I thought having a witch in the family was supposed to be a good thing. Obviously these people have not seen the Harry Potter movies, or read the books. Maybe we should give the headmaster of Hogwarts a call, and see if we can get a few entrance acceptance letters sent out to these African kids.

The last thing I am ever going to do is accuse my kids of being death eaters.

Is the human race supposed to suddenly turn on its heel and become rational? In the developing countries they burn the witches. In the developed counties we have religeous fundamentalists jousting with pseudo scientists. Which is worse? They all look the same to me.

A friend expressed it best with respect to america. He said he could deal with irrational thinking because it was a matter of training. The problem is the surging arational thinking wherein the mind actively rejects and is hostile towards rationality.

This reminds me of the lost boys of Salt Lake or just any disaffected abused runaway in our own country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_3

Ms. Lloyd, please don't used the phrase "beg the question" again until you learn what it means.

With-hunting peaked in modern times, not in late antiquity.

From Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begs_the_question

Contested modern usage

More recently, "begs the question" has been widely used as an equivalent to "invites the question," "prompts the question," "raises the question," or to indicate that "the question ought to be addressed." In this usage, "the question" is stated in the next phrase. For example: "This year's budget deficit is half a trillion dollars. This begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?" This usage has met with substantial resistance among prescriptive grammarians.[3][4][5][6][7] . Argument over whether this usage should be considered "incorrect" is an example of the debate between linguistic prescription and description.

I lived in a village in Cameroon (West Africa) for two years. There is universal belief in magic and witchcraft there. Every Cameroonian I ever met, regardless of education level, strongly believed that magic was real and a part of every day life. Nearly anything bad (sickness, accidents, financial misfortune) that happened to a person was attributed to magic by their (often unnamed) enemies. These ideas were so pervasive that I half-believed them when I was there. If you talked to any Cameroonian about it, they would regale you with first-hand accounts of amazing occurrences. My favorite (that I heard several independent first-hand accounts of ) was about a guy who used to tour the market days in the area where I lived. The story goes like this: He would ask some parent in the crowd to volunteer their child and he would give them a substantial sum of money as a "deposit". In full view of the crowd, he would then dismember the child. As proof that he had really done it, he would hand out the limbs to different members of the crowd. After some time has passed, he would collect all of the body parts from the crowd, reassemble them, work some magic, and viola, the child would jump up whole and normal. I had several friends who were otherwise reliable people swear that they had seen it first hand and it was real.

Fortunately, accusations of witchcraft against specific people were rarely acted on. There was a witch-hunting ritual every year that sometimes resulted in some poor person being identified as a witch. The ritual involved a battle of magic between the witch-hunters and the witch that was supposed to kill the spirit of the witch (this took place on some sprititual level invisible to the spectators). If the witch-hunters were successful in killing the witch's spirit, then he or she was supposed to die shortly thereafter. The two times that I saw it, the witch-hunters were not successful in killing the witches spirit. I was told by my friends that when they were successful, then they would let it be known who the witch was and that person would invariably become sick in some very painful fashion and then die only after confessing their witchcraft. Again, my friends all swore that they had personally witnessed this multiple times. My hypothesis is that belief in magic and the ritual was so strong that the accused witches convinced themselves that it was true.

...of the wave of Satanic Ritual Abuses cases which popped-up around the country in the mid-1980s. It's a very bizarre story in which social workers whipped-up a public frenzy about children being ritually abused in their day cares- sometimes sacrificed on altars or in basement torture chambers- and were sodomized, forced to drink urine, etc. These included such high-profile media circuses as the McMartin preschool trial, Wee Care Nursery School abuse cases, the Kern County ritual abuse cases, Fells Acre ritual abuse case, and the West Memphis 3.

What's amazing is that no altars or basement chambers were ever found and many children themselves denied being abused. This was a real-life witch-hunt in which dozens of people (mostly male day-care workers, incidentally) were put into jail. And some of them still ARE in jail today (Wiki "Gerald Amirault" if you've got the time.)

Oh, and you know what's really interesting about Satanic Ritual Abuse?

Front and center among the social workers who ginned-up this frenzy were prominent feminists, with Ms Magazine and Gloria Steinem putting their fully support behind the cause.

Falsely accusing day-care workers of abuse seemed like such a good way of attacking Teh Patriarchy at the time, I guess...

Ah, turns-out he was released in 2004. Silly me.

Witch hunts were not a medieval ("Dark Ages") phenomenon; they became prevalent in Renaissance (post-1400) Europe. As the religiosity of Europe slowly ebbed, there was left a certain "explanatory" vacuum. Renaissance ecletecism meant that a multitude of explanatory paradigms (science, magic, religion, alchemy, etc. etc.) were advanced as potential successors to Christianity. Given the number of options, there was understandably a certain general anxiety about why things happened. Events which might before have been ascribed to "the will of God" might be seen, at least sometimes, as the result of some mysterious human agency. Whence, witch hunts.