Reading Response 1 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Reading Response 1 - Essay Example not only aimed at spreading the gospel, but had the interest of taking the land of the local people with the pretense they were teaching the people how to use land and the new gospel. The result was grievous execution and torture of the locals who refused to embrace the new teachings and were unwelcoming to strangers. Instead of preaching a gospel of peace, Christians perpetrated mass execution of the locals torturing them by burning them alive and dismembering their bodies, among other atrocities. Children and women bore the wrath of the Christians whose gospel was opposite of their actions. In the name of the gospel, a large population of the Indies people was eliminated, the rest were taken as slaves to work for the benefit of the same Christians, who continued to gather wealth while the locals struggled to suffer in poverty. The locals were denied food despite working in extreme conditions to enrich the missionaries in their own land and using their own blood and resources (Casas 34). The main aim behind the colonialists’ atrocities in the Indies was to weaken the resistance of the locals. There was a thin line between spreading the gospel in Christianity in such Asian regions and exploring the land for resources to enrich the colonialists’ mother countries. Most of the early missionaries turned to be political elements who explored new lands and resources for their mother countries, and the Indies was not an exceptional. The locals were harsh and unwelcome to the colonialists, as a response, the colonialists had to use cruel methods to deter any resistance from the locals and to weaken the resistance of the people towards receiving new instructions. Women and children were easier to deal with, which explains the mass execution of males; moreover, as political figures, the missionaries had to use cheap labor to attain maximum benefits from exploiting resources in the Indies, which degenerated into slave trade. One of the greatest impacts of colonialism