This post will be a change-of-pace.
One of my readers/friends asked me about my opinions on "sorcery". He referenced Revelations 18:23
“And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.”
Furthermore, he went on to show various translations of the original Greek that the most likely kind of "merchants" were compounders of drugs, that is Pharmicists and the sorcery they were engaged in were poisons, hallucinogens, abortifacients and so on.
Puzzling out why God hates sorcery
Heinlein reportedly Arthur C. Clarke wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We use technologies EVERY DAY that would have been considered magic 200 years ago. Does that mean that we are committing evil in the eyes of the only One who matters?
I think one risk of technology/magic is that it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking "I don't need God because my surgeon is the best". That is one reason why God doesn't like it. He is, after all, a jealous God.
Another risk of "sorcery" is that it creates an asymmetry of information and power that can be used in predatory ways. To quote Ben Parker from Spiderman "With great power comes great responsibility." Those asymmetries can be used for the betterment of all or they can be used for personal enrichment or gratification. Falsely claiming to be a member of a favored-group to gain tenure at Harvard, using AI to ace an term-paper (while actually learning nothing about the subject) and so on.
Really, isn't that what pops into your mind at the word "sorcery"? Using a love-potion to gain the affection of somebody who is out-of-your-league or to call down a curse on a rival out of personal animus.
A final risk involves "occult". Occult means "blood" and even the ancients knew that the fastest way to kill somebody was to drain the animal's blood by cutting a major artery. Blood is life. To dabble in the "occult" was to drain the essence of life away from somebody. Today, that has the potential to happen at an unimaginably large industrial-scale with Social Credit Scores and with the personal data packed into data farms around the globe. Santa (who knows when you've been bad or good) has been replaced by Google and thousands of mysterious apps that anonymously skim your data and will cheerfully ruin your life for a fraction of a penny of gain.
My take is that "sorcery" is not dead as you can deduce from the examples I gave. And...pharmacy in its latest incarnation certainly used "asymmetry" and "coercive and predatory" practices for their personal gains.
So, to my friend who wishes to remain anonymous, I agree...there is nothing new under the sun and God's wisdom as revealed in the Bible is never to be ignored.
*From Macbeth by Shakespeare
Good discussion and explanation. I think too many people don’t believe the darkness and evil exist, or only in the stereotypical characters.
ReplyDeleteSouthern NH
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
ReplyDeleteLeading people away from the divine - that which is God and can only be ascribed to God (goodness, providence, and the miraculous) to the sublime - that which is ascribed to things beyond and outside of God through self (I did this as a result of what was created = I created) can lead to much evil.
ReplyDeleteERJ, one additional explanation is to be found in C.S. Lewis's book That Hideous Strength - a book as dystopian and current as 1984 or Brave New World. In it, a character speculates that one of the issues in dealing with Other Powers not of God is simply that they wither the individual through exposure; we become less "human" and something else entirely.
ReplyDeleteAnother general point (not novel to me of course) is simply that sorcery finds its power in something else other than God. For Christians, He is the only one we should seek as our source of "power" (as it were).
(Also to note, sorcery has no limits to use except that of the morality of the individual and could in theory be used for selfish or evil purposes.)
I think that in this context, the use of "sorcery" is more akin to "beguiling." The city's wealth and decadence put a spell over others leading them astray from righteousness.
ReplyDeleteHrrrrrrmmmmmmm. Here is my confusion:
ReplyDeleteI’m one of those guys for whom the Bible says what it means, and means what it says. There’s enough confusion induced by translations of archaic Greek to Olde English to modern vernacular.
When I read that passage, it’s about the evils of deceit: greed, lying, misrepresentation, fraud, etc. When the Bible starts trashing false prophets and gods it is very deliberate and specific in doing so. Here it seems that sorcery is a metaphor for those other behaviours …
But whadda I know?
Arthur C Clarke, not Heinlein
ReplyDeleteThank-you for your correction.
DeleteKeep in mind that every dollar is just conjured into existence.
ReplyDeleteMiss B. addressed this issue several days ago. https://www.barnhardt.biz/2024/05/25/you-gotta-be-kidding-me-mailbag-revelation-1823-for-thy-merchants-were-the-great-men-of-the-earth-for-by-thy-pharmaceuticals-were-all-nations-deceived-edition/
ReplyDeleteMiss B. also had a follow-up, well worth reading: https://www.barnhardt.biz/2024/05/29/the-antipope-bergoglio-faggotry-imbroglio-just-keeps-getting-better-and-better-he-also-called-them-faggots-again-in-the-same-sentence-to-paraphrase-yoda-begun-the-fag-wa/
ReplyDeleteThe Greek word for sorcery is pharmakea (spelling?)… but y’all probably already knew that.
ReplyDelete