(sigh) You wrote: "As for Anabaptists being kooks, I must disagree. Those people were my ancestors."
If I had ancestors who I knew to be kooks I would call them kooks. You seem to suggest that you can't consider these people, or some of these people, kooks simply because they are your ancestors. Is that really a logical approach? If you had a grandfather who was a raving a political or religious wacko would you deny it simply because he was your grandfather?
"They might have been viewed so back then, and they died for their faith."
I see it as they died for denying and attacking THE faith as well as the bonds that held together society.
"Having to die is a pretty high price to pay for breaking the law, laws that were made by the Catholic Church."
Nope. The Catholic Church has no death penalty. Never did. The Catholic Church has no power or authority to draw or spill blood. Any anabaptist who was ever executed in a Catholic country was executed by a secular court for committing a secular crime (the problem was that heresy was a secular crime and not merely a religious one).
And why aren't you attacking Protestants for their executions of anabaptists? Uldrych Zwingli ring a bell?
"The movement continued and grew, however, with the result that a new trial was held in March of 1526, leading to a sentence of life imprisonment for the three leaders and fourteen others, including six women. On March 7, the council issued a decree against rebaptizing; the penalty for disobedience was to be death by drowning. Two weeks later the prisoners escaped. The three leaders went their separate ways, still preaching their faith. Zwingli's policy toward the Anabaptists continued to harden; in November the council decreed the death penalty for anyone listening to Anabaptist preaching.
"In December Manz and Blaurock were caught and tried. Blaurock, who was not a citizen of Zurich, was whipped and banished. Manz was executed by drowning on January 5, 1527, thereby becoming the first Anabaptist martyr. Grebel had already died, apparently of the plague, around August 1526."
So Protestants hated and hunted the early anabaptists. It was Protestants, in fact, who killed the first anabaptist "martyr".
So when will you post about that? Or will you continue to only attack Catholics?
I read the last parts of "Martyrs Mirror" it can alter the course of anyones faith, whether one is very religious or not. Other than the Amish and Mennonite people around Minnesota, I have never known anyone who has read this stirring book through and through. Even among the Baptists, I have met no one who has read it through completely. If I could, I would recommend the last few chapters to be the best part. It is within the confines of these last chapters, the long letters written from various prisons, that one will uncover perfect gems, like the testimonies of those waiting to be burned, to their friends and relatives. Martyr's Mirror is a phenomenal work of Christian orthodox literature, written out of love, because of love, with the bottom line, (that to kill someone because of their faith is a sin.)