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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Krowbar who wrote (13846)	11/25/1997 9:38:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Canon Episcopi "Until the 13th century, the official and accepted position of the Church theoreticians was that the acts of witches were all illusions or fantasies originating in dreams, and that consequently belief in the actuality of witchcraft was pagan and therefore heretical. This position is the precise opposite of the later views of the inquisitors when sorcery was equated with heresy -- that witchcraft, night flights, intercourse with demons, transformation into animals, really occurred and that therefore disbelief in witchcraft would be heresy. One of the earliest and most continuously quoted documents presenting the earlier view is the Canon or Capitulum Episcopi, erroneously attributed to the Council of Ancyra {AD 314} by Regino of Pruem, Abbot of Treves, who was the first (about 906) to present the text. Whatever the origin of this canon, it was nevertheless for many centuries accepted as the highest authority. It was incorporated in the Corpus Juris Canonici by Gratian of Bologna in the 12th century, and thus became part of Canon Law. Since it flatly contradicted the whole theory of witchcraft as established by both clerical and secular demonologists, it had to be continually undermined and whittled away and even expressly denied...." The Encyclopedia of Sorcery and Witchcraft, W H Robbins, Crown, 1959 Sorcery "Sorcery must be differentiated from witchcraft. As indicated in the entry for Witchcraft, sorcery is timeless and world-wide, whereas witchcraft is specifically limited to approximately three centuries from 1450 to 1750 and to Christian western Europe (with an excursion to Salem). Sorcery is an attempt to control nature, to produce good or evil results, generally by the aid of evil spirits. On the other hand, witchcraft embraces sorcery, but goes far beyond it, for the witch contracts with the Devil to work magic for the purpose of denying, repudiating, and scorning the Christian God. The crimes both sorcerer and witch are supposed to commit -- that is, the whole range of maleficia -- appear to be alike, but the motives are distinct. This is the basis on which the Inquisition built up the theory of witchcraft as a heresy -- a conscious rejection of God and the Church; witchcraft became not a question of deeds (did the witch hex the cows so their milk dried up?) but a question of ideas. Witchcraft took ots place among crimes of conscience. Witchcraft 'was but a shadow, a nightmare; the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma' (George Burr) In the early years, while the theory was being formulated, some inquisitors and judges were unsure of this distinction. Their confusion was not surprising, for the Catholic Church had its own traditions of sorcery and tended to view man against a backdrop of magic. For example, the Old Testament is replete with sacred magic. In spite of the legend that all sorcery stopped with the birth of Christ, in the first few centuries after Christ an extensive literature developed about Simon Magus, a magician whose attempts to fly were foiled by his contemporary rival, the Apostle Peter. The inquisitors investigated sorcery very searchingly to discover the intentions or motives of the accused. By the mid-thirteenth century, a Summa de Officio Inquisitionis minutely probed all facets of sorcery and fortunetelling, with a view, presumably, to extending its jurisdiction. Inasmuch as the Inquisition made use of torture, it could extort from the accused whatever it needed..." The Encyclopedia of Sorcery and Witchcraft, W H Robbins, Crown, 1959

To: Krowbar who wrote (13846)	11/25/1997 10:02:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

They have publicly stated that they want to get this country back to it's "Judeo-Christian roots as our founders had intended". You are well-read enough to know that our founders did not intend that. M E Bradford did the definitive work on the founders, reading all of the extant writings of all the Signers of the Constitution as well as the 250 or so men who ratified the document. Only five, maybe seven of these men can be called anything but conventional Christians of that time. A Protestant Christian world was a given in that day; even Catholicism was suspect. Joseph Story's A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution remarks on the Christian assumptions of the law in that time; Story was on the Supreme Court from 1810 to 1845. Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America remarks on the pervasive religiosity of the Americans in his travels of 1835. The Revolution itself was bracketed by the Great Awakening and the Second Awakening. Many of the firebrands for Revolution were the ministers of the day, and Liberty Press has a thick volume Political Sermons of the Founding Era. Virginia had debated whether or not to have an official State Church, Governor Patrick Henry arguing in favor of one; but suspicion of The Church of England, and strong opposition by Baptists and other dissenting congregations who had fled the New England Colonies helped win the argument against a State Church. The resulting Virginia Bill of Rights became the Ten Amendments of the Constitution. The idea that the religion clause of the First Amendment reflects a strong secular impulse at the founding is a useful fantasy for today's lawyers, but it ain't history. However, the founders did wisely decide and intend to keep the spheres of religion and government from being combined. But there wasn't the hostility to religion that marks the last 40 years of American law.