how do occult practices work?

[jewells17]

jewells17;7457239:

I won’t pretend to have any one or even several sources that I would claim to be THE definitive end all and be all of information about us. However, if anyone wants to get the honest low down on how WE understand our own practices and traditions, you might try www.witchvox.com

, www.circlesanctuary.org, the pagan section of patheos.com and any of the books authored by Kerr Cuhulain. A truly excellent resource is Beyond the Burning Times, a Pagan and Christian in Dialogue by Philip Johnson and Gus Di Zerega. It’s a small book and about $15 new, and probably less than half of that used and gives a very fair and balanced contrast of pagan and Christian understanding of things. If anyone expresses a genuine and well-intentioned interest, I’ll snail mail them my copy free of charge.

My whole point is not to sell anyone on joining paganism, or say that everything about us is sweetness and bunny rabbits, but most of what passes for knowledge in the spiritual warfare camps of Christianity is just ludicrous. You’re cheating yourself of true understanding if that’s all you ever read. All I’ve ever asked on this forum is that people who want to debate, criticize, lambast paganism do so based on what we are, not what you fear us or assume us to be. I think you would want the same thing of critics of Catholicism. You would want them to read the Catechism or a good summary of it, not start blazing with some foolishness they picked up from Jack Chick or some radical anti-Catholic protestant website. Whatever faults people find with me on this site (and there are many), you will not find me mis-representing the tenets of Catholicism. I grew up in the faith, studied it at some depth and was considered by some to be a candidate for the seminary at one time. When I disagree with its doctrines, I’m doing so based on what they really are, not crazy misrepresentations of them.

I won’t deny that people have had bad experiences while practicing paganism, or what they believed to be pagan. However, most of the horror story industry which has sprung up is obviously fabricated “satanic panic” nonsense. In many other cases, people project all of their personal problems on our religion. You read accounts of people’s time in Wicca or whatever as a dark period of their lives. Then you read on and they mention that they were involved with drugs, had depression or bipolar disorder, had a messed up adolescence etc. Yet somehow we’re supposed to ignore those connections and believe that it was the Wicca that screwed up their lives.

All I ask is some intellectual honesty. Its most often a futile cry in the wilderness here, but just enough people listen that I’ll keep up the call until they yank my profile down…

 

[jewells17]

kenofken;7457299:
Will read the links and thanks for sharing. After the burning must be about the first few hundred years of Christianity when the Christians were burned alive and fed alive to live animals by pagan Rome? Thanks for sharing that with our Catholic forum and I pray it never gets that way again. Will read what your links and take care!

 

[kenofken]

jewells17;7457312:

Will read the links and thanks for sharing. After the burning must be about the first few hundred years of Christianity when the Christians were burned alive and fed alive to live animals by pagan Rome? Thanks for sharing that with our Catholic forum and I pray it never gets that way again. Will read what your links and take care!

That book actually doesn’t really get into the whole Christian/Pagan violence at any depth. It’s really much more about how each tradition broadly sees the divine, humanity’s place in the world etc. There was of course an ugly back and forth violence across centuries of Christian-pagan relations in the early days, and the reality of that is much more complicated than either modern Christians or pagans allow. It had lots to do with non-religious factors, politics, ethnic hatreds etc. Guys like Nero and Caligula, unfortunately are part of the history of the pagan world, but they’re not by far the best of us or what any of us aspire to today.

 

[edwest2]

Thanks for the links. I see not much has changed since I began researching the subject. A statement of basic principles would be enough for those that don’t appear to understand.

Occult practices continue, both real and fake. The “out to make a buck” idea works both ways, however, there are people who are sincere. I know people who experienced things and it can get dangerous.

Peace,
Ed

 

[jewells17]

Thanks for the links. I see not much has changed since I began researching the subject. A statement of basic principles would be enough for those that don’t appear to understand.

Occult practices continue, both real and fake. The “out to make a buck” idea works both ways, however, there are people who are sincere. I know people who experienced things and it can get dangerous.

Peace,
Ed