TokyoPlayer: In the future, please be so kind as to quote or attribute me honestly as oppoesed to that stunt you just pulled in Post #55.
My appologies, it was a Supreme Court of Oklamaha and not a US supreme court. I see the “of Oklahoma” was left off of a cut and paste. From this cite, which you can get a link to the original case.
If you read the case, you can see the this court rules that people have a right to unilaterally resign from church, even in the face of a church trial. IANAL, but it seems to say that the right to privacy overrules the rights of churches to conduct their beliefs.
:rolleyes:
OK, let’s take this really, really, really slowly Monty. You said that “the Bishop informed the congregation that he was saddened to tell us that a particular member had been excommunicated” and I talk about Mormons in that “they annouce from the pulput of the local church that the person is excommunicated.” The rest of my comments are mine, and in no where do I attribute my thoughts of commentary to you. Perhaps one can read a bit more carefully if one wants to accuse others of pulling stunts.
Anyway, I’ll turn this thread over to you, I’ve got better places to be. 
Except that if the church was threatening death at that time, there would have been no “apologists” for the church, simply people recording the events that they felt were justified.
I think the question itself really harks back to a time and a theology that no longer really exists in most of the major religions (maybe in areas of strict Islam at best). The idea that if you converted or were always part of a church, and then left, that was MUCH MUCH worse than never being a part of the church in the first place: an act of apostasy almost always incurring penalties of torture and death. That was, after all, most of what the Inquisition was about: not rooting out non-believers per se, but rooting out backsliding converts.
These days, when people change denominations sometimes without even thinking much about it (oh, this church has nice drapes!) the idea, at least in the US, of the church itself getting all worked up about poeple leaving just seems bizarre. Religions are far more businesslike: seeking to attract and retain good customers and workers than they are the underpinnings of all society without which everything would collapse and hence leaving the church bespeaks a great and growing evil.
Which, perhaps, is why only the most conservative Islamic societies seem to have “death for deconversion” laws anymore. Many of these highly fundamentalist sects DO still consider the religion the be-all and end-all for any hope of a stable society.
And Catholics, right?
Wasn’t it also about the fear that the heretics would contaminate the true church, by passing their ideas on to nonbelievers?
If I recall my history right, many of Christian denominations burned witches, it wasn’t just the Catholic church.
Monavis
It would make me happy to see proof that the lesbian exorcism in Beijing never happened.
This site refers to it (I don’t know who Joanna Manning is or how reliable this is):
“At a meeting in March to prepare for this week’s conference following up on the
Beijing session, the tactics of the Holy See and its fundamentalist allies
changed from obstruction to intimidation. Priests in full clerical garb, waving
rosaries as a weapon to ward off evil spirits, invaded women’s caucuses. Some
conducted an exorcism in the room where the lesbian caucus had met.”
If it happened, it certainly doesn’t sound the work of the church, just some loonies. The Catholic Church doesn’t consider gay people as possessed by the devil.
Thanks for the information, gigi. So Valteron’s account was at least a bit inaccurate, locating the alleged incident at the 1995 Beijing conference. It took place 5 years later, according to Joanna Manning’s account, at a meeting to prepare a followup conference to Beijing. tomndebb was correct that it didn’t happen in Beijing in 1995, but now it seems that it really did happen somewhere (perhaps New York) in 2000.
Were they real priests who did that, or actors? (“just some loonies”) Or rogue priests? Berrigans of the right wing?
As a former Catholic, who walked out of the RC Church over 40 years ago, I am constantly amazed by the ability of liberal Catholics to close their eyes and pretend that the Catholic Church is really not the right-wing, repressive and ultra-conservative organization that it is and has been over the centuries.
First of all, if my quote about Catholics holding an exorcism to purify the room where a lesbian caucus met at an international Women’s Conference was off in terms of the exact year it happened, I apologize. But in fact the information is from articles about Joanna Manning, a former nun and author of “Is the Pope Catholic?” Look it up if you like.
Here is another quote by Jonna Manning from the same article that contains the information about the exorcism in the lesbian caucus room. The hard copy I have is from an article by Ms. Manning in the *Ottawa Citizen * of June 5, 2000. But it may well have been moved by a wire service and be available on the net or from other newspapers.
“It was the Vatican that led opposition to providing contraception and abortion for women in conflict zones such as Bosnia and Kosovo, where rape was a weapon of war. Tha Vatican’s childless celibates also orchestrated a campaign to cut off funding to UNICEF for the world’s most needy children because the agency distributes emergency contraception to teenage girls in war zones.”
Here is a quote by Madeline Weld, President of Global Population Concerns, who says that at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, more than half of the articles about the conference “dealt with the Vatican’s struggle to subvert the conference’s aims.” She goes on to say that very few people “… are aware of the extent to which the Vatican has influenced tha availability of family planing in all nations of the world.”
And I would guess very few liberal Catholics – who don’t like to let ugly facts get in the way of their devotion to the Church – are fully aware of the long, destructive record of the Vatican (Catholics are the only religion in the world with a seat at the UN!) in combating international efforts at family planning and control of AIDS and other diseases.
And here is a quote from Douwe A.A. Verkuyl, a Zimbabwean doctor who on August 21, 1993, published an article in the highly respected British Medical Journal The Lancet, in which he said that medical practitioners should write a letter to the Pope (or Islamic leaders) every time they encountered a woman suffering health problems because of lack of family planning.
“In large areas of the world,” says Dr. Verkuyl, “health care is provided by the Roman Catholic Church and the Church’s powerful position prevents effective access to reliable contraception.”
“The Bishops refuse to discuss the possibility of promoting condoms for contraception or even for AIDS prevention purposes, while 40 per cent of the under-5 population are malnourished, the population doubles every 19 years, and HIV prevalence in urban areas is more than 20 per cent. As in sub-Saharan Africa, so in Latin America and the Pilippines.”
Most recently, Catholic clergy in Africa have actually taken to telling people that condoms actually cause AIDS! The reasoning is that condoms send a “signal” that it is all right to have sex outside marriage, etc., and since condoms are not 100% foolproof, they can actaully cause a person to be infected. This tortured reasoning (or maybe it was only shown the instruments of torture as a harmless joke, like Galileo?) soon became part of an myth that condoms actually cause AIDS, or even contain AIDS germs, a myth that Catholics in Africa do nothing to contradict.
As to the record of the Vatican joining with repressive, sexist states like Saudi Arabia to represss and scuttle the rights and equality of women in international fora, I could give you so many examples that this message would become impossibly long. Look it up.
I’m sorry. What is “full clerical garb”? A cassock, Roman collar, stole, topped off by a beretta? “Waving rosaries as a weapon”? Would it not have made more sense to pull their pectoral crosses out from their shirts and hold them up in the traditional sign of warding off vampires and similar evils?
The RCC treats exorcism as a pretty serious business and there is nothing diabolical about lesbianism in the eyes of the church. Rosaries are not “weapons” in any church rite. Either these guys were break-away loons or the event never happened.
By the way, here is a somewhat more nuanced view of the Vatican’s participation in the Beijing Conference from Margot Kingston. Given the difference in descriptions of events between Ms. Manning and Ms. Kingston, I suspect that Ms. Manning is blowing smoke.
It’s tough to respond because it seems you have already made up your mind about Catholics who would seek to talk about the Church’s position on these issues.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
The display of the instruments of torture that occurred in the Galileo trial were a formality that were never intended to actually threaten him.
QUOTE]
This comment is exactly what I mean when I refer to Catholic apologists who will go to any lengths to rationalize the present-day and past sexism, homophobia, repression, intolerance and cruelty of their Church. Can you imagine a judge dangling a noose in front of you and saying that his gesture is not threatening?
Imagine that, the Inquisition was just a harmless, fun thing!
Ladies and gentlemen, I now take you back to Spain in 1483. We are at the local stand-up comedy club.
Master of Ceremonies: Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us tonight a new comic who has just been appointed Chief Inquisitor by Pope Sixtus IV, Tomas Torquemada. Will you put your hands (or whatever limbs are left to you) together and give it up for Tomas! Yeah!
(Torquemada comes on stage to thunderous applause from black-hooded torture masters and their chained heretics).
Torquemada:: Hey folks, it’s wonderful to be here tonight. I see we have a lot of heretics here in custody tonight. Yeah, yeah, I know, it hurts! Well, it’s gonna hurt a lot more when you get sent to Hell for all eternity for being a heretic.
And me and my boys aren’t even charging you for saving your soul!
So, I have a lot of heretics who tell me they are heretics no longer, when we come to arrest them. Well, I can you this. Once we get you on the rack, you sure won’t be any shorter! (Roars of laughter).
Now, some people are saying that the Inquisition goes too far. For example, that we burned 400 people in one year in Cordoba (this actually happened in 1499).
Well, listen, with the price of heating oil the way it is, we gotta keep warm somehow! (Peals of laughter).
But seriously, what about that guy Galileo? Talk about mealy-mouthed. First he says the Earth goes around the Sun, then just because the Inquisition shows him a few torture instruments, he suddenly decides it’s the other way around! And this guy calls himself a scientist? He oughta write for Jan Hus. Now there’s a brother who was really HOT. (Laughter, some groans).
Do I hear groans? That’s the trouble with being Grand Inquisitor and stand-up comic. You can’t tell the difference between people groaning at puns and people groaning in agony.
But seriously folks, we don’t burn all hertics. After being thoroughly tortured and after my monks write down the confession – you don’t expect the poory guy to write it with his hands all crushed, now do you ?-- the heretic can recant and be set free. All he has to agree to is to be whipped every week in each of the places he spoke his heresy for the rest of his life (This was a frequent sentence for recanted heretics).
But here’s the good news. I have it from one of our astrologers that in the 21st century, the head of the Inquisition, Joe Ratzinger, is going to become Pope. Yeah! (thunderous applause).
But they won’t be calling it the Inquisition then. They’ll be calling it the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). What’s the CDF? It’s the Inquisition without thumb screws. But don’t worry, folks, it will still be a real pain! Only they will use politics and the religious right to get heretics in line.
Hey, I wanna thank you all, you’ve been a great audience.
It needs to be noted that the Inquisition and the Spanish Inquisition are two different things. The Spanish Inquisition was initiated by the civil authorities (Ferdinand and Isabella) and actually had many of its excesses protested by the Church.
Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, not the Spanish Inquisition. Two different organizations.
A strawman argument is hardly going to make your case.
I have never agreed with any part of the Inquisition as it related to punishing persons with anything more than excommunication.
I have not even agreed with the principle behind the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
I agree that both trials of Galileo were wrong.
I agree that the executions of Bruno Giordano, and Jan Hus, (along with some other actions undertaken by the Church or its minions such as the Albigensian Crusades) were wrong.
However, in the interest of accuracy, I do note that it has been historians (often those who are inimical to the church) who have pointed out that many of the stories surrounding the trials of Galileo contain errors and fabrications and that many of these errors make up a considerable portion of the “received wisdom” regarding the events.
Ther may be errors in popular versions of the story of Galileo, and over-simplifications. But I guess I m pointing out to you that when an organization claims to be the divinely-appointed representative of a loving God on Earth, and when it is clearly on record as having tortured and killed people for disagreeing with it, as well as having thretened a scientist with torture and death for telling the truth about the structure of the solar system, then I question the validity of that organization, especially when it continues to use its power and wealth to advance its conservative and repressive agenda even today, while still claiming to be an orgaization established by Christ to lead people to salvation.
Do you believe Jesus woiuld have shown people torture instruments to get them to change their minds, even if it was “just a formaility”?
I also have a question about your being a moderator. Do you have the power to silence my postings? If so, if there a conflict between that power and the fact that you participate in these discussions with your own viewpoint? If you were to silece me, might I ask to be shown the torture instruments, just as a “formality” and given a chance to recant before you lock me out? 
Way to go. If you’re not making any headway against Tom’s actual arguments, just subtly accuse him of trying to “silence” you. Works like a charm. There are some 9/11 conspiracy threads you might be interested in as well.
This may have been the case years ago, but in current practice all information about church disciplinary councils, excommunications, etc. is held to be strictly confidential. Only the parties involved are even aware that anything has taken place.
I’d like to have this “protested by the church” explained a little bit. I have been under the impresssion that the Church had tremendous influence over the kings in Europe during that time. I believe that had the Pope threatened Ferdinand and Isabella with punishment of some kind their separate inquisition would have come to an abrupt end.
Why did the Church merely protest? Why not demand an end to it?