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Nor did the destruction end with the Founders; the fanatics they made carried on the work: the Crusaders burned all the books they could find, including original Hebrew scrolls. ln 1233 the works of Maimonides were burned along with twelve thousand volumes of the Talmud. In 1244 eighteen thousand books of various kind were destroyed. According to Draper, Cardinal Ximenes "delivered to the flames in the square of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts." On finding similar lore in the New World, the Spanish Christians destroyed it and the temples that contained it.

All evidence of source destroyed, the Christian Fathers coulld now substitute their own absurdities. And to substantiate them they altered words and inserted verses that did not exist in the original texts... On this same subject Massey wrote thus: "..They had almost reduced the first four centuries to silence on all matters of the most vital importance for any proper understanding of the true origins of the Christian superstition. The mythos having been at last published as a human history, everything else was suppressed or forced to support the fraud."

According to their teaching "the blood of Christ washed away the sins of the world," still with us. What it actually washed away was the sanity of the world. In due time its doctrines so bedeviled the Western mind that Agobard of Lyons wrote thus "The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no on ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." Should the skeptical reader wish a sample, we offer another tale of Christian martyrdom, this time about the precursor of the curse, lohn of the Gospels. According to the saints, John, when very old, incurred the anger of the Emperor Domitian. To punish him, the latter had this holy man thrown into a caldron of oil and resin. A fire was lit, and when the liquid began to boil the jeering crowd heard a voice singing in the flames - the Christian Shadrach, etc. When the caldron boiled dry, there was John still alive and quite unharmed. Jerome, Eusebius, Tertullian all relate this miracle and practically all hagiographies contain it. And now if these eminent Christians could believe this absurdity, they could believe anything even the Gospels.

The Church opposed the study of grammar and Latin. Pope Gregory I objected to grammatical study. He also condemned education for all but the clergy as folly and wickedness. He forbade laymen to read even the Bible. He had the library of the Palatine Apollo burned “lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of heaven.

After Christians had spent years destroying books and libraries, St. John Chrysostom, the preeminent Greek Father of the Church, proudly declared, “Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world had vanished from the face of the earth.

11. No mere recitation of statistics can convey the immeasurable evil that the Roman Catholic Church dispensed in God's name. From the time that the papacy cemented its power with the state in the fifth century until the Renaissance, the cloak of ignorance and superstition was draped over Europe. The light of freedom was extinguished. It is no longer fashionable to call them the Dark Ages, but indeed they were. The ancient Romans had libraries of 500,000 volumes, there was not a library of over 600 volumes in Christian Europe the period 500 to 1000. Scientific advance, especially in medicine, came to a screeching halt. Human culture regressed to a more brutal level.

Ironically, it was the initiation of the Crusades against the Muslims that shed a ray of intellectual light through the gloom of ignorance and primitive superstitions. Unlike the Christians who sought to destroy all knowledge that contradicted their theology, the Muslims had preserved the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. Moreover, they had made significant advances in Mathematics, philosophy, and science. When the Crusaders returned from the East they brought with their spoils of war the seeds of knowledge which, eventually, gave birth to the Renaissance. Along with the pile of plundered Eastern artifacts and phony relics, the Crusaders also brought back the art and literature of ancient Greece. The writings of the Greek philosophers, which the Church had suppressed centuries before, reappeared. Some of the philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were accornmodated in Church doctrine. Indeed, the writings of Thomas Aquinas, especially his demonstrations for the existence of God, were basically a rehash of Aristotle. But more importantly in the long run, Greek humanistic philosophy found fertile ground in the minds of those who were painfully aware of the futility of theological speculation and the evil of papal dogmatism. As a result, the very foundation of the Church's intellectual and moral despotism would begin to shake.

“The Age of Faith” was an age of holy slaughter. When religion gradually ceased to control daily life, the concept of human rights and personal freedom took roots.

...In reality, the Crusades were a sickening nightmare of slaughter, rape, looting, and chaos – mixed with belief in magic.

16. But as we read more about the crusades this vision tarnishes; enquiry hardly bears out the truth for which we had hoped. Crusades and crusaders are seen to be different from what we had imagined, and finally we are led to agree with Sir Steven Runciman's masterly summing-up in The Kingdom of Acre: "Faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing... In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident, out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode...There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God.

17. The Deutoronomist’s philosophy, that killing the adherents of every mythology but one’s own in order to protect believers from competing doctrines was a godly and laudable act, was in medieval times carried to its logical conclusion by the Christians who, over the course of several centuries, dutifully massacred between 30 and 50 million enemies of the various Christian gods in such events as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, and various minor atrocities.

18. In the days of ignorance there had been an extraordinary willingness to believe the Catholic priesthood good and wise. Relatively it was better and wiser in those days.

The beginning of the Crusades displays all Europe saturated by a naive Christianity, and ready to follow the leading of the pope trustfully and simply.

The shocking acts of cruelty – the persecution of defenceless Jews in the “First Holocaust” – were perpetrated by men whose minds were conditioned by vendettas. They got the Church’s message that fighting infidels expressed love of God so wrong that the Crusade became for them an act of vengeance against those they accused of “dishonoring” Christ.

In the Rhine Valley of Germany, one throng of crusaders followed a goose they thought had been enchanted by God to be their guide. This group joined the army of Emich of Leisingen, a leader who said a a cross miraculously had appeared on his chest as a holy sign. Emich’s multitude decided that, before marching 2000 miles to kill God’s enemies in Israel, their first religious duty was to slay “the infidels among us”, the Jews of Mainz, Worms, and other German cities. They swept in unstoppable waves through Jewish quarters, chopping and burning thousands of defenseless men, women, and children. Many Jews, trapped and doomed in barricaded quarters, tearfully killed their children and themselves before the mob broke in.

Similar hordes led by priests Wolkmar and Gottschalk likewise massacred Jews of Prague and Regensburg, Bavaria. Occasionally, victims were given a last-minute opportunity, at swordpoint, to save their lives by converting to Christianity.

As the various peasant armies moved through Christian Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, they pillaged the countryside for food, provoking battles with local peoples and armies. In one clash, Peter the Hermit’s army killed 4000 Christian residents of Zemun, Yugoslavia, then burned nearby Belgrade. In tuen, thousands of crusaders died in confused fighting in Bulgaria. Only a fraction of the peasant mobs finally reached Muslim Turkey, where they soon were exterminated by Turkish armies.

Organized regiments of Christian knights followed the rabble, bringing professionalism to the Crusade. Accompanying bishops blessed their atrocities. The advancing legions decapitated Muslim and carried the heads as trophies. During three sieges – at Nicea, Antioch, and Tyre – crusaders catapulted Muslim heads into the surrounded cities to demoralize defenders. After a victory on the Syrian coast near Antioch, Frankish crusaders brought 500 heads back to camp. 300 of them were put on stakes before the city to torment defenders atop the walls. Chronicler-priests recorded that a crusader bishop called the impaled heads a joyful spectacle for the people of God. The other 200 heads were catapulted into Antioch. Inside, Muslim decapitated Antioch’s Christian residents and catapulated their heads outward in a grotesque crossfire. The crusaders finally broke through on June 3, 1098, and slaughtered inhabitants.

Then an arriving Muslim army encircled Antioch and besieged the former besiegers. The Franks were near starvation when one Peter Bartholomew announced that a saint had appeared to him in a vision and disclosed that the lance that pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion was buried beneath a Christian church in Antioch. The Holy Lance was drug up and became a miraculous relic inspiring the crusaders to derocity. They stormed out of the city in a fanatical onslaught that sent the Muslim soldiers fleeing in panic, abandoning their camp – anh their wives. Chronicler Fulcher of Chartres proudly recorded: “When their womwn were found in the tents, the Franks did nothing evil to them except pierce their bellies with their lances.”

Marching on to Jerusalem, the crusaders soon topped the walls and “purified” the symbolic city by slaughtering virtually every resident. Jews who took shelter in their synagogue were burned alive. Corpses were piled in the street. Chronicler Raymond of Aguilers recoreded:

“Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Sacarens were beheaded…Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days, then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amide the corpes of men and horses…

In the temple of Solomon, the horses waded in blood up to their knees, nay, up to the bridle. It was a just and marvelous judment of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers.”

During the subsequent two centuries, Muslim recaptures of portions of the Holy Land caused seven other Christian crusades. Most of these expeditions began, as the first, with massacres of Jews at home.

In the Third Crusade, after Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3000 captures – many of them women and children – taken outside the city and massacred. The corpses were cut open in a search for swallowed gems. Bishops intone blessings. Chronicler Ambroise wrote: “ They were slaughtered everyone. For this be the Creator blessed!” Infidel lives were no consequence. As St. Bernard of Claivaux had declared in launching the Second Crusade: “The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ is glorified.”

In the Fourth Crusade, the armies became diverted and sacked the Christian cities of Constantinople and Zara. The Children’s crusade in 1212 was a tragedy based on the mistaken belief that God would empower innocent Christian tots to overwhelm Muslim armies. Most of the children perished without reaching the Holy Land.

Finally, it all came to an end in 1291 when Muslim recaptured the last Christian stronghold, Acre, and slaughtered its garrison in retaliation for Richard’s massacre a century earlier. The Holy Land was back in Muslim hands. Two centuries of death and destruction had been for nothing.

23. Whether the Holy Lance was genuine or a planted fake wasn’t questioned by the crusade’s chronicler-priests. Christendom was obsessed with finding and worshiping sacred relics, alleged evidence from Bible stories. Fragments of “the true cross”, pieces of saints’ bodies, still wet tears shed by Jesus, barbs from the Crown of Thorns, Mary’s undergarments – such were treasured in jeweled cases in every major church. A ruler of Saxony proudly possessed 17,000 relics, including a branch from Moses’s burning bush and a feather from the wings of angel Gabriel. Canterbury Cathedraldisplayed part of the clay left over after God fashioned Adam. Historian Charles Mackay said Spanish churches had six or seven thighbones of the virgin Mary, and others had enough of St. Peter’s toenails to fill a sack. Voltaire noted that six sacred foreskins were snipped from Jesus at his circumcision; later rechearchers counted fifteen.

24. In 1209 an army of some thirty thousand knights and foot soldiers from northern Europe descended like a whirlwind on the Languedoc - the mountainous northeastern foothills of the Pyrenees in what is now southern France. In the ensuing war the whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed, towns and cities were razed, a whole population was put to the sword. This extermination occurred on so vast, so terrible scale that it may well constitute the first case of "genocide" in modern Europe history. In the town of Béziers alone, for example, at least fifteen thousand men, women, and children were slaughtered wholesale - many of them in the sanctuary of the church itself. When an officer inquired the Pope's representative how he might distinguish heretics from true believers, the reply was, "Kill them all. God will recognize His own.".. The same papal representative, writing to Innocent III in Rome, announced with proud that "neither age nor sex nor status was spared."

After Béziers the invading army swept through the whole of Languedoc. Perpignan fell, Narbonne fell, Carcassonne fell, Toulouse fell. And wherever the victors passed, they left a trail of blood, death, and carnage in their wake. This war, which lasted for forty years, is now known as the "Albigensian Crusade." It was a crusade in the true sense of the word. It had been called by the Pope himself. Its participants wore a cross on their tunics, like crusaders in Palestine. And the rewards were the same as they were for crusaders in the Holy Land - remission of sins, an expiation of penances, an assured place in Heaven, and all the booty one could plunder.

If the past be an indication of the shape of things to come then, given the right opportunities and appropriate political climate, New Inquisition, New Croatia and New Vietnams will be created again and again. When, where and how, only the future can tell.

King Philip of France was at St. Denis when a twelve-year-old sheperd boy, Stephen of Cloyes, near Orleans, came to him with a letter which the peasant lad said had come from Christ himself, bidding him organize a crusade to march on Jerusalem... The French king ordered the boy to return to his father's house; but Stephen was under the spell of religious mania. He even dared to disobey his king, announcing that, in a vision, Christ had promised that the sea would dry up and allow Stephen, and whoever followed him, to walk dry-shod to Jerusalem, just as the Red Sea had opened for that other shepherd, Moses.

Certain clerics were appalled by the simple lad's blasphemy - but Innocent III, curiously, announced that "the very children put us to shame," and, undoubtedly, Stephen had a most bewildering power of persuation for one so young and unlettered. Children from many parts of France flocked round him, carrying banners bearing the sign of Oriflamme. By June, 1212, at the meeting place, Vendôme, it is estimated that 30,000 young people had assembled for this pathetic march to the Holy Land, without maps and even without food supplies. They were about to parcipate in what can only be called a pathetic fact of faith.

How so many children evaded the prohibition of their parents cannot be known: perhaps the parents, hearing of the Pope's admiration, were afraid to contest papal approval; perhaps there was little parental authority exertable in those areas where the fathers themselves were away with Boniface and Dandolo; and perhaps the hypnotic power of Stephen's words had transported these boys and girls in such a way that they were invincibly deaf to any remonstrance. At any rate, they set off that summer, joined by many adults hangers-on, including priests who found themselves caught up by this infectious ecstasy, and marched through Tours and Lyons down to Marseilles, finding food and shelter where they could.

But the summer of 1212 had been unusually hot, graincrops had not thrived, and food and water were scarce because of the drought. Many of the children died by the wayside, while others turned back and tried to find their way home once more. When the remainder at last reached Marseilles they found to their great disappointment that the sea did not dry up as the shepherd-lad Stephen had promised, to let them walk to the Holy Land.

After a few days of misery in the port, they were approched by two unscrupulous merchants.. These men, called Hugh the Iron and William the Pig, offered to transport the horde of children to Palestine in seven ships, free of all charge.

Stephen of Cloyes saw in this offer the hand of God, who works in a mysterious way, and accepted gladly...

...The ships sailed on, but now southwards and not towards the Holy Land. Their destination was the Saracen port of Bougie, in Algeria, where all the French children were sold into slavery.

...It is alleged that of the 30,000 children who set forth from Vendôme but one, a young priest, ever returned to France - and that only after 18 years of slavery.

This crusading fever spread among the German children, who were excited by the preaching of a boy named Nicholas Nicholas told the same story of the sea opening to let the faithful walk dry-shod to Jerusalem. His estimated "army" was of 20,000 children and hangers-on, good and bad. This ragged horde struggled over the Alps and, sadly depleted by death and desertions, at last got as far as Genoa. Here they were turned away from the city walls by a governor who would not tolerate such a hungry and sickly rabble. Then, like creatures in a dream of death, they shuffled on southwards, their visions of relieving the Holy City forgotten in their hunger and agony.

.. "The very children put us to shame," had said Pope Innocent III. He spoke truly, through perhaps in a different sense from his intention. The shame was on the Pope himself for not forbidding this cruel wastage; on the parents for letting their children go; and on the peasants who denied them food and shelter all along the route, or who took them in only to profit by their slave labour. It is estimated that of the 20,000 German children who set out to save Christendom not more than 2,000 ever reached their home again. In this they were more fortunate than their French counterpart.