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From: ellen@reed.UUCP (Ellen Eades)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.flame
Subject: Re: Re: Law and Christianity (sort of)
Message-ID: <1038@reed.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 3-Mar-85 16:50:57 EST
Article-I.D.: reed.1038
Posted: Sun Mar  3 16:50:57 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Mar-85 17:06:50 EST
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Xref: tektronix net.religion:06192 net.flame:09058

>:  David
> >:  Laura

> Nobody is a Christian
> just because they say they are.

This begs the question.  As a non-Christian, then, how am I to
tell who is a Christian and who isn't?  If a person claims the
title of "Christian", who is to judge whether or not he is?  Is
David the ultimate authority?  Or, if we are to go to the
Bible... the Devil cites Scripture, you know.

> > The mentality of the witch burners is alive and well in Ontario. . .
> > and other places as well. By the time I was 12, I had run across it, 
> > and been strapped and ``had the devil beaten out of me'' by some
> > very well meaning people who truly thought that this was what God
> > wanted them to do with pantheists. 

> What happened to you was pretty unfortunate but is there any Biblical basis 
> for saying that what they did to you was Christian? 

     I'm afraid that there is Biblical basis, and Laura is not alone
in her experience.  "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off."
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."  "Spare the rod and
spoil the child."  More subtly, one of my closest friends was
driven out of school by the refusal of faculty and thesis
advisor to believe that she was "academically serious" after she
revealed her paganism.

> Christians never gave up witch burning.  They never did it in the first
> place.  If you will take the time to do some research into the Salem witch
> burnings, you will learn that the actual witches got off scot free. 
> David

     Uhhh...the nine million or so European women who died in the
Roman Catholic Inquisition were killed because they were
suspected witches.  The Roman Catholics of the 1100s to the
1500s were the only Christian church in Europe.  When the
Protestant movement arose in Germany and spread across the
Continent and to Britain, it was the Calvinists (Presbyterians)
of Scotland, also Christians, who devised some of the most
bloody and brutal tortures and murders of suspected witches.
The Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, was authored by
Jesuit priests.
     There were no "actual witches" in Salem;  the women who died
were suspected witches, victims of a hoax by some hysterical
adolescent girls.  Whether or not the "actual witches" were ever
killed, the fact remains that this is witch-burning.  Nine women
died at Salem;  one man was crushed to death.
     As far as I'm concerned, if a person claims to be a
Christian, he/she is.  God may disagree, but since I have less
data to go on, I cannot go around saying one man is a Christian
and another is not;  what standards have I?  And if an
inquisitor claims to burn witches, it doesn't matter if he kills
old widows, three-year-old girls, or pregnant wives;  he is a
witch-burner.  
     And if I claim to be a witch, if I stand up to be counted
among the priestesses of the Mother Goddess, I may well be
burned even today, because of the intolerance of some who claim
to be Christian.  And the person who lays a hand on me in the
name of his deity will be cursed in the name of mine.  

			--Ellen