Whoa. 75 million people. What are you reading?
Phony Statistics
Many Fundamentalists believe, for instance, that more people died under the Inquisition than in any war or plague; but in this they rely on phony “statistics” generated by one-upmanship among anti-Catholics, each of whom, it seems, tries to come up with the largest number of casualties.
But trying to straighten out such historical confusions can take one only so far. As Ronald Knox put it, we should be cautious, “lest we should wander interminably in a wilderness of comparative atrocity statistics.” In fact, no one knows exactly how many people perished through the various Inquisitions. We can determine for certain, though, one thing about numbers given by Fundamentalists: They are far too large. One book popular with Fundamentalists claims that 95 million people died under the Inquisition.
The figure is so grotesquely off that one immediately doubts the writer’s sanity, or at least his grasp of demographics. Not until modern times did the population of those countries where the Inquisitions existed approach 95 million.
Inquisitions did not exist in Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or England, being confined mainly to southern France, Italy, Spain, and a few parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Inquisition could not have killed that many people because those parts of Europe did not have that many people to kill!
Furthermore, the plague, which killed a third of Europe’s population, is credited by historians with major changes in the social structure. The Inquisition is credited with few—precisely because the number of its victims was comparitively small. In fact, recent studies indicate that at most there were only a few thousand capital sentences carried out for heresy in Spain, and these were over the course of several centuries.
http://www.catholic.com/library/Inquisition.asp
And there is more which I will look for and post later.
LOL Ya think? Of course they are. I posted the url to the site btw. I posted that in response to his saying the Catholic Church never killed anyone. I figured that site would get his blood boiling and at least get him investigating to realize that his statement was preposterous but that the RCC is indeed not free of guilt.
The source, www.cuttingedge.org, is a lunatic "Harold Camping" like site chock full of all kinds distortions and lies. No one can claim that those acting on behalf of the Church have always been without sin or that many evil persons have used the Church as an instrument for their ends, but to claiming or repeating that the Inquisitions killed nearly as many as the Bubonic plague is idiocy.
More people died in the witch scare in Northern Europe than in the Spanish Inquisition.
And as always in these discussions, I want to point out that “The Inquisition” is vague. Which one? There were several.