Death To Infidels: Spanish Conquistadors, 1532; ISIS Fighters, 2014

Conquistadors praying before a battle

We've all been appalled by news of Muslim extremists leaving a trail of death and devastation in Iraq and torturing and killing hundreds of innocent Christians and others they consider "infidels", including Shiite Muslims.

Sadly, so-called "Christians" have also been guilty of such acts of terror in the name of God, as documented in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1977, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 69-77, and found in Ron Rude's 2010 book, Abel Emerging, Beavers Pond Press., 193-200).

The following is from a report of the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of the Inca people in the Andes Mountains, led by a Governor Pizzaro:

"The prudence, fortitude, military discipline, labors, perilous navigations, and battles of the Spaniards--vassals of the most invincible Emperor of the Roman Catholic Empire, our natural King and Lord--will cause joy to the faithful and terror to the infidels."

The report then includes details of their "terror to the infidels" in city of Cajamarca. The Spanish force, only 200-300 in number but armed with superior weapons, faced an Incan crowd of tens of thousands who had assembled the city square with their leader Atahuallpa with the promise that "no harm or insult" would befall them.

Then at a given signal, mounted Spanish infantry and ground troops, guns blazing, charged into the assembled crowd of mostly unarmed people and slaughtered them by the hundreds.

"The Indians were so filled with fear that they climbed on top of one another, formed mounds, and suffocated each other... The cavalry rode them down, killing and wounding and following in pursuit. The infantry made so good an assault on those that remained that in a short time most of them were put to the sword."

To the conquered Atahuallpa, the Governor afterwards explained,

"... We come to conquer this land by his command (the King of Spain), that all may come to the knowledge of God and of His Holy Catholic Faith: and by reason of God's good mission, God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things in them, permits this, in order that you may know Him and come out from the bestial and diabolical life that you lead... When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good we have done..."

Author Ron Rude concludes, "It is hard to hard to imagine that such thought processes and behavior could even remotely have been associated with the life, teachings, actions, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Christ."