Out:" The International Battle Cry Of Religion Down Through The Ages

"If Thine Enemy Offends Thee, Rub Him Out:" The International Battle Cry Of Religion Down Through The Ages
Posted By Steve Benson 
 
As author and newspaper editor James A. Haught writes:

"A great irony . . . is that religion--supposedly a source of kindness and human concern--has taken the lead as the foremost contributing factor to hatred, war, and terrorism. With Soviet Communism gone and the Cold War no longer spurring conflicts, the world spotlight has shifted to local ethnic strife, most which involves fractious faiths.

"'Religious tribalism' is a wellspring of trouble. American sociologist Nathan Glazer propounded that ethnicity is the most powerful force in human events. Ethnic conflicts grow from differences in race, language, economics, locale, politics, culture--and religion. Anything that divides people can spawn hostility, and religion is one of the strongest dividers. British anthropologist Desmond Morris, author of 'The Naked Ape,' wrote in his 1977 book 'Manwatching,' that religion is a 'cultural isolating mechanism' because it 'demands social separation from those who worship in a different manner. It creates sects and breeds sectarian violence' ('Manwatching,: A Field Guide to Human Behavior [New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977, p. 149).

"The faith factor is visible in much bloodshed [throughout modern times in various parts of the globe] . . . . .

"The United States itself has escaped major conflict, but it suffers minor wounds of religious tribalism. Various fundamentalist groups are subcultures bonded by their beliefs, some retreating from society while others wage public struggles, picket video stores, or mob abortion clinics. [T]he most extreme U.S. tribalism involves cults living in half-secret compounds, occasionally erupting in murder.

"Religion can produce horrors as well as ethnic warfare. Iran's 'imams' (holy men) . . . increase[d] the bounty offered in their 'fatwa' (religious edict) demanding the assassination of a 'blaspheming' author. An Ohio cultist made human sacrifices of a family of five. Iran's Shi'ites resumed hanging Baha'i believers who refuse[d] to convert. Leaders of a Florida religious sect murdered fourteen defectors and others.

"Rising fundamentalism . . . has also produced tyranny, as seen in Pakistan's 1991 decree that anyone who commit[ted] 'blasphemy' by insulting the Prophet Muhammad w[ould] be hanged. The country's new 'sharia' code, based on the Koran, require[d] women to be stoned to death for extramarital sex, and other offenders to have their hands or feet chopped off.

"Actress Shirley MacLaine, addressing a group of newspaper editors in Baltimore . . . , protested 'the blood-drenched conflicts occurring in the name of God.'

"''It is becoming quite clear that religion is at the heart of so many civil wars and international struggles. People seem willing to kill, maim, torture, and die for a religious or spiritual belief which moves them to believe that their source of the divine is the only source. . . .

"'Consider: In the name of God, a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In the name of God, the bombing of the World Trade Center. In the name of God, the siege at Waco, Texas. In the name of God, Hindus and Muslims kill each other in India. In the name of God, bloody warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. In the name of God, Shi'ites and Sunnis are at each other's throats in Iraq and Iran, as are Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. In the name of God, a doctor is murdered because he believed in a woman's right to choose. In the name of God, what is going on?'

"What's going on is a phenomenon the world avoids discussing, namely, the evil side of religion. Despite the universal belief that religion makes people 'good,' it's obvious that it makes some people commit heinous acts. That phenomenon is ancient. Although religious killing has [lately] surged to the foreground of public consciousness . . ., it has been recurring for centuries in one form or another. Here are just a few historical highlights:

"In the eleventh century, Christian crusaders marched off to attack Muslims occupying the Holy Land, but before leaving, they massacred 'the infidel among us'--Jews living in Germany. After the crusaders took Jerusalem, they slaughtered the whole population and gave thanks to God.

"Some Christian groups in Europe, such as the Cathari and the Waldensians, were declared heretics, and 'internal crusades' were launched against them. (The Cathari, also called Albigenses because of their concentration around Albi, France, were ascetic Christians who believed that the physical world must be shunned as evil. They defied orders from Rome to conform, and were exterminated by more than a century of crusades and persecution. The Waldensians, or Waldenses, followed Peter Waldo, who taught that true believers must live in poverty and preach to everyone. They ignored mandates from Rome that only priests may preach. Thousands of Waldensians were killed for the beliefs, but some descendants survive today). When a crusader army captured the French city of Beziers in 1208, commanders asked the papal legate how to separate the town's condemned Cathari from its faithful residents. The pope's emissary replied: 'Kill them all; God will know his own.' It was done.

"'Jihads' (holy wars) spread as far as Spain and India. No sooner had the conquered peoples been converted than rival Muslim sects began declaring 'jihads' against each other. Shi'ites, Kharijis, Azariqis, Wahhabis, Mahdists, and others waged gory rebellions against the Sunni majority (Shi'ite Muslims broke away from the Sunni mainstream in the seventh century in a dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad after his death. They backed Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, who was rejected as successor, or caliph, and led wars against the majority. Kharijis, or Khawarijis, were embittered followers of Ali who turned against him and eventually murdered him. Azariqis were a fanatic splinter of the Kharijis, who declared that most other Muslims were sinners and must be killed. Wahhabis were followers of Abd al Wahhab, a puritanical eighteenth-century holy man who preached that Islam had become worldly and sinful. Wahhabis waged two centuries of holy wars to 'cleanse' Islam, and finally created the modern nationof Saudi Arabia. Mahdists were followers of Muhammad Ahmad Ibn Assayyid, a nineteenth-century Nile Valley mystic who proclaimed himself the 'Mahdi' (Divinely Guided One) sent to purify Islam. He raised an army and conquered much of Egypt and Sudan before British troops with Maxim guns destroyed the Mahdist forces).

"Jews of Europe lived in peril. Christian councils forced them to wear badges of shame and reside in ghettos. Massacres happened again and again--usually after rumors spread that Jews were sacrificing Christian children in blood rituals, or that Jews were stealing host wafers from Christian churches and driving nails through them to crucify Jesus again.

"The internal crusades against heretics evolved into the Inquisition, which tortured Christians into admitting unorthodoxy, then burned them for it. Later, the Inquisition focused its attention on witchcraft. Hundreds of thousands of women were tortured into confessing that they flew through the sky, changed into animals, copulated with Satan, and the like. Most were executed.

"After the Reformation erupted in 1517, Europe was wracked by dozens of Catholic-Protestant wars. In France, eight wars were fought against the Protestant Huguenots, many of whom were killed in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre during a truce in 1572. The last bloodbath of the Reformation was the Thirty Years War in the 1600s, which killed half the population of Germany. While Catholics and Protestants were waging a century of combat against each other, both sides executed Anabaptists for the crime of double baptism. (Anabaptists held that traditional infant baptism was pointless, since babies couldn't comprehend it, so they rebaptized adult converts. But the other faiths deemed this practice a sacrilege deserving death).

"Pope Pius V typified the religious horror of that era. As Grand Inquisitor he sent troops to kill two thousand Waldensian Protestants in southern Italy. After becoming pope, he sent troops to fight Huguenot Protestants in France, telling the commander to kill all prisoners. He also launched the final crusade against Islam, sending a Christian naval armada to slaughter Muslims in the Battle of Lepanto (off the coast of Greece) in 1571. He also revived the Inquisition to torture suspected heretics. After his death, Pius V was canonized as a saint.

"During the same era, elsewhere in the world, Aztecs were staging human sacrifices by the thousands in Central America, and India's Thugs, religious stranglers, sacrificed up to 20,000 victims each year for the goddess Kali before British rulers eradicated the clandestine cult in the mid-1800s.

"In colonial America, New England's Puritans decreed that Quakers must be put to death as false worshipers. Some who ventured into Massachusetts in the mid-1600s were flogged, tortured, and hanged.

"Another American religious horror was Protestant-Catholic strife that killed twenty Philadelphians in 1844. It erupted because a Catholic bishop wanted Catholic children in public schools to read from Catholic scriptures, not the King James version of the Bible required by education authorities. Thousands of angry Protestants stormed a Catholic neighborhood, burning homes and churches. Martial law was declared. Troops with cannons were sent to guard Catholic churches. Then, amazingly, Protestants took cannons from sailing ships at the Philadelphia docks and fought an artillery duel with the soldiers.

"After the Baha'i religion sprouted in Iran in the 1850s, the Shi'ite Muslim majority called the Baha'is infidels, and inflicted murderous persecution upon them, killing thousands.

"The worst religious calamity in history was the Taiping Rebellion in China in the 1850s, which killed an estimated twenty million people. A holy man declared himself to be Jesus' younger brother and said God, his father, instructed him to 'destroy demons' and make China a theocracy. His Association of God-Worshipers mustered an army of a million followers (partly by promising them shares of the land and loot they seized). They cut a terrible swath. Eventually the rebellion was crushed by opposing armies, including one commanded by British general Charles Gordon, who was dubbed 'Chinese' Gordon for his service in the Orient. (Poor Gordon was cursed by religion. After leaving China, he led an Egyptian army against Muslims waging a holy war in the Nile Valley, and was killed when the fanatics overran Khartoum).

"Christian pogroms against Jews continued into the twentieth century. Europe's nine hundred years of religious slander against Jews branded them as a despised people and set the stage for the Nazi Holocaust.

"Learned people always have known that faith has a potential for horror. Mark Twain wrote: 'Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal who has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal who loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.' Concurring with this view, author W. Somerset Maugham observed in 'A Writer's Notebook': 'What mean and cruel things men do for the love of God.' Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 'Young India': 'The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover or religion or equally noble motives.' Years before, Frederick the Great wrote in a 1787 letter to Voltaire: 'We know the crimes that fanaticism in religion has caused.' Thomas Jefferson said in 1816: 'On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished form moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.' And playwright Eugene Ionesco told 'Esquire' magazine in 1974: 'In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres.'

"In 1890, when Wisconsin believers demanded worship in public schools, the state Supreme Court refused, declaring in its decision in 'Weiss v. District Board' (1890): 'There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, and our government would soon be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed.'

"Clearly, in both past history and current headlines, any observer can see tragedies rooted, to one degree or another, in faith. Of course, not all ethnic conflicts have a religious aspect. . . . However, religion is a divisive factor in so many other human hatreds that some religious figures are sickened by it. [Former] Senator John Danforth, a Republican from Missouri and an Episcopal priest, called for establishment of an international religious Security Council to intercede in such conflicts. Writing in the 'Washington Post' . . . he complained:

''In most of not all of the world's trouble spots, religious extremism is at the heart of the problem. In Israel, Muslims throw rocks at Jews and Jews shoot back at Muslims. In the chaos of Lebanon, religious factions are so numerous it is difficult to keep track of them. In Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant Christians bomb each other as they have for decades. Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan face off against each other, offering the prospect of nuclear weapons if necessary to prove their points. . . .

"'All this killing is done with the absolute certainty that God wants it so. If thine enemy offends thee, rub him out. Indeed, it is believed to to lose one's life in God's cause is to die a martyr's death and win a reward in heaven.'

"The senator's call was echoed . . . at the Parliament of World Religions . . . . More than two hundred delegates from all major faiths adopted a declaration titled 'Toward a Global Ethic,' written by a team headed by Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Kung. It decried: 'Time and again we see leaders and members of religions incite aggression, fanaticism, hate, and xenophobia--even inspire and legitimize violent and bloody conflicts. . . . We are filled with disgust. . . . We condemn aggression and hatred in the name of religion.'

"Rabbi Herbert Schaalman, an organizer of the parliament, said, 'It's so obvious that it hurts--that so many of the things that are wrong in the world are actually due to religious conflicts.' The parliament's chairman, Presbyterian David Ramage, added that, 'Two-thirds of the major conflicts in the world today have religious overtones' [1993]. He expressed hope that the new Global Ethic declaration will cause churches to act in joint opposition 'whenever anyone kills in the name of religion in the future.'

"However, some groups fell into disputes before the Chicago assembly ended, and prospects for unified church action dimmed. At the end, the paradox of religious hate and murder seemed as insoluble as ever. . . .

"[It is amazing,] the [international] frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It is a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant."

(James A. Haught, "Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s," from the Introduction: "The New World Disorder" [Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995], pp.12-22)