The Salem Witchcraft Trials in American History

I read "The Crucible" in my senior year of High School, and I had some ghosts from it; I would say that this was my first real taste of the Puritan faith reading that story, and now that I had a chance to look further into the story I found it to be rather disturbing. Not just because it deals with Witchcraft, but I stopped short of calling the Puritan faith a cult. To me cults are bad news where you get brainwashed, and conditioned to think a certain way. Well our founding fathers would come over in the 17th century, and to have religious freedom from the Church of England, and it's rituals. However, the Puritans involved in this fracas wound up being worse than pagans, and the people from the Church Of England. The Puritans believed in the Bible as the infalliable word of God. That is a healthy way of looking at it, but they picked the legal ends of the Bible, and ignored the love, and grace end of the Bible. The Puritan leaders in Increase and Cotton Mather, and Samuel Parris would rule colonial Massachussettes with fists of iron, and drew up all kinds of codes of moral behavior where citizens were forced to be prim and proper 24/7 with no signs of doing the simple things like a husband and wife kissing in public. The girls would be housebound, and virtual slaves to the men, and still having to carry the weight of the Puritan laws around thier necks like an albatross. Out of this came one of the biggest genocides in American History. It started small as Samuel Parris's daughter, and neice would begin to show signs of illness both mental and physical, and causing them to roll on the ground, and moaning. Then came the arrests as the cause was limited to being a case of witchcraft. The two girls obviously had spells put on them by a witch, or so the public thought...after all there was no physical ailment there to cause the woes, so it has to be witchcraft. I honestly believe that witchcraft played a part, but the bottom line I feel that it turned into a circus as Cotton Mather and Samuel Parris began to run the hunt. Increase Mather would supply the man to run Massachusettes according to England. However, Mather, Parris, and the other major Puritan leaders lead the investigations. Then when one of the accused a minister named George Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer to perfection Cotton Mather would change the subject, and say that Burroughs was a agent of Satan because while he was considered a minister he was never ordained. I didn't know in order to be a Christian you had to be ordained as a minister. Burroughs was just one of 19 who would be subject to persecution, and most eventually death. Lives were changed, and people lost desire to follow God, and many were left homeless and penniless. I feel witchcraft was responsible, but I feel that legalistic religious leaders were just as bad if not worse. I also can't help, but wonder if maybe the girls were doing this to get some attention as well. After all they were banished to a life of slav