Oh yeah...all that peace and love is SCARY
In 1122 Christian crusaders swept over Jerusalem and slaughtered men, women and children, 'until their horses were knee deep in blood. We then went to the church to thank the Lord for his mercy.'
In 777 , Charlemagne, a devout Christian, after conquering the Saxon rebels, gave them a choice between baptism and execution. When they refused to convert, he had 4500 of them beheaded in one morning.
In the fourth century, Emporor Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to become a Christian, had over 3000 Christians executed because their interpretation of the Bible did not agree with his. That is more than the number of Christians who died at the hands of the Romans during the well known 1st century "Christians to the lions" persecutions.
The above are from William Manchester's "A World Lit Only by Fire- The Medieval Mind and The Renaissance"..Little, Brown & Company, 1992
Queen Isabella, famous for sending Columbus to the New World in 1492, was well known also for her 'Spanish Inquisition', the gruesome torture and murder of tens of thousands of Spanish Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, people who read or wrote, uppity women, and anyone else not up to the Queen's strict standards. Isabella was a champion of the faith, piously congratulating herself as her victims writhed to their deaths in the flames and the many other ingenious methods of torture invented by her inquisitors.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Inquisition was born, with Christians killing Christians, during what was known as the Albigensian heresies. Hundreds of thousands of people died because their Christianity did not agree with official dogma. This adds to the irony of murder in the name of Christ, when the majority of victims of the early inquisitions were themselves Christians.
English Catholics suffered horribly under Protestant regimes. American historian William T. Walsh writes: "In Britain, 30,000 went to the stake for witchcraft; in Protestant Germany, the figure was 100,000" (, p. 275). In Scotland, too, alleged witches were cruelly put to death. Karl Keating quotes from the : "It is well-known that belief in the justice of punishing heresy with death was so common among the 16th-century Reformers-Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their adherents-that we may say their toleration began where their power ended" (C.E., s.v., "Inquisition," 8:35).
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One could do this with any religion. I do not mean any disrespect toward Christianity, but no religion is about "love and peace". It's about control of the masses.
None has "peace and love" as the sole or even primary message. It's all about controlling the lives of others, always has been and always will be.