The Medieval Inquisition: The Definition Of Religion

“Religion” appeared as a word as early as c. 1200. It has an Anglo-French origin and constitutes as a basic vocabulary term for any native English speaker. In 1200, “religion” maintained the same definition as it does today, which is “a state of life bound by monastic vows or the condition of one who is a member of a religious order, especially in the Roman Catholic Church” (Religion). Before this time, however, there were many different words pronounced similarly to “religion”, but carried a very different meaning and drastically different spellings. Relegere, for example, was a word that meant “to read over again” and the word religare had a definition of “to bind”. Although these definitions are interesting, there are many more words that …show more content…
A good example of this would be the Medieval Inquisition, which occurred from 1487-1834, mainly in Italy. During the Medieval Inquisition, in an attempt to “purify” the church, priests would travel throughout small Italian towns and call a town meeting. These meetings were labeled as optional, but it would create suspicious towards your loyalty to the Catholic Church if you did not attend. During these meetings, the priests would give the townsfolk an opportunity to confess their sins. If someone came forward and did confess, they were given a minor punishment, and then expected to list names of those who also had committed a sin. Often, in order to avoid any further punishment by the church, confessors would list names of perfectly innocent people. This led to a lot of innocent people being put on trial and severely punished, or even killed, for no good reason. Eventually, the Inquisition became a vicious cycle of Priests pursuing rumors, and people listing names in order to save themselves. But as the years went on, the act of torturing sinners slowly disappeared within the Catholic Church. In the beginning of the Inquisition, the Church had felt like they were pursuing a holy purpose and didn’t feel like they had to answer to anyone. But more and more people began to question the morality and evidence of …show more content…
There are some people that use the guise of their religion in order to justify discrimination against minorities, purely because they have a deep, illogical hatred of that specific minority. This can be seen predominately in reference to the LGBTQ+ community and unmarried women. An upsetting amount of people tend to use the name of Christianity in vain when arguing why they refuse to marry gay couples, provide abortion services, or even accept transgender people as having a right to life. It’s difficult to look at current events and not see some sort of discrimination being committed because it goes against personal beliefs. The Kim Davis story, in which a Kentucky county clerk refused to issue a gay couple’s marriage license purely because it went against her personal morals, is a perfect example of the religious morals can be used to justify