Learning from History

What if someone told you that you had to change your religion? Would you do it?

For more than twenty years during the Middle Ages, a king in Europe battled a group of people to force them to become Christian. They resisted and he brought his armies back three times, killing, burning their places of worship, building his own churches, and replacing their priests with his.

Charlemagne (king Charles) thought that his religion was better than the religions people practiced during his reign so he tried to force them to become Christians. Not everyone thought this was a good idea, so they resisted even though it might cost them their lives. Some of those religions survived Charlemagne’s attacks, but many died out due to the pressure he put on them.

One of the ways people resisted was by building castles. Many of these castles in Europe and the Middle East were constructed to prevent Christians from invading their lands during the Crusades. Muslims, Pagans, Druids, and other religious people tried to protect their religions and their people from being forced to adopt Christianity.

After the Christian invaders defeated the castle owners, they still had to defend themselves from attack from other enemies who wanted their land. These enemies and their greed for more land, because it equaled more power, tried to defeat the Christians and take their castles. In some castles, we can find both churches and mosques because of the many times they changed hands. In Spain, many synagogues and mosques were converted into Christian churches when Queen Isabella ruled Spain and the Jewish and Muslim features of these buildings remain today.

When unbiased researchers look at history, many atrocities emerge that had their origins in human characteristics of greed, anger, and foolishness. As related above, greed makes people want to have things that other people own, just because they want more wealth, power, or food. In today’s events we can see the same force causing people to attack and subdue other people due to these goals.

Anger shows in history when one leader wants to take revenge on another for past offenses or simply to show that he’s stronger, or better than someone else. Anger comes from a desire to punish others, often due to a lack of understanding. In today’s world, the attack on September 11th stemmed from anger at the US. Then the US attacked Afghanistan and Iraq to retaliate for that attack. Then suicide bombers attack others to retaliate for these military actions. And the vicious cycle of anger continues unabated as we also see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Foolishness results from a lack of good judgment. Charlemagne’s actions in the Middle Ages could be described as foolish as his ignorance of other religions made him believe that they were inferior to his. Whenever someone acts out of foolishness, it often stems from ignorance, fear of the unknown, or a lack of compassion.

Greed, anger, and foolishness lead to much suffering. Maybe our prayer should be to apologize for these actions, rather than to fulfill our selfish desires for our daily bread.