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To: The_Reader_David

You wrote:

“The Fathers of the Church wrote urgently against killing heretics.”

No. The Fathers wrote against THE CHURCH killing anyone - and the Church never has. Some Fathers also explicitly wrote against the state inferring and executing heretics. None of the Fathers ever once wrote against the state’s authority in executing violent heretics who disturbed the public order.

“All of the great heresiarchs condemned by the Ecumenical Councils died in exile, rather than being executed for heresy (though admittedly some received very harsh treatment during their exile),”

Yes, exile often equaled death.

“Can you find any well-attested instances of Christian heretics being executed solely on a charge of heresy, without another capital charge as the basis for the execution, prior to the rise of Islam, and with the approval of the Church? I am aware of none.”

The place to look is Lambert’s Medieval Heresy. See page 33. There were some 11th-12th century cases, the earliest cases of secretive heresy, the first major cases of group heresy in centuries, where people were apparently executed by the state with the consent of local Church authorities - ‘reluctant’ consent is the word Lambert uses - even though the heretics were not violent. Those cases were few and far between and the heretics were clearly thought of as great disturbers of the peace who were to be stamped out.

“The view suggested by donmeaker — that the Western treatment of heresy as a capital offense is a corruption imported from Islam — certainly has current scholarly support,”

No, it doesn’t.

” cf. Emmett Scott’s Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited. Scott also notes a shift in the attitude toward witchcraft after contact with Islam: before that the Church, uniformly, East and West, taught that the notions that witches flew through the air, and the like, were pagan superstitions unworthy of belief by Christians; after, in the West, if one didn’t believe nonsense about witches, which largely paralleled Muslim ideas, one was condemned as heretical.”

Emmet Scott spells his first name with one ‘t’ not two. Also, his theory is poppycock. He doesn’t realize it but he is subscribing to the “Islam is the creator and Christians are mere inheritors” nonsense which was always so common about modern secular research about medieval Spain. Only this time, instead of something good like Aristotle’s philosophy (which actually came through translations made in the Latin Empire of Greece and not Muslim Spain) it’s something bad like killing heretics. What he does is STILL negate the sources, resources and creativity of the Christian West. Scott’s pseudo research on this point would especially delight any moron influenced by the sciolist John S. Romanides who held bizarre and completely unsupported views of the Carolingians as a way to lend credence to his own anti-papal Orthodox sentiments.

Someone like Scott also makes the mistake of ignoring medieval sources in which “witches” themselves made claims about night flights. Call them crazy. Fine. They were crazy. But why would the average clergyman doubt these things when people claimed they did them at the very time such an admission imperiled their freedom and possibly their lives? The famous case of the ‘Hound of Heaven’, Thiess of Kaltenbrun, and those of the Friulian Benandanti, makes me think Scott simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (Yeah, I actually misspent much of my youth studying Livonian Lycanthropy. I even was invited to study the subject for my PhD at university in Germany - the eastern half of Germany unfortunately. Sometime I wish I had done it just to be able to travel all over Eastern Europe just after the fall of the Berlin Wall). Then again, if I had stayed on that track, I would have to deal with this stuff for a living rather than for occasional fun: http://depot.knaw.nl/6117/1/Werewolf,_Witch_%26_Warlock.pdf


27 posted on 01/01/2013 3:38:34 PM PST by vladimir998
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To: vladimir998

In short you have no examples until the 11th century, which is precisely the period when Scott argues the Islamic views of the appropriateness of treating heresy as a capital offense and Islamic superstitions about witchcraft infiltrated Western Europe.


28 posted on 01/01/2013 5:13:15 PM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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