DO MAGIC AND PRAYER ONLY SEEM TO NOT WORK? DO THEY ACTUALLY WORK IN CONTRARIES?
In her acclaimed book on Wicca, Vivianne Crowley writes, "In Wicca, we believe that each of us has free will. We cannot have other than free will because each of us in our innermost centre is Divine. It is possible therefore for people to refuse help and to set up barriers against our magic and this is a choice which must be respected. This can be a conscious refusal, but hidden unconscious motives of people involved in the situation are also very important. Sometimes, for instance, we may have worked very hard to help someone to sell their house, only for completion of the sale to be continually thwarted by a whole series of extremely unlikely mischances. Here Witches have to be good psychologists and try to find the source of the blockage. Is the person secretly afraid of change and unwilling to leave the familiarity of their old town? Is it perhaps their partner who is unwilling: do they want different things?" - WICCA: A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Religion in the Modern World (HarperCollins Publishers, 2003 edition).
People who pray can say the same thing. Wicca has many ceremonies and spells that are worded like prayers. You can pray hard or cast spells a lot and then it looks like the miracles are happening to do the REVERSE of what you are working for. In many cases, the prayer or spell-caster will not have a clue what went wrong. But it is clear to them that their prayer or spell is working in reverse. It is not just being ignored by a God or the universe. It is working in the way you do not want.
For these reasons, prayer should be considered an occult activity. It should also be considered dangerous for those who suffer depression or anxiety.
If you feel you have killed your loved one or your child by praying or casting spells to help them that will do you grave harm. The alternative then is if you see your work is doing the opposite of what you ask then if you want to save your loved one from terminal cancer then pray or cast spells that they get it. That turns religion and faith into a hideous ugly thing. You will soon end up hard and cold and evil if you do that.
One thing is for sure that when you ask God that somebody in your life stops hurting you and starts treating you well you are trying to get around their free will. You want them to freely choose what suits you - you want the prayer or spell to trick them into using their freedom the right way. Or you just want them forced without them realising it. Prayer could not but work in reverse with that nasty attitude.
Magic or praying when done to help somebody does the reverse. Always. I mean that if they do nothing that is actually bad. Doing nothing is bad. And if they have magical power then they may do harm in a different way where a prayer to heal actually kills.
The prayer spell may simmer or whatever but it is not simmering to produce anything nice.
It is a big thing in modern spirituality that nobody can hurt you unless you
let them. This mentality blames the rape victim, for example, for being upset
and devastated about being violated. If God helps and God does miracles, if
magic helps and magic does miracles then this vicious attitude is more justified
than it is. If there is supernormal or magical power available to help, it is
far more the victim's fault for suffering than it is if there is no such power.
That is the kind of malevolence that people who say miracles happen are
engendering. Roman Catholicism upholds saints who suffered beyond belief for the
faith as examples of how people can have peace and joy no matter what others do
to them. The Church says these people turned to God and trusted him so much that
nobody was really able to hurt them - they were so happy they might not have
even registered the physical pain. So the Church then needs to explain why we
should disparage rapists if the victims cause their own suffering. So the Church
needs to explain why we should disparage paedophiles and child molesters for the
victims have chosen to hurt themselves because of the abuse. It is small wonder
with an attitude like that how the Church has so little sympathy for victims of
child sex abuse. The Church has to think that the victims damaged themselves in
relation to how they responded to the abuse and so the abuse itself did little
harm. The Church has to think that the victims are evil for wanting the
molesters punished for what the victims did to themselves.
Haiti with its religion of voodoo is the magic and fortune-telling capital of the world. Yet it is not a well-off country at all. Secular nations that discard magic and omens are the ones to admire. They have good healthcare and nobody is killed by depending on magical charms and predictions that do nothing. Saints, Messiahs, witches, spoon-benders and psychics can and do live in misery and unhappiness. They lose their children and the loves of their lives. They lose their health and their sanity and can die young. Their powers are useless. Any placebo from them is not worth the cost.
Some say that maybe magic works in contraries. Others go further and says it often does. When magic is done for good things it will not help. If it works it is doing something so it is causing the bad. Doing magic say for good is the reason Haiti is in the state it is in. This is an argument for using malicious spells in order to help people. You can cast a nasty spell on John and curse and hate him and he will be better off. But how much do you really hate John then? The only answer is to hire a witch who thinks she is hurting him. She can do the hate and the villainy for you.
FINALLY
Some believers in God hold that praying for good things to happen to people sometimes results in bad things. This is a similar concept to what we are exploring. Should we ask God to curse and hurt people in the hope that he will do the reverse? People probably do that or get others to do it for them for God will know that they are trying to use evil to help. The others who really hate the person are the ones who will get results.
