posted
I'm confused. How could the old laws ban something, but make it illegal to accuse anyone of it?
quote: In 1899, colonial settlers made it a crime to accuse someone of being a witch or wizard - wary of the witch hunts in Europe a few centuries earlier which saw many people burned at the stake after such accusations.
posted
Witchcraft itself isn't legalized, it's just legally recognized. It's no longer illegal to accuse someone of witchcraft. From what I can tell from the article, witchcraft hasn't been illegal; now harming someone with it will be illegal. Much as, for instance, vehicular homicide is a special class of homicide. I guess as long as they don't accept spectral evidence like Salem did, they probably won't have much trouble with witch-hunting. I imagine harm-by-witchcraft would be an extremely difficult charge to prove. I mean, person A dislikes person B, someone sees person A attempting a spell, something bad happens to person B; unless you made the intent to cause harm the crime, only the fraction of cases in which what person A said would happen actually happened to person B, tried by a judge who believed in witchcraft, would be cleared. *Valiantly tries to keep an open mind on this, with a disbelief in witchcraft.* This would be a rather interesting Nation-States issue, wouldn't it?
Posts: 283 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
I'm not a witch! I'm not a witch! They dressed me up like this. And this isn't my nose. It's a false one.
Posts: 283 | Registered: Jul 2006
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