Unexpected!



  • Here's an article about how the inquisition was actually much more enlightened (they tortured people less often, and with more restraint) than any secular court at the time. The whole point of the inquisition was to prevent the mob-mentality lynchings that would have happened otherwise (the issue at the time the Spanish inquisition was created was conversos, who people claimed were just pretending to be christian to get around the property laws; there's a funny bit where the king (can't remember which one, probably Ferdinand) goes full-on tinfoil crown mode, like “omg, you're suggesting that we try to find out whether people truly have converted before we kill them and take their stuff? I knew it: the pope is a Jew!”). According to the author, the myth of the oppressive and ruthless Spanish inquisition was purely protestant printing-press propaganda.


  • FoxDev

    To be fair, this is old knowledge ;)

    Related:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqreRufrkxM

    It's not true: they always gave 30 days notice 😄



  • And they made a lot of efforts to maintain all of it written. Nothing was done without a report to the Pope.
    Maybe this has to do with the view the Protestants in England and later its colonies wanted to transmit about those barbarians Catholics. But the reality was that while England was a mud filled tribals war field, southern kingdoms were living in a pretty good age. Reminds me of the view transmitted by american media about the middle age.



  • @Eldelshell said:

    while England wasis a mud filled tribals war field,

    "Was", indeed. Harrumph!


  • Fake News

    @RaceProUK said:

    this is old knowledge

    Well played, old boy.



  • Definitely Funny Stuff.



  • I'll have you know my father died at the hands of the spanish inquisition, I take great offence at this line of discussion.



  • @Buddy said:

    http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/common-misconceptions/the-truth-about-the-spanish-inquisition.html

    Is this the same Catholic Church that pretended the Holocaust wasn't so bad and that there weren't that many little boys being raped? Sorry, but the Catholic Church certainly has a horse in this race and has a long history of lying about the obvious when the truth causes bad press.


  • Banned

    @Buddy said:

    According to the author, the myth of the oppressive and ruthless Spanish inquisition was purely protestant printing-press propaganda.

    Reminds me of what I've recently read - that industrial revolution making people into capitalists' slaves was also a myth, made up by socialist thinkers for propaganda purposes.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    industrial revolution making people into capitalists' slaves was also a myth, made up by socialist thinkers for propaganda purposes.

    It depends. In cities, the main problem was usually just that pay was crap. The real abuses seem to have happened in company towns though, and were often coupled to keeping the employees in debt to the company through payment in scrip instead of money and restricting the stores in the area to those owned by the company. These practices have had a great many actions taken against them by legislators in many parts of the world.



  • @Jaime said:

    that there weren't that many little boys being raped?

    Yeah well that seems to be pretty generalized (Jews, British MPs, Muslims) so it's good that at least they (as Pope Francis did) acknowledge this problem and try to get rid of it.

    Anyway, I'm an atheist and more focused on the historical aspect of the conversation, not on the religious groups confrontation one.



  • My point wasn't to bring these issues into this discussions, it was to show how incredibly biased the original source is. As far as I'm concerned, nothing that comes directly from the church should be considered "history".


  • Banned

    @dkf said:

    In cities, the main problem was usually just that pay was crap.

    Which sounds strange if you remember that people were leaving their farm lives and willfully moving to the cities to work for this crap payment. The only rational explanation is that it was paying better than farming.

    @dkf said:

    The real abuses seem to have happened in company towns though, and were often coupled to keeping the employees in debt to the company through payment in scrip instead of money and restricting the stores in the area to those owned by the company.

    In other words, the companies were making their own little states within a state, with their own paper currency. No wonder the rulers of the state got angry.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    Which sounds strange if you remember that people were leaving their farm lives and willfully moving to the cities to work for this crap payment. The only rational explanation is that it was paying better than farming.

    There were some systematic shifts in the nature of employment at that time. I don't know about everywhere, but in England, farms were becoming substantially more efficient (i.e., requiring a lot less labour per acre) and weaving — a major rural employer in the middle ages — was moving to being done in factories with first water- then steam-powered mechanisation. This was a huge change.

    In short, the pay in cities was crap (and I've seen clear evidence that this was so, at least for the least-skilled) but the pay in the country was often non-existent. Some of the worst periods might have been when the potato crop failed, which it did across a large part of Europe at once during the 19th Century, but it doesn't invalidate my point.


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