Witchcraft trials in Central African Republic

Forty percent of criminal charges in the CAR are for witchcraft or sorcery.

It's easy to scoff and look down on the benighted inhabitants of that backward African nation.

But wait... Canada's current Criminal Code has a prohibition on witchcraft and there was a charge laid in Toronto in the last year (granted, a silly charge -- really what happened was fraud dressed up as fortune telling). Witchcraft and sorcery is just as illegal here as in CAR; it isn't prosecuted much but it's still illegal.

What's more, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, we stopped prosecuting witches not because we had sympathy for witches but because we lacked belief in them. If we still believed witches could, for example, cause child to sicken and die, we'd prosecute witchcraft with great vigour.

In the Central African Republic people still believe in witches and so witches are prosecuted. In Canada, by contrast, we disbelieve witchcraft and instead prosecute farmers who grow crops we disapprove of -- no doubt a far more sensible course of conduct.