Religion Kills [Updated]

Massacre of the Innocence, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

One of the great lies religious people tell is that religion is a force for peace; that without religion there would be no morality and nothing to stop people rushing around killing one another. Like so many other claims made by religious people the facts directly contradict the claim.

Here is a list of religion-inspired massacres, i.e. a single event of mass killing inspired by religion or specifically of followers of a different religion, often merely a different sect of the same religion as the killers.

This is a work in progress, and probably always will be, as there will probably never cease to be excuses for religious massacres.

Date	Location	People Killed	Name	Details
782 CE	Verden, Lower Saxony, Germany	4,500	Massacre of Verden	Saxon prisoners killed on orders of Charlemagne during his war to forcibly Christianise the Saxons
30 December 1066	Grenada, Al-Andelus	4,000	Grenada Massacre	Responding to a rumour that Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela intended to assassinate the king and usurp the throne, a Muslim mob killed him and the Jewish population of the city.
1099	Jerusalem, Palestine	10,000	Siege of Jerusalem	During the First Crusade, a Christian force had laid siege to the Muslim/Jewish city of Jerusalem. When it fell, almost all the inhabitants was slaughtered. Reports spoke of streets being ankle-deep in blood.
16 March 1190	York, England	150-500	1190 York Massacre	During a period of Christian fervour stoked by the Crusades, and egged on by local gentry who were heavily in debt to Jewish money-lenders, the entire Jewish population of York, which had taken refuge in York Castle, were killed. Similar massacres had earlier occurred in Lincoln, Norwich and Stamford and were to be repeated elsewhere in England in succeeding years.
1209	Béziers, Languedoc, France	15,000+	Massacre at Béziers	First major military action in the 'Albigensian Crusade' against the Cathars in Béziers, in which the Cistercian abbot commander, having been told that there were many Catholic Christians in the town, ordered his soldiers to "Kill them all. God will recognise his own". See also "Feel That Christian Love!"
1298	Germany	Many thousands	Rintfleisch Massacres	A local Christian demagogue, the self-styled "Lord Rindtfleisch" claimed he had been given a mandate from Heaven to exterminate the Jews. Starting at Röttingen on 20 April 1298 where his mob burned the Jewish population, he then destroyed the Jewish populations of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Würzburg, Bamberg, Dinkelsbühl, Nördlingen, Forchheim and Nuremberg. He then moved into Bavaria and Austria where a further 5,000 Jews were massacred.
21 March 1349	Erfurt, Germany	100-3,000	Erfurt massacre	Encouraged by local Catholic clergy, a mob massacred the Jewish community of Erfurt, believing them to be responsible for spreading the Black Death. This was one of many such massacres of European Jews by Christians during the Black Death.
29-31 May 1453	Byzantium (Constantinople), Byzantine Empire	4,000-50,000	Fall of Constantinople	Following a siege from early April, 1453, Byzantium eventually fell to the Muslim forced led by Sultan Mehmed II. The victorious soldiers were given the traditional three days of freedom to loot and pillage. Estimates of the number killed vary from the entire population (of some 50,000) to just 4,000, mostly Eastern Orthodox Christians.
1555-1558	England	300+	Marian Persecutions	In an attempt to reverse the Protestant Reformation in England, encouraged by the Pope and her Catholic husband, King Philip II of Spain, Queen Mary ("Bloody Mary") instigated a campaign of executing leading Protestants, mostly senior clerics, by burning at the stake.
1570	Cyprus	30,000-50,000	Cyprus Massacre	Ottoman (Turkish Muslim) forces conquered Cyprus and killed the Christian inhabitants.
23 August 1572	Paris, France	5,000-70,000	Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre	Catholic mobs massacred French Huguenots (Calvinist Protestants) who had gathered in predominantly Catholic Paris to celebrate the marriage of the King's sister Margaret to the Protestant, King Henry III of Navarre.
1612	Yorkshire, England	10	The Pendle Witches	Following an outbreak of witch hysteria, nine women and two men from Pendle and the surrounding area were tried for witchcraft at York Assizes. One woman was acquitted; the rest were executed by hanging. Another woman died in prison before coming to trial. These form a small sample of some 500 English 'witches' to be executed.
September 1649	Drogheda, Ireland	3,552 including 700-800 civilians	Drogheda Massacre	An English force of Cromwell's Puritan "New Model Army" massacred the Irish Catholic Royalist garrison of Drogheda after a brief siege, following the Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War. See also "A History of Ireland - 3. Rebellion, Cromwell and Jacobites"
1649	Wexford, Ireland	2,000+ including 200 women and children	Wexford Massacre	Fresh from their victory at Drogheda, Cromwell's Puritan "New Model Army" sacked the town of Wexford and ran amok, killing at least 2000 people, including 200 women and children 'executed' in the market square. See also "A History of Ireland - 3. Rebellion, Cromwell and Jacobites"
February 1692 to May 1693	Salem, Massachusetts, Colonial America	20. 19 hanged and 1 'prest'	Salem Witch Trials	During another bout of Christian witch hysteria 20 people, mostly women, were executed, fifty more 'confessed', one hundred and fifty were imprisoned and a further 200 faced accusations of witchcraft before the Governor, William Phips intervened and stopped the trials.
1755-57	Northwest China	500,000-800,000	Dzungar Massacre	The Manchu emperor, Chien-lung, sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, poet and art collector, massacred eighty percent of the Tibetan Buddhist Dzungar people in a series of campaigns of conquest.
April 1821	Peloponnese, Greece	35,000	Tripolitsa Massacre	Greek Orthodox Christian forces captured the town of Tripolitsa after a siege and killed the entire Muslim and Jewish population, in the Greek War of Independence.
19 August 1821	Peloponnese, Greece	3,000	Navario Massacre	Greek Orthodox Christian forces repeated their success at Tripolitsa and killed the entire Muslim population of Navarino and the surrounding area.
1822	Chios, Greece	about 20,000	Chios Massacre	Tens of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians on the island of Chios were killed by occupying Ottoman Muslim troops.
30 October 1838	Caldwell County, Missouri, USA	19	Haun's Mill Massacre	240 members of the Livingstone County Militia attacked and killed a Mormon settlement in Caldwell County, Missouri, killing 18 Mormons and one non-Mormon. Although their names were known, no one was ever charged with the murders.
1850-1864	China	20,000,000	Taiping Rebellion	A disaffect and mentally ill Hakka Chinese named Hong Xiuquan (born Hong Renkun) became convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus whom he had read about in some pamphlets given him by European Christian missionaries. He decided that he had been sent to rid China of demons (i.e, Confucianists & Buddhists). The resulting Christian, violently anti-Confucian, anti-Buddhist, and above all, anti-Government, cult was eventually put down in a protracted civil war in which some 20,000,000 Chinese were killed. See also The Heavenly Peace Of Jesus.
11 September 1857	Mountain Meadows, Utah, USA	120-140	Mountain Meadows Massacre	A Mormon force, the Utah Territorial Militia, disguised as Indians, together with Paiute tribesmen, attacked and plundered the Baker–Fancher emigrant wagon train, killing all the emigrants.
30 April 1876	Batak, Ottoman Empire	3,000-5,000	Batak Massacre	Muslim Ottoman irregulars killed Bulgarian Christian civilians who had taken refuge in a church.
1894-96	Anatolia, Ottoman Empire	100,000-300,000	Hamidian Massacres	On the orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Muslim forces killed Armenian Christians across the Empire. Includes the 1895 Massacres of Diyarbakir, in which Syrian and other Christian denominations were also killed indiscriminately.
10 March 1906	Bud Dajo, Jolo Island, Philippines	800-1,000	Moro Crater Massacre	An American Army unit under the command of Major General Leonard Wood and a US Naval unit together with a detachment of native police, attacked and killed 600 unarmed Muslims including many women and children in a village inside the crater of an extinct volcano.
April-May 1909	Adana Province, Anatolia, Ottoman Empire	15,000-30,000	Adana Massacre	Religious-ethnic tensions between Muslims and Armenian Christians in Adana province, led to a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the area.
21 November 1920	Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland	23	Croke Park Massacre	A detachment of the British special force, the "Black and Tans", opened fire on the predominantly Catholic crowd at a Gaelic Football match between Dublin and Tipperary, during the Irish insurrection against British rule.
August 1933	Iraq	3,000	Simele Massacre	Armed Iraqi and Kurdish Muslim forces killed 3,000 'Nestorian' Christians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Northern Iraq. Methods of killing included running over children with armoured cars and bayoneting pregnant women.
29 September 1941	Kiev, Ukraine	30,000	Babi Yar Massacre	Nazi Einsatzgruppen killed the Jewish population of Kiev.
22-24 October 1941	Odessa, Soviet Union	25,000–34,000	Odessa Massacre	German & Romanian forced killed the Jewish population of Odessa and surrounding towns.
25 & 29 November 1941	Kaunas, Lithuania	4,934	Ninth Fort massacres of November 1941	First systematic killing of German Jews by the Nazi state.
1941-1945	German-occupied Europe	6,000,000	The Holocaust	Led by the psychopathic and delusional Catholic fanatic, Adolf Hitler, and encouraged by the German Catholic Church, the German state embarked on an industrial-scale genocide against European Jews who had been officially classified as non-human. Until the early 1960s, the Catholic Church's official position was that the Germans were doing God's work as a punishment for the Jews having killed Jesus. None of the predominantly Catholic Nazi leaders were ever excommunicated for their genocides. Note: The Nazi German state also systematically killed a further 11,000,000 Romani, homosexuals, disabled, communists, Poles, Russians and Polish prisoners of war as well as some 1,200 Jehovah's Witnesses.
October-November 1946	Noakhali, Bengal, British India	5,000	Noakhali Genocide	A series of massacres, rapes, abductions and forced conversions of Hindus and looting and arson of Hindu properties, perpetrated by the Muslim community in the districts of Noakhali and Tipperah.
1947	British Indian	250,000-1,000,000	Partition of India	"Ethnic cleansing" of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu populations leading up to partition of India into India and Pakistan at Independence. In some areas Christians were also persecuted.
1975-79	Kampuchea	25,000	Khmer Rouge Massacres	The Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot, attempting to introduce a primitive form of agrarian Communism, killed 25,000 Buddhists in an attempt to eradicate Buddhism. In all, the regime killed 1-3,000,000 Cambodians and ethnic Chinese, including doctors and intellectuals, targeting anyone with an education.
16-18 September 1982	Beirut, Lebanon	762-3,500	Sabra and Shatila Massacres	During the Lebanese Civil War, a unit of the Israeli Defence Force acting on the orders of Ariel Sharon, Israel's Defense Minister, sealed off two Palastinian refugee camps and illuminated them at night with aerial flares so that a Christian Phalangist militia could butcher the unarmed Shiite Muslim inhabitants including the women and children. Ariel Sharon later became leader of the Likud Party and Prime Minister of Israel whilst the leader of the Christian Phalangist murderers, Elie Hobeika, became a minister in the post civil-war Lebanese government
1975-1990	Lebanon	120,000-150,000	Lebanese Civil War	Multiple massacres of various religious groups by others, taking advantage of the collapse of central authority and degeneration into warring factions and religion-based warlordism.
1994	Rwanda	500,000-1,000,000 mostly Tutsi	The Rwanda Genocide	Aided by Catholic and Protestant Christian priests, following the death of the President in a suspicious plane crash, the Hutu population unleashed a pre-planned campaign of murder intended to exterminate the Tutsi. A popular technique was for priests to invite Tutsi to take shelter in churches and then hand them over to armed Hutu execution squads or, at least in one case, to order bulldozers to demolish the church and crush those inside.
July 1995	Srebrenica, Bosnia	8,000+	Srebrenica Massacre	Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the town of Srebrenica and surrounding villages were butchered by a Serbian Orthodox Christian force supported by Greek volunteers, led by Ratko Mladić during the Bosnia civil war which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. Many of the Greek volunteers who participated in the massacre are now in the Greek neo-Nazi 'Golden Dawn' party.
11 September 2001	New York and Washington DC, USA	2977	9/11	Muslim fundamentalists hijacked four planes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, New York and the Pentagon, Washington DC. In the fourth plane, passengers overpowered the hijackers but the plane crashed, killing all on board. The 19 hijackers also died.
13 November 2015	Paris, France	140+	Paris 2015	A number of Muslim fundamentalists attacked random targets across Paris, killing people regardless of faith, gender or age, by shooting and suicide bombings. At one nightclub, guests were executed one at a time until the police stormed the building at which point three of the attackers blew themselves up killing more victims. Other targets, apparently selected at random, included a packed restaurant and a friendly international football match between France and Germany. Other than killing innocent people for the sake of killing and to spread fear and insecurity, the objective for this massacre remains obscure.

Obviously, there are many yet to be added, and it doesn't include all those little religious massacres like mass witch burnings and the odd clutch of heretics. I'll add to it over the coming days.

Suggestions in the comment section, please.

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