Hey all, this is your life-pondering-question-asking-philosophy-major
classmate here. I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I think
it’s worth a read. Plus there are funny images to make up for it.
The last couple class periods have been filled with
discussion on the primary documents read in Kors and Peters’ Witchcraft in Europe. As you may have
(hopefully) noticed, most of the documents deal with how to understand, find,
and eradicate magic users. The documents we have read involved trials,
executions, underhanded tactics, and moral ambiguity.
Moral ambiguity you say?
<www.enumclaw.com>
The things we have read about made me think of other times
in more modern history where, as a society, we have persecuted and punished
those who are unlike the majority in the name of God and peace. I think a lot
of people have had a negative outlook on the medieval folk that condemned others
to death, but don’t we continue to do that as a society?
What really made me do a double take at the text were the
Persecutions at Trier. Taking place in Germany, this community killed thousands
of their own based on accusations of witchcraft or association of witchcraft. I
think that it’s safe to say that the vast majority of those people were
incredibly unlucky innocent folks who confessed to witchcraft under the pain of
torture, yet similar situations would arise in Germany and the rest of the
world for years to come.
<http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3vfx0c/>
What does that say about humanity? I can’t help but draw
parallels with the Holocaust, McCarthyism, and the unfair manner in which
racial and religious minorities are condemned in comparison to the majority.
Let’s face it; we treat men with turbans and women in hijabs the same way
medieval folk treated the lady who bakes brownies down the street. How come we
haven’t learned any better?
Why?!
<http://alltheragefaces.com/face/misc-jackie-chan>
Humanity often kills off those they don’t understand out of
fear of the unknown. We’ve seen this in Classical Greece when Socrates drank
hemlock after he was wrongly convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth, and
we see this in modern literature as well. I just finished Veronica Roth’s Divergent (it was awesome go read it)
and the story takes place in a dystopian America where the people are divided
into five factions based on virtue, and the rare individuals who do not fit
neatly into any one faction (aka divergent) are discovered and snuffed out
simply because they don’t fit. You see this in Harry Potter when muggles and
muggle-borns are threatened/killed because they are different, you see this in
George Orwell’s 1984 and The Matrix and Doctor Who and even Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is subjected to
ostracism.
<www.whytry.org>
So why did the medieval folks kill their kin? Were they
really that different from us? Were they already corrupt and using magic as a scapegoat?
And more importantly, why haven’t we learned from their mistakes and the
mistakes of others? How come we’re perpetuating something we openly mock? How
come we are so fascinated by this subject that we continue to explore it in
various media when it’s so often staring us in the face?
<http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/40-gifs-that-prove-every-day-is-mean-girls-day/>
End rant. And please answer some/any of those questions
because there’s nothing I like more than a good argument/discussion.
