You're mostly right Phoenix, I lost my head there. I would just point out that my own feeling, as a rational 20th century American, is that while one may observe to the ends of the Earth that the Medieval Inquisition's methods were comparatively humane vis-a-vis the secular authority, that doesn't change one important fact: It was completely and utterly pointless.
There being, at best, no grounds for assuming that Church doctorine was the sole way to salvation, and, at worst, no reason to believe there is any such thing as God or souls at all, the Purity of the Faith works out in longhand to the be preservation of the power and authority of the Church.
Whether a powerful Church was a civilizing or barbarizing force in Medieval life is open to question, but I'd remind you that the two great pieces of vernacular literature from the Middle Ages, Chaucer and Dante, were unequivocally anti-Clerical.
All that said, while I agree that the in-game Inquisition smackdown for random courtiers is extreme, I think it's quite appropriate for court officers. It's hard for me to believe that the church authorities would long tolerate a heretic/muslim/schismatic/jew/pagan as an officer of the state.
As an aside, Godwin's Law is, pretty neutrally: "As the length of an Online Discussion grows, the likelihood of a Nazi analogy approaches one." It was only later twisted into a moral imperative.
