IS WITCHCRAFT REAL?
As per your religious beliefs, do you believe witchcraft is real? Like, magic, is it real? Christians, I’m curious. Do you believe people can access mystic power? Think back to Moses, when he turned his staff to a snake. The Pharaoh’s court mages did the same with their staffs. My pastor of my youth told me that the mages had snakes hidden up their sleeves lol but the Bible says that the mages turned their staffs into snakes. Sorcery, right?
I already practice divination, I’m interested in the occult.
Pagans, I think you guys believe in it, right? Or am I thinking of another group?
Atheists, I suppose you think that any magical experiences are imagined, right?
Skeptics laughed at Gypsy love potions. Viagra?
Potions to put someone to sleep? Melatonin or Diphenhydramine?
Potions to hallucinate? Peyote, LSD, opium (etc).
I think that we have learned that medicines are real. Were they hundreds of years ago? Snake oil peddlers use to hawk their wares with claims of cures for cancer, and every other ailment. They would find a beautiful young person, proclaim his age to be 92 (or so), and make people think that they found the fountain of youth.
I was hiking close to (but off of) famous wagon trail into California. At about 10,000 ft elevation I came across a burned out camp fire, broken wagon wheel, and purple bottle (that for many years I assumed was perfume). Clear glass used to turn purple years ago. It had 10 sides, and said Santol De Midi, Paris, 1872. I did an internet search and found that it used to have a cork and blue pills inside that were made with Mercury (a deadly poison that would make people sick in smaller doses), but they were phony cures for syphillus used (and sold) at Fort Hall (established as a fur trading post by Nathanial Jarvis Wyeth in 1834 in eastern Oregon territory, what is now Idaho). Some men would take their pregnant wives on these grueling trips into unknown wilderness, facing starvation, thirst, and desert and mountain perils. I could imagine a woman, sick with syphillus, not getting better, stuck with a damaged wheel high in the mountains, lost from the trail, with a sheer drop of 6,000 feet if they could push their wagons through a tangle of thin pine trees, having endured thousands of miles of hellish terraine and dangers, with a husband who obvious contracted syphillus from someone (not her), and gave it to her. He obviously had some explaining to do.
Some didn't sell phony cures or yarbs and brews to cure the various mountain diseases (the shakes, the chills, the rattles, the wheezes, etc). Don't worry, you're in good hands, they are MD's (Mountain Doctors....didn't really have much need fer lernin' in them thar days). Rather, they touted chemicals for vengeance. Could you turn someone into a zombie with the right chemicals? Yep. Some was psychological. In Haiti, they claimed that the Pappalau (father God) would get you man. And there were some who were turned into zombies without any drugs at all (just the fear of it paralyzed them).
For centuries, doctors knew of the beneficial effects of placebos (phone medicines, often sugar pills, that the patients thought would cure them). They thought that they would get better, so they did. Those suffering with cancer, feel depressed, facing pain, death, and sadness that their loved ones grieve. That depression releases harmful carcinogens (cause cancer) into the bloodstream, and makes their ailment worse. Psychology of medicine is real. In England, a hypnotist performed open heart surgery on a patient that he trained to feel no pain (without anesthesia). Many people have been coached to feel no pain. Think of how horrible it would be to wake out of the stupor to feel your chest rended wide open. Could someone be hypnotized into believing that a staff could turn into a snake?....Yep, they sure can. When I was taking a course in abnormal psychology in graduate school, my professor, an eminant psychologist, gave us a demonstration of hypnotism. It had not been part of his school training, but he was facinated by the implications of hypnotism in psychology. We could see for ourselves that the mind has many open entry ports in which a hypnotist could work his trade. They could make someone think that they were a chicken and stand in a busy lecture hall and cluck like a chicken (which one of the students did).
Regular Christians, convinced that God exists, could be talked into imagining that they see God or hear God. Especially if they had a psychological trauma in their lives. My aunt had two stillborn kids, buried in her mom's grave (because they couldn't afford a grave in the great depression). She went a bit nuts and delved deeply into Christianity, and dragged her sister in with her. The stricter they were with their kids, the more their kids misbehaved.
God cannot be proven to exist, and Christians have a belief system that doesn't rely on proof (they merely feel that God exists because they want to believe that there is some goodness or direction in the world....it gives them comfort). This makes them perfect patsies for unscrupulous Republicans, who want to do the exact opposite of Jesus (cater to the rich by lowering their taxes, outsourcing factories and jobs for cheaper wages, making wars, torture camps, and insisting on 2nd Amendment gun rights, ravaging the environment, and making wars against scientists who warn of Global Warming and pollution, they tell lies to get their way (claiming that Niger was selling yellow-cake Uranium to terrorists in Iraq...thus justifying cruel wars in both countries to steal precious resources). By brainwashing Republicans, using religion to hynotize them, they can get them to believe virtually anything.
Triple amputee (Vietnam war, McClellan) was running against W. Bush (draft dodger who was intentionally put into a non-combat unit in the Texas Air National Guard), when W. Bush convinced his brainwashed voters that he was the war hero and McClellan was not. W. Bush did the same brainwashing when he ran against Senator John Kerry, a recognized and highly decorated veteran who actually did serve in Vietnam (W. Bush was trained to fly an obsolete plane that would never be called into service, and daddy's lawyers destroyed the attendance records right in front of his commanding officer, Burkett, who later testified).
Brain washing of the Christian faith doesn't stop at politics. Some need to be deprogrammed. Some give all of their money. In the case of the Jonestown masscre, or the Heavens Gate mass suicide (hoping for their souls to ride a comet around the solar system for all eternity), they gave up their lives because they were hypnotized. Christians can be hypnotized into believing that atheists are immoral, while their own leaders (given Christian forgiveness, while that same forgiveness is withheld from their political oponents like Clinton and Monica) don't see reality. Christian programming warps the senses and the logic.
It is the warping of the mind, under hypnosis, that makes people see staffs turn into snakes.
Some people practice magic hoping to be powerful and evil. For example President W. Bush (and his father, George, and his grandfather, Prescott) were all members of Skull and Bones....a Satanic cult. Grandpa Prescott Bush (father and grandfather of a president) stole the skeleton of the famous Native American, Geronimo, to perform Satanic rituals, with their Satanic bible. They would stir a cauldron of unspeakable filth (eye of newt, toe of frog, etc.) and say incantations from their Satanic bible in the Latin that it is written in. Did they perform magic? Well, they did brainwash themselves and that convinced them that their power was real.
