[Buddha-l] buddha-l Digest, Vol 103, Issue 6

[Richard Hayes]

On Sep 16, 2013, at 14:36, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> The Spanish Inquisition, to take just one of your examples, was not about hard-core Abrahamists persecuting multi-religionists. Generally the persecuted also belonged to a single religion -- Catholicism -- which has many sects. Those, like the conversos (derogatorily called Marranos in much literature), who remained closet Jews, were duplicitously maintaining two religions -- one publicly and the other in secret, so secret that it was forgotten even within the family after a few generations.

Exactly my point. The Inquisition was aimed only at Catholics who were practicing some other religion alongside their Catholicism. (Bear in mind that Protestants were also considered an other religion than Catholicism.) To bring one's other religions along into Catholicism was very common. The Inquisitors disapproved of that common practice.

> Jews who did not convert were expelled from Spain, and then Portugal, but not subjected to the Inquisition as such, which only applied to Catholics (in terms of conversos, its purpose was to ferret out those still secretly practicing Judaism).

Exactly. So when I cite the Inquisition in general as an example of an attempt to go against the grain of the general population, which was comfortable with several religions to a customer, it does indeed support my claim that many religions to a customer was as commonplace to Europeans as it is to my neighbors (whom you beseeched me to petition). The Inquisitors, with whom you evidently agree, sought a one religion to a customer policy and eventually abandoned that policy as a hopeless task. Why? Because most people are not at all inclined to be constrained to only one cult (using the word "cult" in the sense of an object of veneration and the methods of veneration used).