But you will not be tried for just being a witch or believing in witchcraft, the constitution protects religious belief.
Now murder somebody, chop them into convenient pieces (heart for courage, penis for fertility etc.) and you are going to get to go to trial and explain yourself. It will probably not go well.
The SA police service has a team dedicated to these kinds of crimes, but again, murder and dismemberment is frowned upon in most places.
Trevor is exaggerating for effect. The law recognises that witchcraft isn’t real, and if you read the Witchcraft Suppression Act you will see that it refers throughout to “professed” or “pretended” witchcraft. But the belief in witchcraft is very real for a lot of people, and it has real effects. For example, in some traditional rural communities accusations of witchcraft can lead to assault, arson and murder.
Despite the title, the main focus of the Witchcraft Suppression Act is actually on preventing witch-hunting, accusations of witchcraft, and the other crimes that can result from that. The only offences under the act that are enforced - and the only ones that are probably constitutional - are those in sections (a) and (b), i.e. the ones that prohibit accusations of witchcraft.
For further information you can read a massive law reform report on the topic, and particularly sections 4.27-4.35 which discuss the cases which have come before the South African courts. Specifically, the report explains that:
As an aside, the South African witchcraft law is not all that different from section 365 of the Canadian Criminal Code although I believe that is about to be repealed.
If there’s empirical data for it, it isn’t alternative.
What’s your evidence that placebo works against gunfire?
Regards,
Shodan
Obviously we need a large scale, protected by charms/unprotected/protected by fake charms study, with all groups shot at from an equal distance by marksmen who are (not literally) blinded as to which group is which.
Add up injuries and fatalities, analyze for statistical significance, and hey presto!, you’ve got empirical evidence.
Any Dopers want to volunteer (as victims)? You’ve got a one-third chance of being assigned to the real charm-protected group and thus surviving unharmed.
More than half the people in the world are already being treated by traditional, non-western medicine. Nobody bothers to ask how they’re doing.
Magic eight ball says, “about as well as you can expect”.
I’m just saying that it’s not impossible to survive, even if you are unprotected or in “fake charm/placebo” group. Also if 95% of unprotected and placebo groups die, even a 20% survival rate in the “charmed” group would be pretty good.
“True believers” would scoff at your experiment, saying that the dynamic and chaotic situations encountered in real world shooting situations provides the grist for the magic to work upon. Perhaps an “unlucky” slip in the mud causes my shot to pass over your head, or your buddy moves forward at just the right moment to accidentally take the shot I aimed at you. These things become less possible in the target range or firing squad mechanics which might be employed in a tightly controlled experiment. (You’d have to rely on gun jams, misfires, and loss of nerve on the part of the shooter.)
This would be best handled epidemiologically, with large number of at risk subjects (soldiers, gang members, etc), use of “real” and placebo charms, and accounting for non-compliance. Crossover could help, too.
I’d apply for funding from the Federal government, but, oh, ::smack::, I forgot, the Federal government won’t fund studies that look at epidemiology of gun death. 
I know of a charm that, when worn around the neck, is pretty effective against gunfire. It is shaped very much like a vest and is made of Kevlar and/or ceramic plate. It’s protective magic is enhanced greatly when paired with a traditional headdress of the same material.
Kelvar that is hand picked by nude virgins during a moonless night.
I want that night-vision goggles concession stand!
I jumped on that, but I can offer a franchise.
I thought I was getting in that action myself. Turns out I misread the ad and wound up as a nude vegan supplier.
While I shouldn’t speak for Leaffan, I suspect that he does in fact have an answer, but - possibly unfamiliar with other posts of yours- was perhaps trying to verify if you were, in fact, serious.
I’m maybe more familiar with other posts of yours, and so am confident that you were entirely serious.
Given the absence of empirical data on, for example, treating deafness with charms rather than cochlear implants, it may be hard to prove to your satisfaction that the implant outperforms the charms by a margin of 100% It would be equally difficult to prove, without doing such experiments ourselves, that the implant outperforms amputating the left pinky finger as a treatment for certain kinds of deafness. This will be a lack of certainty we will all have to live with.
My concern was with the proposition that non-western medical procedures are certain to be exactly zero percent effective. It might be fair to presume that traditional medical practices would yield similar success rates as placebos (aka “charms”), which are certainly not zero (empirically demonstrable), and would of course vary according to the degree the presentation depends on destruction or absence of a relevant organ.
None of which has any relevance to the unhappy outcome experienced by the Nigerian gentleman, but to the trickle down of dogma that followed as the topic veered off into its predicable trajectory.
In the thread, the cases discussed were multiple people believing charms would protect them from bullets, another faith from crocodiles, and one believing his own powers would stop a train. In each of these cases, the placebo effect, relying on the mind causing the body to respond in ways not intuitively obvious, does not apply. In other words, placebos do, actually, have a zero success rate in all these cases discussed in the thread. In these specific cases, it was empirically proven. I believe in any similar cases it may be safely assumed.
If you equate charms to placebos, as you seem to suggest in your most recent post, then your original, much broader question has an easy answer. Because there is in fact a metric shit-ton of empirical evidence of “western” medicine outperforming placebos. Pretty much every drug approved in the U.S., for starters, underwent clinical trials, part of which entails just that - comparing efficacy to placebo. I know of exactly zero brought to market which did not outperform placebo, but even if you know of one, or ten, or a few hundred, that still doesn’t come close to outweighing the balance of the 1400+ FDA approved medications.
I had to sell that business. It became quite tedious and costly hiring a new set of virgins every night.
Virtually impossible to run the business in (insert state of your choice here).
Ah, the generic “Choose Your Own Adventure” joke… kind of like “Two men of your least favorite ethnicity are walking down either a railroad track or the path to the polo grounds, whichever demographic you think deserves ridicule the most…”
Oh, and I thought Shodan taking the jokes in this thread seriously was amusing:
“What’s your evidence that placebo works against gunfire?”
If a three year old told him a joke, he’d probably interrupt with “Now, stop right there, Biffy. How would you set up a controlled double-blind falsifiable experiment to assess motivation in regard to ambulatory decision-making of a particular chicken?”
I read an interesting socioeconomic paper on this recently, on how magical beliefs spread, and how they are rational at a societal level, even though they’re nonsense. It specifically used the example of anti-gun charms in Africa. I can’t find the paper right now, but the basic summary was this.
If you’re a smallish poor African community in a region that is beset by regular violent raiding parties with little means to defend yourself, the rational thing, as a community, is for basically everyone to attack the first such raiding party all-out, hope to defeat a few of the raiders with knives/bludgeons/whatever improvised weapons you have, take their guns, and then defend yourself on relatively equal terms. Yeah, a bunch of people will die in that attack, but in the long run, a bunch of people will be killed by the raiding parties, and they’ll take your stuff and rape the women and do lots of other bad things.
But individuals are generally not capable of those kinds of actions. It’s individually rational to try to live another day. Very few people are brave or foolhardy enough to do so. But if they legitimately believe that they are impervious to harm, then they might.
Believing in a magical protection charm, then, is an individually irrational belief that, if sufficiently widespread, leads to societally rational behavior, at least in certain circumstances.
Right - references to Harry Potter and Monty Python quotes are obvious signals of being deadly earnest.
Regards,
Shodan