I need an easy defense against new age, psychics, etc

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Feanaro_s_Wife

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What is a good orthodox Catholic response to someone who believes in this stuff?

Better yet, what is a good simple response as to why we don’t.
Please help!

Malia
 
Anyone?

Someone out there must have to deal with this issue from family or friends or coworkers…

I got asked today “why” believing in psychics and trying to know the future is wrong in the eyes of Christianity.

How do you respond to these kinds of questions?

Malia
 
An easy way? Well, you could ask why these future-seeing people don’t play the lottery, especially since so many of them “pick up” on numbers and letters as they try to fish around for personal information. These days, they don’t even have to get all the numbers right. You could bring a calculator with a random number generator and see if they do far better than chance at guessing the first significant digit.😃

A less easy way might be handing the person a copy of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Kreeft & Tacelli
 
In short, because it involves placing faith in something besides God, and expresses a desire to control others by having knowledge of the future. Here’s what the Catechism says:
**2116 ** All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to “unveil” the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
48 Cf. Deut 18:10; Jer 29:8.
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This article should help:

You Can Trust Me, I’m a Psychic
envoymagazine.com/backissues/1.5/sept_octstory2.html
 
1 Sam 28

THE WITCH OF ENDOR WAS THE MOST SURPRISED!!! It’s bunk. It is not real, it is not putting God first and we ALWAYS must put God first!!!
 
Trust is a significant part of love. If we truly love Our Lord as we should, then we must also trust His plan for us without reservation. We state rather powerfully this attitude when we pronounce the words “Thy Will be done” during the recitation of the Pater Noster. What we are in effect saying is that we readily place our lives in His Loving Hands.

When we consult the practicioners of the new age “arts” with an eye for divining the future, however, we are in a sense demonstrating that we are not fully secure in His Lordship over our destiny. It is analogous to professing your faith in a child’s ability to look after the house while you go out for the evening and then installing a security camera to ensure his proper behavior in your absence. Upon learning of such activity that child would most likely feel a sense of betrayal, and rightly so. How much more, then, does Our Lord feel betrayed when His imperfect children second-guess His All-Perfect Omniscience?

In short, when we place our faith in fallible men we can - and very often do - easily lose our way. When we allow faith to be our guide, however, we will always find ourselves on the only road that really matters - that which ultimately leads us to Him.

“Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.” (Matthew 6:34)
 
Thanks!

DeFide: my hubby is in the middle of reading Kreeft’s handbook of Christain Apologetics:) …

Fidelis: thanks for the article, it was great! Thanks for the quote from the CCC… I hadn’t had a chance to look it up yet.

Adstrinity: I agree, thanks! And even if there is 1 in a million who is legit, that power is not coming from God…

Mad Amos: I agree with your post… but that is because I am a Christian-almost-Catholic. That type of reasoning wouldn’t work for the situation I am in.
 
Feanaro's Wife:
Adstrinity: I agree, thanks! And even if there is 1 in a million who is legit, that power is not coming from God…
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You have,IMHO, just hit upon a very important point! Not only is there extraordinary fakery, there is also the chance that the person is in some way involveed with evil forces…
But the ease with which people can be fooled by fakes should never be forgotten!! These people are really good at reading their marks…
 
I once read that Harry Houdini tried to prove the existence or lack thereof, of our ability to harness these types of forces. He had made numerous elaborate arrangements to contact his widow after death, and failed to do so.

Alan
 
For the vast majority, New Age, Wiccan etc are a phase. Few stay in it for long. For years, I imported Buddhist items from Nepal. For some reason, New Age stores, over 100 of them, bought Tibetan items from me. Got to know the owners and customers very well. In general, they have no idea of the depth and history of the Christian faith. New Age satisfies their vague feelings of spirituality the way a drive in Burger joint satifies hunger on a trip.

My advice is to offer more than they get now. If mysticism interests them, mention your favorite Catholic mystic.If they are ascetics, rationalists or whatever, your church can offer them full course meals for the rest of their lives rather than burger, fries and a shake.

You may never know if your dinner review was accepted.
Few will take your recommendation immediately.
 
Houdini became a staunch believer against spiritism. After getting annoyed with people claiming to contact his dead relatives he spent a lot of time debunking spiritism wherever he could. His writings on the subject make fascinating reading. This tradition of magicians (in the non-occult sense of the word) debunking spiritists and psychics continues to this day and they do a lot of good work.

Every year there is still a “seance” at Niagara that “tries” to contact Houdini. After all, he stated that if there was any way at all to come back he would do so as he would feel bad about fighting spiritism so much. He left a message that he would give. So far of course, the message has not been given in the seance (only a couple of people know what message is inside Houdini’s sealed envelope - and they’re not telling!) Really Houdini set this up so that even post-death he could continue to debunk the movement.

Some Christians could probably do with a decent magician to analyse certain practices to see if what is going on is really from God or whether it is perhaps deliberately or unintentionally from man.

The trouble is the skepticism of magicians is that it sometimes goes too far and excludes the possibility of the supernatural or excludes it without scientific repeatable proof.

The other trouble is that it is very difficult to debunk someone if others want to believe. There are many cases of people following a new-age teacher/guru/psychic even after thorough debunking. (Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, firmly believed Houdini to be powerfully psychic/spiritist even though Houdini insisted it was all tricks, which it was)

And another trouble is that even the fraudulent practitioners are leading people away from the truth and into deception, a much welcomed deception.

How to witness to people with these deceptions? It is difficult to proclaim the truth to them in any way that will be believed. Prayer is the big key. And much patience. And stating, carefully, what we believe about God and his love for us, rather than constantly attacking whatever they’re into.

Well, that worked for me anyway, eventually. Those people who are into these things are seeking and looking beyond the physical world. That is good. Pray that they will find.
 
I don’t know about responding to psychics, but here is a critique of Neale Donald Walsch’s book, Conversations With God which goes into a lot of aspects of the New Age worldview.
 
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asteroid:
Some Christians could probably do with a decent magician to analyse certain practices to see if what is going on is really from God or whether it is perhaps deliberately or unintentionally from man. The trouble is the skepticism of magicians is that it sometimes goes too far and excludes the possibility of the supernatural or excludes it without scientific repeatable proof.
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You bring back :yup: fond memories of the late Johnny Carson frustrating all the supposed “psychics” who appeared on the Tonight Show…He would watch them–not like a hawk, but like the former magician that he was…None of them ever managed to so much as bend a spoon.
While skepticism can indeed go too far–ending with a rejection of everything but the physical–it is, nevertheless, an important tool in dealing with the current infatuation with the (so-called) “new age”, which gives new life to the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute”…
 
Hello

See the following document available at the Vatican web site. It does a great job of describing this New Age junk.
PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR CULTURE
PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE

JESUS CHRIST
THE BEARER OF THE WATER OF LIFE

A Christian reflection
on the “New Age”

Hope this helps

Brian
Coniunge resistentiam…sustenta Vaticanum II
 
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