On this date in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII kicks off the Witch Hunts.

[AtheistCrusader]

On this date in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII's notorious "Witches Bull" (Bull Summis desiderantes) was issued, officially commencing the witch hunts.

"[m]any persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, ...they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, (...) the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished not without open danger to the souls of many and peril of eternal damnation."

- See more at: https://ffrf.org/news/day#sthash.zEYToIX4.dpuf

[niyad]

1. a most heinous and shameful period in church history, for which it has neverr apologized.

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Of course it hasn't apologized. They still do exorcisms. They still think demons are real.

The only thing worse than having an imaginary friend, is having an imaginary enemy, and then trying to DO something about it.

[niyad]

3. what a lot of people do not realize is that part of the reason for the witch burnings

was that they targeted women who refused to bow to the authority of the church, not to mention confiscating all their goods and properties.

[guillaumeb]

5. And the church was also targeting earth based and goddess based beliefs.

While expropriating their rituals and customs.

[niyad]

6. yes, exactly

[Act_of_Reparation]

8. Disagree... sort of.

I think a very significant number of those targeted were just as devout as anyone else.

[trotsky]

4. Well isn't that special. n/t

[struggle4progress]

7. These are ancient beliefs, and were once widespread

In the Romans' Twelve Tables, Law III in the Seventh Table prescribes the punishment, for spoiling another's crops by magic incantations: it is "to be sacrificed to Ceres." There is a clear connection to Law IV which provides a capital penalty for stealing a neighbor's crop

The Roman law may have evolved from an older custom of sacrificing a pregnant sow to Ceres, in hopes of a good crop -- itself perhaps a symbol version of an ancient method for improving farmland -- and chattel spoiling crops seem also to have been sacrificed, which would also encourage owners to control their livestock

An interesting question about the flurry of witch hunts of the early modern age is: To what should we attribute this development?

[AtheistCrusader]

10. I attribute it to the character of the abrahamic god being entirely fabricated by man.

The source texts know only what people of the time knew, and wanted only what people of the time wanted.

'lowly stamp of their origin' as Hitchens put it.

A supernatural god with omniscient knowledge passing on data to humanity could have countermanded all that and literally saved lives.

[struggle4progress]

11. That is your explanation (say) of what we find in the Twelve Tables?

[AtheistCrusader]

15. What do you mean?

The influences on that iteration of an attempt at legal framework are clear and well documented.

[struggle4progress]

18. You attribute the content of the Twelve Tables to "the character of the abrahamic god"?

[AtheistCrusader]

21. I read your subject line as a direct objection to the OP data.

The body of your response seemed a segue.

No, the 12 were not sourced on the Abrahamic god. Sorry for the confusion, I misunderstood your point. Now that I see the direction you are taking, why would these beliefs have carried forward into a 'true' new religion?

[Lordquinton]

12. These ancient beliefs are still wide spread

christianity is still the largest religion in the world, and there is no guarantee that a future pope won't order widespread witch hunts again. As has been stated previously, the current pope highly endorses exorcisms, so it's not that far away.

[struggle4progress]

13. Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, c 400AD

BOOK II

Chapter 1 ... when I .. discuss .. signs, I lay down this direction, not to attend to what they are in themselves, but to the fact that they are signs, that is, to what they signify ...

Chapter 20 ... All the arrangements made by men for the making and worshipping of idols are superstitious ...

Chapter 21 ... Nor can we exclude from this kind of superstition those who were called genethliaci, on account of their attention to birthdays, but are now commonly called mathematici. For these, too, although they may seek with pains for the true position of the stars at the time of our birth, and may sometimes even find it out, yet in so far as they attempt thence to predict our actions, or the consequences of our actions, grievously err, and sell inexperienced men into a miserable bondage ...

Chapter 22 ... to desire to predict the characters, the acts, and the fate of those who are born from such an observation, is a great delusion and great madness ...

Chapter 24 ... it was not because they had meaning that they were attended to, but it was by attending to and marking them that they came to have meaning. And so they are made different for different people, according to their several notions and prejudices .. to provide for each person the same sort of omens as they see his own conjectures and preconceptions have already entangled him in ...

Chapter 29 ... it is one thing to say: If you bruise down this herb and drink it, it will remove the pain from your stomach; and another to say: If you hang this herb round your neck, it will remove the pain from your stomach. In the former case the wholesome mixture is approved of, in the latter the superstitious charm is condemned; although indeed, where incantations and invocations and marks are not used, it is frequently doubtful whether the thing that is tied or fixed in any way to the body to cure it, acts by a natural virtue, in which case it may be freely used; or acts by a sort of charm ...

Chapter 31 ... The science of reasoning is of very great service .. only in the use of it we must guard against the love of wrangling, and the childish vanity of entrapping an adversary. For there are many of what are called sophisms, inferences in reasoning that are false, and yet so close an imitation of the true, as to deceive not only dull people, but clever men too, when they are not on their guard. For example, one man lays before another with whom he is talking, the proposition, "What I am, you are not." The other assents, for the proposition is in part true, the one man being cunning and the other simple. Then the first speaker adds: "I am a man;" and when the other has given his assent to this also, the first draws his conclusion: "Then you are not a man "' ...

[Lordquinton]

14. So you agree that the modern practice of ancient superstitions is dangerous?

Great to hear!

[struggle4progress]

16. I agree with Augustine that an essential harm of any superstition

is that it misleads us into useless vacuities which cannot offer any benefit

This holds as well for superstitions held today as did for any superstitions held by ancients

[Lordquinton]

22. Augustine was a hypocrite in that regard

He called other's beliefs superstitions, while saying his belief was true.

Unless you're willing to commit to saying that religion is superstition.

[Angry Dragon]

9. Power corrupts absolutely

[nil desperandum]

17. I often wonder

exactly how far we've come when in 2016 more people admit to believing in angels than "believe" in the science of global warming.

77% of Americans believe in Angels...only 61% believe the earth is warming and only 40% think man has something to do with it...55% believe the founders created a "christian" nation...40% admit to not believing evolution is real...56% believe vaccines cause autism and 51% don't believe the big bang theory is accurate....

We've really come a long way apparently.

[struggle4progress]

19. The Age of Magicians: Periodization in the History of European Magic

Michael D. Bailey
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 3, Number 1, Summer 2008,
pp. 1-28

... Did the premodern world comprise .. an unbroken epoch uniformly benighted by its magical beliefs and
superstitions, or were there .. distinct ages of magic into which the past might be divided? ... The modern
conceptions of religion and science, against which magic is so often contrasted, are post-Reformation and .. post-Enlightenment constructions, and the farther back in time one imposes such distinctions the less useful they become ... In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, western Europe became somewhat more stable ... In the legal realm, Europe underwent a revolution in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Scholars rediscovered and reintroduced Roman law ... Above all, the introduction of inquisitorial procedure in place of the accusatorial procedure that had prevailed in most legal proceedings in the early medieval period, and especially the introduction of judicial torture, shaped how charges of magic were handled ... Accusatorial approaches to rendering judgments had placed the burden of proof on the accuser, who was responsible for proving the guilt of the party against whom he brought a charge ... Moreover, if an accuser failed to prove guilt, he was often subject to judicial retribution ... Under inquisitorial procedure, an accuser could still bring charges in a court, but now the inquisitorial tribunal was responsible for investigating and prosecuting the case ... The standard method used by inquisitorial courts to obtain confessions was torture ... The use of torture was grounded in Roman legal principles and followed the recovery of Roman law in the twelfth and thirteenth century. It was not church inquisitors but civic magistrates in Verona who were responsible for the first known application of judicial torture in medieval Europe in 1228 ... Major series of trials began to erupt again after 1560, and a new wave of antiwitch literature began appearing in the late 1500s and into the 1600s. Moreover, while church inquisitors had often directed early trials, now generally secular courts took the lead in prosecuting witchcraft ... In France, the Parlement of Paris refused to sanction the execution of any witches after 1625. The Spanish and Roman Inquisitions stopped executing witches .. after 1610 ... The trials overwhelmingly took place in central Europe, in the fragmented lands of the German empire, with perhaps as many as six out of every seven witches executed between 1560 and 1660 dying within (pre-1648) imperial borders ... The scope of truly major witch-hunting can be limited even more by attending to the fact that only a few massive flare-ups, ‘‘superhunts’’ as they have been labeled, account for around one third of German totals ... A new witchcraft statute passed in England in 1736 ... eliminated witchcraft as a legally recognized crime ... and criminalized any claim to ... magical powers as fraud ...

[Bretton Garcia]

20. Did secular society invent persecution of witches?

Most old cultures had religion. And belief and persecution of witches was often part of that. Among other things, in Old Testament Judaism, the Jewish king Saul first bans witches and necromancers; those who claim to resurrect the dead (like later, Jesus).

So in Judaism, well before the Romans, there was persecution of witches. To be sure, fortunately for once, our religious leader Saul is characteristically hypocritical; after condemning such things, then Saul hypocritically consults one himself.

By the way, Romans had many gods, many religions. Indeed, the very concept of a witch, with supernatural powers, was essentially a religious one. Testifying to what most anthropologists think was the animistic origin of all religion: belief in magic, and invisible "spirit."

To this day, following earlier religious belief in ghosts, the belief in an invisible Holy Spirit, or holy "ghost," working supernatural miracles, remains a central element of Christianity.

In effect therefore, the conflict between religion and witches was not religion against non religion; but one kind of religion against a somewhat different, somewhat related faith

Just like a witch in fact, in the Bible God at least once or twice sends an "evil spirit" to bedevil people he doesn't like. In this way, curiously, God works with and employs what he himself calls evil.

[nil desperandum]

23. Indeed....

curiously, God works with and employs what he himself calls evil.

The same god who created everything according to that document, thus he made the witches he employs, the same as the snake and the tree of knowledge and the rest of the inexplicable evils...he loves you so much he'll burn you for all eternity if you don't love him back...yikes.

[struggle4progress]

24. The process by which we form our individual understandings of the world, and

our own moral notions, is complex -- and it is connected to the cultural understandings we are given

The first lesson most of us learn is the power of our own voice: we cry out, and something appears that feeds or cleans us. Soon we associate the appearance to a particular sound we can make, such as maaa! Our ability to obtain particular results through particular sounds develops quickly, but the lessons are erratic --- most of us then make a new discovery: there are agents other than ourselves, with their own speech and their own desires. They do not all resemble us closely, in the ways we resemble our families. There are wolves and birds and ants and snakes. What then should we make of the noises and acts of the wind or the thunder? What do they desire and how do they speak?

The others are at first stupid or deliberately obtuse: they do not see what we see so clearly. That they might see clearly something, that we ourselves do not see, is a later discovery. I remember being angry, at about age three, that someone had done something, and then it was carefully explained to me that the event never happened but I had only dreamed it. But perhaps the idea "merely a dream" is a cultural treasure that has passed down to us from a remote past: the Homeric epics (for example) are reports from a time when dreams were not yet distinguished from the "real world"

The distinction between what-is-real and what-is-in-my-head is tricky for almost everyone in various ways, so far as I can tell. At age five, I was perplexed that there was a difference between moving-my-arm and imagining-moving-my-arm. If I can move my arm with my mind, what else can I do? At age six, I conducted, for a week or so, unsuccessful efforts to rescue small marbles I had cast into the sea by trying to will them back from the sea into my shoe. I earnestly discussed this with tolerant elders: they were pleased to introduce me to things-I-could-actually-do, and so I acquired more cultural treasures

Francis Bacon once said that it is wrong to regard the ancients as the wise old ones, for they are children compared to us since we know something they did not know: we know what became of them. I would merely add that we ought not despise them either, since what we know was handed down as the fruit of their heroic childish efforts

[okasha]

25. Ah, such textual scholarship!

The Saul who consulted the witch of Endor was king of Israel. The religious leader was the prophet Samuel.

You seem to be conflating that Saul with the fellow who fell off his horse on the way to Damascus. Tch.

[Bretton Garcia]

27. Preachers topspin King Saul as not religious. But?

God himself appointed him.

And he was, on and off, a major leader of the state of Israel. In the days of theocracy; when religion and the state were one.

[struggle4progress]

28. The text in 1 Samuel is somewhat more complex than you suggest:

1 Samuel 10:17-19 reads ... Samuel called the people together .. and said.. “Thus says the Lord .. ‘I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and delivered you from .. the Egyptians .. and from those who oppressed you.’ But you have today rejected your God .. and .. have said to Him, ‘No, set a king over us!’ ...

We need not read this as literal history to find meanings in it: the popular demand for a king seems irreligious here

[True Dough]

26. Couldn't Pope Innocent

just have tweeted instead???




^^^ Heads are gonna roll!