It takes religion to make a good person do evil things.
“I think that on the balance the moral influence of religion has been awful. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil — that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg
Looking back on the Crusades, how can we deny that the inhuman torture imposed upon people by other people was entirely because of religion? The very religion which is supposedly the “moral majority” in the United States today. It was believed that Satan gave his followers strength, so although they screamed in agony and begged for mercy, they really felt no pain. The devices and techniques of torture from those times are so horrific as to make the atrocities of the war in Iraq seem innocent.
Those people who committed those acts considered themselves good, moral people. They believed in the word of the bible with unshakable faith. And that is exactly why they did things which were pure evil. There is no chance to blame this on a few nuts — these were actions sanctioned by the church. Even worse, they were doing these things to people who believed in the same god, just differently.
Happily, Christians no longer consider it okay to torture people for believing different things about religion than they do, just as they reject the barbaric commandments in the bible, like stoning their children to death for disobedience. Now that nearly no Christians actually follow the bible, (they’d probably be in prison if they did), maybe we can get them to put it down and read some non-fiction.
Now the major problem is undeniably Islam. The Muslims aren’t really doing anything worse than the Christians did, and definitely nothing worse than the god of the old testament. The problem is simply that they are still taking their book literally, which Christians have pretty much given up on.
As long as they believe in a book which says that Allah chose some people and not others, and that the chosen people must dominate in this life and the next, there is no hope for peace. May we yet choose knowledge over ignorance.
