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This is horrific. 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 worr

• CamperBob2 13y ago
  There are several things you can do about it. Donate to http://ncse.com http://ncse.com, http://ffrf.org http://ffrf.org, http://www.au.org http://www.au.org and/or similar orgs in your own country. 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.
  • abraininavat 13y ago
    Cheers for saying it. I'd suggest it's not just superstition, it's ignorance in general, in all its forms. The cure is education.
  • mc-lovin 13y ago
    Those organzations are nothing to do with the persecution of witchcrafit in PNG. Did you even read the article. 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".
    • jlgreco 13y ago
      What word do you prefer to superstition?
      • mc-lovin 13y ago
        It's the the word, it's the use of the category that I object to. 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.
        • jlgreco 13y ago
          Why would you say they are burning women as witches, if not superstition? "Why could they believe that witches even exist?" seems like a pretty damn important question to ask, but I suppose that is just my opinion. 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.
          • mc-lovin 13y ago
            You are asking the wrong question. Superstition was one factor, but what about instances where superstition does not cause violence? Or instances (like lynchings) where mob violence is not triggered by superstition. Did you understand my analogy earlier? It seems like you are not addressing all of my argument. 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.
            • jlgreco 13y ago
              So what do you propose we do, if not fight superstition with education? Convert them all to a religion that you find more pleasant? I think I would file that under "not palatable", to put it mildly. Fighting superstition by providing education is the only solution that we can embrace. > 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?
  • pdeuchler 13y ago
    How did it not occur to you that equating the burning alive of young women for witch craft with teaching children beliefs (alongside apposing beliefs, no less!) commonly held among billions of people (who do not burn people alive as witches) would be offensive? Please think before you post next time. e: phrasing
    • MisterBastahrd 13y ago
      How is it offensive? 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.
      • wildgift 13y ago
        Creationism also has little place in church. Most denominations of Christianity reject the literal story of Genesis, and do accept evolution. They're just a little quiet about it because there are masses of people out there who do believe in creationism. The main reason why they do is because they think a literal interpretation of the Bible is a sign of strong faith. 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.
    • stratosvoukel 13y ago
      Some people burn witches, other people kill gay people. Recently 15000 religious people and priests gathered in Georgia , in the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, and started hitting on the LGBTQ crowd that was there for celebrating the day. Tens of people were sent to the hospital, a couple badly hurt. If you are straight , white, catholic and male you may do not feel/know or even care about how religion harms our everyday lives, but what is happening to these women in PNG is happening to non-male/straight/white/religious people all around the world, maybe not in such a ritualistic way but still....
  • charonn0 13y ago
    From the article: >“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.
    • pdeuchler 13y ago
      Did you not read the article? The nurse struggled to stop the violence, and was threatened with a similar fate before the crowd of natives complacently watching the torture forced her away. It was then when she began to pray. 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.
      • CamperBob2 13y ago
        Point being, Catholic missionaries who succeed in replacing one superstition with another may seem to fix the immediate problem, but the rest of us are facepalming hard enough to leave marks.
        • hydrox24 13y ago
          I'm not sure what your trying to say, but with the people of countries/areas like PNG, the only real option is to replace their violent, torturous and inhumane superstition with one that is, at it's core, focussed on something more positive. These people are very spiritual and evangelising atheism simply would not work in the short or medium term. > "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?
• weavejester 13y ago
  It is horrific, but let's not exaggerate the issue... If you're in the top 0.001%, you're a multi-millionaire, and persecution is an issue affecting a minority of the world's population, almost by definition, as it's hard to persecute a group that outnumbers you.
  • MisterBastahrd 13y ago
    It's quite easy as long as you have more power than they do.
• Alex3917 13y ago
  In the U.S. we still have the death penalty for witchcraft, it's just not called that anymore. I think they call it drug trafficking now, but if you look at what witchcraft was historically it's basically the exact same thing.
  • Dylan16807 13y ago
    The fuck are you talking about?
    • Alex3917 13y ago
      Witchcraft and drug dealing are basically both just different instances of practicing medicine that the government doesn't approve of. Drug dealing tends to have connotations involving allopathic-style medicine whereas traditional witchcraft is generally more animistic, but they are basically both the same thing, and in many cases the drugs involved are probably even identical or else analogues.
      • Dylan16807 13y ago
        I wouldn't be so sure about that. > 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.
        • Alex3917 13y ago
          >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." 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.
• Cushman 13y ago
  Be very careful. 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.
• glurgh 13y ago
  0.001% of the global population is 70k people. Most people on the planet do not live under the immediate daily threat of sectarian violence.
  • joshfraser 13y ago
    I think you mean 7 millon
    • glurgh 13y ago
      No, I think I mean 70,000. It's 0.001% not 0.001. (0.001 / 100) * 7000000000 = 70000