Torture In The Middle Ages: Revisited
Torture rack in the Tower of London
A German researcher has studied medieval criminal law and found that our image of the sadistic treatment of criminals in the Dark Ages is only partly true. Torture and gruesome executions were designed in part to ensure the salvation of the convicted person’s soul.
Peter Nirsch would have been seen as a monster at any time in history. While traveling south through Germany, he had a penchant for cutting open pregnant women and removing their unborn babies. Nirsch butchered more than 500 people before he was captured near Nuremberg in September 1581.
The courts were not squeamish in their treatment of the serial killer. First he was tortured, and then hot oil was poured into his wounds. Then the culprit was tied to the rack, where his arms and legs were broken. In the…
The Question of Questions
By Robert Singer
Can Jared Diamond’s “Geographic Determinism” answer “Yali’s ‘Cargo’ Question”: Why “they” are so rich and “we” are so poor?
Geographic Determinism: The shape and location of continents, flora, fauna, microbes, water, climate, topography determine history: Civilizations benefit because human populations with an east-west orientation (east-west) have a more consistent climate than those with a north-south orientation (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared M. Diamond).
No, it cannot.
Civilizations benefit because God and the House of Rothschild so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son to the human populations with an east-west orientation, that whosoever believeth in him shall not have to obey the laws of nature.
Original sin entered the world when man went from trying to survive, to trying to justify his existence. “Cogito, ergo sum“, less ambiguously translated: “I am thinking, therefore I exist”, which is the foundation of Western philosophy.
Societies of civilized savages began when hunters and gatherers started farming and discovered toilet paper…
