VII. Reasonable Stupidity

The Age of Reason was marked by a decline in the theological basis of knowledge and the rise of scientific explanations of natural phenomena—trends which reflected the application of reason to philosophy, astronomy (where it was most effective) and biology. However during this era, the political life of nations continued to be shaped by power, while the cognitive life of people continued to be shaped by religion, tradition and emotion—factors which combined to make this period as unreasonable as any other.

The Age of Reason began unofficially in 1555, when the Diet of Augsburg brought a truce in the religious strife consuming Europe. The new rule was "Whose region, his religion", with dissidents emigrating to a region ruled by a prince with a belief compatible with if not identical to their own. An accepted fact of the era was that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism in its many forms would triumph and dominate completely, and a corollary was that the various Christian sects would have to learn to live together. It somehow seemed that reason might be the means by which this process of religious accommodation would be accomplished— that religious differences might be reconciled by Catholics and Protestants holding rational discussions about theology. Although that was a reasonable hope, the actual result was a resumption of hostilities (e.g., the Thirty Years' War) as people found that intolerance was immune to logic.

However, the spirit of religious intolerance which had sparked and sustained the various inquisitions earlier was directed at first not into military actions against other Christian sects but toward legal action against heretics and witches. In fact, one of the few things upon which Catholics and Protestants agreed was that heresy and especially witchcraft had to be rooted out and expunged. As it turned out, concern with heresy declined while witch mania continued to develop, and eventually, in this Age of Prejudice, even some of the devout were burned as witches.

Witch hunting had its origins in the Middle Ages, grew as the medieval world crumbled in the 1400's and became an obsession during the sixteenth century. Surprisingly, the zeal of the hunters seemed evenly matched by the number of witches: The more witches were hunted, themore there apparently were. Actually, the efforts to root out this crime seemed to increase it because, although the officials could not see it at the time, the methods of investigation were designed to produce confessions, if not witches. The mania finally peaked in the mid-seventeenth century as a growing number of people became disturbed by the excessive cruelty used to elicit confessions from suspects and convinced that such admissions should not be used to justify the execution of the accused.

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