Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 49
undertaken before publishing on the subject of vultures, could have
prevented such a blunder; but the Fathers were interested in logic, pure
logic, and facts were notoriously as illogical as feelings.
Of course, all this was a big pretense. Mr. Murdstone told David
Copperheld's mother that her loving kindness was less "rational" than his
sadism, and perhaps even believed it himself, but any psychologist will
realize that Murdstone happened to enjoy caning little boys on the buttocks,
just as many Englishmen (for reasons peculiar to that culture) still do. So,
too, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the church fathers enjoyed
bullying, torturing and especially frightening others, just as the members of
the Gestapo did. De Sade in his marvelously frank way analyzed the joy in
frightening people as a refined form of the sadistic compulsions that drove
him, and many psychoanalysts have noted the same connection. Sermons
on hell, to hysterical and fainting congregations, are the psychological
equivalent of the racks, whips, iron boots and other overtly sadistic
implements of the Holy Inquisition.
The exact number of people killed in the various witch-hunts, crusades,
inquisitions, religious wars, etc., is not recorded anywhere, but the total
must run into the tens of millions; Homer Smith, an atheist, arrives at a
figure of 60,000,000 in his Man and His Gods, but he is exaggerating (I hope).
One Roman pagan skeptically remarked in the 4th Century A.D., that
"there is no wild beast more blood-thirsty than an angry theologian." He had
only seen the beginning of the feuds between various sects of Christians;
the fury rolled on for another 13 centuries before it began to abate. Of
course, Homer Smith's estimate of 60,000,000 victims is obtained by
including all the Moslems killed in the several Crusades, and the non-Whites
in Africa that the Americans and Oceana wiped out in the process of
Christianizing the world. For Europe itself the very careful G. Rattray
Taylor arrives at conclusions that make Hitler seem like a piker compared to
the churchmen:
In Spain, Torquemada personally sent 10,220 persons to the stake. . . .
Counting those killed for other heresies, the persecutions were responsible
for reducing the population of Spain from twenty million to six million in
two hundred years.... While the well-known estimate of the total death-toll,
from Roman times onward, of nine million is probably somewhat too high,
it can safely be said that more persons were put to death than were killed in
all the European wars fought up to 1914.*
Let us all piously hope that the current mood of tolerance among
Christian clergymen is not just a passing fad but that it represents a real
break with their tradition
*Taylor, op. cit., p. 127