Kill Whitey?

Is there NOTHING a white person can't do?

Do the Winter brothers know of this? If not... should we tell them?

This sort of thing makes one more sympathetic to witch hunters, although not the kind of vicious SOBs that our own Western history records.

I am glad to see Al Jaz speaking out forthrightly against superstition.

We mustn't forget though, that our own ancestors were just as superstitious in the 1600s and some retain the belief in witchcraft and black magic even today, especially "fundamentalist" and evangelical Christians and their satanist competitors.

I read an interesting book on the subject of magic, religion and superstition. Each breeds the two others, with religions rising out of magical thinking and superstition, sinking back into them again, and magic leading to superstitions and superstitions to magic.

Each, in its own way, is an attempt to obtain power over the world through God, through ritual and sympathic magic, and through superstitious mockeries of both magical and religious practice.

Like the belief in luck or God, superstition aims at protecting the ego of the believer against imaginary or real harms, and to give them power over imaginary or real enemies and victims.

Currently, many churches (and mosques) in Africa are very like the more rambunctious Puritans were in the 1600s. The converts are new and thus tend to be waivering or fanatical (and often both), torn between superstitious beliefs and traditional religions (including Islam, which does not take kindly to converts, any more than the Roman Catholic Church did or does). As a result, they are prone to moral panics and to being mislead by ambitious, greedy and somewhat demented religious leaders who are getting rich off of their "flocks".

It's a shame. I hope that something can be done. I expect that a few generations will make a big difference, especially in countries where progress is being made towards good government and prosperity (and that is a number of countries in Africa despite what you may think or hear).

As the witch, Granny Weatherwax says to a priest of some god or other (probably the one with the Crocodile Head) in Terry Pratchett's Disworld novels, treating other people like things is sin. Both the superstitious and the newly religious are prone to falling under the sway of fire and brimstone preachers as well as witchdoctors and fraudsters (astrologers being just as bad as priests).

Let's hope for the best. If you have gods, pray to them for wisdom, peace and justice. Personally, I'd be tempted to think like one of my distant relations, a Royal Judge under Louis XIV, who famously said "We know how to hang in Canada." There are some crimes which are hard to forgive, let alone allow to go unpunished or underpunished by the Talon Law. Even so, I expect you can do nothing about mass ignorance except mass education and raising people up to a basic level of material and mental well-being.

Let's not forget that birth into abject poverty often causes retardation due to maternal malnutrition and poor obstretics, not to mention post-natal malnutrition and abuse. You have to lift people out of savage conditions if you want them to be civilized, and then you have to lift them a little higher still, because even "civilized" people are three meals from a barbarity that "savages" never know except when they are on the receiving end of it.

Even Civilized Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc., need to tame the beast within, although some of them do a poor job of it, even when their brains are not damaged by abuse and neglect.

Wow, that movie was unbelievably depressing. Every time I think I've seen it all, I see an albino boy that looks a fair bit like my own son. I couldn't watch the whole thing.

/Wait...his dad set up that attack? fark me.
//fark Africa.