This excerpt from Distorted Reporting by Masayuki Takayama exposes the dangers of dogmatic ideologies shared by Christianity and communism. From the persecution of Galileo and Calvinists to witch hunts in southern Germany, the massacre of 30 million indigenous people in the Age of Exploration, and papal bans on bathing, it reveals the catastrophic consequences of ideological absolutism in medieval Europe.

The following is from pages 71 to 78 of Masayuki Takayama’s Distorted Reporting.

The Biased Program “Close-Up Gendai”
The Method of Fabrication Using Scholars

Whether it is Christianity or the Communist Party, there is no existence more dangerous and more troublesome than a group cloaked in self-righteousness.

Galileo, who advocated the heliocentric theory, was nearly burned at the stake, and those such as the Calvinists who attempted to liberate finance and business from church control were all burned alive as heretics.

In southern Germany, 7 percent of the population was burned as witches, and during the Age of Exploration the Spaniards killed 30 million Central and South American Indians simply because they were not Christians.

The European Middle Ages are also known as “the thousand years without bathing,” because the Pope, the supreme authority of Christianity, issued an edict declaring that bathing was harmful to health.

This column continues.