"You attempted to cast Force Lightning. You will be tried for the use of the Dark Side of the Force."
"Your honour, there is no such thing as the Force."
"But using the Dark Side is recklessly irresponsible; it leads to predictable sociopathy and violence, and we as a society are well-served banning it."
"But it doesn't fucking exist!"
Now, does that clear your nitpick radar?
First example was better, since it reflected situation we speak of.
Let me ask you a question - imagine you are found to be planning a crime. You are arrested and during the investigation it is proven that your plan couldnt work because the execution of the crime was through impossible means. Does the intention count as attempt in his case?
Different one - one possible Adrian Laguna was speaking of, to be misunderstood by the rest.
A woman is caught with a rag doll in the image of city major. Nedles and hot charcoal are prepared and some long pins are already sticking from the doll.
That is pretty much witchcraft as you can get it by 17. century standart.
The intention she have (for major to die in pain) is absolutelly clear.
The execution of it is toothless, yet intention is there.
We operate under rules of logic and we dont have any reason to exist that anything like magic exist, right?
But in 17. century EVERYBODY knew that magicks is real, including that poor superstitious woman.
Depends on how absurd the impossibility is. If you're like the would-be robber from Barney Miller who tried to hold up a bank by brandishing an electric blue Flash Gordon cosmic raygun, the fact that he intended to do something isn't relevant.
If someone tried to assassinate a head of state but failed because he brought the wrong ammunition for his rifle, that's something different.
Witchcraft would fall in the first category. There was no chance for some medieval peasant woman to cause crops to fail with black magic, and the people who jabbed her, then burned her knew it. As Marvin Harris pointed out in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, the authorities knew they were full of shit when it came to witch scares. Why? Because they made damn sure than nobles and higher clergy were never charged, let along tortured and executed for witchcraft.
hawkwind wrote:First example was better, since it reflected situation we speak of.
No you fucking shithead, you are just refusing to get it. The subject here is witchcraft, not murder by way of witchcraft. Witchcraft does not exist; even if a woman honestly believed she was performing it that just makes her delusional, and if the state honestly believes she was then that just makes the state delusional.
Let me ask you a question - imagine you are found to be planning a crime. You are arrested and during the investigation it is proven that your plan couldnt work because the execution of the crime was through impossible means. Does the intention count as attempt in his case?
J.
Not if the means involve fucking made-up magic powers. But this is irrelevant anyway because it wasn't the ends to which people supposedly turned to witchcraft that were prosecuted anyway, it was the witchcraft itself.
First example was better, since it reflected situation we speak of.
It didn't fucktard. Witchcraft trials were not based on someone trying to kill other people, merely on "practicing" witchcraft.
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Elfdart wrote:Witchcraft would fall in the first category. There was no chance for some medieval peasant woman to cause crops to fail with black magic, and the people who jabbed her, then burned her knew it. As Marvin Harris pointed out in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, the authorities knew they were full of shit when it came to witch scares. Why? Because they made damn sure than nobles and higher clergy were never charged, let along tortured and executed for witchcraft.
Yes they probably knew, but there were cases where even priests were charged and executed.
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Elfdart wrote:Witchcraft would fall in the first category. There was no chance for some medieval peasant woman to cause crops to fail with black magic, and the people who jabbed her, then burned her knew it. As Marvin Harris pointed out in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, the authorities knew they were full of shit when it came to witch scares. Why? Because they made damn sure than nobles and higher clergy were never charged, let along tortured and executed for witchcraft.
Yes they probably knew, but there were cases where even priests were charged and executed.
Were those priests, if I might ask, largely those priests who said things like "You know, maybe there isn't as much witchcraft out there as we thought..."?
Were those priests, if I might ask, largely those priests who said things like "You know, maybe there isn't as much witchcraft out there as we thought..."?
"Father, I think these witches we try aren't really witches. They can't cause any magic!"
"Quick! Tie up this witch accomplice! The witches have brainwashed him! Now to the stake!"
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Adrian Laguna wrote:To a degree yes. Just because I say that attempting witchcraft can be a prosecutable crime does not mean that I believe it should be one. I am mostly defending them in comparison to Protestant witch hunts, I think the Catholics were marginally better.
That's alot like defending Pol Pot because he wasn't as bad as Stalin.
The statement is only technically true, Catholics have a higher standard of evidence than the Protestants merely by having one at all. That it barely existed, and that for the vastly greater part it did not, does not make my statement untrue. If I have one grain of sand and you have none, it might be argued that neither has sand, but technically I have more sand than you.
"Bureaucrat Conrad is technically correct! The best kind of correct! Guards!"
Seriously, Adrian, you have to see how weak that argument is. The Catholic Chruch was by that point heavily bureaucratic. Of course it had "rules" and "definitions". However, what they did was still no less savage; they were still going around torturing people to extract confessions (which, I suppose falls into the evidence you talk about) and torturing and murdering people for no reason at all other than their own insanity. These people used to burn people alive because some guy in the village couldn't get his tallywhacker up and accused a women of looking at him funny, causing it.
That does not constitute real evidence, in the same way your grain of sand (which is in fact a very small rock) doesn't constitute "sand" by a reasonable definition of the word (as sand is a material composed of many of such grains).
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Given that the Catholic Church actually had a codified manual for witch-hunting, it could be argued that they were marginally better. They established certain signs as sure indicators of witchcraft - that could make it harder for some dickweed to accuse just anyone of witchcraft. In that sense and in that sense alone, I would argue that the Catholics' method of witch-hunting, being more formalized, is better than the mob hysteria of Protestant witch-hunting.
wolveraptor wrote:Given that the Catholic Church actually had a codified manual for witch-hunting, it could be argued that they were marginally better. They established certain signs as sure indicators of witchcraft - that could make it harder for some dickweed to accuse just anyone of witchcraft. In that sense and in that sense alone, I would argue that the Catholics' method of witch-hunting, being more formalized, is better than the mob hysteria of Protestant witch-hunting.
This in no way defends their actions, of course.
Have you read their codified manual? It really does boil down to accusing anyone they want of witchcraft.
Remember that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where John Cleese goes "She turned me into a newt! (A newt?!) Well... I got better." Well, that's actually historical, as the Malleus Maleficarum specifically lists Witches Turning Men into Beasts (literally beasts, not as a metaphor) as one of the things witches appearantly do, along with stealing men's penises (literally and figuratively) and causing crops to fail (the same things, incidently, that Protestant witch hunts typically accused people of).
Frankly, the fact that they deliberately wrote a witch hunting manual such at the Malleus Maleficarum only makes them MORE odious. Who the hell writes something like that?
"Show me an angel and I will paint you one." - Gustav Courbet
"Quetzalcoatl, plumed serpent of the Aztecs... you are a pussy." - Stephen Colbert
"Really, I'm jealous of how much smarter than me he is. I'm not an expert on anything and he's an expert on things he knows nothing about." - Me, concerning a bullshitter
You're right, of course. Having thought about it, I realized that it doesn't matter whether they've set up some standards for evidence if they allow bullshit testimony like in the Salem Witch Trial. A codified manual does precisely dick if there are no standards for evidence.
anybody_mcc wrote:
Yes they probably knew, but there were cases where even priests were charged and executed.
That's why I mentioned senior clergy. A local priest or nun was fair game, but anyone who claimed to have seen the bishop at a coven meeting got tortured until he or she said the witchcraft charges were false. Convenient, eh?
anybody_mcc wrote:
Yes they probably knew, but there were cases where even priests were charged and executed.
That's why I mentioned senior clergy. A local priest or nun was fair game, but anyone who claimed to have seen the bishop at a coven meeting got tortured until he or she said the witchcraft charges were false. Convenient, eh?
Sorry missed that distincion, yes i was talking about local priests.
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