In his April 25 letter, "Christian witness to abolitionism," Thomas Clark advises another letter-writer to consider, "Why is the area of the world respecting human rights correlated so closely with the historic orbit of Judeo-Christianity?"
Is that a cruel joke? The Old Testament describes the exploits of the conquering Israelites with great pride. After official Imperial Christianity was formed in the fourth century, two so-called saints initiated mass murder of the followers of earlier religions and the destruction of libraries. Saint Xavier followed suit in India as did the Spanish and Portuguese, sanctified by the pope, in Latin America.
From the 16th century, western Europeans, particularly the British and French, began the genocide and exterminations of peoples in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and India. Within 10 years of the 1757 occupation of Bengal by Robert Clive, one-third of the population was wiped out by the ruthless tax collection efforts of the East India Company, the major drug pusher of the day. Then came the Boxer wars against China.
In 1943, at least 5 million people of Bengal were forced to starve by British hero Winston Churchill. On the day of the liberation of Europe in 1945, about 5,000 people were murdered in Algeria by France. On the first day that the Dutch returned to Indonesia, they killed about 450 people for no apparent reason. France continued its mass murder in Indochina after World War II.
Either Clark must admit that the Christianity of Jesus does not exist except for a tiny number of people, or he must accept the cruelty of Judeo-Christianity as a fact of life.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.