Take care you don't dislocate your yaw when opening it so wide. The letter is a reality. It was on auction in London in Spring this year and sold for roughly a quarter of a million Euros, and has been verified to be original, and it dates back to the year of 1954, that is one year before Einstein died. You can easily find it via google in every major news outlet. Amongst others, Richard Dawkins tried to buy it, but lost.

:lol: I knew that it was only a question of time until somebody would come again with this demand - but you, Brutus...? :rotfl: They will get you crucified over this! :smug:

Well, Frame will take a timeout for some weeks now, at least on my display of the forum. This stupid polemics about Nazi-Germany i have heared some times too often in recent months and years.

P.S. just noticed that it must be storm season or something - the place on the list gets increasingly crowded. Two names just three months ago - now already eight! :lol: Time to run for moderator! :rotfl:

You're a genius:yep: , or maybe I just think so because I agree with you.

OK, sorry if someone placed some hopes of learning seriously from such a dialogue, as I said I never thought this is the correct environment to look for that but may be others don't see it.

I had the enormous luck of having a fantastic philosophy teacher at school (11te und 12te Klasse), he had been studying for becoming a catholic priest but then abandoned it because he couldn't stand the dogmas. He had two universitary degrees, laws and philophy and was an incredibly cult man, who also had shown interest for oriental philosophy. In the class we studied the different doctrines and then we had dialogues where one defended one thing and another a different one, while he moderated and added new bits here and there, enough to make us further think and open our minds to new points of view. Sometimes spontaneusly during those discussions someone came up with a new idea and then he smiled and told us: "Very well, you have discovered Kant/Schopenhauer/etc all by yourself". The most important thing he wanted to teach us was that there are no definitive answers to anything, and that most things have already been thought by someone else, as the greeks showed (There have not been many new things since them in fact). I still remember how he put the classic example of why logic is a method reduced and confined to a specific dimension of the ontology, out of which it served no purpose or where his rules were no longer valid:

God is allmighty. But he can't exist and not exist at the same time. Therefore he can't be allmighty and if he exists, he isn't God.

Yet the idea or concept of allmighty God exists, then at least it has an existance, even if as a concept. Therefore it exists somewhere in a dimension or level, but the logic is no longer valid there.

This he did right after we had studied Descartes and were all enthusiasted by the pure rational thinking. We called it the intellectual version of the cold shower :lol: and it was usual from him. Of course some months later we ggot another cold shower against the statement I copied above :lol: and were thrown in another direction or path, but we really enjoyed that way of teaching.

I apologize if, returning to my younger years enthusiasm I have gone too far in this style of discussing, but hopefully any observer has at least been able to darw the same conclussion we drew back at school: There are no definitive answers, and even if there are some, we probably lack the ability or intelligence to discover and understand them.

Therefore: Carpe Diem! (My teacher's motto) :up:


EDIT:

Oh I forgot: I would really like to have had the chance to attend one of those "trainings" of yours. Sounds very interesting :ping:

SOTP. Your spelling is atrocious.

Anywho, the Crusades killed so many people that the number has never fully been verified. Over a million people disappeared during the days of the Inquisition and were never heard from again. What became of them is likewise a mystery. Oh, Adolf Hitler was a Roman-Catholic who sent 6 million Jews to their deaths. Stalin was an Agnostic who killed Jews and anyone else who opposed him.

See what I'm getting at?

How many times have you heard a nation say, "GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!"? Now how many times have you heard a nation say, "THERE IS NO GOD! EVEN IF THERE WAS, HE DOESN'T PICK SIDES!"?

That's what I thought. Countless times to the first one and never to the second one.

An interesting and normally unknown fact about the spanish Inquisition: They sentenced LESS people to death for witchery, herecy and such than the civil courts. In those days, the civil law also punished such offences and ordinary courts, not the Inquisition ones, took the bigger part of executions. In fact, the Inquisition only did a minor number when compared to the civil courts ;)

Death tolls are given by historians such as Will Durant, who, in The Reformation (1957), cites Juan Antonio Llorente, General Secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, as estimating that 31,912 people were executed from 1480-1808. He also cites Hernando de Pulgar, a secretary to Queen Isabella, as estimating 2,000 people were burned before 1490. Philip Schaff in his History of the Christian Church gave a number of 8,800 people burned in the 18 years of Torquemada. Matthew White, in reviewing these and other figures, gives a median number of deaths at 32,000, with around 9,000 under Torquemada [1].

R. J. Rummel describes similar figures as realistic, though he cites some historians who give figures of up to 135,000 people killed under Torquemada. This number includes 125,000 asserted to have died in prison due to poor conditions, leaving 10,000 sentenced to death. (Death rates in medieval and early modern prisons were generally very high, thanks in part to inadequate sanitary conditions and a poor diet.) There are no death toll figures available for the massacres of 1391, 1468 or 1473. These numbers will probably never be known.

;)

As an interesting note, the Inquisition was not officially abolished until 1834.:huh:

Do these numbers only represent official and executed death sentences, or do they include the number of those who died "unintentionally" while being questioned under torture?

In those numbers you indicate it is not clear if they were executed by the Inquisition or by the civil courts.

Anyway 31,912 people executed from 1480-1808 is about 97 per year, which would match what I already mentioned above. Note that the Inquisition of that period ruled over the whole Empire, including all colonies in South America, Cuba, Philippines and a part of Europe like Flandes, Sicilly, etc.!

I learned that civil courts had done more executions while studying history of spanish laws in my first university year, that was long ago and I can't remember the exact figures (They were in a book I haven't long ago).

Most historians, specially foreign ones (Who are usually interested in highlighting the brutality of the Inquisition) do not differentiate between executions and processes conducted by civil and religious courts, as the offence was exactly the same.

In any case, the practical result is the same: Killed by religious intolerance, directly applied by the church or induced in the civil statement.

EDITED:

Found this link here which explains very well what I had pointed out above:

The link: http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0406181026.asp

Truth hurts! I am sending you a hanky to wipe away your tears...:yep: