Highlights of history:
-4004 Christian scholar Archbishop James Ussher establishes a chronology of the Bible that dates the earth's creation to Oct 23, 4004, BCE.
c. 33 Jesus, in Mark 9:1, predicts that the kingdom of God will come with power while some people hearing him speak were still alive.
c. 70 About 40 years after Jesuss death, people realized he and the kingdom of God would not come and started to write down his teachings.
c. 364 The canonized bible by the "Council of Laodicea" was compiled. It is generally agreed that which books to include in the New Testament were decided by a vote of the council members.
c. 380 Pagan religion was prohibited and Christianity was made the official religion of Rome.
410 Rome fell to the Goths after standing 800 years and the Dark Ages started. Up until around 1500, religion played a strong role in politics and scientists who disagreed with the church were regularly executed.
415 Monks and followers of St. Cyril beat to death Hypatia, head of the Alexandria library, and it is generally believed that they burned down the library, destroying the precious scientific and cultural tomes inside of it and wiping out access to ancient text and technology.
1000 During the Crusades, the Christians of Europe invade and battle the Muslims of the Middle East.
1139 Pope Innocent II prohibited the clergy to marry. His thinking: Celibate priests would have no sons to inherent their property, so everything would revert back to the church.
1208 Pope Innocent III declared a crusade to destroy the Albigenses in France. When Beziers fell, the pope commanded, "Kill them all. God will know His own." Thousands were slaughtered.
1215 Fourth Lateran Council commanded that all Jews in Catholic lands must wear distinguishing labels or garments. Vatican orders confined Jews to ghettos.
1252 Pope Innocent IV authorized torture during the Holy Inquisition to stamp out heresy.
1349 Christians concluded that the bubonic plague was caused by Jews poising wells. 6,000 Jews were killed in one day at Mainz, Germany.
1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull declaring the reality of witches and initiated the accusation, torture, and execution of "witches" all over Europe. All costs of investigation, trial, and execution of witches were borne by the accused or her relatives, including per diems for private detectives, torturers and tar. The members of the tribunal for each witch burned received a bonus, and remaining property was divided between Church and State.
1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Church door, triggering the Reformation, which led to a century of Catholic-Protestant slaughter.
1520 William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English so people could read the Bible and form their own, independent religious views. He was captured, garroted, and burned at the stake by the Catholic Church.
1611 King James Version of the Bible.
1618 Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II decided to eradicate Protestantism entirely, resulting in the Thirty Year war that left millions dead.
1633 The Catholic Church gave Galileo the option of denouncing his beliefs that "the earth moved around the sun" and being imprisoned in his own home for the remainder of his life or being burned at the stake for church heresy.
1650s One mid-seventeenth-century witch picker "confessed he had caused the death of over 220 women in England and Scotland" to gain payment of twenty shillings each.
1690 In Massachusetts, 20 "witches" were killed and 150 others imprisoned.
1750 The Age of Reason spread across Europe, resulting in the emergence from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity.
1793 Last execution of a "witch" in Poland.
1800 "Gentlemen, we are not, nor have we ever been, a Christian nation ...The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan nation." John Adams, second U.S. president.
1801 "I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned
" Thomas Jefferson, third U.S. president, in a letter to William Short.
1805 Harvard Divinity School goes Unitarian.
1816 Inquisitorial torture was abolished in the Catholic Church.
1831 Half of the Islamic pilgrims to Mecca were killed by a cholera epidemic.
1870 The pope's army was defeated and the Vatican shrank from occupying one-third of Italy's boot to today's Vatican city.
1900 During the Bolshevik Revolution, 60,000 Jews were killed.
1915 600,00 Armenians and 2.5 million Muslims died in conflict during 1915-1920.
1947 The Indian and Pakistan border death toll during Hindu and Muslim conflict estimated as high as 1 million.
1954 At the height of the Cold War, the words "under God" were added to the U.S. pledge of allegiance.
1957 Similarly, the motto "In God We Trust" was added to paper money.
1960 Pope John XXIII prayed, "The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews."
1965 Pope John XXIII ended church chants about "the perfidious Jews."
1966 Cardinal Spellman, military vicar of the U.S. armed forces and longtime proponent of the Vietnam War to many politicians stated: " It is a war thrust upon us--we cannot yield to tyranny
" The Vatican replied, "The Cardinal did not speak for the Pope or the Church." By the end of the war in the 1970's, 58,000 Americans and an estimated two to three million Vietnamese died.
1978 912 members of Rev. Jim Jones' Jonestown church colony committed suicide or were killed.
1981 Civil war in Afghanistan, caused by Muslims opposing westernization, killed 1 million. Americas CIA smuggled in $2 billion in weapons even though it was modern reform the Muslims were fighting.
1992 Four hundred years too late, the Catholic Church acknowledged that Galileo was right and the Earth does revolve around the sun.
1993 The supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat.
1995 The March 1995 release of the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system was linked to a religious sect called Aum Shinrikyo.
1996 On Oct. 22, Pope John Paul II releases a document called, "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," defending both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine.
Atrocities are mainly from "Holly Horrors" by James Haught, Prometheus Books with some items from "The Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan. Other sources include the "Bible", "A History of Civilization" by Winks, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon and various internet sources.
