sublimestatanist
Active member
That's a very good question and I'm not sure if I have a full enough answer. Personally I think it's a money grab where priests offer their prayer services and put on a show to placate grieving relatives of a sick person. During the archaic period it was commonplace for people to believe sickness to be the result of 'evil spirits' while at the same time the monarchies in Europe suppressed science and even learning. It was a crime for people to learn to read as literacy was reserved only to people of status.Artoria Pendragon said:
To think they put such control over people's lives. Today we're mostly made illiterate through television and the idea of instant gratification and information via technology, which is largely monopolized by companies like Google and such. We also have spellcheck/auto-correct which not only makes people lazy but it also has a very poor vocabulary.
Things like Wikipedia can have such lies too, one being that Galileo was never tortured. (Mind you it can have great information other times).
At the time he was 70 and any mention of torture would had resulted in an cry throughout Europe, something the Vatican church wanted to avoid at all costs.
Was Galileo Tortured (1878):
"The two preliminary appeals to terror were described as the "verbal scaring" (territio verbalis), and the "real scaring" (territio realis), while the words "rigorous examination were reserved, strictly speaking, for the final scene of actual agony. It is clear, however, from passages of the "Sacro Arsenale," that in certain cases confessions elicited by the second method of proceeding were described and made under the rigorous examination, though this laxity of expression is explicitly stated not to extend to the first. The text of the sentence against Galileo therefore implies, at the least, that he was carried into the torture-chamber and submitted to some form of territio realis."
Any "rigorous examination" (esame rigoroso) by inquisitors that didn't result in permanently debilitating injury in these terms wouldn't fall under torture even though it was just that.
The way these priests would 'exercise' people was to me a way to either 1.) make things worse and blame it on a malicious spirit, or 2.) have some dumb luck or (in some cases) positive results which further indoctrinated people into faith. Even with the former people would be left with the assurance that the afflicted person wouldn't go to 'hell' as this fear was cemented in people's mind at the time.
It just goes to show when whomever is in power says something, the majority of people follow. This phenomena is called cultural assimilation and it's amazing how much this is exploited. It's the same how animals are social and follow the lead of others, learning from their peers to better adapt to changes in their environment.
There were many videos that show this in humans. One was an elevator prank where several actors would face the wrong way. A confused non-actor would enter and nearly always would turn the wrong way even though they knew it was wrong.
Another example, there was a patio restaurant where 2 joggers ran by followed by a third. After, someone else got up and started running and suddenly everyone else started running as though there was some kind of danger. People are bred and raised as lemmings these days and it takes real courage to go against the flow of society.
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