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undefinedreference In reply to retransmission [2015-08-10 21:33:51 +0000 UTC]

Your association with the Inquisition is no coincidence. When I came up with the title I had a certain breed of Christians in mind, who will always find a way to pull their god into any conversation no matter what the initial subject was. And while these creatures love to portray themselves as eternal "chosen" victims, having this deeply rooted self-image of themselves as poor innocent Roman Christians up against the lions of the Colosseum (today represented by the "sinners", i.e. anyone who doesn't agree with them in everything, i.e. anyone they can't control), even the slightest amount of power can easily turn them into bloodthirsty little sadists who will stop at nothing to force their own idea of the Truth upon anyone who happens to cross their path. I'm absolutely sure that if some of these Christian groups, unlike the Catholic Church, don't have any blood on their hands, it's only because they haven't started yet, and that there are plenty of Inquisitions to come in some form or another. Or maybe I'm just a pessimist

(P.S. I'm having American Evangelists in mind in the first place. They have a pilot project going on in Uganda www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opin… , as an overture for "taking" all of Africa, and after that probably the rest of us, if it's up to them. And since they fulfill a political as well as a religious agenda -- keeping the Chinese out for example -- they have a lot of real power behind them)

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retransmission In reply to undefinedreference [2015-08-12 09:42:27 +0000 UTC]

I know little about modern religious societies. But I have no doubt some of them have real power and influence on the people and politicians in some countries. It's not even a conspiracy theory, it is a historical fact.

Inquisitors were endowed with real power.  I was very interested in this topic some years ago. I have some good books devoted to the medieval Inquisition in my home library. When I read all these terrible reports of interrogations of witches and wizards, I realized that the main purpose of the Inquisition (except demonstration of absolute power of the Church) they were interested in the assignment of money and property  those who have been convicted. Put simply, poor people have died in the name of the demonstration of power and intimidation, rich ones for the money.

I always kiddin that all real witches are only existed in Russia or Ukraine, because here is rarely pursued them

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undefinedreference In reply to retransmission [2015-09-02 21:24:55 +0000 UTC]

Haha, what nonsense I wrote. But maybe some of it is true.. The Catholic-Protestant thing is essential though - sworn enemies

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undefinedreference In reply to retransmission [2015-08-20 07:27:00 +0000 UTC]

If you look closely at the history of the Western Church, you will find that in many cases it initially objected the madness, like the Albigenzan Crusades and the witch hunts and probably the Inquisition itself as well. The main strategy of the worldly powers in such cases was to simply replace the uncooperative bishops with more "convenient" ones. There is no doubt that most of these events were staged and served material purposes more than anything else. A standard procedure during the Crusades was for the knights to borrow money from Jewish bankers in order to be able to pay for their armory, which was incredibly expensive, and then to accuse these bankers of being "Christ killers" and massacre them together with their families under a "religious" pretext. And gone was their debt! I personally don't believe in "religious wars", there are always parties pulling the strings in the background. Religion is just a convenient way to incite people, it hands them the weapon of Truth, which allows them to unleash the beast inside them that was there all along, and with this Truth on their side there simply are no boundaries to what they are capable of permitting themselves.

It does matter a lot whether the source of information is from the Catholic or the Protestant camp. Protestants had an interest in painting as negative as possible a picture or the medieval Church, from which they had after all liberated themselves. The very notion of Dark Ages comes from the Protestant camp, or at least was vigorously adopted by them. Catholic authors tend to sketch a bit more nuanced picture of the role of the Church back then, and of medieval society in general. The scholarly view from the 19th century, which is now more or less the popular one, that of our medieval ancestors being mentally blind and cripple idi
ots who only knew how to handle a sword, is largely based upon that Protestant one. By my knowledge Western Europeans are the only people on the planet who look upon their own ancestors with such contempt. We're an uprooted people, cut off from the original stem and grafted onto some "higher" and without doubt totally false ideal based on some idealized view of Classical Antiquity. It never ceases to puzzle me what this exactly means, and what it has done to the collective Western European psyche. I don't think it left us in what could be called "clinically sane" state if you look at the whole, and W-Eu history does seem to suggest
a degree of schizophrenia in our attitudes towards others and ourselves.

I think you're right about the Russian witches. From what I've read, in Russia the Church and paganism coexisted for a long time, even until this day. In Western Europe the Church has always taken a far more aggressive attitude towards anyone who didn't think exactly the way they did. And there's the fact that from Russia you have almost all the great cultures laid out in a fan-shape around you: China, India, the Middle East, former Byzantium and Western Europe, with Moscow at the very center where the fan blades meet. Russians seem far more open and inclusive towards different views than westerners, though at the same time this "forgiving" attitude can lead to a kind of mental fuzziness, where fact and fiction aren't necessarily different things. I don't think there's any place on this planet where there are more conspiracy and other weird theories buzzing around than Russia! Btw maybe that fan model is why so many Russians hate America so much: its very existence puts Russia off-center on the World Map of Civilizations! Have you ever looked upon it like that?

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