Gore Vidal - Knights Templar on Trial TV - Templars Lost Treasure TV - Wolf Hall TV - Graham Greene - Robert G Ingersoll - Henry David Thoreau - Saint Thomas Aquinas - Charles Bradlaugh - Sentence Passed on Joan of Arc - Irenaeus - Thomas More - Peter Ackroyd - Yevgeny Zamyatin - American Heretics TV -
… for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal to a Christian bishop hunting ‘heresy’, as they call any opinion contrary to their own. Gore Vidal, Julian, 1964
On Friday the 13th October 1307 a real-life nightmare began for the elite Knights Templar: on that Black Friday hundreds were summoned to Paris; six hundred and twenty were arrested without warning and thrown into prison. The charges against them added up to the most heinous of crimes ... Heresy! Knights Templar on Trial, National Geographic 2013
Thrown into prison and tortured, many confessed to shocking crimes of heresy. Templars Lost Treasure, National Geographic 2012
It’s 1531. Having failed with the Pope, Henry seeks the power to annul his own marriage to Catherine by asking Parliament to declare him Supreme Head of the Church of England. Those loyal to Rome battle against the advancing tide of heresy. Chief amongst them the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More. Wolf Hall III: Anna Regina, caption, BBC 2015
Your majesty. The heretics you have around you must be put into a great fire. If you don’t do it, you’ll burn yourself. Here’s one – if you marry this one you’ll reign seven months. Wolf Hall III: Anna Regina, prophetess
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. Graham Greene
Heresy is what the minority believe. It is the real name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. Robert Ingersoll
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man. Henry David Thoreau
If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy. Saint Thomas Aquinas
The word heretic ought to be a term of honour. Charles Bradlaugh
We declare that you are fallen again into your former errors and under the sentence of excommunication which you originally incurred we decree that you are a relapsed heretic; and by this sentence which we deliver in writing and pronounce from this tribunal, we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you, praying this same secular power on this side of death and the mutilation of your limbs, to moderate its judgment towards you, and if true signs of repentance appear in you to permit the sacrament of penance to be administered to you. Sentence passed on Joan of Arc
Let us now look at the inconsistent opinions of these heretics ... how they do not agree when discussing the same points, but across the board, in things and names, they set forth opinions that are mutually discordant. Irenaeus, A.D. 183-186, Against Heresies 1:11:1
As for heretics as they be, the clergy doth denounce them. And as they be well worthy, the temporality doth burn them. And after the fire of Smithfield, hell doth receive them, where the wretches burn forever. Sir Thomas More, The Search or the Inner Man p4
More had already been given permission to read heretical books but, by the spring of 1528, the dissemination of those forbidden texts could not be halted ... Within three months of Bilney’s trial, a concerted assault upon presumed heretics was conducted by More and his ecclesiastical colleagues. Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More pp270-271
More’s first defence of the Church: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, was written in this year of death and sickness. ibid. p273
He [More] approved of burning, therefore, and in that respect was no different from most of his contemporaries. ibid. p296
But then Thomas Cromwell struck again, on this occasion by introducing a petition which complained of the injustice involved in trials for heresy; here, of course, he was attacking the methods and procedures close to More’s own conduct. ibid. p316
Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought. Yevgeny Zamyatin
Nobody has the absolute truth. American Heretics, Reverend Robin Meyers, author Why the Christian Right is Wrong, Amazon 2019
Oklahoma: We are Southern Baptist in our orientation. ibid.
This gets to be called the Bible Belt largely because the kind of religion that was in the South created in the Civil War and came out of the support of slavery. It’s the kind of a religion that’s stark. ibid. dude
Social justice churches will thrive. Especially now. ibid. Myers