Making Sense with Sam Harris - #46 — The End of Faith Sessions 3

Episode Date: September 28, 2016

Sam Harris reads and discusses the third chapter of "The End of Faith." Topics covered: Christianity, Judaism, the Inquisition, witchcraft, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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You will soon learn that questions of this sort admit of no exculpatory reply. You are not told the names of your accusers, but their identities are of little account, for even if at this late hour they were to recant their charges against you, they would merely be punished as false witnesses, while their original accusations would retain their full weight as evidence of your guilt. The machinery of justice has been so well-oiled by faith that it can no longer be influenced. But you have a choice, of sorts. You can concede your guilt and name your accomplices. Yes, you must have had accomplices. No confession will be accepted unless other men

and women can be implicated in your crimes. Perhaps you and three acquaintances of your choosing did change into hares and consort with the devil himself. The sight of iron boots, designed to crush your feet, seems to refresh your memory. Yes, Friedrich, Arthur, and Otto are sorcerers, too. Their wives? Witches all. You now face punishment proportionate to the severity of your crimes. Flogging, a pilgrimage on foot to the Holy Land, forfeiture of property, or, more likely, a period of long imprisonment, probably for life. Your, quote, accomplices will soon be rounded up for torture. Or you can maintain your innocence, which is almost certainly the truth. After all, it is a rare person who can create a thunderstorm. In response, your jailers will be happy to lead

you to the furthest reaches of human suffering before burning you at the stake. You may be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack. Thumb screws may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vice may be inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a strapato, with your arms bound behind your back and attached to a pulley,

and weights tied to your feet, dislocating your shoulders. To this torment, squassation might be added, which, being often sufficient to cause your death, may yet spare you the agony of the stake. And there's an end note here describing squassation, which was essentially putting someone in the strapato with their arms

bound behind their back and hoisting them to the ceiling on the rope and then dropping them and stopping them before they reach the floor so that their arms are wrenched backwards. No doubt breaking the shoulders and

much else. Back to the text. If you're unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has achieved a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the Spanish chair, a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brassiere will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice, placed upside down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the bench, with a cauldron filled with mice, placed upside down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in

search of an exit. Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you are indeed a heretic, a sorcerer, or a witch, you will be made to confirm your story before a judge, and any attempt to recant, to claim that your confession has been coerced through torture, will deliver you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If, once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned men, whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds, will do you the kindness of strangling you before lighting your pyre. The medieval church was quick to observe that the good book was good enough to suggest a variety of means for eradicating heresy, ranging from a communal volley of stones to cremation while alive. A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to

death. As it turns out, it was never difficult to find a mob willing to perform this holy office, and to do so purely on the authority of the Church, since it was still a capital offense to possess a Bible in any of the vernacular languages of Europe. In fact, Scripture was not to become generally accessible to the common man until the 16th century. As we noted earlier, Deuteronomy was the preeminent text in every Inquisitor's canon, for it explicitly enjoins the faithful to murder anyone in their midst, even members of their own families, who profess a sympathy for foreign gods. Showing a genius for totalitarianism that few mortals have ever fully implemented, the author of this document demands that anyone too squeamish

to take part in such religious killing must be killed as well. Deuteronomy chapter 17, verses 12 and 13. Anyone who imagines that no justification for the Inquisition can be found in Scripture need only consult the Bible to have his view of the matter clarified. Quote, If you hear that in one of the towns which Yahweh your God has given you for a home, there are men, scoundrels from your own stock, who have led their fellow citizens astray,

saying, Let us go serve other gods, hitherto unknown to you. It is your duty to look into the matter, examine it, and inquire most carefully. If it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword. You must lay it under the curse of destruction, the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time and never rebuilt. Deuteronomy chapter 13 verses 12 through 16. For obvious reasons, the church tended to ignore the final edict, the destruction of heretic property. In addition to demanding that we fulfill every

jot and tittle of Old Testament law, Jesus seems to have suggested in John 15 verse 6 further refinements to the practice of killing heretics and unbelievers. Quote, If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered, and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. End quote. Whether we want to interpret Jesus metaphorically is, of course, our business. The problem with Scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations, including most of the literal ones, can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith. The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius III to crush the popular movement of Catharism. The Cathars, from the Greek katharoi,

quote, the pure ones, had fashioned their own brand of Manichaeanism. Mani himself was flayed alive at the behest of Zoroastrian priests in 276, which held that the material world had been created by Satan and was therefore inherently evil. The Cathars were divided by a schism of their own and within each of their sects by the distinction between the renunciate Perfecti and the lay Credentes, the believers, who revered them. The Perfecti ate no meat, eggs, cheese, or fat, fasted for days at a time, maintained strict celibacy, and abjured all personal wealth. The life of the perfecti was so austere that most credentes only joined their ranks once they were safely on their deathbeds, so that, having lived

as they pleased, they might yet go to God in holiness. Saint Bernard, who had tried in vain to combat this austere doctrine with that of the Church, noted the reasons for his failure. As to the Cathars' conversation, nothing can be less reprehensible, and what they speak they prove by deeds. As for the morals of the heretic, he cheats no one, he oppresses no one, he strikes no one, his cheeks are pale with fasting, his hands labor for his livelihood. End quote. There seems, in fact, to have been nothing wrong with these people, apart from their attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs about the creation of the world.

But heresy is heresy. Any person who believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will understand why these people had to be put to death. The Inquisition took rather genteel steps at first. The use of torture to extract confessions was not officially sanctioned until 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council. But two developments conspired to lengthen its strides. The first came in 1199, when Pope Innocent III decreed that all property belonging to a convicted heretic would be forfeited to the Church. The Church then shared it with both local officials and

the victims' accusers as a reward for their candor. The second was the rise of the Dominican order. Saint Dominic himself, displaying the conviction of every good Catholic of the day, announced to the Cathars, quote, For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying, weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, where blessings can accomplish nothing, blows may avail. We shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land. End quote. It would appear that sainthood comes in a variety of flavors. With the founding of Dominic's Holy Order of Mendicant Friars,

the Inquisition was ready to begin its work in earnest. It is important to remember, lest the general barbarity of the time inures to the horror of these historical accounts, that the perpetrators of the Inquisition, the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions, were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God, popes, bishops, friars, and priests. They were men who had devoted their lives, in word if not in deed, to Christ as we find him in the New Testament, healing the sick and challenging those without sin to cast the first stone. Quote, In 1234 the canonization of St. Dominic was finally proclaimed in Toulouse, and Bishop Raymond du Fauga was washing his hands in preparation for dinner

when he heard the rumor that a fever-ridden old woman in a nearby house was about to undergo the Cathar ritual. The bishop hurried to her bedside and managed to convince her that he was a friend, then interrogated her on her beliefs, then denounced her as a heretic. He called on her to recant. She refused. The bishop thereupon had her bed carried out into a field, and there she was burned. And after the bishop and the friars and their companions had seen their business completed,

Brother Guillaume wrote, they returned to the refectory and giving thanks to God and the blessed Dominic, ate with rejoicing what had been prepared for them. End quote. The question of how the Church managed to transform Jesus' principal message of loving one's neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder and repine seems to promise a harrowing mystery. But it is no mystery at all. Apart from the Bible's heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and irreconcilable aims, the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition without

evidence, that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants, he becomes capable of anything. The practice for which the Inquisition is duly infamous, and the innovation that secured it a steady stream of both suspects and guilty verdicts, was its use of torture to extract confessions from the accused, to force witnesses to testify, and to persuade a confessing heretic to name those with whom he had collaborated in sin. The justification for this behavior came straight from St. Augustine, who reasoned that if torture was appropriate for those who broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the laws of God.

As practiced by medieval Christians, judicial torture was merely a final mad inflection of their faith. That anyone imagined that facts were being elicited by such a lunatic procedure seems a miracle in itself. As Voltaire wrote in 1764, quote, there is something divine here, for it is incomprehensible that men should have patiently borne this yoke, end quote. A contemporaneous account of the Spanish auto-défé, the public spectacle at which heretics were sentenced and often burned, will serve to complete our picture. The Spanish Inquisition did not cease its persecution of heretics until 1834, the last auto-de-fé took

place in Mexico in 1850, about the time Charles Darwin set sail on the Beagle and Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Quote, The condemned are then immediately carried to the Riberia, the place of execution, where there are as many stakes set up as there are prisoners to be burnt, the negative and relapse being first strangled and then burnt, the professed mount their stakes by a ladder, and the Jesuits, after several repeated exhortations to be reconciled to the church, consign them to eternal destruction, and then leave them to the fiend, who they tell them stands at their elbow to carry them into torments. On this a great shout is raised, and the cry is, Let the dogs' beards be made, which is done by thrusting flaming bunches of furs fastened to

long poles against their beards, till their faces are burnt black, the surrounding populace rending the air with the loudest acclamations of joy. At last fire is set to the furs at the bottom of the stake, over which the victims are chained, so high that the flame seldom reaches higher than the seat they sit on, and thus they are rather roasted than burnt. Although there cannot be a more lamentable spectacle, and the sufferers continually cry out as long as they are able, pity for the love of God, yet it is beheld by persons of all ages and both sexes, with transports of joy and satisfaction. End quote. And while Protestant reformers broke

with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful. Public executions were more popular than ever. Heretics were still reduced to ash. Scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason. And fornicators were murdered without a qualm. The basic lesson to be drawn from all of this was summed up nicely by Will Durant. Quote,

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith. Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty. Certainty is murderous. End quote. There really seems to be very little to perplex us here. Burning people who are destined to burn for all time seems a small price to pay to protect the people you love from the same fate. Clearly, the common law marriage between reason and faith, wherein otherwise reasonable men and women can be

motivated by the content of unreasonable beliefs, places society on a slippery slope, with confusion and hypocrisy at its heights and the torments of the Inquisitor waiting below. Witch and Jew Historically there have been two groups targeted by the Church that deserve special mention. Witches are of particular interest in this context because their persecution required an extraordinary degree of credulity to get underway. For the simple reason that a confederacy of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed.

There were no covens of pagan dissidents, meeting in secret, betrothed to Satan, abandoning themselves to the pleasures of group sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors' crops and cattle. sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors, crops, and cattle. It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams, and sheer confabulation, and confirmed by confessions elicited under the most gruesome torture. Antisemitism is of interest here, both for the scale of the injustice that it has wrought and for its explicitly theological roots. From the perspective of Christian teaching, Jews are even worse than run-of-the-mill heretics. They are heretics who explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ. While the stigmas applied to witches and Jews throughout

Christendom shared curious similarities, both were often accused of the lively and improbable offense of murdering Christian infants and drinking their blood, their cases remain quite distinct. Wishes, in all likelihood, did not even exist, and those murdered in their stead numbered perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over 300 years of persecution. Off-text here, in an end note here, I report that the numbers of people killed by the Inquisition is routinely exaggerated. Some people talk about millions of people being killed as witches and warlocks, and that doesn't seem to have occurred. Best current estimate that I'm aware of is somewhere around 40,000 to 50,000. Back to the text. Jews have lived side by side with Christians for nearly two millennia,

fathered their religion, and for reasons that are no more substantial than those underlying the belief in the resurrection, have been the objects of murderous intolerance since the first centuries after Christ. The accounts of witch hunts resemble in most respects the more widespread persecution of heretics throughout the Inquisition. Imprisonment on the basis of accusations alone, torture to extract confession, confessions deemed unacceptable until accomplices were named, death by slow fire, and the rounding up of the freshly accused. The following anecdote is typical. Quote, In 1595, an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry at not being invited to share the Quote, End quote.

Though it is difficult to generalize about many of the factors that conspired to make villagers rise up against their neighbors, it is obvious that a belief in the existence of witches was the sine qua non of the phenomenon. But what was it, precisely, that people believed? They appear to have believed that their neighbors were having sex with the devil, enjoying nocturnal flights upon broomsticks, changing into cats and hares, and eating the flesh of other human beings.

More important, they believed utterly in maleficium, that is, in the efficacy of harming others by occult means. Among the many disasters that could befall a person over the course of a short and difficult life, medieval Christians seemed especially concerned that their neighbor might cast a spell and thereby undermine their health or good fortune. Only the advent of science could successfully undercut such an idea, along with the fantastical displays of cruelty to which it gave rise. We must remember that it was not until the mid-19th century that the germ theory of disease emerged,

laying to rest much superstition about the causes of illness. Occult beliefs of this sort are clearly an inheritance from our primitive magic-minded ancestors. The four people of New Guinea, for instance, besides being enthusiastic cannibals, exacted a gruesome revenge upon suspected sorcerers. Quote, besides attending public meetings, four men also hunted down men they believed to be sorcerers and killed them in reprisal. The hunters used a specialized attack called tukaboo against sorcerers. They ruptured their kidneys, crushed their genitals, and broke their thigh bones with stone axes, bit into their necks and tore out their tracheas, and jammed bamboo splinters into their necks and tore out their tracheas, and jam bamboo splinters

into their veins to bleed them. End quote. No doubt each of these gestures held metaphysical significance. This behavior seems to have been commonplace among the four at least until the 1960s. The horrible comedy of human ignorance achieves a rare moment of transparency here. The four were merely responding to an epidemic of kuru, a fatal spongiform infection of the brain, brought on not by sorcerers in their midst, but by their own religious observance of eating the bodies and brains of their dead. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was perfectly apparent that disease could be inflicted by demons and black magic. There are accounts of frail old women

charged with killing able-bodied men and breaking the necks of their horses, actions which they were made to confess under torture, and few people, it seems, found such accusations implausible. Even the relentless torture of the accused was given a perverse rationale. The devil, it was believed, made his charges insensible to pain, despite their cries for mercy. And so it was that for centuries, men and women who were guilty of little more than being ugly, old, widowed, or mentally ill, were convicted of impossible crimes and then murdered for God's sake. After nearly 400 years, some ecclesiastics began to appreciate how insane all this was. Consider the epiphany of Frederick Spee, quote, torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard of

wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts it. If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured, end quote. But Spee was led to this reasonable surmise only after a skeptical friend, the Duke of Brunswick, had a woman suspected of witchcraft artfully tortured and interrogated in his presence. This poor woman testified that she had seen Spee himself on the Brocken, shapeshifting into a wolf, a goat, and other beasts, and fathering numerous children by the assembled witches, born with the heads of toads and the legs of spiders. Spee, lucky indeed to be in the company of a friend, and certain of his own innocence,

immediately set to work on his Cautio Criminalis, published in 1631, which detailed the injustice of the witch trials. Bertrand Russell observed, however, that not all reasonable men were as fortunate as Spee. Quote, Some few bold rationalists ventured, even while the persecution was at its height, to doubt whether tempests, hailstorms, thunder, and lightning were really caused by the machinations of women. Such men were shown no mercy. Thus, towards the end of the 16th century, Flade, rector of the University of Treve, and judge for the electoral court, after condemning countless witches, began to think that perhaps their confessions were due to the desire to escape the tortures of the rack, with the result that he

showed unwillingness to convict. He was accused of having sold himself to Satan, and was subjected to the same tortures he had inflicted upon others. Like them, he confessed his guilt, and in 1589 he was strangled and then burnt. As late as 1718, just as the inoculation against smallpox was being introduced in England, and the English mathematician Brooke Taylor was making refinements to the calculus, we find the madness of the witch hunt still a potent force. Charles McKay relates an incident in Caithness, northeast Scotland. A silly fellow named William Montgomery, a carpenter, had a mortal antipathy to cats, and somehow or other these animals generally chose his backyard as the scene for their

catawallens, he puzzled his brains for a long time to know why he, above all his neighbors, should be so pestered. At last he came to the sage conclusion that his tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this opinion he was supported by his maidservant, who swore a round oath that she had often heard the aforesaid cats talking together in human voices. The next time the unlucky tabbies assembled in his backyard, the valiant carpenter was on the alert. Arming himself with an axe, a dirk, and a broadsword, he rushed out among them. One of them he wounded in the back, a second in the hip, and the leg of a third he maimed with his axe. But he could not capture any of them.

A few days afterward, two old women of the parish died, and it was said that when their bodies were laid out, there appeared on the back of one the mark as of a recent wound, and a similar scar upon the hip of the other. The carpenter and his maid were convinced that they were the very cats, and the whole county repeated the same story. Everyone was upon the lookout for proofs corroborative. A very remarkable one was soon discovered. Nancy Gilbert, a wretched old creature upwards of 70 years of age, was found in bed with her leg broken. As she was ugly enough for a witch, it was asserted that she was one of the cats that had fared so ill at the hands of the carpenter.

The latter, when informed of the popular suspicion, asserted that he distinctly remembered his joy. Thank you.