By William Sierichs Jr.

As early as 1437, conversos complained they were being discriminated against. Segregation increased in the 1440s in Castile. Despite critics who argued that a Christian was a Christian whatever his or her ancestry, the drive to keep society “pure” of “tainted” Jewish blood increased through the 1400s, leading to the general expulsion order of 1492. The Inquisition was a major force behind this. A 1483 papal edict required inquisitors to be “Old Christians.” The infamous 15th-century Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada of Spain proposed in 1484 that the children and grandchildren of conversos condemned by the Inquisition should be barred not only from public offices but also from numerous occupations, such as surgeon, shopkeeper, broker and money-changer. Royal decrees in 1501 upheld this discrimination. Some religious organizations rejected Jewish and Moorish conversos. Spanish universities likewise barred converso teachers. The last remnants of “purity of blood” discrimination were not ended until the 19th century. This discrimination constrained marriages by stamping a figurative scarlet letter on conversos’ descendants.

Prominent Protestants also feared mixed marriages. John Calvin warned Protestants against marrying Roman Catholics: “The Lord has many ways of avenging contempt of his Word. In contracting Marriage (seeing that the Lord has hitherto left your liberty in this respect entire) consider in what fetters you entangle yourself, if you take a wife differing from you in religion! … [A Protestant might think he could convert his wife] Do not vainly promise this of yourself, but of the Lord, seeing a good wife is His special gift. (Prov. xix.14.) And how can you expect a good wife from Him whom you will not hear while strictly prohibiting you from being ‘yoked with unbelievers?’ (2 Cor. vi.14.).” Calvin equated Roman Catholics with pagans and “heretics” here.

In a long-running 17th-century debate, John Cotton, a defender of the Massachusetts Puritan theocracy, attacked expelled Baptist leader Roger Williams’ views on religious freedom and tolerance. Cotton was certain that it was dissenters from Puritanism who were a pollution. In one attack on Williams, Cotton also mentioned 2 Cor. 6:14-18 and said: “… it onely requireth comming out from Idolaters in the fellowship of their Idolatry. No marriages were they to make with them …”

A 1658 New Plymouth, Mass., colony law decreed, “… Carnall copulation before or without lawfull [marriage] contract shalbee punished” by whippings, fines and imprisonment. This had a discriminatory effect as the colony did not allow non-Puritan churches or religious rites. So if colony had any Baptists, Quakers or Catholics, they could not wed without violating his/her Christian beliefs, yet couples would be punished if they had non-martial sex.

Also in 1658, English Puritans issued the Savoy Declaration, which asserted their god had ordained marriage for “preventing of uncleanness,” among other reasons. Therefore, “… it is the duty of Christians to marry in the Lord, and therefore such as profess the true Reformed religion, should not marry with Infidels, Papists, or other Idolaters; neither should such as are godly, be unequally yoaked by marrying with such as are wicked in their life, or maintain damnable Heresie.” “Papist” was Protestant slang for Roman Catholic. 2 Cor. 6:14 again.

In a history of French law, Professor of Legal History Jean Brissaud described the Christian nature of its government, and, as a consequence, “The first duty of the prince was to enforce the laws of the Church … [including laws] for the religious marriage.”

In the 16th century, French Catholics and Protestants waged the series of brutal Huguenot Wars, finally reaching a truce with a mandate of toleration in the Edict of Nantes. However, Brissaud explained, Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685, and among his decrees, “All Protestant ministers were required to leave the kingdom … On the contrary, it was forbidden to ordinary members to depart from France …” All Protestants were forced to “convert” to Catholicism. “The result of this fiction was: 1st, to subject to the penalties prescribed for the offense of relapsing (death, confiscation) all Protestants who exercised their cult; 2d, to render impossible marriage among them except by a Catholic priest; if he refused to perform the ceremony, they could not marry and had no civil status; their children were considered bastards and they themselves were accounted as living in concubinage.”

In Germany, religious freedom was slowly extended in the 19th century, but, “Notwithstanding this, certain restrictions were regarded as still existent, — for example the well-known prohibition in certain States of marriages between Christians and non-Christians …,” German Professor of Legal History Rudolf Huebner said.

As a state, Austria had had an official relationship with the Vatican since at least the 1448 Concordat of Vienna. Although Orthodox Catholics and Protestants eventually gained some protections in the later 18th century, an 1855 Austria-Vatican Concordat expanded Catholic Church power, restricting Jews and Protestants again while giving the church power over marriages and other civic activities.

In the (future) U.S., Christian prejudice against “impurity” with a pagan underlay the prosecution of a man in the Virginia colony: “September 17th, 1630. Hugh Davis to be soundly whipped, before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath day.” Another settler, Robert Sweet, was punished in 1640 for impregnating a black slave, who was whipped.

The same sentiment operated in a 1662 Virginia law that “mulatto bastards” held the legal status of the mother — i.e., a slave woman gave birth to a slave child, a free mother a free child — and concluded: “… And that if any christian shall committ Fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the Fines imposed by the former act.” This was the ultimate origin of the law against what later become known as “interracial” marriage or sex that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in Loving vs. Virginia in 1967. Science says evolutionary theory shows that “race” is pseudoscientific nonsense; its survival in the Western world lies in Christian theology, not in biological science.

That’s why, in sentencing the Lovings, a mixed-race married couple, in 1958 for violating the race law, Caroline County, Va., Circuit Court Judge Leon M. Bazile said: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intended for the races to mix.” Scientifically, this is nonsense, as skin color and body features evolved in response to local conditions, such as the amount of sunlight available. Gods have nothing to do with it.

The Lovings were expelled from Virginia under threat of prison if they returned; their lawsuit led the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn all interracial marriage bans. The judge’s comment shows the Christian origin of those laws was not forgotten after 300 years.

Other Virginia laws likewise distinguished between “Christian” and “negro,” making clear the religious basis of this bigotry. In the 17th century, all European Christians were “white.” It was only when the modern concept of “race” was developed in the later 18th century that Christians retroactively used it to “explain” why dark-skinned pagans were so “inferior” to white Christians that they either refused to convert, thereby clinging to Satan, or converted in ways that conflicted with traditional Christianity, such as including some pagan beliefs in their practices. “Race” originally was a synonym for ethnicity, such as the English race, the French race, etc.

More interestingly, when Maryland made slavery permanent for blacks and added a marriage ban in September 1664, the Christian-pagan distinction shows up indirectly: “… forasmuch as divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicion and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaues by which alsoe diuers suites may arise touching the Issue of such woemen and a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negros for preuention whereof for deterring such freeborne women from such shamefull Matches Bee itt further Enacted … That whatsoever free borne woman shall inter marry with any slaue from and after the Last day of this present Assembly shall Serue the master of such slaue dureing the life of her husband And that all the Issue of such freeborne woemen soe marryed shall be Slaues as their fathers were And Bee itt further Enacted that all the Issues of English or other freeborne woemen that haue already marryed Negroes shall serve the Masters of their Parents till they be Thirty years of age and noe longer.”

Notice that the law does not distinguish the parties by “race.” By law, “freeborne English women” had to be Christians.

Another 1662 Virginia law required women servants impregnated by a master to be sold into servitude for an additional two years. Initially, this would have affected more white women than black, as black slaves did not become the majority until after this period. A 1691 Virginia law, Act XVI, said that if any free English woman (whites could still be indentured servants) had a child by a “Negro,” she would have to pay 15 pounds to the church wardens; if she could not pay or if she were an indentured servant, the church wardens were to sell her into slavery for five years and the child into slavery until it was 30 years old. The law also banished any “English or other white man or woman, bond or free,” who married a Negro, mulatto or Indian. Here, churches were chief enforcers of a prejudicial law and benefited from slavery. “White” and “mulatto” show color consciousness, but still do not indicate any concept of “race.”

One abolitionist attack on slavery was its destruction of slave marriages. While there was an obvious economic element in disavowing slave marriages, so that a cash-strapped owner could sell any slave he wished, as noted elsewhere in these articles, under Christian theology, marriage was solely a Christian institution, so no non-Christian marriages were legitimate.

While the concept of “race” became the foundation of opposition to freedom for slaves before 1865 or equality and marriages between whites and blacks after the Civil War, the Christian basis of racism surfaced in various ways. Several post-war books put forward religious arguments, based on the Bible — and usually what we would call a literalist, creationist viewpoint today — that declared blacks were inferior by divine mandate and as such could not be allowed to mix with the superior white race. Although these books often were intellectually crude, and their arguments were rejected by liberal Christians, they had audiences among conservative Christians because they echoed popular prejudices, some of which I’ve heard in my lifetime, such as the Africans are “like apes” insult.

One representative expression of this popular bigotry is in the books of Charles Carroll. In “The Negro a Beast” (1900), he claimed Africans were soul-less and that marriages between whites and blacks produced monstrosities: mulattos. Carroll said mulattos were “upon the earth in violation of Divine law. Hence it is not a part of God’s creation. And there can never be any peace between God and man so long as this corrupted flesh is permitted to ‘defile’ the earth with its presence.”

Carroll expanded his argument in “The Tempter of Eve” (1902), claiming the serpent of Gen. 3 was not Satan: “All the circumstances indicate that the beast of the field which tempted Eve was a negress, who served Eve in the capacity of maid servant; that Eve became too confidential and familiar with this negress and was imposed upon by her. … It is evident that this was the initial step in the execution of a cunningly devised scheme to deceive the woman into violating the laws of God.” Carroll claimed the first crime of Adam and Eve was to listen to an “animal,” because God gave them dominion over animals: “… it was the duty of Adam and Eve to control [the negress] in common with the rest of the animals. But instead of controlling this negress, Eve accepted the negress as her counselor … This reveals the startling fact that it was man’s social equality with the negro that brought sin into the world.”

Carroll argued that whites had a natural bond of love and sympathy with God, but blacks (“apes”) and mixed-race individuals could not. Even if they inherited such knowledge of that god from white ancestors, mixed-race peoples “soon lose all confidence in an invisible God” and turned to idolatry. “This reveals the startling truth that the idolatry for which God punished Israel and her neighboring nations, had its origin in amalgamation. When the whites of a nation are absorbed by amalgamation, their mixed-blooded descendants ultimately descend to idolatry …” Carroll claimed that as a result of race-mixing after the flood of Gen. 6-8 “… atheism and idolatry, the twin crimes which owe their birth to amalgamation, increased at the expense of monotheism. This struggle for supremacy between monotheism on the one side and atheism and idolatry on the other, finally culminated in war.” Thus, “the God-believing, God-loving people, widely scattered among the remnant of pure whites, became more and more powerless to withstand the overwhelming tide of atheism, negroism and idolatry that had practically swept monotheism from the globe …” This essentially was thinking of Hitler and many of his supporters, and the basis of their hatred of atheism.

Carroll concluded that Christians had been wrong: “The extension of the gospel to the negroes and mixed-bloods is a plain violation of Divine law, and is due solely to the influence of atheism with its teaching that man is a highly developed species of ape of which the white is the highest, and the negro is the lowest race … Our very existence as a people at once demands that we repudiate the false teachings which have brought us to the verge of ruin …” I must point out that evolution does not say that whites and blacks are either “higher” or “lower,” a concept that is meaningless in evolutionary theory.

Similarly, the 1875 work “The Pre-Adamite, or Who Tempted Eve” by A. Hoyle Lester claimed passages in Genesis showed the violence and immorality of the earlier races, and that Gen. 4:26 “indicates that the evil genius possessed by the pre-adamite family had infused itself into the heart of Adam’s own household, to so great a degree at least that his children had ceased to reverence Jehovah, and had gone abroad amid the groves and mountains to worship the gods of these ancient idolators …,” that is, they had become polytheists. Lester even interpreted Gen. 6:1-4, about the “sons of God” marrying women and breeding a race of giants, as proof that the sons of Adam — who were in the god’s image, his “sons” — married non-Caucasians, and this race-mixing brought on divine vengeance in the Flood. Lester claimed that in race mixing, the offspring of Caucasians and other races “are a weak and enervated cross, and utterly debased in character, sentiment, and practice. Nor is this the only evil perpetrated upon the human family by the abominable practice of miscegenation …” — they caused the Christian god to send natural disasters.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned segregation in 1954, Christians strongly denounced race-mixing. Christianity continued to be the primary source of resistance to marriages between the descendants of Europeans and Africans.

Thus, a 1959 Arkansas Baptist resolution claimed, “God in His divine wisdom ordained that man should maintain a pure blood stream in his own race.” A Baptist speaker, Judge Tom Brady, told a San Francisco audience in 1957 that segregation was a “law of God,” and that “As long as we live, so long shall we be segregated, and after death, God willing, thus it will still be!”

Another old argument took a slightly revised form. The Rev. G.T. Gillespie told the Mississippi Synod of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. that the story of Noah’s three sons implied segregation (apparently stretching the meaning of Noah’s command in Gen. 9:27); and cited the scriptural orders to the Israelites to segregate themselves from their neighbors. A Baptist writer, Dr. Kenneth Kinney, agreed; in a 1956 Baptist Bulletin, he claimed, “Noting that each of these three groups [Noah’s sons] was to keep to its own tongue and family and nation, do we not face the fact that God drew the lines of segregation (or separation) according to His purpose.”

Another scriptural argument was based on a statement in Acts 17:26, in which Paul said the Christian god “allotted the times of [the nations’] existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live …”, apparently considered comparable to Gen. 9:27.

As recently as 1996, a white, Republican, Alabama state senator running for the U.S. Congress, Charles Davidson, declared that the Bible justified slavery: “People who are bitter and hateful about slavery are obviously bitter and hateful against God and his word, because they reject what God says and embrace what mere humans say concerning slavery.” While he is not quoted on the subject of interracial marriage, I have no doubt of his position.

Finally, in 2009, a justice of the peace refused to officiate the marriage of an interracial couple in Tangipahoa Parish, southeastern Louisiana, infamous for its theocratic public officials, on the claim that marriage would be bad for their future children, who would suffer for their parents’ love. As his many critics noted, “mixed-race” children include U.S. President Barack Obama. The justice of the peace paid the price of his bigotry when he was forced to resign his long-held office.

Clearly, for slavery and segregation defenders, religion, racism and creationism justify a hatred of love/sex/marriage between the “wrong” people.

The United States’ Constitution and its First Amendment do not allow the government to enforce bans on marriages between Christians of different sects or Christians and non-Christians. State laws banning marriages between whites (i.e., Christians) and blacks (i.e., pagans or pagans’ descendants) were couched in religious terms in the 17th century but in “racial” terms by the 19th, so technically they did not fall under the First Amendment prohibition on religion having any role in government. This liberalizing attitude on religiously-mixed marriages spread in Europe with church-state separation movements, such as in the French Revolution. Conservative Christians were not happy.

On Dec. 8, 1864, Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” condemned a laundry list of modern, secular ideas, such as church-state separation and the idea that government’s should not enforce Catholic doctrines by law. When it came to marriage, Pius perceived these errors:

“65. The teaching that Christ elevated marriage to the dignity of a sacrament can in no way be admitted. [Pius rejects civil marriage — marriage is valid only in his church]

“ The sacrament of matrimony is but an accessory of the contract and separable from it, and the sacrament consists in the nuptial blessing alone”; “Civil laws can allow divorce, despite Church prohibitions”; “Church restrictions on who can marry whom can be ignored”; “A civil contract can constitute true marriage among Christians; and it is false to affirm either the marriage contract was always sacramental or that there is no contract if the sacrament be excluded”; and civil laws govern marriage issues.

When Pius IX wrote this, his church banned marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics, unless the non-Catholics became Catholics. Carried to its logical conclusion, this claim would prohibit or nullify all non-Catholic marriages, and all children of non-Catholic unions are illegitimate, even today. It was Pius IX who proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility, and while this originally covered only official proclamations, it was later extended to other papal statements, particularly to encyclicals, which were letters on a subject that previously were considered to be a pope’s thoughts and not a binding decree on church members. As will be seen, the elevation of the encyclicals to edicts has put the modern church in a bind, as it cannot reverse some troubling papal statements on sex issues without denying infallibility.

In a Nov. 1, 1885, encyclical, “Immortale Dei,” Pope Leo XIII outlined his view — and by definition his church’s view — of marriage, a holy institution “wherein the rights and duties of husband and wife are controlled with wise justice and equity; due honor is assured to the woman; the authority of the husband is conformed to the pattern afforded by the authority of God; … and the best possible provision is made for the guardianship, welfare, and education of the children.” He declared in this encyclical that the state must be Roman Catholic, with no deviation allowed, and children must be educated as Catholics.

In an Aug. 16, 1898, encyclical, “Quam Religiosa,” Leo XIII criticized Peru’s new marriage law and claimed sole authority for his church to control all marriages: “It is with sorrow that We view the recently disseminated law in Peru. Under the appearance of regulating the marriage of non-Catholics, it introduced in effect, what is called a civil marriage, even though that law does not affect people of all conditions. What is more, putting aside the authority of the Church, a civil ceremony is permitted for mixed marriages whenever the Holy See, for serious reasons and for the eternal salvation of the Christian family, would consider it inappropriate to exempt anyone from the law forbidding marriage between those of different faiths. [including Catholics and Protestants] We were seriously upset by these events, which have been perpetrated in violation of the obedience due to Our dignity and to the authority divinely invested in Our supreme ministry. … in the truly Christian marriage, [civil authorities] have no authority, for this matter should be left to the jurisdiction of the Church, which is not established by men.”

Leo XIII claimed Jesus created the marriage sacrament, “and this duty cannot be divorced from religion and immersed in worldly affairs.” Thus, “No marriage can be considered firmly ratified unless it is joined according to Church law and discipline.” He demanded public officials “should promise that civil marriage laws will contain nothing contrary to the teaching of the Church.” Again, no non-Catholic marriages can be valid.

In a Feb. 11, 1906, encyclical, “Affari Vos,” Pius X attacked France’s law of separation of religion and government. “You have seen the sanctity and the inviolability of Christian marriage outraged by legislative acts in formal contradiction with them …”

As quoted earlier, Pius X and Pius XI strongly criticized the institution of civil marriages and divorces. On Dec. 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical “Casti Connubii,” on “Christian marriage,” that attacked unions not approved by his church. This included the infamous declaration against contraception that has caused so much damage both to societies and his church, as well as prohibitions on divorce and abortion, even to save the life of the mother! He also declared that his god decreed “in Paradise” (so Pius was a creationist) that the purpose of marriage was to have children, which is one reason he condemned contraception, and that marriage was only “between one man and one woman,” which is the modern battle cry against giving homosexuals equal legal rights to heterosexuals, including a right to marry.

Pius XI claimed that his church’s power over marriage was superior to any government’s: “… let it be repeated as an immutable and inviolable fundamental doctrine that matrimony was not instituted or restored by man but by God; not by man were the laws made to strengthen and confirm and elevate it but by God, the Author of nature, and by Christ Our Lord by Whom nature was redeemed, and hence these laws cannot be subject to any human decrees or to any contrary pact even of the spouses themselves.”

Pius XI added that a marriage under his god’s decree was inviolable and differed from the “union of animals” as well as “the haphazard unions of men, which are far removed from all true and honourable unions of will and enjoy none of the rights of family life. From this it is clear that legitimately constituted authority has the right and therefore the duty to restrict, to prevent, and to punish those base unions which are opposed to reason and to nature …” Once more, only Roman Catholic marriages are valid, and governments can prevent non-Christian marriages.

After repeating his assertion that his church, not civil governments, had sole power over marriage, Pius XI approvingly quoted Pope Pius VI from the 18th century, who distinguished between a “true marriage,” done as a permanent bond within his church, and marriages outside that church: “ ‘… in that case there is no marriage, but an illicit union opposed of its very nature to the divine law, which therefore cannot be entered into or maintained.’ And if this stability seems to be open to exception, however rare the exception may be, as in the case of certain natural marriages between unbelievers” or in some unconsummated Christian marriages. It must be pointed out that the vast majority of marriages — many of which are or have been lifelong — have always been outside Christianity as Christians have always been a minority. Also, the institution of marriage predates Christianity by thousands of years. And, of course, he even denied Protestant marriages.

Pius XI condemned people who argued for temporary or open marriages, calling them “enemies of marriage”; people who said marriage was a civil institution; and laws allowing divorce. He said supporters of civil marriages “want it to be no cause for reproach that marriages be contracted by Catholics with non-Catholics without any reference to religion or recourse to the ecclesiastical authorities.” He expanded on this: “They, therefore, who rashly and heedlessly contract mixed marriages, from which the maternal love and providence of the Church dissuades her children for very sound reasons, fail conspicuously in this respect, sometimes with danger to their eternal salvation. This attitude of the Church to mixed marriages appears in many of her documents, all of which are summed up in the Code of Canon Law: ‘Everywhere and with the greatest strictness the Church forbids marriages between baptized persons, one of whom is a Catholic and the other a member of a schismatical or heretical sect; and if there is, add to this, the danger of the falling away of the Catholic party and the perversion of the children, such marriage is forbidden also by the divine law.’ ”

In defending his church’s views on marriages Pius XI repeatedly claimed that his god was the sole source of true marriages and blamed criticism of his views on nothing less than Satan: “Not all the sponsors of these new doctrines [civil or religiously-mixed marriages] are carried to the extremes of unbridled lust; there are those who, striving as it were to ride a middle course, believe nevertheless that something should be conceded in our times as regards certain precepts of the divine and natural law. But these likewise, more or less wittingly, are emissaries of the great enemy who is ever seeking to sow cockle among the wheat. …” His obsession with his church’s “rights” excluded human rights, as Pius XI signed a treaty with Adolf Hitler, knowing that Nazism was a violent, racist and antisemitic movement. (Some historians argue Nazism’s strongly Protestant aspect probably frightened Pius XI into signing the treaty to avoid a new “Reformation” in Germany.)

Not until the 1960s Vatican II Council did the Roman Catholic Church grudgingly and condescendingly authorize Catholics to wed non-Catholic Christians while still insisting Catholics ought to wed only Catholics.

“The sacrament of matrimony was established by Christ as a symbol of his own union with the Church, to give full scope to its sacred power and to enable it truly to become for husband and wife a great mystery (see Eph. 5:32), whereby they might express in their own lives the love by which Christ gave himself for the church. For this reason, marriage demands the fullest and most perfect agreement between the partners, especially where religion is concerned. … This is why the Catholic Church takes with the utmost seriousness its obligation to guard the faith both of the marriage partners and of their children. It does its best to ensure that Catholics marry Catholics.

“The Church’s discipline with regard to mixed marriages, as laid down in Canon Law, clearly demonstrates this careful vigilance. It takes the form of two impediments to marriage: mixed religion and disparity of worship. The first of these forbids marriage between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic, while not taking from the validity of such a marriage. The second renders invalid a marriage between a Catholic and a non-baptized person.”

The statement insisted pastors “should employ all appropriate means to ensure that their young people marry Catholics. … The church therefore deems it her duty to protect her members lest their faith be endangered or lest they suffer spiritual or material damage.”

The liberal element was in ending excommunication for a Catholic who was married by a non-Catholic minister, but at the same time declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to celebrate marriage before a Catholic priest and a non-Catholic minister, each of them performing his own rite, at the same time.”

A Jan. 7, 1970, apostolic letter by Pope Paul VI reinforced the opposition to mixed marriages, as they “do not, except in some cases, help in re-establishing unity among Christians. … For these reasons the Church, conscious of her duty, discourages the contracting of mixed marriages, for she is most desirous that Catholics be able in matrimony to attain to perfect union of mind and communion of life.”

Paul VI explained the Catholic had a duty to preserve the faith, “nor is it ever permitted to expose oneself to a proximate danger of losing it. Furthermore, the Catholic partner in a mixed marriage is obliged, not only to remain steadfast in the faith, but also, as far as possible, to see that children be baptized and brought up in that same faith and receive all those aids to eternal salvation which the Catholic Church provides for her sons and daughters.”

He ordered that a clergyman had to approve any “mixed marriage” while marriages between Catholics and non-Christians were invalid. Also, not only did he forbid a joint marriage rite by a priest and non-Catholic minister, but “nor is it permitted to have another religious marriage ceremony before or after the Catholic ceremony, for the purpose of giving or renewing matrimonial consent.”

Taken together, these statements indicated Roman Catholic officials were still obsessed with the idea that Catholics exist in a purified state amidst a mass of morally corrupt and damned non-Christians and non-Roman Catholics, and that Christians were constantly at risk of contamination by non-Christian contacts. Thus the church insisted Catholics — with a grudging nod to non-Catholic Christians and an abhorrence of non-Christians — must remain pure or at least be protected as much as possible from impurity.

This Christian idea of marital purity underlay certain antisemitic words and actions of the political movements in pre-World War II Europe that are commonly called fascist.

In his 1922 novel, “The Sin against Love,” Nazi writer Artur Dinter called for laws severely repressing Jews, including a ban on Jew/non-Jew marriages as “bastardizing.” Dinter was also a staunch Christian, who wanted “the foundations for the reconstruction of a purely Aryan Christianity, including the elimination of the Jewish Old Testament and all the Jewish-Christian dogmatic business.” He wanted “the restoration of the pure teaching of the Saviour … the greatest antisemitist and antimaterialist of all time, the Hero of Nazareth.” Among later 19th- and 20th-century antisemites, some considered “Aryan” to be synonymous with the original form of Christianity as espoused by an Aryan Jesus, whom Jews supposedly murdered because he offered a superior religion and socio-economic idea.

In guidelines published in 1932, the German Christian movement — possibly a majority among Protestants by then — declared in point 7: “We see in race, Völkstum, and nation laws of life that God has bequeathed and entrusted to us. It is God’s law that we concern ourselves with their preservation. Mixing of the races, therefore, is to be opposed.” Point 9 said: “In the mission to the Jews we see a serious threat to our Völkstum. That mission is the entryway for foreign blood into the body of our Völk. … We reject missions to the Jews in Germany as long as Jews possess the right of citizenship and hence the danger of racial fraud and bastardization exists. … Marriage between Germans and Jews particularly is to be forbidden.” New guidelines in May 1933, when they were a decisive majority among Protestants, claimed the Christian god ordained the differences among “races.”

German Christians also published such declarations in 1933 as: “A decisive battle of unprecedented dimensions is being fought in Germany. The battlefronts are clearer than ever before. On the one side stand Free Thought, severed from God, and Muscovite Bolshevism, storming against all that is holy with a hate-filled passion for destruction. The goal of red world-revolution fought for with satanic zeal is, according to its own words: ‘No marriage, no family, no church, no faith other than faith in Bolshevism alone! …’ ” Many Christian Germans, including Adolf Hitler, made it clear that they considered atheism, communism and Jews to be effectively identical.

Hitler, a lifelong Roman Catholic, bitterly denounced Jews, especially men, who dated “Aryans.” He said race mixing was destroying humanity. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler denied that Jews were even human. He said they were dirty, stank and were covered in “moral stains” that led them to befoul the arts to promote “spiritual pestilence” and Marxism, which he also sometimes called “the godless movement.” He claimed that it was his duty to lead humanity against Jews, and in doing so, “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Here and in numerous other instances, Hitler expressed himself in a Christianity-based mix of anti-communist, anti-atheist, racist and antisemitic beliefs that were inseparable in his thinking. Many of his supporters expressed a similar mix of religion and bigotry.

Hitler denounced the sexually-oriented literature and bawdy nightclubs available in Germany, blaming Jews again, an attitude that parallels historical Christian hostility toward sexuality as well the belief, which increased in the 19th century, that Jews were a moral threat to any Christian society and had to be controlled or eliminated. Of course, the Nazis also threw homosexuals into concentration camps, forcing them to wear pink stars, in contrast to the yellow stars Jews had to wear. Both groups were publicly humiliated by a policy originally initiated by the Fourth Lateran Council in its obsession with keeping Christians from “morally polluting” themselves by having sex with Jews or Muslims.

In Austria, the post-World War I government had signed a concordat with the Vatican that effectively made Protestants second-class citizens by teaching Catholic beliefs in schools and instituting church control over marriage, according to historian Evan Burr Bukey. The population enthusiastically welcomed Germany’s takeover in 1938.

In Poland, Catholic clergy in particular strongly and successfully opposed efforts in the early 1930s to create a form of civil marriage and divorce, according to scholar Ronald Modras. Existing Polish law allowed marriages only within religious traditions; thus, Roman Catholics had to be married within their church and could not divorce; Jews had to be married by rabbis and had divorce as an option; etc. The non-religious were forced to “get religion” long enough to persuade a clergyman to officiate at their wedding; and Roman Catholic couples could only divorce if they publicly adopted a different religion. The proposed law would have created civil options, eliminating the obstacles many couples faced. Catholic clergy relentlessly denounced the proposal as atheistic, Jewish, Masonic and communistic (all of which many conservative Catholics considered to be one and the same). Catholics also demanded the state fund Catholics-only schools, for fear that exposure to non-Catholics, particularly Jews as teachers or fellow students in the nondenominational public schools, would corrupt Catholic children, Modras said.

To put a necessary context on this, while Polish bishops denounced increasing violence against Jews in the 1930s, they also routinely characterized Jews as being at war against Christianity and as a source of much moral corruption, such as spreading pornography and leading youth Catholics into communism, atheism or freethought, Modras said, quoting a number of examples. Historians say Jewish leaders considered mid-1930’s Poland to be the most-dangerous place for Jews, not Germany. Not surprisingly, this mixed message from Christian leaders had murderous results: Many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland either were killed by fellow Poles, such as in the town of Jedwabne, where some 1,600 Jews were locked in a barn and burned alive, or turned over to the Nazis by Poles. Some non-Jewish Poles who protected Jews were harassed by Polish Christians. After the war, Polish Christians continued to murder Jewish Holocaust survivors.

In 1941, Hungary’s Parliament passed a third anti-Jewish law. Its provisions included a racist ban on marriage between Jews and Christians, and a definition of the children of such marriages as Jews. In the Upper House, Roman Catholic Archbishop Justinian Cardinal Seredi and Evangelical (Lutheran) Bishop Bela Kapi of Transdanubia objected because it prohibited some marriages that churches allowed, thereby denying church doctrine that conversion could change a Jew. Seredi noted that he had supported earlier anti-Jewish laws despite their nasty effects on converts. Kapi said the legislation hurt Christians more than Jews. Legislators — both lay and clergy — did not defend the rights of Jews, only the rights of the churches, historians Randolph L. Braham and Moshe Y. Herczl both point out. Defenders of the law emphasized that, as Minister of Justice Laszlo Radocsay argued, “… we must protect ourselves from any further blood dilution.” László Ravasz argued that such marriages would help purify “Hungarians whose blood is about fifty percent Hungarian blood, as long as the chance exists for all their blood to become purified and Hungarian ...” and argued that “impure” blood should not prevent marriage. Scientifically, this was nonsense; yet it made sense in Christianity’s paranoid belief.

In 1937, in Romania, the National Christian Party took over the government. Antisemitic laws were proposed or enacted in the next three years, including one on Feb. 27, 1938, that distinguished Romanians “by blood” from those “by residence.” As elsewhere, a law — adopted Aug. 8, 1940 — defined Jews both as members of a religion and as a race, and blurred the line between the two concepts. A Jew, legally, was someone who followed the “Mosaic” faith, or whose parents were Jews, or a convert to Christianity whose parents were unconverted Jews, or a Christian who had a Christian mother and an unconverted Jewish father, or Jews “by blood,” even if they were atheists. A Dec. 17, 1941, law extended the definition to anyone with two Jewish grandparents, but not one. One law prohibited marriages between Romanians “by blood” and Jews; and required a Jewish parent to raise a Christian child as a Christian or else the child would be removed.

On Sept. 9, 1940, the government declared that “protected” religions included Roman Orthodoxy; Roman Catholicism; Latin, Greco-Ruthenian and Armenian Catholicism; two Protestant sects; Unitarianism; Armenian Gregorianism; and Islam. Judaism was allowed to exist, but with restrictions — up until the massacre of Jews began. Some Protestant sects were banned and persecuted. A Cabinet member even proposed a ban on conversions of Jews to other religions as “the ethnic being of our people must be protected against mixture with Jewish blood.” Thus Romania was a de-facto Christian nation, with protection for Unitarians and Islam as well, but not for Jews or some “heretics” or schismatics.

The Legion of the Archangel Michael, aka the Iron Guard, was the most-violently antisemitic Romanian movement, but the Christian-dominated government supported the mass murder of Jews — by hanging, burning, starvation, etc. — in occupied Russian territories. The Legion briefly mutinied against the government on Jan. 21-24, 1941, and before it was repressed, spent three days slaughtering Jews, notably in Bucharest. The Legion was not part of Prime Minister Ion Antonescu’s government afterward, but Antonescu and three other Romanian government leaders were executed in June 1946 for war crimes that included massacres of Jews. Not surprisingly, a large cross was erected at the site of their execution when the communist government was overthrown.

In February 2010, Pope Benedict XVI continued his predecessors’ campaigns for baseless bigotry when he denounced England for a law mandating equal treatment for homosexuals, including when seeking to adopt children. Five Catholic agencies in England had to cut their ties to the church in order to continue to operate and stay within this law.

At the same time, in the U.S., three Michigan preachers were suing over the federal hate crime law, claiming it would prevent them from criticizing gays, noting that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Their suit claimed, “… homosexual acts are acts of grave depravity that are intrinsically disordered. … Homosexuality is an illicit lust forbidden by God.” So the pope and some Protestant leaders chose “to stand in the doorway and darken the hall” to uphold a common hatred of a minority innocent of anything except being condemned by a handful of ancient, tribalistic writers.

Christianity thus cast a long, bloody shadow over many lovers in the 20th century, and is still thwarting many true loves in the 21st.

What are the real-world consequences today of Christianity’s paranoia about who can love whom and how? The answer must be wide-ranging because Christianity’s totalitarian obsession with people’s love lives causes broad damage.

A necessary footnote: The Bible damns homosexuals, the basis for Christian laws that often mandated execution of “sodomites,” in the literalist belief that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was punishment for gay sex. Thus, a 1658 New Plymouth, Mass., law (like Connecticut’s) dictated: “Capitall offences lyable to death … Sodomy Rapes Buggery.” Theologians often denounced homosexuals, and Christian propaganda about the supposed horrors of Hell usually included sadistic tortures for gays. Such works include the 2nd-century “Apocalypse of Peter,” 7th-century “Pseudo-Methodius” and Dante’s 14th-century “Inferno,” in which gays endlessly walk the Seventh Circle of Hell on a red-hot sand under a relentless “snow” of fiery flakes. In 824, “Wetti’s Vision” gloated that they “therefore were continually attacked by huge fiery monsters, horrible beyond description. Despite their opposition, [the monsters] committed on [homosexuals] the same damnable crimes that they had been guilty of on earth.”

Such hatred and sadism obviously affect how many Christians view and treat gays. Thus, Christian attempts to control love, sex and marriage, even for non-Christians, continued into the 21st century in the U.S. in fights about sodomy laws and homosexual marriage. Sodomy laws technically applied to both heterosexual and homosexual activities, but enforcement was usually (not always) directed at gays. One argument Christians used to defend sodomy laws was that repeal would be followed by efforts to legalize gay marriage.

The legal struggle about sodomy laws probably came to an end with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling (which should have been unanimous) on June 26, 2003, in Lawrence vs. Texas that people’s sex lives are private and are not controlled by the government. This overturned the court’s 1986 5-4 ruling, under Chief Justice Warren Burger, in Bowers vs. Hardwick that upheld sodomy laws. Burger’s concurring opinion cited Roman death-penalty decrees for sodomy — he called homosexual sodomy a “crime under Roman law” — but his citations were not to pagan laws but to laws by Theodosius II and Justinian, both Christian emperors. More incredibly, Burger declared, “Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeao-Christian moral and ethical standards.” He openly incorporated Christian religious beliefs into secular U.S. laws in violation of the Constitution. In fact, pre-Christian societies generally had no problem with homosexual behavior (with some exceptions). Having homosexual affairs did not hurt the careers of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Hadrian. Burger lied by inferring that the pagan Romans banned homosexuality, when it was only Christians who exhibited such bigotry.

The three 2003 Supreme Court injustices (William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) who voted to uphold Texas’ sodomy law were all conservative Christians noted for their hostility to the godless Bill of Rights and to the right of non-Christians not to have Christian beliefs and bigotries forced upon them.

After the “Bowers” ruling, state courts began overturning sodomy laws, correcting the Supreme Court’s theocratic tyranny — although essentially on libertarian grounds (the states had no business in people’s bedrooms), not on the more-comprehensive grounds that sodomy laws violated the First Amendment by enforcing one religion’s pathological view.

The religious nature of sodomy laws was obvious because protests came only from conservative Christian groups — i.e., those in the anti-Enlightenment, anti-American tradition. A Louisiana Republican gubernatorial candidate, Public Service Commission Chairman ‘Jay’ Blossman, stressed this in a letter criticizing the “Lawrence” ruling: “It overturns thousands of years of Christian tradition that holds homosexual behavior to be an abomination.”

Likewise, in a Jan. 21, 2000, speech in Malta, Roman Catholic Cardinal Thomas Winning of Scotland harshly criticized proposals to ease restrictions on homosexuals in Malta, claiming: “Today, society is facing a new threat, aided and supported by governments and politicians: the threat to equate homosexual partnerships with marriage. … All over Europe an active and militant homosexual lobby is pushing for greater power, and the threat to Christian family life is very real.” Exactly how two men or women getting married threatens any marriage between a man and a woman has never been explained. These comments only make sense in the extremely-paranoid Christian view.

When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Nov. 18, 2003, that homosexuals must be allowed to marry under that state’s constitution, George W. Bush said he would work to “defend the sanctity of marriage” and declared, “Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.” Both statements would enforce an unconstitutional religious edict with no moral basis. U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, said the ruling was “just one more assault on the Judeo-Christian values of our nation.” A number of congressmen rushed to support a federal constitutional ban on homosexual marriages.

In 2004, under pressure from Christians, state legislatures began ordering votes on laws or constitutional amendments to ban homosexual marriages, in violation of the Constitution by refusing to honor relationships legalized in some states that all other states are required to honor. Although basic constitutional rights are not subject to popular votes, many of these state referenda have not been overturned. In 2005, Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill passed by the Legislature to allow same-sex marriages, citing a 2000 voter initiative, Proposition 22, declaring marriage to be only between a man and a woman. By contrast, in keeping with the U.S. Constitution, Massachusetts allowed gay marriages and its Legislature twice rejected constitutional amendments to ban them; Connecticut and Vermont allowed gay civil unions, effectively marriages, although civil unions are problematic because they might not extend all the legal rights of marriage.

On June 16, 2004, the Southern Baptist Convention demanded a theocratic amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban homosexual marriages, on the basis that “the union of one man and one woman is the only form of marriage prescribed in the Bible as God’s perfect design.” On June 25, 2004, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, also supported the amendment and urged all bishops to lobby for it. On April 24, 2006, 50 religious leaders signed a joint petition to the Congress for a “marriage protection amendment” to define marriage as between a man and a woman. It was led by prominent Protestant evangelicals, but also was endorsed by Jewish, Episcopal, Orthodox, Lutheran and Mormon leaders, plus the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Catholic Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia was quoted, “On this particular matter we are rock bottom as far as morality goes.” Such an amendment — it failed in the U.S. Senate — would contradict the First Amendment, creating a constitutional conflict.

A typical comment, quoted by news media in these struggles, was made by an 18-year-old high school student in north Georgia who opposed a Gay-Straight Alliance club in his school, arguing, “It ain’t in the Bible.”

In August 2005, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America rejected proposals to allow gays in committed relationships, to serve as clergy, and to allow blessing ceremonies for gay couples. One gay-clergy foe, Louis Hesse of the Eastern Washington-Idaho Synod argued, “A Gospel of full acceptance, accepting everyone the way they are, what does that say about sinfulness.” The story noted that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod rejected gay clergy, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada rejected blessing gay couples.

In July 2005, the Catholic Church in Canada said it would not baptize the children of gay couples if both parents insisted on signing the certificate.

Thus, caught in the middle of the relentless, clergy-organized opposition to equal rights are young homosexuals whom Christians harass at schools and other venues. One example is from a 2003 lawsuit by a gay junior high school student, 14, in Jacksonville, Ark., which said he was preached to and condemned by school officials who quoted the Bible and forced him to read aloud biblical passages condemning homosexuality. In a letter, the Pulaski County school district defended its actions, claiming the boy had talked to classmates inappropriately about being gay. As Homer Simpson would say: “Dooooooh!” Kids talk about all kinds of things. It’s free speech, and it’s also the purpose of education, to encourage discussion of ideas, issues and differences among people and the recognition sometimes that it’s bigotry to condemn people merely for being different in ways that don’t hurt others. Being homosexual doesn’t hurt heterosexuals, any more than being an atheist hurts theists. Being bigoted to the point of discriminating against or physically attacking someone for being gay or atheist, now that does hurt people.

One nasty but predictable irony of Christian theology is that black clergy, some of them veterans of the 1960s civil-rights activities, have been generally staunch opponents of gay marriages, rejecting the obvious historical comparison between the civil-rights and gay-rights movements. In one instance, an estimated 15,000 black Christians marched in Atlanta, Ga., behind Rev. Eddie Long to oppose same-sex marriage. In Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the 17.5-million Nigerian Anglican Church and unofficial leader of Africa’s 40 million Anglicans, threatened to separate from the Church of England if it accepted openly-gay bishops (the U.S. Episcopal Church did that in 2003) or otherwise condoned homosexuality. The Anglican/Episcopalian Church has been rent for years by the fights over gay clergy. Also, under the influence of American evangelical preachers, Uganda in late 2009 debated a law to execute homosexuals and punish heterosexuals for not ratfinking on homosexuals.

In contrast, several major U.S. atheist and humanist groups have expressed support for gay rights.

Quite a few public officials obviously believe the U.S. is a Christian theocracy, not a free nation, and do not believe in obeying the First Amendment ban on an establishment of religion. Christian arguments against contraception, abortion and gay marriages and for sodomy laws all rely on the paranoid attitude described earlier, particularly the police-state theology that their god would punish the U.S. for moral pollution if sexuality in general is not controlled, and particularly if homosexuals are allowed the same basic rights as their fellow Americans. Some Christian leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have gone so far as to claim that disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans, or “prophesied” disasters, such as hurricane hitting Florida, were or would be caused by acceptance of homosexuals.

As Canadians considered legalizing same-sex marriages in January 2005, Catholic clergy opposed the move. Canada’s government rejected the church protests and approved gay marriages in June-July 2005. England and Spain also approved gay marriages. On Dec. 1, 2005, South Africa’s Constitutional Court effectively ordered the country’s Parliament to allow gay marriages. On Nov. 14, 2006, South Africa’s parliament passed the Civil Union Bill, effectively allowing same-sex marriages, over protests by such Christians as Kenneth Meshoe who said his country was “provoking God’s anger.” In December 2009, Mexico City — capital of a heavily Roman Catholic nation — approved gay marriages.

Perhaps the purest admission of the religious nature of anti-homosexual discrimination came in a debate about a gay-rights bill that the Washington Legislature passed Jan. 27, 2006. The bill added “sexual orientation” to laws banning discrimination on the basis of race, religion, etc. Republican Sen. Dan Swecker opposed it because it would “trample unrelentingly” on religious beliefs. “We, the state, are telling people to accept, actually to embrace, something that goes against their religious views.” Of course, the same can be said about religious beliefs that support discrimination against blacks, women, Jews etc.

Since then, attempts to ensure the right of homosexuals to marry and enjoy the many legal benefits of marriage have repeatedly been thwarted by campaigns organized by religious groups. A Jan. 22, 2010, Chicago Tribune news article described how one gay couple had to spend $10,000 on attorney fees in order to secure most of the same legal rights that a heterosexual couple gains by paying a small fee for a marriage license. As I noted at the start of these articles, no secular basis exists for any government discrimination against gays; it is solely the product of religious prejudice. So it’s not surprising that religious groups — particularly the Mormon Church, Roman Catholic clergy and black American clergy — have been leaders in the fight to deny gays their equal rights, as guaranteed them by the First Amendment. In California, Maine and other states, the opposition to equal rights was religious, particularly by the Mormon and Catholic churches.

The plaintiffs in the 2010 trial of a lawsuit against California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage after courts had ruled it was legal, documented the role of religion in the war against equal rights for gays. A Mormon Church official said the Proposition 8 campaign was “entirely under priesthood direction,” and church leaders urged members to donate millions for the campaign. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops praised the Mormons for their “financial, organization and management contributions” to Proposition 8, while crediting Catholic support for getting the measure on the ballot. Two religion scholars were quoted as admitting that discrimination against gays is at least partly religious in origin.

What price the churches will pay for this is unpredictable, but polls show young people overwhelmingly are less prejudiced toward gays, less supportive of discrimination, than the increasingly-elderly populations that prop up churches. Perhaps that is why polls in recent years show the ranks of the “unchurched” and the openly nontheistic are skewing young.

Beyond groups historically targeted by Christianity’s bigotry, its obsession with controlling people’s lives generally, and marriage and sexuality in particular, has injured many. Quality-of-life reports over the years repeatedly have shown, statistically on average, that the best places to live in the United States are the most-secular areas, the Northeast and West Coast. The heavily Christian South and other states with high levels of church attendances usually are near or at the bottom of every list of statistics — level of education, high-school graduation, income, good health, etc. — that a state wants to be high on, but high on the lists of bad statistics, such as crime, violence, teen pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, abortion etc. One study found that evangelical U.S. Christians had a higher-than-average divorce rate, while atheists — along with Catholics — were below average in divorces nationally. If this study is accurate, it is damning to Christian claims that they should only marry Christians or at least theists, the premise of the theology discussed here.

In a nasty irony, a Jan. 12, 2010, Pew Research Center poll on race, with a focus on interracial marriages, found 70 percent of religious believers hostile to the idea of a family member marrying an atheist: 43 percent said they might eventually accept such a mixed marriage, but 27 percent said they never would. Only 27 percent said they would have no problem with a mixed marriage. In contrast, the poll found far more acceptance of racially-mixed marriages.

Nationally, religion’s effects are just as bad, according to a September 2005 comparison of various nations’ religiosity and quality-of-life statistics. The U.S. was the most religious of First World nations, comparable to religiosity in less-developed, often less-democratic countries; and the U.S. also had the worst social statistics vis-à-vis the more-secular nations.

The following shows how Christianity’s insistence on religious unity and control of government and law is damaging to people, including their sex lives and marriages. In a summary of the 2005 scientific study, researcher Gregory S. Paul compared the U.S. with less-religious countries:

• “Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.”

• “… the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard. Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developing democracy norm. Mass student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more than all the secular developing democracies combined.”

• “… rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developing democracies. At all ages levels are higher in the U.S., albeit by less dramatic amounts. The U.S. also suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, which are starting to rise again as the microbe’s resistance increases. The two main curable STDs have been nearly eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia.”

• “Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S.”

• “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. … The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. … No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional.”

A 2007 United Nations report, the “Innocenti Report Card 7,” of UNICEF, “Child poverty in perspective,” collected statistics from “economically advanced nations.” Of 21 countries, all in Europe except Canada and the U.S., the U.S. was the 20th worst overall, ahead only of the United Kingdom. The U.S. had the worst statistics for children’s “health and well-being,” and was 20th in “family and peer relationships” and in “behaviours and risks.” One statistic relevant to this chapter is that of 24 countries (Statistics from Japan, New Zealand and Australia were incorporated here), the U.S. has the highest birth rate for women ages 15-19. Non-Christian Japan had the lowest teen birth rate. While the role of Christianity in social dysfunction is open to debate, it clearly does not make the U.S. a better place to live than more-secular nations. People’s marriages and sex lives suffer where Christian influence is strongest.

Finally, another, often-violent battleground between Americans and Christians was over abortion and two issues that Christians often treat as related: stem-cell research and human cloning. Under religious influence, the U.S. and state governments had prohibited contraceptives for a long time; and where contraception was allowed, it was limited to married couples; single people could not legally have sex under anti-fornication laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 “Roe vs. Wade” decision triggered a violent Christian reaction. Since then, mass rallies have tried to block access to abortion clinics; clinics have been bombed, burned or doused with nauseating chemicals; and several doctors, nurses and guards have been killed or wounded. Protesters and assailants invariably cited strong Christian beliefs. Some acted on the “Phineas priest” belief cited earlier. Some violence was committed by “Army of God” members; including several killers at abortion clinics. The Army of God Web site is run by the Rev. Donald Spitz and calls for violence against abortion clinic personnel.

A zealous Roman Catholic, John C. Salvi III, was charged with killing two and wounding five at a Boston, Mass.-area abortion clinic in 1994; convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Presbyterian Rev. Paul Hill was executed in 2003 for murdering a abortion doctor and his bodyguard in 1994 in Pensacola, Fla. Hill declared that all non-Christian faiths are Satan worship. Lutheran pastor Michael Bray was one of Hill’s supporters and had a car bumper sticker that said, “Execute Murderers/Abortionists.” James Kopp was a Roman Catholic who said he had a moral duty to kill abortion doctors, his lawyer declared. Bray also supported Kopp, who was sentenced to prison for murdering a New York doctor in 1998. Eric Rudolph was charged in 2003 with killing a police officer and wounding a nurse in a January 1998 bombing at a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic, and was a suspect in bombings at the Olympics in 1996, in Atlanta, Ga.; and at an abortion clinic and gay nightclub in 1997 in Atlanta. Rudolph was linked to Christian fundamentalist and white supremacist groups, reportedly writing a ninth-grade essay denying the Holocaust. He pleaded guilty in 2005 to bombings in Alabama and Georgia, and was sentenced to life in prison. In 2004, evangelical Christian Stephen John Jordi, who had a tattoo of a flaming cross, pleaded guilty in federal court in Florida to plotting to blow up abortion clinics and gay bars. He also reportedly targeted churches that refused to take a strong stance against abortion. Jordi corresponded with Paul Hill and reportedly was angered by the arrest of Eric Rudolph. Finally, Scott Roeder was convicted in January 2010 in Kansas of murdering abortion Dr. George Tiller. Although various anti-choice groups claim they reject this violence , the groups’ rhetoric has been relentlessly violent and clearly a call to arms to devout Christians to pursue the rhetoric literally.

Christianity is simply incapable of dealing with honest, real-life, day-to-day love. You would almost think that the Christian definition of “love” is “intense bigotry toward anyone we don’t like.” That happens to be a definition of “hatred.”

By William Sierichs Jr.

 

Similarly, in 1092, the Hungarian King (St.) Laszlo prohibited marriages between Christians and Jews. At least through the 1880s, Hungary barred civil marriages (ferociously opposed by the Roman Catholic Church, a powerful lobby), and continued to prohibit an unconverted Jew from marrying a Christian. The Hungarian Parliament rejected an attempt to enact civil marriages in 1881.

The theme that marriage with a non-Christian polluted a Christian was exemplified in a tale by the English writer Bede, who said the Northumbrians were converted after King Edwin made a political marriage to the daughter of another king, Ethelbert. When Edwin suggested the marriage in 625, he “received the reply that it was not permissible for a Christian maiden to be given in marriage to a heathen husband, lest the Christian Faith and Sacraments be profaned by her association with a king who was wholly ignorant of the worship of the true God.” Bede said Edwin agreed to consider conversion — which he later did — and not to hinder Christian attempts to convert his people. Christians never reciprocated this tolerance to other religions.

Similarly, an 11th-century English biography of the 7th-century (St.) Rumwold said his mother, the Christian daughter of King Penda of Mercia, was to marry an unnamed pagan king of Northumbria. She brooded on how she could live with one not “cleansed with the washing of the holy spring …,” praying, “ ‘O Lord, the creator and redeemer of all, do not allow my body to be polluted by a man estranged from You …’ ” She refused to sleep with her husband until he was baptized; once he was, she became pregnant with Rumwold. “When the baby was born, he immediately cried out with a loud voice: ‘I am a Christian, I am a Christian, I am a Christian!” Scholars say that King Penda, as far as is known, was a pagan, not a Christian.

Something similar appears in U.S. history, in courts on Indian reservations. In a Nov. 1, 1883, report, Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller explained the logic behind these courts, to “civilize” Indians and end their “savage and barbarous practices.” He said, “Very many of the progressive Indians have become fully alive to the pernicious influences of these heathenish [pagan] practices indulged in by their people, and have sought to abolish them; in such efforts they have been aided by their missionaries, teachers and agents … yet a few, non-progressive, degraded Indians are allowed to exhibit before the young and susceptible children all the debauchery, diabolism [devil worship], and savagery of the worst state of the Indian race.” Teller complained about Indian attitudes toward marriage — couples entered and abandoned the relationship easily — and urged that the Christian version of marriage be forced on them.

These prejudices were included in Aug. 27, 1892, court rules that banned polygamous marriages and allowed judges to solemnize marriages in the American (i.e. Christian) tradition. The report’s emphasis on Indians’ “heathenism” and “diabolism” indicate a Christianity-based prejudice against Indians’ native customs, whether religious or not.

Down into the 20th century, U.S. officials pressured Indians in various ways to send their children to non-Indian schools, often run by Christian groups that had no hesitation about trying to impose their beliefs on their pagan charges. American Indian journalist Tim Giago recounted his experiences: “I saw children severely punished by priests, prefects and nuns for speaking in their native tongue … I listened to lectures giving us clear warning that if we did not embrace the Catholic faith, we would never go to heaven. That the spirituality of our ancestors was built upon heathenism.”

Similar abuses were committed against pagan Australian Aborigine children. Beginning in 1905 and ending in 1970, Australian officials seized children of mixed Aborigine-European descent and imprisoned them in schools, some run by church officials, others by the state. The children were brought up to be servants to white Australians.

So non-Christian belief systems were suppressed to block contacts with pagans, making “mixed” marriages impossible.

In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, in Rome, issued canons that Christian governments were supposed to obey. Canon 68 had obscene echoes in the 17th and 20th centuries. “A difference of dress distinguishes Jews or Saracens from Christians in some provinces, but in others a certain confusion has developed so that they are indistinguishable. Whence it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians join with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with christian women. In order that the offence of such a damnable mixing may not spread further, under the excuse of a mistake of this kind, we decree that such persons of either sex … are to be distinguished in public from other people by the character of their dress …”

Obviously, enough Christians rejected decrees against sex outside of marriage that the Church could not ignore unions with non-Christians. The council’s order presumed that relationships with Jews and pagans must be prohibited, based on the traditional obsession with purity. They meant “damnable” literally.

Historian Ronald Modras says Medieval Poland, a Roman Catholic state, was a haven for Jews from persecution in other parts of Christendom, with Jews allowed to intermingle with Christians in Polish cities and enjoy legal protections unavailable elsewhere. After the council’s decree, Poland’s clergy began demanding that Jews be separated from Christians, be forced to wear distinctive clothing and be driven from any office where a Jew might have authority over Christians. The clergy feared Christians would “fall an easy prey to the influence of the superstitions and evil habits of the Jews living among them.” Fortunately for Jews, Poland’s rulers found them too useful and productive to suppress, so the clergy were ignored for many years. But over the centuries, Christian prejudice slowly rose, and Jews were subjected to pogroms, discrimination and segregation.

Protestants differed little from the Catholics they despised. For example, in 16th-century Scotland, more than 30 Scottish nobles supported “The Book of Discipline.” Although not officially adopted, it reflected how hardline Protestants saw the relationship between church and society. Their doctrines were offered because religion in Scotland had been “utterly corrupted,” and to correct this, they would require the “true” gospel be taught in all churches, while “all doctrine repugning to the same be utterly suppressed as damnable to man’s salvation.” Among other demands, marriages would be “solemnised” in churches on Sundays. Thus, as only a government-approved version of Protestantism could be practiced, marriages could only be between the “right” kind of Protestants.

Marriages between Quakers and non-Quakers were hampered by the fact that some American colonies simply expelled their Quakers — Massachusetts actually hanged four in the mid-17th century — or made their lives as difficult as possible. However, even when Quakers were tolerated, they themselves took steps to keep separate, including making marriages “with ‘the world’s people’ as difficult as possibly it could be made,” historian Frederick B. Tolles says.

The Roman Catholic Church holds the record for longest theocracy. This tyranny began disintegrating in recent centuries, provoking papal demands that governments restore Church edicts as laws. For example, in a June 29, 1881, encyclical, on the origin of civil power, Leo XIII declared: “… Let princes take example from the Most High God, by whom authority is given to them … On this account they are warned in the oracles of the sacred Scriptures, that they will have themselves some day to render an account to the King of kings and Lord of lords; if they shall fail in their duty, that it will not be possible for them in any way to escape the severity of God …

“To princes and other rulers of the State … We earnestly exhort them in our Lord to defend religion, and to consult the interest of their Lord to defend religion, and to consult the interest of their States by giving that liberty to the Church which cannot be taken away without injury and ruin to the commonwealth.”

This theocratic mindset led Leo XIII to issue a Feb. 15, 1882, encyclical on conditions in Italy. It complained in Orwellian terms: “… the condition of the Civil State itself disastrously imperils the freedom of religion. … In the midst of the populations of Italy, which have always been so constant and stedfast in the faith of their fathers, the liberty of the Church is wounded on all sides; everyday efforts are redoubled in order to efface from the public institutions that Christian stamp and character which has always, and with good reason, been the seal of the glories of Italy. … [thus are] marriages contracted in despite of the laws and without the rites of the Church, the position of the religious authorities as to the education of the young utterly ignored …” “Liberty” and “freedom” meant the government should force Catholic beliefs on everyone.

Protestant theocratic beliefs are still manifest in the 21st century. In one example, in August 2002, Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, nominated former Family Research Council president Jerry Regier for secretary of the state Department of Children & Families. Regier was co-author of a 1989 essay on “The Christian World View of the Family,” which declared: “We deny that the Bible countenances any other definition of the family, such as the sharing of a household by homosexual partners, and that society’s laws should be modified in any way to broaden the definition of family or marriage beyond the Biblically understood definition of heterosexual marriage, blood relations and adoption.” It also said Christians should not marry non-Christians.

Finally, Louisiana has fought efforts by a gay couple in New York, who adopted a La. child, to get both their names on the child’s birth certificate. The couple say that, for legal purposes, they need both names, otherwise one parent might be barred from making decisions for the child in some situations. A federal judge agreed with them, but the state has refused to issue a new birth certificate and is appealing the ruling despite the injury it could cause to the child.

So Christianity’s paranoia and hatred hurts not only lovers but innocent third parties.

Christian bigotry took multiple forms, sometimes not obvious. For example, the theological basis of Western racism became obscured by a pseudoscientific biological belief. Sometimes, though, the theological basis sticks out.

In the 15th century, Spanish Christians adopted what we would call a racist doctrine, “limpieza de sangre” — “purity of blood” — directed mainly at “conversos,” Jews who were forcibly converted. It arose from a fear that these “converts” remained covert Jews and would introduce subversive ideas among Christians. Initially a practical concern about the forced converts, it became a racist idea because it was extended to their descendants, as if merely having a Jewish ancestor made one eternally “polluted.”

To be continued

By William Sierichs Jr.

 

Despite Christianity’s routine claim that, at its heart, it’s all about some abstract concept of love, Christians historically were among the worst real-world enemies of that powerful, universal emotion.

The struggle over gay marriage is simply one facet of an old, vicious, theocratic tyranny. Christians have always obsessed over controlling who should be allowed to love and/or marry whom. Driven by theological paranoia and authoritarianism, combined with an often-intense misogyny that is unfortunately not specific to it, Christianity has kept countless millions of potential lovers separated or has forced them to engage in illicit love.

The issue of equal rights for gays, especially for the many legal benefits of marriage, is a church-state separation battle. The predominant source of anti-homosexual discrimination in law and policy in the United States is Christian, Bible-based bigotry. While members of other religions in the U.S. also can be anti-gay, the major enemy is Christianity.

One consequence is that there is no secular basis for any government discrimination against homosexuals. The laws and state constitutional articles prohibiting gay marriage, equal government treatment of gays, bans on gays in the military, etc. turn purely religious prejudice into public policy, thus are a plain violation of the First Amendment. Putting religious bigotry into the law is absolutely an establishment of religion. No credible secular argument has ever been put forward against equal rights for gays. The claim that homosexuality is “unnatural,” for example, is so much hogwash, as biologists have observed homosexual conduct in many animal species. Some people simply are attracted to members of the same sex, and that is natural for them.

Also, foes often loudly denounce claims that the gay-rights movement is comparable to the civil-rights movement. In fact, the only or primary source of opposition to equal rights for blacks, women and gays in the U.S. has been/is Christianity, so all movements for equal rights for these groups share a common enemy and therefore a deep connection that makes them functionally identical. Anyone who supports equal rights for black Americans must, to be consistent, support equal rights for women and gays.

This four-part article will examine how Christianity has been relentlessly bigoted on the whole issue of marriage and sexuality, and the damage such prejudice has and still causes. Long before the gay marriage struggle broke out, Christians were using government powers to restrict who could marry or have sex with whom, solely from theology- and Bible-based beliefs. Thus, as late as 1930, a pope could declare that no marriages were valid outside of the Roman Catholic Church, and could compare the “haphazard unions” of Protestants and non-Christians to the “union of animals,” while demanding that governments enforce his church’s strictures on everyone.

Christian attitudes toward marriage/sex are deeply intertwined with its founding worldview that an evil supernatural power is constantly trying to corrupt Christians, primarily by using non-Christians and “heretics” as its foot-soldiers to lure or mislead the purified believers into eternal damnation. Thus, contact with pagans, Jews or “heretics” put a Christian at risk of angering God. Furthermore, the Church, as defined by the majority of clergy, backed by government violence when possible, needed to ensure that only the majority’s doctrines were taught, to prevent dissenters from leading Christians astray. The demand for blind obedience to and absolute authority for the Church leadership derives from this set of beliefs.

One aspect of this is the claim that marriage exists solely in a Christian context, having been created as a sacrament by their god, so only Christian marriages are valid. In reality, marriage is very ancient and worldwide, although in different forms in various societies.

Christianity’s attitude to sexuality was also influenced by the Bible’s misogyny. The Jewish scriptures treated women as inferior to men. The Christian scriptures contain passages ordering women to be obedient and subordinate to men. More significantly, in 1 Cor. 7, Paul basically condemned sex and marriage, justifying the latter only as the lesser evil for people who could not control themselves. Thus he told the unmarried and widows, “I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” He did, however, counsel Christians married to non-Christians to remain married in the hopes that the believer might “save” the nonbeliever, reflecting the belief in non-Christians’ moral and spiritual inferiority. This hostility toward a basic human and social need skews Christian attitudes, such as in the demand that Catholic priests be celibate, even if numerous sex scandals show they rarely are.

In the 4th century, the theologian Augustine of Hippo drew together various strands of Christian thinking to conclude that sexual passion existed as a consequence of the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Apparently, they were supposed to have had sex without lust before they “sinned” and developed “rebellious” parts they could not control.

Consequently, Christianity has treated sexually-active people as too impure for certain religious duties and over time came to bar them from the priesthood in Catholicism. Anti-fornication laws in the U.S., which prohibited singles from having sex, reflect this obsession. In Colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut, Puritans earned their reputations as pious prudes by punishing premarital sex and pregnancy. Massachusetts even banned short-sleeved shirts, “whereby the nakedness of the arme may bee discovered.” In Connecticut, where the laws were openly based upon Leviticus, bestiality, sodomy/homosexuality and adultery all carried the death penalty. Even an animal used in bestiality was to be killed as well, as if it were at fault. The laws complained of “seuerall other wayes of vncleanes and lasiuious caridges practised among vs …” and ordered “seuere and sharpe punishment” such as fines, imprisonment or corporal punishment.

So Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter” about his Puritan ancestors’ hostility to sexuality and its tragic consequences; while “banned in Boston” was practically a guarantee that a racy story (often quite tame by modern standards) would get national attention. The movie industry’s code of censorship, developed in the 1930s and later applied to television, was forced on it by Christian clergy, acting through the “Legion of Decency.” In its early years, television could not show even married couples sleeping in the same bed!

Also, Christianity ultimately drew its marriage theology from Jewish scripture, because in supersessionist theology, Christians were the “New Israel” or “New Jews.” Christians claimed that they had a “New Covenant/Testament” with the god of Israel, who was fed up with Jews’ alleged inability to obey its laws. Christians were relieved of some Jewish obligations, such as circumcision and dietary rules, but were required to obey other scriptural laws.

So Christians based their marriage/sex ideas on such passages as Gen. 24:3, Num. 25:1-9, Ezra 9:12 and Neh. 10:30, which banned marriage/sex with anyone outside of the people of Israel. Christians interpreted these as banning marriage/sex with non-Christians, and that included Christian dissenters (“heretics”) who were really servants of Satan.

Num. 25:1-9, in which the high god of Israel purportedly sent a plague that killed 24,000 Israelites because some Israelite men had Moabite lovers, has had particularly nasty modern consequences. Yahweh orders the murder of the offenders, so an Israelite, Phinehas, stabs an Israelite and his Midianite lover to death, which leads Yahweh to make Phinehas and his male descendants priests. This paranoid story, combined with other tales of divine wrath at disobedience and divine edicts to kill apostates, drove Christians to relentless bigotry, discrimination and violence against non-Christians and “heretics.” Legal restrictions on love, sex and marriage were one aspect of this worldview.

As a side note, the modern, Christianity-based, Militia movement, has adopted the “Phineas (sic) Priesthood” idea that Militia members have a right and duty to kill anyone they believe is violating God’s laws (also based on Ps. 106:28-31). Several murders of U.S. Jews, blacks and other dark-skinned peoples have been tied to the Phineas Priesthood belief among Militia members, who also routinely espouse bigotry against “mixed” marriages of Christians with non-Christians and white with black Americans.

Christian paranoia and bigotry are, above all, based upon the sayings of the almost-certainly fictional figure of Jesus, who purportedly said, “He who is not with me is against me” (Mt. 12:30) and repeatedly declared that anyone not saved/purified through him would be tortured in a lake of fire for all eternity, while also declaring himself a king at a time when that was considered a claim to absolute power.

Paul criticized Christians who associated too closely with non-Christians, who supposedly worshiped demons. In 1 Cor. 10:20-21, for example, says: “I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.” In 2 Cor. 6:14, Paul orders Christians to avoid unbelievers. Titus 3:10 has Paul declare that Christians should admonish dissenters, and if they fail to listen, “have nothing more to do with anyone who causes divisions.” That’s because Satan could disguise himself as “an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), so a dissenter/heretic would lead Christians into damnation. History shows that these statements attributed to Jesus and Paul, accurately or not, dominated Christian views of non-Christians far more than any “love your enemies” aphorisms.

For this reason, the prominent, 2nd-3rd-century theologian Tertullian denounced marriages to pagans, especially by Christian women, in his “Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage.” He did not argue from the Jewish scriptural laws, but rather from Paul’s idea that association with demon-worshipers was corrupting, especially for women, because in the Roman era, a wife was supposed to obey and support her husband, which led to serious moral consequences if he was a Satan-dominated pagan and she was a purified Christian.

He argued this caused “injuries which affect not just the body; they do serious harm to the soul as well. For who could doubt that faith is weakened day by day through contact with a pagan? Evil conversations corrupt good manners: how much more will uninterrupted familiarity under the same roof do so? Every Christian woman is obliged to obey the will of God. Yet how can she serve two masters, the Lord and her husband, especially when her husband is a pagan? If she obeys a pagan, her conduct will be pagan.” It got worse: “Her duties to the Lord she certainly cannot fulfill according to the demands of ecclesiastical discipline, since she has by her side a servant of Satan who will act as an agent of his master in obstructing the performance of Christian duties and devotions.” He hammered this theme: “Moreover the handmaid of God is kept constantly engaged in duties foreign to her calling. She is occupied in them on all the holidays of demons. … She who served the saints in days gone by will minister to sinners now, and not infrequently. Will she not see in this a sentence of damnation passed upon herself before the time …” Even the music she heard would be “some song which sounds in the throat of the devil himself.” Tertullian insisted, “Whatever does not please the Lord, most certainly displeases Him and is most certainly the work of the Evil One.”

When Christians had the power, they acted in two ways to control marriages. First, they enacted direct bans — enforced by governments when possible — on “mixed” marriages with “wrong” Christians or with non-Christians. Second, they also often suppressed all dissent, so that only the “right” Christians lived in a society, making “mixed” marriages impossible. The Roman Catholic Church used both methods, holding to the first one with all means available whenever it lacked legal power to suppress non-Catholics. Protestants, in their diversity, seem to have been less concerned about “mixed marriages,” with one major exception, but quite a few Protestant states suppressed Christian minorities, so that “mixed” marriages were impossible. The exception was the ban on any marriages between Christians and dark-skinned pagans in England’s American colonies, a significant basis of the later concept of racism.

In 339, the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine II declared that Jews were leading women into their “fellowship of turpitude” and “deeds of disgrace,” which he banned under penalty of death. A footnote to a translation said the “fellowship” could mean marriage or various types of legal contacts, including religious associations.

In 388, the Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered: “No Jew shall receive a Christian woman in marriage, nor shall a Christian man contract a marriage with a Jewish woman. … the crime of this misdeed shall be considered as the equivalent of adultery, and freedom to bring accusation shall be granted also to the voices of the public.” The penalties for adultery were harsh; and this law allowed anyone to make an accusation.

This ban on marriage to “impure” Jews showed up repeatedly across the centuries, and was the underlying reason many European Christians in the 1930s and 1940s considered a convert still Jewish if he or she had Jewish parents; some extended the “pollution” to having two Jewish grandparents, even if the parents were Christians or converts. The “impurity” of even a little bit of Jewish blood was enough to send people to the gas chambers. Here you can draw a direct line from Jesus, Paul, Tertullian, Theodosius and other Christian leaders to the Holocaust and 20th-century Christians such as Adolf Hitler.

Because women were considered to be “weaker” than men and therefore more easily seduced into spiritual error, protecting women from “bad influences” was important, explaining the clergy’s obsession with blocking marriages to non-Christians. Ironically, a purported critic of Christianity, the pagan Caecilius, credited Christianity’s spread in part to credulous women who fell for Christian lies. Likewise, the Christian scriptures warned against “corrupt” peoples to be avoided, including: “For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:6-7). Some 15 centuries later, the Puritan leader John Winthrop claimed that the Antinomian controversy of the 1630s was widespread in part because the Christian dissenters “commonly laboured to worke first upon women, being (as they conceived) the weaker to resist, the more flexible, tender and ready to yeeld: and if once they could winde in them, they hoped by them, as by an Eve, to catch their husbands also, which indeed often proved too true amongst us there.”

In Scotland in the 1660s, the earl of Rothes tried to suppress unauthorized services (“conventicles”) led by clergy ousted from their churches after the restoration of King Charles II. Rothes waxed wroth that: “these rogues stir up the women so as they are worse than devils. Yea, I dare say if it were not for the women we should have little trouble with conventicles or such kind of stuff. But there are such a foolish generation of people in this country who are so influenced with their fanatic wives as I think will bring ruin upon them.”

At the same time, women were a threat to men because of their seductive power (i.e., the myth of Adam and Eve). For example, in 1485 in Innsbruck, inquisitor Henry Institoris launched a witch hunt that yielded 50 suspects. He later narrowed this list to seven and began interrogations. “At the beginning of the interrogation he posed questions of a personal character, pertaining to the sexual lives of the accused. From his viewpoint these questions were vital to the trial, since he maintained that witches were generally women who had been promiscuous from youth, and a history of sexual laxity would presumably support the charge of witchcraft,” historian Richard Kieckhefer explains. Institoris was the infamous co-author of the “Malleus Maleficarum,” an extremely misogynistic manual for “identifying” and interrogating (with extreme torture) suspected witches. While men could be suspected of being witches, the majority of witch-hunt victims were women.

So women and sexuality both were threats to Christianity, explaining why control of women, sex and marriage alike were deemed vital to the movement’s survival. But marriage could also be used as a weapon for Christianity.

In 527, the Emperor Justin ordered: “… that differences of opinion frequently arise between Orthodox and non-Orthodox parents, when a father or a mother wants to bring their common children to the faith of the Orthodox but the other parent opposes it, we decree that the opinion of the parent that leads the children to the Orthodox faith is the stronger and certainly the more predominant.” It ordered parents of nonorthodox faith to financially support children who became orthodox, including dowries for daughters and prenuptial gifts to sons. A similar decree in 527 or 528 ordered that orthodox children were not to have their inheritances reduced by parents who were “heretics,” Jews or Samaritans. So here a Christian ruler discriminates against Christian dissenters, as well as non-Christians, within a mixed marriage.

In the late 5th century in Arabia, Archbishop Gregentius, in the Himyarite kingdom, reportedly debated Herban, a spokesman for the Jewish community. Jesus supposedly committed a miracle that led the king and archbishop to order all Jews in the kingdom baptized, with a ban on unbaptized Jews marrying.

A 589 law by Visigothic Spainish King Recared prohibited marriages between Jewish men and Christian women, and ordered the children of any such unions to be baptized as Christians. This ban was repeated by the Visigothic King Sisebut (612-621).

In 633, the Fourth Council of Toledo, Spain, issued a canon, number 60, saying that baptized children of Jews were to be taken from their parents and brought up by Christians; and the children of any Jewish-Christian marriage were to be brought up as Christians. It also decreed that a Jewish man could not have a Christian wife unless he converted.

To be continued

Continuing essay from William Sierichs Jr.

HATTI’S ALLIES
Ramesses’ Kadesh inscriptions listed 19 Hittite allies, identifiably from all over Anatolia and northern Syria.

A key factor in identifying Hatti’s allies in the Egyptian account is a long controversy over “A(k)hhiyawa,” “Millawata/Millawanda,” “Truisha/Taruisha” and “Wilusa/Wilusiya,” suggestive names that appear repeatedly in Hittite records.

The Ahhiyawa were longtime pains in the butt for the Hittites. While relations sometimes were cordial, the two powers repeatedly clashed in western Anatolia, and the Land of Ahhiyawa furnished a refuge for Hittite enemies.

The identity of Ahhiyawa and Millawanda have been contentious since a scholar, Emil Forrer, argued in 1924 that the Ahhiyawa were the Achaean (Mycenaean) Greeks; Millawata was the city of Miletus; Wilusiya was (W)ilios, or Ilium; and Truisha was the famed city of Troy. Additionally, the Egyptian “Drdny” would be the Dardanians (of Aeneas), relatives of the Trojans. For decades, skeptics rejected Forrer’s map and put its peoples elsewhere. This was not sheer perversity, as scholars admitted that Hittite records were confusing.

A 1995 expedition reportedly proved “Millawanda” is Miletus, so the other identifications presumably fall into place as Forrer suggested. So this makes it highly likely that “Drdny” is the land of Dardany, possibly including Troy and Ilios.

More intriguingly, a treaty drafted after Kadesh, probably under Hattusilis III, says the Hittites restored an exiled Wilusan king, Aleksandush, to his throne. “Aleksandush” is the equivalent of the Greek name Alexander (Alexandros), which happens to be an alternate name in the “Iliad” for Paris of Troy, son of Priam. Scholars point out that the Anatolian names Para-zitis and Pariya-muwas correspond to the “Iliad” names, and that “zitis” is Anatolian for “man.” Like Alexander, “Hector” is also Greek, and his son in the “Iliad” has both Greek and Anatolian names (Skamandrios, Astuanaks). Is it only coincidence then that “andros” is the Greek word for “man,” suggesting Paris (Para-zitis) is an equivalent?

Even though the Ahhiyawa are not named as allies at Kadesh, several western Anatolian states are in the list and likely would have covered any Ahhiyawa areas on the mainland.

Kadesh appears to have been a typical, large, Canaanite city of the era. It sat at the intersection of a major north-south road and a mountain passage to the coast. The Plain of Kinza could feed the city and a sizable herd of horses. The city sat on a mound, protected by a double wall, with a natural moat formed by the north-flowing Orontes River on its east and a stream to its west, entering the Orontes after circling north of the city. Despite later slurs in the Jewish scriptures, the Syro-Canaanites appear to have been as civilized as their neighbors and had competent engineers and sea-farers. The famed seamen of the Iron Age, the Phonecians, were descended from Canaanites, as were the people of the famed city of Carthage, founded by Phonecians. Carthage’s military leaders had such names as Maharbal, Hasdrubal and the great Hannibal. “Bal” is the Canaanite word “Lord,” used instead of names for the chief gods of some Canaanite cities. Some cities had “balaats,” goddesses.

All the other questions about who was at Kadesh pale beside the issue of what actually happened at the best-documented (in a sense) battle of the ancient world.

For Egypt, operations north of Kadesh itself or along the coast would have been impractical with a threat of attack from behind or on supply lines unless the city were friendly. Yet capturing the city would have been impossible in the presence of an enemy army — certainly the decisive factors in both Ramesses’ decision to attack the city in the fifth year of his reign and to retreat from the battle when blocked by the Hittites.

Despite a massive amount of historical material — compared with the usually-thin Bronze/Iron Age archives available — scholars are still not clear on just what happened. Was it a big battle or a small one? Did it last one day or two? Did the Egyptians get their clocks cleaned?

Many historians long took the view that it was a massive, two-day battle, even though they usually downsized the number of combatants listed in the Egyptian account, which said the Hittites had 3,500 chariots and, as long thought, 17,000 infantry, divided into two bodies of 8,000 and 9,000 soldiers.

One later modification to this traditional view was the recognition of Egyptian glyphs for “10,000” in front of the troop strengths — implying the Hittites had 37,000 infantry total.

More-recent analyses argue for a conflict between limited parts of the two armies, after which Ramesses executed some soldiers who routed. The executions have been misinterpreted as a second day of combat, in this view.

Several sets of artwork and inscriptions — traditionally seen as a brief “Bulletin,” a longer narrative account and a long poem — were inscribed on the walls of Egyptian temples in the years after the battle. The details of the accounts differ — in some pictures, the Hittites attack Ramesses’ camp from the west, in others from the east! — and the texts are often vague and bombastic, allowing wide interpretations.

The basic outline of events is that Ramesses marched his army to Kadesh in four divisions in the summer.

In the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, two Bedouin told Ramesses that the Hittites were far to the north of Kadesh, afraid to confront the Egyptians. Ramesses believed them and continued his march confident that he had plenty of time to besiege Kadesh and prepare to meet the Hittites if they dared to fight.

Ramesses’ retinue, personal guard and Amon Division crossed the plain of Kinza, bypassing Kadesh on the west to camp on the north side of the city. Ra Division was behind them and began arriving that afternoon. Meanwhile, the Egyptians captured two Hittite scouts who revealed that the Hittite army was just across the Orontes River, east of Kadesh.

Ramesses sent messengers to summon Ra and Ptah Division, which followed Ra, to hurry to join him. Set Divison was described as “on the road.” As Ra crossed the plain, Hittite chariots that had crossed the Orontes River at a ford south of the city, charged Ra’s right flank. Ra’s soldiers scattered, and Hittites pursued refugees into the Amon camp, even breaking into Ramesses’ royal camp within. The inscriptions say the Hittites numbered 2,500 chariots. Ramesses led a series of counter-charges with his guard and, probably, some of Amon’s charioteers. The Kadesh drawings show Hittite chariots crashing under a rain of enemy arrows.

At some point, Muwatallis, watching from a high point on the east bank, ordered a second assault force — purportedly 1,000 chariots, led by many high-ranking Hittites and allied kings — to cross by another ford north of Kadesh and support the first assault force. But a new Egyptian force appeared — the mysterious “Neharin” — and helped drive the new attackers into the river, where many drowned or were shot down. The drowning king of Aleppo was rescued and resuscitated by being held upside down to drain the water he’d swallowed.

In the traditional version, Muwatallis allowed the Egyptians to encamp, then launched a blitzkrieg to destroy the enemy piecemeal. Only the bravery of Ramesses and his elite guard, plus the Neharin, saved the day. A second day of combat followed, presumably between the infantry, based upon a statement about a group who “took their stand far off and did obeisance with their hands in front of me. Thereupon My Majesty prevailed against them and I killed among them and did not relax, they sprawling before my horses and lying flung down in their blood in one place.” This was assumed to mean Ramesses claimed he led a successful assault against the Hittites.

He then accepted a truce offered by the Hittites and retreated. Historians assumed that his army had taken considerable damage, despite savaging the Hittites, and that he was too vulnerable. A siege of Kadesh itself was impossible with the Hittite army nearby. So Ramesses made the best of a bad situation, saved face and returned to Egypt.

But the Hittites showed they knew the real score, as they then occupied Egyptian territory around Damascus. Muwatallis appointed Hattusilis III to be governor of this territory. The Canaanite city-states also knew who’d won, as they rebelled against Egyptian control. Ramesses spent several years suppressing the rebellions, before he could return to Syria.

In recent years, an alternate view of the battle has developed, with details open to debate. I use historian Hans Goedicke’s analysis for this alternative narrative.

He suggests Muwatallis and Ramesses had agreed to meet at Kadesh to settle the war, its plain offering plenty of open space for the chariots. The encounter lasted three days; Ramesses and Amon arriving on Day One; Ra and Ptah on the second, when the clash occurred. The fourth division’s path was different, which Goedicke says solves the “Neharin” riddle.

While Ramesses’ main army marched through the interior, Set came up the coastal highway, partly to show the flag, partly to collect chariot units from subject states. The Neharin possibly were a force of Canaanite charioteers gathered ahead of Set, or possibly just an advance guard of Egyptian charioteers. Neharin means “young man,” and could have been either. If Canaanite-Syrian, they were the “maryannu,” the nobility. Through careful planning, Set was scheduled to cross the Amanus Mountains from the coast to Kadesh and join the army right about the time Ra was arriving on Day Two. Upon arrival, the Neharin leaders rode to report to Ramesses, Goedicke argues.

Meanwhile, Muwatallis and his chariots had arrived on the east bank, the infantry trailing, about the same time that Ra started crossing the plain. The king sent a scouting force across the ford south of Kadesh, not knowing Ra was approaching. Despite the official claim of 2,500 chariots, the Hittites likely numbered no more than a couple hundred, Goedicke argues. The larger number might have been available in Muwatallis’ whole army, still en route.

The ford allowed the Hittites to cross only in a narrow column, at most two chariots abreast, and Goedicke argues they were further slowed because horses are skittish about crossing water bodies. The Hittite leaders worked their way through the vegetation around the river and found themselves on the flank of Ra. The leading Hittites charged, as retreat was impossible, and the rest of the charioteers followed.

Their weapons stowed in carts, Ra’s soldiers panicked and broke, with the Hittites cutting them down. However, most of Ra’s soldiers escaped to nearby hills, and the Hittites turned northward to attack Amon.

Goedicke sees Ramesses’ counterattacks as involving his guard and available charioteers, launched to stop the slaughter of Ra. He says it’s possible the first Hittite force penetrated Amon’s camp, as depicted in Egyptian art, but thinks it more likely that Ramesses stopped the Hittites.

Muwatallis made a desperate attempt to save his charioteers by sending his personal retinue, perhaps 100 chariots, not 1,000. The number of prominent Hittites and foreign royals among the slain shows that these were not the ordinary Hittite chariotry but a small force of high-ranking officials who ordinarily accompanied the king.

This attack broke into Amon’s camp, in Goedicke’s view, but the Neharin leaders were arriving by coincidence, and immediately attacked, driving the Hittite elite back into the river.

What happened on the third day was not another battle. Goedicke argues that the tone of the inscriptions does not describe a battle but rather punishment of the soldiers who fled the battlefield. The ones who did obeisance could not have been Hittites but could only have been Egyptians frightened at Ramesses’ wrath. They had a duty to fight for him and they let him down, so they had to be given a lesson.

Ramesses illustrated his rage at this disloyalty by employing the Egyptian version of the Roman decimation of a disgraced legion. Ramesses similarly selected a number of soldiers for execution, perhaps also as a sign to Muwatallis of his ruthlessness, Goedicke argues. This lesson in Egyptian implacability, combined with his heavy loss, persuaded Muwatallis to offer a truce. However, the Hittites subsequently took advantage of the Egyptian retreat as noted.

Although this version solves several puzzles, I see possible objections.

For one thing, Kadesh is listed as a Hittite ally. Anyone on its walls had a clear view of the disposition of the Egyptian army. Unless he was incredibly lax or stupid, Muwatallis should have had a full report of Ramesses’ maneuvers. He should not have needed to send chariots — hardly useful as a scouting tool — to find out where the Egyptians were located. In crossing a river, a veteran general like Muwatallis would have preferred his infantry as an advance force.

A minor question is when Goedicke says horses don’t like crossing rivers. I’m not an expert on horses, but horse-equipped armies have crossed countless streams and rivers over the centuries. It’s difficult to imagine the Hittites trying to cross a river in the face of the Egyptian army if its horses were expected to be balky.

I can speculate on alternate scenarios. For example, maybe the Hittites did put several hundred chariots across the river before or during Ra’s approach, hiding on the riverbank until they launched a surprise attack, which proved to be too weak. Or maybe the Hittite advance squads intended to lurk on the riverbank until a larger force could assemble, but someone charged prematurely, hardly an unusual occurrence in military history. The Charge of the Light Brigade anyone?

The bottom line is that the Egyptian account is inadequate to understand what happened, and all solutions are speculation, although Goedicke’s might be the closest yet, even if it were to be proven flawed.

The value of Goedicke’s account is that he strips away the shallower, hyper-dramatic arguments. Additionally, he makes a case that Ramesses had the account scrawled across his temples as a public warning to his commanders and civilian leaders. Despite the modern view that the pharaohs were absolute monarchs, evidence suggests Egypt had a complex political structure, with power centers to hold a pharaoh in check, and military leaders who constituted a “council” that Ramesses had to consult for approval of important decisions.

Goedicke argues that Ramesses faced considerable opposition, speculatively leading to rebellions, in the southern area of Thebes, which was known to be hostile to the northern, Memphis-based 19th Dynasty. In close readings, Goedicke sees a political context to specific statements in Ramesses’ descriptions of the slaughter of “rebels” and to his later Hittite treaty, in which both sides guaranteed to help the other against rebellious subjects. Goedicke even makes a case that Ramesses spent much of his second decade as ruler campaigning in Canaan-Syria, perhaps in modern Jordan and Iraq, and putting down a major rebellion in Egypt, before settling down to a mature, less-belligerent, domestic policy.

As for the Hittites, after Muwatallis’ death, his son Mursilis III took the throne, but ran afoul of his Uncle Hattusilis, who rebelled, won the civil war and became king, aided by his remarkable wife, Pudahepa. Hattusilis signed a peace treaty in Ramesses’ 21st year; signed a treaty with Aleksandush of Wilusa; and apparently maintained the empire’s borders relatively intact.

Readers can see why many are fascinated by the battle. Skeptics of religion also see something else: If scholars cannot agree on what happened, even on some basic details, of such a well-documented event, how can we begin to assess the many historical claims in the Bible? We have zero documentation for most biblical stories; the stories have many problems; and even the texts can offer serious challenges to translators. The existence of contradictory versions of the same event adds another crushing weight to the Bible’s credibility. (Which is true, Gen. 1 or Gen. 2; whom did Cain marry if his parents were the only other living people; who slew Goliath, David or Elhanan, the son of Jaareoregim, the Bethlehemite, (2 Sam. 21:19); how did Goliath and other Giants survive a flood that killed everyone not on Noah’s ark; on which day was Jesus executed; who went to his tomb on Sunday; was it guarded or unguarded; etc.?)

The basis of modern historical scholarship is the need to analyze sources critically, not simply to accept stories no matter how plausible or pleasing. Uncritical use of sources has tripped up quite a few scholars over the centuries; it’s why modern historians are wary of scholarship even up to roughly the mid-20th century. It’s why Petrie, cited earlier, took the Egyptian account of Kadesh as accurate to the point of suggesting the Hittite army disintegrated after its “defeat”; even the then-ignorance of the Hittites’ identity does not excuse an unwarranted assumption based upon a highly-propagandistic text.

Even Christians get this concept right when evaluating the miracle stories of other religions, both modern and ancient. The Trojan War has some plausible elements, particularly with the discovery of Troy’s ruins and confirmation of the Mycenaean civilization, but no Christian believes a river god chased Achilles or that Apollo sent a plague to the Greeks. Yet Jesus walked on water; he and biblical prophets raised the dead; an angel slaughtered all the first-born of Egypt; Moses parted the Red Sea; etc., and for more than a thousand years Christians would burn you alive for denying these; and even today, many Christians defend these stories.

As a sidenote: In 1989, I went on a tour of Egypt in which I saw two sets of Ramesses II’s Kadesh inscriptions, in Luxor and Abu-Simbel. That trip ended with a visit to Turkey, where I toured Hittite sites, notably their former capital, Hattusas.

By William Sierichs Jr.

Literalist Bible worshipers have often pointed to real historical evidence to argue that miracle stories in their book could be true. Even many non-literalists play this game, rewriting the “sacred” text to make implausible events possible.

Thus, the Exodus story of 2-3 million Israelites escaping Egypt amid Cecil B. DeMille-level special effects is pared down into a few thousand Israelites slipping out quietly. An alternate hypothesis was that the explosion of a volcanic island in the Mediterranean could have caused the famous Plagues of Egypt, allowing oppressed Bedouin to flee. A lone reference to the land of Israel in a 12th-century BCE text about a pharaoh’s victories in the area of Palestine has been read to imply that the Exodus must have taken place in the 13th century. Yes, and “Gone With the Wind” could be based on a true story because there was a Civil War.

Historian Donald B. Redford points out the underlying flaw made by proponents of the Bible as history, which has included professional historians over the past century: They assume that a story must have some kernel of truth and then build a narrative mixing speculation drawn from fragments of evidence, instead of first asking the question: “Is there any reason to think that story X has a historical basis?” Redford dissects several Bible stories to show the very foundation is improbable. He actually makes a case that the Exodus has a historical origin, except that it was when oppressed Egyptians drove out their Hyksos overlords! He suggests reasons why it was drastically revised for later propaganda reasons.

I’m going to use two examples to illustrate the problems of the Bible as history, first a real historical event and then a well-established biblical fiction about real events that many people, not just literalists, think is true, at least to some degree.

Believers think Egyptian Pharaoh (a title, not a name, despite Exodus) Ramesses II really was Moses’/God’s foil in that story. In historical reality, Ramesses was one of the longest-lived kings of Egypt and built, or at least put his name on, many monuments.

For many historians, one of the most-fascinating episodes of his reign was the 13th-century BCE battle of Kadesh, when he was 25. It’s one of the best-documented battles in ancient history. It’s also one of the most-infuriatingly vague and controversial events in ancient history.

Ramesses left an extensive written record and massive, cartoon-like drawings of the battle on a plain in western Syria. Yet much of his account is problematic, to the point that historians have created sharply differing hypotheses about it. The only certain points of agreement now are that, after some combat, the Egyptians retreated and the Hittites held control of the disputed region.

Historians have always known that Egypt was a major power in the Bronze Age, but its history was shrouded in myths, propaganda and distortions. Ramesses loomed so large that the works and deeds of other kings were even ascribed to him.

Not until J.F. Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s, allowing historians to read ancient Egyptian, did people begin to sort out the mess. Numerous expeditions uncovered a fascinating assortment of texts, from officials’ letters to bureaucratic files to diplomatic archives to accounts of the pharaohs’ achievements. Unfortunately, the last items are often mostly propaganda with limited historical material; some kings even simply copied reports of earlier kings!

New Kingdom Egypt was born in the mid-16th century B.C.E. from the expulsion of the Hyksos, an Asiatic dynasty with probable Egyptian support.

Following the reunion of Egypt, its kings worked to secure its borders. In the later 16th century, Thothmosis I marched across Canaan and Syria, reaching the upper Euphrates, where he defeated the region’s ruler. In the next two centuries, his successors gradually established control up into northern Syria.

The most-important campaigns were under Thothmosis III in the mid-15th century. He captured the city of Megiddo after defeating a coalition of 330 Canaanite rulers (some probably Hyksos descendants) on the plain outside its walls (the “har-Megiddo,” or “Armageddon”). The king of Kadesh was the leader of the coalition, and it’s possible he was acting as an agent of the powerful Hurrian state of Mitanni, based in northeastern Syria and eastern Anatolia. Thothmosis captured Kadesh and crossed the Euphrates to defeat Mitanni. For the next century, Egypt was the dominant force in Canaan-Syria.

The emergence of the Hittites as the superpower of Anatolia, under King Suppiluliumas, coincided with a period of Egyptian weakness in the 14th century. For an unknown reason, Tutankhamon’s widow, Ankhesenamon, asked Suppiluliumas to send a son to marry her and be Egypt’s king. Suppiluliumas sent his son Zannanza. Unfortunately for Zannanza, a coup had replaced Egypt’s government, and he was murdered. Suppiluliumas retaliated with an invasion of Syria; Egyptian POWs brought a deadly, unknown plague that killed him and many of his people.

The coup led to the reign of Ramesses I, whose son Seti I and grandson Ramesses II set about restoring Egyptian power in Syria, which included Seti’s capture of Kadesh and defeat of the Hittites. When Ramesses II took the throne, the Hittites had regained control of Kadesh/Kinza and were pressuring Egyptian allies to accept the sovereignty of King Muwatallis, Suppiluliumas’ grandson.

HATTI
The Hittites were Egypt’s greatest rival, and ironically were as completely forgotten as Egypt’s imperial glory was remembered. The world knew their name only from scattered references in the Jewish scriptures as “sons of Heth.”

Long unrecognized, “The Odyssey” also referred to the Hittites in Book XI, when Odysseus told the ghost of Achilles that his son had slain Eurypylus, “the son of Telephus” and his forces, rendered “Ceteians” in a 19th-century translation, a variant of the Egyptian “Kheta,” now translated as Hittites. “Telephus” is Telepinus, a Hittite royal name.

When the Kadesh texts first were translated, historians weren’t quite sure whom Ramesses had fought. In 1905, noted Egyptologist W.M. Flinders Petrie believed the Hittites were a Syrian people. He concluded that after Ramesses repelled the Hittite assault on his camp, they “were then chased by the king to the junction of roads, probably the great meeting-place of roads at Homs, whence the allies fled to their own districts, and there was no longer any solid body to be followed. The chief of the Kheta fled back along the north bank to the entrance to Qedesh, where he was received by the remaining garrison.”

Soon after, archaeologists finally established that the Hittites were an Anatolian people, whose capital, Hattusas, was a major city, located about a hundred miles east of Ankara. The ruins yielded many diplomatic archives that are invaluable. One text was the Hittite copy of a peace treaty between Ramesses II and Hattusilis III, Muwatallis’ younger brother, known previously from Egyptian records, ending the war of which Kadesh was one battle.

The Hittite homeland was in central Anatolia, where its Indo-Hittite-speaking founders apparently emigrated in the first half of the 2nd millennium B.C.E. Despite powerful enemies all around and repeated setbacks, the Hittites gradually came to dominate much of Anatolia. In the early 16th century, King Mursilis I not only conquered the dangerous kingdom of Aleppo in Syria, but launched a blitzkrieg downriver to capture Babylon! The shock overthrew the reigning family of Babylonia, which was replaced by the Kassite dynasty.

The next two centuries were followed by imperial ups and downs, with Hattusas falling once to a coalition of enemies. A watershed event occurred in the mid-14th century, when Suppiluliumas seized the throne from the official heir, his brother Tudhaliyas, who was assassinated. Suppiluliumas destroyed Mitanni and secured control of northern Syria.

After Suppiluliumas’ fatal illness, his son Mursilis II struggled for nearly 30 years to defend the empire’s borders, leaving a relatively-powerful state to his son Muwatallis. After Seti’s defeat of Mursilis (or Muwatallis, by an alternate interpretation), the Hittites apparently replaced their two-man chariots with heavier, three-man chariots that were harder to maneuver but increased their fighting power. Muwatallis also put Hattusilis in charge of the defense of the unruly northern Hittite homeland.

By the early 13th century, the Hittites were ready for a renewed death match with Egypt. (Note: Dating systems vary; Kadesh was fought in 1300 B.C.E., 1295 or 1274.)

EGYPT
Egypt could raise sizable armies if needed from a population that one scholar estimates at about 4 million in the 14th century, with mercenaries available from beyond its frontiers. Egypt relied on large forces of archers and spearmen, but chariots carrying archers gave the army mobile firepower.

The army was divided into at least four divisions: Amon, Ptah, Ra and Set or Sutekh. The size of a division is unknown. Some scholars have argued for a standard 5,000-man force. Others point out that the number 5,000 comes from sources that do not pertain directly to an Egyptian division. Any commentary is speculative here, but Egypt was theoretically capable of putting forth a much-larger field army, so the size of a division might have varied depending upon the perceived threat. A campaign against the Hittites was much more serious than one in Canaan.

Egypt sometimes used Canaanite charioteers, the maryannu, likely provided by city-states under treaty obligations. However, most Canaan-Syria states apparently had small forces, as the Amarna letters show the local rulers frequently begged Egypt to send small forces of archers, as few as 50, and sometimes chariots, to protect them, usually from hostile neighbors, who were equally as insistent that Egypt assist them against the other petitioners. The population of Canaan (roughly modern Israel and the West Bank) has been estimated at 250,000 at most in the 14th century. Western Syria’s population likely was higher. The coastal city of Ugarit in northwestern Syria, a one-time Egyptian ally, might have been able to put 600 chariots in the field.

Ramesses II notably had a bodyguard of Shardana warriors, recognizable by their horned helmets and mustaches. He reportedly defeated a Shardana raid as a boy, and hired some prisoners into his service. The Shardana were one of the so-called Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt about a century later. Some migrated across the Mediterranean to an island which now bears their name: Sardinia.

THE HITTITES
The Hittite army normally relied on a mix of infantry spearmen and chariotry. The kings had a bodyguard, the Meshedi. Records show sizable supplies of composite bows and arrows were delivered to the empire, but archery does not appear to have played the same role in the Hittite army as the Egyptian. Surprise attacks and guerrilla warfare apparently were part of the Hittite tactical ops. A Hittite horse-training manual partially survives, showing horses received several years of careful training to prepare them for battle.

One of the most-intriguing aspects of the Egyptian Kadesh account is its list of Hatti’s allies in the battle. The Hittites’ national manpower probably was inadequate to deal with threats from so many sides. Surviving treaties show subject provinces were required to provide forces of infantry and chariotry, some at a ratio of 10-to-1. Kizzuwadna (Cilicia) had to supply 1,000 infantry and 100 chariots, for example.

The Egyptian account says the Hittites had 37,000 infantry and 3,500 chariots at Kadesh, implying a maximum of 47,500 men. Interestingly, this is a ratio of just under 11 infantry to 1 chariot, close to the ratios in treaties and some surviving Hittite battle accounts. As the Syrian allies at Kadesh might still have used two-man chariots, the army size probably was smaller; and this argument assumes the Egyptians had reliable intelligence of Muwatallis’ army when the Kadesh accounts were written later.

Stay tuned for Part II

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."

Upton Sinclair was an author, political candidate, and progressive activist just about 100 years ago. His book, “The Jungle”, was an exposé on the unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, which ended with laws enforcing clean and safe operations in the industry. On the other end of the spectrum, he published “The Brass Check”’ which was an extended diatribe against “yellow journalism”— which  publisher William Randolph Hearst  abused—leading to to the creation of a journalist code of ethics, which guides journalists and newsrooms to this day.

Upton Sinclair was a freethinker and religious contrarian. He self- published “The Profits of Religion” in 1917. The book, consisting of mostly belabored and boring localized anecdotes, has an amusing opening with “Boot-Strap Lifting,” The Priestly Lie,” and “The Great Fear,” and concludes with the coup de grâce of his progressive liberal humanist philosophy—including the dubious science of psychoanalysis, the fascist world of eugenics, and the totally bebunked experimentation and “evidence of telepathy”.

  

The New Morality

 

“ LIFE IS A PROCESS OF expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers; driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call the élan vital. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of distress. So pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the final goal is a condition of free and constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is enduring.

 

 That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It is a perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall upon the earth and wipe out all man’s labors. But on the other hand, it is a conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements of comets, and even of starry systems. It seems certain that if he is given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate environment

 

—The untamed giants of nature shall bow down—

The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease

 From mockery and destruction, and be turned

 Unto the making of the soul of man.

 

It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food from the elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it is conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present prey upon his body, and so put an end to death. It is certain that he will ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human qualities as he has created the spurs of the fighting-cock and the legs of the greyhound. He will find out what genius is, and the laws of its being, and the tests whereby it may be recognized. In the new science of psycho-analysis he has already begun the work of bringing an infinity of subconsciousness into the light of day; it may be that in the evidence of telepathy which the psychic researchers are accumulating, he is beginning to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which may come to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars, and of the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are disclosing.

 

 All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way of their realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and submission, the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him from his animal past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and of others; to root them out of the garden of the soul is the task of the modern thinker.

 

 The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save the law of his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself imposes. 

And 

The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true pleasure is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.

 

 The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there is no authority above reason; no possibility of such authority, because if such were to appear, reason would have to judge it, and accept or reject it. 

 

The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy tomorrow.

 

This new morality, like all things in a world of strife, is fighting for existence, using its own weapons, which are reason and love. Obviously it can use no others, without self-destruction; yet it has to meet enemies who fight with the old weapons of force and fraud. Whether it will prevail is more than any prophet can say. Perhaps it is too much to ask that it should succeed—this insolent effort of the pigmy man to leap upon the back of his master and fit a bridle into his mouth. Perhaps it is nothing but a dream in the minds of a few, the scientists and poets and inventors, the dreamers of the race. Perhaps the nerve of the pigmy will fail him at the critical moment, and he will fall from the back of his master, and under his master’s hoofs.

 

 The hour of the decision is now; for this we can see plainly, and as scientists we can proclaim it—the human race is in a swift current of degeneration, which a new morality alone can check. The struggle is at its height in our time; if it fails, if the fibre of the race continues to deteriorate, the soul of the race to be eaten out by poverty and luxury, by insanity and disease, by prostitution, crime and war—then mankind will slip back into the abyss, the untamed giants of Nature will resume their ancient sway, and the tides, the tempest and the lightning will sweep the earth clean again. I do not believe that this calamity will befall us. I know that in the diseased social body the forces of resistance are gathering—the Socialist movement, in the broad sense—the activities of all who believe in the possibility of reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice and love. To such people this book goes out: to the truly religious people, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness here and now, who believe in brotherhood as a reality, and are willing to bear pain and ridicule and privation for the sake of its ultimate achievement.

 

 From the edge of harsh derision, 

From discord and defeat,

 From doubt and lame division,

 We pluck the fruit and eat;

 And the mouth finds it bitter, and the spirit sweet. … 

O sorrowing hearts of slaves,

 We heard you beat from far!

 We bring the light that saves,

 We bring the morning star;

 Freedom’s good things we bring you, whence all good things are. …

 

— The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation by Upton Sinclair

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Happy Mardi Gras, NOSHAns!!

February 21, 2025

Marty B, ed.

“NOSHA brought in 49 pounds of food for Second Harvest Food Bank for Saturday’s program.”

 

This bulletin showed up on last week’s NOSHA Facebook page, as have many others similar following the third Saturday meetings. Several years’ worth third Saturday meetings, in fact. It has been a tradition our generous humanists/humanitarians started a few years before COVID broke out and paused during the period of isolation, and then resumed after a green light was given to resume public gatherings.

 

Before we began collecting food at our meetings, we were associated with the Catholic-owned Second Harvest in a much more involved way. We met at he food bank’s office and warehouse and participated in the hands-on labor of sorting and boxing the hundreds of pounds of foodstuffs that came in by way of public donations. This work had more of a feel-good sense of accomplish that was more rewarding than than simply putting a few cans in a grocery bag and dropping it off at our meetings. I suppose this sense of involvement  is why these group outings usually drew double-digit attendance. Maybe the idea that the organization was affiliated with the church seemed a bit curious for our non-religious advocacy, but it helped to understand that even churches do some good things. 

But COVID happened, and Second Harvest discontinued using volunteer groups for this warehouse work. It has recently resumed, but we have settled in with the current donation collections.

But our participation is not the point of this; rather, the point is bringing the idea of a common humanity; and the idea that church leaders often follow good deeds with not-so-good deeds—and sometimes with really bad ones should be a familiar one to us.

Today we find out that the archbishop has fired and replaced the top brass at Second Harvest. Why? Because, the leaders say, “the nonprofit refused to contribute to paying survivors of child sexual abuse by priests…..following months of increasingly aggressive pressure placed on Second Harvest to contribute as much as $16 million toward helping to resolve victims’ claims related to the church’s sexual abuse-related bankruptcy” writes David Hammer, WWL Louisiana Investigator. The former leaders contend that Second Harvest “is a 501c(3) nonprofit and thus donations to it must be used for the organization’s stated purpose (feeding the hungry)”, and furthermore that it it had nothing to do with the scandal, and certainly “did not provide a point of access to children for clergy.”

This is a perversion of the mission of Second Harvest and untenable. Archbishop Aymond is a craven and misguided Christian; it is an attempt to extort one of the church’s most honorable foundations to bail out years of complicity in child abuse sex trafficing. Aymond needs to be fired, excommunicated, and prosecuted before he resigns and disappears.

**********************************

Marty Bankson, ed.

January 30, 2025

Comedian and banjoist Steve Martin collaborated with members of roots band Steep Canyon Rangers on writing and performing  “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs” over a decade ago, and the humorous acapella verses remain a haunting enigma for atheists—no songs equals no love, no hate, no friends…well, you know: no purpose, no anything. It’s a musical shaming of atheists, if ever there was one (but probably not). 

Add to the list of things under the heading of No, the conclusion that could be drawn from the reporting of Hemant Mehta in his ”Friendly Atheist” substack in the past weeks is that  Atheists Don’t Have No Heroes Anymore.  Three of the most recognized public intellectuals associated with the cause for rejecting religion over the last 20 years resigned from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently over a brouhaha originating in a post by FFRF writer Kat Grant in the organization’s blog Freethought Now. In summarizing her feelings on her transsexuality she claims “I’m non binary because no particular gender matches my internal sense of self at all,” and, “a woman is whoever says she is.” 

The article motivated biologist/ethnologist (and one of the more recognizable public atheists) Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, to ask to reply to Grant’s conclusions on FFRF’s page.

His response was a disaster. With no—or shabby, at best— evidence, Coyne claimed transexual women are more prone to be sexual predators, among other idiotic claims,  drew such criticism that FFRF scrubbed his piece from their blog.

For those who haven’t followed their opinions since the early days of the rise of New Atheism, early idols like Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker have, along with religion, publicly rejected the recognition of the trans-sexual legitimate claim to existence and the universal rights that should come with every living human. They rightfully resigned their honorary board positions at FFRF in protest of Coyne’s degrading diatribe getting yanked. The answer to the question of how the misguided article of Coyne was allowed to see a place in the blog will likely never be told.

“Good riddance” says Mehta; and this whole shitshow should serve as a good example of why atheists don’t need any heroes, idols, or role models. Those days are gone; we are on our own now.

 Some day, some creative non-believer somewhere might come up with a song; but until then we will be left wondering whether the double negative construction of Martin’s title could imply the opposite of its colloquial interpretation. Surely he has heard John Lennon’s “Imagine” and “God”?”

 

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January 15, 2025

Marty B., Ed.

 

The New Orleans Secular Humanist Association expresses its condolences to all of New Orleans' visitors and citizens  and their families who were victims of the terrorist attack in the early morning of January 1, 2025. The event became the predominant  mainstream media and cable news network story of the day, and resulted in the postponement of a major football game. The brutal killing field littered with 15 bodies equaled those that have occured in Europe and other parts of the world. It was—and is—a shocking time in New Orleans' history.

There are no answers at the beginning or end of a nihilist's thought process except human carnage. 

For Orleaneans, laissez les bontemps rouler is paused for a day.

But just one.

We got you

 

Marty Bankson

January 2, 2025