[HPFGU-OTChatter] And you wonder why the Magic World keeps itself secret.

[Silverthorne Dragon]

It seems  that fear and persecution of witches and wizards is still
alive and well in the modern world. Just ask the English Mum who was
sentances by an Italian court to 16 month in prison for being  a witch.

For full details, see...

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=609&id=169722004


bboy_mn


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{Anne}

Okay, that's just wierd, even for one of 'my' kind....

Heh, maybe she's just an untapped pyrokenetic (no demons required for
that)....weird crap involving water used to happen to me all the time when I
was really upset--the most notable time being when the entire bottom fell
out of the water heater in my friends/roomates house one night while I was
mooning around the house bewailing getting betrayed and abandoned by my love
interest (yes, yes, cue the violins...:P).

Pipes have also burst under the sink before when I'm really going--although
I'm sure that there's some sort of explaination for it all that I haven't
thought of ye, and that had nothing to do with my 'traumatic' emotional
episodes of the timet...^^;

What scares me is that the Italians beleived it enough to fall back to old
ways of dealing with it (almost--at least they didn't try and lynch mob the
poor lady). What scares me more though is that some extremist groups in
American still think it's okay (and god's law) to hunt down a 'witch' and
make thier lives miserable--right up to 'stoning' them even. A few have even
been flipped out enough in the past to try and get stomning laws passed.
(Now that's just insane).

Being pagan/witch myself, I have to say that I agree announcing my beleif
system is often suicidal--I;ve known friends to loose thier kids to child
services because some misguided monotheist reported the raising thier
children in teh same path as abusive....people getting fired (or pressured
socially by co-workers), when thier beliefs are discovered, houses getting
vadalized....we even had the cops called on us once for doing ritual in the
back yard...and...get this...not only were we quiet AND clothed (so we
wouldn't disturb or scare the neighbors), the yard was surrounded by a high
fence and shrubbery--making it impossible to see anything...unless, of
course, you got right up to the fence and looked through the cracks. (IE:
Someone was tryong REALLY hard to find some way of getting us in trouble).

What was funny is that we invited the officers to watch once they;d showed
up to see what the 'disturbance' was. And they did. We enver got bothered by
them again...^^;