Ron Collins
Jul 24, 2017 · 1 min read

Widespread belief in witches and witchcraft was just one part of that gestalt.

Here you’re doing in grand style, the thing my dad always reminds me not to do when trying to understand former times and the people in them: you’re projecting your own mindset, knowledge and values onto people in a past you truly know next to nothing about, and assuming that the way you see things is applicable to the ways they did. And your conclusions are about as snobbish as it gets: “they weren’t as smart then as I am now, so who could blame them?”

Your simply assuming that there was some “widespread belief in witches and witchcraft” is not an iota different than it would be to look back at the USSR in the 30s and just wave the purges way by saying there was “widespread belief” in Trotskyites and Zinovievites plotting and scheming behind every political joke or dissenting editorial;

…or the USA in the 1950s, saying there was “widespread belief” that anyone who’d had a conversation or attended a rally about Spain twenty years before must certainly be a communist.

…or a western university campus the day before yesterday, a block or two away from where a lot more women get attacked than they ever do in the safe, leafy confines of the school grounds, and saying there is “widespread belief” in some campus rape epidemic.

Honestly, listen to yourself.

Frankly, your post is silly, reckless and irresponsible. Quite unlike you.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s