Report: More than a million Americans say they are witches

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Replace witches with Christians and watch everyone get angry. But seriously can’t you say that about any belief system as well? To outsiders they are all weirdos
 
Yeah I agree but Christians don’t claim to cast spells or put Hexs on the President

I think just in general
They’re either insane or like the attention for looking that way
 
I used to do witchcraft. I had to have an exorcism said over me. I did not worship satan, just did witchcraft for a time. I was able to make people ill.
 
There’s a reason we have some Catholic prayers asking God to break evil spells and curses cast against us.
 
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The article says that 1.5 people practice Wicca or Paganism. Not all those who practice Wicca consider themselves witches and certainly MOST people who practice other pagan faiths don’t consider themselves witches or practice witchcraft.
 
delrey said:
Well you can be a witch and be of any religion it’s a craft not a belief. Wicca is a religion you are right they don’t believe in satan but many witches don’t believe in satan as well
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Except that what the word “witch” has meant for the last two millennia is someone who gets the power from diabolic sources . . . claiming to be a witch who doesn’t believe in a devil is like claiming to be a priest who doesn’t believe in God, but insists that somehow the Eucharist is real . . . 🤯😱:roll_eyes:

haw
 
While they may not consider themselves witches, it does not necessarily mean that they do not practice witchcraft. Certain rites which infiltrate many pantheistic religions around the world like Santaria, the Vodun variants, and the animistic worship found here in the Philippines are indistinguishable from witchcraft.

For example, a woman in our town once went to a ‘faith healer’ who gave her a prayer to recite to cure her illnesses. It didn’t work, but was eventually passed on to the daughter of one of our Order’s benefactors who was also ill. As soon as the daughter started praying it, she took a serious turn for the worse and had to be hospitalized. The mother brought the prayer to us to make sure it was legitimate. My superior brought it to me because his Latin was very rusty and he knew that I had taught it the previous year to the seminarians. It turned out that the prayer was actually a spell which was to invite demonic forces into the life of the one who pronounced it. I advised the mother to destroy the prayer and as soon as she did, the daughter and the original friend got better and were released from the hospital the next day. They were taken to the diocesan exorcist to make sure that there was no lingering demonic influence.

It doesn’t matter if you intend to practice the rites of witchcraft, if you do them unknowingly and still invoke demonic forces. This is why the Church is so firm on the prohibition of any contact with the occult. It can get very bad, very quickly.
 
It’s coincidence

Witches have no power because who could they receive it from?

Would a demon make someone ill in the hopes you will believe you have supernatural powers? Probably

But witches alone
Just some weird chanting and immoral practices
 
I guess the term I was looking for is the cunning folk. A lot of witches identify as a witch but actually practice folk medicine, herbal remedies. But really spells are just the placebo effect nothing supernatural. You believe in something take action and you accomplish it. So a witch would say a ritual or a spell believe in it take action and notice changes. Nothing to do with the devil. Like a lucky charm to do well in a tournament. You believe the charm is luck so you carry it therefore making your confidence increase and your ability to focus increase since you believe it can help you.
 
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CRM_Brother said:
It doesn’t matter if you intend to practice the rites of witchcraft, if you do them unknowingly and still invoke demonic forces. This is why the Church is so firm on the prohibition of any contact with the occult. It can get very bad, very quickly.
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You know how Catholics don’t worship Saints, they venerate them, no matter what it looks like from the outside. You can’t accidentally worship something, intention matters, etc.

From the outside, the priest dressing up, performing the ritual of the Mass is likewise indistinguishable from witchcraft, as are other Catholics rites and customs.
 
Calliope said:
You can’t accidentally worship something, intention matters, etc.
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Exorcists would heartily disagree. Even from my own experience, I know this to be false when it comes to the occult.

While not within a demonic context, worshiping what you do not know is even in the Bible. St. Paul praises the Athenians for unknowingly worshiping the God of Abraham at the altar to an unknown god. They are worshiping something, or doing something for an unknown purpose. The object of worship or purpose is still there, even if it is unknown.

I was involved in a case confirmed by the Vatican where one of my friends was demonically obsessed (physically attacked but not possessed). We were studying abroad in Rome and the priests and exorcists in the course of their investigation found that the obsession stemmed from my friend having his palm read by his ‘medium’ grandmother before leaving for the semester. He did not believe in his grandmother’s so-called ‘powers’ and put no importance in the act. He just wanted to give his grandmother some piece of mind before he traveled.

Any contact with the occult, whether knowingly or unknowingly, can incur demonic attention.
 
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Than it is a good thing they don;t agree on much lest they run for office. So far there are no “Wiccan” chaplains in the military although in my time in I met many that said they would be the first…
 
People can be complicated.

Spirituality in general can give people comfort and also make them feel alive because of the idea of having something not understandable and bigger than they giving their lives mystery and purpose.

But that can also be frightening and irritating. People can also become pragmatic atheists, which is living as if there were no God even if you do happen to believe in God or a god.

Different people will be attracted to those different lifestyles for different reasons, often related to their personality or life experiences, especially in childhood. People with early negative experience with spirituality as being wonky and uncomfortable tend to be more atheistic as adults. Or vice versa, people in very spiritually arid families can find themselves craving for spirituality later in life.

Catholicism is all of the above. It has mystics and charismatics that went far into the deep end with God as well as a long history of rigorous Biblical scholarship, naturalism, sciences, etc.

But yeah, with more organized religion being vacated there’s going to be people turning to other things. Atheism/agnosticism has been around for thousands of years though and it isn’t going anywhere.
 
CRM_Brother said:
St. Paul praises the Athenians for unknowingly worshiping the God of Abraham at the altar to an unknown god. They are worshiping something, or doing something for an unknown purpose. The object of worship or purpose is still there, even if it is unknown.
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They weren’t accidentally worshiping something, they were deliberately worshiping an unknown god, which St Paul then decided was the Abrahamic god. Rather like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the United States, it’s a deliberate memorial with a deliberate intention to honor a real thing, though we don’t have a list of names.

I often read in these forums people saying “How silly that non Catholics say we worship saints or the Virgin Mary! We know what we are worshiping and it’s God.” Does that not apply to non Catholics? Don’t they get to decide what they are worshiping and say. “I worship this, not that.” ?

By definition Catholicism is an occult religion. Occult refers to being mystical and supernatural. Though Catholics may decide that anything outside of their practice MUST be related to demons and thus occult becomes a bad thing, the word itself does not refer to the demonic.

As I pointed out, many rites and rituals in the Catholic Church are indistinguishable from occult practices in other faiths, other than the supernatural beings they are aimed at.

I don’t understand the dichotomy that Catholics can’t accidentally worship something while they are intentionally worshiping something else, but somehow people of other faiths do it all the time.

Worship isn’t like accidentally putting the check for the water bill into the envelope for the electric bill, it’s immediate and personal. If a person is worshiping a particular entity, whether that entity exists or not, the cosmos doesn’t somehow redirect their worship someplace else.

If I choose to worship a rock, I can’t accidentally worship Jesus by mistake.
 
Right but as a former neo pagan most modern pagans and wiccans either do consider themselves witches or they cast spells and charms regardless if they call themselves witches or not.

I’m sure if you type Wicca in the search engine you will find the majority of links contain spells or spell casting tutorials.
 
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It’s all fun and games until something happens, then a vested interest in an underwear company is required.
Or things turn out very badly.
 
Wicca is most certainly not a religion. It is a hocus-pocus, cosplay type of thing concocted by Gerald Gardner practically out of whole cloth after the war, with great lashings of Dr Margaret Murray’s thoroughly debunked witchcraft ‘research’ thrown in for good measure, and bits of Frazer’s The Golden Bough as well. It is meaningless drivel, with no basis in reality nor any claim to be respected or practiced as a bona fide religion. Those who defend it are either sadly misguided or actively malicious.
 
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