Excusing the Inquisition 1
Fear is always the first incentive to religious worship.Paul Carus, History of the Devil (1900)
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 12 December 2002; Friday, 19 December 2003
Abstract
An excuse is that the Church was not stifling belief but imposing discipline! The Church must make laws and uphold them with penalties. Heresy violates ecclesiastical law and strikes at the Christian communion. But it does not suffice to expel a member not conforming. That is why “heresy” was and is a lie. It is not “heresy”, it is mind control. People who were never baptised as Catholic Christians cannot be Catholic heretics. Even those who were baptised were baptised before they had the chance to dissent, but when they did as adults, they were deemed heretics and murdered. Protestants wanted to secede from the Church of images and luxury and return to the ways of the Essenes. They were therefore heretics and had to be burnt alive. Excusing The Spanish Inquisition
History and Religion
History is a science as incompatible with religion as evolution. It eliminates the supernatural from the chronicle of human development. Religion should too, because whenever a supernatural intervention would be beneficial in the affairs of humanity, it never happens. Indeed, supernatural interventions never happen for good or for ill—they just never happen, which is why historians, as opposed to theologions or religious apologists, deny them.
The science of history means making a record of past events based on a critical use of the evidence, particularly when it is documentary evidence, not gullibly accepting it because a tradition has been fostered that it is God’s own word. Even historians are still blinded by society’s intoxication with the lies called the “holy bible”. It purports to be history and many historians accept that it is, though it mainly is not, and it does not stand up to the scrutiny of normal historical standards.
Our age is a liberal one, and even skeptical historians bend over backwards not to offend religious people. It is time this unwarranted respect ended, whatever the religion is, because all of the patriarchal religions are equally bad. When Christians defend the indefensible, no historians will cross swords with them, though Christians heap lies upon lies. The convention is to be silent—out of “respect”. Someone might be offended. In the UK with the religions of immigrants, the brand of racism is added. Against these timid conventions of history, wherever religion is concerned, these pages are protesting.
Critical historians excite the rancour of theologians almost as much as do scientists. The discoveries of science are hard to decry even by Christians, but history does not have the same consequences, and is more readily rejected by theologians. Many people do not like it, are not interested in it, will not read it and have nothing to learn from it. They could not even begin to understand George Santayana’s chilling dictum:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
But lack of interest in history suits the clergy down to the hilt. Christianity’s dependence on the people’s ignorance and dislike of history allows it to pretend it beneficially transformed Europe when Paganism was suppressed. Christians certainly think this and few of the non-committed care about anything other than the present day, so they accept school history, which is Christian history, and it is false. Christianity transformed Europe from the practical, natural civilization of Paganism into dense ignorance, indifferent brutality and social disorder. The Christian apologist, faced with evidence that Europe did not immediately benefit from Christianity, blames the initial collapse of society on to the barbarians, but insists that the benefits of Christianity emerged later.
Yet, the barbarians were already Christian when they invaded, though not Catholics, and why did Europe continue to decline for centuries after the barbarians had converted to Catholicism? New and appalling evils were being created even into the Middle Ages.
Few people, least of all Christians know any history, and Christians know nothing about the history of Christianity. If they do, how can genuinely pious Christians accept that their religion promoted the most awful tortures—the Inquisition? Christians say that heresy was a crime in European law. It was a secular crime against the state not a religious crime and was punished accordingly. Do they really think that their own God does not notice that this juggling with words is actually lying? Christians think their own God is a dolt and does not notice them blatantly lying as long as it is meant to be in defence of the Church. The leaders of the Church used people’s belief in their control of the destiny of their souls to oblige rulers and peoples to make heresy a crime! The church introduced the Inquisition.
Apologizing for the Inquisition
Professor J Hitchcock has another defence of the Inquisition in that the Committees of Public Safety during the French Revolution were worse. They really did condemn people wholesale without regard for guilt or innocence, and if they had gone on for as long as the Inquisition—Hitchcock admitting to 1230-1530—their death tolls would have been greater. But they only lasted for a decade whereas the Inquisition lasted for 500 years. Indeed, few people realise it has never been officially disbanded.
Blötzer says a kind of iron law disposes mankind to religious intolerance. If that is the case, the best thing to do is to abolish religion. But atheism is the worst “heresy” according to the Christians. They cite Plato who made it the duty of the government of his ideal state to show no toleration towards the “godless”, even though they were content to live quietly and without proselytizing. Doubtless this is one of the reasons why Christians admired Plato so much they were willing to preserve his books. Revisionists use this as evidence that the attitude of the Church in the Middle Ages was not unusual.
The revisionist apologetic claim is that the principal teachers of the Church held back from accepting the practice of the civil rulers. Some did, but in the end the Church did not. The Catholic Church became dominant in the West. That was its aim, and it had succeeded. It taught everyone that the welfare of society depended on the welfare of Christianity, and people believed it mainly because there was no other possible option. King Peter of Aragon, voiced the universal conviction:
The enemies of the Cross of Christ and violators of the Christian law are likewise our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom, and ought therefore to be dealt with as such.
It meant, of course, that not everyone had accepted the rule of the Church in religious matters. The original Christians, who took their lines more from the original Essene Christianity of Jesus, and had evidently survived in the east, began to spread west. It scared the pampered prelates of the fabulously rich Church. People behaving like Jesus?—Heresy!
More excuses. The representatives of the Church were children of their time, and in their conflict with heresy accepted the help they could get. It was the help of the mob, and the secular princes, all Christians, all taught by the Church, but apparently none the wiser in terms of following the teaching of the humble Galilean. They imposed laws based on the old Roman system and enforced them. The Church learned its habits from the princes, we are told, not the other way round.
Yet, S Thomas Aquinas, the Medieval Church’s answer to Augustine, demonstrates that the sin of heresy separates man from God more than all other sins, and, as the worst of sins, is to be punished more severely. Bishop Lucas thought the worst sin becomes holy in comparison with the depravity of heresy. Stephen Palecz of Prague declared before the Council of Constance that a belief false in one point in a thousand was heretical. The dualistic system found a point of agreement in one of the doctrines of the Church—that of the dogma of the devil and his kingdom. The exclusive salvation enforced by Catholicism meant a Catholic had to believe it was merciful to sweep away the catechumens of Satan with fire and sword. They would be saved by the Catholics Christians whether they wanted to be or not. Later, Protestant Christians were the same. God had raised His Churches to fight such battles against those who wanted to reject them.
The schoolmen proved that persecution was a work of charity, for the benefit of the persecuted. So, they and the bishops advocated capital punishment for heresy. The capital punishment was taken to be death by fire, based on heresy being called high treason (crimen laesae majestatis) against God. The Jewish law was remembered and cited as biblical precedent with concomitant citations of Jesus:
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.Matthew 5:17
If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.John 15:6
Yet another apology is that the Church was not stifling belief but imposing discipline! And any judgement made on the Inquisition has no bearing on the correctness of the Church’s dogmas. The Church still, the apologists claim, must make laws and uphold them with penalties. Heresy violates ecclesiastical law and strikes at the Christian communion. But it does not suffice to expel a member not conforming. That is why heresy was and is a lie. It is not heresy it is mind control. People who were never baptised as Catholic Christians cannot be Catholic heretics. Even those who were baptised were baptised before they had the chance to dissent, and when they did as adults, they were deemed heretics and murdered. Protestants wanted to secede from the Church of images and luxury and return to the ways of the Essenes. They were therefore heretics and had to be burnt alive.
Catholics still argue that unity of faith is essential, and every Protestant sect agrees, as long as it is their sect around which unity is built. The Church taught that a united religion was essential to civil society, then when kings and princes took them at their word, as the wise and the sage, and insisted on unity of religion rigidly, the Church pretended it was not their fault. That is how they still argue.
The same people had taught the ordinary poor, illiterate and ignorant people everything that they should think. Then they tell us popular hatred of heresy caused summary justice and cruel punishments that the Church then had no choice but to continue. Catholics absolve themselves by pointing to the worse crimes of the Protestant Reformers. Neither consider it a problem of a terrible and unjust religion that appears in different but equally bad forms.
Revisionist, Edward O’Brien, is not content to revise the Roman Inquisition, he wants to revise the trial of Galileo. Galileo was a believer in Copernicus—the Earth revolves around the Sun. The Church took the earth to be the center of the universe, but Galileo said truth cannot contradict truth. Scripture could not teach contrary to nature, so there had been an error of interpretation of scripture. Galileo had to answer for his views before the Inquisition in 1616, and that same year, the Inquisition ordered the text of Copernicus must no longer be published until it was “corrected”. On 24 February, 1616, the Inquisition decided that Galileo was heretical because his theories were contrary to scripture. The Roman tribunal did not torture Galileo but just ordered him to desist from saying such things. He did not, and in 1632 published a book, The Dialogue, expounding the differences between science and the Church. O’Brien just tells us the Inquisition did nothing more than put him under house arrest, and he later died in his own bed, after enjoying a papal pension! He does not say:
- all this took place in 1633, when already the Inquisition was waning in power before the new secularism that was growing, but he was threatened with torture and burning alive,
- Galileo knew that only a few decades before Bruno had been burnt at the stake, so still had reason to think the Church would carry out its threats,
- Galileo was already an old man of seventy but was forced to kneel and make a public confession with his hand on the gospels, and had to do penances for three years as part of his recantation,
- he was refused burial in consecrated ground, when he did die, even though he had complied with the requirements of the Church.
The Dialogue remained on the papal Index until 1822 by which time everyone except Catholics agreed the earth moved round the sun. The conviction stood until John Paul II overturned it. This is the nature of historical revisionism. No need to lie, just miss out the unacceptable bits. The sin is omission, but no less a lie.
Moses and Exodus
