The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

In God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, journalist Cullen Murphy calls overemphasis on the numbers “pointless and distasteful.”14 He compares it to Rudolf Hess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, who, when confronted with a copy of his confession after World War II, scratched out the part where “three million” victims were mentioned and replaced it with “two million.” At the end of the day, the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, a global fixture with a universal mandate to spread the love of the Gospels, went on a bloody rampage. However many lives were lost, Cullen focuses on the “deep psychological imprint” of an Inquisition that “levied penalties of some sort on hundreds of thousands of people” and generally affected millions. A campaign in which the “fear and shame instilled by any individual case, even a minor one, rippled outward to affect a wide social circle.”15 Now that’s how you kill the religion with no name.