Desire to Kill – How Primate Nature Still Drives Us

When talking about religions we find ourselves often deconstructing arguments, these sometimes simply end in the will of humans, since the dawn of time, to control things. Many of the most terrible things humans have done to each other was when the falsely accused others of natural phenomena, witchcraft falls neatly into the category of humans killing other humans just because something happened to them (or they were afraid of something) to our disgust we discovered that the practice of burning witches has not yet passed from this world, even in 2013.

The following story happened only a few days ago, when a young woman (a mother) of 20 years have been burned alive for the suspicion that she was something she simply can not be, because witches do not really exist. Papua New Guinea is the place, it seems, where people still think that they can take out their sadness and frustration on other people, by killing them.

However insane this sounds to you, imagine a calm English village, in the 14th or 15th century, where witch hunting was a popular hobby of most people, and if you happened to be a older woman living alone or a man who likes to be alone, or even a child who plays in the field, you had a pretty good chance of getting yourself into serious trouble. In that village it was common knowledge that witches did exist and were in fact a very serious threat to normal life, if we had a chance to talk with these people they would probably be shocked to discover that we dropped the whole witch thing long ago.

This shows you how many wrong ideas humans can have, can be seriously passionate about, can even kill other humans because of those beliefs, and how difficult it is to part from those beliefs. Just like religion, witchcraft is superstition, and a very dangerous one indeed. Even though Papua New Guinea has tremendous challenges in moving into the 20th century it is a shame on its whole population that people are slaughtered in this way, and an example for the rest of us of what happens when you let superstition rule your life.