From a friend:

Terry Lane “God: The Interview” (ABC; Sydney: 1993)

Do you know why the Black death took such a terrible toll in Europe in the fourteenth century? Because the Jesuits had this amazing notion that their were witches everywhere and that cats were their familiars – so it wasn'[t enough to burn the witches (thousands of them incidentally), they had to also stamp out the cats. So there were no cats to kill the rats, which brted like rodents and carried the infected fleas all over the place. pp.56 – 57

The method of examining expected witches is interesting. First the woman was asked if she believed in witches. If she said no, then she was by definition a witch and in league with the prince of Liars. on the other hand, if she said yes, she was immediately asked where she was on Thursday night when the storm broke and the cows died. p.57

And a thing cannot be moral in a religious sense and immoral in a secular sense, can it? Truth is one. That which is true scientifically cannot be untrue religiously, can it? p.66

And consider this. If there were an outbreak of bubonic plague today, what would you do? Pray? Or start putting out the rat bait? Where would you expect your help to come from – heaven or the medical laboratories? pp.73 -74

Who is seriously going to argue that Martin Luther wasn’t a real Christian? He even has a whole sect named after him. Or that the popes who revelled in the Inquisition weren’t ‘real Christians’. Or that the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Tomas de Torquemada, was not a real Christian. He was such a real Christian that he sent 10 220 people to the stake and 97 371 to the galleys for various forms of heresy. You can’t get any more real than that. … They never tortured a heretic more than once – they merely suspended the process a few hours and then continued the same torture. But don’t think for a moment they were not motivated by anything other than Christian love. The torture instruments were regularly sprinkled with holy water. pp99-101