As apologetics go, all I can say this is, "Wow."Coke Bear said:
Why were the Spanish Inquisitions started? Because Spain had finally rid the Iberian peninsula of Muslims after 700 years of oppression. The state instituted the Inquisitions. The Church interrogated the "heretics." Spain, which was a Catholic country, wanted to insure that the Muslims were gone. Sadly, some innocent Jews were persecuted in this.
Actually, that's not all I can say. Your summation of the Inquisition is about as sugar-coated as it gets. Hard to know where to start.
As to Muslim "oppression," I'm sure that is the Church's point of view. It would not a historian's point of view. By and large, the treatment of religious minorities during the centuries of Muslim rule was much more enlightened than it was in the early centuries after Christians regained control of Spain. Yes, Christians had to pay a tax. Yes, there were some occasional episodes of violent persecution. But the more typical feature of Muslim rule was the notion of "convivencia," or living together.
Christian persecution of Jews was a feature of Christian rule, not a bug. It was so bad that the Jews of Spain welcomed the Muslim invaders in the 8th century as their liberators and assisted them in their conquest. And though there were occasional spasms of violence against Jews in the centuries of Muslim rule, Jews generally prospered in Moorish Spain.
Some innocent Jews were persecuted? More than some. When the Christian rulers captured the last Moorish stronghold in southern Spain, the persecution of Jews began again in earnest. In the same year that Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus across the Atlantic, they decreed that all Spanish Jews must either convert, leave Spain or be killed.
Some converted. But there was later a backlash against these "conversos" for having impure blood.
A surprising number, conversos and otherwise, came to the New World, and some continued to practice their religion in secret.
Others left for other parts of Europe. A number went to the Netherlands, which was under Spanish control until the early 17th century. (I don't have conclusive proof, but I have good evidence that my ancestors were among the Spanish Jews who left Spain for Holland, where at some point they became Christians.)
To justify the Inquisition on the grounds that Spain had to be rid of Muslims is just an awful rationalization. And it wasn't just confined to Spain. The conquistadores and priests brought the Inquisition to the New World, too, where it was practiced against English, French and some Dutch Protestants whenever they came under Spanish authority.
To try to pawn responsibility of the Inquisition off on the state rather than the Church is misleading at best. The Spanish state and church were joined at the hip. The Inquisition would not have happened without the Church's direction and leadership.
The Inquisition was a horrible period, and much blood was on the Church's hands because of it. As you note, we look on the use of torture today as sinful and barbarous. But what makes it all the worse is the Church knew it was barbarous even then. I'll point you to the letter that Pope Nicholas I wrote in 866 to the newly converted Bulgars, expressly forbidding torture (see chapter LXXXVI, near the end). The Pope condemned torture for the same reasons you did in your post above.
The best traditions of the church were expressed by the Brazilian Cardinal Paulo Arns, who opposed the use of torture by the Brazilian military junta. As the dictatorship was ending, Cardinal Arns helped facilitate the publication of the military's torture archives that named names and exposed what had been done. The resulting book, Brasil: Nunca Mais, took the country by storm. Asked why he had been involved in this effort, even at personal risk, Cardinal Arns cited the Letter to the Bulgars. And then he cited Genesis 1 -- that all human beings were created in the image of God. To torture a human being, said Cardinal Arns, "violates God himself who created him."
But if expect people to take the church seriously, we cannot just focus on the best traditions. We also have to acknowledge and repent of the worst. We cannot hide behind dishonest rationalizations without forfeiting some legitimacy. The only honest way to look at the Inquisition was as a rebellion against God's moral law. We might speak of its good intentions or understandable motives, but the bottom line is that it was immoral. And we ought to acknowledge that there were periods when the Church may have done as much harm as good.
The harm is not measured only by the number of lives directly impacted -- the 3,000 (to use your figure) killed in the Inquisition or the many thousands more who underwent torture, or the many, many thousands more who were expelled upon threat of death. It is also the harm to the greater community. If you disagree, consider the damage done by the clergy abuse scandal. It goes way beyond those actually molested. It goes way beyond the individual priests (300 named today in Pennsylvania alone!). It extends to the loss of trust by millions, and to the congregations closed because the Church had to see properties to pay legal damages for what the priests did and what the hierarchy covered up. The only way to regain trust is by honest admission of failure, and that's as true of the Church's evildoing in the 1500s as it is of the 1900s.
