Jeffrey Burton Russell, who identifies himself as a “lapsed atheist,” has spent most of his career writing about Satan and hell. His most recent book is a history of the modern “mislaying” of heaven. Early in the book, he points out that “The ‘decline of heaven’ was linked to the decline of hell and of the Devil, and these in turn were closely tied to the fading of the witch-craze that arose in the 1500s and gradually died away by 1700.”
Contrary to the exaggerated estimates that millions of women were killed for practicing witchcraft, Russell says that “the evidence proves that over the centuries a total of about 110,000 persons were tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed; in fact, between a quarter to a third of these victims were men.”
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