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Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness
When you think of saints, you envision stained-glass pictures of piety. But the truth can be horribly different. Consider Saint Pius As Grand Inquisitor, he sent Catholic troops to kill 2,000 Waldensian Protestants in southern Italy. After becoming pope, he sent Catholic troops to kill Huguenot Protestants in France. Pius also launched the final crusade against Muslims, sending a Christian naval armada to slaughter thousands in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. And, he intensified the Roman Inquisition, torturing and burning Catholics whose beliefs varied from official dogma. After his death, Pius was canonized a saint. Heaven help us.Holy Horrors chronicles the grim spectrum of religious persecution from ancient times to the present, including such historic massacres as the Crusades, the Islamic jihads, the Catholic wars against heretics, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the Reformation, and such atrocities as the Holocaust, the seemingly insoluble Catholic-Protestant schism in Northern Ireland, religious tribalism in Lebanon, and the barbaric cruelty of the theocracy in Iran. The antique woodcuts, paintings, prints, and contemporary photographs that illustrate the book are at once gruesome and riveting.
268 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1990
10 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
James A. Haught
12 books14 followersJames A. Haught was born in 1932 in a small West Virginia farm town that had no electricity or paved streets. He graduated from a rural high school with 13 students in the senior class. He came to Charleston, worked as a delivery boy, then became a teen-age apprentice printer at the Charleston Daily Mail in 1951. Developing a yen to be a reporter, Jim volunteered to work without pay in the Daily Mail newsroom on his days off, to learn the trade. This arrangement continued several months, until The Charleston Gazette offered a full-time news job in 1953. He has been at the Gazette ever since – except for a few months in 1959 when he was press aide to Sen. Robert Byrd. During his half-century in newspaper life, Haught has been police reporter, religion columnist, feature writer and night city editor – then he was investigative reporter for 13 years, and his work led to several corruption convictions. In 1983 he was named associate editor, and in 1992 he became editor. He writes nearly 400 Gazette editorials a year, plus occasional personal columns and news articles. Haught has won 19 national news writing awards, and is author of eight books and 60 national magazine articles. Thirty of his columns have been distributed by national syndicates. He also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, and Contemporary Authors. He has four children, 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Personally, he enjoys hiking with Kanawha Trail Club, participating in a philosophy group at Edgewood Summit, and taking grandchildren swimming off his old sailboat at Lake Chaweva, where he lives.
Currently the editor of the CHARLESTON GAZETTE in West Virginia, Mr. Haught has spent more than 50 years as an investigative journalist, columnist, and author. A self-proclaimed skeptic and agnostic, Haught writes and lectures frequently on religious topics, particularly injustices and atrocities committed in the name of religion, and the scientific debunking of supernatural claims.
He is the author of five books, including HOLY HORRORS: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS MURDER AND MADNESS; HOLY HATRED: RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE '90s; and 2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, a paean to freethinkers, atheists, and religious doubters. Haught also serves as a senior editor at FREE INQUIRY magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism.
More: http://infidels.org/library/modern/ja...
http://uuhumanistsymposium.com/author...
Currently the editor of the CHARLESTON GAZETTE in West Virginia, Mr. Haught has spent more than 50 years as an investigative journalist, columnist, and author. A self-proclaimed skeptic and agnostic, Haught writes and lectures frequently on religious topics, particularly injustices and atrocities committed in the name of religion, and the scientific debunking of supernatural claims.
He is the author of five books, including HOLY HORRORS: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS MURDER AND MADNESS; HOLY HATRED: RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS OF THE '90s; and 2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, a paean to freethinkers, atheists, and religious doubters. Haught also serves as a senior editor at FREE INQUIRY magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism.
More: http://infidels.org/library/modern/ja...
http://uuhumanistsymposium.com/author...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 12, 2009
What an eye opener. Please read so you may NEVER forget the atrocities humans are able to inflict upon others in the name of their god! :(
August 21, 2016
This book I learned about on the book list for the Church of Satan. I liked this book a lot though the author did repeat a few times and in chapters somes jumped around. The worse part is that the author could probably write another just on the modern holy horrors we hear about in the news.
February 5, 2012
This has a really worthwhile purpose but was disappointingly executed.
The biggest problem is the lack of sourcing in the text. There is a bibliography at the end, but not even all the sources mentioned in the text are included there. Meanwhile, there are frequently no sources cited in footnotes, endnotes, parenthetical citations, or in the text otherwise. I expect that most of what he's describing here is pretty much the case, but this is exactly the sort of book that could use a ton of good scholarly secondary sources on which to build its case.
It also undermines his credibility that in his foreword the author uses the 2001 anthrax attacks as an example of a religiously motivated attack. There doesn't really seem to be credible evidence now for the idea that it was Muslim terrorists behind that one after all, and this makes him seem more eager to find examples for thesis than concerned about carefully confirming that those examples are necessarily valid.
The content perhaps could have been organized more effectively as well, although I'm not sure which the best alternative would necessarily be.
Despite its genuine flaws, though, this does have value as a single focused source of information on religious atrocities of various sorts by and against various religious groups. As long as you're willing to check that information in other sources before relying on it.
The biggest problem is the lack of sourcing in the text. There is a bibliography at the end, but not even all the sources mentioned in the text are included there. Meanwhile, there are frequently no sources cited in footnotes, endnotes, parenthetical citations, or in the text otherwise. I expect that most of what he's describing here is pretty much the case, but this is exactly the sort of book that could use a ton of good scholarly secondary sources on which to build its case.
It also undermines his credibility that in his foreword the author uses the 2001 anthrax attacks as an example of a religiously motivated attack. There doesn't really seem to be credible evidence now for the idea that it was Muslim terrorists behind that one after all, and this makes him seem more eager to find examples for thesis than concerned about carefully confirming that those examples are necessarily valid.
The content perhaps could have been organized more effectively as well, although I'm not sure which the best alternative would necessarily be.
Despite its genuine flaws, though, this does have value as a single focused source of information on religious atrocities of various sorts by and against various religious groups. As long as you're willing to check that information in other sources before relying on it.
May 31, 2024
A RECOUNTING OF THE “DARK AND DANGEROUS SIDE OF RELIGION”
Author James A. Haught wrote in the Introduction to this 1990 book, “Christianity has no monopoly of killing for God. Even before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Lucretius warned: ‘How many evils have flowed from religion!’ A grim pattern is visible in history: When religion is the ruling force in a society, it produces horror. The stronger the supernatural beliefs, the worse the inhumanity. A culture dominated by intense faith invariably is cruel to people who don’t share the faith---and sometimes to many who do. When religion was all-powerful in Europe, it produced the epic bloodbath of the Crusades, the torture chambers of the inquisition, mass extermination of ‘heretics,’ hundreds of massacres of Jews, and 300 years of witch-burnings… Today, much of the Third World hasn’t broken free from religious horror. In India, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims repeatedly massacre each other… This book traces the dark and dangerous side of religion through the past nine centuries.” (Pg. 14, 17)
He states, “The ultimate murder religion was that of the Aztecs, which demanded about 20,000 victims per year. The chief deity was the sun, which might disappear, priests warned, without daily sustenance of hearts and blood.” (Pg. 32)
He notes, “Then, in the 1200s, a storm of heretic-hunting burst upon Europe. The first victims were the Albigenses, or Cathari, centered around Albi, France. They doubted the biblical account of creation, considered Jesus an angel instead of a god, rejected transubstantiation, and demanded strict celibacy… In 1208, Pope Innocent III declared a major crusade to destroy the Albigenses… Another group targeted for extermination were the Waldensians, followers of Peter Waldo of Lyon, lay preachers who sermonized in the streets. The church decreed that only priests could preach, and commanded them to cease… the Albigensian crusade was directed at them as well.” (Pg. 54, 56)
He observes, “During the 1400s, the Holy Inquisition shifted its focus toward witchcraft, and the next three centuries witnesses a bizarre orgy of religious delusion. Agents of the church tortured untold thousands of women, and some men, into confessing that they flew through the sky on demonic missions… turned themselves into animals, made themselves invisible, and performed other supernatural evils… The number of victims is estimated widely from 100,000 to 2 million.” (Pg. 73)
He recounts, “Corruption in the mediaeval Catholic hierarchy was infamous. Pope John XII openly had love affairs, gave church treasure to a mistress, castrated one opponent, blinded another, and donned armor to lead an army. Benedict IX sold the papacy to a successor for 1,500 pounds of gold. Urban VI tortured and murdered his cardinals. Innocent VIII proudly acknowledged his illegitimate children and loaded them with church riches… Sergius III likewise killed two rivals for the papal throne…. Boniface VIII sent troops to kill every resident of Palestrina and raze the city…” (Pg. 81-82)
He says, “Catholics and Protestants … united to kill certain Christians for the crime of double baptism. ‘A larger proportion of Anabaptists were martyred for their faith than any other Christian group in history…’ … The Anabaptists rejected traditional infant baptism. They said baptism should be for thinking adults, so they rebaptized mature converts… The Swiss Anabaptists were ordered drowned---which was deemed a fitting end for those wanting immersion.” (Pg. 109-111)
He recounts, “Parliament member Oliver Cromwell rose to the leadership of the Puritan army… he took his soldiers to Ireland to kill rebellious Catholics… Cromwell ordered the execution of surrendered Catholics and their priests… Then the same treatment was inflicted upon town after town until the Catholic resistance was destroyed… Cromwell returned to England and made himself a holy dictator, the Lord Protector.” (Pg. 121-122)
He states, “It was during the Bolshevik revolution… the anti-Communist White Army … slaughtered thousands in Jewish towns as they passed… On the surface, the pogroms weren’t religious---yet they were rooted in the religious division of Russian society. The Orthodox faith bestrode the land, making a natural target of the vulnerable clusters of Jewish aliens, ‘different’ people viewed with distrust, ready victims for pent-up anger of the majority.” (Pg. 150-151)
He explains how in the Republic of the Sudan in 1983, “President Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimery subjected the whole country to harsh Islamic religious law… The United States State Department declared that Sudan’s imposition of Islamic law on Christians was a violation of human rights… Even some Muslims protested… [The] punishments produced grotesque scenes. ‘Amputation days’ were … drawing large crowds…. [This] sent the south’s Christians and animists back into full revolt. The death toll to civilians was horrible…” (Pg. 176-177)
He observes, “in the 20th century, southern Ireland was liberated as an independent nation, 95 percent Catholic. But Ulster Protestants… feared being swallowed in a ‘popish’ united Ireland. They voted to remain part of Great Britain. that brought on the modern nightmare between Ulster’s Protestants and Catholics. In the 1950s, the clandestine Catholic paramilitary Irish Republican Army waged terrorism in Ulster in an attempt to force unification with the south… poor Catholics excluded from Ulster’s economy staged riots. Protestant militants responded with guns, bombs, and burning. Then the IRA’s Provisional wing… countered with escalated killing.” (Pg. 182)
He concludes, “Is religion a force for good? This much is self-evident: Religion has a great potential for evil---and that potential has been realized thousands of times through the years. There is plenty of non-religious horror in the world… Yet it’s profoundly depressing that religion---supposedly the cure for human cruelty---often is just another basis for murder and madness.” (Pg. 224-225)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking critiques of world religions throughout history.
Author James A. Haught wrote in the Introduction to this 1990 book, “Christianity has no monopoly of killing for God. Even before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Lucretius warned: ‘How many evils have flowed from religion!’ A grim pattern is visible in history: When religion is the ruling force in a society, it produces horror. The stronger the supernatural beliefs, the worse the inhumanity. A culture dominated by intense faith invariably is cruel to people who don’t share the faith---and sometimes to many who do. When religion was all-powerful in Europe, it produced the epic bloodbath of the Crusades, the torture chambers of the inquisition, mass extermination of ‘heretics,’ hundreds of massacres of Jews, and 300 years of witch-burnings… Today, much of the Third World hasn’t broken free from religious horror. In India, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims repeatedly massacre each other… This book traces the dark and dangerous side of religion through the past nine centuries.” (Pg. 14, 17)
He states, “The ultimate murder religion was that of the Aztecs, which demanded about 20,000 victims per year. The chief deity was the sun, which might disappear, priests warned, without daily sustenance of hearts and blood.” (Pg. 32)
He notes, “Then, in the 1200s, a storm of heretic-hunting burst upon Europe. The first victims were the Albigenses, or Cathari, centered around Albi, France. They doubted the biblical account of creation, considered Jesus an angel instead of a god, rejected transubstantiation, and demanded strict celibacy… In 1208, Pope Innocent III declared a major crusade to destroy the Albigenses… Another group targeted for extermination were the Waldensians, followers of Peter Waldo of Lyon, lay preachers who sermonized in the streets. The church decreed that only priests could preach, and commanded them to cease… the Albigensian crusade was directed at them as well.” (Pg. 54, 56)
He observes, “During the 1400s, the Holy Inquisition shifted its focus toward witchcraft, and the next three centuries witnesses a bizarre orgy of religious delusion. Agents of the church tortured untold thousands of women, and some men, into confessing that they flew through the sky on demonic missions… turned themselves into animals, made themselves invisible, and performed other supernatural evils… The number of victims is estimated widely from 100,000 to 2 million.” (Pg. 73)
He recounts, “Corruption in the mediaeval Catholic hierarchy was infamous. Pope John XII openly had love affairs, gave church treasure to a mistress, castrated one opponent, blinded another, and donned armor to lead an army. Benedict IX sold the papacy to a successor for 1,500 pounds of gold. Urban VI tortured and murdered his cardinals. Innocent VIII proudly acknowledged his illegitimate children and loaded them with church riches… Sergius III likewise killed two rivals for the papal throne…. Boniface VIII sent troops to kill every resident of Palestrina and raze the city…” (Pg. 81-82)
He says, “Catholics and Protestants … united to kill certain Christians for the crime of double baptism. ‘A larger proportion of Anabaptists were martyred for their faith than any other Christian group in history…’ … The Anabaptists rejected traditional infant baptism. They said baptism should be for thinking adults, so they rebaptized mature converts… The Swiss Anabaptists were ordered drowned---which was deemed a fitting end for those wanting immersion.” (Pg. 109-111)
He recounts, “Parliament member Oliver Cromwell rose to the leadership of the Puritan army… he took his soldiers to Ireland to kill rebellious Catholics… Cromwell ordered the execution of surrendered Catholics and their priests… Then the same treatment was inflicted upon town after town until the Catholic resistance was destroyed… Cromwell returned to England and made himself a holy dictator, the Lord Protector.” (Pg. 121-122)
He states, “It was during the Bolshevik revolution… the anti-Communist White Army … slaughtered thousands in Jewish towns as they passed… On the surface, the pogroms weren’t religious---yet they were rooted in the religious division of Russian society. The Orthodox faith bestrode the land, making a natural target of the vulnerable clusters of Jewish aliens, ‘different’ people viewed with distrust, ready victims for pent-up anger of the majority.” (Pg. 150-151)
He explains how in the Republic of the Sudan in 1983, “President Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimery subjected the whole country to harsh Islamic religious law… The United States State Department declared that Sudan’s imposition of Islamic law on Christians was a violation of human rights… Even some Muslims protested… [The] punishments produced grotesque scenes. ‘Amputation days’ were … drawing large crowds…. [This] sent the south’s Christians and animists back into full revolt. The death toll to civilians was horrible…” (Pg. 176-177)
He observes, “in the 20th century, southern Ireland was liberated as an independent nation, 95 percent Catholic. But Ulster Protestants… feared being swallowed in a ‘popish’ united Ireland. They voted to remain part of Great Britain. that brought on the modern nightmare between Ulster’s Protestants and Catholics. In the 1950s, the clandestine Catholic paramilitary Irish Republican Army waged terrorism in Ulster in an attempt to force unification with the south… poor Catholics excluded from Ulster’s economy staged riots. Protestant militants responded with guns, bombs, and burning. Then the IRA’s Provisional wing… countered with escalated killing.” (Pg. 182)
He concludes, “Is religion a force for good? This much is self-evident: Religion has a great potential for evil---and that potential has been realized thousands of times through the years. There is plenty of non-religious horror in the world… Yet it’s profoundly depressing that religion---supposedly the cure for human cruelty---often is just another basis for murder and madness.” (Pg. 224-225)
This book will be of great interest to those seeking critiques of world religions throughout history.
February 26, 2013
Very quick read - that is really its best attribute. It would have been better with footnotes, but it is a satisfying overview.
June 16, 2025
A super-fast read this is essentially an annotated listing of murders rapes and other assorted mayhem done in the name of God over the ages. It's a lot. There's virtually no effort to cite sources. There's also little reason to doubt the tales told but it would be nice to have more of a background on some of them as they are short chapters that cover a lot with a minimum of detail. It's probably a good place to start for someone looking for a topic for a paper on religious history but you're not likely to know where to turn next without a librarian's assistance.
June 2, 2019
Hastily written, and sparing far too much in research, we've read more in-depth works from Prometheus. Even so, the subject is of interest, but would have received better treatment given a credible approach, not this offhand insult to the reader. 5/10, at best.
June 3, 2018
If there was a "pulp fiction" category of non fiction, this book would be it. Lots of shock appeal, little substances or detailed research. Yeah but also religious people are crazy.
December 31, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Newsreel Footage of Hellish Realities
Reading this book is like watching newsreel footage, it is not meant for ‘more sensitive viewers’. The drawings, etchings, woodcuts, illustrations and photographs in the book from the past nine centuries depicting the very real horrors of religious atrocities comprise the visual/reading equivalent of watching newsreel footage recorded at the concentration camps of the Nazi horror. This newsreel starts nine centuries ago and runs continuously into the modern world including the aforementioned Nazi horror show which had much in common with the most gruesome practices and deranged beliefs of Medieval Christians from which the Nazis learned. James Haught makes the important point that while the Nazi horror was not explicitly religious in nature, it was the result of many centuries of Christian teachings about Jews that made the European population predisposed to accept the message of Jew hatred. “The Holocaust was, of course, the bitter fruit of long centuries of Christian teachings about the Jewish people.” – Professor Franklin Little, Temple University. It is only in the name of God that such gruesome atrocities and barbarism can take place, there is no other way to justify it other than with divine ordinance.
I believe that there is this direct relationship: the stronger the supernatural beliefs, the more gruesome will be the barbarism and inhumanity needed to cement those beliefs into orthodoxy. The supernatural is the natural misunderstood, or not understood or willfully misunderstood and this it forms the basis for the most terrible and dangerous human made power. Supernatural beliefs are the stuff of religion. This is how religions preaching compassion are spread by means of intolerance, war, cruelty and torture and how they eventually turn on themselves, fragment into many pieces and devour their own in the frenzied and bizarre madness of heresy pogroms. Each fragment metastasis into a new intolerant orthodoxy. In the stench of all religious belief, the persecuted morph into the persecutors. In this light, the Christian antipathy for Jews makes sense in that Christianity is a heretical sect of Judaism.
Of course, the book does not exclusivity focus on the crimes of Christianity; the manner in which each major world religion removes the human from humanity is discussed and displayed, viz, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs etc. The scariest words that I know are “God is with us” for it is with God that all manner satanic atrocity, torture, cruelty and gruesome insanity is possible and made real. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, humanism, human rights and liberty of conscious are not religious ideas, they are fully secular ideas. Look though the nine centuries covered in this book and you see what has blighted history. Murder and madness are the great and profound legacy of religious belief as the author concludes this book and I conclude this review.
Reading this book is like watching newsreel footage, it is not meant for ‘more sensitive viewers’. The drawings, etchings, woodcuts, illustrations and photographs in the book from the past nine centuries depicting the very real horrors of religious atrocities comprise the visual/reading equivalent of watching newsreel footage recorded at the concentration camps of the Nazi horror. This newsreel starts nine centuries ago and runs continuously into the modern world including the aforementioned Nazi horror show which had much in common with the most gruesome practices and deranged beliefs of Medieval Christians from which the Nazis learned. James Haught makes the important point that while the Nazi horror was not explicitly religious in nature, it was the result of many centuries of Christian teachings about Jews that made the European population predisposed to accept the message of Jew hatred. “The Holocaust was, of course, the bitter fruit of long centuries of Christian teachings about the Jewish people.” – Professor Franklin Little, Temple University. It is only in the name of God that such gruesome atrocities and barbarism can take place, there is no other way to justify it other than with divine ordinance.
I believe that there is this direct relationship: the stronger the supernatural beliefs, the more gruesome will be the barbarism and inhumanity needed to cement those beliefs into orthodoxy. The supernatural is the natural misunderstood, or not understood or willfully misunderstood and this it forms the basis for the most terrible and dangerous human made power. Supernatural beliefs are the stuff of religion. This is how religions preaching compassion are spread by means of intolerance, war, cruelty and torture and how they eventually turn on themselves, fragment into many pieces and devour their own in the frenzied and bizarre madness of heresy pogroms. Each fragment metastasis into a new intolerant orthodoxy. In the stench of all religious belief, the persecuted morph into the persecutors. In this light, the Christian antipathy for Jews makes sense in that Christianity is a heretical sect of Judaism.
Of course, the book does not exclusivity focus on the crimes of Christianity; the manner in which each major world religion removes the human from humanity is discussed and displayed, viz, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs etc. The scariest words that I know are “God is with us” for it is with God that all manner satanic atrocity, torture, cruelty and gruesome insanity is possible and made real. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, humanism, human rights and liberty of conscious are not religious ideas, they are fully secular ideas. Look though the nine centuries covered in this book and you see what has blighted history. Murder and madness are the great and profound legacy of religious belief as the author concludes this book and I conclude this review.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews