I didn't say all accusations of satanic abuse were false.
Only that the only occurrences ( that I know of) turned out to be false.
Believe it or not, I actually know some people who willingly call themselves Satanists. They do it more to make a political statement against Christianity and Catholicism. As an ideology, they use the name "Satanism" for shock value. They are no more willing to sacrifice virgins or children, than any other sane individual. Their idea of a Satanic ritual involves reciting dirty limericks, and getting drunk.
From the links you posted, I just don't know enough to make a judgement. The Richard Ramirez stuff sounds more like a combination of Drug Dealing and Cultism than organized Satanism. Satanism isn't even mentioned.
The stuff about Elizabeth Bathory is legend, and I expect much of it has been expanded on, and embellished over the years. Some argue that the accusations were politically motivated, and the murders never actually took place.
Even if taken as 100% true, then the damage and death handed out by Satanists pales by comparison to that dealt out by those damn Puritans.
I've actually seen the damage puritan ideology can do. (People acting like Puritans, I mean.) I can't say the same for Satanism.
The Puritans came to America because they could not get political office in England unless they were members of the English Church. Then, they set about doing the same trick to other religions in America.
It's been years since I've read Bernal Diaz. As I recall he was colorful
I wouldn't call Bernal Diaz colorful. He gives fairly straightforward reportage. It's just an incredible story, 400 Spaniards waltzing into the middle of a highly populated country and bossing everybody around. Cortes must have had balls of brass.
Two disparate groups came to what became known as Massachusetts, the first being the separatist group commonly known in present times as the Pilgrims, who "came over on the Mayflower." The second, who came later, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were the non-separatist Puritans.
My reading of history informs me that the Pilgrims never took in the notion of witches in such a way as to find and label people as witches. That is why, as a separatist, I do not identify with the Puritans, who, I surmise, plausibly would have tried me as a some sort of heretic, had they been given the chance to do so.
To what extent have those of "the religious right" (which is, to me, really, "the religious wrong") adopted the tragic travesty of the Puritan Unethic?
How did that song, as sung by Pete Seeger, go, "...when will they ever learn..."?
gedanken (imported) wrote: Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:47 am
I wouldn't call Bernal Diaz colorful. He gives fairly straightforward reportage. It's just an incredible story, 400 Spaniards waltzing into the middle of a highly populated country and bossing everybody around. Cortes must have had balls of brass.
Though the Spanish Conquistadors were outnumbered at least 400 to 1, they did have several advantages:
(1) Spaniards rode horses which were unknown in Mexico. The Mexica (Aztecs) thought the horse and rider were one terrifying creature.
(2) Spaniards wore plate armor which was more than adequate against Aztec weapons such as their war club with obsidian blades called Macuahuitl.
(3) Spaniards used metal swords. The Aztecs had no protection.
(4) Spaniards used smooth bore muskets.
(5) Aztec mythology told of a fair skinned man arriving who might have been Quetzalcoatl. Cortez was thought to be him, at first.
(6) Numerous astronomical signs occurred in 1521 spelling doom for the Aztecs.
(7) The Aztecs had conquered or subdued so many local tribes that many of them were willing to aid the Spaniards.
(8) Cortez arrived at a time in Aztec history when Montezuma II was the king. He was one of the weakest of all Aztec kings.
My reading of Early European-invaded "New England" history informs me that, after the Puritans came to have some semblance of a grasp of what they had done, they repudiated puritanism without relent, and adopted the ways of the Pilgrims. Yeah, that took a while. And I observe that Jonathan Edwards perhaps most notorious sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," was but a brief detour into the foibles of then-unrecognizable biological heresy during his otherwise rather decent-for-the-time-and-place life work.
Edwards "Freedom of the Will," written while he was in Stockbridge, is, for that era, a remarkable exercise of scientific acumen regarding human nature and what then existed of social psychology; the issues raised there persist (largely unresolved?) until today, as in "The Oxford Handbook of Free Will," Robert Kane, ed., Oxford University Press, 2011.
As to that "free will" issue, I have my own, bioengineering (it includes quantum mechanics) research based view.
The human brain is comprised of interconnected neurons and supporting cells and tissues. Neurons interconnect at synapses, which contain a chemical milieu in which there are excitatory and inhibitory neurochemicals, dendrite ends, and a post-synaptic membrane which is part of a neuron. When the chemical milieu at the surface of the post-synaptic membrane is such as to result in a depolarization of the post-synaptic membrane from its resting potential, an action potential along the neuron axon travels to the cell body and out to other dendrite ends in other synapses. The depolarization of the post-synaptic membrane, and the traveling action potential (or nerve impulse) is an all-or-none event; the strength of the action potential in a nerve impulse is not modulated; modulation in neurons and muscle fibers is a function of how many neurons and muscle fibers are activated and not a function of the strength of the individual neuron action potential or individual muscle cell contraction strength.
Quantum mechanics and its relevance to human brain function and human brain function resulting overt conduct? Neurochemicals are rather large molecules and wander around by thermal and diffusion mechanisms and their observable locations are such as quantum mechanical fluctuations appear to effectively average out to having no noteworthy effect. So, most biology folks whose work I have studied reject quantum mechanics as being relevant to human brain function, especially as human will, free or else, is concerned.
Only, methinks those folks may have missed something, something that is more allied with the traditions of engineering than biology.
A particular instance of observable overt conduct act of will is the result of, as best I can discern, millions of neuron action potentials. Post-synaptic membrane depolarization being a threshold phenomenon, the threshold, as best I can discern, is actually ultimately governed by distances between neurochemicals and the post-synaptic membrane which are of the order of Planck length and Planck time, and the overall activity of the human brain in terms of its generating overt conduct is slightly iffy because of the superposition of millions of events which are ultimately of the dimensions of Planck length and Planck time.
I am reminded of Aerovironment, Paul MacCready, and a comment he made that I read in the National Geographic. Of the Gossamer Condor, I recall MacCready saying that it had to have the right amount of flimsy. Too much, or too little, flimsy, and the Gossamer Condor could not fly, being human-powered.
The effects of quantum-mechanical timing on human brain activity appears to me to have rather remarkably the right amount of iffyness to allow choices to be other than purely deterministic and not so iffy as to make choices utterly chaotic.
This has, in my mind, a particular, readily observed effect. No human choice is certain to be free enough of iffyness as to allow anyone to truthfully be held accountable in the Adversarial System sense for any decision ever made, and yet there is enough iffyness that those of the Adversarial System can sincerely, if tragically mistakenly, believe that choice made by free will is sufficiently deterministic as to make people fully accountable for the choices made.
I have yet to find anyone sufficiently competent in both biology and physics as to be able to demonstrate the existence of any plausible flaw in the above philosophical argument.
Anyone out there willing and able to demonstrate where I have actually gone awry in this modeling of the nature of human will, whether the will be free, disciplined, captive or else?
I haven't been following this thread real closely. Has anyone mentioned the title of the book Cotton Mather wrote about the witch trials? "The Wonders of the Invisible World"?? Ha! Ha!
I went to a talk at Harvard given for a little fun-facts-history-of-Harvard book and one of the professors, probably retired, talked about what an asshole Cotton Mather was. He had a sign on his office door that said, "Be brief", for example. Of course, his dad, Increase Mather, had been president of Harvard. What kind of a name is "Increase"??
And speaking of the "invisible world", I read a book about the development of civilization that made this statement about the ancient Greeks and all their sacrifices: "Apparently, the entire population of the invisible world shared a keen interest in the success or failure of the Greeks agricultural efforts". Ha! Ha! Ridiculous! But the American Indians had all kinds of ceremonies and charms that were supposed to guarantee success in the hunt or in battle. Surely this kind of tendency is an early indication of evolution towards civilization, a project that is obsessed with controlling the future outcome of everything it can.
By education and pleasure I am a Physicist. Once, while lecturing in the deep, deep South I was attacked in my class room by someone who was screaming that I was trying to refute God. It was nearly as bad as the semester at Brigham Young. (For a time based on reports from several fellow Academics who had lectured there, BYU was not "suggested" as a "good" place to visit by our University, USC.) In retrospect, it's rather a shame I didn't give those at BYU a broader look at my "sins". And they thought being a (suspected) gay smoker was bad. Shame they didn't ask, I would have confirmed their worst imaginings and told them with whom I slept and of what sex they were.
considering (imported) wrote: Thu Dec 27, 2012 7:58 am
By education and pleasure I am a Physicist. Once, while lecturing in the deep, deep South I was attacked in my class room by someone who was screaming that I was trying to refute God. It was nearly as bad as the semester at Brigham Young. (For a time based on reports from several fellow Academics who had lectured there, BYU was not "suggested" as a "good" place to visit by our University, USC.) In retrospect, it's rather a shame I didn't give those at BYU a broader look at my "sins". And they thought being a (suspected) gay smoker was bad. Shame they didn't ask, I would have confirmed their worst imaginings and told them with whom I slept and of what sex they were.
In the old days, and Middle Ages all institutions of higher learning were sponsored by religious organizations. Namely, the Roman Catholic Church.
Today, religious organizations are "threatened" by education in a DIRECT CORRESPONDENCE with the length of time that they have existed.
...ask yourself... how long has education existed in the Deep South? How long has the sponsoring institution of BYU been in existence?
You see, state Universities DO NOT have a religious affiliation. Public schools (with ELECTED OR appointed school boards), generally do. It is the predominant religion of the area. There are ways to avoid this, but never completely.
However, state universities generally have a POLITICAL board... You tell me, which is worse?
