Closer to home can we be excused for lynching blacks just for sport? Remember the slogan, the only good indian is a dead indian? What about the Jews not being allowed asylum? They ended up being sent back to Germany to die in the gas chambers?
Were our forefathers justified?
Before you start waving your anti-Catholic flag you need to take a closer look at your own history. Somebody once said he who is without sin cast the first stone.
It appears to me that you haven’t read the entire thread of this conversation. For a single example, go to post 333 in which I said
"All of this very much reminds me of arguments I hear about the practice of slavery in the American South.
I am a Southern American woman. My family has been in this area for over 250 years and I take pride in my heritage and identity as such. Many great things have come out of the culture of my heritage, but so have some awful things. I have documented evidence that many of my specific ancestors owned slaves, not just that they were part of a culture that did so. Do I consider this even partially justifiable? No, I do not. It was shameful, horrific and morally wrong then, it is so now… period, end of statement…" and go on to show that I see exactly the same arguments used to justify the immoral action of slaveholding as I see being used on this board today to justify the immoral action of burning people alive based on their religion.
To say that burning people alive is wrong is not “waving an anti-Catholic flag.” If I am waving anything it is an “anti-burning people alive” flag.
Go back and read the original post on this thread:
"Many people critisize the catholic church because it would hand heretics over to the authorites for their false teachings. from there the authorities would often execute heretics by burning at the stake.
I believe that these actions, at the time, were justified because heresy is the cause for the damnation of souls and we execute people for murdering the body but heretics murder thousands of souls with their false teachings. Think about it, which is worse, for one person to die or for thousands to be led astray into hell because of false teachers and descievers…I think that there is a movement today to apologize for these kinds of events but I can’t help but feel that these actions were at least somewhat justified. … Think about it, if the secular governments had dealt with luther the reformation might never have happened, think of all the problems and heesies we have had to deal with becuase of the reformation! "
This is what all of us are responding to…that burning people alive was justifiable morally. Politically, economically and socially expedient, I will grant that, but morally justifiable, no.
the Irish are only poor Celts, trying to subsist under one of history’s most brutal regimes. Oh, I forgot: Bess was Church of England; condemning **her **wouldn’t win any brownie points in an attack on Catholics.
My bad…NOT!!!
