RE: It's A Quote
September 13, 2024 at 7:17 am
(This post was last modified: September 13, 2024 at 7:18 am by Fake Messiah.)
In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church had a monopoly on interpretation of the Bible. You have The Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus talks about love and compassion, and if somebody slaps you, you should turn the other cheek, and so forth. Then, you have medieval commentators explaining how this actually means that we should persecute heretics and burn them at the stake. They really do it, although burning people alive is obviously not turning the other cheek, but they find an interpretation that they are saving them in this way from the flames of Hell. So this is actually doing them a favor and being compassionate to all of the other people who might have been affected by their heretical views.
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"