[FoRK] " Atheists behind the greatest cruelty, says Pope"

[Jeff Bone]

On Dec 4, 2007, at 11:52 AM, Jeffrey Winter wrote:

>
> If it's just about a body count, according to Norman Cantor anyway
> (See his excellent: Civilization of the Middle Ages
> http://amazon.com/o/asin/0060925531) the total deaths that can be
> attributed to the Catholic Inquisitions both Papal (12th-13th
> centuries) and Spanish (15th-16th centuries) probably did
> not total more than ten thousand.

Yeah, I've seen number on the Spanish Inquisition ranging from 1k to  
10k.  However...

> Not that this much matters if you're the one on the pyre.
>
> Still, Stannard's argument in "American Holocaust" is that European
> Christianity as manifested by the Spanish Inquisition imbued
> the colonizers with a culture of death that resulted in the
> subjugation and slaughter of the Native Americans.  I found this
> argument to be weak, but his documentation of the brutality
> and its effects was very well done.  But even he doesn't claim
> these deaths were part of the Inquisition and that most deaths
> were the result of non-native disease infestations.

...those numbers don't include these deaths, i.e. the genocide of the  
indigenous Americans.

jb