With all the talk of ISIS, radical Islam, "bad" Islam, and forum chatter about persecution....it might be time to pull out a brief history of "bad" Christianity and how it kinda cleaned itself up in 1619.
Few history professors want to tackle the Thirty-Years War....for obvious reasons. It's five conflicts that have been wrapped neatly into one package....for the benefit of historians. To be honest, you can't really define where one conflict starts and another begins. Thus, it's complicated for regular people to get into this.
To set the stage....the Catholic Church had set itself up into a franchise operation there in the 400-to-500 AD period. It expanded out into Europe and set requirements for each region or kingdom to have a cathedral and a cardinal/bishop installed.....then to branch out and put up additional churches/priests in lesser towns (those with no real cash flow). Taxes were invented and authority over the public became a nuisance.
Around 1525, along came Martin Luther to challenge the Catholic Church and it's doctrine....along with Gutenberg to invent a printing press.
By 1619....the Protestants and Catholics were divided up and preparing for civil war within central Europe. It was a war situation, with God telling one group to fight, and another group to defend. All of the evils of Christianity over the past thousand years had come to be examined, and it was clean-up time.
What we can say from this period....Sweden alone can say that 2,000 castles ended up destroyed, along with 18,000 villages. Germany? Historians say up to 1,500 villages simply disappeared because of population decreases and attacks.
Magdeburg, Germany had a population of roughly 35,000 residents prior to 1619. After the end of the war? 2,464 residents were noted.
One needs to be somewhat honest and admit that the plague came along this same period, and it helped to some extent.
After roughly nineteen years of religious fighting.....both groups were kinda finished off and religious enchantment was wrapped up. But the Thirty-Years War goes into a different direction then.....it's now one village versus another village....with religion not of any interest by anyone. Around 1649....the war finally comes to a closure.
The value of the Catholic Church going forward? Pretty much regulated and deemed non-essential by the public. If you attended the mass....it was your business....not that of the church or the local authorities.
For all the evils that can be dumped onto Christianity....the Thirty-Years War ends the troubles. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch trials? They all come to a closure by the end of the 1600s. Society has cleaned up the mess.
When some dimwit wants to chatter on some public forum today and cite all the bad effects of Christianity....they rarely note that the bad side ended over three-hundred years ago....mostly because of the Thirty-Years War. Few people read up on the subject....ask questions....or want to research something that is rarely brought up in school or university today.
The clean-up of the Muslim religion? The theme here has yet to occur. There's been no Thirty-Years War to solve internal conflict. Because of this....we are stuck in a repeating cycle....waiting on some dynamic to arrive on the scene and force change to occur.
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