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Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt

131 points by blago 9y ago

quickthrower2 9y ago
I think this is meant to be taken with a pinch of salt! I'll bite though: What if a person is technically guilty but they have convinced themselves that they are not? Be it ignorance of the law, or just arrogance? They'll get let off. Conversely what if someone who is easily brainwashed has been convinced they are guilty and given false memories? However, the effect mentioned does play in modern life: * People who did park illegally won't bother to contest their parking ticket. * People who get sued for doing something wrong would settle if they actually did (although a lot of people will settle due to the cost of fighting, so it isn't perfect?)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- averagewall 9y ago
  No doubt it was terribly inaccurate, but the best they could do at the time. Even in the modern system, false memories implanted by prosecutors have been a real problem causing confessions.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >What if a person is technically guilty but they have convinced themselves that they are not? Be it ignorance of the law, or just arrogance? They'll get let off. Conversely what if someone who is easily brainwashed has been convinced they are guilty and given false memories? Then some outlier cases will not be punished.
horsecaptin 9y ago
This makes me think that the Salem witch trials were carried out on women who refused to sleep with the priest. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- legostormtroopr 9y ago
  That seems like a very strong and unverified claim.
- blackbagboys 9y ago
  The Salem witch trials were carried out by secular authorities. There were also no catholic priests in the Massachusetts bay colony at that time.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    "priests" is wrong, but the core rest of the comment applies.
pwinnski 9y ago
Inasmuch as this works, or any justice system works, is as much as people believe the system metes out justice. In the USA, in 2017, people who knows they're guilty plead not guilty because they have reason to believe that they'll be able to get away with something. Either their entire crime, or at least the heaviest punishment for it. Meanwhile, people who know they're not guilty frequently plead guilty (or more accurately, take plea bargains) to avoid a slow and expensive justice system they don't perceive as an instrument of true justice. Even in the system described in the article, it seems one third of people claimed innocence and yet were found guilty by the priests. My cynical thought is that they didn't pay the priest, or weren't regular churchgoers, or were "outsiders" to the community, and so justice didn't work for them.
- speedplane 9y ago
  > In the USA, in 2017, people who knows they're guilty plead not guilty because they have reason to believe that they'll be able to get away with something. I don't have a problem with this. Allowing a defendant to plead not guilty puts the onus on the system to make its case. The purpose of the justice system is not only to determine innocence and guilt, it's also to show that there is a fair and transparent process to get to that result. The procedure is often as important as the substance. > people who know they're not guilty frequently plead guilty Not sure how often this occurs, but this is definitely bad.
  - michaelchisari 9y ago
    > Not sure how often this occurs, but this is definitely bad. Unless you have a clear alibi with documented proof that you were nowhere near the scene of the crime, every public defender in America (and plenty of private lawyers) recommends you take a plea deal. Even if the charges are absurd. Even if you repeatedly assaulted the police officer's fist with your eye-socket in the process of being arrested. Even if your friends, your parents, and your priest were all witnesses to your innocence, a plea bargain is the first and most prominent option.
    - speedplane 9y ago
DubiousPusher 9y ago
Cool. By this article's own logic, only 33% of innocent people tried were wrongly convicted. What a great system.
- Retra 9y ago
  "Hope for a miracle to occur" isn't much of a system when you get right down to it.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    That how it works today in the public defender system
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  I would have assumed around 99%. At least it's much better than that.
  - Kiro 9y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I expected the same.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Me too, which is why I'm a bit surprised at all the negativity towards this article. Sure, it's sort of 'defending' trial by ordeal, but it's not new that this practice was real and terrible. What's novel to me is that it wasn't just a way to automatically convict every suspect; a 2/3 acquittal rate is vastly higher than I would have guessed.
    - squeaky-clean 9y ago
      Yeah, I really enjoyed this article too! Trial by ordeal has always confused me for that reason, obviously 100% of people holding burning iron will get burnt hands, wouldn't they find it fishy if 100% of the people undergoing trial end up guilty? And this gives a really sensible explanation for that.
protoster 9y ago
Doesn't that mean that the priest doesn't trust god if he has to rig the ordeal himself?
- jscheel 9y ago
  I think the point is that the system was created with the understanding that the game was rigged, not that they figured it out after God didn't save a few people they truly believed were innocent.
- muzani 9y ago
  Maybe the priest tried contacting God, but got a busy line. So they normally just handle it on their own when that happens.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Medieval priests weren't naive or stupid. Even those that really believed, understood that miracles, if they existed at all, are not something that is forced just because they have a trial. At best they were something that happens once in a blue moon, or in the biblical times.
- ralmeida 9y ago
  The priests might have convinced themselves that the 'holes' in the system were the wordly vehicle through which God would show his will. Which, by the author's logic, is actually the point.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    In particular, it stands out that the cauldron is removed from the fire and then the priest prays over it. That's going to improve everyone's chances of acquittal, and even if it was manipulated it doesn't take any conscious fraud. You want a good judgement, you believe your prayers are a factor in that, and perhaps if you're biased it's simply by praying longer for those you believe innocent. I'm sure some priests did rig trials intentionally, but there's plenty of room produce a result like this out of piety.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
emanreus 9y ago
Is this some kind of satire?
dmichulke 9y ago
Disadvantage: Justice through obscurity It only works as long as no criminal knows how it works. Kerckhoffs would have frowned upon such a system.
grondilu 9y ago
> How could an ordeal-administering priest make boiling water innocuous to an innocent defendant’s flesh? By making sure that it wasn’t actually boiling. I had no idea that this kind of things was actually staged. Should I understand that even the priests did not actually believe in God's influence in this, and that instead they used the whole thing as a psychological trick? If so, that says a lot about religion in general.
- ManlyBread 9y ago
  It's not that they didn't believe, it's more likely that they believed that God has no obligation to actually participate in such a trail and went with a more controlled solution instead.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Yes , with religion there's always another epicycle or turtle to explain away the inconsistent logic.
    - twodave 9y ago
      Wait, what? Assuming he exists (because otherwise the point is moot), are you saying that this God who created the UNIVERSE should be obligated to ask, "How high?" when we ask him to jump? Hinging one's belief (or disbelief) the existence of God on whether he is compliant with our wishes is foolishness; the mistake made by the priests here was NOT that they trusted in God (a neutral act in this example), but rather that they placed expectations of civil/criminal justice on a God who had promised them no such involvement in society. He didn't even provide this to the Israelites, with whom he had a much more intimate covenant. Instead, there were the judges/prophets/kings who administered justice. What is more interesting to me is how these ordeals seem to (poorly) parallel the cut-the-baby-in-half sort of justice King Solomon was recorded to have administered. Except in his case it was obvious soon after that he never intended to carry out the sentence.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  If anything, it's the priests that had most proof and evidence that no matter if someone's guilty or not, putting their hand in boiling water does damage, and God doesn't give much of a shit either way.
tonyg 9y ago
A light-hearted post about a completely evil method of "correctly" finding fact. A whisker away from apologetics for torture. The final paragraph is particularly bonkers: > "In practice, it might not have mattered whether ordeals were truly God’s judgments or instead the judgments of clever legal systems that leveraged criminal defendants’ incentives to correctly find fact. For, in either case, the result was the same: improved criminal justice, thanks to God." It's a facile analysis indeed that posits that this setup is either "clever", might "correctly find fact", or might lead to "improved criminal justice".
- dm319 9y ago
  Yes, it's a strange article in that on the face of it they take a philosophical, almost game-theory approach to how it works (with some pretty big assumptions of course), but at times it ventures into the medieval belief system itself. > The only ones who know for sure whether a defendant is guilty or innocent are the defendant himself and God above Maybe it is carefully written so that the writer can get across an interesting anecdote, while not upsetting the 60% of people that pray daily in Virginia.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    No, it's written like that because belief in God is paramount to how this system works; especially back then, defendants might've not be afraid of the criminal justice system per se, but God, hoo boy don't want to piss that guy off. I mean the basic premise of trial by ordeal is "Hey, we dunno if you did it or not, and we can't trust your word for it, let's ask God, and let Him burn the shit out of your hand if you're lying". Pain + religious fears.
smegel 9y ago
> or has he been charged guilty by an overzealous prosecutor? Isn't that the point of a prosecutor?
- tialaramex 9y ago
  No? In a sensible criminal system the prosecutor, just like the judge is there to ensure justice. It's an asymmetric system, the defence represent an individual but everybody else represents society's interest in justice. In England for example the prosecutors work for the Crown and make their decision based on the "Full Code Test" which says they shouldn't prosecute unless a bunch of constraints are true, including: They are convinced the subject is guilty They expect to secure a conviction at trial, meaning they can prove the accusation to the satisfaction of judge and where appropriate jury. The prosecution serves a legitimate public interest The subject hasn't already suffered equivalent or greater consequences for their actions than could be inflicted as punishment for the crime.
  - smegel 9y ago
    > It's an asymmetric system I thought it was an adversarial system and the judge was the umpire. > They are convinced the subject is guilty Is they believed that why wouldn't they "charge guilty" the accused? Or am I misunderstanding what "been charged guilty by an overzealous prosecutor" means?
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      The prosecutor's job is to represent the best interests of the state, not to get the most and harshest possible convictions. It's not like a sport where whatever is bad for one side is automatically good for the other side. It is like any other legal proceeding: the two parties interests are opposed in some areas and aligned in other areas.
borvo 9y ago
The priest's friends and whoever paid the bribes would be found not guilty. Pretty lucrative job, being a priest and administering god's justice. The 1/3 didn't pay, or the priest didn't like them.
silveira 9y ago
I disagree with effectiveness of the trial by ordeal as it relies entirely in the priest integrity and ability to determine if defendant is guilty or not, which sometimes may not be feasible. But it was an interesting article. If you liked it, you may like this one which changed my view on how justice works in US, "Why Innocent People Plead Guilty" by Jed S. Rakoff http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peop...
gerbilly 9y ago
What silly logic. Why assume that the people or the priests in medieval times 'believed' with any less doubt than we have today? Humans haven't gotten any smarter since then. If the ordeal 'proved' the defendant guilty, all it would take is for one person to know for a fact that a defendant was not guilty to create doubt in the system. Iterate this a few times and the absolute belief required for this approach to work would quickly disintegrate across the whole village. The whole system of ordeals seems like a charade to legitimize what amounted to arbitrary judgments in light of insufficient evidence. Kind of like the system we have today, come to think of it.
SeanDav 9y ago
In summary: Get on the Priest's good side, as he was pretty much judge, jury and executioner.
Clubber 9y ago
This is the same trick lie detector tests use. They don't actually work, but it tricks the defendant into confessing because it believes the machine is infallible, just like God in the medieval period.
dogruck 9y ago
born into this into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes http://www.adrianaparcero.com/bukowski/ab_poems01.html http://www.adrianaparcero.com/bukowski/ab_poems01.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sandworm101 9y ago
"A few days later, the defendant’s hand was inspected: if it was burned, he was guilty; if not, he was innocent." No. That isn't how it worked. The miracle was not that the hand was not burnt. It always burned. God's intervention was measured upon whether or not the hand was healing. If it was infected then god was not with you (and there was a good chance you would die). If the wound/burn was healing nicely then god was with you. They did not expect miracles so dramatic as a hand not being burnt. To think that they did suggests that everyone was found guilty. They were not. The OP also suggests that ordeals were rigged. Some certainly were but people in the past weren't idiots. They knew what boiling water or red-hot iron looked like, fat better than we do today. They could spot a trick. Trial by ordeal was not some scam or legal trick. People actually believed in the process took it very seriously. And we see remnants of it today. Many still believe that sickness and recovery from wounds involves "faith" and regularly pray for healing. Others believe that sickness is the result of God's displeasure, evidence of sin. Trial by ordeal is alive and well.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  I wouldn't argue too much from modern religious thoughrt. Much of modern religion is obvious jokes and scams and become "divine truth" via the passage of time. See Scientology and Mormonism for the newest examples, and realize that Islam and Christianity were not so different.
trhway 9y ago
so basically church hijacked justice system as a propaganda vehicle allowing to show off god-in-action - with impressive "miracles" for the "innocents" and with god-blessed-and-willed torture for the "guilty".
rpenm 9y ago
I'm sure that the priests didn't allow their complete control of an opaque judicial process to be affected by their biases. There's no way that their social, economic or political interests could possibly affect the outcome. Doesn't this system fail when priests believe in miracles? Or when the guilty believe God will spare them? Or when the innocent don't believe in miracles? Or when a guilty nonbeliever considers the same game theory? Or when the accused isn't some homo economicus rational agent? These are hardly edge cases.

131 points by blago 9y ago

I think this is meant to be taken with a pinch of salt! I'll bite though: What if a person is technically guilty but they have convinced themselves that they are not? Be it ignorance of the law, or just arrogance? They'll get let off. Conversely what if someone who is easily brainwashed has been convinced they are guilty and given false memories? However, the effect mentioned does play in modern life: * People who did park illegally won't bother to contest their parking ticket. * People who get sued for doing something wrong would settle if they actually did (although a lot of people will settle due to the cost of fighting, so it isn't perfect?)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
averagewall 9y ago
No doubt it was terribly inaccurate, but the best they could do at the time. Even in the modern system, false memories implanted by prosecutors have been a real problem causing confessions.
coldtea 9y ago
>What if a person is technically guilty but they have convinced themselves that they are not? Be it ignorance of the law, or just arrogance? They'll get let off. Conversely what if someone who is easily brainwashed has been convinced they are guilty and given false memories? Then some outlier cases will not be punished.

horsecaptin 9y ago

This makes me think that the Salem witch trials were carried out on women who refused to sleep with the priest. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

legostormtroopr 9y ago
That seems like a very strong and unverified claim.
blackbagboys 9y ago
The Salem witch trials were carried out by secular authorities. There were also no catholic priests in the Massachusetts bay colony at that time.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  "priests" is wrong, but the core rest of the comment applies.

pwinnski 9y ago

Inasmuch as this works, or any justice system works, is as much as people believe the system metes out justice. In the USA, in 2017, people who knows they're guilty plead not guilty because they have reason to believe that they'll be able to get away with something. Either their entire crime, or at least the heaviest punishment for it. Meanwhile, people who know they're not guilty frequently plead guilty (or more accurately, take plea bargains) to avoid a slow and expensive justice system they don't perceive as an instrument of true justice. Even in the system described in the article, it seems one third of people claimed innocence and yet were found guilty by the priests. My cynical thought is that they didn't pay the priest, or weren't regular churchgoers, or were "outsiders" to the community, and so justice didn't work for them.

speedplane 9y ago
> In the USA, in 2017, people who knows they're guilty plead not guilty because they have reason to believe that they'll be able to get away with something. I don't have a problem with this. Allowing a defendant to plead not guilty puts the onus on the system to make its case. The purpose of the justice system is not only to determine innocence and guilt, it's also to show that there is a fair and transparent process to get to that result. The procedure is often as important as the substance. > people who know they're not guilty frequently plead guilty Not sure how often this occurs, but this is definitely bad.
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  > Not sure how often this occurs, but this is definitely bad. Unless you have a clear alibi with documented proof that you were nowhere near the scene of the crime, every public defender in America (and plenty of private lawyers) recommends you take a plea deal. Even if the charges are absurd. Even if you repeatedly assaulted the police officer's fist with your eye-socket in the process of being arrested. Even if your friends, your parents, and your priest were all witnesses to your innocence, a plea bargain is the first and most prominent option.
  - speedplane 9y ago

DubiousPusher 9y ago

Cool. By this article's own logic, only 33% of innocent people tried were wrongly convicted. What a great system.

Retra 9y ago
"Hope for a miracle to occur" isn't much of a system when you get right down to it.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  That how it works today in the public defender system
squeaky-clean 9y ago
I would have assumed around 99%. At least it's much better than that.
- Kiro 9y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I expected the same.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Me too, which is why I'm a bit surprised at all the negativity towards this article. Sure, it's sort of 'defending' trial by ordeal, but it's not new that this practice was real and terrible. What's novel to me is that it wasn't just a way to automatically convict every suspect; a 2/3 acquittal rate is vastly higher than I would have guessed.
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    Yeah, I really enjoyed this article too! Trial by ordeal has always confused me for that reason, obviously 100% of people holding burning iron will get burnt hands, wouldn't they find it fishy if 100% of the people undergoing trial end up guilty? And this gives a really sensible explanation for that.

protoster 9y ago

Doesn't that mean that the priest doesn't trust god if he has to rig the ordeal himself?

jscheel 9y ago
I think the point is that the system was created with the understanding that the game was rigged, not that they figured it out after God didn't save a few people they truly believed were innocent.
muzani 9y ago
Maybe the priest tried contacting God, but got a busy line. So they normally just handle it on their own when that happens.
coldtea 9y ago
Medieval priests weren't naive or stupid. Even those that really believed, understood that miracles, if they existed at all, are not something that is forced just because they have a trial. At best they were something that happens once in a blue moon, or in the biblical times.
ralmeida 9y ago
The priests might have convinced themselves that the 'holes' in the system were the wordly vehicle through which God would show his will. Which, by the author's logic, is actually the point.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  In particular, it stands out that the cauldron is removed from the fire and then the priest prays over it. That's going to improve everyone's chances of acquittal, and even if it was manipulated it doesn't take any conscious fraud. You want a good judgement, you believe your prayers are a factor in that, and perhaps if you're biased it's simply by praying longer for those you believe innocent. I'm sure some priests did rig trials intentionally, but there's plenty of room produce a result like this out of piety.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

emanreus 9y ago

Is this some kind of satire?

dmichulke 9y ago

Disadvantage: Justice through obscurity It only works as long as no criminal knows how it works. Kerckhoffs would have frowned upon such a system.

grondilu 9y ago

> How could an ordeal-administering priest make boiling water innocuous to an innocent defendant’s flesh? By making sure that it wasn’t actually boiling. I had no idea that this kind of things was actually staged. Should I understand that even the priests did not actually believe in God's influence in this, and that instead they used the whole thing as a psychological trick? If so, that says a lot about religion in general.

ManlyBread 9y ago
It's not that they didn't believe, it's more likely that they believed that God has no obligation to actually participate in such a trail and went with a more controlled solution instead.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Yes , with religion there's always another epicycle or turtle to explain away the inconsistent logic.
  - twodave 9y ago
    Wait, what? Assuming he exists (because otherwise the point is moot), are you saying that this God who created the UNIVERSE should be obligated to ask, "How high?" when we ask him to jump? Hinging one's belief (or disbelief) the existence of God on whether he is compliant with our wishes is foolishness; the mistake made by the priests here was NOT that they trusted in God (a neutral act in this example), but rather that they placed expectations of civil/criminal justice on a God who had promised them no such involvement in society. He didn't even provide this to the Israelites, with whom he had a much more intimate covenant. Instead, there were the judges/prophets/kings who administered justice. What is more interesting to me is how these ordeals seem to (poorly) parallel the cut-the-baby-in-half sort of justice King Solomon was recorded to have administered. Except in his case it was obvious soon after that he never intended to carry out the sentence.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
If anything, it's the priests that had most proof and evidence that no matter if someone's guilty or not, putting their hand in boiling water does damage, and God doesn't give much of a shit either way.

tonyg 9y ago

A light-hearted post about a completely evil method of "correctly" finding fact. A whisker away from apologetics for torture. The final paragraph is particularly bonkers: > "In practice, it might not have mattered whether ordeals were truly God’s judgments or instead the judgments of clever legal systems that leveraged criminal defendants’ incentives to correctly find fact. For, in either case, the result was the same: improved criminal justice, thanks to God." It's a facile analysis indeed that posits that this setup is either "clever", might "correctly find fact", or might lead to "improved criminal justice".

dm319 9y ago
Yes, it's a strange article in that on the face of it they take a philosophical, almost game-theory approach to how it works (with some pretty big assumptions of course), but at times it ventures into the medieval belief system itself. > The only ones who know for sure whether a defendant is guilty or innocent are the defendant himself and God above Maybe it is carefully written so that the writer can get across an interesting anecdote, while not upsetting the 60% of people that pray daily in Virginia.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  No, it's written like that because belief in God is paramount to how this system works; especially back then, defendants might've not be afraid of the criminal justice system per se, but God, hoo boy don't want to piss that guy off. I mean the basic premise of trial by ordeal is "Hey, we dunno if you did it or not, and we can't trust your word for it, let's ask God, and let Him burn the shit out of your hand if you're lying". Pain + religious fears.

smegel 9y ago

> or has he been charged guilty by an overzealous prosecutor? Isn't that the point of a prosecutor?

tialaramex 9y ago
No? In a sensible criminal system the prosecutor, just like the judge is there to ensure justice. It's an asymmetric system, the defence represent an individual but everybody else represents society's interest in justice. In England for example the prosecutors work for the Crown and make their decision based on the "Full Code Test" which says they shouldn't prosecute unless a bunch of constraints are true, including: They are convinced the subject is guilty They expect to secure a conviction at trial, meaning they can prove the accusation to the satisfaction of judge and where appropriate jury. The prosecution serves a legitimate public interest The subject hasn't already suffered equivalent or greater consequences for their actions than could be inflicted as punishment for the crime.
- smegel 9y ago
  > It's an asymmetric system I thought it was an adversarial system and the judge was the umpire. > They are convinced the subject is guilty Is they believed that why wouldn't they "charge guilty" the accused? Or am I misunderstanding what "been charged guilty by an overzealous prosecutor" means?
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    The prosecutor's job is to represent the best interests of the state, not to get the most and harshest possible convictions. It's not like a sport where whatever is bad for one side is automatically good for the other side. It is like any other legal proceeding: the two parties interests are opposed in some areas and aligned in other areas.

borvo 9y ago

The priest's friends and whoever paid the bribes would be found not guilty. Pretty lucrative job, being a priest and administering god's justice. The 1/3 didn't pay, or the priest didn't like them.

silveira 9y ago

I disagree with effectiveness of the trial by ordeal as it relies entirely in the priest integrity and ability to determine if defendant is guilty or not, which sometimes may not be feasible. But it was an interesting article. If you liked it, you may like this one which changed my view on how justice works in US, "Why Innocent People Plead Guilty" by Jed S. Rakoff http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peop...

gerbilly 9y ago

What silly logic. Why assume that the people or the priests in medieval times 'believed' with any less doubt than we have today? Humans haven't gotten any smarter since then. If the ordeal 'proved' the defendant guilty, all it would take is for one person to know for a fact that a defendant was not guilty to create doubt in the system. Iterate this a few times and the absolute belief required for this approach to work would quickly disintegrate across the whole village. The whole system of ordeals seems like a charade to legitimize what amounted to arbitrary judgments in light of insufficient evidence. Kind of like the system we have today, come to think of it.

SeanDav 9y ago

In summary: Get on the Priest's good side, as he was pretty much judge, jury and executioner.

Clubber 9y ago

This is the same trick lie detector tests use. They don't actually work, but it tricks the defendant into confessing because it believes the machine is infallible, just like God in the medieval period.

dogruck 9y ago

born into this into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes http://www.adrianaparcero.com/bukowski/ab_poems01.html http://www.adrianaparcero.com/bukowski/ab_poems01.html

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

sandworm101 9y ago

"A few days later, the defendant’s hand was inspected: if it was burned, he was guilty; if not, he was innocent." No. That isn't how it worked. The miracle was not that the hand was not burnt. It always burned. God's intervention was measured upon whether or not the hand was healing. If it was infected then god was not with you (and there was a good chance you would die). If the wound/burn was healing nicely then god was with you. They did not expect miracles so dramatic as a hand not being burnt. To think that they did suggests that everyone was found guilty. They were not. The OP also suggests that ordeals were rigged. Some certainly were but people in the past weren't idiots. They knew what boiling water or red-hot iron looked like, fat better than we do today. They could spot a trick. Trial by ordeal was not some scam or legal trick. People actually believed in the process took it very seriously. And we see remnants of it today. Many still believe that sickness and recovery from wounds involves "faith" and regularly pray for healing. Others believe that sickness is the result of God's displeasure, evidence of sin. Trial by ordeal is alive and well.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
I wouldn't argue too much from modern religious thoughrt. Much of modern religion is obvious jokes and scams and become "divine truth" via the passage of time. See Scientology and Mormonism for the newest examples, and realize that Islam and Christianity were not so different.

trhway 9y ago

so basically church hijacked justice system as a propaganda vehicle allowing to show off god-in-action - with impressive "miracles" for the "innocents" and with god-blessed-and-willed torture for the "guilty".

rpenm 9y ago

I'm sure that the priests didn't allow their complete control of an opaque judicial process to be affected by their biases. There's no way that their social, economic or political interests could possibly affect the outcome. Doesn't this system fail when priests believe in miracles? Or when the guilty believe God will spare them? Or when the innocent don't believe in miracles? Or when a guilty nonbeliever considers the same game theory? Or when the accused isn't some homo economicus rational agent? These are hardly edge cases.