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.
I have heard all the arguments seeking to justify or mitigate the horrors of slavery, and they sound very familiar:
—it was considered an accepted part of society at the time (burning people at the stake was considered acceptable at the time)
—the South wasn’t the only group that had slaves (Protestants killed heretics, too, not just Catholics)
— yes, there are stories of torture and mistreatment, but that was only by a few select people. Overall, the slaves weren’t really treated as badly as you think, they were considered valuable and treated well because they were an investment and most considered themselves part of the family and were grateful to their masters (burning to death wasn’t really as bad as you think it would be, and they didn’t really “torture” heretics, just tried to persuade them to return to the fold)
—the slaves were better off as slaves than if they had been left in Africa because many were converted to Christianity and they would have been damned if left as they were so it was in the end a good thing (it was better that heretics be tortured until they recanted and returned to the proper religion and then strangled before being burned as an act of mercy than left in their heresies because it saved their souls)
—the southern economy would have collapsed without slave labor so it had to continue for the good of the state (religious heresy was a threat to the state)
—many slaves had it better than free blacks in the North as they at least had food and shelter (what was done to heretics wasn’t as bad as what was being done to others in the same time)
—publicly killing in the most painful way possible habitual escapees was an unfortunate necessity to keep the rest from trying to escape to freedom, because it would have threatened the economy, political stability (slaves counted as 3/4 of a person for purposes of political representation and without that the South would have had less power in the governance of the country) and safety of the whites (habitual heretics deserved what they got because allowing them to live with their heresies and possibly infect others was too dangerous on many fronts)
—it was considered okay because at the time, many Southerners believed that the Bible taught that blacks weren’t really human, did not have souls, etc in the same way that whites did (heretics are in some fundamental way radically different from us, so it is okay to do to them what we would never consider acceptable if done to us by another group)
I think the arguments on each topic hold up equally well, to wit, not at all.
