Medieval Church Atrocities

I’m part way reading through Sam Harris’ book ‘The End of Faith’. In many ways it has nothing new to say.


It follows virtually the same line of reasoning as Hitchens’ ‘God is not Great’. They both mainly take the form of what I will term ‘Whinge literature’. What I mean by this is that they have very little of substance to say, they are totally devoid of any form of argument against the existence of God. Rather these types of books merely serve as outlets for the author to release torrents of whinging.



That’s all that one reads in The End of Faith. Whinge, whinge, bloody whinge.



Now I totally get what the authors are trying to say, but they don’t tell me something that I don’t already know.

Accessed from; http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianheresy/burningalive01.jpg

What prompted this post is when Harris starting whinging about the abhorrent torturing that the medieval Church committed. Now don’t get me wrong, I find these facts of history utterly repugnant, just like Harris. But what I find almost as repugnant is Harris’ egregious attempt at blaming Christianity alone as the source of such atrocities. He paints the picture that this type of thing was original to Christianity and just didn’t happen anywhere else in the world. He is basically attributing Christianity as the sole source of such abhorrent behaviour.



Any historian will tell you that this type of behaviour was rife throughout the ancient world. Such inhumane tactics were practiced by all forms of power in almost every civilization on earth. This by no means is an excuse, but goes to prove that the Church was a product of it’s times. It was very weak in it’s ability to withstand the influences of wider society.

One only has to briefly look at the pacifist teachings of Christ to see that this type of behaviour is patently anti-Christian. One can find no such justification of this behaviour in the teachings of Christ.



This type scholarship from Harris is appalling. What he is doing is deliberately spreading false information. This is basically fraud.