Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea
theglobalmail.org
theglobalmail.org
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
Please think before you post next time.
e: phrasing
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.
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.
>“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.
I can't believe you would cherry pick that quote and spin it in a negative context, just to prove an opinion about religion.
HN astounds me sometimes.
> "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?
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.
A rational mentality does lead to a more civilized society, but sometimes it can be just as cruel.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
(0.001 / 100) * 7000000000 = 70000
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.
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".
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.
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.
"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."
And anger is what made this happen in the first place.
I'm not trying to draw any platitudes or grand truths here. Just... think on that.
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?
So I really hope we can do better than "there should be consequences".
"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?
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 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].
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_...
See also: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-politics-and-self-sup...
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.
It's an arresting question, I think.
How? As a species we're real good at hurting each other.
The fact that the accusations were of rape or murder doesn't make the murder any less ritualized.
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.
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).
And how is any of that not torture? Seems like your definition of torture is just "doesn't result in death."
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia
... and the account of one patient who valiantly struggled to prolong his life in the face of this disease.
Just different manifestations of the same problems, at a more archaic level.
I felt disgusted reading the article, but before pointing the finger look what's happening in OUR "modern" society:
- fanatic belief in all sorts of superstitions and stuff (christianity, islam etc)
- mass savage violence (war) against each other, even when above belief forbids (love your neighbour, don't kill your neighbour etc)
- incredible abuse against our mothers, sisters and daughters (rape, gang rape, FGM, murder, beatings etc); not to mention abuse against children!
- mass scale butchering of other species so we can be a race of fucking obese creatures
That's how fucking elevated we are.
Our only hope, if any, is a good education.
"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."
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.
There are people in the US like this, too. Look at the lunatics in the Westboro Baptist Church.
Or the Tea Party for that matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qYhmf-boE&bpctr=1369466...
Warning:Content is very Graphic
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.