Ping!
ping
Drugs and pornography DEFINITELY lead to harassment by demonic spirits. Anyone with experience with either (or anyone with experience with those how have such experience) knows that.
Screwtape
I wish more people understood this. Most people I know are so lost they think Jesus is in heaven, God is merely a spectator, and Satan is some kind of folklore/fairytale thing. Yikes!!!
In my house, we DO NOT even so much as check the daily horoscopes, let alone visit fortune tellers, read tarot cards, etc. And I dont allow my child to watch such garbage as “Wizards of Waverly Place” nor will she be permitted to read Harry Potter or vampire pop culture trash.
Anyway....I was in Barnes and Noble on Saturday looking for Spanish and English literature for youth. I was greatly surprised the enormous volume and percentage of fiction devoted solely to the topic of vampires, witches, and magic driven fantasy. In the Spanish section for youth it was nearly entirely vampire and witchcraft. I bought the **only** non-vampire/witchcraft book on the Spanish literature shelf.
This must reflect the curiosity that youth have in the occult. From the covers of the books these fiction seems to be dark stuff...not many cute little red slippers there.
The Catholic church has long been very dubious about the whole thing, because superstition is about as reprehensible as it gets—often a throwback to old pagan practices.
Despite the demonologies of the past, in which church scholars imagined all the details of Hell down to, literally, Hell’s pastry chef, eventually the church decided that some distinctions had to be drawn.
1) Just because something is unknown does not mean it is demonic or evil. Likewise, the unknown far tremendously outstrips the demonic by many orders of magnitude. So the assumption should be that the unknown is just unknown, until it becomes known. Not that it has evil or malign character by default.
2) The church also recognizes that mental illness is almost invariably an illness, and that almost all illness is not caused by demonic or evil forces, but are congenital and genomic, or caused by pathogens, parasites, malfunction and injury.
3) However, the church also recognizes that many are the times in our lives in which we need solace in many forms. Just because people are mistaken in the cause of their problems does not diminish their need for ministration.
4) Unfortunately, people will adopt heterodoxical or even heretical beliefs, as well as rampant superstition. But an important distinction needs to be drawn, that these are objectionable *not* because they are demonic or powerfully evil, but because they are empty and meaningless.
What is offensive is that people waste themselves, putting their faith into mindless and powerless things instead of how it should be directed, in enriching their lives and faith in what does matter.
The church recognizes that people can terribly harm themselves in the pursuit of such things. In investing the life, their hopes and desires, their strength and their character in foolish ways. It becomes like other sins, indicated more by obsession and excess than the thing in itself.
People need to eat, but if they gorge themselves they are gluttons.
It is good to procreate, but insatiable lust makes a person jaded.
Prosperity is good, but greed steals away from your life.
People need to explore the unknown, to make it part of the known. But obsession with not just the unknown, but the unknowable, saps the strength. A graven image may be worshiped all day, but it just sits there.
5) Then finally, after all that argument, there is an admission that demons exist. But claiming that from the start is a fool’s errand.