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I used to think what you wrote. Then I read some other researchers. Just as most of us come out of school with very little idea about the world between 300 and 1500, so most of us get a deformed view of intellectual history. It's not just on FR that the default position on Catholicism is a tad negative. Who knows how welcome Galileo and his thoughts were until he began to insist that Copernicus's theory was more than a hypothesis? (And in the absence of observable parallax, that could not be maintained.) Everyone gets a caricature of the story.

My uncle who was born in 1902 was a professor of physical chemistry at Stanford and he got Galileo all wrong.

In 17th century England they were using the ordeal to try for witchcraft. Though the Spanish Inquisition did use so-called "gentle torture" it had, by the standards of the time, advanced due process standards, and resulted in far fewer deaths than the witch trials of Protestant Europe.

It was Dominicans (mostly) in Spain who argued for civil rights for the Indians and, notably, that the fact that American nation were not Christian did not make it opoen season on them.

To say the Greeks et al had ideas similar to the University is being over generous. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, et al.were unprecedented.

It's a popular work, but the sources are in Thomas E. Woods,Jr. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. The good thing about popular books is they don't take long to read. This one has a very helpful bibliography.

I will quibble with you:

Would you agree that never used to “think” what he thought, rather you used to unthinkingly “accept” what such people still unthinkingly accept?

For once you actually “thought” about such statements you rejected them as baseless and contrary to all facts?

I will quibble with you:

Would you agree that
you never used to “think” what he thought,
rather you used to unthinkingly “accept”
what such people still unthinkingly accept?

For once you actually “thought”
about such statements
you rejected them
as baseless and contrary
to all facts?

Just as most of us come out of school with very little idea about the world between 300 and 1500, so most of us get a deformed view of intellectual history. It's not just on FR that the default position on Catholicism is a tad negative.

While I admit that I am beyond my normal range running all the way up into the 1500's (the Venerable Bede is new, trendy stuff for me), and while my interest in the Roman church was tangential (until I met your fellows here), I did not obtain my knowledge from school. I study in manuscripts, songs, and lore of the very ancient past.

Because of that line of interest, which is paralleled by an extensive anthropological bend (particular to religions and their prophets, I suppose, but fairly well rounded beside that) I am decidedly Old Skool, and am imbued with a double dose of the prerequisite distaste for historical revisionism. Hence I will always allot credence toward those authors of the first person, and thereafter to a lessening degree depending upon the breadth of time the author must stand astride, away from the original incident. Those early authors ~~do not~~ seldom agree with the modern works, regardless of the field... and as I said, where there is disagreement, my inclination must go to those nearest the subject at hand.

That will, no doubt, make me invincibly ignorant to those who prefer to run to their prophets with itching ears - and if so, all the better.

So forgive me FRiend, if your recommended author (who seems to be a Roman-church fanboi) has no impact upon me at all, though I will give him a shot.