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To compare Baptists to Usama bin Laden due to the fact that we don't like the fact that the established heirarchy attempted to stamp us out of existence for over 1,600 years is absurd. You ask for proof? Try Foxe's Book of Martyrs" for a start. I would offer to loan you one of my two copies, but you might just burn it, much like your forefathers burned my forefathers and their writings.

I guess that my words are "Catholic bashing", whilst your ancestor's actions cannot be considered "Baptist bashing"?

I should state the real reason why I reject Foxe's Book. Yes, there were executions for heresy under Mary's reign in England. However, "no sooner had the Catholic Government in England ceased to put Protestants to death for heresy, then the Reformed Christians who succeeded it in power gave themselves over to the horrid business of hunting down witches. The legal establishment of this superstition went hand in hand with the 1559 settlement, and Protestant Marian exiles took a principal part in it. The martyrologist, Foxe, was largely responsible for spreading the horrid notions from which sprang frightful cruelties through the rest of this and the next centuries - barbarities especially associated with the more extreme forms of Protestantism."

In Scotland, where Calvinism was dominant, some eight thousand "witches" were burnt between 1560 and 1600, in a country with a total population of a million at most; the number hanged in England is unknown: but it is declared by those who have studied the subject to be certainly "enormous." In comparison with these forgotten innocent victims, the number of heretics killed under Mary is a mere handful. And to all this, we must add that the killing of people for religion, under a new penal code which made Catholic priesthood and the saying of Mass "treason," went on until the time of Charles II, though it was sometimes covered by "political" accusations of a type resembling those brought against Christian victims "behind the Iron Curtain."

There are ghosts in all our closets. Have you checked yours lately?