>> I am a Baptist and one of the reasons we do not have a centralized institution is because of this history. <<
Gee, the Calvinists NEVER did ANYTHING evil... LOL! Besides burn every monastery, convent, and church they could get their hands on. Ya know why the Catholic Church is so screwed up in Boston? Ya might want to look up such historical issues as the Somerville convent: a few hundred nuns brutally murdered and ain't none of the kindly Baptist folks saw nuttin.
My point is not to tar Baptists. You and I both know and acknowledge that the KKK and the like are not representative of the Baptist faith. My point is that evil is not borne of hierarchy. In fact, the underpinning of the modern democratic state is that institutions' meting out of justice protects society from the capriciousness and chaos of the masses.
In the pursuit of fairness I should partially retract/clarify this statement.
I lived in an apartment in Somerville, MA, which was once part of Cambridge, MA. Various (non-Catholic) people in the apartment building reported being haunted by the ghosts of nuns. I investigated a little and found a local museum practically bragged that the city had once "eliminated" a community of about 200 nuns that once occupied most of what is now the city, and that subsequent murder investigations turned up no witnesses. The convent was utterly destroyed, and to this day, the city of Somerville has very, very few practicing Catholic.
I trust my reporting of this will not lead anyone who reads it in this forum towards a belief in paranormal hogwash such as hauntings. I am only reporting the context of what I learned, and how I jumped to a conclusion that the nuns had been murdered. I do not know whether this is actually the case, or merely a presumption based on poorly-written museum exhibits and false inferences. By the way, I told none of my apartment-mates about my discoveries at the time; they hadn't known of the history and I didn't want to encourage their beliefs in ghosts. (Ghost mythology is that violent deaths, particularly those which have gone without justice, often leads to hauntings. I was concerned that my findings would "explain" what was happening.)
I'm not a baptist, but the reason why our government is a representative democracy is to lessen the chance that it will be easily corruptible as hiearchial governments surely are.
Roman Catholics need to admit that the reason Protestants (and even baptists) exist at all is chiefly due to the corruption in the renaissance Roman Catholic church and secondly, due to our freedom of religion (directly coming from Protestant's fear of the tyranny of centralized religion).
On Calvinists burning things: In England (and Scotland) the Monarch seized Church lands (25% of the land, and therefore in those days, the wealth), which were usually under the supervision of monasteries. Did their cloisters and chapels get destroyed? You bet, but it wasn't a bunch of religious fanatics doing it...more often than not it was the nobility to whom Henry VIII gave those lands... As to the murders at the Somerville Convent--being in the (overwelmingly Baptist) South, I'll attribute that to Yankee barbarism.
I do have serious issues with the Calvinist iconoclasm though...indeed many of these were fanatic.
Currently I am studying (and have studied) Reformation history, and its fascinating (and seems a common human trait) that it was the 2nd Generation from the Reformation times which seem the most extreme. John Calvin for example is, as a rule quite a bit more mild theologically, than the Calvinists of the early 1600s. (and please don't dredge up Servatus....as Roman Catholicism was instigating the burning of thousands of Protestants at the time Calvin executed one (already twice condemned by the Catholic courts) heretic). It seems the children of reformers tend to go too far, before the pendulum swings back.
I took up your offer and did a quick check on "google" as to the burning of the Somerville convent. I had never heard or read about it. Apparently it was attacked and burned in 1834, but there is no reference to the several hundred nuns who you believe were were killed in the assault. Is there another reference that I can consult? It seems strange that they include an article, but omit the deaths of so many people.