I don’t think he thought about to any degree more than :us-foreign-policy:

well many of those world wars were because of the shared value of belief in violent domination of those weaker than you

not good values but values none the less

They do share the same values of death and brutality.

:think-about-it:

One of those values is killing people and making up reasons for it

The Catholics have deprecated purgatory in the last couple of decades. iirc they said "It doesn’t exist, people made it up in the middle ages, don’t worry about it God isn’t interested in torturing you you’ll be fine.

Ties in to the popular conception of Hell being almost entirely fan fiction.

It’s a conservative version of Life of Brian.

because he’s actually proselytizing Capitalism and a lot of the rubes in his target audience need this contradiction reconciled for them

the malleus maleficarnum was condemned by the Catholic church and was deemed not in line with the Catholic view of demonology.

Yep. The idea that the malleus maleficarum reflected the doctrine of the church at the time is a pop history idea, debunked by historians ages ago and I love you for pointing out that it was the secular authorities that most prosecuted witchcraft, and even especially in protestant countries. The inquisition is another aspect of that understanding of history which is completely misunderstood. It’s jurisdiction was so strictly defined to assure the orthodoxy of religion that, again, the odds are that if you fell afoul of the religious state you’d be prosecuted by a regular ass judge.

Thank you. It is frustrating how easily people can use Malleus Maleficarium to make the opposite point of reality. It was heresy, the Council of Paderborn in 735 outlawed the belief in witches, something that became widespread by the end of the Middle Ages. I know it is wikipedia, but I think this section gets the point across

The Inquisition within the Roman Catholic Church had conducted trials against supposed witches in the 13th century, but these trials were to punish heresy, of which belief in witchcraft was merely one variety.[6] Inquisitorial courts only became systematically involved in the witch-hunt during the 15th century: in the case of the Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of Milan was not sure what to do with two women who in 1384 and in 1390 confessed to have participated in a type of white magic.

Not all Inquisitorial courts acknowledged witchcraft. For example, in 1610 as the result of a witch-hunting craze the Suprema (the ruling council of the Spanish Inquisition) gave everybody an Edict of Grace (during which confessing witches were not to be punished) and put the only dissenting inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, in charge of the subsequent investigation. The results of Salazar’s investigation was that the Spanish Inquisition did not bother witches ever again though they still went after heretics and Crypto-Jews

They continue to stress that witch trials as a phenomenon are Protestant through and through. Others carried them out, but the standard practices are post-Reformation. I’ve been reading “The Many-Headed Hydra: Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic” and just got done with a section covering how widespread executions became in England, and they make some fascinating points about how Protestant development of capitalism encouraged witch-hunting and the like as a means of making an example of those who lived in the commons and now had nowhere to go who they regarded by law as “idlers” with vagabond acts and poor laws being enacted to explicitly make them slaves. Executions made it easier to kill the “excess” and make future arrestees more likely to take the hellish penalty of slavery in the colonies. The development of capitalism at home in England genuinely is what “perfected” so many of these methods and the particulars of the more famous witch-trials.

They framed section with the black dog of Newgate, a story from the time by a former prisoner symbolizing law and why you must obey. They assign to it different disabilities upon people, different ways people became controlled or restricted, being inability to name the oppressor, overwhelming horror thus conduced to a desire for death, and finally terror. That the presence of the authorities and the prisons broke and enslaved people, and the terror of those executions made them contemplate that submission might be better than isolation or being in Newgate.

I have to say I am LOVING this book