Nonsense on occasion leads to real suffering, a suffering that is not obviated through reference to 'quantum holism' and the Akashic Field. I continue to be saddened by the ease with which quantum mysticism fans embrace notions of remote healing but elide any recognition that the same 'holism', if real, might enable remote harming. Presumably the evolving cosmic consciousness - 'intelligent design' for people who want a bit of sufism and interstitiality with their cornflakes (and who were alas AWOL from discussion of the Sokal Hoax) - only involves good, rather than evil. How very convenient ... and so much less distressing than similar mumbojumbo from the faux-science of L Ron Hubbard.
I was reminded tonight of the consequences of belief in spookies when reading a Guardian item on African witchcraft.
That paper reports -
Dozens of people in Malawi, most of them elderly women, have been jailed for up to six years with hard labour for practising witchcraft.Oh well, at least the elderly witches and their young acolytes weren't drowned, barbecued, buried alive or stoned to death.
Campaigners say they will call on president Bingu wa Mutharika to release the 86 prisoners since witchcraft is not a crime under Malawian law.
Most of the group are elderly women accused by children of teaching them witchcraft. Belief in the practice is widespread in the impoverished southern African country.
George Thindwa, spokesman for the Association of Secular Humanism, called for the women to be freed immediately because they had committed no crime.
"We are intervening in this matter because we are concerned we still have prisons in Malawi [with] people being accused of being witches," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme. "The courts were wrong 100%, [and] the police, to actually accommodate cases."
Thindwa said the women were vulnerable and their convictions had taken place with undue haste. "The problem is that our police and our courts, most of them are witchcraft believers and this belief is very strong here in Malawi."
Last year the government bowed to public pressure by setting up a committee to investigate criminalising the practice.
Malawi's public prosecutions office told the BBC that 11 cases were brought under the witchcraft act in the last month. This led to the conviction of 61 elderly women, seven elderly men and 18 younger relatives of the other accused. They received prison sentences of between four and six years.
Justice minister George Chaponda has claimed that a person can only be found guilty of practising witchcraft if they confessed to being a witch. But the BBC reported that the records showed all the suspects had pleaded not guilty.
I invite the good folk at World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution and GlobalShift University to put aside, just for a moment, their immensely important contemplation of 2012 (the year when, according to guru Ervin Laszlo, there's a change in cosmic consciousness ... as predicted by the Maya!) and fund some legal aid for the Malawi grannies. Devotees of the Akashic Field might even spring for a few air tickets to rescue those bad bad wiccans!
