Is the "crusades card" getting old?
Posted by: mishapqueenI don't mean to offend anyone, but as a Christian, I have heard many atheists, agnostics, and Muslims, saying that I am intolerant because I am a Christian, and if you're not sure, look at the Crusades. Are modern-day Christians still responsible for a mistake other Christians made in the Middle ages? Hasn't Christianity changed significantly since then?
The "crusades card" still applies
The "crusade card" is out of date and overused.
65%
11 votes
35%
6 votes
For those who say it still applies, could someone explain why? I genuinely do not really understand why people are still upset.
It still applies because history is taught to be a reminder of what happens when we do this. I believe the history of the 4 crusades show that we cannot trust a theocratic style government. It shows why we have the separation of church and state.
@andymcstab This article says about 200,000 people died during the crusades. I'm pretty sure more people died in the crusades than the Iraq war. You say this wasn't a crusade to kill non-believers? This religious website posted an article that begs to differ just read this excerpt: "Emperor Alexius asked Pope Urban II for assistance. On 1095-NOV-27, the Pope called on Europeans to go on a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers. "The first and second wave of Crusaders murdered, raped and plundered their way up the Rhine and down the Danube as they headed for Jerusalem." 1 The "army" was primarily composed of untrained peasants with their families, with a core of trained soldiers. On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews. The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust." Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim were also slaughtered without mercy. " http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_cru1.htm
@mishapqueen Do you really think this doesn't apply?
I wouldn't say present-day Christians should be held responsible for something that happened like 5 decades ago, but they should be aware of the details of what happened. History should always be remembered and studied.
*5 centuries* (sorry for all quad-post I'm a history nut).
Prefer, if you count all of the dead iraqis, the war probably killed more than the crusades.
All you've done is validated my claim, prefer. If 200'000 died over 200+ years, thats 1000 a year. It barely even counts as a state of war. The iraq conflict has killed over 1m in a fraction of the time.
Http://www.Reuters.Com/article/2008/01/30/us-iraq-deaths-survey-idUSL3048857920080130
I claimed that the war was to reclaim the holy land, and this is all your source verifies. I am certain some atrocities were commited, this is part of the human condition. They were not instructed to do this, nor was it entailed by their mission. As you say "they", (the army of which the majority were peasants), decided themselves to add these extra missions. It was not an instruction of the church, or of Christian doctrine.
Andy, 1 million is a really high estimate. Its probably more in the ballpark of 250,000, the estimates range between 100k and 1 million but 1 million is probably wrong.
It took the crusaders a year to even get to the holy land. There also weren't waves of troops coming in every week like in Iraq. They didn't have anything near as powerful as the arsenal that the US has today. Today it takes a matter of hours to a day by plane. You said it wasn't their goal to slaughter non-believers yet they did. Whether or not the Pope directly told them to or not they did. They were inspired by faith, anger, and lust for blood. It happened like this whether the Pope wanted it to or not and this is how it's remembered.
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Reasons in comments. To sum it all up a lot of people died for believing what they wanted to. The level of religious intolerance that was present during the crusades should be used as a reminder of how bad it is when religions have all the power.
Pop culture has a completely wrong idea about the Crusades. It was NOT a crusade to kill non believers, it was a Crusade to SAVE Christians from Muslim oppression, and reclaim the Holy Land which Muslims took at a huge amount of blood loss. The Crusades spanned over a couple of hundred years, and the total death toll was minimal. Far less than the Iraq war, for instance, which only lasted for 10 years. Without the Crusades, we would all be Muslim, because they were intent on conquering the whole of Europe.
christians did lots of bad things during the middle ages not just the crusades but as we can all see christianity has changed and not like that anymore unlike islam who refuses to change and has stayed in the 12th century which is what you should tell those muslims when they accuse you of being intolerant