Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Thursday 2 October 2014

A matter (but not a game) of numbers.

During the first 20 - the most violent - years of the Spanish Inquisition,
at the end of the 15th century, some 2,000 people were killed in the name of Faith.

By contrast, about a quarter of a million people (out of a population of roughly 800,000) were killed in the Vendée [Western France] when a peasant rebellion against the rationalist, anti-religious, Enlightenment-engendered French Revolution was put down by Republican armies in 1794.
And some 17,000 men, women and children were guillotined in the purge that ended in July that year, including the man who had designed the new revolutionary calendar which featured the 'rational' ten-day week.

- Read John Gray's review of Karen Armstrong's new book
on  Religion and the History of Violence.

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