A spirit of love?

Posted in: OPINION

On January 6, 2009 – the Mille Lacs Messenger published the following letter of mine. It was "the letter of the week".

Throughout the history of Christianity has this religion been a religion of love and peace, or a religion of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, grand theft of non-Christian peoples’ lands and natural resources, evangelization by violent coercion, hateful white racist attitudes and behaviors that have caused its white adherents to dominate and exploit people of other races, inappropriate proselytizing attitudes and behaviors, hateful Euro-centric bigotry, demeaning male chauvinistic subjugation and exploitation of women, destructive anti-environmental attitudes and behaviors toward the natural world, extreme anti-Semitic oppression, truth hiding schemes and agendas,  greedy money loving and hateful war mongering colonial and imperialistic attitudes and horrific atrocities?

For centuries Christian nations have been brutally beating up one Muslim nation after another. In the Middle Ages they came as crusaders. They colonized many Muslim countries and tried to destroy their cultures and religion. The French killed about a million Muslims in Algeria because they wanted independence. Our nation and Britain have killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim Iraqis. Christian Serbs killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and raped thousands of women in Bosnia and Kosovo. Israel has been for half a century destroying the Palestinian people with the help of arms as well as financial and moral support provided by our nation. And a past president of ours needed to divert attention away from his sex scandal so he bombed Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq — because he knew that this would be approved by a vast majority of our nation’s population, including a majority of our nation’s Christian population.

Muslims ruled Spain for about 850 years and during this time they lived with Jews and Christians in a spirit of tolerance and cooperation. But the moment Christians took over and the Muslims consequently became the weaker segment of the population, the hate in the Catholics’ hearts came out with a vengeance. Muslims were either killed, converted, or forced to leave Spain and their heritage was destroyed.

The horrible treatment of the heretics and witches in the Middle Ages is an example of how hateful Christians have been. The native peoples of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand bear a tragic witness to what Christian nations have done.  Christian Western nations have fought two world wars with tens of millions dead and untold misery for the living.  The first nation to make a weapon of mass destruction and the only one to use it is a Christian nation, and it was used to kill innocent civilians.

The most cruel tyrant in history [Hitler] came from a Christian country and there has been no shortage of other somewhat less ruthless dictators in Christian countries, especially in South America and Africa.

In South Africa the inhuman system of apartheid was maintained by the church-going white community with the blessing of the churches and indeed the apartheid was practiced by the churches themselves.

The European slave trade was instigated by Pope Nicolas V..  In a 15th Century papal bull he instructed European Christian nations to “invade, capture, vanquish” and “subdue” Indigenous Peoples, “subjugate” them and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery” and “to take away all their possessions and property.” And this papal bull has still not been revoked. Where is the papal granted moral right for indigenous peoples to own land and be independent sovereign nations? When we look at what Christian nations have done, and are still doing, any validity in their claim of being people of love and peace vanishes.

Thomas Dahlheimer
Wahkon

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