MrKrinkles

Sojourner,

I need to toss my two cents in here, just to make it plain exactly what we are talking about. I went to France a few years ago and saw some of the torture instruments and techniques religious folks used on witches and heretics. It was very disturbing. One thing they did was force their victims to sit atop sharpened poles, and they attached weights to their victims limbs to accentuate their discomfort. They created a metal chair with spikes all over it that they strapped people into. Underneath the chair they had a charcoal broiler which they would use to heat up the spikes. This is kind of similar to the Iron Maiden. Of course there was the wheel, which was essentially a wagon wheel which they would spreadeagle people on. They would spin this wheel around and bash the person's limbs until their limbs were pulverized masses of broken bone and flesh. The spiked pear was apparently a favorite tool of the Christian torturers. It was a metal spiked instrument in the shape and size of a pear which was inserted in various orifices and expanded with a screw. This, of course, caused severe internal injuries.

I was nearly in tears looking at this stuff. I couldn't believe one person could use these devices on another person. But since God tortures unbelievers for eternity, maybe torturing unbelievers for a finite period (until they are dead) is holy and righteous. Glory!

Scary stuff. Thank God Christians no longer have the power they once had.

Brooks

Butters

Posted by Bede,

I'm probably talking to a wall. I don't consider you or Mr. Turkel scholars. I have no prejudices, just facts. Christians have tortured, raped, plundered, and burned people in the name of God. You want to minimize the scope of these atrocities, in order to lessen the stain of shame that your religion has brought upon itself.

As for outright lies, how about this,

I guess useing the words "Hardly ever" can in your mind reduce the level of guilt the church has, without outright lying.

And I suppose the saying "it was supposed to be beating only" means that if they did more, it was not the churchs fault. Beatings for what? disagreeing with the church? What type of defence and appeals?

You know whats funny, is the history I read is also mostly written by Christians, but at least they were honest.

Oh, and since you're Catholic, I forgot pedophelia, but I'm sure there was only one or two cases of that and the church put a stop to it the miniute they found out.

I don't need to roll myself into a ball of selfrighteous disgust. I leave the selfrighteousness to Theists, and as to disgust, you have taken care of that.

Egoinos

The Malleus was mostly used in Germany - where Kramer and Sprenger worked, and not in the more Catholic countries such as Spain. They had fewer witch trials, as it happens.

There are a number of theories as to the witch beliefs:

Kieckhefer (European Witch Trials, 1976) said that the first wave of witch trials in France, England and Germany (1300-30) were for political reasons, involving prominent figures as either the victims of witchcraft or suspects.

Trevor-Roper (The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1969) said that witch beliefs increased during the Jesuit evangelisation of Poland (which is the reason that country held witch hunts later than anyone else), the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, that it was the product of religious upheaval and change.

Erikson (Wayward Puritans, 1966), when looking at the Salem witch trials, and following on from Durkheim, said that they were connected with social and religious deviance and were therefore the action of conservatism. The hunt for criminals drew the community together by identifying those outside that community.

Macfarlane (Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 1970) said that the witchcraft allegations were an excuse to ill-treat inferiors and those who were in a relationship to the accuser which would normally demand love and charity, and that this was a reflection of the peasant world.

Functionalists say that witchcraft accusations arise from social and economic change which then produces social strain. Example: The Elizabethan Poor Laws took the responsibility for aiding the poor from the community to the state, so beggars were turned away even though the expecation was still that the person should aid them. The beggar would then curse the householder and be accused of witchcraft. (Example given in Larner, Enemies of God, 1981, p21). This particular idea fits the English model better than the European though.

According to Delumeau (Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire, 1977) the peasantry of Europe were first Christianised during the Reformation and taught belief in a lay personal religion. They also were given a sense of sin both in themselves and in others, thus famines and other disasters were interpreted as being the just punishment for sin. As no one wants to be in a famine, the hunt for those whose sin had caused this was on. He also said that there is a basic antipathy between "true religion" and magic and that the witch hunts represented the removal of magical beliefs and the imposition of "true religion" in Europe.

Muchembled (Culture Populaire et Culture des elites, 1978) said that witch hunting came from the increased urbanisation and centralisation of countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and was a product of the need for more control on these countries. This is why witch hunts are more common in border areas.

Marxist interpreters such as Le Roy Ladurie (Les Payans de Languedoc, 1969) see witch beliefs as mythological interpretations of agrarian revolts, and that these beliefs came from the peasantry and infected the higher classes. These beliefs led to hunts for the "traitors".

sojourner,
Be careful about using England. England is an anomoly in terms of witch trials - they had far, far fewer witch hunts than other countries, and do not seem to have had the same level of witch belief or even the same type of witch belief as Europe (including Scotland). In England you don't tend to get as many mentions of witches having sex with the devil, or the diabolic pact, for example.

The bit about women is right though There were more women than men accused and convicted - witches are "an inversion of the positive values of the society concerned" (Larner, p9) and are generally therefore female, ugly, and old.

--Egoinos--

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Dark Jedi

Let's keep emotions under control and discussions civil, please.

Things are coming back in line, thanks for that.

Sojourner553

To Egoinos:

I tend to subscribe to the theory that religious authorities "fanned" the debate over witches so as to more easily hunt down proto-Protestant heretics.

Still, once the imagination of the people had been stirred, they were emotional frenzies where some people believed they saw "evil" magic all around them.

Here are a few references of people who were executed for witchcraft -- when this clearly was not for religious or political heresy:


Here is an example from England:

Women midwives were accused of witchcraft if they employed drugs to relieve the pain of women going though labor. (Opium can halt the progression of labor, although alcohol does not.) One such case occurred in 1591, when a woman of high social standing, Eufame Macalyane, asked Agnes Sampson to help relieve her pain during the births of her two sons. Agnes Sampson
was later arrested and tried before King James for this heresy. She was condemned as a witch and burned alive at the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.


In 1630, Guglielmo Piazza, commissioner of health of Milan, was observed by some women in the neighborhood, of wiping his ink-stained fingers on the walls of some houses. He was accused of smearing the houses with the plague, and was arrested by city officials. Although the Commissioner Piazza was brought before a Renaissance judge--the application of law that he
faced was a carryover from feudal times. He was shaved and purged. According to the law, if he survived the tortures inflicted upon his body through three rounds, then God Himself was deemed to have intervened, thus attesting to his
innocence.

It was said the Commissioner Piazza withstood two sessions of the torture, but yielded to the "third degree". During this time he "confessed" his guilt, and agreed to name his "accomplices". A barber named Mora was implicated, and after being tortured, he too gave the desired confession of guilt and the name
of another "accomplice". The prisoners were thereupon sentenced to death.-- They were stretched on a wheel, ripped up with red-hot pincers, their bones were broken, and their hands cut off. They were burned after their torture
session was over, and their ashes were thrown into the river.

to Bede: I apologize for slipping millions instead of tens of thousands/one hundred thousand. But when I hear such grotesque tales of torture, to me the MAGNITUDE of how many were killed is really a secondary issue for me.

BTW: Just to add a different tangent: Bede as I have seen in many of your posts, you like to compare Christianity with the pagans,

How do you compare pagan witchcraft torture and executions with that under the Christians?

I too have seen museums and also pictures in books of the instruments of torture. Bede, your position is that they largely sat unused?



Sojourner

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Sojourner553

Hi Butters,

I am going to pick on you next for claiming Hitler was an atheist. Hitler could probably best be described as a pagan [of ancient German religion(s)]. He also insisted he represented "Positive" Christianity in public.

Now Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists. (Sigh) That is a reason why all of us (theists AND nontheists alike) should show some restraint/respect for the other side. We all have our villains, rather or not we would "like" to claim them for our side!

Sojourner

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Egoinos

The extent to which the elite of society caused the witch hunts is hotly debated. Certainly they don't seem to have been cynical onlookers fanning the flames of the belief while not holding it themselves. There were the odd cases, of course, when certain members of the higher classes do seem to have had an ulterior motive - such as when John Knox was accused of witchcraft.

Which period of history are you talking about here, by the way? "Proto-protestant" would seem to indicate the earlier periods, rather than the great mass-witchhunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prior to that there weren't really mass trials, though there were isolated incidents and the odd flare-up.

I don't think we can say that all accused were religious heretics - though quite a few seem to have had divergent beliefs, though they are more indicative of their social status. Quite a number of the trial records and pamphlets make mention of belief in fairies, for example, but while after the Reformation such beliefs were either condemned outright or looked upon a bit dubiously, they weren't exactly uncommon.

Well, its nice to have someone to blame if a storm destroys your ship, or a famine hits your country. Witches make a convienient target, especially once the belief in the witches' sabbaths came into play - a belief which was held first by the peasantry and then became accepted elsewhere, by the way. Useful in that it posited a mass conspiracy of witches to harm others - and we all know how popular conspiracy theories are today!

This is the North Berwick witch trial, and it was in Scotland not England. Normally this wouldn't make much of a difference, but as I pointed out in my previous post, England was peculiar in its treatment of witches, whereas Scotland adhered more to the European beliefs.

The North Berwick trial is also rather odd - James VI took a personal interest in the proceedings, because one of the charges brought against them was that they, along with others, had tried to wreck the King's ship as he travelled back from Denmark. The Earl of Bothwell was later accused of complicity in the crime. Trials were held both in Denmark and Scotland - the one and only time two nations collaberated like this.

While the North Berwick trial may have started off by being a quarrel between two women, it escalated to an enormous extent and became a political crime, though, Sampson's mention of the Queen of the Fairies notwithstanding, not a religious one.

The reasons behind this may simply be that the Reformation in Scotland was not that long established, and they may well have been feeling the strain of the "auld alliance", now severed as France was a Catholic country. In addition North Berwick lies on the Borders, and the North of England was quite strongly Catholic despite England being a Protestant nation. Not that Scottish and English forms of Protestantism were particularly similar, of course.

lpetrich

Robert Turkel / James Patrick Holding has invented a name for Richard Carrier:

Broken Vector

in his discussion of RC's "Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story"

Amos

I saw the same exhibition in Amsterdam. It is a travelling show and I thought the funniest one of all was "the dipper" used to "cool down" unfaithful women.

But I agree, they looked like rather mean machines. Maybe bullets and bombs are better. Then at least we cannot see the agony of our victim and continue doing it without remorse.

Vorkosigan

Like by me, for example. I wonder if there is some psychic relationship to the rising fundamentalism we are experiencing in this age of scientific and technical success....