Why We Should Burn Heretics (Protestants and Atheists Included)

 Well, maybe we shouldn't. While I hate heresy even more than the next guy, I'm not sure I'd burn people for holding crappy belief systems. But back in the good ol' days, the Catholic Church had quite a good barbeque going...

Church potluck, circa 1480

At least that's what I thought, along with most everybody else. But after exhaustively researching the subject (on Wikipedia) I found a few statistics that were a bit interesting:

1) The Church itself refused to kill heretics, but would sentence them to execution by the state. (kind of hypocritical though, if you ask me).

2)Executions ordered by the entire Inquisition, including the Spanish one (weren't expecting that were you? Nobody does):  6,000ish people, or about 1.8% of the 125,000 ish in total that were investigated over a period of about 500 years.

3)That's about 12 people a year on average. Not exactly a genocide. if you convert that to per 100,000 people, it's about 9.8 people per year, slightly higher than the homicide rate of Minneapolis, MN.

Depicted: Heartless killer

    

 But the Catholic Church isn't completely off the hook. I've found a quote that would be considered a serious gaffe by today's standards:

"murderers of souls as well as robbers of God’s sacraments and of the Christian faith ... [are] to be coerced—as are thieves and bandits—into confessing their errors and accusing others, although one must stop short of danger to life or limb."

- Pope Innocent IV (insert ironic comment here)

His Holiness was a conehead

So how do we explain this? How do we explain what seem to be insane actions committed by oppressive church officials with extreme prejudice? We obviously can't justify it, but we can at least try to understand their reasoning behind their (literal) burning man festivals.

    Well first of all, I'd direct you to the Milgram experiment. But I'd also like you to imagine yourself in this position:

1) You value your soul more than your life, and you value other's souls more than the life of one man. (I'd refer Christians to Matthew 16:26)

2) You believe that certain ideas and photos should be illegal to publish (freedom of speech didn't exist as a concept at that time, and even today, I think some things like child porn illustrations should be illegal).

3) There's a guy or girl spreading around half-baked, mostly stupid ideas (Albigensian heretics were reported to advocate the practice of starving oneself to death), and worrying a mostly illiterate populace about the safety of their immortal souls.

4) You consider Luke 17:2 to be completely true. (Atheist translation: as true as the Establishment Clause in the Constitution).

It makes a little more sense when you look at it from that point of view. And the fact is that people can kill for any type of ideology, religious or otherwise. It's in our nature. Even concepts that are dearly held in our society (freedom, the rights of man, secularism, rationality) can be used to kill people. One clear example is the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, which sent 16,594 people to the guillotine and executed another 25,000 by other means, all within a period of several months. In the name of freedom, transparency, and equality, they killed thousands of aristocrats and tried to destroy the Catholic Church, which was in their eyes the Scientology of the 18th century.

Guy Fawkes masks not included

So in conclusion, the Inquisition was a terrible event in Church history. But at least it wasn't as bloody or ironic as the French Revolution and their Cult of Reason. Take that, atheists.

Sincerely,

The Bigot