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.
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
> 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.