Re: “The preacher and the plague” (Nov. 1):
Staff Writer Colin Woodard is a modern version of Cotton Mather, the principal instigator of the 1692 Salem witch trials, during which 19 Massachusetts men and women were hanged and one man was pressed to death for witchcraft.
Woodard’s long-winded attack on Christianity and Rev. Todd Bell, which uses herd mentality and speculation, coupled with the post hoc fallacy that simply because one thing follows another in time the first thing caused the second, is a variation of the “spectral evidence” accusation used by the judges of the condemned. Correlation is not causation.
Woodard contradicts himself when he writes that “the wedding (Bell) presided over … sickened at least 178 Mainers and killed at least eight,” followed by “the Maine (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) was unable to formally connect the outbreak to the wedding reception.”
The record of the Salem witch trials is worth studying because the problem of dealing with conspiracy opinions is a perennial one.
Walter J. Eno
Scarborough
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