A resounding “NO”! and here’s why:
About the time Thomas More was proclaiming the supremacy of his conscience over the king's orders, the Catholic church was the driving force in bringing thousands of those it called heretics to their deaths.
Neither Christ nor his disciples took up violence against even their most aggressive opposers.
And the attitude of the founding fathers was a “live and let live” in matters of religion.
"Thousands"? No, that's a gross exaggeration. As the article mentions, More presided over the executions of six heretics (that's *six*, not "thousands") during his time in office. The numbers around the rest of Western Europe are similar.
The real large scale religious persecutions started under Henry VIII *after* he broke with the pope -- read up on the dissolution of the monasteries sometime -- and both sides engaged in bloody atrocities, leading eventually to the massive atrocity of the Thirty Years' War.
It's an historical anachronism to project our ideas about individual freedom of religion back into More's age. Nobody believed it then, not Protestants, not Catholics, not Orthodox ... nobody. Freedom of religion in the West developed in response to the religious wars which followed the reformation, and largely developed on American shores.
The article quite correctly points out that More opposed government control of the church. That's not the same thing as opposing government interference in the religious decisions of individuals, but it is a prerequisite for it. If government controls the church (any church), it's automatically interfering in the religious decisions of individuals who belong to that church.
Give More credit for his correct opinions in the context of his age.
As the articles states,”More presided over the execution of six Protestants for heresy,” as he approved of burning heretics on principle, though this was not really central to his job as Lord Chancellor. An yet some Catholics accuse More of being a heretic himself .
And while he is seen as opposing government control of the church, what Rome favored was the church essentially being or controlling the government.
One (eloquent) critic, who expresses the contrast btwn Utopia and the later mind of More, writes,
Most absurdly, because of Robert Bolt’s screenplay, this barrister of Catholic repression is widely envisioned as modernity’s diapason: the clear, strong note of individual conscience, the note of the self, sounding against the authoritarian intolerance of the Early Modern state. Thomas More died in defense of an authoritarian intolerance much more powerful than a mere king’s, however, for he died believing in God and in the authority of the pope and the Catholic Church. As Lord Chancellor, he had imprisoned and interrogated Lutherans, sometimes in his own house, and sent six reformers to be burned at the stake, and he had not done this just so that he might die for slender modern scruple, for anything as naked as the naked self. This drained, contemporary view of More, which admires not what he believed but how he believed-his “certainty,” only-is thinly secular, and represents nothing more than the retired religious yearning of a nonreligious age. . - http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wood.htm
As for how many died under the Roman sanctioned or promoted Inquisitions, there are certainly inflated numbers, as well as attempts to minimize them, and to explain it away as being part of the times.
But while the historical context should be understood as regards the degree of guilt, such things as papal advocation of torture of suspected heretics, which was more strictly defined, and even of witnesses, and using such and even killing to deal with theological dissents cannot be excused any more than burning witches could or any declension can be today by invoking the culture.
For we are not be conformed to this world, but to Christ by the Scriptures, which do not sanction the church ruling over those without and taking up the sword of men to subduing souls because of theological dissent.
While the Church can and should influence the State to enact laws that reflect Biblical morality, and punish acts of violation thereof, and to overall reflect a general ethos (as every State will), yet it should not need to be involved in policing the church, nor is the Church to use the State to punish members because of theological dissent from her, much less after some of the manners employed under the Inquisitions.
Is this what the Jehovah’s Witness heretics teach? Some odd , perverted moral equivalent view of history that leaves out much?
“Neither Christ nor his disciples took up violence against even their most aggressive opposers.”
False. You ignore the sword in the Garden of Gethsemane and the throwing our of the Moneychanger from the Temple by Our Lord.
Is all of your history taught from the flawed and heretical rewritten false Bible of the Jehovah’s Witness cult?
And all the Catholics that were killed at that time? Far outnumber your assumption in my opinion.
A resounding “NO”! and here’s why:And yet count-your-change seems unable to identify even ONE Jehovah's Witness who signed the Declaration of Independence. Odd, s/he knows so much about the middle ages and yet cannot answer a simple American history question. Anyone care to help count-your-change with either the flaws in his odd views of history or the answer to my question?About the time Thomas More was proclaiming the supremacy of his conscience over the king's orders, the Catholic church was the driving force in bringing thousands of those it called heretics to their deaths.
Neither Christ nor his disciples took up violence against even their most aggressive opposers.
And the attitude of the founding fathers was a “live and let live” in matters of religion.