"They aren't real Christians"

Wait a minute, says who?

I watched the documentary on this topic of "witch children" on Channel 4 the other night really quite moving. Both my wife and I were really quite shocked to see how poorly adults can treat children. The documentary correctly points the finger at a particularly paranoid, mystical strain of the Pentecostal faith. But is it wrong because "they aren't real christians" or are they wrong for the way they treat children?

It seems to me that the above argument is a particularly dangerous path that leads to no where, because to someone else, you may not be a real Christian either, and to people like me, the book of "old Jewish fairy tales" (to borrow from Bill Maher) is just so much tripe, so pretty much all christians lack authenticity on some level. So what's a real one?

Maybe, instead of banging on about how this one is real and that one isn't, you could make some bolder statements. Witches aren't freaking real. Demon possession just doesn't happen. I like watching a good horror romp on the late-night movie myself now and again, but I don't think this crap is actually possible.

While watching the documentary, it was most telling not when the filmmaker visited the far-out whacko selling videos and books on how to best torture demonic forces out of your small children, but when she went to see the head of the mainstream Pentecostal churches in the country. Instead of tackling the woman's weird culty ways directly, all he said was that he hadn't seen her films and that in his own opinion, he didn't think what she was saying expressed the full story of what his faith was about.

That's the best you can do? I could easily imagine a similar answer from the Vatican which doesn't exactly proclaim that supernatural possessions are impossible.

So what would happen if your own church leaders did one day say "oops, I just prayed and heard from Yahweh that it looks like we have some possessed kids over in the Sunday school room." Would that change things?

Let's fess up. The ancestor religion from which your presently cuddly faith evolved from was exported around the globe by people who did some pretty awful things and left huge messes in their wake. Christianity didn't just pop up out of no where in Nigeria, it was brought there, installed on a people with no degree of nicety with regards to the process.

Until modern, mainstream followers of these faiths disown all the hocus-pocus aspects of their own religions, then they aren't so much clearing evil out of the souls of their fellow humans. They are the demons themselves, wielding some aspect of fear and intimidation as a weapon to control. Because if you go around banging on about the existence of fairies that you can't actually prove, then other people can to, and you don't have much of an argument to make against them.

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the REAL one
http://tinyurl.com/6hfs3y

You sound just as fanatical as fanatical Christians and Muslims wishing to spread their beliefs.

1) First, see if the person have any religious belief .
2 )Second, if they do find out if the religion is safe and haven’t pressured them in anyway .
3)Third , if they were not pressured , maybe they need mental health treatment
4 )Fourth, if they were pressured , the right authority may need to notified; so they can expose the cult/sect .

I myself was victimized by in cult ; which is Refuge Church of Christ , that is overseen by Bishop Bonner; his body is all over the United States and an Africa. They have destroyed my family life tremendously . They prompted adoption of resistant ex - members

Please make sure that, churches are monitored when the began to sprout in your country.

Take care Africa my descendant land of beauty and the originators.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/children-are-targets-of-nigerian-witch-hunt

This needs to stop!

So those fundies are most likely building on pre-existing beliefs about the efficacy of sorcery, rather than trying to debunk such beliefs by challenging people to put hexes on them.

In any case, belief in the efficacy of sorcery is a widespread and cross-cultural belief, making one wonder what induces belief in that. I wonder if Daniel Dennett has addressed that question in his work on what makes people believe in religions; it seems like a closely-related one.

And extending the arguments of certain religious apologists, if we refuse to believe in the efficacy of sorcery and refuse to cringe in fear of malicious sorcery, we will not be very happy or mentally healthy, and we will become miserable and depressed.

And as Richard Carrier has noted in his master's thesis, Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Early Roman Empire, many less-educated Romans believed that lunar eclipses were caused by sorcerers making the Moon go away, and they would often make a lot of noise to try to interfere with those sorcerers' efforts. Plutarch noted that education was good for women as for men, because someone who's educated would refuse to take seriously anyone who claimed the ability to cause a lunar eclipse. Plutarch also claimed that some centuries earlier, a certain Aglaonike had used her ability to predict lunar eclipses to convince people that she could cause them.

And nearly 15 centuries later, Christopher Columbus would do just that to some pesky Native Americans to get them to help him and his crew.

A belief that many Africans maintained despite also recognizing other causes of death like hunting elephants and collapsing granaries. So if someone goes out hunting elephants and gets killed by one, it's because someone cast a spell of "Sic 'em" on that elephant.

I think it's most accurate to say that there's an unfortunate correspondence: the traditional religions, many of which are in decline, accustomed people to the idea of believing in sorcery and sympathetic magic. This paved the way for the far more virulent Christian traditions, now on the rise, which exploit those beliefs to enrich their preachers and are now destroying families and communities.

Of course, I'm sure these witch-hunting Christians, if asked, would fiercely deny that their beliefs have pagan antecedents (and, in fairness, one could reinvent these ideas entirely from the Bible without any reference to traditional religions). Whatever the historical influence exerted by the older belief systems, it seems clear that, in this case, Christianity is both the proximate and dominant cause.