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

[Richard Hayes]

On Sep 16, 2013, at 17:03, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Of the non-conversos -- who were the initial victims of the inquisition --  which "religions" do you imagine they were importing from? That's not what it was about.

If you think non-converts were the initial people investigated by the Inquisition, then you are showing your ignorance of the Inquisition as a whole, perhaps because you are focusing on only one brief episode, namely, the Spanish Inquisition. But there was much more to the Inquisition as a whole than the political use to which a fanatical (if you'll pardon my cartoon talk) pair of Spanish Catholic monarchs put it. And there were a lot more people investigated for their practical religious pluralism than the Jews and Muslims who had converted (under considerable pressure) to Roman Catholicism.

> (I've already attempted to explain that the purging of "impurity" from the conversos was not a matter of sampling "other" religions; you don't want to hear that.)

It's not that I'm unwilling to hear about that, but that you are throwing a red herring into the discussion and trying to change the terms of the discussion. 

I am quite willing to admit that during the Spanish Inquisition, Ferdinand and Isabella made an attempt―a rather successful one―to rid Spain of Muslims and Jews. People who did not convert to Catholicism were killed or driven out. No one denies that. But the Inquisition itself, which was of much wider scope than the Spanish use of it, was a response to a crisis that arose in the Catholic church after a period of very rapid growth. A result of rapid conversion was that many converts did what people naturally do; they mixed elements of their previous religions with Catholicism. In short, they practised more than one religion at once. This was seen as a potential threat to the fictitious purity some in the Catholic church, particularly some people in southern France, wanted to believe in. So somewhere about 1185 attempts were made to make sure converts adhered to your favored "one religion to a customer" paradigm. The papal inquisitions came about somewhat later, when the Dominicans were put in charge of enforcing the "one religion per customer" policy among Catholics. 

The Inquisition officially ended in the mid-19th century, although many of the functions continue to this day under other names. During the Inquisition taken as a whole, from the 12th through the 21st century, the principal concern has always been to make sure that Catholics (and especially priests) are practising only one religion without admixtures of other religions. Those elements of other religions that people practised alongside pukka Catholicism were denounced as witchcraft and whatnot. (Eventually Protestants became enthusiastic about burning witches, too. But that is a story for another night.)

My original claim was simply that if people were not in fact naturally inclined to practise more religion than one and to shrug off the delusion of religious purity (which is every bit as fictitious as the notion of racial purity or ethnic purity), the Inquisition would not have had any work to do and would have died out for want of kartavya. And with that claim you disagree. 

So let's just leave it at that. Let this go down in history as the first time that Hayes and Lusthaus did not eventually come to agreement over an apparent difference in interpretation of the same body of evidence.

I truly hope that you get as much fulfillment and meaning out of the one religion you have allowed yourself to give your custom as I get out of the several to which I (and most of my neighbors and friends) give mine.

Richard