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Religion

Supernatural Enforcement

I’ve been wondering, as is my wont. The topic: oh, something narrowly defined, like the interaction between religion, politics and societal evolution. As a result you all have a few choice reading assignments today, should you share my fascination.

Jokes aside, I HAVE been rattled by the outspokenness of the Christian Right in both peddling dominionism, a “group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their personal understandings of biblical law,” and a longing for (and prediction of) the end times, in which they and only they will be saved. Betsy deVos certainly advocates for this mysticism and then there is John Bolton who willingly adds his biblical interpretations to the mix (Trump sent by G-d to save the Jews from the Iranian menace? As a Christian he believes it possible!)

And now, with the Mueller report completed and Barr’s decisions around it delivering a gift for Trump, my worries increase. Whether one believes it would matter that Trump (as an individual) should be felled or not, the proclaimed vindication is certainly empowering the underlying rot, comprised of people and ideas, and gives it momentum for its destructive mission. That will not be changed by whatever we’ll discover, should there ever be transparency, a full reading of the report, or dragged-out State court proceedings. They circled the wagons around their own and succeeded.

Roaring to capitalize on all this are people like Bolton, who, by the way, was a major architect of the Iraq war, a war that cost over half a million lives (beyond the 5000 American troops) if you count civilian deaths caused by violence and collapsing infrastructure. And that is only the dead. Nobody seems to count the permanently crippled, maimed, blinded, traumatized victims, or a population deprived of the kids never to be born. Source for statistics below, no need to peruse.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001533 .

What you really should (re-)read on the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion is what’s attached beneath, so brilliantly written by Eliot Weinberger.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/eliot-weinberger/what-i-heard-about-iraq

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Back to topic: Religion affecting societies. Have you noticed how many recent editorials or articles are focussed on the link between religion and politics? Here are two typical examples.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-left-was-about-salvation-the-right-is-about-the-end-times/2019/03/18/2cd16898-49b8-11e9-9663-00ac73f49662_story.html?

https://ips-dc.org/apocalyptic-christianity-returns-u-s-foreign-policy/

Underlying all of those speculations on the end times is the concept of an angry, judging, punishment-meting G-d. Which brings me to the truly interesting, scientific reading for today, just out this week in the journal Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4

The argument, provided by a research group of Oxford scientists, in a nutshell: what do we know about the appearance of “moralizing” G-ds, who, as it turns out, have not always been around even when other ones were? Harvey Whitehouse and his colleagues systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, and used 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. The resulting claim: the more complex a society, the more likely the presence of supernatural agents who make sure rules are followed and who are invested with the power to identify and punish individuals who don’t, even beyond death.

The critical mass seems to be around 1.000.000 – societies with that many members develop belief systems that emphasize “supernatural reinforcement.” Big Gods (or the related concept of retributive Karma) push people in the direction of prosocial behavior to prevent asocial tendencies that might be disruptive to the community as a whole when they can no longer be controlled through tribal/neighborly supervision. It takes about 100 years after you’ve reached the one million benchmark, for a vengeful G-d to appear.

(Note, I am not singling out Christianity here, dominionists were just the trigger for my musings.)

“Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established.”

The argument is not without critics – some claim that the complexity of societies is associated with the (subsequently emerging) ability of people to think about questions of meaning and answer them with religious concepts.

The Whitehouse data seem to point to a different causality. Most interesting for us, though, has to be the question: when does the idea of a punitive God, thought to be a stabilizing factor for complex societies, flip into the opposite? When does that belief lead to violent acts, civil strife, oppression of people who don’t buy the concept, or pray to another moralizing G-d? Will it again be used to justify another war?

Photographs today are European spires seen across my last two trips.

Music is dedicated to all who died at the hands of believers in a reinforcing G-d. May the beauty of the music console us on this Monday.

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Purim

Yesterday afternoon was the beginning of spring, and at sundown we saw the beginning of Purim.

This Jewish festival is a celebration of the courage of one woman to do everything in her power to save her community from evil attacks of anti-Semites, with her own life under threat. For once, there was a happy ending – Queen Esther, the woman in question, was able to convince her husband, King Ahasveros, to save the Jews in the Persian empire from attacks by the King’s vizier, Haman. Not so happy an ending for the latter – he and his descendants were hanged.

It is a boisterous holiday, with the story, contained in the Megillah, being read out loud, with people making lots of appropriate noises and appearing in costume (think of it as the Jewish version of movie night for Rocky Horror Picture fans.)

The costume part is actually an interesting possibility of cultural appropriation: some academics argue that the first Purim masquerading appeared around the medieval times when Jews and Christians first lived in proximity together. Mardi Gras or the Venice Carnival were tied to the vernal equinox and all involved costumed celebrations.

Here is a link that details history and customs, including the hotly debated question if we can trust the historicity of the story.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-the-odd-history-of-purim-1.5332554

My favorite Purim food – cookies, what else – is served and also added to gift baskets that are generously shared among friends and family. The cookies’ name is derived from two German words: mohn (poppy seed) and taschen(pockets). Mohntaschen, or “poppy seed pockets,” were a popular German pastry dating from medieval times.

Around the late 1500s, German Jews dubbed them Hamantaschen, or “Haman’s pockets, although earlier versions of the pastry had been known as Haman’s ears – see the etymology of the pun here: http://time.com/4695901/purim-history-hamantaschen/

Beyond feasting, making merry, and remembering a time when the actions of a single model individual saved a whole population, there is the proscription to give to the needy, matanot l’evyonim.

And here is a wonderful example of that in 2019: two orthodox rabbis in NZ are asking their congregations to contribute to the victims of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where 50 people were murdered last Friday.

Rabbi Ariel Tal, head of the Wellington Jewish Community Center, and Rabbi Natti Friedler, head of the Auckland Hebrew Congregation, issued a request to their respective communities, asking them to donate the traditional charity money given on the upcoming Purim holiday to support the families of the victims of the attack in addition to the Jewish poor.

https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Give-Purim-charity-to-victims-of-mosque-massacres-583933

Interfaith connection that we can all celebrate, whether we observe Purim or not!

Images today capture spring’s arrival. All photographed yesterday.

Music has an interesting genesis: https://www.classical-scene.com/2019/02/16/miryam-esther/

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Pulp, alas not Fiction

Hate to admit it, but when everyone swooned for John Travolta in Pulp Fiction I had a crush on Harvey Keitel. Riddle me that.

The memory came up when I listened to an interview by Terry Gross with the author Mattathias Schwartz covering his thoughtful and perceptive piece for the NYT on Mike Pompeo. The article is a must read, particularly in combination with his profile of Brennan from some months back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/mike-pompeo-translates-trump.html

Keitel’s name surfaced in the context of his role as The Wolf in Pulp Fiction and parallels were drawn to our current Secretary of State. Fixers wherever we look, it seems, this week….seamlessly transitioning from fiction to reality, from the halls of congress to the hotels in Hanoi.

Here is the link to the interview.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/698887851/journalist-explains-how-mike-pompeo-helps-translate-trump-to-the-world?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Full disclosure: I happen to know Matt, see him once every other year or so for an evening. He notes in the interview that he does not easily attribute “smarts” to people but acknowledges that Pompeo is smart. Same could be said for Matt and one should add the equally important “not boring.” The sheer diversity of topics he tackles and subjects he latches onto is mind boggling. No wonder that his work is snatched up by major news publications, from the New Yorker, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, Bloombergs, the LRB to The Intercept, and winning prizes. His New Yorker story, “A Massacre in Jamaica,” on the Christopher Coke extradition, won the 2011 Livingston Award for international reporting.

I could not find a link to a free version of Pulp Fiction. Just as well, since the topic of The Rapture came up in the interview (das Jüngste Gericht). Apparently there have been public references in Pompeo’s speeches to this spectacle brought down from up high. His avoidance to be nailed down by Matt’s questions of how much his Christian beliefs about the end times influence his politics made me once again wonder where we have landed in 2019 in this country. Which gives me, of course, the opportunity to link to a movie of same name, seen by almost 1 000 000 people on YouTube alone (and produced by Fallen World Productions, no less!)

Maybe watching something like this offers a glimpse of the universe of those who govern us or those who want to be ruled by the current administration….

Then again, why waste our time.

Let’s watch this instead, still a trailer, but the full documentary had its premiere day before yesterday in DC by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and co-sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD); it can soon be ordered.

https://vimeo.com/291373548

Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook describes what happens if political operatives try to subvert the sacred American principle of “one person, one vote,” hatching and pursuing this plan for years with too few of us noticing. Rather than worry about the Rapture, maybe we should worry about the reality of the decline of democracy. If only to ensure that we’ll get rid of fixers in the next round. Here is a good suggestion for a start, written by another of these young brilliants, Jamelle Bouie. :https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/opinion/the-electoral-college.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage


Photographs are of old Dutch church murals about the Rapture.

And here is Buxtehude’s Das Juengste Gericht

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Bird Hospital

Why do I like my Leberwurst so much….. was my first inane thought about one of the most fascinating articles I read last week. I don’t know what your reaction will be to the mix of science reporting, journalistic adventure story and non-didactic teaching about an Indian religious sect that goes to extreme length to protect animals, but mine was awe mixed with apprehension. And yet another thought about trying to curb my meat consumption.

We have discussed animal cognition here before, but the description of the Jains’ reverence and a discussion of new scientific data about animal consciousness goes way beyond anything I’ve previously integrated. This is not just about eating or not eating one’s prey. It is about a pretty radical new understanding of what took place during evolution.

The article starts with a description of a bird hospital in Old Delhi run by devotees of Jainism,” an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals.” It’s the setting to delve into the history of that religion followed by a comparison of it’s tenets to what modern science has to say about consciousness in species other than humans.

Ross Anderson, the author, is careful: Many orthodox Jain beliefs do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The faith does not enjoy privileged access to truth, mystical or otherwise. But as perhaps the world’s first culture to extend mercy to animals, the Jains pioneered a profound expansion of the human moral imagination. The places where they worship and tend to animals seemed, to me, like good places to contemplate the current frontier of animal-consciousness research.

You can read the list of scientific developments in the article attached below. What particularly lingers with me was this one fact: fish – like mammals of course – are conscious in the sense that they experience pain. Unlike us, they do not have the capacity to know that pain will end, either by healing or by the bliss of (permanent) unconsciousness and so are stuck in seeming eternity. Imagine. No, don’t. It’s given me nightmares.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/

Photographs today are of robins in my icy garden, photographed through the window last week.

Music from Respirghi’s The Birds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZzpcnYy1jQ

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Hanacpachap Cussicuinin

Amazed I managed to spell that. More amazed at what it actually entails. Today’s title words are the name of a four-part polyphonic piece titled Hanacpachap cussicuinin, to a text in the Quechua language, to be sung ‘in processions when entering the church’; it is the earliest example of polyphony printed in the New World. The work was either composed by Friar Pérez Bocanegra, or by an anonymous native composer in Lima, Peru, in 1631.

I learned all this when reading up on Latin American Baroque music after a splendid concert by Portland Baroque Orchestra last week. An Empire of Silver and Gold featured “Daniel Zuluaga as guest director with a  trailblazing program of works he gathered in archives of Latin American cathedrals. Five singers, two guitars, dulcian, violins, cello, cornetto, harp, and percussion blend familiar baroque sounds with distinct Latin American flavors.”

 

 

The concert was an energetic romp, and initiated me to a combination of elements that I only knew individually: classical Baroque music and South American or Mexican melodies and rhythms. What I learned in my subsequent reading was that colonizers, and in particular missionaries bent on converting indigenous souls, were no psychological slouches.

“Spanish missionaries in the New World often used music as a means for converting and indoctrinating native populations, often combining it with their knowledge of indigenous language and culture. The Hanacpachap specifically incorporates both Incan and Christian imagery, describing the harvesting of the land and praising the Virgin Mary, who is symbolized by a pale blue flower that grows in the Andes. This same flower was also the symbol of a local goddess in the Incan pantheon.”

http://brynmawrcollections.org/home/exhibits/show/bulkeley-dillingham-project/missionary-histories/ritual-formulario–1631-

 

 

In Mexico City, “the conquistadors decided to build their church on the site of the Templo Mayor of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to consolidate Spanish power over the newly conquered domain. Hernán Cortés and the other conquistadors used the stones from the destroyed temple of the Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli, principal deity of the Aztecs, to build the church.” (says Wikipedia)

Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los cielos was built across two centuries, starting in 1573. Here you have the combination of land and material that meshes the usurped with the new, in addition to a melding of music, language and other cultural entities.

 

 

Wherever you come down on the politics of this or the (in) justice, the results are often amazingly beautiful in their own right, both buildings and music. You can judge for yourself by listening to the link below.

Photographs are all from cathedrals and churches in Mexico City.

 

And here is last year’s blog on the cathedral:https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=5726

 

 

 

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Would-be Revolutionaries

Today is Guy Fawkes Day – or night, as the case may be. The annual commemoration of the gun powder plot is a strange celebration of historic hatred. Guy Fawkes and his buddies had planned to blow up the House of Lord, King James I included, with a goal of ridding England of Catholicism. Fawkes was betrayed by an anonymous tip and arrested on November 5, 1605, while guarding the explosives that the plotters had stored beneath the building.

People celebrated King James’ I survival of this attempt with bonfires; across the years repeated celebrations took on an increasingly religious, anti-Catholic bend, with effigies burnt not only of Guy Fawkes but also the Pope and these days despised political figures, not necessarily only British ones.

Guy Fawkes was supposed to be hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, but managed to fall of the scaffold and painlessly die by breaking his neck. James I, a complex monarch often described as a drinking fool and rumored to be bi-sexual, died of disease in his mid-50s. Under his reign, with England and Scotland united, the people lived in a somewhat golden age – he was intent on avoiding wars, particularly with Spain. But he also imbued the monarchy with a sense of absolutism, a belief in the divine rights of kings, that his son Charles inherited. It did not end well for him – or the country that slid into civil war.

Why the Occupy movement took on a stylized Guy Fawkes mask is a mystery to me. Many see Fawkes’ role in history as that of a terrorist, killing anyone in a large radius to instill fear at the heart of a nation. But even if you see him as a freedom fighter, a symbol of revolt against those in power, think about what was at the root of his plans: religion. He wanted to strike in favor of Catholicism, and replace one elite with another, namely instate Jame’s I daughter Elizabeth on the throne and generate a new government overnight. In this sense it was like a failed military coup.

And in an ironic footnote: Occupy’s adoption of the mask had led to it becoming the top-selling mask on Amazon.com, selling hundreds of thousands a year. Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world, owns the rights to the image and is paid a fee with the sale of each official mask. So much for showing it to the man…..  Then again, some funny protest songs tell it as it is.

Here is to overcoming dark times by educating ourselves (if necessary by the light of the moon) instead of dwelling in senseless symbolism, lighting bon fires to celebrate schisms….

 

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When Words Fail: Retreating to Numbers

Recent statistics from the Anti-Defamation-League: (before Pittsburgh)

Number of anti-Semitic incidents was nearly 60 percent higher in 2017 than 2016, the largest single-year increase on record.

There were 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents reported across the United States in 2017, including physical assaults, vandalism, and attacks on Jewish institutions, with every single state included, the one with the largest Jewish populations having the largest share. Anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 schools and college campuses (both non-Jewish and Jewish institutions) in 2017 nearly doubled over 2016. Unclear how many more incidents there are that people did not report for a variety of reasons.

The dark numbers are feared to be large. Over the last decade a total of 71 percent of all hate crime fatalities have been linked to domestic right-wing extremists.

2017:

  • 1,015 incidents of harassment, including 163 bomb threats against Jewish institutions
  • 952 incidents of vandalism
  • 19 physical assaults

And at the Tree of Life now 11 murdered in 2018.

https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/anti-semitic-incidents-surged-nearly-60-in-2017-according-to-new-adl-report

Photographs from European Jewish Cemeteries this summer.

 

And Israeli politicians dare to politicize this as the “results of the left stoking anti-Semitism.” (שאַנד(ע – eine Schande.

And here some history:https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/brief-history-anti-semitic-violence-america/574228/

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Luck

Perhaps it is no accident that we found ourselves discussing the issue of luck at a place that serves fortune cookies. Surrounded by large Chinese families, screaming babies, delicious food, a general hustle and bustle at this huge restaurant where we regularly meet friends, the talk turned to randomness and moral privilege.

I learned – since I grab my education even with my mouth full of fried rice – that the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Moed Katan quotes Rava, one of the rabbinic text’s greatest sages, saying that “length of life, children and sustenance depend not on merit but rather on Mazzal.”  That debate started around the belief that people who die young had been punished for a reason, while those who lived long did so on merits. Rava countered those assumptions with an examples of two equally upright rabbis, Rabba and Rav Hisdah, who died young and aged respectively, and whose families experienced corresponding economic decline and ascent. Rava’s assumption that outcome is not divinely predetermined but due to chance factors predates the copernican revolution by about 15oo years!

So what does Mazzal refer to? Plain luck? Matters outside of your control? Elements of our lives over which we have no direct influence – our genes, the place where we were born or when, the socio-economic class we grew up in – or simply randomness?

I am not sure if that was ever clarified by Jewish sages, but I know that the issue is not exactly resolved today either. So many people cling to the notion (phrased by psychologist Barry Schwartz) that People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. In this case you assign credit for outcomes, good or bad by assuming it all or mostly lies within the realm of your own responsibility. Correspondingly, you have no moral obligation to help those who suffer bad outcomes, since it’s their own fault.

Alternatively, you acknowledge that outside chance factors play a huge role in outcome; if they systematically disenfranchise some we might be morally obliged to help them overcome harsh factors that led to their disadvantaged lives if we have been the more fortunate ones.

What we know from psychology is that you bring with you a genetic makeup that sets the path; you also encounter environmental influences that shape you and which play a role in your ability to escape a given path, should it be a bad one.  The interaction of these factors try to explain the range of control you have over your fate.

Note that both, genetic make-up and the context you find yourself in, happen to you – if you happen to be born with a certain genetic predisposition towards a disease and you are born in a country where that disease can be fought with easily accessible drugs you are in the clear. If you are born in a country without access to those meds you are sunk. Same for having a specific intelligence level and lucking out on having a rich daddy or not, access to a good school or not, neighborhoods without lead in the water etc…. in other words, both what you bring and what you encounter are pretty much outside of your control when you are young.

What about when you are an adult? Does the merit assumption kick in when you are old enough to take your fate into your own hands?  Can you take on responsibility over your life’s circumstances? Make god decisions based on deliberate, rational reasoning rather than following spontaneous base impulses? Maybe that is where you deserve moral credit and the whole idea of meritocracy resides: you keep your impulses in check and choose the high road? Miraculously your hard work gets you access to education, riches follow? You don’t smoke so don’t get cancer? Life improvement is all about personal choice?

Won’t work. Both the capacity for deliberate, rational thinking as well as the need to apply it are unevenly – and unjustly – distributed.

Using rational, deliberate, slow and measured thinking thinking is difficult; additional strain on your system leaves few resources that you can use to accomplish this difficult task. In other words, the capacity that leads to better behavior is dependent on having more basic needs already fulfilled: enough food, physical shelter, educational training and habituation. Your ability to use it depends on external factors, in other words.  And even if you were able to use it, say, to decide that hard works gets you into situations that improve your state – access to education which in the end is what it’s about in societies like ours, is not guaranteed. Exclusion on the basis of race and class and set early in life cannot be overcome by good decision making alone.

The need to apply self control is differentially distributed as well – again an external factor. If you have enough external resources – money, lawyers, social and political connections – you don’t need to curb your baser impulses. You just need to have someone clean up their horrid consequence. (Note, I didn’t need to mention any names.) In contrast if you are a female black tennis player and loose it with the umpire, you are held to the highest degree of demanded self-control, needed to not be censured and punished.

Of course if you acknowledge all this, the lucky feel threatened, since they cling to their belief that it is all about their own actions. That opportunistic assumption has moral consequences – how we all engage in projects to assure a more just distribution of resources.  Luck,then, has pretty harsh effects beyond the positive ones of singling out the lucky ones.

Below is a link to a good summary article.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/21/17687402/kylie-jenner-luck-human-life-moral-privilege

Photographs today are of swallows – long thought to bring luck to the farms where they nest.

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Spellbound

“Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet.”

This sentence by Philip Pullman, author of the epic trilogy His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) which held sway in our household for years of childhood, caught my eye. In fact it made me read the rest of his review of a new exhibit, Spellbound, currently up at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until January 6. https://ashmolean.org

Pullman pulls off (sorry, couldn’t resist) once again his effortless way of embedding serious and difficult ideas in flowing and lyrical writing that winds its way into your brain as if it was a song. All the more impressive given that he writes a review here and not a science fiction novel. Then again, the topics of the exhibit which he reviews, magic, witchcraft, superstition, fall squarely into his novelistic domain: to delineate the realms of science and rationality against those other kingdoms seated deep in our imagination.

Where his novels stress the dangers of the latter undermining the former, the review extends an invitation to do the opposite. He points to the fact that “witchcraft and magic existed in a shared mental framework of hidden influences and meanings, of significances and correspondences, whether angelic, diabolic, or natural. Everything in the exhibition testifies to a near-universal belief in the existence of an invisible, imaginary world that could affect human life and be affected in turn by those who knew how to do it.”

Now, just the fact that belief in a shadow world and imaginary powers is universal does not make them a reality. Pullman would probably agree. But he is specifically after something else: he refers to Keat’s concept of Negative Capability: that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” – is where the imagination is at home, and so are ghosts and dreams and gods and devils and witches. There, possibilities are unlimited, and nothing is forbidden. Pullman speculates that it is this very state that is at the bottom of much scientific discovery, and certainly the source for the creation of every piece of art in existence.

The review ends with an appeal to heading both: imagination and reason.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/01/the-limits-of-reason-philip-pullman-on-why-we-believe-in-magic&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjmyaHjw5zdAhWhCTQIHd90DZQQFggFMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=007466294097402385199:m2ealvuxh1i&usg=AOvVaw1jA8jz5PRqTfa_I_wzol_G

Let’s use reason to approach the issue of witch hunts – the real thing, the one that staged over 10.000 trials (and subsequent executions) in continental Europe, the British Isles and North American colonies. Let’s use science to understand the explosion of these persecutions at a time when churches competed for conversions:

https://qz.com/1183992/why-europe-was-overrun-by-witch-hunts-in-early-modern-history/

Two economists have dug beyond the usual explanations of bad weather, hunger crises and need for scapegoating and come up with a theory that comes down to market competition – between churches. “Similar to how contemporary Republican and Democrat candidates focus campaign activity in political battlegrounds during elections to attract the loyalty of undecided voters, historical Catholic and Protestant officials focused witch-trial activity in confessional battlegrounds during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to attract the loyalty of undecided Christians,” write the study’s authors, Peter T. Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, and Jacob W. Russ, an economist at Bloom Intelligence, a big-data analysis firm. When it comes to winning people to your side, after all, there’s no better method than stoking fears about an outside threat—and then assuring them that you, and you alone, offer the best protection.”

Let that sink in.

Photographs today of architectural details that gave me the irrational sense of being watched…. and why should I be immune to superstition?

 

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