[kragen]

While I appreciate your compliment about my prose, it is no less factual for being "poetic". The Inquisition was established as a genocidal institution against the Jewish and Muslim populace of Iberia, many of whom fled, and was later extended to serve the mission of obliterating the native religions and cultures of the New World; the price of this dominion, for Spain and later Italy, was the intellectual degradation and descent from greatness into mediocrity, as learning could only flourish outside the Catholic world. The burning of the Mayan codices and of the khipu were fruits of the Inquisition, losses of learning whose depths we will never fathom.

For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.

The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of scholars and Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written. It is to be weighed by the end of Galileo's scientific career, in Descartes' cowardly refusal to publish his greatest work until after his death, and in his inability to learn from the criticisms that ensued. It is evident in the near absence of Iberian and Italian philosophers from the birth of physics, chemistry, and the calculus; even Lagrange left Italy in the end.

That today we fly through the air like birds; that we live in artificial mountains of glued-together stone; that we walk on the moon; that we use precious steel where our great-grandparents used wood; that only one in thirty children die before reaching adulthood, instead of one in five, as through all human history; that we routinely cure cancer; that I am writing you this note in letters of lightning playing over the surface of tiny stones from the other side of the world — these miracles are all thanks to the fact that the Inquisition did not reach England, or Prussia, or the Low Countries, except briefly. These miracles are thanks to the noble fruits of free inquiry.

[dmaldona]

Yo do write very well! Is not an empty compliment.

About your comments, I can point to some excerpts in the Inquisition wikipedia article:

> The Inquisition was established as a genocidal institution against the Jewish and Muslim populace of Iberia,

"The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism"

There was no genocidal intention, its a nuance but important. It wasn't established to "find every Muslim and put it on a stake".

> For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Censorship

"The censorship of books was actually very ineffective, and prohibited books circulated in Spain without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom than in other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries."

"Despite the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the development of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro", although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another."

> The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...

"evertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed" [...] "In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000)."

[kragen]

Indeed, the witch-panic exists everywhere and at every time, though sometimes it is weaker and sometimes stronger, and the words used vary. Today in Nigeria and in Evangelical Christian churches there is still persecution of "witches" and "cultists", while in mainstream America instead the word used is "hackers". But in England the witch-panic did not dissuade Newton from publishing his works on natural philosophy, as it had Descartes during his lifetime; and in Leipzig and Hanover the witch-panic did not dissuade Leibniz. Spinoza, whose Jewish family had fled the Inquisition, published many of the fundamental works of rationalism; had his family remained in Spain, only with great luck would he have escaped the auto-da-fé, and today we could not debate his ideas.

How many potential Spinozas did we lose to the Inquisition because they had the misfortune of being born in Spain instead of in the Low Countries?

England and Holland were certainly guilty of atrocities, at home and in their colonies abroad, but the indigenous peoples of many of their colonies retained their cultures. The Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee survives today, and possibly it inspired the revival of democracy in Europe. Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Buddhism survive in India today, as does knowledge of Vedic, Pali, and Sanskrit, despite centuries of English enslavement and exploitation. Contrast this with the fate of the cultural legacies of the Inka, the Maya, the Caribs, and the Quilmes.

Genocide does not require extermination. Cultural obliteration and mass expulsion — the explicit intent of the Inquisition, and to a very great extent achieved throughout Iberia and the Spanish colonies in America — are equally genocidal.

So, I say, do not accept censorship. It is a poisonous remedy, and it kills what is most precious in human culture before it begins to cure the illness for which it was prescribed.