Early
forms of trial were devised to ascertain the will of god. Trial by
ordeal involved subjecting miscreants to cruel and often
life-threatening attack such as burning or drowning. Survival or death
was taken as denoting innocence or guilt ordained by god! These methods
survived well into the 16th century, when they were used as methods of
torture to elicit confessions from women accused of witchcraft. Mostly
elderly women were stripped and examined for blemishes or warts on their
bodies called the marks of the devils or ‘imps’ that they were
supposed to nurture!
The
implementation of the ‘Wrath of God’ on sinners has been carried out
zealously by his devotees throughout history, contrary to the
supposed biblical tradition of turning the other cheek, or giving the
benefit of the doubt. The harsh treatment of miscreants was in great
contrast to their claim to have care and compassion for the fallen. The
pattern was more of persecution, torture, incarceration deportation, or
hanging of wrongdoers even for the most minor misdemeanours. Their
punishment was harshest for those who opposed their religious teachings,
heretics, and unbelievers.
This was
illustrated most notoriously by the Roman Catholic Church’s
persecution of heretics and deviants through its Courts of the
Inquisition over most of mainland Europe from the 12th to the 17th
Centuries, eventually abolished in 1835. People who were denounced,
for whatever reason, political or personal spite, as heretics,
apostates, or witches, were seized, tortured to extort confession and
hanged or burned at the stake. The worst effects of the Inquisition were
spared the British, because of the Reformation and the destruction of
the monasteries, events that are usually portrayed as acts of
desecration rather than relief. Unfortunately, the Protestant
religion soon produced its own fanatics, the Puritans, who copied many
of the tactics of the Church of Rome, particularly in persecuting
Catholics, non-believers and witches.
During this
time, the Roman Catholic priests, despite their supposed vows of poverty
and chastity, alienated themselves from the people by assiduously
accruing wealth to themselves and their Churches from the imposition and
collection of compulsory tithes. These were taxes from people whose
lives were already blighted by extreme poverty and poor health, who were
unable even to feed themselves and their children.2
Harsh
punishment of miscreants,many of whom were drawn into
crime by destitution was the order of the day Hanging, flogging and
deportation were the regular punishments for even the most trivial
crimes. Property crime however petty or whatever the motives or
extenuating circumstances, and any attack involving the better off (who
would steal from the destitute) being used as justification for cruelty
and death.
Women
bore the brunt of the superstition, misogyny, and puritan fanaticism of
the 15th and 16th centuries, when many were hunted down as ‘witches’.
They were persecuted, imprisoned, and hanged for being possessed by the
devil. Old women and a few children and men were hounded by the ‘Great
Witch finders’ three most notably in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia,
events that have since been well chronicled, a pattern that was to be
repeated in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, now well known from Arthur Miller’s
famous play ‘The Crucible’.
From
pre-Roman times through the Middle Ages and the Victorian era, up to the
present day, zealous punishment has been and still is meted out by the
pious upholders of the religious establishment, the most punitive
usually being the most piously sanctimonious. Prison regimes today
are still based on traditional principles of retribution and revenge,
and progress towards constructive, rational treatment of prisoners,
aimed at reducing offending behaviour as a lifestyle, using humane and
effective programmes, is slow. Slow because of the irrational attitudes
that enforce vengeful punishment that has proved so ineffective as the
dominant ethos.
How much
progress might we have expected, had the principles of encouraging good
behaviour by example, reward and appreciation been used, instead of
fear, rejection and the stick of the god-fearing. How much better and
more effective, the patience and care of rational, evidence-based
teaching, rather than the wrath and vengeance of the scriptures!
Another
characteristic of the typical religious attitude to crime and punishment
is to be seen in its rigid Church-run institutions, schools, workhouses,
prisons and asylums; their enthusiastic use of punitive regimes and
cruel treatment of ‘inmates’, be they ‘the poor’, children,
criminals, the mentally or physically ill, or the disabled. Consonant
with the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor, the Poor Laws and
the punitive correctional establishments were all administered by the
great and good, upright, god-fearing members of the community and
Church.
Cruel too
were their policies of removing children from their single young
mothers, and from the homes of ‘unsatisfactory’ parents, to increase
their chances of good god-fearing education by fostering and adoption;
and punishment of ‘fallen’ women, their incarceration and harsh
treatment in asylums for ‘immorality’ (having illegitimate babies,
and having or procuring abortions). The Roman Catholic nuns, ‘Brides
of Christ’ who ran the ‘Magdalen Laundries’ 4 (Magdalen meaning
‘a reformed prostitute’ or ‘a reformatory for prostitutes from
Mary Magdalen’, CED) for girls and young women who became pregnant out
of marriage in Ireland, must have been among the most unfeeling of
women.
Only now
are we becoming fully aware of the excessive cruelty, and the mental,
physical, and sexual abuse inflicted on vulnerable children and young
adults at the hands of priests and nuns in institutions, industrial and
convent schools. Orphans and abandoned children, and children with
physical or mental disabilities in need of care, found themselves in ‘homes’
that were far from homely, treated harshly by ‘fathers’, ‘brothers’,
‘mothers’, and ‘sisters’ of the Church.
Amazingly,
these institutions existed well into the 1960s. Such is the control
exerted by the religions over their believers that only now are the
excesses of their systems of harsh religious control coming to light, as
is the even more widespread extent of child sex abuse by priests in
Europe and the US.
All these
aspects of religion in practice were common well into the mid-1900s,
some even into the 2000s if the reports are true of the abuse meted out
to children by Catholic priests and some evangelical American sects.
Since vast sums of money have already been paid out in compensation, one
must assume that the accusations were verified and found to be true.
Only in
relation to the punishment of its paedophile clergy does the church see
fit to protect a few men from the punishment of the law and allow them
to hold positions in which they can and do re-offend.
Elsewhere I
have dealt with the effects of harsh punishment for relatively minor
crimes, obviously less now than in the past, but still bad relative to
the living conditions of the rest of society. We still imprison people
who are mentally ill, drug addicts, people who are more weak than evil,
and not violent or a danger to society. The effect of this is to punish
the families, and especially the children of such families, and far from
repairing the damaged lives it turns out better-trained criminals, who
may well feel more angry and aggressive towards society and become
habituated to a criminal lifestyle.
How much
suffering has been caused through the centuries from these god-loving,
god-fearing people, their Churches, and the institutions over which they
had control! It is sad to think how different so many lives might have
been, had liberal, humanitarian attitudes prevailed over the cruel
reality of god-worship.
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