Although I like many of your points and your over theme, which make a critical idea about the use of religion to cover up atrocities, I’m sure completely about this one point of “outgrowing” things like “witches.” Do you mean the burning of witches at the stake after a trial and judgement? Sam Holt, a black American, was chained in 1899 and burned alive at stake after no trial and judgement, with children putting kindling around him, and after he was stabbed and desexed. Parts of his liver were taken from the ashes in the morning, along with some bone parts, and distributed as souvenirs to the white in Georgia.
In February 1918 the Chattanooga Times report how, without a trial and punishment and only an allegation, Jim Mcllherron was burned alive while tied to a stake, after the crowd of 2,000 whites “Burn him; burn him!” “Prominent members” of white society Estill Springs implore them to take him out of town to do so, not to stop and have a fair trial. Just outside, children put kindling around him and the crowd watch him burn alive, the odor of burning flesh filling the air and terrifying screams from Mr. Mcllherron rent the air after coal oil was poured on his legs. Women and toddlers watched. From the waist up his “body was cooked to the bone.”
I won’t go on about the 1930s one or all the others in-between. These American atrocities were worse than the “witches”, who had fair trials at least, even if superstition gripped the crowd. But by this time in post-Civil War America south and then Midwest, this ritualistic atrocities had no equals. The burning of black flesh, the torture, hundreds of bullets fired in addition, the cutting of parts off as souvenirs. On and on and on they went with no due rights process like the witches had.