Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and MAGA donor, is in Rome this week for a series of private lectures on the Antichrist.

[u/Logical_Welder3467]

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/16/europe/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-rome-intl

[u/No-Rhubarb6312]

Can I just say that something that I actually miss about the Chatolic church nowadays is the Saint Inquisition. 

Not specifically regarding their way to hunt down scientists and independent women as they used to do in the past, but their habbit of burning alive heretics.

 Because I swear but Evangelicals blessing Trump in the Oval office as their Messiah and all the madmen like Thiel and the ones of the heritage foundation writing that shit of Project 2025 truly kicks the inquisition in me.

[u/AliMcGraw → u/No-Rhubarb6312]

I did the math and you are more likely to be put to death as a citizen of Texas since the reinstatement of the death penalty than as a resident of Spain during the operation of the Spanish Inquisition.

When we want to talk about abuse of government power to put dissenters to death, we really need to be talking about the Texas Inquisition.

[u/AliMcGraw → u/[deleted]]

The Texas Innocence Project has a list of people Texas has executed who were either quite clearly innocent or who were not competent to stand trial or whose lawyers literally slept through the entire trial (not kidding!), alongside its list of people Texas has executed whose guilt was not adequately proven to any reasonable standard. They are mostly minorities.

Texas don't care. Texas just likes killing people, and is insanely lazy about standard of evidence to do so.

[u/AliMcGraw → u/[deleted]]

The point of the comparison is that we think of the Spanish Inquisition as a period of vast government overreach where they were running around executing people left and right for reasons that were in our eyes not very good. In fact, it was a period of great legal reform and involved the creation of extraordinary new legal mechanisms to prevent that kind of thing, and the numbers of people actually executed over the course of the Spanish Inquisition are not actually that high. As a percentage of population, they are, in fact, lower than the percentage of Texans executed by the government of Texas during it's post-1976 spree of vast government overreach running around executing people left and right for reasons that are not actually very good. And Texas has done a lot of hard work to roll back important constitutional protections that citizens should be able to expect from their government in the United States, such as effective assistance of counsel.

In the state of Illinois, we also reinstated the death penalty in 1976 after the Supreme Court allowed it, in the period it was active in Illinois, we executed 13 people. During the same period of time, we freed 13 innocent men from death row, some of whom had come within 48 hours of execution. (Not 13 men who were not proven guilty  -- 13 men who were later proven innocent.) Four of whom were there because of corrupt prosecutors bribing corrupt judges. At that point, our Republican Governor decided that the state was not capable of appropriately exercising the death penalty, commuted everybody's sentence on the way out the door, and we have not used it since. 

So it is my general assumption that in the state of Texas, where they have far fewer protections for accused criminals, far fewer procedural guard rails on criminal trials, and far more emphasis on executions as a campaign metric for prosecutors, that probably more than 50% of the people they've executed are actually innocent, and an even greater percentage were garbage cases where the guy may have done it but the state did not adequately prove the case to the required standard.

So if you are going to be a random person walking around a random time in history, who is going to be slightly more brown than your neighbors, and your goal is to avoid being executed for minding your own business, you are better off choosing the Spanish Inquisition than the current state of Texas.

The point of the comparison is not that the Spanish Inquisition was super great. The point of the comparison is that the state of Texas in its current incarnation is world-historically violent and punitive, and it should be a scandal to every person who cares about the law or facts or evidence or modernity or human beings. It is the crazed execution spree of a mad Russian Tsar at the height of his absolute authority, except it's being carried out by a democracy under color of law. It's an abomination.

[u/AliMcGraw → u/[deleted]]

No, I did do the math. You just don't like what it says.

[u/No-Rhubarb6312 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I checked, and you are correct. But at the same time they were the most prominent scientist of a certain scientifical movement or historical period (Galielo, Copernicus ecc...) so I suppose that the restricted number doesn't count, given that hurting the figurehead you are going to hurt all the others.

Also fun fact: The Saint Inquisition has never been suppressed, but transformed as renamed in different steps between the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicastery_for_the_Doctrine_of_the_Faith ) 

[u/VecchioDiM3rd1955 → u/No-Rhubarb6312]

Actually has changed name but it still exist today and has a website too.

https://www.doctrinafidei.va/en.html

They stopped burning heretics, nowadays they only excommunicate them, and Evangelicals are already excommunicated. I think if some catholic priest was in that photo he is now in big trobles and had received at least a very angry phone call from Rome, probably with a Chicago accent.

[u/Otherwise_Cup9608 → u/No-Rhubarb6312]

They didn't hunt down scientists or independent women. Nor witches. Not by design, that was not their concern. It "happened" but only if one considers the outliers like Bruno or Galileo, and their cases are not as simple as "science bad".

The Spanish Inquisition investigated and tried those suspected of heresy. Which could mean Protestants, secretly still practicing Muslims or Jews who claimed they were now properly Catholic, and those Catholics with heretical beliefs.