For Geoff re:Matthews
Just a smidgen:
Elie Wiesel answering a question with respect to who committed the Jewish Holocaust: ‘All the killers were Christian. The Nazi system was the consequence of a movement of ideas and followed a strict logic; it did not arise in a void but had its roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of Christian, civilized Europe.’
Cotton Mather compared them to Satan and called it God’s work – and God’s will – to
slaughter the heathen savages who stood in the way of Christianity.
As he aimed his howitzers on an encampment of unarmed Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, an army colonel named John Chivington, who had once said that the
lives of Indian children should not be spared because “nits make lice,”
told his officers: “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”
The Ustashe regime of Croatia committed genocide against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during World War II. They also mass murdered other political opponents. Mile Budak, the Minister for Education & Culture, said in July 1941 that “The basis for the Ustashe movement is religion. For minorities such as the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. We will kill a part of the Serbs. Others we will deport, and the rest we will force to accept the Roman Catholic Religion. Thus the new Croatia will be rid of all Serbs in its midst in order to be 100% Catholic within 10 years.”
…a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred to gain power. He began by inflaming long-standing tensions between Orthodox Christian Serbs and Muslims in the independent provence of Kosovo…(b)y now, over 200,000 Muslim civilians had been systematically murdered. More than 20,000 were missing and feared dead, while 2,000,000 had become refugees. It was, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, “the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s.”
A BARNA Research poll shows that evangelical Christians are the least likely group to help AIDS victims in Africa-less than 3 percent said they would financially help a Christian organization minister to an AIDS orphan. Why? Death is the ultimate penalty for sin; we shed few tears for those whose death comes more quickly than most as a consequence of sexual sin.
