Ugandan Christians find themselves combating "members of the country's new elite [who] are paying witch doctors vast sums of money... in a bid to increase their wealth" —
Where child sacrifice is a business.


"Child sacrifice has risen because people have become lovers of money," Pastor Peter Sewakiryanga Kyampisi Childcare Ministries church is quoted as saying. "They have a belief that when you sacrifice a child you get wealth, and there are people who are willing to buy these children for a price," says the clergyman. "So they have become a commodity of exchange, child sacrifice has become a commercial business."
Leaving aside the fact that in our modern, advanced, enlightened Western world,
child sacrifice also
has risen because people have become lovers of money and
has become a commercial business, one can't help but think back to the
Witches' Sabbaths of early modern Europe and America, at which contemporaries reported that "human flesh was eaten... preferably children."
Returning to contemporary Africa, the article says, "The ritual... was almost unheard of in the country until about three years ago, but it has re-emerged, seemingly alongside a boom in the country's economy." If it was
almost unheard of but
re-emerged, it must at some point have been heard of.
Likewise,
Witchcraft was
almost unheard of during the
Age of Faith, when our Europe was firmly in the care of
Holy Mother Church. It had been known in the pre-Christian times that
Wicca wants to reanimate, and only
re-emerged with the upheavals resulting from the
Protestant Reformation.
Popular opinion, as shaped by fools like
Dan Brown, is quite confused about this era in our history.
Inaccuracies in The Da Vinci Code include the baseless assertion "that the Church burned at the stake five
million women" as witches. History tells us that at most a twentieth of this number were executed in this manner for this same crime, that among them men were included, and that it was not
The Church but several ecclesial communions and civil bodies that carried out these executions.
But all this, however true, is utterly beside the point. Few would argue that child sacrifice is a crime undeserving of harsh punishment. If modern-day Ugandans would have good cause to try and execute witches, why not our own ancestors? We owe them at the very least the benefit of the doubt.
Labels: Africa, America the Beautiful, Europa, Evil, The Occult