Deep Purple ~ Mandrake Root
Good Afternoon Feral Nation!
Found on HuffPo:
In Defense of Witchcraft:
by Sam Harris
So, who TF is Sam Harris, and why should you care?
Sam Harris is a disciple of one Mr. Richard Dawkins!
Well, Shazam!
For your Feral enjoyment, our very own Lucius Septimius deconstructs Harris' "Defense of Witchcraft" below.
L'Chaim all ye whores and beasts of the global dhimming!
~ BZ
Sam Harris’s use of “witchcraft” as a means of demonstrating the foolishness of his opponents is certainly inventive. Never mind that ultimately it is a straw (wicker perhaps?) man of titanic proportions. It rests on an assumption that belief in God and belief in witches are on the same level. We’ll come back to that in a moment, but for now let’s focus on his history. He begins his snarky commentary with this account of how stupid people in the past thought.
Imagine that the year is 1507, and life is difficult. Crops fail, good people suffer instantaneous and horrifying turns of bad luck, and even the children of royalty regularly die before they have taken their first steps. As it turns out, everyone understands the cause of these calamities: it is witchcraft. Not all witchcraft is at fault, of course -- there are “white” witches who use their powers to heal -- but there is no question that some witches have formed an alliance with the Devil. Happily, the Church has produced many learned and energetic men who are equal to this challenge, and each year hundreds of women are put to death for casting spells upon their innocent neighbors.
Leaving aside the fact that 1507 comes during the nadir of witch-hunting, it is true that in pre-modern (and well into modern times) there was a generalized belief in magic. Popular opinion around 1500 tended to credit it to the charismatic power of individual persons who had been somehow selected before birth to receive this gift (sort of like what Democrats believe about Obama). A standard sign was being born with the “caul,” a part of the amniotic sack around the head. Learned opinion viewed magic as a matter of art and skill. Neo-Platonists, Cabalists, and Hermeticists understood that all matter in the cosmos was connected together by hidden, unseen forces or “sympathies.” By manipulating one form of matter, one could, on account of these sympathies, effect changes in other matter elsewhere. Sort of like particle physics.
Few people claimed that large-scale calamities were caused by witchcraft. Malevolent witchcraft was almost always understood as a matter of conflicts between individuals. Such cases, when they did appear before the courts, were generally dismissed for lack of evidence. “Hundreds of women” were not put to death each year for casting spells. Even at the height of the “witch craze” between 1590 and 1630, witch trials were rare and the rate of accusation low. Far more people were prosecuted for theft, simple battery, and adultery than for witchcraft.
1968
There were some who did argue that witches were not individual actors; that they were an organized cult of Devil-worshipers intent on destroying Christendom, but initially such conspiracy theorists were in the minority. The position of the Church and of Canon Law was ambivalent on the subject, with the dominant line of thought suggesting the belief in witches was demonically inspired. It was only in the later sixteenth century that theorists began putting together formal arguments in defense of witch hunting. Most of these were not theologians but lawyers. And when persecution did begin en masse, it was the secular state, not the Church, which drove it.
Witchcraft, because it was a form of criminal assault, had to be dealt with by secular courts, which were the only ones that could hand down a death sentence. And it was secular powers which, more than anyone else, profited through the coordinated persecution of an imaginary witch-cult.
The arguments that the defenders of witch-hunting used were eminently logical. The opinions of the ancients, or learned moderns, and the piles of empirical evidence taken from trials were analyzed with flawless logic. The only conclusion one could draw was that witches existed as an organized anti-Christian religion. Each set of trials produced more evidence; that evidence in turn was used to fine-tune the interrogation process. Torture was used, but a remarkable number of people confessed according to the script -- mostly likely avoiding torture by responding in the words they knew the accusers wanted to hear. By 1620, one could reasonably argue that the demonic conception of witchcraft had become “PC,” and people knew to simply tow the line. Not because they feared the sanction of the Church, but because they feared the power of the State.
The defenders of witch-hunting in
This brings us to Harris’s depiction of the (imaginary) dissenting voice:
Imagine being among the tiny percentage of people -- the 5 percent, or 10 percent at most -- who think that a belief in witchcraft is nothing more than a malignant fantasy. Imagine writing a book arguing that magic spells do no real work in the world, that the confessions of bad witches are delusional or coerced, that the claims of good witches are self-serving and unempirical. You argue further that a belief in magic offers false hope of benefits that are best sought elsewhere, like from scientific medicine, and lays the ground for false accusations of imaginary crimes, leading to the misery and death of innocent people.
He of course identifies himself as one of those who would have been in that minority. But in reality, it was the most intolerant defenders of witch hunting who constituted the minority. That minority, moreover, was constituted by those who believed that they had evidence and logic on their side. Never mind that their logic was flawed on account of unsupportable assumptions; never mind that their evidence was frequently compromised -- anyone who dared to question their findings revealed themselves to be either a fool or somehow in league with the witches.
What drove the witch hunters of old was arrogance -- and arrogance with regard to their scientific method and their intellectual and moral superiority over their opponents. They represented a minority opinion, to be sure, but that in and of itself demonstrated their cultural superiority -- their elite status -- over the ignorant herd. Which then points to the real “enemy” identified in their tracts. Over and again, the vast output of the small group of virulent witch-hunters reveals their bigotry towards their ideological and religious opponents. That bigotry reveals itself in a constant and persistent misrepresentation of the ideas and beliefs of their opponents. The straw man and the polemic were their chosen weapons in their effort to defend the indefensible by belittling -- and ultimately dehumanizing -- their opponents.
Sort of like Sam Harris.
~ LUCIUS SEPTIMIUS
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