How could they believe that

“How could they believe that?” “Were they just stupid?” “Why would they buy into such crazy ideas?” Over a decade ago I began giving lectures about witchcraft in colonial New England, mostly to college students but occasionally also to high school students. One of the greatest challenges I faced was how to overcome the tendency of many in the audience to dismiss early American witch beliefs and accusations as the result of “superstition” or “ignorance.” These reactions were generally spiked with either breezy and amused contempt or horrified and quite selfconsciously righteous indignation. I have often been tempted to point out that such responses are based, whether explicitly or implicitly, on questionable contrasts with our own ways of understanding the world around us. Many people living in the United States today believe in one sort of supernatural phenomenon or another: they often become members of an institutional religion like Christianity or join alternative movements like Wicca. Students who belong to such organizations or movements tend to forget that some of their own assumptions and beliefs might well strike outsiders as irrational and even morally questionable. Those who view the world from a “scientific” perspective, believing it to be governed by natural rather than supernatural forces, generally dismiss premodern world views as less logical, less empirical, and in general less plausible than their own. They routinely ignore the many unsubstantiated assumptions (otherwise known as “leaps of faith”) that undergird modern scientific paradigms as well as the myriad questions to which such paradigms provide no solutions

Contempt · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Faith · Ignorance · Indignation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Superstition · Witch · American History and Culture · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · History of Science and Medicine · History · Law · Philosophy