Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Demon-Haunted World
publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over
Europe. Eventually he was captured, garrotted, and then, for
good measure, burned at the stake. His copies of the New
Testament (which a century later became the basis of the exquisite
King James translation) were then hunted down house-to-house
by armed posses - Christians piously defending Christianity by
preventing other Christians from knowing the words of Christ.
Such a cast of mind, such a climate of absolute confidence that
knowledge should be rewarded by torture and death were unlikely
to help those accused of witchcraft.
Burning witches is a feature of Western civilization that has,
with occasional political exceptions, declined since the sixteenth
century. In the last judicial execution of witches in
England, a woman and her nine-year-old daughter were
hanged. Their crime was raising a rain storm by taking their
stockings off. In our time, witches and djinns are found as
regular fare in children's entertainment, exorcism of demons is
still practised by the Roman Catholic and other Churches, and
the proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic
practices of another. We still use the word 'pandemonium'
(literally, all demons). A crazed and violent person is still said
to be demonic. (Not until the eighteenth century was mental
illness no longer generally ascribed to supernatural causes;
even insomnia had been considered a punishment inflicted by
demons.) More than half of Americans tell pollsters they
'believe' in the Devil's existence, and ten per cent have
communicated with him, as Martin Luther reported he did
regularly. In a 1992 'spiritual warfare manual' called Prepare
for War, Rebecca Brown informs us that abortion and sex
outside of marriage 'will almost always result in demonic
infestation'; that meditation, yoga and martial arts are designed
so unsuspecting Christians will be seduced into worshipping
demons; and that 'rock music didn't "just happen", it was a
carefully masterminded plan by none other than Satan himself.
Sometimes 'your loved ones are demonically bound and
blinded'. Demonology is today still part and parcel of many
earnest faiths.
And what is it that demons do? In the Malleus, Kramer and