XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis   
   From: chenrich@monmouth.com   
      
   In article , Peter B. Juul   
    wrote:   
      
   > Steve Hayes  writes:   
   >   
   > > The Great European Witchhunt was a prduct of modernity, not of the Middle   
   > > Ages. And, as Williams shows, it was an aberration, that lasted about 200   
   > > years. Many people speak as though witchhunting was "medieval". It wasn't   
   > > (and   
   > > isn't). It was, and is, modern.   
   >   
   > Also, protestants (like me) tend to link witchhunting to the catholic   
   > church, when it was mostly a protestant phenomenon.   
   >   
   > The dreaded spanish inquisition burned less than ten witches over its   
   > entire existence period as far as I recall, whereas e.g. Sweden burned   
   > hundreds, maybe thousands. (The SI believed that confessions brought   
   > forward under torture were useless.)   
   >   
   > There's a rather brilliant swedish book by Jan Guillou that probably   
   > isn't available in non-scandinavian languages, which points out that   
   > the swedish practice was based amon other things on the premise that   
   > "children doesn't lie under oath", so that if a child said that he had   
   > been brought to a witch's sabbath, riding backwards on a flying cow,   
   > it had to be true, and the grownups he identified as involved had to   
   > be burned.   
      
   _Witches_ _and_ _Neighbors_ by Robin Briggs is a recent book in   
   English, that examines witchcraft accusations in a district in France,   
   in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (if memory serves).  It   
   seems that they often happened because somebody was under stress, and   
   releived it by accusing a neighbor of having caused it.   
   >   
   > Torture was used, because a confessed sin could be forgiven. However,   
   > no matter if the accused confessed or not, he was burned. Thou shalt   
   > not suffer a witch to live...   
   >   
   > (Guillou goes on to show that the same idea about childrens'   
   > truthfulness lives on today. Today the crime is usually pedophilia,   
   > but the stories are similar - secret rooms (that noone can find),   
   > strange costumes, wild orgies involving more and more   
   > grown-ups. Specially trained child psycologists are brought in to   
   > explain that this is what has actually happened to the child, no   
   > matter how absurd the stories grow.)   
   We had some notorious cases like this in the USA in the 1980's and   
   1990's.   
      
   --   
   Chris Henrich   
   http://www.mathinteract.com   
   God just doesn't fit inside a single religion.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)