Understanding the burning of heretics

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Rolltide said:
As a professional historian, I can tell you as a fact that “millions” did not die as a result of the Inquisition. Firstly, the Inquisition never even came to the New World. There was no point to it, since Native Americans were not heretics. In fact, they were given a protected position by many laws enacted by Spain and Portugal. Now… millions DID die as a result of exploitation by the Spanish and Portuguese, who used them as slaves, or who were exposed to new diseases they had no immunity to, but this was ILLEGAL under Spanish law, and this was a SECULAR exploitation that was condemned in the strongest possible terms by the church. However, due to the distance, many of these protective laws could not be enforced. (A good book to read about the topic would be “Bartolome de las Casas” by Lawrence Clayton.) Also, since Brazil, Argentina, etc. were colonies of Spain and Portugal, Protestants were forbidden from moving to the area. Aside from a few pirates, you don’t see any Protestants in these countries until the mid 1800s.

Now, in Europe, modern historians have made a thorough attempt to reconstruct the trials of the Inquisition. This is not as hard as it sounds, since the Inquisition actually kept excellent records. Interestingly, many people (especially in Spain), given the choice between being tried by the secular government or the church, actually chose the Inquisition, because the Inquisition, despite the problematic practices of torture and burning at the stake, actually made a reasonable effort to determine someone’s guilt. The secular institutions of the time were somewhat more lax and corrupt. Second, figures show that less than 1% of all of those who went on trial were actually executed. Believe it or not, the most common ruling in an Inquisition trial was “not guilty”. Among those that were found guilty, fines and penances were often the penalty. Although the exact number is a matter of some debate, it appears that no more than about 20,000 to 30,000 were executed in the entirety of the Inquisition across Europe. In Spain, the average number of executions works out to less than just 125 per year.
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I was reading on the link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
and what is documented much more compared to what you have mentioned. It gives a comprehensive history of inquisitions.
 
Karen107 said:
My guess that people were more violent back then and serious about their faith. And there was reason to believe that the heretics would have also done things to Christians to cause Christians to act in a negative way towards them… Most people don’t look at the other side of the coin. The Church has always been a target of persecution since the beginning and the message of Jesus ‘the bible’ was under attack since the church began…Should the Christians always just ‘take it’ without ever fighting back?

Anyway those are just some of my thoughts.
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The inquisitions does not seem to have been a response to anything violent or that Christians were defending themselves from physical attacks.
From the recoded history, it is clear the state had a strong connection to religion. As the religion was under threat, the religious leaders had to ask the state to help them in stemming out the heresy. Thus there came about the inquisitions.
You may check this link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
 
ru1too said:
Originally Posted by Karen107 View Post
Secondly we can’t put today’s standards of punishment on people who lived a thousand years ago. How about the Romans, they tortured and crucified THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS besides Jesus Christ long ago. users.erols.com/mwhite28/romestat.htm
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Yeah, I agree, especially in light of Jesus’s rebuke of James and John, the Sons of Thunder, for their desire to call fire down from Heaven upon those that would not follow them. Didn’t the Catholic Church (or Luther or Calvin, for that matter) know that Scripture?
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