Why is it that just about every utterance of the President is attacked, disputed, or belittled. In a recent speech the President noted that various religions at one time or another had done terrible deeds in the name of god, and he mentioned the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples.
People went nuts.
Maybe the President was talking about the members of the First Crusade. According to a Christian chronicler of the time, when the Crusaders reached the town of Mainz in the Rhineland in 1096, they broke into a hall where Jews had taken refuge.
“Breaking the bolts and doors, they killed the Jews, about seven hundred in number, who in vain resisted the force and attack of so many thousands. They killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age and sex.... Horrible to say, mothers cut the throats for nursing children with knives and stabbed others, preferring them to perish thus by their own hands rather than to killed by the weapons of the uncircumcised.” (From “The First Victims of the First Crusade,” by Susan Jacoby in The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2015, P. SR5.)
Actually, we don’t have to go back to 1096. In the 1990s Christian Serbs were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims.
Fanatics killing people in the name of various gods, which has been occurring for millennia and shows no sighs of abating, is about the most irrational and stupid thing I can think of. If you balanced the good religions have done against the harm they’ve done, I think the harm side would win out.
No comments:
Post a Comment