NOSHA will be posting a series of articles by member William Sierichs, who was a copy editor with The Advocate, the daily newspaper in Baton Rouge, and who also published in Free Inquiry, the national magazine for the Council for Secular Humanism. 

“These articles were written for several secular and humanistic publications from 1991 to a few years ago. A number are derived from a book I wrote attempting to explain why Christianity is one of the most murderous and brutally totalitarian movements in history. Materials in my book are footnoted, but I did not include the footnotes in my articles.

As a movement, Christianity has never tolerated dissent, whether internally from so-called heretics and schismatics or externally from non-Christians. While Jews were given some protection for historical reasons, these protections were always fragile. I have several chapters that deal with this. Those were devout Christians who murdered some 6 million Jews in WWII. Hitler and the vast majority of his supporters were Christians. He and his supporters also believed the invasion of the Soviet Union was a war against atheism, among other reasons. Some 25-30 million “atheists” in the USSR were murdered for that reason, about 15-20 million of them civilians, not soldiers.

Also, Christians historically believed all pagans were soldiers of Satan and, if they could not be converted, must be killed or enslaved to prevent them from seducing Christians into Satan’s army. This is the basis of racism as well as Islamaphobia and antisemitism.

I show why scholars reject the myth (which I grew up learning) that Christians converted the Roman Empire’s, and then Europe’s, pagans because Christianity was obviously superior and so pagans simply abandoned their dying cults. In reality, Christians were a small minority in the empire (10 pc at most) and simply used, efficiently and brutally, the legal, financial and military power of the government after they were handed control to crush pagan cultures (which were quite healthy), first in the empire, then across Europe. In northern Europe and the Baltic states, they was a particularly brutal war, often with annual crusades, to wipe out the pagan Slavic religious cults. So many pagan Slavs were captured and sold as forced labor that Slav (slave) became synonymous with forced labor. Slavs who resisted and could not be converted were killed. This might just be the worst genocide in history. The murderous Nazi contempt for Slavs is a descendent of that long-ago Christian-pagan conflict.

When Christians began spreading out from Europe, they found a world full of dark-skinned pagans, and simply applied the Slav treatment to them. This was the legal basis of slavery and led to the development of racism (to explain why dark-skinned pagans were inferior to white Christians), the Civil War and segregation. It also was why Europeans treated dark-skinned pagan Native Americans, Asian and Australians with bigotry, contempt and violence. The violence and bigotry of Christianity continue today.”