Crusades

In 1095 CE, Pope Urban II ordered the first Crusade in order to reclaim the Holy Land. Muslims, Jews, heretics, pagans, and atheists were targets. The rallying cry was “Deus vult!” or “God wills it!”­­­ As an incentive, the pope promised salvation by way of indulgences. These, he promised, would reduce the amount of punishment the Bible god would exact for sins. Since everyone knew they had sinned, avoiding hell and purgatory was motivating. Additional bonuses were earthly rewards, including plunder from conquest, the forgiveness of debts, freedom from taxes, fame, property, and political power.

From Europe, the hundreds of thousands of Crusading pilgrims and knights traveled by sea or by foot more than 2000 miles over snowy mountains and across deserts. About one in twenty survived.

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They had to carry food, water, hard money, armor, siege equipment, tents, and drive thousands of animals. Needs, travails, and the consequences of sieges lasting months and years were underestimated. Starving and dehydrated soldiers were called upon to engage in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Rotting bodies, waste, and feces piled up. People were reduced to drinking urine, eating grass and leather, and cannibalism. Disease took advantage.

Plundering the countryside for supplies and loot left resident peasants to starve to death. People in cities who would not give over control were subject to siege and then slaughtered, raped, pillaged, enslaved, and tortured in every imaginable way. Heads and putrefying horses and cattle were catapulted over walls into cities under siege. The vanquished may be blinded, and noses, lips, tongues, and ears were sliced off as punishments. The slaughter by Crusaders created rivers of blood in the cities they entered. In the Albigensian Crusade, the battle cry of the papal legate was: "Kill them all, surely the Lord discerns which ones are His." Irreplaceable art and monuments were desecrated and melted for coin. Ancient libraries were destroyed.  Muslims, tit for tat, did likewise. Both sides justified it in the name of their gods and holy books.

An estimated nine million people and countless animals died miserable deaths during the 200 years of the Crusades.

Vanity, greed, corruption, factionalism, power-mongering, and internecine battles occurred within both Muslim and Christian religions.  It seems their gods were fickle, wavering between which enemy or faction to starve, mutilate, torture, and slaughter. Fratricide, matricide, patricide, and assassinations were common.

The perfectly just Creator of the universe can't be found anywhere in it. Only people doing the evil they can do, particularly when the state merges with religion and people abandon conscience in favor of man-made religion. Where Muslim and Christian communities merged after a conquest or treaty and followed common decency toward one another, bishops would be sent to put an end to such devil's play. The body was to be mortified, so Christians who were enjoying the ungodly Mideastern custom of frequent bathing were also set straight. 

Cycles of religious revenge continue to this day with no denouement. The Crusades are thought to be the beginning of east gods meeting west gods and the current Mideast animosity. However, godly Persians, Greeks, Huns, Goths, Avars, Romans, and Byzantines warred and mutilated one another back and forth for thousands of years prior. Who struck the first blow thousands of years prior to the Crusades is unknown. But religious justification was always there.

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When deaths, maiming, and torture in the name of religion are tallied, going back to the beginning of humans creating gods and up to this day, the toll is in the billions.

And here is the incredible shame. None of the killing, torture, starvation, abandoned children, cruelty to animals, and ruination of land was or is necessary. Such evil springs from humans following humans and the unjust and cruel holy books they write and falsely attribute to the Creator. A modicum of conscience not perverted by religion would have prevented it all.

Defenders of man-made religions and their holy books will say these devices are needed to know right from wrong. But when asked to identify one righteous act that cannot be known by listening to one's own conscience, implanted in everyone by a just and ethical Creator, silence is the only reply.

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Words of Wisdom:
It is no more necessary to dredge scripture for an occasional moral lesson than it is to consult a book to learn that 2 + 2 = 4.