Islamic Slaughter of Christians

If a mob of Islamic people come to kill me I am going to respond. If I were Stephen and the Jews were going to stone me, I would have picked up the stones and tossed them back at them. Jesus already came as the suffering Messiah. He paid the price. Fulfilled His destiny. His next appearance is as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. As far as I can see, the suffering Messiah time period is over.

Like so many Custodial religions before it, Islam did not allow people the luxury of choosing whether or not to become adherents. Mohammed embarked on a program of conquest to make it clear which way the choice was to go. Using the tactics of a generalissimo, the “divinely inspired” Mohammed raised an army and set off to convert ”unfaithful ones” (“infidels”) to his faith. Mohammed’s apocalyptic army cut a wide bloody swath through most of the Middle East, including important Christian centers. The militant Moslem empire eventually stretched as far east as India where elements of Islam were incorporated into the Hindu religion. Untold lives were lost during the Islamic conquests because the Islamic armies were prone to commit fearsome genocides as part of their mission to bring Utopia to mankind.

To most “infidel” Christians, Moslems were nothing more than savage “heathens” (“nonbelievers”). This set up an inevitable conflict into which millions of people would be dragged. Five hundred years after the death of Mohammed, the Christian world launched a coordinated military effort to force the Moslems out of the Holy Land. That effort is known as the Crusades. The Christian Crusades to free Palestine from the Moslems took place between 1099 and 1270 A.D.

Skirmishes and minor battles between Christians and Moslems had broken out beforehand, but it was a call-to-arms by Pope Urban II in 1095 that finally turned those skirmishes into an organized war effort involving nearly every Christian ruler of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Christians enlisted in the Crusades after being promised religious blessings, fiefdoms, and spoils of conquest. Volunteers came from nearly every social class. For many serfs and peasants, the Papal call-to-arms represented a way to escape feudal lords and perhaps to return as wealthy heroes.

The Crusades got off to a good, but bloody, start. The Christians captured Jerusalem in the summer of 1099. Although the knights and peasants who marched under Christian banners were extolled to practice high virtues and chivalry, they frequently degenerated into butchery and other acts of viciousness. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they murdered many of the non-Christian survivors in a slaughter that claimed the lives of more than 10,000 victims.

Not only were the Crusaders killing Moslems, they were also killing Jews, who were considered by many Christians to be as heathen as the Moslems. The slaughter of Jews began even before the first Crusade to the Holy Land. In the year 1095, Christian factions started murdering Jews in Europe. A genocidal wave in the German Rhineland was the first major episode; it was sparked by unsubstantiated rumors that Rhineland Jews were using Christian children in their religious sacrifices. Obliterating the Jews became an important element of the Crusades, and the massacres continued even after the Crusades to Jerusalem had ended…………….

At some point, people will sacrifice their own physical existences, and even the physical survival of loved ones, if they believe that the sacrifice will ensure their spiritual integrity or that it will bring about their spiritual salvation. When genuine spiritual knowledge is distorted, yet the desire for spiritual salvation continues to be stimulated, a great many people can be led into doing a great many stupid things. One important step to solving the problem of war, then, is to achieve a true understanding of the spirit and an actual way to its rehabilitation.

When we look at the spiritual practices of the Christian knights and the Moslem Ismailians, we discover that participation in warfare was often exalted as a spiritual quest. Warriors on both sides were inspired by corrupted Brotherhood mysticisms which taught that spiritual rewards could be earned by engaging in military endeavors against fellow human beings. This was the mythology of the “spiritually noble” war in which gallant soldiers were promised eternal salvation and a place in Heaven for fighting a noble cause. This mythology still remains vital today for recruiting people to participate in continued warfare. It twists the urge for spiritual freedom into an honoring of war.

Gods of Eden William Bramley:
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/godseden/godseden07.htm#Mohammed