The Crucible

[SteveS]

Have any of you read "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller?  I know a lot of people do in school, although I did not.  I read my wife's old copy - I loved it.  It is a fictional account of the Salem witch trials (where the children testified that many of the adults were witching them - historically I think 19 people hanged without confessing).  There's some really good stuff in the story.

For example, this is how the judge reasons that a lawyer is not needed to argue a charge brought forth that the children are lying:

I have been thirty-two year at the bar, sir, and I should be confounded were I called upon to defend these people.  Let you consider, now --- And I bid you all do likewise.  In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused?  One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence.  But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature, an invisible crime, is it not?  Therefore, who may possibly be witness to it?  The witch and the victim.  None other.  Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted?  Therefore, we must rely upon her victims --- and they do testify, the children certainly do testify.  As for the witches, none will deny that we are most eager for all their confessions.  Therefore, what is left for a lawyer to bring out?

What is left indeed.  Witchcraft is invisible (ipso facto).  So we must work only with the testimony of the children.  Brilliant.  But, why is witchcraft invisible?  Witchcraft is just presumed to be real, but then they take it's presumed properties (invisibility) as being absolute fact.  This fact becomes the premise in a neat little logical deduction that goes right down the toilet (ker-plunk).

And this is my problem with immaterial experiences, or revelatory knowledge.  Believers define revelation and the spiritual as being "outside the realm of science", much the way this character has defined witchcraft as being invisible.  Now consider revelation --- it can't be shown to be real to any other person.  You only have the "testimony" of the "blessed" to consider.  Because the spiritual is defined as untouchable by physical investigation.

Also, there's a line that reminded me of the Carl Sagan Dragon Story just a moment later in the play.

Setup: A character named Elizabeth Proctor is accused of being a witch because the chief villain (Abigail Williams) is found stabbed in the stomach, and a puppet (the play uses "poppet") is found in the Proctor household with a needle stuck in it's stomach.  Mary Warren is the servant at the Proctor household, and it was really her puppet.  But, the court (and Reverend Parris) are questioning John Proctor about his wife's alleged puppet:

Proctor: ... Mary Warren swears she never saw no poppets in my house, nor anyone else.

Parris: Why could there not have been poppets hid where no one ever saw them?

Proctor, furious: There might also be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.

Parris: We are here, Your Honor, precisely to discover what no one has ever seen.

All quotes are from "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller, published by Penguin Books (ISBN 0140481389).

[donkeyhoty]

I've never thought of it in terms of religion, although it does involve a religious persecution of sorts.  It certainly can be used to compare all sorts of ridiculous claims, albeit its intended target was bullshit McCarthyism rather than whatever-you-wanna-call-it-religiosity.  In that sense it's an apt comparison, the red scare was a myth and so is religion.