Witchcraft is Not a Crime
How can the impossible be a crime?
Witchcraft has always been associated with the impossible, the implausible and the delusional.
The accusers have always been delusional.
Murder should quite rightly be regarded as a crime.
Any activity should be regarded as a crime if it is directly associated with causing harm.
Witchcraft does not cause harm. It does not exist except in fiction.
A witch, by definition, is often a person without much power at all.
It has always been an injustice to regard witchcraft itself as a crime. The activity itself belongs in the realm of fantasy.
Yet there are witches. In the same way as practitioners of any other occupation, witches may be involved in evil practices and/or good practices.
Persons in other occupations, particularly occupations associated with societal power, have been much more likely to be involved in evil practices than the vast majority of purported witches.
Throughout history, more often than not, wrongdoers have had power over, and within, governments, and societies. Justice has been little more than an image.
There have also been gross levels of impunity among the powerful.
Selfishness and superstitions continue to cause considerable harm.
Addressing that harm effectively requires power.
Perhaps you regard peace and justice as impossible.
Many inaccurate assumptions arise from inaccurate definitions.
Cowardice is excessive fear, yet ignorance of danger can easily be mistaken for courage.
Rashness is excessive self-confidence.
Enlightened witches do their best to avoid all excesses, and all inadequacies.
What do you do?
There is much evil in the world yet it is not associated with
witchcraft. It is associated with violence and the threat of violence.
Clear definitions can have seemingly magical effects on the human mind.
Governments often have a focus on building up armed forces, through population growth. That is why they want (heterosexual) long-term couples to have children.
But when have governments really and truly had a focus on encouraging peace in the world?
Perhaps you do not have the moral courage to define corruption accurately.
Any type of corruption can only become widespread when political corruption is evident.
Organised crime, and violent crime, gain in strength only when corruption is ingrained.
Evidence-based suspicion of wrongdoing is another matter entirely.
What have been your experiences of praise and blame?
What do you do when wrongdoers blatantly act with impunity?
What do you know about power politics and the practice of plausible deniability?
How do you usually identify accurate causality and distinguish it from the merely plausible?
How do you attempt to support the casualties of miscarriages of justice?
How do you attempt to reduce the power of political and economic giants?
The blameworthy, when accused of wrongdoing, often attack the innocent, in much the same as kicking the cat or even killing it.
Enlightened witches do not have pet cats, or dogs, or any pets at all. Nor do they have children. Nor are they arrogant or hypocritical.
The act with decorum and prudence. They act with diligence and self-control. They do their best to uphold true justice. They lead by example, through temperance and well-informed kindness.
What is your moral character, and how do know?
How do you know you always act in good faith?
Who, if anyone, has attempted to destroy your reputation for virtue, and why, and how?
How have you confronted your fears over your lifetime, and why have you taken that approach?
People have often been accused of witchcraft for bravely telling the truth.
Accusations of witchcraft have always involved inaccurate definitions. They have also involved shifting the blame for a problem or tragedy onto an innocent person.
The accusers and judges were often the real criminals.
When judges do not care about real justice, there is no real justice.
What is your acquaintance with perceptual inattention, including towards changes in a situation?
How perceptive are you of gradual changes?
Perhaps most of your attention is drawn towards rapid changes, and overwhelming personal problems, rather than the gradual increase in police corruption and political corruption.
What, if anything, have you learned from the history of population rises, including those encouraged by governments?
Perhaps one or more of your ancestors was a victim of a purge or unjust workplace dismissal or unfair redundancy or bullying or intimate partner aggression or child abuse or a terrorist incident or war or blowback or another act of recklessness.
Perhaps you have been such a victim, or even a perpetrator of recklessness.
Perhaps you have suffered persecution and/or perpetrated prejudice or another form of injustice.
When have you preferred to ignore wrongdoing, or your suspicions of wrongdoing, and why?
First they came for the witches.
How and where have you been learning the truth about witches, and why have you been doing so?
The purportedly supernatural practice of witchcraft, by definition, is an expression of magical thinking.
Such thinking is unreasonable yet it may be a relatively effective and harmless coping strategy in the absence of more reasonable options.
The skills of real witches are natural, political and moral, not supernatural.
Perhaps you are seeking to experience a sabbatical through which to study wonderful 21st century witchcraft, scientifically and imaginatively.
What is a sabbath, in your view?
Perhaps science frightens you even more than witchcraft.
Enlightened witches devote their full attention towards addressing wrongdoing and preventing harm.
That is why they prefer a low-maintenance environment from which to work, and in which to live. They prefer not use noisy or otherwise polluting machinery, unless absolutely necessary.
Enlightened witches are always practitioners of suitable temperance, they even attempt to maintain patience sufficiently, in themselves and other people, to prevent themselves from losing their tempers.
How do you attempt to maintain equanimity?
Real witches attempt to thwart all craftiness, wherever it may originate, in much the same way as real journalism.
How do you attempt to address the principal-agent problem?
Evil people often attempt to equate a deal with the devil with the practice real journalism.
That even happens when evil individuals possess control of media empires, physical empires, financial empires and/or empires of superstition.
How are you involved in thwarting evil?
Perhaps you have often preferred to associate propaganda, and other forms of misinformation, with witchcraft.
Are you an active supporter/contributor to the Civility Journalism Circle?
Adversarial legal systems are, by definition, evil.
What do you know about those systems?
Any system established to encourage the aggressive defence of wrongdoing is evil.
Rudely attacking the statements of the innocent is especially evil. It shows a complete disregard for mental health.
And when judges have too much power, whether in an adversarial system or inquisitorial system, or any other system, that is a sign of corruption in itself.
How do you know when someone has too much power?
How do you know when a group has too much power?
Authentic civility arises through good reasoning, not abused emotions and abuses of power.
And real witches are renown for their authentic civility. That is why they are wonderful.
Perhaps you believe yourself to be associated with witchcraft through the activities of tutelary household brownies and/or suitably tutored Brownies, and/or the consumption of chocolate brownies.
Perhaps you regard the production and/or consumption of chocolate brownies to be a crime, with or without the inclusion of an additional ingredient.
There are also many gullible people in the world. They may even believe that they, or someone else, has psychic powers, even when there is no real proof.
Are you capable of accurately examining matter and imaginings?
Perhaps you have a little manna in your kitchen cupboard and/or a stash of moly and/or another apparently powerful ingredient.
Perhaps you have an unusually rude manner, or an unusually polite one.
Unfortunately, reasonable people, and vulnerable people, and many other people unjustly viewed as threats, or as scapegoats, by unjustly powerful people, are still being accused of witchcraft, heresy and treason, and other purported crimes, in many parts of the world.
What have you discovered through learning about Pride's Purge and its consequences?
What is your acquaintance with phronesis?
What is your acquaintance with cognitive biases?
How do you assess the dangers associated with misinterpretation and misrepresentation?
What is your acquaintance with military and militant brutality, including within the ranks of such groups, and other aggression-related groups?
What is your acquaintance with the cardinal virtues?
How do you attempt to understand the reality?
You may know that reasonable temperance is often mistaken for dour abstinence and the puritanical prevention of artistic expression.
If you believe you are capable of properly interpreting mysteries and histories, where is your proof?
For many mysteries, the only evidence is in the existence of puzzling clues.
Even relatively well-documented histories contain gaps in evidence.
And so do relatively well-researched news reports.
Perhaps you are mostly interested in fringe theories.
Yet mysteries remain interesting to the curious.
And fearmongering attract the attention of gullible, anxious people and directs their minds away from truly corrupt practices.
Perhaps you have a considerable interest in the history of hoaxes.
How do you tell the difference between a hoax and a fraud?
How do you tell the difference between real news and fake news?
How do you tell the difference between real enchantments and fake ones?
Are you capable of understanding quality investments as enchantments?
Perhaps you are attracted to strangeness.
How do you define a crime?
Perhaps you do so mainly in terms of criminal law.
How do you define corruption?
There is often no law against corrupt practices?
Perhaps you regard slavery as a crime, yet credible research shows that the world has still not eradicated that evil, or even put suitable legislation in place.
What, then, is a quality society?
Perhaps you regard the idea of a quality society quite enchanting.
Perhaps you believe you are capable of understanding the impossible.
How do you tell the difference between pranks and natural occurrences?
Perhaps you prefer news with a title such as The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire or Saducismus triumphatus.
Perhaps you enjoy cock and bull stories.
Perhaps you have a particular interest in the funerary art of Puritan New England, or funerary art more generally.
Perhaps you are interested in the history of treason.
Perhaps you are interested in the history of loaded language, including words and ideas associated with witches and witchcraft.
Perhaps you have been performing a political incantation for peace and justice.
You may be quite interested in the mysteries associated with crop circles.
You may be quite interested in the truth about witch hunters.
Or perhaps you are only really interested in your own curated imaginings, existing as though you are in a little village, long, long ago, with no real knowledge of the world beyond it.
How do you define a belief as dangerous?
What is your acquaintance with common misconceptions?
What is your acquaintance with the family of Oliver Cromwell?
What is your acquaintance with real witches and wizards?
What is your acquaintance with dangerous beliefs about witchcraft?
When deluded mobs in comparatively educated societies behave violently as a consequence of believing untruths, and the psychopathic instigator claims to be a victim of a witch hunt, how much more are deluded beliefs likely to happen in less educated societies?
Why have so many people been murdered as witches, traitors and heretics over the centuries, and why whom?
Many delusions express themselves through religious beliefs and political beliefs.
Deceivers continue to accuse the innocent of deception while failing to acknowledge their own lies.
Yet even the purported rule of law in the United Kingdom has done nothing to prevent major societal upheavals over the centuries.
Perhaps you have experienced a locus focus recently.
Perhaps you believe you are protecting health properly and helping healing adequately.
Perhaps you have acquired power through a clique of rich friends.
What do you know about political movements aimed at the improvement of reasonableness?
How do you compare populism with democracy?
What is your acquaintance with the Diggers and Agitators of 1600s England?
What do you know about the diggers of Australia and New Zealand?
How do you compare parliamentary sovereignty with popular sovereignty?
Perhaps you are mostly interested in the further investigation of England's crop circle controversy.
How do you ascertain the elegant and the defiant?
How do you attempt to turn emotions into art?
How do you attempt to turn emotions into reasonable public policy?
How do you attempt to assess moral responsibility through an understanding of one century or another?
What do you believe to be your moral responsibilities in relation to time and place, and why?
How have you been reflecting upon blessings and curses over the past few years?
Witchcraft is a fantasy. The word is meaningless in terms of public policy. Yet there are still innocent victims of crazy claims.
Temperance must be tempered by a reasonable sense of urgency.
Grief must be acknowledged. Cruelty must be acknowledged. Life must be acknowledged. Time must be acknowledged.
It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sublime splendour and hidden danger.
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