The name of our current month (February, for all you stoners out there) comes from the Latin februum, which means purification.  Originally, February was the last month of the year, when the Romans would celebrate their purity festival to make up for the awful things they did that year.  Carrying on that tradition, we have Black History Month, which was celebrated in my high school (60% Black/40% Other [including but not limited to White, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Native American, Eskimo, Pacific Islander, Mongolian, and Latino]) with a brotherhood rally, where leaders from the black community would come in and speak briefly about how a black man invented the traffic light and the shower curtain rod (both true) before negating any scholastic message by encouraging everyone to get out there and play sports or sing in order to become somebody.  I really wish that was a joke.

On the other hand, if social guilt isn’t your thing, you always have Lent to express all that moral angst you’ve accrued by giving up chocolate for a few weeks.  Nobody knows guilt better than the church, which would have a hard time selling the product if everybody felt good about themselves all the time.  So, for those of you taking this Lenten season a bit too hard, I’m giving you each an historic atrocity committed in the name of religion to make you feel a little better.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Father Bernhard Stempfle spent time in a German state prison where, in his spare time, he carved soap sculptures, prayed, created knotwork jewelry, and helped Hitler edit Mein Kampf.

PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20): Jimmy Swaggart, Jesse Jackson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts, Lonnie Frisbee, Peter Popoff, Robert Tilton, Richard Roberts, Kent Hovind, Benny Hinn, John Paulk, Mike Warnke, and Ted Haggard.

ARIES (Mar. 21-Apr. 19): In 1095, the First Crusade was launched with the rallying cry “Deus Vult” (God wills it).  Germanic crusaders started by slaughtering thousands of local Jews for the Lord.

TAURUS (Apr. 20-May 20): 1209 saw the sacking of the French city Béziers by Pope Innocent III in his attempt to remove Albigenses Christians from Southern France.  When asked by his generals how to distinguish the innocent from the infidels, the pope’s legate replied, “Kill them all; God will recognize his own.”

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The first white Americans, the Puritans, settled in Massachusetts in the 1600s, devoting themselves to a religious police state that punished those who disobeyed the Bible with flogging, cutting off of ears, boring through the tongue with a hot iron, and, if you were lucky, hanging.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): On a bright, Sunday morning in 1983, a group of Catholics wandered into a Protestant church in Darkley, Northern Ireland and open fired with automatic weapons, killing three and wounding seven.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Cardinal Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) gave a speech in 1990 condoning the 1633 heresy trial of Galileo for saying that the Earth rotated around the sun.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): On November 20, 2007, Warren Jeffs was sentenced to 10 years-to-life in prison for forcing underage girls to marry older men and telling them that it was God's will.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple in the early sixties to help bring people of different races and backgrounds together to drink gallons of poisoned Kool-Aid®.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): While 99.8% of Roman Catholic priests are honest and to be trusted, the other 0.2% more than made up for it by molesting thousands of children over the past few decades, often avoiding legal consequences with the help of their church.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): My youth minister in middle school told me God put dinosaur fossils in the ground to “test our faith” in the Bible.  I know it’s not historical, but COME ON!

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The missionary arm of the Church of England (the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts) owned a plantation in Barbados, where its slaves were branded across the chests with the word “SOCIETY” to mark them as church property.