Witches & the Occult and the Bible

 

Both the Old and New Testaments say that God forbids witches and fortunetellers.  The Law of Moses which Jesus said he loved and respected bans us from allowing a witch to live.  The text never says it means occultists who sacrifice children.  It simply says kill the occultists.

 

The strange ban on wearing wool and linen together may refer to some popular superstitious talisman in Deuteronomy 22. It is best to see the text as not referring to any specific enchantment but warning against something normal that could be invested with occult significance. God would not be happy if people were wearing both if magicians were telling them there was luck in it.  Their wearing is innocent in itself but God is so anti-superstition that he cannot bear it.

 

God is said to ban the occult out of love for us and believers argue that even if you don’t know of this ban, it is dangerous to get involved even with the best of intentions. The occult like poison will affect you no matter how well meaning or oblivious to God’s law you are. The occult when understood as poison will be more dangerous and the risk will be bigger when you don’t know the damage it can do.

Dr Stuart Checkley a psychiatrist stated, “I have seen patients whose involvement with relatively minor forms of the occult has caused them to suffer mental illness.”

Some occult practitioners agree. Sri Krishna Prem warned that to practice yoga “as many do, out of curiosity -is a mistake which is punished with futility, neurosis, or worse”.

Though witchcraft today claims to be a benign nature religion the fact is that all magic is evil magic. All magic is evil magic for it is trying to avoid what really matters. What matters most is not spells, believing in God, a man who rises from the dead, miracles but believing in your natural power to change and make yourself happy. This is your natural power  to accept - maybe it will take a long time - that bad things can and do happen so that you will cope better.
Don’t try to change the world but change yourself and nice changes will happen automatically around you. It is not what you have in life that matters or who loves you. What matters is how you feel about your life. What good is it to be loved if you don't appreciate that love? What people need is self-esteem training not magic. Magic then arises from laziness and therefore lack of concern for self-esteem. Magic workers say that magic cannot work without self-esteem for you produce magic from your own mind and emotions. But if you really have self-esteem you wont feel the need for magic! If you don’t have good self-esteem you cannot really trust in the spell so it can’t work. So magic contradicts itself by requiring something that it forbids!

 

Magic is trying to manipulate reality and other people. Believers claim that love spells are wrong for they are too manipulative for they are trying to make another person love you. They say that instead you should do a spell to make yourself more lovable to another. But there is no difference in forcing a person to love you and in forcing them to see that you are lovable and therefore attract them. Nobody can love anybody unless they see them as attractive. If love spells are wrong, then who will want to do magic?

 

We all love people with faults. The Witch who is trying to use magic to catch a man who likes gossip is making him see her as a gossip or using magic to turn herself into a gossip! This is self-manipulation, self-deception. Also to magically make yourself more lovable in the eyes of the other is to manipulate his life so that he will see this. To do a spell to make yourself more lovable to another is manipulative for it asks that they only see or let themselves see what they find attractive about you. Moreover, you are degrading yourself by turning yourself into somebody else’s idea of desirability. The spell might have the side-effect of putting his mother in an accident so that you can help her and he can see how wonderful you are. If you were lovable, you wouldn’t need magic to make him see it.

 

The self-righteous say that spells that use force are wrong. But that can be said of any spell. For example, a healing spell will try to force a person to have a better attitude for a good attitude is one of the main helps in recovery. A person wants to change their own attitude. They don’t want forces doing it for them.

 

All magic is harmful and the notion of white magic is nonsense and sooner or later the white magician will see that and the temptation to use malicious magic and start calling up demons will get too much. Magic should lead to black magic and Satanism. Magic workers who claim to harm none are just deceivers.
We know that some people will die in accidents. Nothing can stop that. Then why not use magic so that evil people or your enemies will be the ones struck down instead of the innocents that these things usually happen to? You would be shuffling the pack so that the deserving people have the accidents. It is probably because magic leads to attempted murder and evil that the Bible God says that we should not suffer a sorceress to live (Exodus 22:18). The context doesn’t allow us to get liberal. God is blunt. He says the life of a sorceress should not be tolerated. He could have demanded some other treatment for her but he demanded execution. The command is thought to be compatible with love your neighbour as yourself for the sorceress is dangerous no matter how altruistic she seems to be or acts so she must be destroyed to save others. God evidently believes that there is something in this magic – why else be so harsh against it - but we know better! The view that God opposed it for he wanted to keep his people free from pagan influence doesn’t explain the harshness.

 

Magic workers do loads of protection and health spells and still get cancer and have accidents and die young so magic is wasting time. Magic is always evil because it implies that it is better to do nothing active for other people but spend all your time casting spells to help them. This - like becoming a contemplative nun dedicating yourself to a life of prayer for others - is really putting faith before people. Religion is schizophrenic, it pretends to want to help people and then chooses, in its smugness, a futile way of doing so. Magic-workers will respond that magic doesn’t happen. They say that you can't just sit back and wait for the spell to work. You have to help it to work by doing something. But though you may help it to work it is only a small part. If you help your sick father by looking after him it is mostly how circumstances you can’t control work out that do any good. The doctor will help, the nurse will help, his medicine has to agree with him, the heating has to work, your own health has to be okay there is so much. Magic then needs to be very powerful to look after all those things so why shouldn’t it work if you do nothing?

 

Magicians insist on you trying to make your spells come true the mundane ordinary way because they know fine well that magic doesn't work. They want you to think that if you go to more interviews and get a job that a spell helped. You could have got the job anyway. And religionists who advocate the power of prayer are no better. They are just as manipulative. They too rob you of the recognition that you got the job and the supernatural did not help. 
The clever thing about saying that magic and prayer work with the natural course of things is that if they fail you will think you asked for too much. If nature has too much to do to give you a gold watch, then you will argue that the spell worked though you didn't get the watch as a result. The problem was that it was like asking for an earthquake in a region that is not prone to them. You will assume the spell did its best!

 

What I could never understand was how people who could allegedly bend spoons by mind power can’t change their DNA so that they remain youthful until death or manage to change their DNA so that they never die or get cancer. The magicians say magic cannot give you a new set of teeth if your adult teeth all fall out. But why not? Some people do grow teeth a third time. When magic changes what is going to happen it should be able to change nature for changing this is still changing nature. Saying magic cannot change nature is only an excuse. It is used to explain why magic cannot make an amputee grow a new limb.

 

The excuse doesn't work for magic doesn't work!