Was it theocratic or global warming reasons that Catholics and protestants stopped burning people at the stake?
Although rather a flippant question, it does raise useful contemplation. Mind you, burning at the stake was not the prerogative of Catholics and Protestants, not was it the only inhuman activity they got up to. Eventually, people reject brutality. This was helped by the secularisation of societies, but it was still a function of the attitude of people. The ‘Christian’ based faiths have moved on from that kind of obscene behaviour and so will Islam eventually. Whenever brutality is practised, it demeans and degrades those who perpetrate it. It thrives on primitive environments where life is hard and harsh. Eventually, these societies will increase their standard of living (there is nothing that the religious leaders can do to stop that), and will reject brutality as an acceptable way to behave. The religious leaders will either adjust or be ignored and become irrelevant. So it was neither theocratic or global warming, but human nature.
It was the change in criminal law. *Most* of the people burned at the stake for religiously-*based* reasons were actually executed by the political authorities – not any church (though often, as in England and the American Puritan colonies, the two were largely indistinguishable). When punishments for crimes began to be more humane – mostly as a result of democratic influence, but also as a result of technological improvements (prisons became secure) and economic improvements (these nations could afford to support prison populations), the *need* to execute criminals was no longer present and so that most severe of punishments was relegated to only the most severe of crimes. SO, it was neither theocratic nor environmental, but political.
