i don't know where else to put this, so a new thread it is.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/0 ... index.html

Woman suspected of witchcraft burned alive

A woman in rural Papua New Guinea was bound and gagged, tied to a log and set ablaze on a pile of tires this week, possibly because villagers suspected her of being a witch, police said Thursday.

Her death adds to a growing list of men and women who have been accused of sorcery and then tortured or killed in the South Pacific island nation, where traditional beliefs hold sway in many regions. The victims are often scapegoats for someone else's unexplained death, and bands of tribesmen collude to mete out justice to them for their supposed magical powers, police said.

"We have had difficulties in a number of previous incidents convincing people to come forward with information," said Simon Kauba, assistant commissioner of police and commander of the Highlands region, where the killing occurred.

"We are trying to persuade them to help. Somebody lost their mother or daughter or sister Tuesday morning."

Early Tuesday, a group of people dragged the woman, believed to be in her late teens to early 20s, to a dumping ground outside the city of Mount Hagen. They stripped her naked, bound her hands and legs, stuffed a cloth in her mouth, tied her to a log and set her on fire, Kauba said.

"When the people living nearby went to the dump site to investigate what caused the fire, they found a human being burning in the flames," he said. "It was ugly."

The country's Post-Courier newspaper reported Thursday that more than 50 people were killed in two Highlands provinces last year for allegedly practicing sorcery.

In a well-publicized case last year, a pregnant woman gave birth to a baby girl while struggling to free herself from a tree. Villagers had dragged the woman from her house and hung her from the tree, accusing her of sorcery after her neighbor suddenly died.

She and the baby survived, according to media reports.

The killing of witches, or sangumas, is not a new phenomenon in rural areas of the country.

Emory University anthropology professor Bruce Knauft, who lived in a village in the western province of Papua New Guinea in the early 1980s, traced family histories for 42 years and found that one in three adult deaths were homicides -- "the bulk of these being collective killings of suspected sorcerers," he wrote in his book, "From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology."

In recent years, as AIDS has taken a toll in the nation of 6.7 million people, villagers have blamed suspected witches -- and not the virus -- for the deaths.

According to the United Nations, Papua New Guinea accounts for 90 percent of the Pacific region's HIV cases and is one of four Asia-Pacific countries with an epidemic.

"We've had a number of cases where people were killed because they were accused of spreading HIV or AIDS," Kauba said.

While there is plenty of speculation why Tuesday's victim was killed, police said they are focused more on who committed the crime.

"If it is phobias about alleged HIV/AIDS or claims of a sexual affair, we must urge the police and judiciary to throw the book at the offenders," the Post-Courier wrote in an editorial.

"There are remedies far, far better than to torture and immolate a young woman before she can be judged by a lawful system."

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that last quote is a doozy: instead of burning her to death, let her stand before a judge on the accusations of being a witch!

IHRM should like this one:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... -thinking/

Two stories, no thinking

What do these two stories have in common?

1) The TV channel A&E has greenlit a new unscripted program called "Paranormal Cops", where police moonlight chasing ghosts. This is not a joke. Well, the program is, but the story isn’t. The only accurate part of this thing is that they didn’t call it a "reality" program.

2) A woman in Papua New Guinea "was bound and gagged, tied to a log and set ablaze on a pile of tires this week". Why? Probably because she was accused of being a witch. Yes, a witch. There has been a growing number of people in that country who have been tortured and killed because they were suspected of sorcery.

Those two stories don’t seem too similar at first blush. One is a frivolous program meant to entertain, the other a deadly serious and shameful act.

But I think they are both shameful (on different levels, but still), and both are driven by ignorance. Ignorance of science, ignorance of logic, ignorance of reality.

There is no credible evidence for the existence of ghosts. None. Zip. Just first-hand testimony, notoriously inaccurate and untrustworthy, and fuzzy pictures either obviously hoaxed or obviously pareidolia. Our all-too-human fear of the dark, bred into us by ten thousand generations of being prey, takes over our rational mind.

The same with witchcraft; it’s our all-too-human ability of linking events together that may not be causally connected. You find a penny, and then you get a raise. Your brain says, finding a penny is good luck! Your neighbor sneezes violently, and your crops fail. Your neighbor is a witch.

Both of these feelings are natural. Both are understandable, and both are powerful motivators. And they’re both wrong. We are more than animals, capable of far more than simple stimulus and response. One of our finest aspects is our ability to reason, to check our logic, to make sure our senses aren’t trying to fail us. The TV show on A&E will teach thousands of people to trust their senses, to not use reason, to not analyze things logically. It will steer people away from our finest and noblest attributes.

And the other story… that’s the extreme consequence of ignoring our ability to reason. When you partially reason, when you only take logic part-way to a conclusion, when you let your desires and your fears rule your thinking rather than the other way around, people get hurt. People die.

These stories are both about ignorance. One may seem relatively harmless, and the other horrifying. But they are linked strongly by their combined willful disdain for logic and reality.

there's a place for willful ignorance of logic in favor of fantasy. not when it's taken far enough that it results in the death of someone; but it's not that a reality tv show turns into a murderous ritual. if anything, it's the opposite, an evolution from witchcraft trials long ago in our history to reality tv shows that are fun to watch nowadays.

I think equating curiosity about or a belief in "ghosts" with burning a woman alive for being a witch is a bit over the top, don't you c_b?

perhaps. people are clearly not dying because of the human belief in ghosts. but i think he does make some good points in there.

I think he's a pompous, judgmental douche myself.

go on ...

So, because I have an interest in the paranormal, I'm ignorant huh? I'm irrational, don't know how to reason or analyze things logically? If this guy had been around hundreds of years ago, he'd be writing how irrational it is to believe the world isn't flat. Or how silly it is to believe in invisible things like "germs." All he's doing is trumpeting the status quo, and saying those who don't are idiots basically. Fuck that. I'd rather be curious about the unknown than be so arrogant as to think I know what's real and what isn't. I use logic when I watch a show like Ghost Hunters. I don't blindly believe everything they claim as evidence.

I would never go so far as to say I "believe" in ghosts unless I had an experience of my own, but there are certainly things that have happened and been documented that are outside the realm of what we consider "normal." I often put it to people like this: imagine what the world would be like if we could see things like radio waves. We take for granted that these things are "invisible," but the fact is they are invisible to us. Just because we can't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Actually, he'd probably be burned at the stake, being that "pile of old tires" technology was still some time in teh future.

that's not what he's saying at all, from what i read. what he is saying is that the show will give people the belief that there are ghosts to be hunted. i suspect a show about scientists investigating ghost claims would be fine in his eyes. Paranormal Cops is not that; Paranormal Cops is this:

I don't know what you read, but let me repost these excerpts for you.









Seriously, fuck this arrogant douche.

he's a bit strong in terms of denying the existence of ghosts, because we surely don't know whether or not they exist. but that doesn't give us reason to believe, either, and the show is based on the assumption that ghosts indeed exist, is it not? you can't hunt for something that does not exist. imagine a show called Leprechaun Cops. how would you feel about that?

which is why i now see a problem with tying it to witchcraft, because we absolutely know that witches do not, or have not ever existed, while i suppose the field of ghosts (for lack of a better word) is still up in the air. and it may be forever.

however, i don't see how he called interest in the field ignorance. that'd be like him saying my interest in the study of all things god is ignorant, and i can tell you he surely would not say that. but he probably would say that belief in god is absolutely illogical, ignorant, whatever else he'd throw in there.

It's not just about this particular show to this guy. Don't you see that?

i see that. but shit, i'm interested in the entire ghost thing, but i don't get from him that being interested in its validity means i'm ignorant. there's a large difference between interest and belief in.

Mike, he says flat out that there's no reason to believe in ghosts.

well, there aren't any good reasons to believe in ghosts, are there? for one to believe in something that incredible, there should be incredible evidence to support one's belief. where's the empirical evidence to support the statement that ghosts exist? as david hume said, "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."

now, there may be good reasons to further investigate the possibility that ghosts exist, but that's a different proposition.

man, this is crazy

Some people just choose to believe fairy tales (over 80% of the world, I might add) over logic and truth. If there's one thing I could wish for the future, it would be that humans finally abandon religion.