The Death and Violence During the Middle Ages

In today’s world, there are many global issues that are surfing through the media and being interpreted through fictional eyes. Isis, global warming, climate change, discrimination, homicides, school shootings, etc. are some of the many things that are polluting human society in the twenty first century. While there are many people who actively try to find ways to solve these problems using real solutions, you also have the average sit at home, news watching, schizophrenic, science illiterate, close minded, high school dropout, homophobe with a third grade vocabulary and a heavy southern accent who claims to know the reason for all this is that God is punishing humans for their “sins”.

These people sit at home amongst family and friends while diving deep into very specific details about a book that they have never read. But as they pray and drift into their imaginations, they lose sense of all reality and fail to make a simple connection. Bad things are always happening, religious people have always been serving God/s, and yet disasters continue to petrify humanity.

All this makes their god look awfully irrelevant. The best demonstration for this can be found in the middle ages, where violence and catastrophes were constantly terrorizing humanity.

The middle age was a time period where it sucked to be alive. Death was constantly lurking around every corner like an obsessed ex-girlfriend. During the year 1315, there was a great famine that overtook the population of Europe.1 This was due to an increase in the human population and a failing economical system that was unable to provide for the large masses.

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Not only were there too many people to provide resources for, but climate change started to have a huge impact on the crops. There was a global cooling that lead to wetter summers and earlier autumn storms, thus eliminating ideal conditions for agriculture. 2 The famine left a great number of people malnourished, fragile, and weak.

There were also many reports of cannibalism, even though it is possible that they were just rumors. Families struggled as they fought for their survival and some even watched the elders starve themselves to death, just so that the youth could have food and energy to work the fields.3 In Christian belief, god was obviously watching. So why the hell didn’t he use his divine thunderous voice to say “Let there be famine no more!”?

That was just the beginning of hell on earth though. In 1333 there was a drought that brought more famine to the plains that were watered by the rivers Kiang and Hoai. No need to worry though, because mother nature made up for the lack of water by sending floods that presumably caused the mountain Tsincheou to “fall in” and cause great chasms on the earth. Then you there’s the year 1334 where there was another drought in the area of Houkoang and Honan that was followed by swarms of locusts, more famine, and pestilence.

As a Christian, to accept the bible as the literal word of God means that you must also acknowledge that all of this was of his own doing. Just like in the Exodus when this divine lunatic punished Egypt in the same nonsensical manner with locusts, famine, and pestilence for disobeying him. However, the plot twist to the Exodus is that God “hardened the heart of the Pharaoh” so that Pharaoh would intentionally not let the Israelites go. So if these events were a result of God’s punishment on the people, then perhaps God was the very demon that hardened their hearts in the first place.

Around the time that the locusts were being destructive pests, there was also an earthquake in the mountains of Ki-Ming-Chan that formed a lake more than a hundred leagues in circumference. It is also believed that the number of dead people in Tche reached numbers above five million. With earthquakes and floods constantly wiping out villages and people from 1337 to 13457, God’s omnipotence seems absent. All of these events that sound awful were really not that bad. This was just the appetizer to what was about to come. In 1346, the black plaque settled in Asia Minor and spread through to all of Europe by the following year. It was estimated that nearly twenty-five million people had died in the course of only five years (1347-1352).

In the modern era that we live in, twenty-five million is nothing. We can go out and kill twenty-five million people and the population wouldn’t suffer any heavy damage. As a matter of fact, God should bless the world by wiping out twenty-five million of his followers. Not all, but at least the ones who refuse to bake a wedding cake for homosexuals and the ones that refuse to serve them in public restaurants. God has my permission; he can have them because society doesn’t need them. We can afford to lose a couple twenty-five million nut jobs. However, the society of the 1350’s couldn’t afford such a heavy loss since that was one-third to half of their population.” If God was able to prevent this but chose not to, then the God people worship today is by all means malevolent.

When people think about the slaughtering of Jews, they usually think about the Holocaust. But this was not the only time in history where God’s “chosen” people were being exterminated. When the black death occurred, people needed somebody to blame. But since Yahweh is “perfect” and just, it is blasphemous to even think about putting the blame on such a majestic being (even though he commands the forces of nature). During the middle ages, Jews were also hunted and burned because of rumors that they had poisoned the wells and rivers. 10 However, these rumors were later on to be “true” after they were put on the wheel (torture device) and told to confess.” Then they would be burned and killed for the crime that they “committed”. Effective.

From the years 1348 to 1349, All the Jews between Cologne and Austria were sought out and barbecued. Except for the babies, they were isolated from their parents and baptized so that they would be saved. How could such calamities happen to Gods people? A loving father would do anything possible to protect his children, yet the father of the universe watches all of this with indifference. He does nothing about it and seems not to care since he hasn’t physically shown up since he killed Moses: This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants. ‘I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not crossover into it”. And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said. He buried him in Moab. (Deuteronomy 34:4-5)

The writer can’t fool me. I see right through the text, God killed Moses. He used him, then told him to go to the top of the mountain, and then he killed him. He violated his own commandment. He killed Moses and he also watched as his people were lit on fire. He is completely irrelevant to us and does not deserve the title of a god.

These were some of the many problems that the people of the middle ages had to face. Without mentioning the corruption of the church, the wars, and other man made problems, nature alone was a destructive force upon the people of this era. This is just one of millions of examples that show the irrelevance of the gods. The sooner these people realize that all we can count on is each other, the sooner we will be able to achieve a utopian world. We should all strive for the knowledge to understand the world around us and learn to respect one another. The exact opposite of what religious extremists promote. The vision is a world in which two-thousand-year old folk tales do not dictate the lives that we live.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

                                                                             Epicurus