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....
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.