Chili

History never repeated itself until after the Refomation when the power of desitiny was removed from the Church. We now talk about the Reformation that gave witches the freedom to roam, such as the holocaust that was ran by a witch and the many wars since that time that were also inspired by witches to bring the rest of the world to its knees and worsphip the idol that they call salvation.

triffidfood

(I’m dying to respond here but don’t have much time.. sorry if this ends up being a splurge……)

Well okay, it is important to consider things in their historic context in order to understand them, but to say (or imply) that the inquisitors were simply behaving in accordance with the social norms of their time seems wrong to me.

The inquisitors were able to behave in the way they did because they had the power to do so, not because they were necessarily reflecting some sort of social consensus: power was the key to the inquisition(s).

Furthermore, the Church (organised Christianity) was itself crucial in determining what the values of the times were: for instance, the Church (e.g., through Augustine’s twisted theology of original sin) had originally set the blueprint which determined women’s place in society, and which made the disgusting persecution of ‘witches’ possible (possible in a social or cultural sense).

In that sense, the witch trials were of course a product of their time, but how does that make them any more forgivable or any less wrong?

To say that the inquisitors didn’t consider what they were doing to be wrong is undoubtedly true, that goes without saying, but how does that make their behaviour excusable?

How many people responsible for atrocities, then or now, or throughout history, knew what they were doing to be wrong? Actually, isn’t the tragedy of events such as the inquisitions, or such as the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, suicide bombings in Iraq, etc, that these happen precisely because people believe what they’re doing to be justified & ‘right’ (for whatever reasons).

For example, National Socialism only happened because millions of people (‘ordinary’ people, not mentally deranged people, nor any other subset of humanity, just ordinary people) genuinely believed what they were doing (in supporting the Nazis) to be right, and believed the Nazi’s theories (about racial supremacy etc) to be true. Does this mean we shouldn’t judge them?

As much as anything, the inquisitions were I think simply the exercise of deadly force by institutions (and individuals) in positions of essentially absolute power, in order to consolidate this power (by removing potential alternatives & silencing opposition, or simply by show of force and intimidation).

In some senses, this was possibly as true for the individuals involved as it was on the level of the actual institutions (Church or secular), in terms of reinforcing the inquisitors ‘standing’ (power & authority) within their own communities.

They (the inquisitors) may genuinely have believed that witches existed (as they defined them), and may genuinely have believed they had a divine obligation to hunt them out & kill them. Likewise, the people responsible for the Srebrenica massacre (of 8,000 or so Moslem males) a decade or so ago no doubt also genuinely believed they had to act as they did to defend their communities (i.e. Serbian society). Does this mean we shouldn’t judge them either?

If we don't learn from history, and if we don't make judgements, aren't we just condemned to keep repeating the same mistakes? (Okay, kind of an obvious and highly unoriginal point, but anyway....... )

Chili

You must understand that torture was their best effort to get witches to change their mind and stop behaving as scavenging wolves in their flock. The easiest way would have been just cut their head off but that was not their intent. The Church wanted to stop the spread if this perversion that robbed the people they played their tricks on from eternal life, which, obviously, was real in those days and led to the high Renaissance of our civilization.

It also was their way of testing the power that the angel of light can have on people who are willing die to protect this illusion wherein they think that eternal life will be theirs after they die. This illusion is addressed in Jn.5:39- where Jesus condemned scripture reading because it [only] testified on his behalf but is not the life he spoke about in John. 6. Then in John 6:66 we see the first witches walk away from that eternal truth.

So lets just he glad that the Inquisitor knew best and was given the power to rule on this with an iron fist or we would still be living in caves today.