Reformation passions resurrected in the twenty-first century

Reading history, it is sometimes difficult to recapture the fervor and convictions which led to so many tragic outcomes.  An example would be the Massacre at Matanzas Inlet.  

The Massacre at Matanzas Inlet was the killing of French troops by Spanish troops near the Matanzas Inlet in 1565, at the order of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, adelantado of Spanish Florida (La Florida).

The Spanish Crown in the 16th century laid claim to a vast area that included what is now the state of Florida, along with much of what is now the southeastern United States, on the strength of several Spanish expeditions made in the first half of the 1500s, including those of Ponce de Leon and Hernando de Soto. However, Spanish attempts to establish a lasting presence in La Florida failed until September 1565, when Menéndez founded St. Augustine about 30 miles south of the newly established French settlement at Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River. Menéndez had not known that the French had already arrived in the area, and upon discovering the existence of Fort Caroline, he aggressively moved to expel those whom he considered heretics and intruders.

When the French Huguenot leader, Jean Ribault, learned of the Spanish presence nearby, he also decided on a swift assault and sailed south from Fort Caroline with most of his troops to search for the Spanish settlement. His ships were struck by a storm (probably a tropical storm) and most of the French force was lost at sea, leaving Ribault and several hundred survivors in two groups shipwrecked with limited food and supplies: one group about 15 miles south of the Spanish colony, and Ribault's group much farther southward at Cape Canaveral. Meanwhile, Menéndez marched north, overwhelmed the remaining defenders of Fort Caroline, massacred most of the French Protestants in the town, and left an occupying force in the rechristened Fort Mateo. Upon returning to St. Augustine, he received news that Ribault and his troops were stranded to the south. Menéndez quickly moved to attack and massacred the French force of two separate parties on the shore of what became known as the Matanzas River, sparing only the Catholics and a few skilled workmen among the French.

It would be easy to dismiss this as merely a territorial dispute but the actual accounts make clear that these few hundred Europeans, perched a mere thirty miles apart on the littoral of a dangerous and unknown shore, thousands of miles from home, were committed to wiping out one another entirely owing to doctrinal differences. 

All through Reformation history and the Thirty Years' War, there are similar instances of astonishingly immoral inhumanity as well as people willingly going to their deaths for their religious beliefs based on seemingly thin doctrinal differences.

One such was the issue of baptism; whether it can be done to children (who cannot understand the commitment being invoked) or only for adults who have the agency to knowingly make the commitment.  See Anabaptists as one group who suffered persecution and massacres for their conviction that only adults should be baptized.  

You can work your way into the mindset of the time but it is difficult to simulate the convictions which were so powerful.  As a consequence, you are left with the horrified sense of "How could they have done that?"

But jaded and secularized as we are, we still have some of the same cleavages in belief systems today.  You just have to see them for what they are.

The passions being invoked around transgenderism is an example.  Especially the zealotry in some corners which lead to imposing chemical and surgical transitions upon unsuspecting children at the behest of the Munchausen by proxy adults around them.

For those of us who regard ourselves as sane and rational, these procedures are clearly and inescapably a particularly cruel form of child abuse.  There is no way for an adult to divine a child's future desires and character in such a compelling way as to warrant drastic and irreversible actions.  

For those ideological zealots committed to childhood transitions, they similarly see anyone standing in the way of such operations as hopeless barbarians.

I think the sane adults are clearly the betters of the ideological zealots and that there really is no common ground on which to reach any sort of "compromise."  For the first time, I begin to understand the passion of those fifteenth and sixteenth century perpetrators and victims.