Tiassa, your education it seems has lead you to condemn all of Christianity, but I see it as not being well founded in Christian beliefs. I don’t know where on Earth a Christian education is required by law. Certainly not in the US where atheists are doing their best to eliminate any references to God or any moral absolute from the education of our youth.
Certainly power corrupts, even the power of an old man over children. It corrupted the Catholic Church, which lead to the Protestant Reformation (Protestant meaning to protest). But even acknowledging that corruption exists, virtually no evil and murder in this world is due to Christians.
The great mass murders in history are usually atheists. Hitler’s Nazi’s despised Christians: the Nazi’s became Gods. Stalin, Lenin, both atheists responsible for the murders of tens of millions. Mao was a communist not a Christian, allowed more tens of millions to die. Cambodia – not Christian, 3 million deaths. The various genocidal regimes in Africa – not Christian. Sudan where some 200,000 people have died in the last 5 years – Muslim. Nowhere will one find such evil at the hands of Christians.
Even the Crusades were defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression, an effort to defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands. Muslims were gunning for Christians to wipe them out. The Christians of 11th century Europe were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims were and still are. Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt-once the most heavily Christian areas in the world-quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul.
From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them.
By the 1500’s the Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. The Protestant Reformation enabled the Renaissance which led to great economic growth and new science and engineering – by Christians: the Muslim lands had no such Renaissance, leaving ultimate defeat of Islam due to economic power not military power.
Today power still corrupts. And perhaps there are some who call themselves Christians who do good works to try to buy themselves into Heaven. Nevertheless much of the good in this world comes from Judaeo-Christian values and devoutly religions people. Much of science and technology, from Kepler, Newton to Einstein, came from devoutly religious people. Christians are not killing people because their God tells them to.
