Re: Witchcraft, plagues and human sacrificies .. Archived Message
Posted by Ian M on May 24, 2019, 9:56 pm, in reply to "Re: Witchcraft, plagues and human sacrificies .."
Witchcraft - used as a smear term against traditional European herbalism. Was it investigated and proved to be wrong? Plagues - epidemic disease facilitated by city overcrowding and regular proximity to livestock and other tag-alongs eg: rats. No evolutionary niche for it among nomadic tribal people out of contact with other groups for much of the year. Human sacrifices - examples? All the ones that spring to mind come from civilised cultures, eg: Aztecs. 'You can force me at the point of a spear to forget everything I know about the universe, probably, but that is what it will take.' - Different ways of knowing. If your knowledge is valuable to you then keep it - how can anyone take it away from you? The problem is that it's based on highly complex technology which has only been available for a brief blip in time and will most likely not last a great deal longer. On the plus side it might mean going back into a direct engagement with science in the laboratory of the world, for everybody not just an elite caste whose word we have to take on everything because we don't have the means to verify it. People have looked up at the stars and made observations and deductions probably since the birth of our species. Now we just look at the occasional pics from the hubble telescope and check the weather forecast on the internet. Cumulo-what? 'And as for Kingsnorth knowing that the forest can sense a footprint, where do you think he got that knowledge from?' - from science, like I said! As Rhis said though, it doesn't mean that knowledge is inaccessible through other means, even if you're happy to dismiss that as 'witchcraft'. cheers, I
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