The education of Cosmos

And so we see what was always clear from the start, Cosmos simply doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about and is lurching wildly about due to his intellectual foundation of historical ignorance. This ignorance really isn’t his fault, most people are astonishingly so these days and it’s hard to know what you don’t know when you know nothing.

However, only a fool persists in continually demonstrating his ignorance rather than choosing to learn from those who demonstrably possess the knowledge that he lacks.

No, I don’t thnk the lethality of the inquistion is irrelevent. If only 2 people died or suffered as a result it would never have been recorded.

But what results from an organized attempt at killing, torture and the imposition of suffering and persecutioin is significant?

You seem to know what level would make it insignificant. I’d be curious to know what level you think makes it significant.

For me, I’ll go with 10,000 deaths at the hand of a torturing christian makes it “significant”.

I quote myself: “The 763-page report states that approximately 1,250 sentences of death were meted out, around one percent of the 125,000 heresy trials, over a period of 356 years. Accounting for population differences, it was thus about one-half as deadly on an annual basis as children’s bicycles in the United States. (This is about one-quarter of the 6,000 deaths usually estimated by academic historians, however the larger number refers to the entire [set of] Inquisition[s], not only the Spanish.)”

True, 3.51 deaths per year are more than two, but arguably not enough more to put the Spanish Inquisition on par with the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Killing Fields or the Great Leap Forward. The myth of the dread Inquisitor owes more to Dostoevsky and “The Brothers Karamazov” than to any historical documentation; it should not be necessary to point out that basing one’s view of history on a piece of fiction, however classic, is unlikely to yield particularly accurate results.

Uneducated little boys
Should stick to playing with their toys,
Lest they show how history
Remains to them a mystery.

For by his own open admission,
The nature of the Inquisition
Was not at all significant,
Which means once more he’ll have to front.

Little though it will avail,
We have all seen right through his veil.
And so the puppy slinks away
Wet and wearing Eau Vox Day.