A Christians Call for the Removal and Destruction of the Cross of Christ

As they conquered new lands and acquired new gods, they sent effigies of them back to the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. This collection, which should have been modern Europe's inheritance from the ancient world, disappeared in Christian times. Countless other works of art from all over the known world were also lost under Christian rule. Some classical art survived in the Eastern Empire, especially in Constantinople. But when the Western Christians besieged and took the city in , they immediately set about pillaging these ancient treasures, and destroying those that they could not carry away.

Nicetus, a contemporary Greek writer, listed some of the treasures: Some of these statues were huge: The statue of Hercules by Lysimachus was so large that in girth, the statue's thumbs were equal to a man's waist. Bronze work was broken up and melted down so that it could be transported more easily; marble work was simply vandalised. The Triumphal Quadriga, is a set of bronze statues of four horses, originally part of a monument in Constantinople, depicting a quadriga a four-horse carriage used for chariot racing The horses were placed on the facade, on the loggia above the porch, of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, northern Italy having been looted during the sack of Constantinople in The sculptures have been removed from the facade and placed in the interior of St.

Mark's for conservation purposes, with replicas in their position on the loggia. Much of what survived the vandalism throughout Western Christendom did so either because of pagan care or Christian ignorance. It was found, walled up, in the seventeenth century. Another Aphrodite, dug up on the Greek island of Milos in , is now celebrated as the Aphrodite of Milos, or more commonly the Venus de Milo.

Even missing her arms which were broken after the statue was found she is one of the most famous statues in the world. She is now in the Louvre, and is shown on the right. The arms and original plinth were lost following her discovery. The statue, in marble, was created sometime between and BC. From an inscription on its plinth, noted before it disappeared, she is thought to be the work of Alexandros of Antioch.

According to modern experts she is not in the same class as Praxiteles" original Aphrodite, which is, of course, "lost".

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So was the Farnese Hercules by Glycon, rediscovered in Some statues were vandalised but not destroyed. For example a statue of Isis in Rome now leads a second life as the liberally bosomed "Madama Lucrezia". Not only religious statues fell victim to the Christians. Early Christians destroyed secular statues and inscriptions. The great Church historian Eusebius gloated that Caesar Maximian was "the first whose complimentary inscriptions and statues, and everything else that is customarily set up, were thrown down as being reminders of a foul monster" 3.

Vandalised statues of him were left as objects for jests and horseplay for anyone who might want to insult and abuse them. Similar fates befell others who were not sufficiently sympathetic to the Christian cause. Unsympathetic people were executed, and all memorials to their existence destroyed. The West's patrimony from classical times is tiny compared to what it might have been if the early Christian authorities had allowed artistic taste to encroach on their religious prejudices 4.

The little that remains has survived despite the efforts of the more zealous Christians. Statues were buried, or walled up, or cast into the sea to avoid the Christian picks and hammers. Had the Christians been more competent detectives, and less ignorant about the subject matter, then the whole patrimony would have been "lost". An equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campidoglio in Rome survived because Christians mistook it for a statue of their hero Constantine. We can often tell that Christians were responsible for vandalising statues first because they made a point of disfiguring the face as Moslems vandals still do , and secondly because they would often carve crosses on the face, most commonly a cross in the middle of the forehead, to somehow Christianise the statue.

Making crosses on foreheads is a common Christian practice. It is still done with water in the course of baptisms, with ash on Ash Wednesday, and with paint on the skulls of dead monks. It was previously done with a red hot branding iron on the foreheads of supposed heretics. Below are a few examples of statues vandalised by Christians. This statue of the goddess Aphrodite found at the Agora at Athens bears the hallmarks of Christian vandals, including crosses carved on the forehead and chin.

This statue of Livia Drusilla, wife of the Emperor Augustus also bears the hallmarks of Christian vandals. Statue of Augustus from Ephesus. Now in the Ephesus Museum, Selcuk, Turkey. Religiously inspired philistinism extended to all corners of life. Christians were responsible for putting a stop to the original Olympic Games, of which they disapproved.

The famous statue of Zeus at Olympia, wrought in gold and ivory, one of the seven wonders of the world, was carted off to Constantinople where it was later destroyed. It is thought to have looked like the image shown on the right. The workshops of Phidias, the sculptor of the statue of Zeus, were converted into a Christian church. Other wonders of the world suffered similarly.

According to Christian sources, the Temple of Diana Artemis near Ephesus was destroyed along with the goddess's statue, first damaged by Saint John the Apostle, and then flattened by Saint John Chrysostom in , following a Christian emperor's Edict of Thessalonica 4a. The stones were used for a "tomb" for St John and a bath-house. A cross was raised on the spot where Diana's statue had stood. Another wonder of the world, the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus, was cannibalised to build a crusader castle, which still stands near the harbour of modern Bodrum in Turkey.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Mausoleum left , before it was dismantled by Christian crusaders to build a crusader castle right. It was described by Antipater of Sidon, who compiled a list of the Seven Wonders:. I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, "Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught anything so grand".

Antipater, Greek Anthology [IX. It was destroyed by Christians, and is now an empty field. Some stones used to build a nearby church, other carted off to Contantinople. Some of the columns in Hagia Sophia came from the temple of Artemis, and statues and other decorative elements ended up in the Christian capital.. An inscription at Ephesus confirms the role of Christians in the vandalism, in particular a Christian called Demeas:. Destroying the delusive image of the demon Artemis, Demeas has erected this symbol of Truth, the God that drives away idols, and the Cross of priests, deathless and victorious sign of Christ.

A reconstruction of what the Temple of Artemis would have looked like, and a photograph of the site today the pillar is reconstructed from stones on the site. Quality stones were carted off to Contantinople, others used in churches and eventually building like those in the background. For years bands of Christian monks had been sweeping down from their desert monasteries to destroy shrines and temples. They ransacked houses, destroying all non-Christian religious objects.

Some estimates put the number of volumes destroyed at , although enough volumes remained for later Muslims to enjoy more fires when they arrived in The end of progress in ancient mathematics is conventionally dated as , the year Hypatia was murdered by Christians in the same city, during the reign of the next bishop. The great tradition of learning at Alexandria came to an end in when its world famous School of Philosophy was closed down. Elsewhere, rival Christian schools had to be eliminated too. In the Emperor Zeno had closed the schools of Edessa.

The end of ancient philosophy can be equated with the closing of the Academy and other philosophical Schools in Athens by the Christian Emperor Justinian in Any possibility of intellectual opposition was now eliminated. Philosophy was considered dangerous to Christianity. Philosophers were persecuted and their books burned. Such was the persecution that men of learning were driven to destroy their own libraries rather than risk a volume being seen by a Christian informer.

The few intellectual Christians that there were had to be careful of offending the sensibilities of the less intellectual majority. The philosopher Boethius for example was killed by the pious Christian Ostrogoth Theodoric in the sixth century. He is reputed to have met his end by having a bowstring tightened around his temples until his eyes protruded from his head. His death marked the end of the classical tradition of learning.

Any pagan work that referred to Jesus, and any works by Christians who could not accept the theology agreed atthe latest Church Council, were suppressed. The only acceptable literature was literature that conformed to the official Christian line of the moment. Gospels that did not fit requirements were discarded, and their existence denied. Other writings were creatively edited. Works by educated pagan authors were destroyed along with those of Christians whose views were not currently regarded as orthodox.

Histories were either "lost" or doctored to make them acceptable. Numerous works by pagan authors were known during the early centuries of the Church, and many of them were subsequently destroyed or otherwise "lost". We know for example that several biographies of Pythagoras were written. All have been "lost".

He was a highly regarded thinker who had a poor opinion of the Christians, and unsurprisingly his work has disappeared. Parts of his medical writings were rediscovered in the Middle Ages, and from these it is possible to gauge the scale of our loss. Often we know that works were still current in the early years of Christianity: Some pagan tracts were given Christian prefaces and conclusions, and presented as original documents. Thus the letter of Eugnostos the Blessed was converted into an account of the wisdom revealed by Jesus to the disciples after his death.

Anything that could not be cannibalised in this way was discarded. Thus, no Greek secular works were preserved in the original. Secular learning and secular art, along with secular education, almost disappeared. Some works were recovered during the Renaissance. Petrarch, for example, recovered other works by Cicero. Poems by Catullus were reputedly found serving as a bung in a Mantuan wine barrel.

Parchment was expensive so Medieval Churchmen would sometimes take a used one, scrape off the existing text, and reuse it - as a so-called palimpsest. Regarding the works of pagans of the ancient world as worthless, they destroyed, or at least thought that they had destroyed, the works of the some of the greatest minds in human history, to make prayer books. Modern science has been able to recover a few important works from these Christian prayer books. For example, in AD parchment copies of seven treatises of Archimedes were erased and overwritten by prayers, then bound in a Byzantine prayerbook a euchologion by a priest called Johannes Myronas.

Myronas understood Greek, so must have known what he was doing. Of the seven treatises by Archimedes, two are otherwise unknown The The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion and one On Floating Bodies is unknown in the original Greek, the language in which Archimedes wrote. Working in Jerusalem, the priest had vandalised not only treatises by Archimedes to make his prayerbook, but also other works, including 10 folios of the Attic orator Hyperides dating from the fourth century BC, one of which contained an extremely important speech that has not otherwise been preserved.

This copy of Archimedes Method was found in There is no way of telling how many other such palimpsests there were on which Christians did a more thorough job, and so will never be discovered. The loss through Christian vandalism - both deliberate and casual - is incalculable, but the scale of it can be estimated from the shreds that survive. Tacitus's surviving Histories and Annals are both incomplete.

Livy's lost works include his volume History of Rome of which only a small part has survived. Pliny the Elder wrote numerous works of which only his Historia Naturalis survives. It was not only classical works that were destroyed. When they had the opportunity to do so Christians burned Jewish and Muslim books as well. After the Muslim city of Tripoli surrendered to the crusaders in , the great library of Banu Ammar , the finest in the Muslim world, was burnt to the ground with all of its contents.

Some works were preserved because they were taken out of the reach of orthodoxy. When persecuted Nestorians fled eastward, they took ancient works with them. They enjoyed much greater freedom under Zoroastrian and Muslim rulers, and established prominent communities in what are now Iraq and Iran. Along with other refugees they translated the writings of Greek philosophers. For 1, years these writings were lost to the West. When they were eventually retranslated from Arabic into Latin they fired the revival of learning that we know as the Renaissance.

It was through this route that the works of Aristotle were preserved. Other works survived in other ways. In the ancient rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt yielded, amongst other things, a forgotten song by Sappho and fragments of "lost" plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. A common claim made by Christians is that Christianity single-handedly kept alight the guttering flame of learning during the Dark Ages, in the face of marauding wild barbarians.

The truth is almost the exact opposite. The Church was largely responsible for plunging western Europe into ignorance and darkness. Towards the end of the fourth century for example Goths destroyed much of the Western Empire, including great cities like Delphi and Athens. But these Goths were not the pagan barbarians of traditional history books, they were Christians.

These barbarians marched with bibles at the head of their armies. When they besieged Rome it was not, as is often supposed, pagans besieging civilised Christians but for the most part Christians besieging civilised pagans. To be sure there were some Christians in the city, but there is no reason to suppose that their faith was stronger than that of their bishop. Their bishop now regarded as a Pope consented to pagan sacrifices on the altar of St Peter's in order to save the city from the Christian hordes at its gates.

Popular stories about pagan barbarians sacking Rome are pure fantasy. Rome was still in good shape until the middle of the sixth century when the Christian Emperor Justinian tried to reconnect Italy to the Empire. The city was repeatedly besieged and plundered by Christian forces.

Byzantine Iconoclasm

Rain and weather did further damage, but there was still enough left for later Christians to exceed the efforts of all their predecessors. Guidebook to Rome 6. The true torchbearers during the Dark Ages were Arabs, Jews, heretics and pagans who kept alive pre-Christian teachings. In western Europe Christianity enforced a monopoly of thought, and the consequence of this was that Western Christendom spent the Middle Ages in abject ignorance, regarded by Byzantines and Muslims alike as hopeless philistines.

Pope Paul II, a nepotist and murderer, epitomised Western Christianity at the end of the medieval period. When in the historian Bartolomeo Platina commented on his ignorance, His Holiness had him imprisoned and tortured. The same pope suppressed the Roman Academy, which he thought encouraged paganism, and also banned the reading of ancient poets by Roman children.

How great was Europe's cultural loss can be assessed by comparing the state of civilisation under the ancient Greeks with that of Christendom at the close of the Middle Ages, almost 2, years later. Stone buildings that had been built extensively for private and public purposes were now limited to military and ecclesiastical structures. Existing public buildings forums, libraries, odeons, theatres, museums, stadia, hippodromes, circuses, schools, gymnasia, temples, baths, Roman amphitheatres etc.

Iconoclasm

Many building techniques were forgotten. Where even the poor had been taught to read and write in pagan times, and the rich had been expected to build public schools, education became a Church monopoly, and was denied to all except prospective priests and sons of the rich. The syllabus was restricted to Christian indoctrination. Unsympathetic or objective histories were "lost". Law was converted from an instrument of justice to a system featuring trials by ordeal, frequently serving the interests of the Church and denying the principles of natural justice.

Inequality was a fundamental principle of ecclesiastical law. All literature, including the Bible, was banned to the population at large. The few who were allowed to learn to read were restricted to prayer books and Christian Legends presented as fact. Other books were generally destroyed or hidden away in monasteries.

This was limited within the Church to the arithmetic necessary to calculate the date of Easter. Otherwise it was treated with suspicion or hostility. All medical progress was halted. Illness was considered to be a punishment for sin. Hygiene and public health were abandoned as unchristian.

Music and singing were periodically restricted to Church music. Otherwise they were regarded as satanic. The study of nature, popular in the ancient world, stagnated until the Enlightenment. Research was suppressed until then because the Church insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible and its infallibility as a handbook of all world knowledge.

All representation was first banned, then restricted to religious themes from the fifth century. Existing non-Christian art was destroyed. The rules of perspective, known in Antiquity, were "lost" for a thousand years ie during the hegemony of the Church. In , the Council of Trent confirmed Art as a conformist naturalistic propaganda tool. A Church monopoly was established. The subject was then reduced to scholasticism. Existing philosophical works were destroyed. Genuine philosophers were censored, persecuted and sometimes killed. The charitable endowment of public buildings schools, libraries, theatres, sports stadia, baths, horse racing cources, etc.

Almost every village in Europe has a medieval church, generally built in better materials than any other local building. A vanishingly small number have comparable church built schools, hospitals or other useful public buildings. Non-religious sculpture ceased to be produced. The best examples from antiquity were "lost".

Inferior material was produced for the Church, generally for propaganda purposes. Nothing comparable in quality to classical work was produced until the Renaissancet. Sports were suppressed, along with international sporting events. They were replaced by various kinds of animal torture and pastimes too local to be controlled by the Church. Acting was banned, except for propaganda purposes: Streets and viaducts were used but not maintained.

They survived into secular times only because they had been so well built. It is notable that all of these areas flourished again as the hand of the Church was progressively relaxed, prized off by Renaissance Humanists, Enlightenment thinkers, scientists and secular philosophers. Typical Classical sculpture before the Christian era.

Typical Christian sculpture, after a millennium of Christian hegemony. Church vandalism continued for centuries after the Middle Ages. The canopy under the dome of the present St Peter's is made from tons of bronze stripped from the Pantheon in the sixteenth century the rest reputedly went to make papal canon. Construction of St Peter's had been started by Bramante. He destroyed much that could have been preserved from the old basilica, and pillaged various old buildings for marble and other materials.

Raphael, who took over after his death, called him Ruinante. Roman Christians were not content with destroying their own city. Rome, the Eternal Parasite , is still furnished with treasures pillaged from elsewhere. There are for example more large obelisks in Rome than remain in Egypt. Medieval Christians claimed that Holy Books could be easily identified because they would not burn. It was the same technique supposedly used by early Christians to determine the cannon of the New Testament - Heretical books burned: Holy books did not.

As Voltaire noted, it is a great pity that this simple method of distinguishing the two no longer works - Holy Testaments have burned just as well as heretical ones since the end of the Middle Ages. In any case, this supposed method enabled Churchmen like Saint Dominic to destroy any book they wanted, and acclaim their vandalism as proof of heretical content. When wagonloads of Jewish books were burned in the incident provoked an official inquiry. The committee approved of the destruction of the books. As a result more mass burnings were held. Talmudic studies were banned, and centres of Jewish scholarship were destroyed.

In a papal bull forbade Jews to possess or read the Talmud. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish books, including rare manuscripts, were burned in Italy by the Roman Inquisition. In an Italian cardinal could boast of having collected 10, Jewish books for destruction 9. Classical books, if discovered, were burned or hidden, Arabic books were burned, heretical books were burned, books exposing forgery and corruption were burned, books containing original thought were burned. Not only were factual information and opinions in need of suppression.

Some churchman could generally be found to condemn any item of innocent fun, amusement, interest or beauty. In the Christian citizens of Florence were inspired by the Friar Savonarola and armed guards to burn material possessions. Countless works of art went onto a "bonfire of the vanities". One bonfire, lit on Shrove Tuesday , was feet wide and sixty feet high. The crowd sang Te Deum laudamus as it burned. This is Chetham's Library in Manchester. It i is the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom.

It operates as an independent charity, open to readers and visitors free of charge. The Churches could have created such libraries throughout Europe, but never saw the need to do so. The idea of enouraging the masses to read was traditionally seen as undesirable. Soon the Church would be suppressing nudity too. Paul IV pope , defaced many statues and paintings by covering up or painting over disconcerting genitals. Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel was sanitised in this way, the artist who carried out the task, Daniel of Volterra, earning the nickname il braghettone "the trouserer".

Innocent X pope installed metal fig leaves on the nude statues in the Vatican. Numerous keen Christians have occupied their time in chipping the genitals off male statues throughout Christendom. He thought that it was just as bad and uncontrolled in a marriage as it was in non-marital sex, but that an excuse could be made for it within marriage because its purpose was to produce legitimate children.

This bad element in sex provides the means by which original sin is transmitted from father to child. It transmits both humanity's guilt for Adam's crime and the sickness or defect that gives human beings a sinful nature. Now from this concupiscence whatever comes into being by natural birth is bound by original sin The Council or Trent , or Trentine councils were a series of Roman Catholic theological meetings in response to the Reformation. The Council of Trent gave the official stamp to the idea that original sin was transferred from generation to generation by propagation - which means during the sexual act that led to conception.

This formalised the notion of Original Sin as part of Roman Catholic doctrine. The Council explicitly ruled out the idea that original sin was transferred by "imitation"; in order to block the idea that human beings just copied the bad example set by their parents and others. These closely related ideas teach that original sin is passed on by copying the sinful tendencies of other people. The Council of Trent decreed that this idea was false. Many churches accept that infants can be cleansed of original sin by being baptised soon after birth. The other elements required are carried out by adults on the baby's behalf during the ceremony.

In St Paul's letter to the Galatians, he wrote: This conception of Redemption as freedom from bondage is crucial for Judeo-Christian thought. On the face of it, original sin doesn't answer the question as to how evil got into the world; instead it leaves other questions to be answered. As one writer puts it:. Why is there original sin? Then why did Adam sin? If it was because of the serpent, why did the serpent sin? If the serpent is supposed to have been a fallen angel, why did the angel sin? And there is a second, but related, question. If evil did not exist before Adam sinned, how could Adam know that what he was about to do was evil - how was he to know that it was wrong to disobey God?

For modern people the idea of being punished for a crime committed by someone else is unethical and unacceptable. The doctrine of original sin blames Eve for tempting Adam into sin and has been responsible for centuries of Christian bias against women. Augustine's theory of original sin was so intrinsically tied up with his disapproval of human sexual love that for centuries it contaminated all sexual passion with the idea of sin. Some Christian thinkers are unhappy with the idea that human beings start out so bad that they can't become good without God's help. Science shows that the Biblical creation story is not literally true, and demonstrates that Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden are myths and not historical figures.

This destroys the idea of original sin as being caused by the misbehaviour of the first man and woman, and the idea of inheriting guilt or punishment for that misbehaviour. Most modern theologians don't think this a good reason to abandon the doctrine of the fall. They believe that although the story is not historically true, it does contain important truths about the state of humanity.

China's crusade to remove crosses from churches 'is for safety concerns'

The doctrine of original sin is based on the idea that God created a perfect world, and that humanity damaged it and themselves by disobeying him. Evolution, on the other hand, suggests that life in the world is steadily changing and becoming more diverse. Scientists do not tend to think of this as a moral good or evil, but in a sense evolution sees life on earth as moving closer to 'perfection' - becoming better adapted to its environment. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

A more modern idea is to give an ethical spin to the evolutionary idea and suggest that humanity should not be concerned about a past fall from grace, but concentrate on becoming more ethical beings and thus bringing about a better world. Bishop Richard Holloway has described the idea that unbaptised babies go to hell as "one of the most unsympathetic of the Christian doctrines," and not greatly improved by the teaching that there is a special "limbo" for unbaptised babies on the outskirts of the inferno.

Original sin has been criticised for inspiring excessive feelings of guilt. The 18th-century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke once said: Is the feeling of guilt a vital part of our moral lives or can it do more harm than good? One of the biggest problems the Catholic Church faced over the years was the problem of children who died before they were baptised. Before the 13th Century, all unbaptised people, including new born babies who died, would go to Hell, according to the Catholic Church. This was because original sin had not been cleansed by baptism.

This idea however was criticised by Peter Abelard, a French scholastic philosophiser, who said that babies who had no personal sin didn't even deserve punishment.

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It was Abelard who introduced the idea of 'Limbo'. The word comes from the Latin 'limbus', meaning the edge. This would be a state of existence where unbaptised babies, and those unfortunate enough to have been born before Jesus, would not experience pain but neither would they experience the Beatific Vision of God. The idea of Limbo was defined in by Pope Pius X in his catechism. Babies dead without baptism go to Limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but neither do they suffer, because, having Original Sin alone, they do not deserve Paradise, but neither do they merit Hell or Purgatory.

However, unease remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to Limbo and the church still faced much criticism.

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The Church, which has never claimed to definitely know who will go to Heaven apart from the Saints , or Hell, has said that the issue has long been one of speculation in the Church. This speculation has led to an oversimplification of the matter, and some people have regarded it as fact when it was never the case. Catholics feel sure that God won't impose punishment on babies who are free from personal guilt, but they do admit they don't know what their afterlife will hold. In April Pope Benedict XVI approved the findings of a report by the International Theological Commission, a Vatican advisory body, which found grounds that the souls of unbaptised children would go to heaven, thus revising traditional teaching on Limbo.

The report said there were "reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness". Parents were urged to continue to baptise their children, as the Vatican stressed that baptism is still considered necessary to achieve salvation; the report emphasised that "there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible" to baptise them.

St Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, in what is now Algeria, from to He was one of the greatest theologians in history and his ideas still influence Christian thought today. Although he didn't invent the doctrine of original sin, his ideas about it dominated Western Church teaching. Augustine's theory shows great understanding of human psychology. It provides an explanation for human suffering and guilt by teaching that those human beings somehow deserved these things.

One of the most notable of these campaigns was the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution of the Tang dynasty. During and after the Xinhai Revolution , there was widespread destruction of religious and secular images in China. During the Northern Expedition in Guangxi in , Kuomintang General Bai Chongxi led his troops in destroying Buddhist temples and smashing Buddhist images, turning the temples into schools and Kuomintang party headquarters. Westerners fled from the province and some Chinese Christians were also attacked as imperialist agents.

Bai led the anti-religious movement against superstition. The anti-religious campaign was agreed upon by all Guangxi Kuomintang members. There was extensive destruction of religious and secular imagery in Tibet after it was invaded and occupied by China. Many religious and secular images were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution of , ostensibly because they were a holdover from China's traditional and capitalist past which the Communist regime led by Mao Zedong reviled.

The Cultural Revolution included widespread destruction of historic artworks in public places and private collections, whether religious or secular. Objects in state museums were mostly left intact. During and after the October Revolution , widespread destruction of religious and secular imagery took place, as well as the destruction of imagery related to the Imperial family. The Revolution was accompanied by destruction of monuments of past tsars , as well as the destruction of imperial eagles at various locations throughout Russia.

After a considerable amount of time, the statue was decapitated and its remaining parts were broken into rubble". The Soviet Union actively destroyed religious sites, including Russian Orthodox churches and Jewish cemeteries , in order to discourage religious practice and curb the activities of religious groups. During the Hungarian Revolution of and during the Revolutions of , protesters often attacked and took down sculptures and images of Joseph Stalin , such as the Stalin Monument in Budapest. Another statue of Dzerzhinsky was destroyed in a Warsaw square that was named after him during communist rule , but which is now called Bank Square.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Iconoclast disambiguation. Anti-Western sentiment in China. A history of Catholic antisemitism: Retrieved 9 February Ancient Egypt and Religious Change , pg. The Victory of Reason: Random House Publishing Group. The Beeldenstorm, or Iconoclastic Fury, involved roving bands of radical Calvinists who were utterly opposed to all religious images and decorations in churches and who acted on their beliefs by storming into Catholic churches and destroying all artwork and finery.

A Century of Giants, A. Devoutly Catholic but opposed to Inquisition tactics, they backed William of Orange in subduing the Calvinist uprising of the Dutch beeldenstorm on behalf of regent Margaret of Parma, and had come willingly to the council at her invitation. Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation. Lutherans continued to worship in pre-Reformation churches, generally with few alterations to the interior. It has even been suggested that in Germany to this day one finds more ancient Marian altarpieces in Lutheran than in Catholic churches.

Thus in Germany and in Scandinavia many pieces of medieval art and architecture survived. Joseph Leo Koerner has noted that Lutherans, seeing themselves in the tradition of the ancient, apostolic church, sought to defend as well as reform the use of images. In fact, in the 16th century some of the strongest opposition to destruction of images came not from Catholics but from Lutherans against Calvinists: Works of art continued to be displayed in Lutheran churches, often including an imposing large crucifix in the sanctuary, a clear reference to Luther's theologia crucis.

In contrast, Reformed Calvinist churches are strikingly different. Usually unadorned and somewhat lacking in aesthetic appeal, pictures, sculptures, and ornate altar-pieces are largely absent; there are few or no candles; and crucifixes or crosses are also mostly absent. Luther's view was that biblical images could be used as teaching aids,and thus had didactic value. Hence Luther stood against the destruction of images wheras several other reformers Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin promoted these actions. In the following passage, Luther harshly rebukes Karlstadt on his stance on iconoclasm and his disorderly conduct in reform.

Voracious Idols and Violent Hands. Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Iconoclastic incidents during the Calvinist 'Second Reformation' in Germany provoked reactive riots by Lutheran mobs, while Protestant image-breaking in the Baltic region deeply antagonized the neighbouring Eastern Orthodox, a group with whom reformers might have hoped to make common cause. Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Concise History of Western Art.

In an episode known as the Great Iconoclasm, bands of Calvinists visited Catholic churches in the Netherlands in , shattering stained-glass windows, smashing statues, and destroying paintings and other artworks they perceived as idolatrous. The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, — Although some reformers, such as John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, rejected all images, Martin Luther defended the importance of images as tools for instruction and aids to devotion.

Lucas Cranach the Elder: Art and Devotion of the German Reformation. University Press of America. Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe.

The "Discovery Doctrine"

As it developed in north-eastern Germany, Lutheran worship became a complex ritual choreography set in a richly furnished church interior. This much is evident from the background of an epitaph pained in by Martin Schulz, destined for the Nikolaikirche in Berlin see Figure 5. Scott 9 March According to Koerner, who dwells on Lutheran art, the Reformation renewed rather than removed the religious image. Bamiyan, Islamic iconoclasm, and the museum". The Life of Muhammad. A translation of Ishaq's "Sirat Rasul Allah".

Quraysh had put pictures in the Ka'ba including two of Jesus son of Mary and Mary on both of whom be peace! The apostle ordered that the pictures should be erased except those of Jesus and Mary. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Vaishnava Accounts of the Krishna images' Exodus from Braj".

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Archived from the original on September 8, Retrieved April 30, Retrieved 10 July Retrieved 21 October