Posted on 07/11/2024 7:22:20 AM PDT by patriot torch
Gee, what a righteous guy.
So you are a Christian eh?
Do you support the Bible?
It also has a lot of history contained in the pages of Scripture. Is that also something you would like to censor as well? Or just those inconvenient atrocities committed by the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRICAL CHURCH?
Wow, you are just trolling like crazy and looking for a fight. I am done with you. Arguing with you is like punching a baby - no sport.
That’s really a shame because you seem like such a nice guy.
You're not even using the right words.
Did you mean to say "Imperial"?
Because even so, "Holy Roman Imperial Church" wouldn't even make sense either, as the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church are quite distinct and different entities.
Protestantism didn’t murder those people, a guy did, a Catholic King in a Catholic culture in flux and transition, while the centuries of the Inquisition were official policy of Catholicism, a single denomination.
They’re right next to the phrases Incarnation, Trinity and Christmas as well as the sentence “everything you believe must be found explicitly in this Bible, the books of which are Genesis, ...”
Furthermore, there was no Inquisition in England during the time of Henry VIII. No such formal institution for the English existed before or after his reign, save for a short-lived ecclesiastical court system controlled by the Crown during the relatively brief reign of Mary Tudor.
Furthermore, trying to label all of Catholic Christendom as sharing in a singular Catholic culture is to ignore all of the national and cultural differences that existed between the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Franks, and all the various ethnic/tribal groups that existed in medieval Europe. (Seriously, try making the case that there was a single unified culture for all of 15th century Europe in the face of a map like this.)
Lastly, Henry VIII ceased to be Catholic the moment he severed himself from the Church. On a related note, you can also thank him for the political theory known today as the "divine right of kings."
Of Catholicism did, it was the Catholic church doing it, officially.
Perhaps it's useful to look at the Inquisition periods as not strictly religious in nature, despite their origins in the Church. Murphy's overarching point has more to do with the modern-ness of this era and its machinations.
In his own words:
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Cullen Murphy
Q: Why the Inquisition—and why now?
A: This question gets to the very heart of the book. We’ve all heard of the Inquisition—and we all remember the Monty Python line, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition"—but we tend to think of it as something safely confined to the past, something "medieval" that in an enlightened age we’ve moved far beyond. But that’s exactly the wrong way to think about the Inquisition. Rather than some throwback, it’s really one of the first “modern” institutions. This attempt by the Catholic Church to deal with its enemies, inside and outside, made use of tools that hadn’t really existed before, tools that have only improved and that are part of our lives today.
Q: Like what?
A: Well, let’s start with what an inquisition is: it’s a disciplinary effort designed to enforce a particular point of view, and it’s built in such a way that it can last for a long time—in this case, for centuries. To last for a long time you need to have some sort of functioning bureaucracy. You need to have trained people—"technocrats," we might call them today—who can run the machinery, and you need to be able to keep training new people. You need to be able to watch and keep track of individuals, know what they think, collect and store information, and then be able to put your hands on the information when you need it—you need what today we’d call search engines. And you need to be able to exert control over ideas you don’t like—in a word, censorship. It’s quite a feat of organization. We take these kinds of capabilities for granted today. With the Inquisition, you can watch them being invented.
Q: Go back to the beginning and fill us in—when did the Inquisition start, and why?
A: Over a period of about seven hundred years, there were many Inquisitions mounted under Church auspices, and they varied in intensity from era to era and place to place. That said, you can divide the Inquisition into three basic phases. The first of them, called the Medieval Inquisition, is usually given a starting date of 1231, when the pope issued certain founding decrees. It was mainly concerned with Christian heretics, especially in southern France, whom the Church saw as a growing threat. Then, in the late fifteenth century, came the Spanish Inquisition. It was run by clerics but effectively controlled by the Spanish crown, not by the pope, and its main targets were Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims. After that, in the mid-sixteenth century, came the Roman Inquisition, which was run from the Vatican, and was mainly concerned with Protestants. This is a very simplified outline. And all kinds of people were caught up in the Inquisition’s machinery—Jews and heretics, yes, but also witches, homosexuals, rationalists, and intellectuals.
Q: How did the Inquisition work?
A: In the early days inquisitors would arrive in a particular locale and ask people to come forward to confess their misdeeds or to point the finger at others. Because there was a "sell by" date—anyone who came forward by a certain time would be treated with lenience—a dynamic of denunciation was set into motion. Interrogation was at the center of the inquisitorial process—hence the Inquisition’s name. The accused was not told the charges against him or the names of the witnesses. The questioning often made use of torture. Detailed records were kept. Most of those who came before tribunals received sentences short of death—for instance, they had to wear a special penitential gown for a year or two. But tens of thousands were burned at the stake for their beliefs. In all, hundreds of thousands of people passed through the tribunal process. The psychological imprint on society would have been profound. And as time went on, the Inquisition in some places became a fixture, with its own buildings and with officials in permanent residence. In some places, the networks of informers were complex and dense.
Q: Burning at the stake frankly doesn’t seem all that contemporary. Why do you say that the Inquisition is essentially "modern"?
A: I’ll start by asking a different question: why was there suddenly an Inquisition when there hadn’t been one before? After all, intolerance, hatred, and suspicion of the "other," often based on religious and ethnic differences, had always been with us. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution—to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life—did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those omnipresent embers of hatred did not exist. Once these capabilities do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well—just look at the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Or, on a far lesser scale, the anti-communist witch hunts. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.
Let’s think about those tools—the ability to put people under surveillance; to compile records and databases, to conduct systematic interrogations, to bend the law to your needs, to lodge your activities in the hands of a self- perpetuating bureaucracy, and to underpin all this with an ideology of moral certainty. The modern world has advanced far beyond the medieval one on all these fronts. Look at what governments can do when it comes to listening in on private conversations, or what corporations can do to distill personal information from the Internet, or what law enforcement can do on a hint of a suspicion.
(This is my opinion, not Mr. Murphy's):
Of course, there's been a fair amount of historical back-pedaling going on, because.....new documents have been found; or previous records were deemed incorrect; or previous authors were found to be untrustworthy...yada, yada. Given what we know of human nature, given what we know of the resilience of human corruption, of the psychopathic mindset; how sociopaths and psychopaths take to the intoxication of ruling power like moths to a flame - we can surmise - we can deduce, that in all likelihood, most of these horrific things did transpire, and that contemporary accounts were in fact accurate. In our current world, powerful ruling interests have a stake in undermining the established historical narrative. This is because they are the descendants of the people who perpetrated and carried out the evildoing. The rewriting of this particular era will benefit them greatly, and have the effect of erasing their ancestral and historical ties to evil.
Now you’re trying to have it both ways.
You want to blame the religious and political institutions of Catholicism for those tried and condemned by her for crimes of heresy and so on.
Yet you don’t want to blame Protestantism for the ideals that motivated royals and nobility like Henry VIII to ransack countless monasteries (uprooting centuries of culture rooted around the European monastics), and to persecute countless Catholics that refused to convert, even to the point of execution for some accused of treason (for the religion of the state was now supreme, and those who did not convert could therefore be deemed treasonous).
To be polite, that’s utter hogwash.
The Catholic church is a single denomination under a single authority, that wild Catholic king was not, he was just him and his argument with his Catholic church.
Given that America (in principle, foundationally speaking) owes very little to the Catholic Church, and given that the Catholic Church keeps being criticized regardless of the era (historical evidence vindicating her notwithstanding), this argument seems very tenuous to me. This is especially so when, as the supposed "rewriting" of the Inquisition's history is concerned to lessen its evils, we're simultaneously in the grip of a popular culture that demonizes our country's Founders with an excessive zeal, criticizing them as unabashedly evil and heinous (and any attempt at correcting them or providing context is deemed white-washing or apologizing on behalf of racists or sexists).
Placing the Inquisition as the origin point of modern bureaucratic tyrannies seems to be arguing for too much, as any particularly large organization with a centralized authority tends to implement a bureaucratic system of some sort after a certain size threshold has been reached. The bureaucracy of the late-stage Roman Empire comes to mind (which Murphy seems to brush off rather blithely, in my opinion, by stating "the ability to sustain a persecution—to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life—did not appear until the Middle Ages"), given that its bureaucratic machine turned at the whims of whoever the emperor in charge was at the time.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1599475367?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
The author is a Protestant.
You do come off as being a bit unhinged.
Unhinged?
Nope simply posting in response to all the anti Protestant threads posted by catholics.
Wow!!! Sounds like clapper, brenner, comer and the entire cast of characters from deep state have the holy roman empirical church to thank for their black site tools and techniques of the trade.
Thanks for posting.
The fact that you would accept this without hesitation shows how lacking in seriousness you are.
And the fact your down as undecided is shocking, SHOCKING I TELL YA !!!
I appreciate your knowledge of those times. It’s always fascinating learning the history behind the story and understanding just how much the truth of it has been changed or even manufactured.
Those were truly Dark ages.
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