Just to give everyone a religious heart attack. . .

[velvetpage]

Magick in the Bible: only condemned when it's doing something the Christian God sees as competition.

I haven't read it all yet, but the first part was fun. I've made a few similar arguments myself at various points, but I've never done a dedicated search for such examples. Interesting. A bit wacky, but interesting.

Comments

[gracevlikevrain.livejournal.com]

I'll admit I only skimmed the article...but I think it kind of goes with our other discussion about "myth becoming fact."

ACK. I almost quoted CS Lewis again. (fighting it...fighting it...okay, can't help it! :) In yet another God In The Dock essay, he talks about how, in order to be a Christian, you have accept both the reality of the world and the mystic side, and how Christianity satisfies both the concrete and the abstract desires in humans. Of course, on a flip through the book, I couldn't find it, but it's a really, really, really good one.

Again, I didn't read the whole article in detail, but I got the impression that it was giving examples of how supernatural practices frequently came up in the Bible, right? (and if it's not then disregard my reply, but look for that essay in gitd anyway...it's great!)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. Divination was fine as long as it was Hebrew high priests doing it, but outside races divining the will of other gods were evil. It's trying to combat the whole idea that Christianity and Judaism have no magic in them.

[rallymama.livejournal.com]

Interesting, if superficial. I wish he'd gone beyond a mere listing of the Biblical examples of magic into an assessment of the historical implications, and the twisted path that brought us to our current state. That would be, of course, a much longer article, and possibly the scholarly work of a lifetime! He started to go in this direction in the "Witchcraft" section, but backed off.

The more I read the Torah, the harder it becomes to see the connection between the YHVH-cult and modern Judaism. I guess the truly amazing thing, for me anyway, is how the religion kept re-inventing itself to stay relevant.

[purplkat.livejournal.com]

It makes sense, if you look at the Bible in a historical context. Historically, people accepted that magic happened, and there wasn't much that could be done about this. So really it came down to a matter of market shares.