Reflections of a stormy petrel

Witches weren't pagans. The charges brought, the confessions obtained, and the evidence presented, was fully in terms of Protestant demonology - I invite you to read Cotton Mather's unbelievably obstinate tracts, which actually twisted Calvinist Satanism to argue that the Devil (who is a wholly Christian character) could make himself unconscious of his own existence the better to deceive his followers! And that, mind you, was supposed to be the reason why so many accused witches were certain of their own innocence! If you had the slightest idea of any kind of paganism - Teutonic, Celtic, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, anything - you would know that this simply is no part of it. It is a spectacularly perverted kind of bookish Calvinism, and one of the reasons why most Christians loathe Calvinism. I personally don't believe that any of them were even witches; the evidence is too strong that the whole thing was a collective piece of lunacy, visited, as such things inevitably are, on unpopular people or personal enemies. Maybe you seriously believe that the victims of the Salem hysteria were "guilty as charged"? And you still insist on Protestant England and its paranoid ruling class, which was fighting a civil war when those "acts" were passed. You are incapable of contextualizing, ignorant of contemporary events, you have never made anything like a credible study of events; or else it would never occur to you to answer an article which was a defence of the Catholic Church, and specifically of the Papacy, with the deeds of Protestant fanatics who would gladly have burned suspected witches and suspected Catholics together!

And I have to spend my time answering this kind of thing.