The Inquisition was not Catholic

Pope Innocentius III excommunicating the Albigensians (left), Massacre against the Albigensians by the crusaders (right) (British Library, Royal 16 G VI f. 374v) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Inquisition with its censorship was in itself not Catholic, like ISIS is not in fact “true Islam.” When Pope Innocent III (1160 or 1161–1216) considered the dualistic religious movement of the Cathars, descended from Gnosticism and Manichaeism and echoing many of the ideas of Marcion a greater menace to Christianity, a greater menace to Christianity than the Islamic warriors who pummeled the crusaders and who threatened all of Europe he took up the weapons against believers of the same God and followers of the same teacher Jeshua (Jesus). To satisfy his outrage, he ordered the only Crusade ever launched by Christians against fellow Christians, declaring as heretics the Albigensians, as the Cathars of southern France were known. It would be totally wrong to say that the Catholics all were in favour of the killing and murdering which took place at the catholic wars like the Inquisition and the military campaigns sanctioned by the Latin Roman Catholic Church during the High Middle Ages and Late Middle Ages, such as the Albigensian Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, the Reconquista, and the Northern Crusades. They all were papal-led expansion attempts by Western Christendom but that does not make it that Christendom nor Christianity were in favour of those so called defensive wars against Islamic conquest.
Also when Protestantism got more followers throughout Europe and Pope Paul III (1468–1549) established the Congregation of the Inquisition (also known as the Roman Inquisition and the Holy Office) in 1542, it where not all Catholics who hated those different thinking Christians. It also where not all Catholics who wanted to kill those other Christians. The Holy Office was less concerned about heresies and false beliefs of church members than they were with misstatements of orthodoxy in the academic writings of its theologians. When Carafa became Pope Paul IV in 1555, he approved the first Index of Forbidden Books (1559) and vigorously sought out any academics who were prompted any thought that offended church doctrine or favoured Protestantism.
True or not true Islam
Religions of all sorts of kinds and menace to the world
Having regard for a culture or faith
When people choose to belong to a group of people or to a faith group, it are normally several things which attracts them and enough matters that pleases them to join. when feeling part of a culture or religion one expects that those persons do have respect for that culture and for the signs of that religion.
With ISIS we do see that those Jihad fighters do not at all have any respect for their previous Muslim constructions. Igor Volsky and Jack Jenkins of ThinkProgress are right in claiming ISIS is not, in fact, Islamic because
ISIS clearly has little regard for this or other fundamental tenets of Islam. They have sparked the rage of Iraqi Muslims by carelessly blowing up copies of the Qur’an, and they have killed their fellow Muslims, be they Sunni or Shia. Even extremist Muslims who engage in warfare have strict rules of engagement and prohibitions against harming women and children, but ISIS has opted to ignore even this by slaughtering innocent youth and using rape and sexual slavery as a weapon.
No matter which Quran, belonging to a Sunni, Shiite, Christian or Jew, that book always be a Quran and by Muslims to be considered holy and not allowed to be damaged or to be disacrated or dishonoured. Burning, bombing or tearing up a Quran is blasphemy because the Holy Quran belongs to the sacrilege writings.
“No matter how many people they kill to gain power, how many fellow Muslims they terrorize into submission, or how loudly they scream their self-righteous blasphemy to the heavens, ISIS is not—nor will ever be—Islamic.”
Volsky and Jenkins write.
Original Holy Scripture and additional human writings
Front cover of Musnad Imam Ahmed Ibn Hanbal Urdu translation, published by Maktabae Rehmania, Lahore, Pakistan.
As in the Bible the Quran refers to certain elements, like prayer, in general terms only. According Muslims it is the Sunna/Sunnah* which supplies the detailed explanation.’ (“L’tibar” by al Hamdani). Sunnah (or Sunnat) and Hadis are technically synonymous terms, but sunnah
- “implies the doings and practices of Muhammad.” (Sahih Muslim Introduction, page IX of Volume I). ‘It is thus a concrete implementation, a tangible form and the actual embodiment of the Will of Allah….”(ibid.). Literally it means a “path”, “way”, “a manner of life”.

Ahlus Sunnah Website Preview
If Mohammed is reputed to have done something it is “sunnah” to his followers. This obviously applies also in the negative sense: if Mohammed rejected or condemned something, it is forbidden to all Muslims.
In the Islam one expects the Muslim to seek guidance for his actions in every aspect of daily life in the Hadith. To copy the sayings and doings of Mohammed, is (to the Muslim) the safest way to live a life pleasing to Allah. Therefore salvation is sought by copying as closely as possible the life of the Prophet, who is considered to be the greatest of all human beings for a Muslim. Most Muslims believe that Mohammed’s life and everyday talk were as inspired as the Quran itself. Sober scrutiny will cast doubt on the reliability of the Hadith, however. To give an example: Abu Da’ud, one of the collectors of Hadith, accepted only 4 800 traditions out of 500 000 and even in his careful selection, he states that he had written down only “those which seem to be authentic and those which are nearly so.” {Ibn-Khallikan Volume I, page 590}.
The Sunnah is thought off to regulate all aspects of the life of Muslims but some Muslims deny that the Sunna may abrogate the Quran and there is disagreement concerning this point.
In fact, it cannot be imagined that one reject the entire probativeness of the Sunna and remain a Muslim. For the foundation of Islam is the Qur’an, which cannot be described as Allah’s word when one unconditionally rejects the probativeness of the Sunna since the fact that the Qur’an is Allah’s word was not established by other than the Prophet’s — Allah bless and greet him — explicit statement that this was Allah’s Word and His Book. That statement is obviously part of the Sunna. Therefore, to say that the Sunna is no proof is no different than a denial of an integral part of the Religion and an attempt to undermine the basis of the Religion. {The Probativeness of the Sunna, part 1 Introduction}
To be a true Muslim demands than at least to hold onto some Sunnah rules or writings. But it would also mean somebody going totally against those writings would not really to be considered a Muslim and as such we do find those ISIS fighters going against to many traditional Islam writings and therefore I would not consider them true Islamists or not real Muhammadans.
No “true” religion in the factual sense
No concern with traditional law rules
Throughout history the way of thinking how to behave changed and continuously new rules about morality became considered the right way to behave in the future and often became part of a new law. Also by the followers of Muhammad there were “regulations of God‘s law” or Shariʿa as transmitted through their prophet. Also by them, like in many Christian societies their ‘Law’ also depends on theology brought forward by the human beings who considered themselves as allowed to discuss and to present (new) laws.
When we look at IS we do not seem to see that they do give validation of law by resting on textual sources, “whose divine origins and truth are known”.
Furthermore, all sciences that are used to attain a knowledge of law and theology are considered Shariʿa sciences, even if their subject matter is not legal or theological. Therefore, the Arabic language, hadith (verbal statements of Prophetic traditions), exegesis (interpretations), and even logic are deemed Shariʿa —even if designating logic this way has always been controversial. {Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa}

Sunni Islam mosque
For ISIS none of the numerous schools of jurisprudence which emerged in the course of Islamic history seem to belong to the ‘true Islam’. though four coexist today within Sunni Islam, with one or more dominant in particular areas — Maliki or madhhab (N and W Africa), Hanafi (Turkic Asia), Shafii (Egypt, E Africa, SE Asia), and Hanbali (Saudi Arabia; see Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad). While these schools of jurisprudence vary on certain rituals and practices, they are often perceived as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Twelve-Imam Shiite jurisprudence is often referred to as Jafari.
We do know that the Muhammadans give great importance to Islamic law. In nearly all nations with a Muslim majority population we see that the extension of sharīʿa is made particularly by ijmaʿ, qiyās and ijtihād, and in practice through fatwā made by a.o. a muftī according to a particular madhhab (‘school of law’) and often being modified by local custom (adat). But here by this group of Jihad fighters we do see that they follow mainly one leader, Mohammad Al-Areefi, who has made up his own rules and has no concern with traditional law rules. sam Harris writes:
The man has 9.5 million followers on Twitter (twice as many as Pope Francis has). If you can find an important distinction between the faith he preaches and that which motivates the savagery of ISIS, you should probably consult a neurologist.
In his speech responding to the horrific murder of journalist James Foley by a British jihadist, President Obama said:
ISIL speaks for no religion… and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt…. we will do everything that we can to protect our people and the timeless values that we stand for.
I could agree with the saying that ISIS is “a strain of Islam that is barbaric and dysfunctional”, but can not agree by calling it “a nonsense that it’s a “false religion.”” I do not think we might say ISIS is really a religious movement based on the faith in Allah. They use the title of the Most High Allah, but only to cover up their aim to create an own rich empire. Their supposed faith, “which is belief in the absence of convincing evidence” (according Jerry A. Coyne, professor of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago and author of Why Evolution is True), “isn’t true or false, but simply irrational”.
Devout Muslims merely want what everyone wants—political and economic security, a piece of land to call home, good schools for their children, a little leisure to enjoy the company of friends. Unfortunately, most of my fellow liberals appear to believe this. In fact, to not accept this obscurantism as a deep insight into human nature and immediately avert one’s eyes from the teachings of Islam is considered a form of bigotry.
writes Harris. While he also reminds his readers that many Muslims happily ignore the apostasy and blasphemy of their neighbours, view women as the moral equals of men, and consider anti-Semitism contemptible.
But there are also Muslims who drink alcohol and eat bacon. All of these persuasions run counter to the explicit teachings of Islam to one or another degree. And just like moderates in every other religion, most moderate Muslims become obscurantists when defending their faith from criticism. They rely on modern, secular values — for instance, tolerance of diversity and respect for human rights — as a basis for reinterpreting and ignoring the most despicable parts of their holy books. But they nevertheless demand that we respect the idea of revelation, and this leaves us perpetually vulnerable to more literal readings of scripture.***
Religion shall always have impact on one’s behaviour
When people come to a certain faith, this will influence them. We can not deny that religion has an impact on one’s behaviour. As in Christianity we would say Faith without works is death. Without any difference between a person of a faith and another person who does not keep to that faith, that religion would not contribute much to that person nor the society.

Kansas City Chiefs Husain Abdullah after he kneeled for a post-touchdown prayer was penalized 15-yards and may be fined by the NFL for doing what many NFL
Today we can see many cases of genuine Islamophobia, like penalizing someone who shows their Islamic belief in public while letting off others who do the same thing in the name of the Christian God, which the main-group in the U.S.A. considers the right God. ** First of all it is totally wrong to claim god for one self or for only one faith group. The Divine Creator who created all human beings in His image belongs to everybody and wants people to live peacefully together, not hating one each-other, believer or non-believer.
The ones who really seriously live by faith should not be afraid to show it and should live according to that faith, being a good example for that faith. This can not be said of the people behind the “war for an Islamic State” (IS).
The way people behave should others give the right impression or make them to believe those people live according to their ideas of faith, regulations, laws and their faith- or holy books. Too many expressions, too many actions ISIS undertook were contrary to basic Quran teaching. Therefore we can not take them to be people of the ‘True Islam”.
° This is a reaction on: If ISIS Is Not Islamic, then the Inquisition Was Not Catholic There is no such thing as ‘true’ religion & WhyEvolutionIsTrue.
*** One of the reasons, you could say, not bad to have a look at the Quran and compare it to the Bible: Quran versus older Holy Writings of Divine Creator
Please do find as well:
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- Does He exists?
- People Seeking for God 2 Human interpretations
- People Seeking for God 3 Laws and directions
- True faith
- The Immeasurable Grace bestowed on humanity
- Being Religious and Spiritual 1 Immateriality and Spiritual experience
- Being Religious and Spiritual 2 Religiosity and spiritual life
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- Being Religious and Spiritual 4 Philosophical, religious and spiritual people
- Being Religious and Spiritual 5 Gnostic influences
- Being Religious and Spiritual 6 Romantici, utopists and transcendentalists
- Being Religious and Spiritual 7 Transcendence to become one
- Being Religious and Spiritual 8 Spiritual, Mystic and not or well religious
- Trusting, Faith, Calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #11 Prayer #9 Making the Name Holy
- Trusting, Faith, Calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #18 Fulfilment
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- All things written aforetime for our instruction
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- Are you religious, spiritual, or do you belong to a religion, having a faith or interfaith
- Looking to the East and the West for Truth
- Looking for True Spirituality 1 Intro
- Looking for True Spirituality 2 Not restricted to an elite
- Science and the Bible—Do They Really Contradict Each Other?
- Science, belief, denial and visibility 1
- The mythical conflict of science and Scripture (2)
- Reconciling Science and Religion
- A dialogue about the earth moving and spinning around the sun
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- A disciple of Christ “hating” the world
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Additional reading:
- Rabbinic, Heterodoxy, sectarianism and Modern Judaism
- Judaism and Jewish tradition
- Jewish conceptions of childhood
- The Canon Episcopi and Inquisition
- Albigenses. A branch of the Cathars of S. France
- Reminders of Extinct Sect Live on in ‘Cathar Land’
- The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Laguedoc in the High Middle Ages
- The Song of the Cathar Wars: A History of the Albigensian Crusade
- Power & Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy
- Catholic Identity: The Heart of Catholic Education
- Protestantism -Ologies and -Isms
- Essay on War
- How does one define a war?
- Culture, War, and the Military
- Border a boundary/especially the Border, the boundary and adjoining districts between Scotland and England
- Sunnis
- The Hadis and Sunnah
- Mosque: anglicized French cognate for the Arabic word masjid, which literally means “place of prostration.”
- Mosque or Masjid (Arab., masjid, from sajada, ‘he bowed down’, Egypt. dial., masgid > Fr., mosquée). The Muslim place of assembly (jumʿa) for ṣalāt.
- Madrasa, Islamic college and, more specifically, a center for religious and legal studies
- Sharia, the religious law of Islam
- Fatwa, an opinion made by a judicial/religious scholar (a mufti) on a legal, civil, or religious matter, often issued to raise awareness and provide clarification regarding a specific issue for Muslims, who then may or may not follow them
- Adat, Land, and Popular Democracy: Dayak Politics in East Kalimantan
- The Roots of Law in Malay Muslim Society
- Reform of Sharīʿah law
- Ḥanafīyah (Islamic law)
- Ikhtilāf (Islamic concept)
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Related articles
- The War on the Cathars (newdawnmagazine.com)
The “Cathar heresy” that struck Southern France in the 13th century, and was viciously persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church, remains a pool of interest and intrigue. What really happened, and what did the Cathars actually believe?
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an estimated 200,000 to one million people died during the twenty year campaign, which began in earnest in Béziers in July 1209. Papal troops marched to Béziers where they ordered that 222 people, suspected of being Cathars, be handed over to them by the town’s citizens. When this was refused, the papal troops decided to attack. One of the crusaders asked their leader, the Papal Legate Arnaud-Amaury, how to distinguish between the 222 heretics and the thousands of faithful Catholics that lived in the city. “Kill them all,” was the abbot’s alleged reply. “God will recognise his own!” The number of dead that day was between 7,000 and 20,000, the latter figure being the one quoted when Arnaud-Amaury reported back to the Pope. - Cathars – the crushing of a medieval heresy (thetemplarknight.com)
Rome had fought to establish its primacy as the centre of the church – with the pope, as the successor of Saint Peter, as its leader. This was not a given in the early days of Christianity and there were still some who baulked at the idea of Rome telling them what they should be thinking and how to pray. One such group were the Cathars and their beliefs were complete anathema to Rome.
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the Cathars looked at the Catholic church and saw the work of the evil deity with its prelates and bishops decked in jewels and fine robes. What made this situation so dangerous for Rome was that the Cathars included much of the southern French nobility in the Languedoc. If the secular power could not be trusted to deliver the people’s souls to the church – and their contributions – then rocky times lay ahead for the Pope. - ‘Credible Threats’: Islam Determined To Assassinate Pope; Trip To Pro-ISIS Turkey Looms (patdollard.com)
Pope Francis is at risk of an assassination attempt by the Islamic extremists of I, the Vatican has been warned, ahead of his first visit to a Muslim-majority country this weekend.
+Jihadists from Isil have in recent weeks boasted of wanting to extend their caliphate to Rome, the heart of Western Christendom, and have talked of planting the jihadist black flag on top of St Peter’s Basilica. - The Holy Inquisition: Dominic and the Dominicans (insightscoop.typepad.com)
We must first realize that there were two inquisitions or, to put it better, two currents of inquisition, quite dissimilar in their origins and functions. The first, in the thirteenth century, was the result of a long process set in motion by the popes; it is often called “the pontifical inquisition”. The second answered to an initiative of the Catholic kings of Spain who, in 1478, asked the pope to reorganize the former institution. This tool of royal absolutism – aimed at the religious minorities of Jews and Moslems, who were being assimilated with difficulty into the national life, and at the current trends of thought which seemed to be threatening the social order – would not be suppressed until the nineteenth century. This was the object of “the black legend”, so tenacious that even today the term “inquisition” immediately arouses emotional reactions and evokes concepts of fanaticism and intolerance among the people. The kings of Spain often appealed to Dominicans like Thomas of Torquemada, but more often, from the end of the sixteenth century on, to Jesuits. - The Cathars (thepressnet.com)
The end of Catharism began with the Albigensian Crusade ), which was initiated in 1209-1229 by Pope Innocent III to annihilate the “heresy” in the South of France and maintain the power of the Roman Church. Many of the handed texts show the distorted image of the Cathars which was drawn in order to discredit them and to banish them from society like the pestilence. - Osama bin Laden Death – Vengence (stevenddeacon.wordpress.com)
Most Muslims share our condemnation of these Islāmic Extremists and worship according to Islāmic traditions of love and faith.
As we are vigilant we must also be mindful of the fact that there is blood on Christian hands as well.
- Muslim Coalition Denounces ISIS for Steven Sotloff’s Murder (pr.com)
The murder of innocent civilians is immoral, illegal, barbaric, and in direct contravention of the major tenets of Islam and Islamic law. No cause or purpose is served by this heinous act other than a clear manifestation of this group’s cruel and un-Islamic nature.
“We are outraged that we once again find ourselves in the position to condemn this organization that calls itself the ‘Islamic State’, also known by the acronym ISIS, for killing Mr. Sotloff, especially so soon after its members murdered journalist James Foley,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO secretary general.
- Stumbling Into an Insight: (brothersjuddblog.com)
Well, if ISIS is not Islamic, then the Inquisition was not Catholic.Which is precisely what B. Netanyau demonstrates in his magisterial, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain -
Netanyahu Defends The Islamic Religion, And Says This About The Jihadist Terrorism Problem: “It’s not Islam.” (shoebat.com)
Typically, its first victims are other Muslims, but it spares no one. Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Kurds — no creed, no faith, no ethnic group is beyond its sights. And it’s rapidly spreading in every part of the world.
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