Giving Europe the Third Degree: The Inquisitions
If the door-to-atheist opinion was open just a crack in ancient Greece and Rome, it slammed shut completely in 381 CE. That’s the year Roman emperor Theodosius took a break from overseeing the collapse of the empire to ban all religious opinions other than his own, which was Nicene Christianity. The Christian church fathers spent the early medieval period sorting out what constituted the church’s official doctrine, banning this or that departure from the party line. For seven hundred years, it seemed to work because heresy (beliefs or practices that differ from those official sanctioned by the church) went fairly quiet. But by the mid-12th century, new movements within Christianity began finding adherents and all hell broke loose. The Inquisition was a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate unorthodox beliefs and practices in Europe by use of interrogation, torture, and even execution. It continued on and off for more than 600 years with the purpose of securing Catholic religious and political control over the continent. This Thread introduces in greater depth what the Inquisition did through the stories of three otherwise unknown villagers in 14th-century southern France, as well as the man who interrogated them for unorthodox thinking. [/b]

Eyeing the Inquisition’s main focus [b]
The Inquisition’s main concern wasn’t nonbelievers. Nobody cared too much about the occasional French peasant muttering to himself about God being pretend. The idea was to root out fellow Christians who are forming sects that differed from the orthodox norm differing sometimes (like many denominations today) in seemingly tiny ways. But the Catholic powers at the time perceived any organized movement to be a threat, so the Inquisitions ground on, generation after generation, casting a wide net to pull in heretics and give them a choice: Conform, or pay a terrible price. The usual procedure follows instructions in
Deuteronomy 17: If a man or woman living among you . . . has worshiped other gods . . . and this has been brought to your attention, then you must investigate it thoroughly. If it is true . . . on the testimony of two or three witnesses, a person is to be put to death. So the Inquisitor generally began by finding two or three witnesses against someone suspected of heresy before interrogating the actual suspect. [/b]

Meeting Jacques Fournier, Inquisitor [b]
After an uneventful childhood in late 13th-century France, Jacques Fournier first became a monk, then a bishop in the local Catholic diocese. In 1317, he moved on to the Big Dance as an Inquisitor for the Catholic Church. Fournier was ordered to begin local interrogations to smoke out adherents of Catharism, a sect that believed the good, spiritual God had an evil, physical counterpart, Rex Mundi, and that Rex, not God, created the world. That would answer the question of why evil exists and there was an overabundance of evil in the 14th century but it tinkered too much with the rest of theology to be acceptable to the Church. Though the Catholic Church claimed it was all about theological differences, the Cathar habit of loudly pointing out the corrupt behavior of Catholic clergy surely had something to do with the attention the Cathars received. The Catholic Church did its level best to kill off every last Cathar in a 45-year crusade during the previous century,and for a generation or two it seemed to have worked. But reports of Cathar activity in southern France surfaced again by 1317, and Fournier was tasked with bringing the heretics in his region to the Pope’s justice. Fournier wasn’t the only Inquisitor at the time, but he took the unusual step of having his interrogations transcribed in exquisite detail. Those transcripts make him pretty useful for my purposes, because while Fournier trawled around for Cathar heretics, once in a while he caught . . . an actual atheist. Of 578 people interrogated by Fournier, five were executed. Most of the rest, including those I introduce in the next Post, were either imprisoned or forced to wear a double yellow cross, a mark of shame, for the rest of their lives. Fournier’s efforts were rewarded a few years later when he was first appointed cardinal, then elected Pope Benedict XII. [/b]

Finding unbelievers among the heretics [b]
Jacques Fournier was probably surprised when his interrogations turned up an actual unbeliever rather than a heretic, but it did happen, more than once. And here’s where it gets personal. These stories aren’t of philosophers putting forward a challenging opinion in the marketplace of ideas, but everyday folks whose friends and family often reported them to the authorities for honest expressions of doubt. I introduce you to three such doubters, villagers in southern France in the early 14th century who were caught in the net of the Inquisition. Aude of Merviel In 1318, two years into his new post as Inquisitor, Fournier interrogated a woman named Aude of the village of Merviel. Aude had come to doubt transubstantiation, the Catholic doctrine that says the bread and wine of the Eucharist change into the literal body and blood of Christ (though human senses don’t perceive the change). This doubt apparently led her further into disbelief, until she cried out to her husband, “Sir, how is it possible that I cannot believe in our Lord!” He swore and threatened her, then ordered her to confess to the priest. The following week, Aude told her aunt the same thing and pled for help: “Aunt, what might I do to believe in God, and to believe that the body of Christ is really on the altar?” Brought in as a witness against Aude, the aunt testified about what she said to Aude in reply,which boiled down to Try harder to believe and don’t infect others with your foul ideas! Imagining Aude’s anguish is painful as she spilled her honest doubts in front of her husband, her aunt, and finally the Inquisitor, meeting nothing but fear and anger at every turn. In the end, she was sentenced to wear a double yellow cross on her back for the remainder of her life. [/b]

Guillemette of Ornolac [b]
Guillemette of Ornolac ended up in the Inquisitor’s chair because she told others seemingly everyone she knew that she doubted the existence of the soul. Called before the Bishop, one friend of hers described a conversation the two of them had the year before. When the friend had told Guillemette that she was afraid for her own soul because she sinned so often, Guillemette replied, “The soul? You idiot! The soul is nothing more than blood.” The friend told the Inquisitor that she told Guillemette to never say such a thing, to which Guillemette supposedly replied that she’d say it in front of anyone she liked, adding, “And what would happen to me if I did?” Bishop Fournier called in another neighbor, who described a conversation in which Guillemette expounded on her reasoning a bit. When she cut off the head of a goose, the goose lived until the blood was gone, so she reasoned that what people call “soul” the essence of life is nothing more than blood. Finally Fournier called in Guillemette. Under Fournier’s questioning, she confessed not only to her idea that the soul is blood, but also to the opinion that death is final. When Fournier asked, “Did someone teach this to you?” this is the greatest concern, of course, the spread of unapproved ideas Guillemette said something wonderful: “No. I thought it over and believed it by myself.” She assured Fournier at last that her folly was in the past, and that she had returned to fully orthodox beliefs. When he asked what caused the change, she answered with unbearable honesty: “I heard tell that My Lord the Bishop wanted to carry out an investigation against me about it. I was afraid of My Lord Bishop because of that, and I changed my opinion after that time.” Like Audi, she was sentenced to wear a double yellow cross on her back for the rest of her life. [/b]

Raimond de l’Aire
The most colorful of Fournier’s suspects was Raimond de l’Aire, a villager who seemed like Diagoras reborn Witnesses described Raimond saying that God never made the world, that the world had always existed, that the resurrection was a myth, that the Eucharist was nothing more than bread and wine, that the rituals of the priests meant nothing, and that he gave to the poor not for his soul but so that others would see him as a good man. At one point he apparently told a friend that Christ was created not through divine intervention, but “just through screwing, like everybody else” then struck the heel of one hand against the other repeatedly to underline the point. The witness assured Fournier that he told Raimond he was speaking evil and deserved to be killed. Whether he actually was killed isn’t recorded....

no problem we know all these,
blessed are those who were persecuted for my sake,

Protestant Christians were persecuted, non-believers were persecuted but these acts were carried out by men who had selfish, political reasons n were backed by dogmatism n fanaticism,
they simply used the Umbrella of Christianity to carry out their atrocity

we know the message of Jesus preaches peace, we've endured 2000years, we'll continue to prosper...

With true Christians
Jesus walks on after 2000 years in Us..

ChykePryor:
no problem we know all these,
blessed are those who were persecuted for my sake,

Protestant Christians were persecuted, non-believers were persecuted but these acts were carried out by men who had selfish, political reasons n were backed by dogmatism n fanaticism,
they simply used the Umbrella of Christianity to carry out their atrocity

we know the message of Jesus preaches peace, we've endured 2000years, we'll continue to prosper...

With true Christians
Jesus walks on after 2000 years in Us..

Can U say this same thing for Islam also?

The common good in jacques maritain:A philosophical appraisal
http://www.bravoprojecthelp.com/philosophy/the-common-good-in-jacques-maritaina-philosophical-appraisal/

The common good in jacques maritain:A philosophical appraisal
http://www.bravoprojecthelp.com/philosophy/the-common-good-in-jacques-maritaina-philosophical-appraisal/