Do Christians still fear witches as much as they did in the middle ages?
A few yes. Funny thing is historical witches and modern witches are nowhere near each other. A “witch” in the middle ages was someone who worked malevolent magic. If I believed people killed with magic, I’d fear them too! They stopped being persecuted when society generally accepted such things were impossible. The modern use of the term doesn’t designate type of magic. Most self-described witches do healing, protection, self-empowerment, etc. They also agree that claims from the middle ages against witches were geneally impossible and rediculous. And yet, there are Christians who every time they hear “witch” insist it MUST be referring to someone evil and malevolent and sometimes even think them capable of the same reduculous accusations as 400 years ago.
Witches were demonised by the Catholic church in the middle ages. Thankfully they are mostly left alone to do their thing these days. They had intuition, the ability to tune into universal energy. It’s kind of natural really, everyone has the same potential in that respect. There appears to be a major movement in consciousness that is in favour of the ‘witchy’ ways.
I doubt that they do today. At least in America, where we’ve gotten used to that “Freedom of Religion” thing. I don’t think that witches have magic powers, but there are a fair number of Christians who seem to. I predict that some of the answers to this question will illustrate that. Yes, they were. Anything smacking of Paganism (the religions that existed before the Church came along and smacked them down) was labeled as “witchcraft”. They were rival belief systems, and could not be tolerated by the autocratic church. In addition, the lack of emotional hangups regarding sexuality seemed to be a threat to the sexually repressive church. The church regarded anything that had to do with the physical world as “corrupt”, which naturally included sex–except under controlled circumstances (married, for the express purpose of having children, but don’t you dare enjoy it).
They needed to believe that they had some control over things like the Plague. They found someone to blame by targeting witches. They believed in witches because the Bible said they were real. They tortured the victims until they confessed to whatever the interrogators wanted to hear, as anyone would (something that Bush still doesn’t understand). They killed not only hundreds of thousands of people, including children, they killed cats, because of the belief in “familiars”. The decrease in cats meant an increase in rats, the real carriers of the plague.
