A women confessed that she was not a witch but was poor and that, even if set free, no one would give her food.
Sir George estimated that 2/3 of the accusations were false and that many of the victims were poor and that the confessions were through torture (1:30)
Woman who forgives her persecutors (1:27) but the prosecutor believes she is still guilty.
Test whether witches float via ordeal. (1:30)
King James exports witchcraft persecution from Scotland (1:31)
Floating Test, Reciting Lord’s Prayer (1:38)
Weigh more than the Bible (1:39)
Man who is paid per witch caught. Threatens not to come (1:40)
People feel no one is safe from his reproach. Mob accuses him of being a witch (1:42)
Educated people stop believing in modern witchcraft ~1650 (1:45)
Not 1/100 witches would be convicted if a normal trial would be given (2:11)
Duke has woman accuse Jesuits of Sorcery (2:35) Frederick S, Schondbrun, Duke of Brunswick (~1650)
- condemned torture, swimming of witches
Man couldn’t account for headache (2:43)
Native Americans think Salem settlers an inferior species because he Great Sprit sent no witches(2:50)
Misguided Delusion: RE Sam Harris Fireplace Delusion
Sam Harris wants to help non-religious people understand how it feels to be a believer confronted with scientific rationality. Toward that end, he offers the fireplace delusion. The idea is simple:
.. A better analogy than the fireplace delusion might be something derived from it. I offer, instead, love.
Love is not rational. It cannot be refuted by rationality and facts. Scientific reasoning may suggest that my entire biological purpose is to pass my genes on to my children. Yet my deep and abiding love for my wife does not enter into it. It might be argued that love evolved to increase the chances of human genetic success, but such argument neither supports nor refutes my love the way scientific research refutes the value of fire. It simply is.
.. It’s not just love and religion that work like this, that are a-rational. Art. Jazz. Hacking. That which motivates, that drives passion, dedication, and creation, that embodies culture in the Anthropological sense—including, yes,the pursuit of scientific research and reasoning—is a-rational. No, better: it’s extra-rational. That’s part of what makes it beautiful.
You cannot refute love. You cannot refute art. You cannot refute faith. Because they are not in the domain of refutation, are not subject to the facts. They are something else entirely. Often—not always, but often—they create beauty.
And beauty isn’t subject to refutation, either.
The Limits of Discourse: As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky
not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another rather badly.
.. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the developing world.
.. One helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns against their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers.46
.. benign intentions are virtually always professed, even by the worst monsters, and hence carry no information, even in the technical sense of that term.
.. The bombing of al-Shifa was an immediate response to the Embassy bombings, which is why it is almost universally assumed to be retaliation. It is inconceivable that in that brief interim period evidence was found that it was a chemical weapons factory, and properly evaluated to justify a bombing. And of course no evidence was ever found. Plainly, if there had been evidence, the bombing would not have (just by accident) taken place immediately after the Embassy bombings (along with bombings in Afghanistan at the same time, also clearly retaliation).
.. There’s no rational way to explain this except by assuming that he intentionally bombed what was known to be Sudan’s major pharmaceutical plant, and of course he and his advisers knew that under severe sanctions, this poor African country could not replenish them – so it is a much worse crime than if al-Qaeda had done the same in the US, or Israel, or any other country were people matter.
.. I have often discussed the ethical question about the significance of real or professed intentions, for about 50 years in fact, discussing real cases, where there are possible and meaningful answers.
.. And I agree that I am litigating all points (all real, as far as we have so far determined) in a “plodding and accusatory way.” That is, of course, a necessity in responding to quite serious published accusations that are all demonstrably false, and as I have reviewed, false in a most interesting way: namely, you issue lectures condemning others for ignoring “basic questions” that they have discussed for years, in my case decades, whereas you have refused to address them and apparently do not even allow yourself to understand them. That’s impressive.
.. It would also be interesting if, someday, you decide actually to become concerned with “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” most notably, the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium who did so, he explained, because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy.
.. I now see that to the extent that he does weigh intentions, he may do so differently than I would (for instance, he says that Clinton’s bombing al-Shifa without thinking about the consequences is “arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human”). This would have been interesting terrain to explore.