Freethought & Rationalism Archive

MrKrinkles · 12-15-2002, 11:08 PM

Howdy,

I posted the following information on the general religious discussions forum a few days ago but I thought the information merited mention here as well. There is an Internet apologist who calls himself "JP Holding." This apologist recently posted an essay on his site in which he appears to justify the Inquisitions. He would qualify this description by saying that he "socially" justifies the Inquisitions(?). Holding's claim is that the Inquisitors were simply trying to maintain social order by torturing and killing people who they thought were threatening society. Apparently Holding regards the Inquisitions as a series of honest mistakes.

Holding also claims a very low number of victims for the Inquisition, just a couple of thousand in fact. He refers to one author who gives this estimate.

Here are a couple of quotes from Holding's essay:

<a href="http://www.tektonics.org/spaninq.html" target="_blank">http://www.tektonics.org/spaninq.html</a>

Quote:

"One may as well credit Christianity for making the Inquisition less severe than it would have been had it been conducted by secular authorities addressing the same social fears and concerns!"

(snip)

"Why was there an Inquisition? Stalcup [13] asks the honest question, 'How could the leaders of the church reconcile the terror and destruction wrought by the Inquisition with the doctrine of mercy taught by Christ?' The answer she gives is a familiar one -- one we have also seen given in answer to such questions as, 'Why would a God of love order the Canaanites exterminated?' or 'Why does Proverbs teach corporal punishment?' Eventually different forms of the Inquisition grew up in different places for different reasons. But in terms of why and started, the simple answer is that the Inquisition was seen as an instrument of social survival."

(snip)

"Kamen [K60, 203] notes that, 'Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1530, it is unlikely that more than two thousand people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition....for most of its existence that Inquisition was far from being a juggernaut of death either in intention or in capability.'"

Here is another wonderful section from the essay that another person from the GRD thread posted:

Quote:

'The CC moreover believed that the eternal soul's fate was of more importance than the body -- which runs as a match to what we have observed elsewhere that the short-term destruction of peoples like the Amalekites and Canaanites are understandable in light of the long-term goals of social survival for people as a whole. To the Inquisitors, a few moments of pain on earth was a necessary price for saving someone from eternal torment. Skeptics may claim that their priorities were wrong, but they can't fault them as much for their motives...

This last quote from Holding's article brought up the subject of eternal torture. As can be seen in the following essay, Holding supports and defends the eternal torture of unbelievers (note the typical blame-the-victim rationalization for Hell):

<a href="http://www.tektonics.org/JPH_BOC.html" target="_blank">http://www.tektonics.org/JPH_BOC.html</a>

Quote:

The namecalling arguments. Finally, there are those last-ditch attempts to sway by emotion which include comments like this from Pinnock and Shaw [Cro.4VH, 88; Shaw.LAD, 74ff]: Eternal punishment means "God is a sadistic torturer", God is a loser in the battle for souls, etc. In response, I can only say that all who choose Hell, do so of their own will. God "tortures" no one; they have selected their fate; hell is "a condition brought upon the sinner by his persistent self-will" [Chan.LH, 29] -- they won't like the darkness, but they hate the light even more. C. S. Lewis rightly said that the doors of Hell would be locked from the inside!

(snip)

One must face the fact that eternal punishment is taught in the Bible, and deal with it. Whether you choose to do so with acceptance, or my means of paste and scissors, is up to you. Exegeting it out of existence is not a viable option.

Anyway, it turns out that Holding found out about the GRD thread, and responded to the comments in the thread by tacking some notes onto his Inquisitions essay. Here is a particulary interesting comment made by Holding in his tacked on notes:

Quote:

(sarcastic comment from the GRD thread) Why you lucky so-and-so, we are only going to torture you for half a day, if this was a secular tribunal, we would have been busy with you for a full day. And that is not all... Be glad that we are too dumb to brainwash you…so we’ll stick to burning your fingers and toes off.

(Holding) Tsk tsk, they'll never get past "argument by outrage" will they? Passes right by the issue of whether it's ever justified and just assumes it never is. Okay, chaps, I have a dilemma for you, and it's a real one. Ready? We had dispute lately over whether it would be moral to torture Afghan prisoners in Cuba to get info on whether there were deadly terrorist attacks coming. So I'll put it this way. We have a prisoner named Ahmed who says he knows of an impending attack that will kill tens of thousands of people. But he refuses to spill the details. Do we use the rack, or not? Give me an answer. Then I'll tell you what happened.

Holding is well known for being irrational and for making completely innapropriate analogies, and this is a good example of that. The victims of the Inquisitors, of course, were not terrorists with plans to kill tens of thousands of people, but were simply people who were unlucky enough to be accused of heresy or witchcraft. Or they were Jews who would not convert. Or they had a lot of money that the inquistors wanted. Comparing the Inquisition's victims to terrorists is bogus and is really kind of sick.

What is ironic about Holding's analogy is that, if anything, the Inquisitors are the ones who are comparable to the terrorists. The Inquisitors based their actions on their religion, as Holding points out, and the fanatical Muslim terrorists base their actions on their religion as well. Like the Inquistors before them, the Muslim terrorist fanatics see themselves as moral crusaders who are ridding the world of evil, never realizing that they are actually doing just the opposite. It is unfortunate that Holding cannot see the similarity between these two groups.

But maybe he will become enlightened at some point. If that happens, I wonder if Turkel would be willing to write an essay that "socially" justifies the atrocities of Muslim terrorist fanatics now that he has written an essay that "socially" justifies the atrocities of Christian terrorist fanatics?

Any comments?

Brooks

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: MrKrinkles ]

excreationist · 12-16-2002, 12:12 AM

Edit:
I've moved my post to MrKringles' other similar thread in the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=45&t=001574" target="_blank">General Religious Discussions</a>.

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]

winstonjen · 12-16-2002, 12:12 AM

Quote:

Apparently Holding regards the Inquisitions as a series of honest mistakes.

How many mistakes do they need to make? Surely most of them can't be justified, let alone ALL of them.

MrKrinkles · 12-16-2002, 01:03 PM

Hi again,

Turkel/Holding monitors these boards, but apparently has some sort of trouble actually posting to these boards and instead replies to comments here only on his closed web site. Because of this, I am going to paste in here a few of his latest replies from his web site-these comments are quite relevant to the topic of morality and religion. Let's read a few of the words of this apologist, shall we?:

<a href="http://www.tektonics.org/spaninq.html#peanut" target="_blank">http://www.tektonics.org/spaninq.html#peanut</a>

Quote:

(my comments here) What is ironic about this analogy is that the inquisitors based their actions on their religion, and the fanatical Muslim terrorists base their actions on their religion as well. These Muslim fanatics think that slaughtering infidels brings joy to Allah, just as the Inquistors believed that torturing and killing infidels brought joy to Jehovah. I wonder if Holding would be willing to write an essay that "socially" justifies the atrocities of Muslim fanatics now that he has written an essay that "socially" justifies the atrocities of Christian fanatics?

Gee, these guys are dense. Didn't I just give the answer above? If Islam is true -- figure it out.
Now let's throw another wrench to these thinkers from the One Dimension, shall we, using that fanatical Muslim? Now if said Muslim -- we will stick with calling him Ahmed -- truly believes what he does, then by what information he has, he is doing the morally correct thing. He is only morally culpable IF he does not believe what he claims to. Ahmed is, however, intellectually culpable because he believes something false. He pursues his moral code in ignorance, and is therefore not morally culpable for his actions. He is wrong, but does not know it. By the same token, a police officer who shoots a man dead because he thought he saw a gun pulled is not morally culpable (unless he lies about it) if it is later found that what he thought was a gun was actually a cell phone. Tie it in: The Inquisitors were not, as a whole, morally culpable for their actions if they understood there to be a real threat to society and to people's eternal fate. In that light Skeptics have no valid reason to accuse them of moral negligence. Hence the tired refrain about what they did is a loadof emotional hokum -- argument by outrage. They can argue that the Inquiz was factually in error, based on other grounds, but to say that they were morally in error, they need to prove that the Inquizzers didn't actually believe they were helping people. Brooks has started hoeing the row with charges of money laundering -- and while I would not doubt that may have happened, he has a long way to go to prove it. In the meantime, what little I find on the subject shows that self-interest was not at the heart of the average Inquizzer's actions.

So Brooks wants to now, do I believe "that the Inquisitions were for the greater good"? I certainly believe from the evidence that the Inquizzers as a whole thought so, which was what the question was. What *I* think is not the issue -- and whether it was for the greater good or not can only be answered by using a Harry Turtledove machine. No one can answer it for sure -- neither a Skeptic nor a Christian.

Sorry Bobby, you are not going to get off that easy. Answer the question.

Quote:

Brooks decides to play the emotion game a bit more by asking, "if you lived in medieval times, would you torture women and children in order to get them to 'confess' that they were witches? And would you burn them alive after torturing them into confessing? Yes or no?" Sigh, same game Brooks has always played -- and you have your answer in our last conversation, Brooks. I will ask you in turn: If there really are witches who are killing people, ruining crops, or doing other things like that with their works -- how on earth can you possibly justify NOT doing what is necessary, even torture, to get them to stop? As I show in the linked article above, it's an easy question for Brooks -- he won't be here to see future generations suffer from his chicken-heartedness.

So Bobby, are the Al Queada terrorists morally culpable for 9/11? After all, they believed they were acting according to the wishes of Allah, the one true god, the ruler of all there is. Just like the Inquisitors believed they were acting on behalf of God and Jesus. So are the 9/11 terrorists morally culpable for their actions or not? Do you think that the Islamic terrorists who murdered about three thousand people on 9/11 are morally equivalent to police officers who shoot crime suspects who are thought to have guns? Yes or no?

Quote:

Brooks decides to play the emotion game a bit more by asking, "if you lived in medieval times, would you torture women and children in order to get them to 'confess' that they were witches? And would you burn them alive after torturing them into confessing? Yes or no?" Sigh, same game Brooks has always played -- and you have your answer in our last conversation, Brooks. I will ask you in turn: If there really are witches who are killing people, ruining crops, or doing other things like that with their works -- how on earth can you possibly justify NOT doing what is necessary, even torture, to get them to stop?

So if a deluded person thought that toddlers in a day care center were actually evil demons in disguise plotting to take over the planet, would that person be morally justified in killing these toddlers? Yes or no, Bobby?

Quote:

As I show in the linked article above, it's an easy question for Brooks -- he won't be here to see future generations suffer from his chicken-heartedness.

So you would torture and burn women and children alive as an Inquisitor living in medieval times, Bobby? Is that a yes?

Brooks

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: MrKrinkles ]

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: MrKrinkles ]

winstonjen · 12-16-2002, 03:28 PM

Quote:

So you would torture and burn women and children alive as an Inquisitor living in medieval times, Bobby? Is that a yes?

Of course he would. God told him to.

MrKrinkles · 12-17-2002, 01:05 AM

Relayed from someone who told me that he just registered with the Infidels discussion boards but doesn't have a password code yet:

Quote:

Regarding Holding-Hitler-Moral Culpability in the Inquisition

"And, I imagine, Hitler justified the short term destruction of the Jews because of his long-term goals (A thousand year Reich is pretty long term).

He probably did. And he was in error precisely because his reasons were bogus. Here's where the Skeppies have some analogy problems they'll refuse to admit: The justification for torture in a hierarchy of morals lies only in a truly greater good -- as my Ahmed example above. A false "greater good" -- as all but a few would agree with Hitler's case -- offers no justifcation. So the questions return to, "Is it justified?" and the answer lies in, "Is there a greater good to be accomplished?" (i.e., saving tens of thousands from death) and at the same time, "Is the greater good for real?" So sorry, Stevie, that one is too simple."

Holding’s own source, Henry Kamen, agrees with the thesis that The Inquisition falsified confessions and prosecuted fellow Christians based solely on there racial makeup.

Thus, the comparison to Hitler and his are valid. Unless Holding wishes to argue that anti-Semitism is not a "bogus reason" in the case of the CC or that perhaps Hitler didn’t really think the Jews were bad for Germany...

I pointed this out to Holding via-email. At first he didn't understand the compairson and then refused to comment further once I had pointed it out a second time. He did however recommend I post a reply at infidels if I had "something to say". He also refused to comment on my suggestion that he revise his text to elaborate on the nature of those Jews who had legitimately converted (And where regarded as Christians by many Rabbis) but where prosecuted based on nationality, instead of the two misleading lines he gives to the this subject.

He is right that the Inquisitors may not register as "morally culpable" because the Inquisition was waged for more financial reasons. However the fact that they persecuted known Christians as "heretics" and non-Christians when they knew otherwise *does* make them morally culpable - by his definition.

Holding also still refuses to provide credible comparisons that a small sect of Cathars verbally protesting inside a society so utterly dependant on the Church were such a threat to have them lumped in with Mass murdering terrorists in his analogy.

Steven Carr · 12-17-2002, 01:26 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by MrKrinkles:


So Bobby, are the Al Queada terrorists morally culpable for 9/11? After all, they believed they were acting according to the wishes of Allah, the one true god, the ruler of all there is. Just like the Inquisitors believed they were acting on behalf of God and Jesus. So are the 9/11 terrorists morally culpable for their actions or not?

Brooks, how many times does Robert (No Link) Turkel have to answer this question.

Turkel wrote 'Now if said Muslim -- we will stick with calling him Ahmed -- truly believes what he does, then by what information he has, he is doing the morally correct thing. He is only morally culpable IF he does not believe what he claims to.'

These terrorists were not , Turkel claims, morally responsible for killing thousands of people on Sept. 11th. How clear does Turkel have to make that to you?

He believes these terrorists are only intellectually cuplable (whatever that may mean, I've never seen anybody described as intellectually culpable before ), just like the example he gave of a policeman who accidentally kills in self-defence, not realising there was no real danger. (Turkel comparing Al-Qaeeda to a policeman acting in self-defense, proves he is the master of bad analogies)

But perhaps Robert (Humpty Dumpty) Turkel can tell us himself why he is making up phrases like 'intellectually culpable' for somebody who is not morally culpable. I put it into a search engine , but couldn't find anybody else apart from Turkel who speaks like that!

However, being an apologist means making words mean whatever you want them to mean!

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: Steven Carr ]

[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: Steven Carr ]

12-16-2002, 12:12 AM	#2
excreationist Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Australia Posts: 4,886	Edit: I've moved my post to MrKringles' other similar thread in the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=45&t=001574" target="_blank">General Religious Discussions</a>. [ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>

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