Well it depends, if my neighbours treat me like a "witch" was treated in the HRE I would probably prefer the inquisition, also if was treated like some violent mobs treated religious minority across the Christian and Islamic world then again the inquisition is possibly better.
Oh no, you're missing the context--Fabius Maximus would rather deal with the Inquisition than have his modern neighbors, in the present day, ostracizing him over his political beliefs. He would rather deal with the Spanish Inquisition than not be invited to the neighborhood barbecue.
Well the source you linked took for granted the idea that the inquisition stifled economic growth or somehow discouraged "thinking for oneself" in general, as if heresies and not being Christian was the extent of "thinking for oneself" in early modern Spain, never mind the fact that presence of protestants in Spain was minimal at best to begin with and the inquisition had little to work with on this front(I guess we can pretend that the less than a thousand people prosecuted and the inefficient censorship was all it took...).
This very idea of connecting persecution to economical success is incredibly bizzarre when places like England and the Netherlands were relatively more advanced despite being very discriminatory against Catholics themselves.
On the other hand, we know that persecution can lead to economic problems, because wealth and poverty can be transmitted intergenerationally. If a community was subject to heavy persecution by the Spanish Inquisition--say it was heavily Jewish up until all Jews had to convert or leave, then the people there were widely suspected of false conversions--it makes intuitive sense that confiscations of property, imprisonment, and the social difficulties caused by Inquisition trials led to poverty, and this poverty was transmitted generationally.
Now, that something makes intuitive sense doesn't mean it actually happened, and I wouldn't try to connect Spain's current economic problems to the Inquisition; that's ridiculous. But you can see how the basic idea makes some amount of logical sense.
I'm sure you know full well that those aren't the only views which modern society taboos. Or, if you don't, that's probably because you tend to take them for granted, just like most 16th-century Spaniards would have taken their taboos for granted.
Those, and ones that are functionally identical, are really the main ones which are taboo enough to get a reaction even close to the one being Jewish or Muslim could get you in Inquisition-era Spain. Most of the things that get identified as "taboos" these days are believed by significant fractions of the population. There are certain beliefs which are relatively taboo within certain limited communities, but the people who get targeted tend to be the ones with more money and power to begin with (because they're the ones that hit the news), so they have a much easier time pursuing alternative livelihoods than I would have once I got tossed out of Spain for being Jewish.
Like, you note that historians with your view find employment and aren't socially ostracized. But "Spanish Inquisition apologia"
is on the same level in terms of "taboo-ness" among society as a whole as most of the other things you'd label as "taboo."
It's true, if I'd been raised in 16th-century Spain, I expect my views would be within the 16th-century Spanish mainstream. Even if they weren't, though, I'd at least benefit from the fact that the views which the Inquisition would punish you for expressing were pretty explicitly laid out and stable over time, which is an advantage over the current system of taboos.
Or you could be born Muslim or Jewish. That would suck for you, wouldn't it?
Lots of historians reject the notion that the Spanish Inquisition was some uniquely awful thing, and some of them even still have jobs and social circles. So, I don't think my position is some sort of extremist outlier like you suggest.
How many of them said dealing with the Spanish Inquisition was better than dealing with neighbors who don't like which candidate you have yard signs out for aside?
You said it turned Spain into a dystopia and is still harming the country's prospects two centuries after its abolition, that sounds pretty Black Legend-y to me.
I never said that, someone else said that it arguably made Spain more dystopian than the Triple Alliance (due, specifically, to the fact that the Inquisition was basically acting as the thought police, and the Aztecs didn't have an analogous institution), and I said there was
some evidence to suggest it was harming the country two centuries after its abolition. The latter is indisputably true, even if you don't think it's good evidence.
