What was wrong with the crusades?
What religion is responsible for the holocaust?
Who slaughtered witches during the middle ages?
My understanding is that the crusades were defensive in nature against aggression from muslims.
I thought the nazi’s were atheist and/or some kind of pagan.
And I believe it was the secular governments who tried and executed witches.
Regarding the Crusades, they were as much political as they were religious, if not more so, especially when considered with the Muslim encroachment into Europe.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
The Crusades were expeditions undertaken, in fulfilment of a solemn vow, to deliver the Holy Places from Mohammedan tyranny.
The idea of the crusade corresponds to a political conception which was realized in Christendom only from the eleventh to the fifteenth century; this supposes a union of all peoples and sovereigns under the direction of the popes. All crusades were announced by preaching. After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church. Crusaders were also granted indulgences and temporal privileges, such as exemption from civil jurisdiction, inviolability of persons or lands, etc. Of all these wars undertaken in the name of Christendom, the most important were the Eastern Crusades.
From Wikipedia:
The Crusades were a series of religious expeditionary wars blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church, with the stated goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem. The Crusades were originally launched in response to a call from the leaders of the Byzantine Empire for help to fight the expansion into Anatolia of Muslim Seljuk Turks who had cut off access to Jerusalem. The crusaders comprised military units of Roman Catholics from all over western Europe, and were not under unified command. The main series of Crusades, primarily against Muslims, occurred between 1095 and 1291. Historians have given many of the earlier crusades numbers. After some early successes, the later crusades failed and the crusaders were defeated and forced to return home.
The Holocaust was not a response from an organized religious sect, at least not an official one. Hitler himself was raised a Catholic, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would call him a good Catholic or Christian.
From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
What the Nazis did was to replace the religion of the majority, Christianity, with Hitler and Nazi beliefs. Many Catholic priests and other clergy were put to death in the camps because they would not kowtow to the Nazi-imposed system.
Hitler was revered almost like a deity and he used that power to try to create scapegoats he could use to enhance his own power and authority.
So, while a religion recognized today wasn’t the driving force behind the holocaust, it was religious fervor nonetheless.
Regarding the Burning Times, (that is what the killing of alleged witches in the MIddle Ages was called), some believe it was the Catholic Church that caused it.
But I recently read an article that indicated the followers of the reformation were more likely to have promulgated it. In other words, Protestants caused it.
From “The Wiccan Pagan Times,”
The beast that was the witch craze was controlled, if such a thing could be controlled, by the Reformation and Counter Reformation. It was the zealots of the new denominations that sparked the real witch hunting. Reformers spread out into the countryside to rid the earth of pagan influenced Catholicism.
The Catholic Church had treated many holdover pagan practices in a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. When the reformers started their campaign, the Catholic Church responded by doing the same thing --as if trying to show that they were as “bad ***” as the Protestant upstarts.
It was mainly a battle of individual zealots, and the effects were quite spotty. There was no countrywide sweep looking for Satan worship. There was no Big Brother checking everyone’s ID cards.
Only in Germany and Poland was the horror widespread. There were many determined reformers in these lands, and so these countries claimed the greatest number of deaths the greatest number of convicted “devil worshipers?”
So, what was wrong with The Crusades? While one might justify the initial crusades as a response to Muslim encroachment into historically Christian territory, they soon became little more than a power grab and a search for treasure and loot.
What religion is responsible for the Holocaust? A fascist ideology that became so powerful it led to the near deification of their leader, Adolf Hitler.
The Burning Times were a good example of what can happen when one group of people decides all must share their beliefs - and forces that decision with the sword.
None of the above examples are black and white. There were undoubtedly many factors that played into each of them.
But I think they do provide examples of how people sometimes fail to “coexist.”
Peace,
Seeker
That was before I came here.