His trick was that he had very accurate scales, so when he weighed the accused against a duck, he could actually tell which ones were heavier, and which ones were witches.

He was very wise in the ways of science.

"Witchcraft sounds like bullshit", William Harvey, 1634

Whew...just saw that thing called a Spider the other day that they used on the ladies accused of witchcraft and let's just say...mammectomy with no painkillers.

On the flipside you had Thomas Hobbes who asserted that witchcraft was fake but witches should be prosecuted anyway because anyone claiming to have magical powers was obviously lying.

Quick! Someone cross post this to r/WitchesVsPatriarchy. They hate this kind of shit.

Your words souds like heresy - Protestant church 1634

It's a fair cop.

Two Monty Python references in TIL today so far , must be a good day.

"Witchcraft sounds like bullshit", Catholics

He was wise in the ways of science.

They would only hate it if you tried to make a shitty point that there is no patriarchy based on it.

It is in the bible heretic. The bible supersedes the traditions of man and the church that realized witchcraft probably doesn't exist. Sola scriptura papist!

Men were accused of being witches too, in Salem the only reason women were more likely to get accused of being witches was because the people doing the accusing were women accusing other women they knew.

Basically so long as you kept giving names they would hold off persecuting you. Both men and women were initially accused of being witches but when men were accused of being witches they were more likely to just accept being killed immediately rather than accusing a bunch of other people first to spare their own life, with the famous case of the guy who instead of announcing a plea would grunt "more weight" when they came to ask him for one as he was sandwiched between two boards with rocks on top.

Ultimately the witch trials did not end until the accusations of witchcraft had passed through the women's social circles as they accused people they knew until they eventually reached up all the way to the governor's wife, in which case the whole witch trial thing was clamped down upon swiftly.

Nah. That slightly watered down version of FDS gets pissed at anything that contradicts "all men bad always". I honestly think 99% of that sub couldn't give the correct definition of "patriarchy" if their left eye depended on it.

The powers of clinical, empirical sciences. Not much nonsense gets past that useful sieve.

He was wise in the ways of events in existence worked and knew this.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/162120.Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds