Here's something I wrote nearly six years ago...
Occultism is more about the belief that nature, and the various entities/personalities that inhabit it, can be successfully manipulated by humans into granting said humans some favor.In short, all of creation is humankind's personal vending machine, and the whole magic thing is just about learning how to use exact change.
Christianity isn't a religion of manipulation - it's a religion of ethics. Our relationship with God is based on our ethical standing before Him. No amount of relics, or icons, or potions, or incantations can change that. God is not some impersonal force that we can manipulate if we're skilled enough. The occultist's beef with Christianity is that it places humankind permanently subservient to a single diety, instead of allowing them to pick and choose their leaders (and allegiances), as if they were simply voting for their next senator.
That seems to sum it up pretty well, Alex Murphy!
Thank you so much for your excellent insights!
Obama must be challenged daily to witness that he is a fallen creature saved only by the blood of Christ. Any other answer is demonic, yes, demonic.
I am troubled by the notion that Christianity is a religion of ethics.
The presence of Christ in my life did not occur out of some ethical series of behaviors or any sense of goodness on my part. He is alive in me because he saved me from the oblivion of my self. I am bought by His blood, not by ethics. This seems to me to be a cosmological and not an epistological event. The only theory of knowledge necessary is to recognize the nature of reality, a simple and essentially primitive act.
The distinction may simply be between the experience of religion as a human construct and the experience of God. One need not, after all, be religious to know God.