Something To Think About - 02

Are the Natives of the Americas Savages?

This is in effect a sequel to my earlier post, necessitated by some interesting comments from someone who has identified himself/herself as only Anonymous. I believe that this person has made the comments with serious intent and not in a flippant, facetious manner. But he/she apparently belongs to the Roman Catholic Church and finds it difficult to stomach the thought that the Catholic Church or the Pope can ever be capable of any wrong-doing. To be sure this person represents millions and millions of people who are followers of the Christian faith and belong to the western world, and have grown up with the thought that theirs is a civilised society of culture and refinement, whose leaders, spiritual, social and political, are engaged in providing compassionate, philanthropic, humanitarian services, in the true tradition of Jesus Christ, to the rest of the world, populated by uncivilised brutes and savages with no religion, who need to be converted to Christianity. If only they make an effort to know something of the real world!

Mr/Ms Anonymous says, "The brutality of the pre-Christian Indian cultures was, everyone agrees (!!), horrifying — human sacrifices, brutal slavery, mass killings, etc. No wonder the Indians converted so readily when they were told of Christ. Pope Benedict was right." The ‘Indians’ refers to natives of the Americas.

It’s a pity that in this 21st century when the internet and the world wide web (WWW) are flush with tremendous amount of authoritative information on all subjects under the sun, people do not make any effort to get to the truth of the matter.

I can't do better than reproduce some excerpts from this piece, "A Spanish Friar Indicts the Conquistadors for the Massacre of Indians, 1542" (From Bishop Las Casas. An Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacre and Slaughter of 20,000,000 of People in the West Indies by the Spaniards, [1542]. [Translated from the French edition. New York, J. B. Publishers, 1898. Originally published 1620.]) (http://historicaldocuments.com/SpanishFriarIndictstheConquistadores.htm)

"In the year 1492 the West Indies were discovered, and in the following year they were visited by the Spaniards. The islands were inhabited by an infinite multitude of people who were without fraud, without subtlety or malice, and faithful and obedient to their Princes. ………….. To this quiet and peace loving people, the Spaniards came like tigers, wolves, and lions, enraged with hunger. ………….. At Hispanola, where the Spaniards first landed, they took captive their women and children to serve them as slaves; but not satisfied with this, they commenced to assault the highest and mightiest among them, and when the natives attempted to retaliate, the Spaniards started on their campaign of devilish cruelty and slaughter, sparing neither women nor children. ……... They often laid wagers as to who was the most dexterous in cleaving a man's skull open, cutting him in the middle, or taking an arm or leg off in a single blow. The treatment accorded women, and the indignities their bodies suffered, cannot be related. ....... ...... In the year 1511, they landed in Cuba, a fertile country, filled with a comely and intelligent people. Here, too, their lust for gold and thirst for blood devastated the island, putting more than 800,000 people to the sword. ........ Among the many enormities committed by the Spaniards in Cuba, the following deserves notice: A certain Nobleman or Prince presented to the Spaniards, on their arrival, 15,000 crowns. They, perceiving that he must necessarily posess vast treasure, tied him to a stake, and stretching his legs apart, built a fire under them, offering him his liberty if he would give them more. Unable to bear the torture he sent for more, but notwithstanding this, they began to torment him again, increasing the fire so that the marrow dropped from the soles of his feet and he expired....... In the year 1522 a band of Spanish adventurers went to the Island of Nicaragua, a country fertile beyond comparison, inhabited by a docile and industrious people. It was here that the natives suffered the most severely, as their island did not posess mountains into which they could flee from their conquerors. The Spaniards seizing upon all the products of the country and driving the men from the usual sowing and harvesting, famine followed quickly, from which none could escape. So that from sheer necessity, the natives became cannibals. I saw one woman in such dire extremity that she killed and ate her suckling infant. ………… There is no language, no art or science, that can avail to recite the abominable and bloody actions committed by these human monsters. Neither is it possible to exaggerate their detestable deeds."

When Mr/Ms Anonymous says, "The brutality of the pre-Christian Indian cultures was, everyone agrees, horrifying — human sacrifices, brutal slavery, mass killings, etc.”, how much does that statement correspond to the truth? One has to wonder who the savages are - the original inhabitants, the natives, or the so-called 'civilized', 'Christian', marauders from Europe.

He/She has quoted: "No wonder the Indians converted so readily when they were told of Christ. Pope Benedict was right." Sorry, Anonymous, it was not the natives, wrongly referred to as Indians, who needed to be converted to Christianity. It was the 'Christians' from Spain, Portugal and other European countries who needed to be told about Christ. And Pope Benedict was nowhere near being right. He was far far away from the truth.

Anonymous has begun his/her comments with the query: "Would you care to cite any evidence that the Catholic Church engaged in forced conversions or had anything whatsoever to do with any alleged “genocide” in Latin America? Lefties make this baseless claim based on this:
http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details.php?content=2004-02-26"

Let us take a look at what others say about this, starting with the Goa Inquisition in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1111142225
Details of the Goa Inquisition Posted March 18, 2005 Christian historian, Dr. T. R. de Souza

"The Goan inquisition is regarded by all contemporary portrayals as the most violent inquisition ever executed by the Portuguese Catholic Church. It lasted from 1560 to 1812........... So harsh and notorious was the inquisition in Goa, that word of its brutality and horrors reached Lisbon but nothing was done to stop this notoriety and escalating barbarity and it continued for two hundred more years. Nobody knows the exact number of Goans subjected to these diabolical tortures, but perhaps it runs into hundreds of thousands, may be even more. ........... Dr. Trasta Breganka Kunha, a Catholic citizen of Goa writes, "Inspite of all the mutilations and concealment of history, it remains an undoubted fact that religious conversion of Goans is due to methods of force adopted by the Portuguese to establish their rule. As a result of this violence the character of our people was destroyed. The propagation of Christian sect in Goa came about not by religious preaching but through the methods of violence and pressure." “

"Historians consider the Goa Inquisition the most merciless and cruel ever" Excerpts from interview with Richard Zimler, author of Guardian of the Dawn, by Lindsay Pereira of Rediff.com (14 SEP 2005) (http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/sep/14inter1.htm)

Q. “Portugal, today, is still a country deeply steeped in a Catholic tradition. Do you think people are aware of the Inquisition and what it meant back then? Would they look at this as a re-opening of old wounds?” A. “No, few people here know anything about the Inquisition. Many of them would rather not examine what their ancestors did, both in Portugal and its colonies. But others are very curious about what they didn't learn in school about their own history. Yes, in a sense I am opening old wounds. But I think it's important to do that. I think that we need to face the bad things we do -- both individually and as a society. …………… ........... Guardian of the Dawn has been a Number One bestseller here, for instance. A great many readers tell me I have opened a door to a part of their history they know nothing about. I'm proud of that.”

Q. “Re-examining the Inquisition seems apt, more so at a time like this when religious fanaticism is changing the world in ways unknown to us. What do you, as an author, believe we ought to take away from a study of it?” A. “I couldn't agree with you more, and that is one of the reasons I wrote Guardian of the Dawn. Put simply, I think we all need to be alert to the intolerance in our societies and in ourselves. We ought to maintain government and religion completely separate -- such a separation is the only guarantee we have of freedom of expression. We ought to learn from the ancient Asian tradition, which is to respect the religious beliefs of others and not impose our own Gods on them.”

Let us see how the Catholic Church behaved in the rest of the world in the same time period.

During the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), in three days from August 24, 1572 Catholic forces massacred about 25,000 Protestants. Known as the St. Bartholomew Massacre, "this was the single most bloody and systematic extermination of non-combatants in European history until World War II." After this, "Protestants no longer viewed Catholicism as a misguided church, but as the force of the devil itself. No longer were Protestants fighting for a reformed church, but they suddenly saw themselves fighting for survival against a Catholic church whose cruelty and violence seemed to know no bounds." (http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/REFORM/) "In March, 1562, an army led by the Duke of Guise (Catholic) attacked a Protestant church service at Vassy in the province of Champagne and slaughtered everybody they could get their hands on: men, women, and children—all of whom were unarmed. Thus began the French Wars of Religion which were to last for almost forty years and destroy thousands of innocent lives." (25000 in three days. One has to wonder how many were killed in the 40 years).

Again, Duke of Alba, sent by Philip, the King of Spain, a staunch Catholic, to quell the growth of Protestantism in the Netherlands, "imposed a tribunal, the Council of Troubles, to question and sentence heretics (Protestants). The Dutch called this council the "Council of Blood," for it managed to publicly execute thousands of people before Alba was forced from the Netherlands."

Further, in the Thirty Years War, 1618-1648, between Catholic and Protestant forces, primarily in Germany but joined by other countries too, "The sheer amount of casualties and human destruction made this war the most calamitious and disastrous war of European history before the nineteenth century."

These massacres were all the result of the Catholic Church’s campaign to put down the Protestants whom they labelled as heretics. The Catholic Church had arrogated to itself the right of deciding dogmatically what was orthodox doctrine, and declared any other interpretation of the doctrine as heresy, and anybody who dared to put up a different concept as a heretic. If this was the level of their hatred for people of their own Christian faith who had a different view of what Jesus Christ said, their level of intolerance and arrogance was much more virulent against the Hindus of India, the natives of the Americas and others whom the Catholics labelled as pagans and heathens,and whom they murdered or converted. While the Western world looked the other way when the millions of ‘pagans’ and ‘heathens’ in India and the Americas were slaughtered, they suddenly woke up and took notice when six million Jews were massacred by Hitler and his Nazis with the tacit blessing of Pope Pius XII.

When the ‘heretics’ finally survived the onslaughts of the Catholics and established a place for themselves under the sun, they, the Protestants, Baptists and all other brands of Christians, too, in turn, have behaved in the same intolerant, arrogant way as the Catholics, and have engaged in conversion of people from other religions. Why? Haven’t they learnt anything, from their own experiences, about tolerance for and acceptance of other thoughts and ideas?

When Mr/Ms Anonymous says, "The brutality of the pre-Christian Indian cultures was, everyone agrees, horrifying — human sacrifices, brutal slavery, mass killings, etc.”, against such massive evidence of barbaric, brutal, savage behaviour of ‘civilized’, ‘CHRISTIAN’ folks from Europe, it leads one to wonder whether it is naivete or innocence or ignorance.

However, the purpose of this discussion is not so much about whether the Europeans were more savage than the native Americans, or whether the Christians are more savage than the Muslims or the so-called pagans, but to highlight some fundamental aspects of life, of which religion is just one component.

The Bible says God made man in His own image. Then the Bible goes on to say that God took out one rib from Adam and fashioned the woman, Eve, out of that. Does it mean woman is not made in the image of God just as the man? Does it mean God loves man more and loves woman less, allowing the idea to develop that woman is inferior and subservient to man? Is it not an insult to God to suggest that He, who created the earth, the oceans, all the animals, the birds, the fishes, and the man, could not create woman also in the same way, but made her out of a body part of the man? In fact it is the woman who is made truly in the image of God in the sense of the spirit of God such as love, compassion, ability to create life and so on. Is it not arrogance on the part of men, more so men who have come in the tradition of Jesus Christ, to treat women as inferiors?

So, God made man in His own image. Does this term ‘man’ stand for just one person, called Adam, as the Bible says, or is it a collective term which denotes a pair of man and woman in every single country or region in the world, who subsequently populated the entire world? Is there a white skinned God who created the white people populating the European and American countries, a brown skinned God who created the brown skinned people of the Indian sub-continent, a dark skinned God who created the ‘blacks’ of Africa, a pint-sized God who created the pigmies of Africa, a yellow skinned God who created the yellow tinted Mongoloid people and so on? When man with his limited mental and intellectual capacity can create so many different models and brands of cars such as Ford, Buick, Chevrolet, Austin, Rolls Royce, Peugeot, Daimler-Benz, Skoda, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Ferrari, Audi, Citroen, and many many more, is it difficult to understand and accept the simple fact that the one God (who is the same for everyone), in His own infinite wisdom and love of variety and diversity, has created all the different types of people in His own image, and endowed them all with the same type of feelings and emotions, skills and abilities? “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” is what Jesus said. And he added, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Is that the way the European ‘Christ-ians’(??) have behaved with the Aborigines of Australia, the Maoris of New Zealand, the natives of the Americas, the ‘blacks’ of Africa and any other local populace of the countries they colonized? While the American natives received the Europeans with a smile, with love and kindness, the inhuman monsters from Spain, Portugal, England and France repaid all that loving welcome with barbaric, brutal, savage attacks. It is immaterial which brand of Christ-ianity they professed, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Presbyterian, whatever, they were all equally horrid. The love, the compassion, the peace which Jesus Christ stood for, were conspicuous by their absence. Is this not primarily because of the lack of love, lack of respect, lack of tolerance, lack of acceptance of people who seem different from them, even though they are also made in the image of the same God, the one and only God who is the same for all?

The Christians say there is only one God, the Muslims and the Jews also say the same thing, and the Hindus too say there is only one God. Then what is the problem? Just a qualitative difference between what the Hindus say and what the others say.

The Vedic scriptures which govern the Hindus say that there is only one God, the Supreme Being, but the learned people call IT by various names. So the Hindus recognise and accept that God can be denoted by not only the Hindu names like Rama, Krishna, Vishnu, Siva, Ganesa and so on, but also as the Father of the Christians, as Allah of the Muslims, as Yahweh of the Jews, as Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrians (Parsees), and by any other name as well. It is because of this basic acceptance that all religious thoughts are equally valid that Jews as well as the Parsees found ready asylum in India when they had to flee their own countries, without any persecution by the Hindus. So it has never been in the ethos of the Hindus to force Hinduism down the throats of anybody.

On the other hand it has been the style of the Christians to refuse to accept as valid anything other than their own faith, so much so they label them as pagans, heathens and so on, and develop the urge to convert them to Christianity by force or eliminate them. Isn’t it a shame that this is all that they have learnt from Jesus Christ in whose name they call themselves Christ-ians? Jesus Christ was an embodiment of love, compassion, mercy, gentleness, peace. How far removed from Jesus Christ and His teachings are these Christ-ians!

Respect for and acceptance of the fact that the one and only God has created everyone in this world in His own image and all are entitled to their place on this earth on an equal footing without negative impact from others, and respect for and acceptance of the fact that the one and only God has revealed Himself not only to the prophets who gave birth to Christianity but also to other prophets, sages, rishis, elders etc whose teachings brought forth the other religious faiths in the world all of which should be treated by everybody as equally valid, are two primary requirements for people to live in amity and peace in this world. As Richard Zimler said, “We ought to learn from the ancient Asian tradition, which is to respect the religious beliefs of others and not impose our own Gods on them.”

Just think about it.