The murderess’s beliefs aside, it would only take a small amount of empiracism to determine whether the poor snow-cone vendor was even capable of “putting a curse” on her. I guess what I’m saying is that it would seem logical to investigate what someone tells is true before propogating murder… you know, evidence.

Gyahh! It reminds me of gradeschool, my elementary was integrated with the special ed kids. and at recess all the jerks and bullys who liked to think of themselves as master manipulators as opposed to common thugs would find a special needs kid, and tell them that “So-and-So said something bad about you, why don’t you go over and hit them” and then they would revel in their masterwork as this poor special kid would then go over and enact their mayhem by punching Suzie in the face. They thought themselves even smarter when the special kid would take the wrap and they would get away scott free.

Now instead of Suzie getting punched or spit on, people are dieing, and instead of people with sub-par reasoning skills we are dealing with people with presumably average intellegence… at least people who are high enough functioning that society assumes they can manage on their own and don’t need constant supervision.

Now I’m thoroughly depressed. On the other side of the token, the reason this is so newsworthy is that this kind of stupidity thankfully only happens rarely.

Based on the information in the story, it would seem that the only evidence against the bruja is the word of an accused killer – hardly a strong case. Unless the witness heard the words directly, it would be inadmissible hearsay.

Wish I knew more about criminal law so I could actually authoritatively speculate about what can really be done in a case like this…

You’re absolutely right. There are actually much better reasons to ignore what religious belief is trying to say.

One of the irrational approaches believes people can walk on red hot coals(oh, wait, people CAN walk on red hot coals)???

Ever wonder how the first person to do that came up with that insane idea?

For an animal to touch fire, it would have to be crazy, so where does that leave us???

I wonder how that first fire handler came to the empirical conclusion it was safe to pick up a burning branch.

What we mean here by magical/irrational thinking has to be carefully defined, else we run the risk of ignoring other ways of approaching the problem of knowing reality. Just because someone kills in the name of religion is no reason to ignore what religious belief may be trying to say. People also make RATIONAL decisions to kill, be it for money, power or vengence.

The individual in question THOUGHT her brujo was telling her the truth. Humans are SO trusting,,,in some ways that’s an admirable trait, in other ways,,,

I wonder if the real lesson here is TRUST NO ONE!!!
She COULD have asked the snow cone peddler if he had cursed her.

Gary 7