The recent exoneration by the Connecticut legislature of 12 people who were convicted of being witches in 17th-century Connecticut brings to the surface a couple of important questions: why would any legislator vote against exonerating these victims of religious fear-based violence and why would people believe in witches.
The Connecticut House of Representatives voted in favor of exoneration of the victims of the witch hunts 121 to 30. The Connecticut Senate voted in favor of exoneration 33 to 1. The one state senator, Rob Sampson, who voted against exoneration said he voted against it because, "I don't want to see bills that rightfully or wrongfully attempt to paint America as a bad place with a bad history." Sampson must not realize that the American Republic did not exist at the time of the witch trials. The American Republic did not come into existence until March 4, 1789, when the US Constitution came into effect. The Deism of many of America's key Founders saw to it that religion was separate from government in the American Republic. The US Constitution destroyed Christianity's ability to execute people Christians thought were witches.
Of the 12 people convicted of being witches in Connecticut, 11 were executed by hanging. Nine of these victims of unbridled religion/superstition were women and two were men. One woman, Mary Johnson, was convicted while she was pregnant. The Christians delayed her execution until after her baby was born, causing her child to be motherless.
The reason Christians believed/believe in witches is because the Christian Bible tells them witches are real. And the reason Christians in North America killed people, when they had the means of killing them prior to the creation of the American Republic, whom they believed were witches, is also based on their Christian Bible. Or, more accurately, the Hebrew Bible, which Christians incorporated into the Christian Bible as their Old Testament. At Exodus 22:18, the ancient Jewish clergymen who wrote the Bible claim God commanded, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
The promotion of the belief in witches in the Bible causes big problems for Christian apologists. Even for world-famous and bestselling authors who are Christian apologists, such as C.S. Lewis who wrote Mere Christianity. When I wrote An Answer to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, the desperate and bungling job C.S. Lewis did attempting to maintain the false belief that the Christian Bible is the Word of God in the face of the reality that it promotes the falsehood that witches are real, made me laugh. Lewis avoided the obvious, that the Bible claims God believes in witches, as would have to be the case if God commands people to kill witches. Instead, Lewis claimed that when people believed witches were real, it would have been morally wrong not to kill people who were believed to be witches!
Recognizing that the Bible, nor any other man-made book, is not the Word of God, we can recognize the true Word of God is the Creation itself. In The Age of Reason, the Deist Thomas Paine wrote:
The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator Himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.
Deism shines the light of God-given innate reason on everything, including the religions. This is priceless since reason applied to the "revealed" religions is necessary if humanity is to evolve and move away from irrational and harmful religious beliefs.