A good time to remember that if you're reading this, you are in the <0.001% of humans privileged enough to live a life without having to worry about such things on a daily basis.
Compared to things like that, our preoccupations seem so trivial, and I don't know what we can do about it.
Everything from witch-burning to the teaching of Creationist doctrines in public schools is possible because we somehow still consider it not only socially acceptable but desirable to be superstitious in the twenty-first century.
Civilization isn't a gift, and it didn't just happen. We had to build it. The people who are burning witches in New Guinea are not monsters, or aliens, or mutants. They're us, and we're them. The only differences lie in the decisions we make, as individuals and as a culture.
Those organzations are nothing to do with the persecution of witchcrafit in PNG. Did you even read the article.
If you want to stop these horrific acts of violence, it would be better to give to the Catholic Church since it was a catholic nun who saved the woman in that article.
Your prejudice against religion is as irrational as what you accuse religion as being, since you put your secularist ideology ahead of the facts when you lump completely unrelated phenomena together into the category of "superstition".
It's the the word, it's the use of the category that I object to.
Imagine a person who says "everything from the holocaust, the the weathermen, to Obamacare is possible once we accept collectivism". The problem with statement is not that there is no such notion as collectivism, but that the different manifestations of it are in no way comparable in terms of their relationship to these forms of violence.
The person I was replying to was ignoring the important, immediate causes of this event (which are described in the article), and focussing on the least important factor, i.e. superstition in general.
Why would you say they are burning women as witches, if not superstition? "Why could they believe that witches even exist?" seems like a pretty damn important question to ask, but I suppose that is just my opinion.
Superstition must be fought with education if we are to fix these problems. There are other ways to fight superstition, but they are almost universally not palatable.
"Superstition" is just an outlet for these peoples' troubles, their fears, and their anger. Coupled with truly despicable individuals who would take advantage of this situation for power and pleasure, you can have such a mob mentality in any of the "enlightened" communities.
Education certainly helps, and I'm not saying it wouldn't, but blaming this on superstition as though that's the true cause is woefully misguided.
Despicable people will exist without superstition, but superstition has an unprecedented ability to allow good people to feel okay about doing horrible things. If superstition can be said to be a tool of the truly despicable, then we must remove it.
Perhaps without superstition those men would find another way to rile up a crowd into burning more women, but taking that tool from them is sure as hell worth a shot. What is there to lose?
You are asking the wrong question. Superstition was one factor, but what about instances where superstition does not cause violence? Or instances (like lynchings) where mob violence is not triggered by superstition. Did you understand my analogy earlier? It seems like you are not addressing all of my argument.
Let me ask you a question this time: How would donating to any of the causes that the post I replied to advocated, help the situation in PNG. And "magic" is not an acceptable answer here.
So what do you propose we do, if not fight superstition with education? Convert them all to a religion that you find more pleasant? I think I would file that under "not palatable", to put it mildly. Fighting superstition by providing education is the only solution that we can embrace.
> what about instances where superstition does not cause violence?
What about it? Why should we clinge to it just because it can be benign? I cannot mourn the loss of benign superstition killed by education.
> Or instances (like lynchings) where mob violence is not triggered by superstition.
We shouldn't fight superstition because doing so is not a silver bullet for all the worlds problems?
>“I called on the people. I asked, ‘Who here is a Catholic? Come, we will pray the rosary.'"
"And a lot of people came and prayed with me. We prayed the whole rosary.” Angela’s suffering echoed around them through their invocation, the ritual comforts of one belief system colliding with the atrocities of another.<
(emphases mine)
This speaks, I think, to your underlying point. Superstition played a role both in perpetrating this crime as well as in squandering an opportunity to put an end to it. Instead of "a lot" of people helping, "a lot" of people prayed.
Did you not read the article? The nurse struggled to stop the violence, and was threatened with a similar fate before the crowd of natives complacently watching the torture forced her away. It was then when she began to pray.
I can't believe you would cherry pick that quote and spin it in a negative context, just to prove an opinion about religion.
Point being, Catholic missionaries who succeed in replacing one superstition with another may seem to fix the immediate problem, but the rest of us are facepalming hard enough to leave marks.
I'm not sure what your trying to say, but with the people of countries/areas like PNG, the only real option is to replace their violent, torturous and inhumane superstition with one that is, at it's core, focussed on something more positive. These people are very spiritual and evangelising atheism simply would not work in the short or medium term.
> "seem to fix the immediate problem"
But the thing is, it is a fix to the immediate problem. Those people that were praying with her were praying. Not torturing and physically abusing. Even if you think it will just lead to issues down the road, we need to stop this torture and abuse in whatever way possible. In my opinion, the best way to do that without restructuring the government and pouring in money to cut down on corruption seems to be evangelising.
But, what I'm more interested in knowing is why you're face-palming hard enough to leave marks. Yes, humans will do things that are horrible no matter what the religion, but what's so terrible about teaching them to follow doctrines that forbid what they're doing rather than ones that compound the problem?
Catholicism has sin, shame, and guilt at its core. It's not 'focussed on something more positive' at all. Not to mention that Catholicism's upper echelons still believe in possession and exorcism - something which isn't going to particularly stop people who currently believe in 'black magic' - they'll just change the underlying story and still 'exorcise demons', but in their own way. Magic is still a significant tenet of Catholicism - transubstatiation is the very core of their doctrines. "Don't murder people because your black magic is not real, but this wafer and wine are literally flesh and blood"?
Buddhism would be a better religion for this, if you were to choose one. Buddhism's basic goal is to get people to be happy with their lot in life, instead of Catholicism's angle that we're all sinners and only a magic man can cure you.
It's not about "evangelizing atheism", it's about evangelizing knowledge. If someone in their community died, perform an autopsy to determine the actual cause of death and banish the specters of ignorance surrounding it. Create schools, encourage education. Praying is an empty gesture.
Secular thinking can also become a folly, just like any religious thinking. For example, believing that anything and everything can be measured in numbers, or refusing to acknowledge any phenomenon which cannot be explained scientifically.
A rational mentality does lead to a more civilized society, but sometimes it can be just as cruel.
Rejection of catholicism doesn't mean you think everything can be reduced to mere numbers. Nor does secular thinking mean that you consider everything can be measured by numbers. I would say that most secular people don't believe this, given that most secular people are simply areligious rather than STEM fans.
No, it can't. If it's a "folly," then either it was not really secular, or it was not really thinking.
Secular thought can still be wrong or incomplete, but as far as the folly of the process itself goes, it is the only process that has advanced Mankind over the course of thousands of years. Anyone who criticizes it must be prepared to provide a better alternative. So far that hasn't happened.
How did it not occur to you that equating the burning alive of young women for witch craft with teaching children beliefs (alongside apposing beliefs, no less!) commonly held among billions of people (who do not burn people alive as witches) would be offensive?
The creationism in public schools movement is a religious pseudoscientific movement directly aimed at destroying children's trust in science. You want to teach your kid that God created the world and that evolution isn't a real phenomenon? Do it at your home or in your church. It has NO place in a science class and it retards both social and scientific progress.
It doesn't matter HOW many people hold a belief if that belief isn't founded in reality.
Creationism also has little place in church. Most denominations of Christianity reject the literal story of Genesis, and do accept evolution. They're just a little quiet about it because there are masses of people out there who do believe in creationism. The main reason why they do is because they think a literal interpretation of the Bible is a sign of strong faith.
That's just how many people are: doctrinaire. At least on a handful of controversial issues. (They aren't so uptight about impractical things.)
At the same time, the religions must adapt to reality. They need to be practical.
Indeed, the only way that the Catholics in PNG managed to do that peace rosary thing was basically by rejecting the old doctrines that, among other things, led to Catholic enslaving or killing "savages" and others who didn't believe in their God.
Some people burn witches, other people kill gay people. Recently 15000 religious people and priests gathered in Georgia , in the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, and started hitting on the LGBTQ crowd that was there for celebrating the day. Tens of people were sent to the hospital, a couple badly hurt. If you are straight , white, catholic and male you may do not feel/know or even care about how religion harms our everyday lives, but what is happening to these women in PNG is happening to non-male/straight/white/religious people all around the world, maybe not in such a ritualistic way but still....
There is a kind of "first-world problem" which is objectively rather trivial: My Xbox Live account got banned. My electric car is cold in the mornings. You know what I mean.
But there are other sorts of problems: I was imprisoned for possession of a controlled substance. My mother refused a life-saving ambulance ride because the debt could cripple our family for a generation. I used to go to sleep hungry every night so that my children could eat, but I just lost my job; I'd kill myself if I had life insurance. Perhaps they take place with the trappings of technology and civility, but these horrors are surely no less so for that they occur in the so-called "first world".
As the wealthy and powerful -- and we are that -- I do believe we have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate everywhere that we find them. But we cannot do that, we cannot even assert our obligation to do that, if we cannot solve or even seem to care about the human misery that lives with our tacit consent just next door. And it is so hard for me to buy that there is nothing we can do about that.
I do not know what we do either. These systems did not arrive by any happy accident; powerful men willed it to be so, and undoing their careful work will not be easy. But I do know that if it seems powerful men stand to benefit from the status quo, we should treat any feeling of powerlessness we may have been told to experience with a certain skepticism.
It is horrific, but let's not exaggerate the issue... If you're in the top 0.001%, you're a multi-millionaire, and persecution is an issue affecting a minority of the world's population, almost by definition, as it's hard to persecute a group that outnumbers you.
In the U.S. we still have the death penalty for witchcraft, it's just not called that anymore. I think they call it drug trafficking now, but if you look at what witchcraft was historically it's basically the exact same thing.
Witchcraft and drug dealing are basically both just different instances of practicing medicine that the government doesn't approve of. Drug dealing tends to have connotations involving allopathic-style medicine whereas traditional witchcraft is generally more animistic, but they are basically both the same thing, and in many cases the drugs involved are probably even identical or else analogues.
> Diane Purkiss argues "that there is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also some parts of the Continent, midwives were more than likely to be found helping witch-hunters."[92] Also the fact remains that most women used herbal medicines as part of their household skills, and a large part of witches were accused by women.[93]
And drug dealers aren't hunted out of the idea that they're laying curses on people. Any harm from drugs is self-induced, and people know that. The reason to go after dealers is more complex.
>Diane Purkiss argues "that there is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also some parts of the Continent, midwives were more than likely to be found helping witch-hunters."
Interesting, I'll look into this.
>And drug dealers aren't hunted out of the idea that they're laying curses on people.
I think many of the differences have to do with culture rather than something intrinsic. E.g. obviously witches weren't using silkroad, but that's just an artifact of the times we live in. Similarly, the reason drug dealers aren't using curses anymore is because western medicine markets itself as having moved away from ritualistic healing and toward drugs. Thus non-sanctioned medicine has followed the same trends.
There are a lot of similarities though. Both are basically taboo because of religion. And even the methods of putting them on trial are equally ridiculous pseudoscientific religious nonsense: with witchcraft it was stereotypically putting them on a scale to see how guilty they where, and in modern times it's putting the drugs on a scale to see how guilty they are.
The method for outlawing specific drugs is stupid and arbitrary, but at the very least it's easy and unburdensome to follow the rule against trafficking. There is no risk to the average person, only risk to those that put profit above the law (you don't traffic for personal use, generally speaking).
"She had dragged herself [...] into the clinic, her genitals burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated intrusions of red-hot irons."
What? This made me very angry. But how do we combat it if even law officials are aware of it going on and don't do anything to stop it? There's so much corruption, and the government legally acknowledges sorcery and punishment for sorcery as valid.
In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done.
The UN isn't a global police force. All it can do its organise sanctions to force the PNG government to do something about it or get nations to contribute to some sort of fund to improve education and policing domestically.
Nor should it be a global police force. I think people/countries that don't condone this type of behavior should be more willing to offer refugee status and provide the means to leave such places and situations, but people are pretty hard-mouthed about their borders... At the end of the day, we can't tell people what to do, only offer them alternatives.
I don't even want to know on what planet mob lynchings and indignation at the brutalization of a defenseless individual are the same thing, just "anger" -- but I suggest it be nuked from orbit, because one might just as well argue it's sloppy thinking and the resulting stupidity that causes this crap. And by crap I don't mean a group enacting punishment on an individual[1], but the crooked ways in which they arrive at their judgement... because that a mob is angry might be okay, great even; depending on what they're angry at, and how they act on that anger.
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." -- Albert Einstein
"Anger is a gift." -- Rage Against The Machine
[1] notice how even we have that, and that nobody is angry in the process does not help someone who, say, has been framed and is sitting in prison for 20 years. Even if all inmates were excellent to each other all the time, even if the prison food was delicious and varied and healthy, it would still suck, no? How does anger even enter into any of it?
> I don't even want to know on what planet mob lynchings and indignation at the brutalization of a defenseless individual are the same thing, just "anger"
It is the planet Earth, your home, and it is not as simple as you wish it were.
Men who do and wish violence upon others -- and women, but mostly men -- claim to for various reasons: money, power, fun. But it's blatantly obvious that we live in a universe where escalation to violence is almost never the best way to attain your desires.
But us mammals, we grew up in a much more dangerous world. We grew a brain function to overrule our own better judgment, to make us look tough when we feel our weakest, to make us fight when we would retreat. Anger is the feeling of wanting to do violence and not knowing why, because there was no time to ask questions.
But we have time now. Something unconscionable has happened, and we should ask questions like "How do we fix the damage? Why did this happen? What could we have done?" But anger seizes the thoughts of men -- and women, but mostly men -- and transforms this into: "Who should suffer for this?"
Of course, no one in this thread is going to raise their hand because of this (nor, I imagine, does anyone here have anything more productive to do). But I'm not asking anyone here to change their behavior; just to think on it.
This strikes me as a rather lazy analysis of human behavior. We have had consequences for senseless violence for as long as we have had sense, and while it has been slowing it shows no signs of stopping. Can't we do any better than that?
We would not be looking at the same scale of operation of there were consequences. I'm not saying it would eliminate it, but having huge crowds of people gathered around to see a 'witch' tortured to death would be less likely to happen if they were all at risk of significant jail time.
The idea of changing minds is nice, but that happens slowly, over longer periods of time. It's a nice long-term goal, but in the meantime, people are being tortured and killed. Would you throw these people under the bus rather than take a multi-tiered approach to the issue?
I'm not sure I can do anything at all for Papua New Guinea. Not to sound callous, but I'm more worried about the state-sanctioned torture and killing that takes place much closer to my home. It is the very people whom we have entrusted with power to provide consequences who get away with these things -- in fact the violence and suffering inflicted often takes the form of those consequences themselves!
So I really hope we can do better than "there should be consequences".
> In order for this to stop, the entire society and way of life would have to change. Is the United Nations looking to do this? It needs to be done.
And here I thought "Cultural Imperialism" was a bad thing.
This is a dangerous road down which to tread, especially when the entity doing the treading (the UN) contains members such as Iran, the PRC, and every country that rates "depicting Mohamed" as being worse than "killing Jews".
Yes. But ultimately it comes down to this. Trying to go and affect rapid change on a culture and society is no easy task. It is difficult to predict and control, and almost certainly full of unintended sideeffects and costs.
To jump into any attempt to affect change without really REALLY carefully considering what the actual goals are, what the acceptable costs on the sides of all parties are, and even what tools and strategies are available or possible is literally how you end up with Afghanistan.
For example, say we decided to go in there and change things. Do we go and punish those who partook in this? What happens if the potential backlash from imposing punishment is too way to even consider it? How then do you answer the cries of the victims asking for justice? Yes, you could answer with all sincerity and truthfulness that you cannot go after their tormentors for the good of all future people. But it still sucks, and if you're not careful, you can find yourself not just in a shitty situation, but also causing all sorts of unintended problems where you're trying to fix things.
These are clearly not easy issues, and I do not mean to say that these problems or issues should always deter from action. What I do mean to say is that "OMG, that's terrible, can't we do -SOMETHING- about that?" is a fine, and acceptable first response. But if that becomes your guiding philosophy, then you're going to have a harddd time.
Forcing cultures to change their barbaric ways has been done successfully in the past. A quote, from Charles Napier (Britain's Commander in Chief of India), on the topic of burning women:
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
You make a good point; however, I'm not advocating we invade. I'm saying we need to do this as peaceably as possible, but certainly assertively. I'm not a politician, I don't know how it would be done, but would strengthening the economy even more help the situation and modernize perspective or serve to increase class divisions?
> would strengthening the economy even more help the situation and modernize perspective or serve to increase class divisions?
Initially it would do the second. As we see from the modern PRC and our own Gilded Age (1870s-1910s), it takes a fairly active and honest government to force wealth out of the hands of the richest and into society as a whole. Until and unless that government comes into being, wealth creates cliques and oligarchs in a crony capitalist mode.
This article talks about PNG, but I recall reading of similar incidents in various parts of Africa while the US has it's own fairly recent history of lynching [0].
Huh? Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft.
> Most lynchings, both against either whites or blacks, were a result from vigilante justice. It was completely illegal, but a result from accusations of rape or murder, not witchcraft.
The fact that the accusations were of rape or murder doesn't make the murder any less ritualized.
It is highly ritualized. The last meal, final words, gathering others to watch... really the only way that you could say that it isn't ritualized murder is if you want to nitpick about "when the government does it, that means it is not murder".
It's not about who does it, it's about whether there is a sufficiently fair establishment of guilt. In a developed country anyone calm and reasonable enough to be part of establishing a trial is extremely likely to let the government handle the trial. But it's entirely possible to have a fair hearing without involving the government. Once you've shown guilt of a sufficiently heinous crime beyond reasonable doubt then from my point of view it's not murder to kill them. It doesn't matter who is doing that killing.
There are other, simpler circumstances where you can show guilt to a reasonable degree, such as self-defense. If someone is shooting at you you can shoot back, for example. No murder.
My objection is to comparing it to lynching. Not on a technicality based on who is performing the act, but based on the existence of a fair trial. Versus a mob acting on mere accusation.
Fair enough, though it is essential to remember that the problems with lynching are not just that the court system is not used. There have been many lynchings that occurred after the trial and a guilty verdict (for example, the infamous lynching of Jesse Washington, where he was dragged from the courtroom immediately after being sentenced to death.)
Of course trials at that time and place were anything but fair, but we don't generally refer to those state-run executions as lynchings (perhaps we should).
Well, if the mob wants to drag a guilty person out of the courtroom and kill them via firing line or guillotine or proper hanging or some other quick method, it's less than ideal but acceptable. Torture is a completely different issue, and can never be justified as punishment.
How could that possibly be acceptable? Not just the fact that it remains mob justices, post trial or not, but what about appeals? Errors? New evidence?
And how is any of that not torture? Seems like your definition of torture is just "doesn't result in death."
Sometimes appeals are needed but that's getting far too into the picky details of the court system. And if the evidence was wrong somehow it's probably not going to get fixed: justice is wrong sometimes and the only solution is to never jail anyone, that is not a debate for this conversation.
Anyway torture, simply defined, is an act causing extreme pain in someone. And not just for five seconds. Hanging-done-wrong can be torture. Many ways of killing someone are torture. But the fast methods are not. Tell me your definition if it can somehow apply to the use of a guillotine.
> really the only way that you could say that it isn't ritualized murder is if you want to nitpick about "when the government does it, that means it is not murder".
Well, the real definition distinction is that when it is legal it isn't murder, and I think that that distinction is more than just semantic, as I think it ties into some substantive differences in the social forces at work.
That's not to say that there aren't also areas of substantive similarity between that form of ritualized killing and others including ritualized murder.
Probably around the start of civilization since it appears in the old testament to stone people for various crimes[1]. United States also had witch trials in the 1600s in Salem Massachusetts. Europe had theirs with the Catholic Church (sometimes even digging up heretics after they were dead to burn them[2]). Also for many years executions were public display in many European Countries as well as the earlier days of the United States. Pretty much every culture has had some sort of ritualized murder/executions (whether deemed legal by the state/tribe/official body or otherwise).
Human sacrifice is far more ancient than the modern state, coinciding with primitive religion. As sick as it may be, I think its primary purpose is in-group cohesion, regardless of the religious or political narrative pretext. A cadre who have knowingly committed murder together is one whose members will have strong bonds of loyalty to one another.
To question whether there's some lower level function to this behavior. If it's developing consistently, independently I would think there's some base, primal desire being satisfied through it.
You only have to look at the Salem Witch Trials to know that this has been going on for hundreds of years, and probably much longer than that. Any social group eventually develops its leaders and outcasts. Combine that with the human instinct to understand misfortune by casting blame, and you get situations like this.
I understand crowd frenzies (riots, lynchings, witch-hunts) as fear of becoming the focus ("better them than me") and the willingness to be a spectator while not seeing the line between watching to know and enabling an event gone horribly wrong. I'd also like to think only sociopaths are the main actors, but apathy and simple mistakes all add their weight to such events.
In Papua New Guinea the prion based disease, Kuru, transmitted by cannibalism was last reported in 2005. There is still cannibalism among the Korowai tribe. Papua New Guinea has many corners that are a far, far different place from the modern Western world.
"Two days earlier she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men. They had stripped their quarry naked, blindfolded her, berated her with accusations and slashed her with bush knives (machetes). The “dock” for her trial was a rusty length of corrugated roofing, upon which she was displayed trussed and helpless."
Belief in a lot of ridiculous stuff persists and is very mainstream depending on your stance on general religious belief. It's hardly isolated to PNG.
I read an article recently about suggestions that the Japanese PM wasn't moving into the prime ministerial home because it had a macabre history and was thought to be haunted by ghosts. The official response was a denial, but there seemed to be comments from other politicians suggesting that this was not a ridiculous position to hold.
What's with that headline. The real story seems to be that they are out of control of their environment. It's been heavily invaded by modern society, which is extracting natural resources. As people are harmed by modernity, they can't figure out the reasons.
There are people in the US like this, too. Look at the lunatics in the Westboro Baptist Church.
I am amazed as to how similar the word "sanguma" is to the Zulu word for a traditional healer (and also an area of witch burning) "sangoma". Anyone can offer some enlightenment on the linguistics?
This was quite depressing to say the least. The fact that one is so helpless against the hivemind and unable to defend oneself against such mob-driven attacks makes me shrivel
Yes, let's go tell these backwards people their antiquated superstitions are ridiculous. Emphasis on their... our own antiquated superstitions are completely OK.
I lived in Papua New Guinea for over two years, teaching in a school not far from a mining town. Sorcery was just a part of daily life. I remember a kid telling me he would be off school for a week as he had to go back to his village. When I asked him why he explained that one of his wantok's had been killed by a sorcerer and he was going back to the village for payback.
Payback in general was very common. A kid was run over in our town and it was all the police could do to stop the driver from being massacred by the kid's family with bush-knives. It was lucky that most of our policemen were from outside of the district so they had a disconnect from the local community. We were advised that if we were ever driving and by accident ran over a dog or a pig, we should get to the nearest police station as fast as possible, to protect ourselves from payback.
What shocked me about the article was the torture that was described. I'd never heard of this kind of thing back in 2000. Payback was usually brutal but quick, whether it be retribution against a sorcerer or anyone else. I do have to wonder where the concept of torturing victims has come from, as this seems to be a fairly new development.
A good time to remember that if you're reading this, you are in the <0.001% of humans privileged enough to live a life without having to worry about such things on a daily basis.
Compared to things like that, our preoccupations seem so trivial, and I don't know what we can do about it.