Mago Sales is a magician that also is a catholic priest. As far I could recall he never said anything like this.
Almost all magician are sayng that faith healers, mediums, clairvoyants and psychics are actually con artists.
I think that this is a fairly recent thing. I am not a huge fan of Christian teachings and symbolism, but historically there have been quite a few serious thinkers who have used these as a schema for mental organisation. The masses of politically-motivated âSoldiers for Jesusâ in the US really seem to work hard to indoctrinate their kids to be uncritical. But I doubt if an eight year old marked for Jesuit training would wind up so blinkered. Looking around for actual kids books on logic and rhetoric can be interesting, as much of the material has grown from the Trivium as taught in Christian schools of Europe over the past several hundred years. These represent solid grounding in critical thinking and formal reasoning intended to be taught at elementary school level, rather than the 20th century trend of being relegated to those few who graduate high school and find themselves in liberal arts courses.
Lots of compartmentalisation of disparate concepts? Indoctrination seems to be very much a selective process. It is about social conditioning rather than education. So Iâd look into the usual psychological-warfare/brainwashing techniques as developed through the 20th century. A lot of the conservatives who push vaguely neo-Christian fundamentalism seem to overlap with the sorts of demographics who were similarly motivated by red scare and suspicion of âforeignersâ in the past. A lot of it probably involves cultivating cognitive dissonance with regards to something deemed âunthinkableâ, ratcheting up the insecurity and tension, and then offering them soothing relief/escape. It is pretty much like straight up torture.
And, I hate to be cynical, but I think that most all âsocializationâ works this way. Otherwise, people would casually question many of the core tenets of society and institutions which those who are invested in think must be taken for granted. Which IMO would only be a good thing.
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Carter had to be stopped because, unlike almost all the other Presidents who claimed to be Christians, he meant it.
If all the CINOs were denied the vote, I suspect the US would have a permanent Democrat majority.
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The Jesuits have a very high attrition rate, so youâre right. Frequently when listening to Jesuits defending Catholic doctrine, you get the impression that the person theyâre trying to convince is themselves, because theyâve been educated to the point they can see how silly it is.
In your dreams.
Slightly OT, the liberal Christian Charles Dodgson, who wrote the Alice books as Lewis Carroll, took his theology very seriously. After much thought he decided that God had to be truly beneficient, and that therefore although God might have created Hell, it would be empty. Needless to say, this did not go down with the religious fundamentalists of his day. But his books were so wildly popular with parents and children that anybody going against him wouldnât have stood much of a chance.
Catholic doctrine (and the view of most theologians) would be that these people are con artists too. Faith healers (on the Catholic view) because only God can work miracles and the NT specifically mentions false prophets; mediums, clairvoyants and psychics because the dead are either in Heaven or Hell and canât be contacted, and because all âmagicâ implies stealing a bit of Godâs power.
There is nothing wrong with illusionists or stage magicians because they donât claim to have actual magic powers.
[before anybody starts, no I am not a theist; I just find it interesting that Christian doctrine, at least among educated Christians, leads inevitably to the view that nobody can talk to the dead or work magic. The common ground between, say, atheists and Episcopalians is that superstition, magic and necromancy - which is basically what âspiritualismâ is - are all bunk.]
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I have- now, Iâve declared myself a god. I even have a support line. Seeing as time is meaningless to us gods, itâs open between 10 and 15 million years ago.
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Well no wonder heart disease is killing so many Americans! Jesus doesnât mix well with cholesterol and fat.
It seems like at least some of that is the near tautology that religious people tend to believe in the supernatural and divine intervention, while non-religious people generally donât.
In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion.
It mentioned that all of the religious kids were Christian, so the fact that they accepted God as real and potentially active is not surprising. Whether that makes them rubes or not will depend on your own beliefs. The same goes for other fantastical narratives - itâs not surprising that people accept the supernatural when theyâre taught within that framework. It does undermine the claim that kids have to be taught not to believe in God and the supernatural though.
But not all religion depends upon belief. Typically itâs only those which use it to brainwash people. In much of the world, it is simply ritual, which can be as matter-of-fact as âbelieving inâ the importance of morning coffee or in celebrating Independence Day. Ritual only needs to be practised to have meaning, like playing a piano, the rationalization of why you do it doesnât really matter very much.
By this same reasoning, gods accepted as cultural myths are not particularly supernatural. Many gods are ârealâ in the sense that they simply personify things which demonstrably exist - such as crashing ocean waves, or parching desert heat. So whether or not you âbelieveâ that Poseidon smashed your fishing boat makes very little practical difference if the damage has been done anyway. There are real cognitive science reasons as to why this works - humans deep brain, the 99% which actually runs things, doesnât really use language or discursive thought. It and the waking, conscious, rational mind are more likely to share information by use of symbols, be they pictures or performance. Many people who fancy themselves rationalists who have a bug up their ass about hating religion donât especially like to be reminded that their conscious mind canât handle very much. What seems like âfantasyâ is very much like the âprogramming languageâ of the human mind, so it works. But like any language, it is only as good as the content you use it to communicate, so for many the message is simply âobey and payâ. People of both the pro-religion and anti-religion camps are both pretty invested in not being honest about how and why this all works as it does.
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Thereâs a common thread thatâs very telling in what Christians find to be Satanic.
It can be summed up as:
Anything that gives people Power (literal or metaphorical) is the work of the Devil.
Humans can only empower themselves through God, and just about anything else is the work of Satan.
Thereâs a lot of window dressing on this argument, and why even âWhite Witchesâ communicating with Angels is the work of the Devil. Even communicating with the Dead is somehow Devil work. (I never quite got that. Also Iâm not sure that talking to angels is a thing in Pagan religions but whateverâŚ)
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Well thatâs both false and extremely offensive, but I donât expect that matters to you.
And on Good Friday no less.
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I want to âlikeâ this more than once.
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That is very true, which is why that study and its small sample size of exclusively Christian religious kids (who probably werenât even that representative of Christianity as a whole, especially if they came from one school or other group) only has limited relevance to discussion about religion in general. When a kid is taught that God actually exists and actually interacts with the world, they end up believing that the supernatural world actually exists and that narratives that depend on divine intervention or supernatural influence are plausible, because thatâs how their view of reality is framed. Often when these kids get older, they learn that the smart move is to assert the supernatural in ways that are specifically designed to be impossible to prove or disprove.
Shhhh⌠questions like that are how Jack Thompson got started.
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Itâs often more specific than that. There is a hugely colonial/political factor involved here. As Judaism and Christianity spread, they tended to deprecate the gods of areas they âconqueredâ. For example, the demon Astaroth is based upon the ancient goddess Astarte, aka Ishtar.
A lot of the complaints that everything is Satanic are fairly recent. Even the bible itself is rife with examples of sorcery from the likes of Moses and Solomon. Moses turned his staff into a serpent and unleashed plagues upon people. Solomon used to capture demons and make them run errands for him. So there is a lot of handwaving as to why this is sometimes ok. The short answer is that the Council of Nicea decided that the bible would be a closed canon. This is why the old prophets are prophets, and why anybody since is just a crazy person. It allows those in power of the church to control the narrative.
Angels were also deities from other religions, they were gods in their own right. So the whole âno other gods before meâ is only valid by demoting other âgood godsâ into angels. But demons are angels also. If you get into it scripturally, there is not any difference. The Greek word âdaimonâ basically means âa divine powerâ, and not anything evil. I even have a book by a high-ranking clergy from a few hundred years back about how demons liked to have sex with people, and that it was not a particularly big deal. They didnât know any better, and you didnât want them, so just find a priest to chase them away and be done with it. It was not assumed that any of this meant that a person should be punished, which was reserved for turning oneâs back on the church and Christ.
Much of modern satanic panic seems to have been a reaction against spiritualism and comparative theology. Hostility towards hypnosis or anything âsupernaturalâ which was not their church. Before the industrial revolution, most people died within 10 miles of where they were born, so exposure to outside ideas seldom occurred.
Where some Abrahamic religions can get tedious is that to many adherents, there is no such thing as outside of their church. So if you think itâs something outside, like another god, ritual, personality, discipline, etc - they say itâs really just you being duped away from being the Good Christian you should be. Itâs very colonial and dishonest. Most Jews or Taoists would simply assume that you practiced something else, you just arenât one of them, and be done with it. As a result, many of the most bone-headed bible thumpers out there canât handle any real theological argument, so they just preach to the converted and talk trash about everybody else.
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The Solomon example is the recent one - itâs not in the Bible (it may actually have been written later than the Council of Nicea) and is more a case of âBiblical fanfictionâ. Other than that, the perspective doesnât seem to be that different from that of the magician in the video - Godâs power exists, but there are also frauds and spiritual powers that arenât from God. Either way, you want to be sure that youâre acting under Godâs authority. It seems to make some sense if you think of it as a kind of feudalism. Moses acted under the direct instruction of God, so his magic was more powerful than that of the sorcerers and their gods (his staff ate the others and the sorcerers were unable to replicate more than the most basic of Mosesâ signs. When he acted under his own authority, he was barred from entering Palestine (even though the magic worked). In the NT, you get the same idea: demons are powerful, but God is more powerful. Still, demons are a lot more powerful than humans.
I think this is an example of how modern fundamentalist belief in the spiritual world is not that far from folk or even mainstream Christian belief throughout most of history. When I was growing up in Ireland as an Evangelical, I found Catholic belief much more superstitious than ours (although we had plenty of superstitious beliefs ourselves). People would put so much weight on magical talismen (such as holy pictures that would go to different peopleâs houses to bring luck, holy water, relics, trinkets), belief in spirits of dead people haunting houses, rituals, taboos and other superstitious beliefs - not just because they gave spiritual comfort, but because people believed that the spiritual world was very close to our own and had a direct impact on it. I donât think people were all that laid-back about the spiritual world in the past, and there are a number of examples of satanic panic throughout the history of Christianity, alongside the more rational elements. As for other religions, itâs definitely true that others are more laid back and pluralistic - although in the case of Jews, that seems to be more true of modern times rather than as a general statement.
The constitution doesnât protect your feelings, so I guess, go ahead and be offended. Itâs part of free speech.
Also, Iâd rather you tell me why you think what I said was false, rather than try to halt the dialog with your cries of offended sensibilities.
(I really hope this is just a poe Iâm responding to though.)
No, I didnât say it offended me. I said it was offensive. And you know it was, and you meant for it to be offensive, so donât pretend youâre stupid. Youâre celebrating Easter by being a dick, and thatâs your right, of course, but you demean yourself when you pretend you donât know youâre doing it.
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Celebrating easter? No, I donât do that.
And anyway, you seem to be the only one here getting hot under the collar about something I said. Everyone else either didnât bother to respond, or added their own points and caveats onto what I said.
I said that children indoctrinated into a religion that tells them not to think critically, tend not to think critically. And that if the parents know thatâs what their religion does, itâd make sense that theyâd work hard to keep their credulous children from seeing/hearing/doing anything that might pollute their mind.
I might have said it with a tone you donât like, but do you really want to become this threadâs tone police officer?
Do you know what I find both false and extremely offensive? Teaching children that theyâll burn in a lake of fire forever if they donât accept the imaginary âloveâ of a psychotic blood-god, and that theyâll be tortured by demons if they use their brain to think about things.
Iâd say thatâs pretty offensive. Even child abuse. It certainly was child abuse in my case.
So while weâre talking about offensive and untrue things, thereâs a long list of worse offenses than what I said. And you still have yet to point out where what I said was false.
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