Religion is a beacon which sparkles to guide a society to salvation and prosperity .It helps people to cope with violence, bloodshed and moral corruptions. The purpose of religion is to humanize all societies and free human beings from the domination of vice and wickedness. Oppression and subjugation is not an acceptable feature of religion. In short, piety and moral values, which are the building blocks of one’ s soul and spirit, are the very aims of a religion.
By ill-fate, slavery has been rife throughout history and continues till today. If we open the pages of the history of Europe, we see that bishops of the Catholic Church saw “the sale of indulgences” as a very good way to get rich, and it worked magnificently. An indulgence is "the remission of the temporal penalty due to forgiven sin, in virtue of the merits of Christ and the saints." The granting of indulgences is a practice that became generally accepted during the first Crusade and grew considerably during the later Middle Ages. It had fallen victim to commercial exploitation; professional pardoners sold indulgences on a large scale.
Threaten an ignorant person with eternal burning, and he will give you some money to feel safe again. It got ridiculously out of hand from about 500 AD until Martin Luther spoke against it in 1517. One of the most notorious abusers of the practice was a person called Johann Tetzel, to whom is attributed this infamous couplet, “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.”
These Bishops extorted people for years, by horrifying them that their departed loved ones were currently frying in Purgatory, and would remain there for a very long time, unless their surviving loved ones paid the Church money. This money would atone for the dead persons’ sins, and they would then enter Heaven.
In addition, whoever dared protest against the Church or the bishops, were tortured to the worst possible way. Tortures were not always overseen by the Church itself, and thus, the rule of not shedding blood was ignored in these instances. So the torture became much worse: flogging, skinning alive, castration by red-hot pincers, disemboweling, drawing and quartering, head crushing, tooth extraction, de-nailing. Death, if not by torture, was always via burning at the stake.
The Church was also pursuing and slaughtering people because of the slightest hint of heresy and in so doing, it also ordered that all witches’ “familiars” be hunted down, killed and burned. These familiars were pets that witches were believed to keep whether frogs, or owls, or rats or especially cats.
For example, William Tyndale, who was caught after some help from a backstabbing friend, charged with heresy for no other reason than translating the Bible into English, and strangled, then burned at the stake, in 1536, in Vilvoorde, outside Brussels.
I believe that currently the religious extremists follow the same fundamentalist beliefs in Islamic societies. The Taliban dictatorial regime in Afghanistan, which lasted about five years, is the worst example. They ruled people with a strict set of beliefs and force of the spur. Whoever dared protest against beliefs was called a heretic given a death penalty. Religion was an element in the realm of their power which was used to legitimate their government. In other words, they imposed their own stereotypical mindsets on religion rather than following what religion ordered.
Moreover, the religious fundamentalists, just like the Catholic bishops, were torturing the innocent people harshly. A Taliban commander encouraged his men saying: “You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can beat and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.”
His men followed his orders strictly. One of his men by the name of Hassani said, “Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water– like a knife cutting through meat – until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.”
Hassani further shared his opinion : “Maybe the worst thing I saw was a man beaten so much, such a pulp of skin and blood, that it was impossible to tell whether he had clothes on or not. Every time he fell unconscious, we rubbed salt into his wounds to make him scream.”
Hassani was told that if he died while fighting under the white flag of the Taliban, he and his family would go to paradise. The soldiers were given blank marriage certificates signed by a mullah and were encouraged to “take wives” during battle. This was basically license to rape.
Hassani also spent time as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Taliban. He says about him: “… He doesn’t say much, which is just as well as he is very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name ‘Omar’ and sign it.”
In addition, both Islamic extremists and Catholic Church made efforts to keep people in the dark so as to exploit them longer. The highly knowledgeable people were murdered by bishops and the schools were burnt by Islamic extremists. The protesters were tortured or killed by both.
The actions of Islamic and Christian religious radicals were totally against their religious instructions. In other words, Islam and Christianity were against their inhuman and immoral actions. Under the aegis of religion, they aroused people’s hatred towards religion and it was a great harm they did. So, when a religion is used this way, it will do more harm than good and that society’s downfall is ensured.