Quote:
Originally Posted by Oleander
We know how Christianity dealt with independent thought in the past. The Inquisition was only one small part of a long history of violence and suppression.
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As scholars have been discovering for at least 20 years now(especially with the opening of the Vatican archives), the supposed bloody trail of the Inquisition has been blown out of proportion. Barely 2% of all people ever brought before the Inquisition were ever executed, which meant an average of three people per year. Most previous estimates of executions were largely based off the numbers of
effigees burnt, not actual people.
The vast majority of people brought before the Inquisition received rather light sentences, mostly house arrest(which in practice largely amounted to a daily curfew).
We could also add that the Inquisition was one of the first legal institutions to mandate that a defendant had a right to a lawyer; and that the court would provide one if the defendant couldn't afford one.