Religions and people who have been in charge of them, have been on the receiving end of a lot of complaints and hatred for as long as we can remember. Pedophilia, child abuse, secret homosexual orgies are just some of the examples of what happens behind the closed doors of religious institutions when the rest of the world is not paying attention. We’ve dug a bit deeper and found the ten of the most brutal religious ceremonies that have taken place that are guaranteed to shock you.
Scalp Dances
Native American tribes have a practice of removing the scalps of enemies in a sort of post-battle celebration. It was considered that this way the victory of the winning tribe was sealed and the scalps were given to women who were grieving for their husbands to wipe away the tears.
Mongolian Executions
Mongols paid a lot of respect to their gods, especially when killing other people. Their protocol for killing their enemies was quite astonishing, with them wrapping the enemies’ live bodies into cloths and then crushing them with stones or trampling horse hooves until they turn into a paste. It was believed that if any blood were to escape from the cloths it would offend the gods, so they paid a lot of attention to killing their victims this certain way.
Self-Impalement
Many religions teach that purification can only be achieved through self-induced pain. The best example would the town of Phucket in Southern Thailand where people stab themselves through the cheeks with anything from gun barrels to umbrella handles in order to put flowers through the holes.
Sparagmos
The ceremony of sparagmos was a ceremony reenacted by the Greeks in order to commemorate the event of the god Dionysus being torn apart by Titans. The participants use different creatures such as bulls and goats and sometimes even babies in order to rip them apart.
Agoge
In the ancient Greek city of Sparta known as Agoge there was a religious ritual involving sending teenage boys into the world, which usually meant woods, on a mission to learn how to provide for themselves. It encouraged surviving with only a blanket and a spear, but it also involved stalking and murdering slaves which were living in the woods.
Torture Exorcisms
Although exorcism is often portrayed as quite a common way of dealing with tortured souls, it also has a lot of cases where the patients died from slow, agonizing death. Such is the case of a woman by the name of Haseena who died from internal bleeding during a form of exorcism performed by an exorcist. There’s also been multiple cases of exorcism involving cutting and lacerations and other ways of physical torture.
Child Sacrifice
In the last decade, there’s been a significant rise in the number of children being sacrificed in Uganda. The sacrifices include kidnapping and killing the children but not before removing one part of their body such as an ear, the heart or genitals. Apparently a sacrifice like that is enough to solve a personal problem in your life.
Cannibal Executions
The ritualistic eating of human flesh is something that is still performed by the tribe named Korowai in Papua New Guinea. It is done as a sort of a punishment for those who are considered to be male witches. The body gets distributed throughout the tribe with the head being left for the family that put the person to death.
Real Crucifixion
While the biggest part of the Catholic Church is opposed to the practice of crucifixion, it does not involve a city in the Philippines where people have themselves nailed to crosses as a tribute to Jesus Christ. People do it regularly with some of them performing it on themselves up to 30 times in the course of their lives.
Conversion Through Rape
It is by now known that ISIS terrorists are performing mass rapes under the claim that doing so would convert the non-Muslim people to their religion. According to a statement issued by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, one of the leaders, if a woman is subjected to rape by at least ten different terrorists, then she will become a follower of Allah.