Finally I am concluding this series with a view of the Christian Church and any role that it may have played in the persecution or its culpableness against others. The question for consideration is, can the church much like the Muslims point to a group or groups that have attacked, persecuted or harmed others in the name of God? Can we look at the Medieval Catholic Church and see how it killed those that would dare to espouse doctrine other than the company line? Or what can we say about its successor the Roman Catholic church? Can we look at Martin Luther the noted reformer and see if he needed special sanctuary to protect his life from the church; and was he culpable at all in reportedly making a disparaging comment about the Jews? Or can we look to the Lutherans and other church bodies in how they may have treated the Anabaptist church that shared another doctrine? Can anyone argue that Hitler used the church to persecute the Jews during the holocaust? Can we point to how the church in early Spain during what we now call the Spanish inquisition, and see if the crown tried to force Jews to convert to Catholicism or die, causing many of the Jews to flee to the new world? Also can we also point to how the Pilgrims in England fled or left to come to the new world in order to avoid religious persecution? And last but not least, is there any truth to the story of the Puritans killing people they believed to share a different view of God? True historians can more accurately answer these questions. My point being that the church historically “may not” have always had clean hands when it came to playing nicely with others, and that it is important for us to shed a light on how we (regardless of our faith) as God’s highest form of creation are so willing to abuse one another in God’s name, therefore, what would God say? However, it is a subject that is worthy of further research and that we must answer for ourselves.

You may have noticed that this series is not all inclusive and it wasn’t intended to be. It was intended to bring up the highlights of the subject for us to see and to give some serious consideration as to how we relate to one another in the name of our God. I am trying to show is that there is no religious organization that is operated by mankind that does not have the faults and bias’s that we ourselves bring into it. When we look into our own religious tradition, we see that there are factions at odds with each other who acknowledge the same god. It has to be because we in and of ourselves are very weak and we are ruled by our fleshly nature, therefore, we are predisposed to being at war even with our selves. We trust that the Creator is perfect but we as humans are not. We trust that our Creator understands our short comings and will provide the grace and mercy necessary for us be forgiven for being such poor spiritual Stewarts with how we’ve represented the God of all creation to God’s creation.

What do you think?