Massacres in the name of a peaceful faith

Burning people alive in the name of God's love.

Preach to the choir Religion

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An act of faith

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“”As long as people continue to believe absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

—Voltaire.

“”Religion is based... primarily and mainly upon fear. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand.

—Bertrand Russell, British philosopher.

There have, in the course of history, been numerous massacres by believers in YHWH, Allah, and Jesus. This is something they don't like to mention when they talk of God's love, or Allah the merciful and compassionate. Fuck 'em, here's a list of their crimes:

Old Testament

See the main article on this topic: Old Testament

• Ten massacres of the enemies of God ("enemies of God" includes children laughing at someone's bald patch, 2 Kings 2:23-24).
• We won't go into all the massacres God had the Israelites commit against the Canaanites and others in Exodus, since the evidence indicates that those never actually happened. Pointing that out makes literalists unhappy, but it gets Christians and Jews off the hook for many large-scale atrocities that their (physical or spiritual) ancestors probably committed.

Roman Empire

See the main article on this topic: Roman Empire

• State-sanctioned murder of Christians by pagans until Christianity became the official religion.
• State-sanctioned murder of pagans by Christians until there were no more pagans left.
  • Of particular note are numerous massacres of pagans by Christian mobs in the fourth and fifth centuries CE.

Middle Ages

See the main article on this topic: Middle Ages

Constant pogroms followed by expulsions plagued the entire Jewish population of Europe for many centuries.

“”If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.

—"Ordinances concerning Saxony" — legal code issued by Charlemagne, c. 782 CE

• Sasanian conquest of Jerusalem (614): Jews purchased thousands of Christian prisoners from the Persian Empire and massacred them.
• The Muslim conquests, ordered by Muhammad and carried on after his death (622-750): shortly after Islam's foundation, which led to numerous massacres of pagan Arabs and Iranian Zoroastrians for not converting to Islam.
  • Massacre of Banu Quarayza (627): Muhammad's forces betrayed an alliance with Arabic Jews and slaughtered them, killing between 600-900 (stated by the Quran to be the entire male population of the tribe, with the women and children being sold into slavery).
• Massacre of Verden (782): after the Saxon pagans rebelled against forced Christianization, Charlemagne had 4,500 captive rebel Saxons executed. Historian Alessandro Barbero comments that the most likely inspiration for the mass execution of Verden was the Biblical tale of the total extermination of the Amalekites and conquest of the Moabites by David.
• 1016 Ismaili massacre in Ifriqiya (1016): Sunni riots in what is now Kairouan, Tunisia resulted in the mass murder of about 20,000 Shia Muslims.
• The Fez pogrom (1033): Amazigh Moroccan tribes massacred more than 6,000 Jewish citizens of the city of Fez shortly after conquering the city.
• The Granada Massacre (1066) A Muslim mob crucified a Jewish vizier and brutally massacred the city's Jewish population. About 4,000 killed.
• The Crusades (1095-1291): an estimated 20 million victims in the Middle East over the centuries of religious warfare, based on contemporary estimates.
  • Rhineland massacres (1096): Crusaders during the First Crusade committed mass murder against the Jewish population of western Germany. About 12,000 killed.
  • Antioch massacre (1097): Crusaders murdered thousands of Muslim and Christian civilians, unable to tell them apart.
  • Ma'arra massacre (1098): Weary and hungry Cruasders killed and cannibalized (!) several thousand Muslim civilians.
  • Battle of Ascalon (1099): 200,000 Muslims slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
  • Jerusalem massacre (1099): Crusaders butchered Jerusalem's Muslim and Jewish population in a cold-blooded act of ethnic cleansing.
  • Fall of Edessa (1144): Islamic forces executed all foreign-born Christians in Edessa after capturing the city in an unprovoked attack.
• Massacre of the Latins (1182):Eastern Orthodox Christians wiped out the Catholic population of Constantinople, killing 60,000 to 80,000.
  • Richard the Lionheart's massacre (1191): The king of England ordered the execution of 2,700 Muslim prisoners due to Saladin's failure to pay a ransom.
  • The Sack of Constantinople (1204): Crusaders destroyed the Byzantine capitol, killing an unknown but high number of their fellow Christians.
  • Albigensian Crusade (1209-1299): Crusaders murdered over 200,000 Cathars in France.
• York pogrom (1190): A pogrom incited by prominent locals who were in debt to Jewish moneylenders murdered several Jews and drove the rest, an estimated 150, to barricade themselves in Clifford's Tower, where they killed themselves rather than be captured by the mob. The few survivors were killed after begging for a Christian baptism. So much for loving thy neighbor.
• Timurid conquests (1370-1405): Islamic Mongol ruler Timur, also called Tamerlane, led a reign of terror over southern Asia while calling himself the "defender of Islam", committing genocides against Indian Hindus, Egyptian and Turkish "usurpers", and Middle Eastern Christians. He justified his campaigns against his fellow Muslims by describing them as "bad"; one infamous incident saw him behead 90,000 people in Baghdad so he could build towers with their skulls. In total, Timur killed an estimated 17 million people on his insane quest for Islamic dominance and purification.
• The Valentine's Day Massacre: Several hundred to 2,000 Jews were burned to death in Strasbourg by Christians blaming them for the Black Death.
• Attack on Mainz (1349): A Christian mob attacked the Jewish population of Mainz, Germany and killed 3,000 due to hysteria over the Black Death.
• 1391 massacres: A Catholic priest in Seville, Spain incited the city's Christians into mass killing over 10,000 Jews during their holy week.

Early Modern era

St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Religion of peace!

• Witch trials (~1400-1775): 40,000 women put to death by hysterical Christian witch trials during Europe's wars of religion.
• Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834): Torquemada alone is estimated to be responsible for about 10,000 executions.
• Polotsk drownings (1518): Ivan the Terrible ordered his soldiers to drown 300 Jews to death for refusing to convert to Christianity.
• Massacre in the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (1520): Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado ordered the unprovoked massacre of many thousands of Aztec citizens due to his revulsion towards one of their religious festivals.
• The German Peasant's War (1524-1525): German peasants inspired by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation rose up against the Catholic Church, resulting in a war that killed 100,000 people.
• Massacre of Cajamarca (1532): Spanish conquistadores executed an entire army of the Inca Empire during an unprovoked attack, including Inca ruler Atahualpa. This began the near-total destruction of Inca culture and religion.
• The Münster Rebellion (15340: Anabaptists took over the city of Münster and turned it into a brutal theocracy; local Catholics responded by killing 600 people and torturing the movement's three leaders to death.
• Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-37): Responding to a revolt in northern England in protest of his religious policy, King Henry VIII broke the truce he established with the rebels and executed several hundred people, some by dismemberment.
• Portuguese Inquisition (1536-1821): not as bloody as some historians consider the Spanish Inquisition, but around 40,000 executions are believed to have taken place.
• Mérindol massacre (1545): Francis I of France ordered the deaths of thousands of Waldenisan heretics in Provence in an unprovoked attack against civilians.
• Marian Persecutions (1553-1558): "Bloody" Mary I of England began a persecution campaign against Protestants following her ascension to the throne. Protestants were ordered to either go into exile or convert to Catholicism, with at least 287 Protestant martyrs being burned alive. See Foxe's Book of Martyrs for a supposed full list of Protestants executed during this period.
• French Wars of Religion (1562-1598): a long series of wars between French Catholics and French Huguenots (Calvinists) which tore the country apart for decades. The wars notably featured numerous massacres carried out against civilians by religious fanatics. Between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000 people were killed as a result of war, famine, and disease.
  • Massacre of Wassy (1562): Francis, Duke of Guise ordered 63 Huguenot worshippers to be murdered without cause out of personal anger, inciting the religious wars.
  • Massacre of Sens (1562): French Catholics celebrated Easter in 1562 by tying about 100 Huguenots to poles and drowning them in the Yonne river.
  • Toulouse riots (1562 again): Huguenots and Catholics clashed violently over the span of a week, killing 3,000 to 5,000 people.
  • Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572): 30,000 Protestants dead. This was the largest massacre of the wars and occurred across the country. It also notably occurred in between the religious wars, making it even more galling for happening during peacetime.
• Massacre in Florida (1565): Spanish colonial troops massacred about 200 French colonists in Florida, only sparing the Catholics.
• The Spanish Terror (1572-79): During the Eighty Years War, Spanish armies destroyed multiple Dutch Protestant cities to put down religious/nationalist rebels, killing more than 8,000.
• Thirty Years War (1618-1648): Tensions between the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and various Protestant states spiraled into a devastating continental war that killed between five and ten million people.
  • The Sack of Magdeburg (1631): Imperial Catholic armies destroyed the city of Magdeburg, killing 20,000 Protestants.
• The Ulster Massacres (1641): Irish Catholics rose up against the English in 1641, in the process slaughtering 4-12,000 Protestants.
  • The Protestants later got their revenge thanks to Oliver Cromwell's notoriously brutal conquest of Ireland. Cromwell and many of his army were Puritans who considered all Roman Catholics to be heretics, and so for them the conquest was partly a crusade. 40% of Ireland's pre-war population died. Cromwell is still a hated figure in Ireland.
• Chmielnicki Pogrom (1648): Cossacks under Bohdan Chmielnicki rose up against Polish rule in Ukraine, in the process attempting to exterminate all Jews in the region and killing at least 100,000 people.
• Massacre of Uman (1768): Ukrainian Cossacks rising up again against Polish rule in 1768 massacred many thousands of Jews, Catholics, and Uniates near Kiev.

The Gordon Riots (1780): British Protestant opposition to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which lifted legal restrictions on civil rights for Catholics, sparked destructive riots across London that resulted in 285 deaths.

• First Massacre of Machecoul (1793): Angered by conscription and by the restriction of the privileges of Catholic clergy during the French Revolution, French Catholic zealots rose up and slaughtered hundreds of suspected republican sympathizers.

Nineteenth Century

• The Constantinople Massacre (1821): orchestrated by the authorities of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek community of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in retaliation for the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. As soon as the first news of the Greek uprising reached the Ottoman capital, there occurred mass executions, pogrom-type attacks, destruction of churches, and looting of the properties of the city's Greek population. The events culminated with the hanging of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Gregory V.
  • Not to be outdone by the Turks, the Greeks after capturing the city of Tripolitsa (Tripoli) in 1821 showed everyone how it's properly done. Up to 30,000 Muslims were killed and the whole Jewish population was wiped out.
• Haun's Hill massacre (1838): A Missouri mob murdered 17 Mormons acting on an "Extermination Order" issued by Governor Lilburn W. Boggs.
• The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) saw the Christian cult known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom commit atrocities against the Manchus during their rebellion against the Qing dynasty. The conflict saw upwards of 20 million people killed.
  • Battle of Nanjing (1853): Taiping forces executed or expelled the entire population of Nanjing following the city's capture in 1853.
• Bloody Monday (1855): Riots instigated and targeted against the Irish- and German-American communities by the anti-Catholic "Know Nothing" Party in Louisville, Kentucky resulted in 22 deaths.
  • Tianjing Incident (1856): Internal conflicts led to Taiping forces under Wei Changhui slaughtering military leader Yang Xiuquing, his children and 54 servants and concubines, along with thousands of supporters.
• Indian Mutiny (1857): A violent rebellion by Hindu and Muslim soldiers killed at least 6,000 people, partly in response to rumors that the British were using pig and cow fat in cartridge grease.
• Mountain Meadows massacre (1857): Mormon militia killed up to 140 unarmed members of the Baker-Fancher emigrant wagon train.
• Russian Tsarist pogroms (first wave, 1881-4): A wave of violence targeted Jews in southwest Imperial Russia, featuring mass rapes and killing an unknown-but-high number of Jews.
• Hamidian massacres (1894-1896): Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered Turkish forces to kill Armenian Christians across the Ottoman Empire, killing some 300,000 people.

Twentieth century

Victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.

• Bud Dajo Massacre (1906): US forces massacred about 900 Moro Muslims with artillery in the Philippines during operations to counter Muslim anti-colonial insurgency.
• Russian Tsarist pogroms (second wave, 1903-06): A wave of pogroms killed at least 2,500 people. It's likely that the Russian state press helped instigate the violence to distract from the disastrous failures of the Russo-Japanese War.
• Adana massacre (1909): Pogroms target Armenian Christians, resulting in 20,000 to 30,000 deaths.
• Late Ottoman Genocides (1912-22): Took place before and during World War I.
  • Armenian Genocide (1915-1917): Turkish forces killed between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians.
  • Greek Genocide (1913-23): Turkish forces killed between 450,000 and 750,000 Greek Christians.
  • Genocide of Syriac Christians (1912-23): Turkish forces killed between 200,000 and 275,000 people.
• Lvov pogrom (1918): Polish militias murdered about 150 people in the chaos of the Polish-Ukrainian War.
• Azerbaijan genocides (1918): Christian Armenian nationalists slaughtered 50,000 people, including Jews and Azerbaijani Muslims.
• Pinsk massacre (1919): Polish forces murdered 35 Jews over religion and fears of "Jewish-Bolshevism".
• Hebron massacre (1929): Arab religious leaders incited Muslims to massacre 67 Jews in British Palestine in 1929.
• 1929 Palestine riots: Muslim and Jewish disputes over access to holy sites in Jerusalem escalated into mass religious riots that left 133 Jews and 116+ Arabs dead.
• Simele massacre (1933): Iraqi forces machine-gunned or executed some 6,000 Assyrian Christians in 1933.
• Ustaše massacres (1941-45): committed by the Catholic fascist group during World War II and were explicitly motivated by a desire to promote a "Holy Croatia" by exterminating Eastern Orthodox Serbs. They mass murdered upwards of 300,000 Serbians, 30,000 Jews, and 29,000 Gypsies throughout their four-year reign of terror.
  • Gudovac massacre (1941): Firing squads mass murdered some 190 Serbs in 1941.
  • Glina massacres (1941): Paramilitaries murdered Serbs who would not convert to Catholicism, shooting them or burning them inside church buildings, killing about 2,400.
  • Banski Grabovac massacre (1941): Summary executions of 1,200 Serbs.
  • The Garavice extermination site was used by the Ustaše as a place to murder between 12,000 and 15,000 people and dump their corpses throughout 1941.
  • The Jasenovac death camp, where the Ustaše murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people between 1941 and 1945 through methods that included knifing, smashing skulls with mallets, and torture to death.
  • The Stara Gradiška death camp, where the Ustaše murdered an estimated 12,800 people.
• King David Hotel bombing (1946): Jewish extremists killed 91 people in an attack on the British headquarters in Palestine.
• Indian Partition (1947): Millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were killed during the partition of India in tit-for-tat massacres between all three, with a total death toll of up to two million.
• The Troubles (~late 1960s-1998): In large part a religious civil war, the conflict in Northern Ireland resulted in 3,500 deaths, of which 1,785 were civilian.
• Malisbong Massacre (1974): Filipino armed forces murdered about 1,500 Moro Muslims inside a mosque.
• Various crimes against humanity in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990):
  • Karantina Massacre (1976): Lebanese Christian militias murdered 1,500 people in a Palestinian slum district.
  • Damour Massacre (1976): Palestinian militias murdered the residents of a Christian town south of Beirut in retaliation for the Karantina Massacre, killing between 150 and 582 people.
  • The Sabra and Shatila Massacre (1982): Israel allowed a Lebanese Christian militia to enter a Palestinian refugee camp; the militia proceeded to massacre at least 800 civilians.
  • Tel el-Zaatar Massacre (1976): Lebanese Christian militias attacked a Palestinian refugee camp, killing between 1,000 and 1,500.
• Guatemalan genocide (1981-83): Paramilitaries under Efraín Ríos Montt's government massacred indigenous Mayan villagers, killing almost 200,000.
• Temple Mount killings (1990): Israeli security forces killed 17 Palestinians during a religious riot near the Al-Aqsa mosque holy site.
• Algerian Civil War (1992-2002): Islamic fundamentalists killed about 60,000 people.
• Cave of the Patriarchs massacre (1994): Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist, committed a mass shooting during Muslim prayers at a holy site in Palestine, killing 29 and injuring 125.
• Bosnian Genocide (1992-95): Serbs in Bosnia attempted to exterminate Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav Wars, resulting in a civilian death toll of around 200,000.
  • The Srebrenica massacre (1995) alone saw Serbs murder more than 8,000 Bosniaks.

Twenty-first century

The World Trade Center is destroyed on 9/11.

• 9/11 (2001): Al Qaeda terrorist attack in the United States that killed 2,977 and was motivated by religious anger at non-Muslim US forces based near Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia.
• 2002 Gujarat riots: Hindus and Muslims clashed for days in Gujarat, killing about 1,000, many of whom were burnt alive.
• Iraq War (2003--2011): President George W. Bush claimed that God told him to "end tyranny in Iraq". The war and the resulting chaos has claimed the lives of over 182,000 civilians and counting.
• Routine executions and honor killings in the Middle East in the name of tribal morality.
• 7/7 (2005): Islamic terrorists carried out suicide bombings in four different parts of London, killing 52 people.
• Muslims persecute and murder Christians during the Arab Spring, currently ongoing in Egypt and Syria.
• Various horrible massacres committed by DAESH (2014-ongoing):
  • Yazidi genocide (2014): DAESH launched a genocidal campaign of genocidal massacres and mass rape against the Yazidis of Kurdistan, killing 3,100 people and 6,800 women and girls to become sex slaves.
  • Badush prison massacre (2014): DAESH forces killed about 1,000 Shia Muslim prisoners (DAESH is composed of Sunni fundamentalists) in Mosul.
  • Camp Speicher massacre (2014): DAESH forces captured and massacred about 1,500 Iraqi Shia air force cadets in Tikrit.
  • 2015 Sadr City truck bombing: In Sadr City, Baghdad, a DAESH bomb attack targeted at Shia Muslims killed 76 people.
  • 2016 Karrada bombings: a coordinated series of terrorist bombings by DAESH in Karrada, a Shia Muslim district of Baghdad, killed 382.
  • 2016 Kabul bombing: a suicide bombing targeted at Afghanistan's ethnic Hazara minority killed 80 people, was claimed by DAESH.
  • Palm Sunday Bombings (2017): two suicide bombings in Egyptian churches, claimed by DAESH, killed 45 Christians.
• Peshawar School Massacre (2014): The Taliban attacked a school in Pakistan, killing 141 people, 132 of whom were children.
• Charlie Hebdo attacks (2015): Islamist gunmen killed 17 people across France's Paris Region a shit-fit response to the publication of a satirical cartoon of Muhammad by Charlie Hebdo; Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility.
• Pulse Nightclub shooting (2016): Islamic terrorist Omar Mateen killed 49 people in a mass shooting at an Orlando gay bar.
• 2017 Al Shabaab truck bombings in Mogadishu, Somalia killed at least 537.
• Sri Lanka Easter bombings (2019): ISIS-aligned suicide bombers attacked churches in Sri Lanka, killing 253 people.
• 2019 Boko Haram attack: mass shooting at a Nigerian funeral in 2019 killed at least 65 people.
• A series of attacks in 2020 by the Lord's Resistance Army in the Democratic Republic of the Congo left many civilians dead or missing and displaced hundreds more.
• Kabul Airport bombing (2021): a suicide attack by ISIS-K during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 left at least 182 people dead, including 13 US soldiers.
• Crackdown on the Mahsa Amini protests (2022-23): Protests in Iran over Mahsa Amini's murder at the hands of the Iranian morality police were violently suppressed by the government, resulting in at least 500 deaths.

Massacres in the name of secular humanism

See also

• Examples of God personally killing people
• List of actions prohibited by the Qur'an
• List of actions prohibited by the Bible
• No True Scotsman — the most likely form of denialism by the faithful when confronted about modern massacres in their faith's name