Can You Prove that Witches Exist in Canada?

Somehow I missed this, but last September an organization of self-proclaimed Canadian skeptics challenged the world to prove that witches exist—along with Bigfoot, voodoo, and the Easter Bunny.

OK, all this fun hinges on the difference between “anthropological witchcraft” and capital-P Pagan religious capital-W Witchcraft.

But still.

Of course, if anyone shows up and says, “I’m a witch,” the professional skeptics will set the bar so high: “Can you fly? Can you turn me into a frog?” You know the drill. And no, metaphor will not be good enough.

4 thoughts on “Can You Prove that Witches Exist in Canada?

  1. That’s similar to the arguments made against magic. You can point to the established facts about Renaissance magic, that it was largely a system of what we would now call psychology, therapeutic and practical, with an energetic theory underlying it, not even going beyond those into what Patrick Harpur terms the “daimonic”, and they will ask if a magician can cast “fireball”. When the “skeptics” are allowed, or demand, to set the parameters, they can make anything at all as impossible as they like, and often do. That’s not skepticism, it is simply denialism.

  2. Deep down, I feel like this blog post and the entire topic is some sort of wanna-be-a-Monty-Python-sketch thing. Lumberjacks. Larches. Dead Parrots, Funny Walks, The Spanish Inquisition. Luton. The Canadian Sceptics. The Canadian Witches.

    Funny. Absurdist. Loony. Sarcastic. Comedy of the Sanely Crazy.

    NO, of course there are no Witches in Canada. And no beer, And no hockey. And No Canadians, neither. Eh?

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