The Dangers of Dogma (or Creeds)

Original Author Unknown

 

     Creeds are dangerous because they often lead to intolerant dogma. Intolerant dogma is dangerous because it leads to strict fundamentalism.  Strict fundamentalism is dangerous because it divides human beings. Divided human beings are dangerous because they kill one another.  There is no religion in the world that has not experienced violence in the name of its religion.

  

     The entire world is aware of the terrorist attacks all over the world by fanatical fundamentalist Muslims, which culminated in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City which killed over 3,000 innocent people.  But radical fundamentalist Muslims are not the only religious terrorists by any means.

 

     The list of atrocities committed in the name of religious creeds is long and horrible.  I will discuss only a very few.  When Christians went on the first crusade in 1095 against the Muslims who were occupying Jerusalem, they gathered a large army along the way in Germany.  They had a mandate from the pope: “Destroy the infidels wherever you find them.”  With this mandate from the pope, as these intolerant Christian crusaders passed through Germany on their way to fight the Muslims, they gathered thousands of Jews in the Rhine Valley and either killed them with their swords or burned them alive.  They rode on to Jerusalem where they slaughtered so many people that one cleric remarked, “In the Temple of Solomon, one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses’ bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God.”  Of course he was exaggerating but it gives you some idea of how much blood was shed.

 

     This horrible bloodletting is not confined to those who are outside a particular faith.  The Albigenses were a sect of Christians that occupied a portion of southern France.  When Pope Innocent III launched a campaign to eradicate them in 1209, about 20,000 people were slaughtered; many after being cut, mutilated, and dragged behind horses.  Some were blinded before being killed.  When the commander of the soldiers in charge of the massacre asked the Bishop how he would be able to tell an Albigensian Christian from a Catholic, the Bishop commanded the officer to, “Kill them all, God will know his own.”

 

     The Albigensians gave the Catholics the impetus they needed to establish the Inquisition.  Torture was authorized by Pope Innocent IV and the methods of torture eventually developed were almost too horrible to imagine.  Screaming victims were burned, pierced, nipples torn off, bones broken, genitals mutilated, boiled, drowned, and a host of other methods of torture inhibited only by the imagination of the Inquisitor.  In later years, the Inquisition turned its attention and resources to alleged witches who were gathered up, tortured until they confessed and then killed by burning or drowning.  In Britain as many as 30,000 women were killed for witchcraft and in some European countries the number approached 100,000.  The city of Bamberg in the German Alps burned 900 witches alone.

 

     The Jews were always targets of hatred and bigotry.  The Catholic Church proclaimed the doctrine of transubstantiation in 1215 which said that the communion host was turned miraculously into the literal body of Jesus and the wine the blood of Jesus.  It was only a matter of time until Jews were accused of stealing the consecrated communion wafers and torturing them.  Some accusers said the wafers cried out in pain when stabbed with pins.  Jews by the dozens were arrested and killed on these ludicrous charges.  One German knight went on a bloody rampage that lasted six months and destroyed 146 Jewish communities.

 

     Of course, Jews also have a history of violence in the name of religion.  Laying aside the admitted atrocities of the Old Testament upon the inhabitants of Canaan, far more recent violence can be cited.  In the 1930s and 1940s Jewish Zionist organizations like Irgun and Lehi conducted terrorist activities throughout Palestine.  Menachem Begin, destined to become Prime Minister of Israel and who was ironically awarded a Noble Peace Prize is widely reported as one of the leading architects of the July 1946 King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem which killed 91 people.  On April 9, 1948 Irgun and another organization known as Stern massacred over 250 Arabs (mostly women and children) in the village of Deir Yassin.  United Nations and Red Cross observers filed reports stating that houses were set on fire and occupants were shot as they ran from the flames.  One woman who was pregnant was killed and her baby cut from her stomach with a knife.  Jacques de Reynier, the leader of the Palestine delegation of the International Red Cross wrote, "All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine-guns, hand-grenades, and knives, most of them still blood-stained. A beautiful young girl with criminal eyes showed me hers (knife) still dripping with blood, she displayed it like a trophy."  During Easter week in 1954 Christian religious ceremonies were raided by Jewish terrorists where crosses were broken and trampled. 

 

     Protestant Christians were also brutal to those who held different beliefs from their own interpretation of the Bible, and their brutality was limited only by their size and resources.  John Calvin, the father of the Presbyterian sect is well known for his hatred for, and murders of Catholics and others who did not accept his interpretation of the Bible which included the fatalistic doctrine known as predestination, which stated that the future of all souls was determined before the world began.  Some were predestined for Heaven and some were predestined for Hell.  England’s Queen Elizabeth made Catholicism illegal and killed 200 Catholics during her reign.  Charlemagne had set the stage for brutality in England in the name of his religion when he first conquered the Saxons in England.  He killed 4,500 inhabitants of the land who refused to be baptized and convert to Christianity.   

 

     Of course I have given examples primarily of Christian atrocities because I am from a western nation that embraces Christianity.  There are just as many examples from all other world religions that are based on creeds derived from “sacred” books.

 

     The name “assassin” comes from a radical Islamic sect of Shiites who terrorized the countryside in the name of Allah from the 11th to the 13th centuries, and they killed hundreds of people to satisfy the demands of their slavish obedience to their interpretation of the Koran.  Many of the Assassins committed their heinous acts while intoxicated with hashish.  They were little concerned about whether they lived or died during their murderous campaigns because they had been assured by their clerics of eternal bliss after their death for killing the infidels.  For them, like some radical Muslims today, terrorism was a religious duty.  

 

     Hindus have killed many Muslims and Muslims have killed many Hindus in India in the name of God.  One of the most recent uprisings between Hindus and Muslims occurred near New Delhi in 1980.  Someone let a pig (thought by Muslims to be an unclean animal) out on Muslim holy ground and bloody riots ensued.  Muslims blamed Hindus (probably rightly so) for the desecration and many Hindus were beaten to death.  Hindus retaliated, killing a number of Muslims.  In the end, more than 200 people were killed over this incident with the pig.

 

     Dr. John Dayal, president of All India Catholic Union said, "Hindu extremists have beaten our priests, assaulted our nuns, broken crosses and urinated on sacred vessels.  These acts of desecration show the true nature of the attackers."  Attacks were reported in Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and the states of tribal central India.  "We also have reports of attacks on Catholic clergy from West Bengal in the east to Andhra Pradesh in south central India," Dayal said.  By the middle of last year reported attacks by Hindus on Christians had reached over 200.

 

     The Sikhs, a minority sect in India have tried to establish their own Theocracy independent of the rest of India.  One Sikh cleric, Jarnail Bhindranwale declared killing opponents and sending them to hell was a religious duty.  When Sikhs killed Indira Gandhi, riddling her with over 50 shots, the retaliation by angry Hindus claimed 5,000 Sikhs during three continuous days of riot.  Not only were thousands of innocent Sikhs killed, but reports tell us that many Sikh boys were dragged from their homes and publicly castrated.

 

     Burma is a Buddhist land that was the home of sporadic human sacrifices well into the 1800’s.  Fifty six men were killed and buried beneath a city wall that was built around the new Burmese capital of Mandalay.  The British government, who held Burma as a British colony, stopped these senseless sacrifices after astrologers decreed that 500 men, women, and children had to be sacrificed to keep the city of Mandalay safe.  Before Britain could contain this new outbreak of human slaughter and misery, one hundred innocent people had been sacrificed.

 

     The Aum Shinrikyo is a relatively large Buddhist cult with a membership as large as 100,000 which includes some scientists.  The Aum Shinrikyo believe it is their sacred duty to destroy this world and repopulate it with Aum membership.  The cult is best known for its deadly attack with sarin gas (a nerve gas invented by Nazi Germany) on a Tokyo subway in March 1995.  Five faithful cult members boarded different subway trains at 7:45 AM and deposited plastic bags filled with sarin, punctured the bags and disembarked.  Over 5,000 people were injured and 12 died.  The Aum members who released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway were a cardiovascular surgeon, Dr. Ikuo Hayashi (48), a former graduate student in particle physics, Toru Toyoda (27), a specialist in applied physics, Masato Yokoyama (31), another applied physicist, Kenichi Hirose (30), and an electronics engineer, Yasuo Hayashi (37). They were all members of Aum's Science and Technology Ministry.  When the Aum headquarters was subsequently raided by authorities, a number of planned subversive activities were discovered.

 

     Love and service to others is the seed and substance of every major world religion.  If we could return to the simplicity of cultivating and caring for that single seed of love and service to others, we would reap a harvest of peace.  May God help us do so.

 

 

 

 

WARNING:  If you have a weak stomach, please don’t go any further.

 

Instruments of Torture During the Catholic Inquisition.

 

The inquisitional chairs

This instrument of torture comes in different versions. We are first going to examine their common features and, then, their differences. All of them have common features, in that they are covered with spikes on the back, on the arm-rests, on the seat, on the leg-rests and on the foot-rests. The chair exhibited at the museum of San Gimignano has 1300 spikes, a real "carpet" of spikes . One version has a bar screwed on the lower portion of the chair, by the victim's feet, which by a screw mechanism forced the back of the legs against the spikes, thus penetrating the flesh of the victim. Another version had two bars immobilising the victim's wrists forcing his forearms against the arm-rests resulting in the flesh being penetrated by the spikes.
Another version had a bar at chest height, to immobilize the victim's bust, while the spiked seat had holes to allow the victim's bottom to be 'heated" by hot coals placed under the seat, causing painful burns, but still keeping the victim conscious.
The strength of this instrument lies mainly in the psychological terror it causes and the threat that the torture will get increasingly worse, conforming to a model where the pain starts off easy and then gets progressively worse. The idea is that the Inquisitors can interrupt it at any stage, upon visual inspection of the damages that have been inflicted.
This instrument was used in Germany up to the 1800s, in Italy and in Spain up to the end of the

1700s, in France, in Great Britain and in the other central European countries, according to certain sources, up until the end of 1800s.

The maiden of Nuremberg

The name of this instrument seems to have originated from a prototype that was built in the town of Nuremberg. It is also said that this sort of sarcophagus had the face of a maiden carved on its front door, probably with the aim of making this horrible container look more refined.
This instrument has four main features, whose wickedness, I think, deserve to be analyzed. The inside of the sarcophagus was fitted with spikes designed to pierce different parts of the body, but miss the vital organs, so that the victim was kept alive, in an upright position.
Its second feature is that the victims were kept in an extremely confined space to increase their suffering.
Its third feature was that the device could be opened and closed without letting the victim, who had been pierced from the front and the back, get away.
Its fourth feature was that the container was so thick that no shrieks and moaning could be heard from outside unless the doors were opened. When the sarcophagus doors were shut again, the spikes pierced exactly the same parts of the body as before, and thus no relief was ever possible. This instrument can be defined both a torture and a death instrument.

The Garrotte

This instrument bears a Spanish name because it was "improved" in Spain, where it became the official instrument of capital punishment. It remained in use until 1975, when the last person to be executed was a young student who was later found to be innocent. This incident was one of the arguments used for the abolition of death penalty in that country.
This instrument has very ancient origins. Simply put, a pole was driven into the ground and a rope was tied around the victim's neck. But if the pole was not very thick and the rope was tightened behind the pole, the neck of the victim could be tightened more gradually and easily released.
This sort of torture was used all over the world as testified by etchings.
The string tying the victim's neck to the pole could be made of a material that would shrink once wetted, so that the victim would slowly suffocate as it dried.
The "improved" Spanish version of this instrument was used for executions. It had a steel collar, larger in size than the victim's neck to prevent strangulation, but, at the same time, tight enough to immobilize the head and the neck.
Preventing neck and head movement was necessary because it allowed the victim's cervical vertebrae to be penetrated by a steel tip, moved by a screw mechanism positioned in the rear of the pole. In theory, such penetration was to be quick and precise, thus, able to administer a rapid and certain death.
Actually, though, the possibility of error and failure is so high that I leave it to the imagination of the reader to consider the suffering it actually inflicted.

Branks

These devices had two main features: They exposed the victims to ridicule by forcing them to wear a ridiculous likeness, and, at the same time, they inflicted mortification and physical torture by occluding the victims' mouth or nose and covering their eyes. As we can see in the picture number 3, the victim's mouth was stopped up with a ball to prevent her from screaming and moaning.
The long ears represented the ears of an ass. In Europe, many negative characteristics were attributed to this animal. Even today, donkeys are considered to be the stupid version of horses and the epithet "ass" is still used, in Italy, France and Spain, to define a stupid person.
The version with a pig nose or even a pig head, symbolizes someone dirty. The word pig, when referred to a person, is considered offensive in all European languages.

 

The Inquisition was a campaign of torture, mutilation, mass murder and destruction of human life perpetrated by Catholics. The church increased in power until it had total control over human life, both secular and religious.

 
The Vatican wasn't satisfied with the progress made by regional leaders in rooting out heresy. Pope Innocent III commissioned his own inquisitors who answered directly to him. Their authority was made official in the papal bull of March 25th, 1199. Innocent declared "anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of god which conflicted with the church dogma must be burned without pity."

In 1254, to ease the job of the inquisitors, Pope Innocent IV decreed that accusers could remain anonymous, preventing the victims from confronting them and defending themselves. Many churches had a chest where informants could slip written accusations against their neighbors. Three years later, he authorized and officially condoned torture as a method of extracting confessions of heresy.

Victims were tortured in one room,

then, if they confessed, they were led away from the chamber into another room to confess to the inquisitors.
This way it could be claimed the confessions were given without the use of force. The Inquisitional law replaced common law. Instead of innocent until proven guilty, it was guilty until proven innocent.

Inquisitors grew very rich, accepting bribes and fines from the wealthy who paid to avoid being prosecuted. The wealthy were prime targets for the church who confiscated their property, land and everything they had for generations. The Inquisition took over all of the victims' possessions upon accusation. There was very little if any chance of proving one's self innocent, so this is one way the catholic church grew very wealthy. Pope Innocent stated that since "god" punished children for the sins of their parents, they had no right to be legal heirs to the property of their parents. Unless children came forth freely to denounce their parents, they were left penniless. Inquisitors even accused the dead of heresy, in some cases, as much as seventy years after their death. They exhumed and burned the accused's bones and confiscated all property from their heirs, leaving them with nothing.

The Witch hunts, 1450-1750 were what R H Robbins (The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology) called "the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of western civilization." In this 300 year period, the church stepped up the mass murder and systematic torture of innocent human beings. Torturers were allowed as much time as they needed to torture their victims. Most courts demanded that prior to the torture, the victim be thoroughly shaved, claiming that any Demon left undetected in the victim's body hair might intervene to deaden the pain that the torturers inflicted or answer for the victim.

Doctors would be in attendance if it seemed the victim might die from the torture. The victim would then be allowed to recover a little before more torture was applied. If the victim died during the torture, inquisitors claimed the Devil intervened with the purpose of sparing the victim further pain or preventing them from revealing his secrets. Those who fainted had vinegar poured into their nostrils to revive them. The victim's families were required under law to reimburse the courts for the costs of torture. Entire estates were seized by the church. Priests blessed the torture instruments prior to their being used.

Judas Cradle

The victim was pulled up by a rope or chain and then lowered to the point. The torturer controlled the pressure by attaching weights to the victim or rocking or raising and dropping the victim from various heights.

Brodequin (The Boots)

The brodequin was used to crush the legs by tightening the device by hand, or using a mallet for knocking in the wedges to smash the bones until the bone marrow spurted out. People who passed out were further condemned as the losing of consciousness to be a trick from the Devil in order to escape pain.

Burning the feet. Oil, lard and grease were applied to the feet before roasting them over a fire. A screen was used to control or increase the pain as exposure to the fire was applied on and off for maximum suffering. Also, as a variation, some victims were forced to wear large leather or metal boots into which boiling water or molten lead was poured.

Hanging and the Strappado

The victim's hands were bound behind the back. They were then yanked up to the ceiling of the torture chamber by a pulley and a rope. Dislocation ensued. Catholics preferred this method, as it left no visible marks of torture. Heavy weights were often strapped to the victim to increase the pain and suffering.
Squassation was a more extreme form of the torture. This method entailed strapping weights as much as hundreds of pounds, pulling limbs from their sockets. Following this, the Catholic inquisitor would quickly release the rope so they would fall towards the floor. At the last second, the Catholic inquisitor would again yank the rope. This dislocated virtually every bone in the victim's body. Four applications were considered enough to kill even the strongest of victims.

Many were hung upside down as well until strangulation ensued.

Heretic's Fork


This device was often used to silence the victim on the way to the burning stake, so they could not reveal what had occurred in the torture chamber or defend themselves in any way.

Ripping the flesh

The Catholic Church learned a human being could live until the skin was peeled down to the waist when skinned alive. Often, the rippers were heated to red hot and used on women's breasts and in the genitalia of both sexes.

Breast Rippers

Skull Crusher
This one speaks for itself. Catholic clergy preferred this device because it did not leave visible marks, unless the skull was completely crushed, which happened.

The Rack

The Rack, aka the Ladder was another device that was used extensively. The procedure was to place the nude or near nude victim horizontally on the ladder or rack. Ropes were used to bind the arms and legs like a tourniquet. The knot could be steadily twisted to draw tight the ropes and stretch the victim to where the muscles and ligaments tore and bones broke. Often, heavy objects were placed upon the victim to increase the pain. This was considered by the church to be "one of the milder forms of torture."


The Thumbscrew

The thumbscrew was a device where the victim's thumbs were placed and systematically crushed. Similar devices were used on the toes. Thumbscrews were often applied at the same time as the strappado and other torture devices to inflict more pain.

The Water Torture

The victim was stripped and bound to a bench or table and a funnel was inserted and pressed down into his throat. Water was poured into the funnel in jugs, with his/her nose being pinched, forcing him/her to swallow. After this was repeated enough times to where the victim's stomach was almost to burst, the bench or table was then tilted, with the victim's head pointing to the floor. The water in the stomach put painful pressure on the victim's lungs and heart. There was not only the incredible pain with this, but also, the feeling of suffocation. Inquisitors would also beat upon the stomach with mallets to the point of internal rupture.
In another variation, the victim was forced to swallow large quantities of water together with lengths of knotted cord. The cords were then violently yanked from the victim's mouth resulting in disemboweling.

 

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