Violence in the Name of Religion: Witch Burning, Heretics, Apsotates and Islamic Tumult and Terrorism

It is a little disingenuous to pretend that the most recent murders and depredations by Islamic terrorists in the name of religion are something new. Europe itself has a long history of extreme violence, torture and persecution because of religion which any educated person will recognize if they think about it.

Just the burning of witches ( before the wars between Catholics and Protestants) yielded up thousands and thousands of victims.

Consider this insight by a historian published in Science Blog on the internet"

"Darin Hayton is nearly vitriolic, even hyperbolic, in chastising someone else for using the phrase “hundreds of thousands.” In his post addressing the question “How Many Witches were Executed?!?”, he mentions the 40-50 thousand number, but also provides a table that adds up a bunch of numbers, by country, adding up to low vs. high estimates for executions between 57,401 and 61,651. These data are from the 14th through 17th century.

There are a few problems with these data. One is that Witch killing did not begin in 1300. There are important pre-1300 documented cases. Also, it did not end in 1700, though the post 1700 numbers are probably small. Another problem is that these numbers, as far as I can tell, are known cases or estimates of the outcome of known “Witch Hunts.” However, there seems to have been times and places where the trial and execution of Witches had become a poorly documented local matter that may have gone on as a routine slowly piling up bodies but entirely under the radar of those who must see it on paper for it to exist. As an archaeologist who has frequently compared the documented and the undocumented realities of Euro-American culture I would not finch at a 10-1 ratio of cases estimated from historical documents to actual cases. If the numbers add up to 60,000, than 600,000 would not shock me.

Of course, the new wave of Islamic extremism is threatening World Peace in a way that seems especially disheartening just when the threat of World Communist domination ( and its official and persecutory Atheism) had seem to be stopped from taking over the World.  ( And in China, for instance, "Communism" has taken on a whole different meaning than that meant by Karl Marx).

Before that, in the 20th Century, Adolf Hitler had appointed himself Fuehrer of the Thousand Year Reich where Christianity would be purged from the World as an evidence of "weakness and degeneracy" ( especially because of its Jewish roots).

As a New Yorker and witness to the horror of the destruction of the World Trade Center, of course I am deeply affected and to some extent traumatized by that event.

People in Boston are still grieving over the Marathon bombings there, and of course each new day we hear of some new awful depredation in the name of religion.

Just the news that another Muslim terrorist has tried to assassinate a police officer in Philadelphia increases our anxiety even more. 

And meanwhile, one ISIS leader has killed his own mother for "apostasy."

As I have written here before, the actual percentage of Islamic Terrorists is small, but they are gaining more and more influence by every yardstick we have and the Muslim leaders such as Assad in Syria are terrorists in their own right. ( Something like twenty to forty thousand Syrian rebel peoples have been encircled and are being literally starved to death as I write this, among other horrors of that area).

Someone in the Islamic world , which is torn by sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites ,  has to take the lead in stopping the escalating violence and truculent and bellicose language that has become a part of everyday life in Muslim countries. 

Christians, with their own history of ultra-violence, cannot pretend to be speaking from some ground of ultra innocence and purity. Nor can anyone from any other religious group, even those that practice non-violence as part of their underpinnings.

The ultimate question here is how far, militarily, the United States and Europe are going to become involved in these battles. On the one hand, we have people like Rand Paul, who wants us to practice a new isolationism; on the other, we have people such as Chris Christie who wants to shoot down Russian planes in the Mideast if necessary ( with Hillary Clinton not far behind him in this).

This still leaves unmentioned the mass use of "intelligence gathering" and planting of informants everywhere...

It is useless to blame President Obama for his clumsy handling of all this, because there is NO consensus among Americans or of Europeans as to what we are to do.

One thing we can do is try to track and deflect the workings of terrorists of all kinds within the borders of the United States.

With  that in mind, no mass importing of Muslims into the United States, even for the nicest humanitarian reasons, makes much sense.  We cannot keep terrorists out very well anyway ( the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks had even been tracked and "lost" by an inept FBI in the United States after gaining entrance to the country with the greatest of ease)...

Finally, it seems to me like the tumult in the Muslim world is one of those historical phenomena that will just have to run its course. Iran and Saudi Arabia will have to resolved their feuding and all kinds of other shifts will have to occur and there is not much the United States or Europe can do about THAT.