Is Witchcraft Rational?
Human nature has always instigated us to try and look for explanations for what happens around us. Psychology looks for the explanations for human behavior, meteorology looks for explanations for weather and the police now look for scientific explanations to solve a crime. The means we have today to investigate cause and effect are different from how they were even a decade ago let alone in the ancient civilizations when witchcraft and magic supposedly originated, not to mention that there are still tribes and peoples who live by the old traditions.
People who strongly believe in witchcraft will explain any negative events saying that witchcraft was at play, that someone was bewitched or cursed. Such is the case of the Azande tribe in north central Africa although their idea of what witchcraft is is somewhat different from what we understand by the word. For the Azande witchcraft is a substance that is inherited in one's belly that is fairly autonomous that performs bad magic on the person's enemies without the carrier's knowledge (1). Due to our skepticism of such beliefs we might be compelled to challenges such them by asking questions such as "what if someone does not have enemies but bad things still happened to him?" and an answer to that question would have to be a tricky one if you try to answer it with today's scientific knowledge or with our society's beliefs. The point is that ultimately most of the bad things that happen to us really are caused by other people. Buildings do occasionally collapse and kill people in them due to human error in construction or maintenance. People do get sick if they are in contact with other sick people. People do sometimes intentionally cause harm to others too. So is it really such a huge l ...