Ruby and I were having a conversation about religion in the United States today and I find it incredibly interesting that there is a small, cultish group of “Christians” (for lack of a better term) that are really nothing more than the modern day resurrection of the ancient Babylonian pagan cults. They are so ignorant they have no idea that they are literally taking some of the beliefs of these ancient cultures they condemn, slapping the symbol of a cross on them, and insisting that they are somehow different; enlightened. Most Christians throughout history would have had these “Christian” beliefs labeled witchcraft and the practitioners burned at the stake. Given that I could have been happy just studying socioeconomic trends, this fascinates me; that there could be such a disconnect historically, theologically, and intellectually between what they are actually doing and what they believe they are doing. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks.
The ancient Babylonian cults would often ascribe different things to different deities. I’ve noticed more and more Churches in the United States talk about a “spirit of (insert trait here). This is a form of paganism that was widespread a few thousand years ago. I find it incredibly interesting that these people often are completely ignorant of the fact they are adopting the very practices that caused God to wipe out entire civilizations according to the Old Testament in the Judeo-Christian religion.
Let’s back up for a moment, though. I maintain that mankind is exceptional because we have the ability to make choices. The very definition of a soul is “mind, will, and emotions”. It is our soul – our ability to make choices – that makes us different from animals. We can choose to act righteously or choose to act wickedly. There is not always agreement on what those terms mean – after all, the people of Hiroshima, Japan had every reason to believe that the United States was acting wickedly when it dropped a nuclear weapon on them given that their lives, families, health and infrastructure were destroyed, whereas the United States believed it was acting righteously to end the war and save as many net lives as possible.
Most of the good and evil in the world (which is different from “joy” and “suffering” – a distinction that is sometimes lost) is the result of individual choices by men and women. With the exception of mental illness, if a man picks up a gun, walks into a supermarket, shoots and murders people, it was his choices that did it. He had to choose to get the gun, choose to load it, choose which building to target, choose to get out of the car and walk into the store, choose to point the gun, and choose to pull the trigger.
Neo-Paganism Seems to Be Particularly Popular in Christian Cults
You can tell who these modern-day neo-pagans are by their insistence upon a “spirit” being responsible for everything. That is, they might say someone has a “spirit of alcoholism” or a “spirit of depression”; a “spirit of lying”, a “spirit of envy”, a “spirit of homosexuality”, a “spirit of adultery”, a “spirit of hedonism”. They might say a child has a “spirit of rebellion” or a woman has a “Jezebel spirit”. There is even a “spirit of gluttony”, a “spirit of anger”, a “spirit of avarice”, and a “spirit of infertility”. They find something with which they disagree and then assign a supernatural entity to it. Then, they work to “fight” this spirit.
[mainbodyad]Likewise, they might say that having a statue of a dragon in your garden invites spirits into your life. This is the same religion as the voodoo of the French Quarter and those who believe in the occult! The idea that objects hold spiritual power and can influence you is the very heart of, again, what our ancestors called witchcraft. (Not to mention that in addition to being drawn directly from the witchcraft of yesterday, this idea is laughable to modern science.)
Going through life thinking that “a spirit” or “the devil” or “Satan” is responsible when all action requires man to choose to do something is one of the greatest sins imaginable because the person who believes it willingly gives up the most powerful thing man has – our will; the ability to make choices. Our life is shaped by our choices. Our present is determined by the sum culmination of our past decisions. Choices matter. If you earn more than you spend, you accumulate money. If you eat more calories than you burn, you put on weight. If you study, you accumulate knowledge that can be applied. In a free society, life is choice.
Even in the Christian Bible, Satan didn’t cause mankind to fall – Adam and Eve both individually made a choice to eat the fruit. The devil didn’t cause David to murder Bathsheba’s husband. He chose to do it. Nothing could be accomplished without consent, which is choice.
Magic Is a Term for Things Physics Can’t Yet Explain
And “magic”? Yeah. “Magic” is a term that ignorant people use to describe things that physics can’t yet explain. Holding an iPad and watching a movie would have looked like a “magic mirror” a few hundred years ago and gotten you burned at the stake. Listening to radio waves from thousands of miles away would have seemed suspiciously demonic. Viewing a baby inside a mother’s womb through an ultrasound would have seemed like black magic.
(Side note fact: The term “occult” means the study of “hidden things”. In the middle ages, magnetism was said to be an “occult property” because society didn’t understand how magnets worked and chalked it up to magic. Over the past few centuries, the term has come to have a religious connotation associated with Satanism often, ironically, by the very Christian groups that engage in most of the neo-pagan belief systems.)
The next time you hear someone say something like that, just remember: What they are really saying is, “Man is an animal. He is subject to the unfathomable and incomprehensible shifting mores of unseen magical spirit beings and is therefore not responsible for his or her own destiny through choices.” I reject that. Willful ignorance is a crime I refuse to commit. The glory of man is the rationality given to us by God. The ability to think, to reason, and to analyze are sacred and holy. All of civilization are built upon them. Every building, machine, computer program, and medical advance that makes life better depend upon them.
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Reader Comments (7)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.
crabhooves
June 1, 2011
I go back and forth, but most days if someone asked me my most honest opinion I would say that I don't believe in choice, I think it's a false concept, a rationalization after the fact that lets people believe they have control over their own lives. I don't believe that we are fundamentally different than animals, no ethereal soul, no magical substance that sets us apart - animals are just like us, just less evolved. They speak, they love (though of course this differs from animal to animal, a worm is less capable of this than say, a dog). They even have the rudimentary beginnings of regional culture (cows will moo differently in different places and when moved will pick up the new method) they will even pass along knowledge to each other and mourn the loss of other animals (human or otherwise) close to them.
It's actually disconcerting how similar they are to us, everything I've heard from people who study animal intelligence confirms that, for example, pigs are as intelligent as a human toddler. Remember that, we raise pigs in the conditions we do and kill them to eat their flesh. But we would consider it an abomination and a cruelty beyond measure if someone were to factory farm and eat toddlers, but it's essentially the same thing, just different species. So either every living being has a soul - or nobody does.
I like to think of our minds as a giant car wreck, imagine a car slamming at full speed into a building that then collapses (not a very well built one of course) and destroys several other cars, then there's an explosion or two. We would call it chaos, but it's as ordered as anything else in the universe, following the same universal laws of physics that we understand enough to make that same car speed down the highway at 100km/h (what we would call order), we just can't grasp the thousands of physical reactions going on at once. Life is like that, we are driven by a complex set of emotions and physical circumstances that are abstractions of the laws of physics that govern everything else. We don't blame people who are mentally ill when they commit crimes because we realize they had no control - our entire species is like that, we're just under the illusion that the things that compel us to do what we do aren't compelling us because we know them so well.
But in the end it doesn't really matter (and I don't mean that in a nihilistic, "we're all doomed sense"), people are going to do what they're going to do anyway, nothing changes regardless of what you believe. We still have to sentence people to life in prison when they kill others, even though they had no choice in the matter because the strong deterrent is one of many factors that can make sure the next person does not. Think of it like a mathematic equation. Do I want to kill this person? Yes, add 3 points, do they have family to mourn them? No, add 2 points, do I want to go to prison? No, take away 50 points. End result is -45 points, do not carry out murder.
Personally I don't care anymore and I'm ok and even happy with it all - when I fail or I make a bad "choice" I don't whine and moan that I had no agency in the matter, attitudes like that are deeply counterproductive and would compound any failure. I instead take the attitude to find out why I went wrong and improve for next time.I can't believe it took me so long to write that up, my baked potatoes are ready! Mmmm.
Ammar_ah34
June 3, 2011
What do you think about ally savings account with a 2% rate that compounds daily?
Mfulwood13
December 15, 2011
You seem to have written a well thought out piece but it leaves out some essential truths.
If you have never been a slave to crack, porn, adulterous relationships or other then it is well enough to say there is choice. However if one delves deeper then one will find the believer in Jesus esteems Him highly for He does "set the captives free".
I am pleased for you that your life has gone along pretty well thus far and you have not suffered because of being enslaved by that we believers call evil. (Do not think me sarcastic as I do not think it nice to be so).
Joshua Kennon
December 15, 2011
Replying to Mfulwood13
Welcome to the site! Thank you for taking the time to comment!
I don't talk much about my beliefs because I want people to arrive at their own conclusion. Personally, I believe evil exists. I also believe that in most cases, such as drug addiction, there is no evil involved, just a physiological response due to certain people's genetics with DNA and a chemical compound. That addiction is real and life destroying. I've had people in my own family who have lost everything because of it. In the case of my own family, it was Christianity that got them sober, clean, and rebuilt their lives.
So, yes, I believe someone can be enslaved to addiction. Yes, I believe that religion can help them overcome it and explains a lot of the success of program like AA. Yes, I've seen it firsthand in the lives of my own family. But addiction is, in most cases, a disease just like cancer, that arises from a combination of genetics and environment. If there were a "spirit of drug addiction", for example, then major pharmaceuticals wouldn't be able to create a vaccine to cure cocaine addiction, which is now happening in laboratories (reference: http://io9.com/5725864/cocaine-vaccine-could-make-drug-addiction-a-distant-memory)
Just because it is a physical handicap that can be scientifically proven doesn't mean there is no role for the church or religious counselors. Like I said, I've seen first hand how those programs can change people's lives. It's also one of the reasons I give a good deal of money to Christian ministries through my family foundation.
Personally, I don't think that in any way, shape, or form negates any religious belief system. My main hypothesis is that people are personifying their subconscious cravings for the addictive stimuli as a means of combating it, which would probably be successful psychologically because it makes it easier to confront and resist. I think this falls into a "my people are destroyed due to a lack of knowledge" category, to quote Hosae. For thousands of years, there were well-meaning, devout men and women who thought their children were demon possessed, only now we know of the existence of epilepsy and sociopaths, both of which are caused by genetic flaws (though in the case of the latter, there is, in my opinion, considerable evidence that the condition arises along a continuum of genetic archetypes because it was probably an adaptive advantage for biological reproduction in the past but that would require another essay for another night).
We're only a few decades away from being able to solve a lot of the major drug addiction problems with vaccines. Then again, it was Proverbs 25:2 that said it is the Glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out. Drug addiction or other behavior issues will join, relatively soon, the list of things beat by knowledge, just like polio and the black plague did. Just as I don't think it damaged God's reputation when the Church admitted the Earth was not the center of the universe, I think acknowledging the true nature of things like drug addiction or sexual addiction can only help improve our cognition and free more people.
Mfulwood13
December 15, 2011
Replying to Joshua Kennon
I do not agree that "addiction", for instance, alcohol is the problem. Alcoholism is a symptom and as we all know treating a symptom is without merit.
When we decided alcoholism was a disease we removed "choice" altogether and made it a lifetime struggle which it is not at all. Is one born with the disease of alcoholism or is it developed? Is it developed as a mechanism for overlaying the root problem? The answer is yes. And it makes void the need for understanding that man's spiritual nature needs more than food and drink in order to prosper.
When I first read the title of your post I thought you were going to speak about the methods of operation of witchcraft within the Christian churches such as 'praying AGAINST one's enemies or the prayers for money that have been concocted out of a few scriptures. There would be the truth of it but you have chosen instead an intellectual approach to deciphering that which you find offending.
bubba1000
March 5, 2015
Orthodox (little o) Christianity believes in a spirit world and could never reconcile with a reductionistic view of man like yours. Just because voodoo and Christianity both believe in a spirit world doesn't make them the same.
Joshua Kennon
March 5, 2015
Replying to bubba1000
Respectfully (and I mean that sincerely), the only thing reductionistic is your gross oversimplification of my view of man and the incorrect conclusion you draw based on a belief you assume I hold though never explicitly stated. The difference between what I actually believe, and the false parallel you've tried to descry in your response, is nuanced but the implications are as stark as the difference between night and day.