Bearing False Witness: Debunking centuries of anti-Catholic by Rodney Stark

the next ancient statements all look in well-established textbooks, and became a part of our universal tradition. which ones might you assert are true?

* The Catholic Church incited and actively colluded in approximately millennia of anti-Semitic violence, and Pope Pius XII continues to be rightfully often called ‘Hitler’s Pope’.
* only in the near past have we realize historic and remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, which narrow-minded Catholic specialists attempted to suppress.
* as soon as in energy because the reputable Church of Rome, Christians fast and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence.
* the autumn of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church prompted Europe’s decline right into a millennium of lack of awareness and backwardness, which lasted till the Renaissance.
* Initiated via the pope, the Crusades have been however the first bloody bankruptcy within the background of unprovoked and brutal Christian colonialism.
* The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered large numbers of blameless humans for ‘imaginary’ crimes, corresponding to witchcraft and blasphemy.
* The Catholic Church persecuted and attempted to suppress scientists comparable to Galileo, and the clinical ‘Revolution’ accordingly happened more often than not in additional tolerant Protestant societies.
* Being solely happy with slavery, the Catholic Church did not anything to oppose its creation within the New international, or to make it extra humane.
* until eventually very lately, Catholicism’s hierarchical view of the fitting country has led to its sour resistance to all efforts to set up extra liberal governments and its keen aid for right-wing dictators.
* It used to be the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on development and ushered in capitalism, non secular freedom and the trendy international.

In this strong and persuasive booklet Rodney Stark topics those and different widely-held ideals to a rigorous historic overview. He supplies a compelling account of the way each one of them grew to become accredited because the traditional knowledge, how egotism and beliefs frequently labored jointly to create fake or hugely distorted photos of individuals and occasions, and the way we have to work flat out to get better the reality if we’re to undo the cultural harm that centuries of anti-Catholic heritage has done.

Contents:

1. Sins of Anti- Semitism
2. The Suppressed Gospels
3. Persecuting the Tolerant Pagans
4. implementing the darkish a while
5. Crusading for Land, Loot, and Converts
6. Monsters of the Inquisition
7. medical Heresies
8. Blessed Be Slavery
9. Holy Authoritarianism
10. Protestant Modernity