You know, they are still killing witches these days.
Two elderly women accused of practicing witchcraft in Papua New Guinea were tortured and murdered by a group of men who dragged their bodies to a riverbank and burnt them, police say.
A manhunt is under way for the offenders following Monday’s killings near the banks of the Bumbu River in the port city of Lae, regional police chief Giossi Labi said.
He described the actions of the killers from one of the city’s squatter settlements as “animalistic and inhuman”.
And not far from Salem, Massachusetts, the site of America’s first witch trial, there is another one going on right now in Long Island.
A former teacher fired from her job at a Hampton Bays elementary school has filed a $2 million federal lawsuit, claiming she was improperly dismissed because the administration and others thought she was a witch.
While the school district was not under obligation to explain why Lauren Berrios was not granted tenure, its lawyer claimed Wednesday that Berrios didn’t get along with co-workers, had a condescending attitude and was eventually reported to Child Protective Services after telling tales about imaginary injuries to her own son.
“It’s been quite a long time since we’ve seen a witch trial in this country,” defense attorney Steven Stern told a jury of five men and three women during opening statements in U.S. District Court.
The war of Christianity against Pagan religions is nothing new and been hot and heavy for a couple of thousand years now. It flared up here in the US a few years back when then US Rep. Bob Barr sought to deny Wiccans in the Army the right to practice their faith.
If you consider the broader definition of Paganism: a faith which is positive, life-affirming and Earth-centric, Paganism is the second largest religious group in America encompassing not only Wiccans, Druids and other Euro-centric ancient faiths, but the Dharmic religions, Native Americans, native Hawaiians and all the indigenous religions of Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania.
Don’t believe me? Try this test. Go to your local Barnes and Noble and measure the shelf space dedicated to New Age, Hindu, Buddhist and other Pagan topics. Now go to the section on Christianity and measure the shelf space. Do the same for Judaism and Islam.
See the difference? Someone has to be buying all those Scott Cunningham books.
Over at AlternativeApproaches.com we’ve been covering a lot of stories like this. In addition to the stories you mention, we’ve been watching the following:
For the last year or so, we’ve been watching the case of Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart who was killed in action in Afghanistan. The VA has refused to let him have a pentacle put on his grave marker, because Wicca isn’t on the list of approved religions (which approves atheism as a religion). He finally got his pentacle marker, after the state of Nevada stepped-in, but the VA is still dragging it’s feet on approving Wiccan symbols for our war dead. Even the magazine “Christianity Today” has called for the VA to recognize Wicca as a religion.
There’s also the case of Don Larsen, a Pentecostal Christian Army Chaplin who, according to his superior when he was in Iraq, Chaplain Kevin L. McGhee, was “the best” of the 26 chaplins he supervised. Recently, Larsen did some soul searching and converted to Wicca. When he applied for the Army to change his denomination, they kicked him out of the military. The North Carolina based “Conservative Voice” web site has this to say about that:
“When Larsen left the service, I suspect the service may have lost the most legitimately capable chaplain it had. At the same time, it was made abundantly clear that we don’t respect all religions equally after all. We only give the idea lip service, and muddle the matter further by passing hate speech laws and pretending that government endorsement of religion extends to discriminating against groups that can or can’t use facilities available to everybody else.”
Every day, five or six stories come down the wire about folks in Africa and India being killed by their fellow villagers because of suspicions of “witchcraft.” There’s so many of these that we usually don’t bother to publish them anymore.
You’re right, Mr. Storm. It’s a sad state of affairs when an atheist’s “religion” is protected, but Pagans are denied their rights. From my viewpoint here at AlternativeApproaches.com, the public is on our side. Surprise, surprise! It’s the neocons who’re standing in the way.