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let live".
But in order to question intelligently, you should be familiar with why something exists in the first place.
In order to question and possibly discard the scourging in a ritual, you have to understand why it's there.
Just saying, "no one is going to hit ME with a whip over a hundred times" is not enough, you have to
understand what that whipping means in the context of the ritual, in the context of the religion and in the
context of the symbols it represents. Without that understanding, how can you judge what should be there
and what should be done away with? Saying it's not for you is fine, but it may also be a case of throwing
out the baby with the bathwater if you discard it. You could be throwing out a critical component of the
spirituality and part of the Mysteries you signed up to learn if you discard this.
Another major lack in fluffies is
4) Critical Thinking Skills. June 12, 2003
Let's look at an example for a moment:
We will use for this example one of the greatest and most often cited "fact" of modern Wiccan/Pagan
history; the 9 Million European Women Dead during the Burning Times. I have personally seen this
figure quoted in numerous books, cited as "fact" on many pages, and found it being taught in classes on
Wicca and Paganism. Most of those in the know, the ones who have done some research on the topic,
have found that this is a complete fallacy. In the first draft of this document, I had a series of suppositions
dealing with this "fact" but it seems that my assumptions made me talk out of my ass myself. So, I will
defer to the experts in this field and send you all to these pages: Recent Developments in the Study of
The Great European Witch Hunt and The Burning Times Myth are two excellent articles debunking this
particular myth. Please read both these articles before continuing with this article.
Done? Good. Now, given what you just read, does the "fact" of 9 million European women being
murdered logically stand? I truly don't think so.
What are scholars saying? That the actual death toll is between 40,000 and 60,000 with a POSSIBLE
high of 100,000 ( Summerlands Remembrance ) but that's it. In fact, as more accurate data is found, the
death toll is going down. It's approaching 20,000. ( Population sources for information on actual
population totals during the time period we are talking about. )
But all of this assumes you don't believe the 9 million estimate, it assumes you have enough thinking
skills to actually try to think things through and find out for yourself what is true and what is not,
especially when facts are concerned, and sources are NOT cited. This means that you have to have
critical thinking skills and the ability to question what you have been told, and the tools necessary to find
out the truth.
I did some web searches and found the above pages through those searches. The first one to find out
population was done on Google with the key terms of "Estimated population Europe 1550" and I got
thousands of hits. The second of these was sufficient for my purposes, but I bet any of the others that
showed population statistics would have done. The second search I did was for "Estimate death "burning
times"" and I had over 200 hits. But I knew how to find the facts I wanted.
This is one of those skills that I see fewer and fewer people actually using. The Internet is one huge
research library, and people don't know how to use a search engine. It's like looking in the index of a
book in the library. One fluffy posted a question about some Gods and who they were, their myths, what
they did and so on. Now, I was able to find all the information she wanted in about 10 minutes with
Google, but could she be bothered to do that? Why not? This is part of basic fact-finding, a skill taught in
EVERY school in America, and probably in the world. So why couldn't she do this? IMO, one word
sums it up, laziness. She simply did not want to do the 10 minutes of work associated with this to find
out the answer to her question.
So, this needs to stop, along with not wanting to question "facts" especially when they are highly
subjective facts.
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