This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday! Time once again for Tuesday School – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Ha! Actually, it’s time for MONDAY School. I was just testing to see if you were paying attention. Were you? I thought so. Please keep up the good work as you continue reading. :-)

Today’s Lesson: What’s The Deal With The Inquisition?

I haven’t talked about the Inquisition very much in this diary. It’s too bad, too, because it’s a safe bet you didn’t hear it talked about much in Sunday School, either, or in any church service you might have attended yesterday. I know for a fact that there’s not even a listing for it in the index of David Chidester’s Christianity: A Global History (compared to 20 references to Christian martyrs) and only three brief references to it in the index of The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (compared to 9 references to Christian martyrs). My Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions devotes just three sentences to the Inquisition – a single inch of column text – while devoting nine times as much space to its entry on Christian martyrs. Even the entry on Pope Innocent III that comes immediately before the one on the Inquisition runs four times as long.

If you ever get the chance, you might ask a priest, nun, minister, or reverend why that is – and what they themselves might be able to tell you about this important subject. I’m sure whatever they might say will be interesting, if not particularly accurate.

In the meantime, here’s a brief rundown of the basic facts as presented by a few of the sources I’ve come to know and trust.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there were actually three separate Inquisitions: The Medieval, the Roman, and the Spanish. These can be further subdivided by time, place, and players. The important thing to remember is that all were run by Christians and all used force and fear to defend dogmas that were essentially indefensible.

The Britannica gives this background history:

“During Christianity’s first three centuries, penalties against heretics [i.e., those who dared question Christian dogma] were exclusively spiritual, usually excommunication. After Christianity had become the established religion in the 4th century, heretics came to be looked upon as enemies of the state, and laws were enacted against them. Penalties included confiscation of property, exile, loss of civil rights, etc….

“About 1000 [CE] the doctrines of the Cathari began to spread in Europe, and throughout the 11th and early 12th centuries there were occasional instances of executions….

“After about 1150 opinion in regard to the employment of force to secure ecclesiastical unity began to change. The numbers of Cathari and, somewhat later, the Waldenses increased to such an extent that the state as well as the church appeared to be threatened. Strict degrees condemning heretics and obligating secular rulers under threat of deposition to assist in prosecuting the heretics were passed by church councils and by the popes. As a result, the death penalty for heresy was decreed in several dominions….”

Peter Occhiogrosso’s pithy The Joy of Sects picks up the story at this point:

“Those who were not baptized – Jews or Muslims – were allowed to live and function within Christian society but had virtually no rights. And any Christians who challenged or turned away from the authority of the church were liable to be imprisoned, tortured, or killed as heretics. An unbeliever or agnostic was by definition a heretic, subject to persecution. Christian society was so total and authoritarian that the process of seeking out infidels and heretics inevitably led to abuses of power.

“The creation of a permanent tribunal by Pope Gregory IX early in the 13th century, manned by Dominican friars, was intended to control these abuses. Instead, it made a bad situation worse, as the Inquisition allowed church courts ferreting out heretics to scuttle almost every principle of trial law as we now know it. One could be accused of moral or theological crimes by anonymous informers, including one’s personal enemies, and then denied the right to defense. The mere accusation of religious wrongdoing was tantamount to proof of guilt; the burden to disprove lay with the accused, who could be tortured as part of the questioning process or jailed until either admitting guilt or denouncing others…. Favorable witnesses or other advocates for the accused were certain to share in their guilt, and few people chose to take the risk. As a result, almost every person accused by the Inquisition suffered some form of punishment, the least of which was being forced to wear foot-long yellow Crosses of Infamy, which made getting a good job difficult….

“In Spain, Tomás de Torquemada (circa 1420-98) was named Grand Inquisitor in 1483, and the pace of persecution picked up. The Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella made the Spanish Inquisition an independent operation, not answerable to the papal Inquisition, and so Torquemada had a free hand to torture his victims with impunity. Since the church could not shed blood. the secular authorities were in charge of actual executions, of which Torquemada ordered some 2,000. The Inquisition also became a convenient excuse for the continued hounding of the Jews, who were later blamed for the Protestant Reformation and expelled from Spain in 1492…. Famous for its brutality, the Spanish Inquisition continued to operate in one form or another into the 19th century, running out of steam only after the once abundant number of rich targets began to dwindle” (pp. 332, 334-335).

Edward Burman’s The Inquisition: Hammer of Heresy quotes the testimony of inquisitor William Pelhisson to illustrate how not even the grave could protect heretics from persecution:

“They dug up that Galvan and took him from the cemetery of Villeneuve where he had been buried, then in a great procession dragged his body through the town and burned it in the common field outside the town. This was done in praise of Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Dominic and to the honor of the Roman and Catholic church, our mother, in the year of the Lord 1231″ (p. 60).

Galvan was by no means the only person to suffer this treatment….

Burman also details some of the more common tortures inflicted on the living. These included:

—– The Ordeal of Water in which five to ten litres of fluid would be forced into a person whose nose was blocked.

—– The Ordeal of Fire in which a person was manacled near a fire and his or her body greased and allowed to fry.

—– The Strappado, or Pulley Torture, in which a person had his hands tied behind his back and was then hoisted by a rope tied to the wrists, often after iron weights had been attached to the feet. Those who didn’t confess were hoisted higher, then suddenly dropped to a point just short of the floor. “The strain usually caused dislocations, and must have been terrible to bear repeatedly.”

—– The Wheel, which involved tying a person to a large cartwheel and then battering his or her body with hammers, bars, or clubs.

—– The Rack, the well-known torture that involves tying a person’s hands and feet to rollers at either end of a wooden frame. The rollers are then turned….

—– The Stivaletto, also known as the Brodequins. “It was a vicious form of the boot-type of torture: four thick boards were attached two to each leg with strong rope, as tightly as possible. Then wooden or metal wedges, four for the ‘ordinary’ torture and eight for the ‘extraordinary’, were driven between the two boards and the leg until the pressure became intolerable and the ropes began to cut into the victim’s flesh. If continued, this torture could easily result in the splintering and crushing of bones….” (p. 65).

I don’t mean to dwell on such unpleasantness but offer these descriptions merely as a reminder of the sorts of cruelties Christians repeatedly inflicted on thousands of human beings for hundreds of years in country after country – and now seem to have forgotten. It’s important that they be reminded.

And it’s important that we non-Christian never forget. Not because it pays to hold a grudge or because it’s proper to blame contemporary Christians for the crimes of their predecessors but because the same impulses and mindsets that gave rise to the Inquisition continue to exist today.

Thinkers such as Plato and Thomas Aquinas have proclaimed the need to kill heretics; both Plato and Aquinas continue to wield great influence. Many Church fathers like St. Augustine advocated “righteous persecution” during their lifetimes; these Church fathers continue to be revered rather than repudiated today. Numerous popes have justified, ordered, even demanded that atrocities be committed; despite this, a sizeable number of Christians today assert that the pope must be respected and obeyed no matter what. None of this is very encouraging – and the ways and assertions of lesser Christian thinkers and preachers are often just as bad.

As Burman declares as he attempts to explain the genesis of the Inquisition in his very first chapter, “Thus the primary function of Dominic and his early followers was topreach against heresy; but, as Maisonneuve has observed, ‘preaching tends naturally towards inquisition’” (p. 27).

When people start thinking they have The Truth, it’s easy for them to conclude that those who disagree have willfully and maliciously embraced falsehood. When people believe they’re on God’s side, it’s easy for them to conclude those who disagree are evil and for Satan. Once these thoughts and beliefs get into people’s heads, they become capable of inflicting the most horrible of things on those who disagree – and to inflict these things with joy and pride.

William Harwood puts it this way in his Mythology’s Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus:

“The Deuteronomist’s philosophy, that killing the adherents of every mythology but one’s own in order to protect believers from competing doctrines was a godly and laudable act, was in medieval times carried to its logical conclusion by the Christian who, over the course of several centuries, dutifully massacred between thirty and fifty million enemies of the various Christian gods in such events as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, and various minor atrocities. Among the latter was the extermination of possibly as many as seventy thousand Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, a purging of heretics that caused the jubilant Pope Gregory XIII to proclaim a year of celebration” (p. 156).

Such hideous beliefs and actions are not the result of Christians going astray (as so many Christians have tried to tell me) but of their taking the Bible all too seriously when it says things like this:

“If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God….” (Deuteronomy 13:6-10)

Occhiogrosso’s Joy of Sects further diagnoses the mindset which gave rise to the Inquisition when it says “it was commonly believed that only one in one thousand would be saved. With so many potential damned running around, it only made sense that most people were already guilty as charged” (p. 334).

When Christians berate themselves as worthless sinners saved only by the grace of God; when they extend that worthlessness to ALL people and claim our entire species is basically evil; when they see only a world of sin and decay; when they denigrate science and logic and elevate “right belief” above everything else; when they look forward with joy to an imminent, final battle between Good and Evil that will kill millions and send the vast majority of people to Hell, the foundation is being laid for the emergence of another Inquisition.

When atheists and other non-Christians forget this, when we forget or minimize how awful previous Inquisitions have been, when we ignore the dangers presented by extremists like [former Alabama Judge] Roy Moore and others who seem to have learned nothing from the last 2000 years of history, we risk becoming co-conspirators in our own persecution and demise.