Religion and War, Again

I think we all realize that religion has been used to justify war for a long time, perhaps ever since the human species has existed. I just want to add a couple more examples to your mental list. Both examples come from medieval and early modern Europeans, who despite their protestations of advanced culture were more bloodthirsty than the people they called “savages,” who were plenty bloodthirsty themselves.

The first example is from the Crusades, in which the pope would give indulgences to the soldiers in advance for whatever rape and pillage they might undertake against Muslims. We are talking about more than one pope and more than one Crusade.

The second example comes from Martin Luther. In a 1526 essay, quoted in E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, Luther wrote that it was God who instituted the holy practice of war.  He said that Romans 13:1 indicated that God invented war; it was not a human invention. “For the hand that wields this sword and kills with it is not man’s hand, but God’s; and it is not man, but God, who hangs, tortures, beheads, kills, and fights. These are all God’s works and judgments.”

Now, if a fundamentalist were to hear this in church today, he or she would simply nod his or her head in agreement with the preacher. But those of us who care about evidence would do as I just did and go read Romans 13:1. It says nothing at all like what Luther claimed. It says to be subject to government authorities, because God has instituted them. That is, from the Apostle Paul’s viewpoint, God created governments. This does NOT mean that God approves of everything that every government does. So if your government tells you to torture somebody, that does NOT mean that God wants you to torture that person. Luther was just making all that stuff up out of his prejudiced, evil, bloodthirsty mind. Protestants revere him, but he sounds like Pol Pot to me, with a little God-puppet added. Luther was so consumed by hatred that he deliberately made stuff up about the Bible. He wanted so badly for whatever government (in what is today Germany) was supporting him to go out and torture Catholics that he used his ecclesiastical position of power to blasphemously stick words in God’s mouth. If there is a hell, Luther is in it, along with the Crusaders. Luther certainly did not believe that God instituted the Muslim governments and that God ordered Muslims to torture Christian captives, unless maybe they were Catholics.

Look, I’ll try to cut Luther a little bit of slack here, but I’m afraid it won’t be very convincing. Luther once said that he did some of his best thinking “over porcelain,” that is, when he was sitting on the toilet. He must have been having a hard time of it, if he had enough time to think up his theology of God-inspired torture. I wonder how many acts of torture were inspired by Luther’s words, which emerged from a recalcitrant turd in Luther’s bowels. Might history have been just a little bit less violent if milk of magnesia had been invented earlier?

Sorry to all you Lutherans out there, but you’d better get yourself a different hero.