Post by humphreyclarke on Mar 4, 2009 10:15:13 GMT
Ok, against my better judgement I have been commenting on CIF as 'Robert Boyle' in a bid to combat the sheer stupidity I witness on there every day. It has come to my attention that there are some very silly numbers floating around for so called 'Christian atrocities'. I might as well cut and paste the conversation from this thread as its a fairly good illustration of the kind of rubbish which is going round:
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/mar/02/religion-atheism?commentpage=3
Someone brought up the deaths caused by Communism and Nazism, to which some chap replied:
'Go for it... you'll have a hard time finding anything that compares to the 150,000,000 murdered by the Holy Roman Empire.'
To which I replied 'eh?', rather incredulously I might add.
We then get this response from GhostofBeaye:
'CRUSADE LIVES LOST
Saracen/Muslim Crusades 7,000,000
Aryan Crusade 1,000,000
Carthaginian Crusades 1,000,000
Spanish Crusades 5,000,000
Scandinavian Crusades 2,000,000
Witchcraft Crusades 9,000,000
Holy Wars* 1,000,000 - * Against the Netherlands, Albigenses, Waldenses and Huguenots
PROPAGANDA of the NEW WORLD
since the discovery of the Americas under Pope
Alexander VI, an estimated 100,000,000 native
Americans have died in the name of Christ at the hands of
Catholic and Protestant crusaders and colonialists.
I think that adds up to around 150 million.'
Utter crap. My response was - drawing on Bede's research i might add:
Interesting figures you have here, especially given we just don't have the sources available to give decent estimates. For example, you have the crusades down as 7,000,000 dead. That's roughly equivalent to the total dead, both military and civilian in the entire Napoleonic Wars from 1799 to 1815, a much larger conflict.
Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft vary between about 40,000 and 100,000. The total number of witch trials in Europe which are known for certain to have ended in executions is around 12,000. The figure you have is 9,000,000.
The figure you have for the Spanish Reconquista is 5,000,000. Again this seems high given that the entire death toll in the later American Civil War 1861-1865 was 500,000.
To put it in perspective, the highest the entire population of Europe got in the medieval period was from 70-100 million. I suspect the reason they are so high is that they have been copied straight out of '666 the antichrist's almanac'
The next comment I got was:
You forgot the millions of black africans enslaved by the Church before being transported to the Americas where they were subsequently worked to death. Incidentally Mr. Boyle, the figure of 9 millions murdered by the Church in Christian Europe on charges of heresy and witchcraft is as near to the truth as possble. Until the rise of Nazism in recent years, Europe knew no system of organized terrorism to rival the 500 year reign of the Inquisition, who embarked upon the horrific torture and murder of millions of people, including children, for heresy and witchcraft. Most of the victims however were women, Pope Innocent VIII in a papal bull of 1492 having declared women ‘enemies of Christ. All property and assets of the accused were confiscated upon arrest and expropriated by the Church, and papal records exist which show that there were instances of imprisoned victims having been tortured up to fifty times, and in ways so terrible that the details I cannot possibly repeat in this letter.
My reply was:
Ok, heres the thing. Just because a moral distasteful event occurred in history, that does not thereby hand you the right to rewrite the history books and invent some wildly inflated death toll in order to create a false equivalence to the holocaust. Lets run the numbers:
Witchcraft
Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft vary between about 40,000 and 100,000. The total number of witch trials in Europe which are known for certain to have ended in executions is around 12,000.
The Inquisitions
According to Geoffrey Parker the Spanish inquisition executed a total figure of around 5,000 for the entire three hundred year period of its operation. According to Henry Charles Lea, the Portuguese Inquisition executed 1,175 persons. According to Andrea Del Co, the Roman Inquisition executed 1,240. We dont have figures for the medieval inquisition (1184- 1230s) but we know Bernard Gui, a famous inquisitor working in the area of Toulouse, executed 42 people out of over 900 guilty verdicts in fifteen years of office. Another famous Inquisitor was Jacques Fournier who tried 114 cases of which 5 were executed (4.3%). Using numbers that are known, scholars have been able to surmise that approximately 2,000 people died in the Medieval Inquisition.
If we add the figures, we find that the entire Inquisition of 500 years, caused about 8,000 deaths. Deplorable?, yes, immoral?, yes; a holocaust of 9,000,000?. Nope.
You also appear to blame ‘the church for the Atlantic slave trade which is imaginative but wrong. There was one papal endorsement (Pope Nicholas V), the subsequent bulls were condemnations.
Anyone else seen these types of figures floating around?.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/mar/02/religion-atheism?commentpage=3
Someone brought up the deaths caused by Communism and Nazism, to which some chap replied:
'Go for it... you'll have a hard time finding anything that compares to the 150,000,000 murdered by the Holy Roman Empire.'
To which I replied 'eh?', rather incredulously I might add.
We then get this response from GhostofBeaye:
'CRUSADE LIVES LOST
Saracen/Muslim Crusades 7,000,000
Aryan Crusade 1,000,000
Carthaginian Crusades 1,000,000
Spanish Crusades 5,000,000
Scandinavian Crusades 2,000,000
Witchcraft Crusades 9,000,000
Holy Wars* 1,000,000 - * Against the Netherlands, Albigenses, Waldenses and Huguenots
PROPAGANDA of the NEW WORLD
since the discovery of the Americas under Pope
Alexander VI, an estimated 100,000,000 native
Americans have died in the name of Christ at the hands of
Catholic and Protestant crusaders and colonialists.
I think that adds up to around 150 million.'
Utter crap. My response was - drawing on Bede's research i might add:
Interesting figures you have here, especially given we just don't have the sources available to give decent estimates. For example, you have the crusades down as 7,000,000 dead. That's roughly equivalent to the total dead, both military and civilian in the entire Napoleonic Wars from 1799 to 1815, a much larger conflict.
Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft vary between about 40,000 and 100,000. The total number of witch trials in Europe which are known for certain to have ended in executions is around 12,000. The figure you have is 9,000,000.
The figure you have for the Spanish Reconquista is 5,000,000. Again this seems high given that the entire death toll in the later American Civil War 1861-1865 was 500,000.
To put it in perspective, the highest the entire population of Europe got in the medieval period was from 70-100 million. I suspect the reason they are so high is that they have been copied straight out of '666 the antichrist's almanac'
The next comment I got was:
You forgot the millions of black africans enslaved by the Church before being transported to the Americas where they were subsequently worked to death. Incidentally Mr. Boyle, the figure of 9 millions murdered by the Church in Christian Europe on charges of heresy and witchcraft is as near to the truth as possble. Until the rise of Nazism in recent years, Europe knew no system of organized terrorism to rival the 500 year reign of the Inquisition, who embarked upon the horrific torture and murder of millions of people, including children, for heresy and witchcraft. Most of the victims however were women, Pope Innocent VIII in a papal bull of 1492 having declared women ‘enemies of Christ. All property and assets of the accused were confiscated upon arrest and expropriated by the Church, and papal records exist which show that there were instances of imprisoned victims having been tortured up to fifty times, and in ways so terrible that the details I cannot possibly repeat in this letter.
My reply was:
Ok, heres the thing. Just because a moral distasteful event occurred in history, that does not thereby hand you the right to rewrite the history books and invent some wildly inflated death toll in order to create a false equivalence to the holocaust. Lets run the numbers:
Witchcraft
Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft vary between about 40,000 and 100,000. The total number of witch trials in Europe which are known for certain to have ended in executions is around 12,000.
The Inquisitions
According to Geoffrey Parker the Spanish inquisition executed a total figure of around 5,000 for the entire three hundred year period of its operation. According to Henry Charles Lea, the Portuguese Inquisition executed 1,175 persons. According to Andrea Del Co, the Roman Inquisition executed 1,240. We dont have figures for the medieval inquisition (1184- 1230s) but we know Bernard Gui, a famous inquisitor working in the area of Toulouse, executed 42 people out of over 900 guilty verdicts in fifteen years of office. Another famous Inquisitor was Jacques Fournier who tried 114 cases of which 5 were executed (4.3%). Using numbers that are known, scholars have been able to surmise that approximately 2,000 people died in the Medieval Inquisition.
If we add the figures, we find that the entire Inquisition of 500 years, caused about 8,000 deaths. Deplorable?, yes, immoral?, yes; a holocaust of 9,000,000?. Nope.
You also appear to blame ‘the church for the Atlantic slave trade which is imaginative but wrong. There was one papal endorsement (Pope Nicholas V), the subsequent bulls were condemnations.
Anyone else seen these types of figures floating around?.
.