to the 3 three lets pretend it ain’t true Catholics....... facts ...historical facts.....the proof is in the pudding......Christ’ church does not do the things the Roman religion has done, it couldn’t ....fact!
Another fact - not one of you disputed anything I wrote about the religion of Rome...because you can’t ...it is true.
Answer me this. How could the true church of Jesus Christ burn Jews and those it considered heretics at the stake?
It couldn’t and it didn’t, but the Roman Catholic Church, did. Wake up and smell the sulfur!
“How could the true church of Jesus Christ burn Jews and those it considered heretics at the stake?”
I’m not a huge fan of burning people at the stake, but I think your answer lies here: What is worse, killing the body of a person (murder), or endangering their immortal soul (heresy)?
If we kill people for the former, then why not the latter?
Mind you - I’m a Baptist. I believe in Potluck Dinners & Shooting the Breeze, not burning at the stake!
Do some reading, try Professor Thomas F. Madden who writes:
To understand the Inquisition we have to remember that the Middle Ages were, well, medieval. We should not expect people in the past to view the world and their place in it the way we do today. (You try living through the Black Death and see how it changes your attitude.) For people who lived during those times, religion was not something one did just at church. It was science, philosophy, politics, identity, and hope for salvation. It was not a personal preference but an abiding and universal truth. Heresy, then, struck at the heart of that truth. It doomed the heretic, endangered those near him, and tore apart the fabric of community.
Or read - Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and a self-professed Episcopalian, remarked on the Inquisition in his book, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (2003):
“There never was such a thing as a Church-wide inquisition, a terrifying monolith comparable to the NKVD or the Gestapo. It is more accurate to think of inquisitions that operated extensively in some areas in a highly decentralized way, although they notionally acted under papal authority. Inquisitions were important at certain times and places but never existed in other areas.”
“The main problem about speaking of ‘the Inquisition’ is that it suggests that religious repression of this sort was a Catholic prerogative. In fact, before the Enlightenment, virtually all religious traditions on occasion acted similarly when they had the power to do so..This indictment of religious savagery and intolerance applies to.all the Protestant nations, even relatively liberal ones such as England and the Netherlands..Equally blameworthy would be Muslims, Hindus, and even Buddhists. After all, in the seventeenth century, when Catholic inquisitions were at their height, the Buddhist/Shinto nation of Japan was engaged in a ferocious attempt to stamp out the deviant faith of Christianity through torture and massacre. In just forty years, these Japanese religious persecutions killed far more victims than the Spanish Inquisition would in all the centuries of its existence.”
Or better yet read - Jenny Dobbins - a WICCAN historian:
Since the late 1970’s, a quiet revolution has taken place in the study of historical witchcraft and the Great European Witch Hunt. ... many theories which reigned supreme thirty years ago have vanished, swept away by a flood of new data. the quantity and quality of available evidence has dramatically improved...Today, for the first time, we have a good idea of the dimensions of the Great Hunt: where the trials occurred, who was tried in them, who did the killing, and how many people lost their lives. Every aspect of the Great Hunt, from chronology to death toll, has changed. And if your knowledge of the “Burning Times” is based on popular or Pagan literature, nearly everything you know may be wrong.
For years, the responsibility for the Great Hunt has been dumped on the Catholic Church’s door-step. 19th century historians ascribed the persecution to religious hysteria. And when Margaret Murray proposed that witches were members of a Pagan sect, popular writers trumpeted that the Great Hunt was not a mere panic, but rather a deliberate attempt to exterminate Christianity’s rival religion. Today, we know that there is absolutely no evidence to support this theory.
When the Church was at the height of its power (11th-14th centuries) very few witches died. Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe’s indisputable moral authority. Moreover most of the killing was done by secular courts. Church courts tried many witches but they usually imposed non-lethal penalties. A witch might be excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but she was rarely killed. The Inquisition almost invariably pardoned any witch who confessed and repented.
... in York, England, as described by Keith Thomas (Religion and the Decline of Magic). At the height of the Great Hunt (1567-1640) one half of all witchcraft cases brought before church courts were dismissed for lack of evidence. No torture was used, and the accused could clear himself by providing four to eight “compurgators”, people who were willing to swear that he wasn’t a witch. Only 21% of the cases ended with convictions, and the Church did not impose any kind of corporal or capital punishment.
... Ironically, the worst courts were local courts. ...”Community-based” courts were often virtual slaughterhouses, killing 90% of all accused witches... national courts tended to have professional, trained staff — men who were less likely to discard important legal safeguards in their haste to see “justice” done.
The secular municipal capital of Italy doesn't have a single religion.