Month: July 2014

 

In the 60’s Margot Adler was a social activist, druggie, and political radical. In the 80’s onward, she was an outspoken occultist and national proponent of witchcraft. She was herself a witch in the Gardner mode, and an “elder” in the Covenant of the Goddess. [See my book Larson’s Book of World Religions for an analysis of her mentor, British witch Gerald Gardner. To order CLICK HERE.] Her book, Drawing Down the Moon, first published in 1979 was reissued in 2006. It was a call for a return to pagan practices. The blurb from her publisher glowingly describes the book (which I’ve read) as providing “inspiration in ancient deities” [read that DEMONS]. Her father was a Jewish psychotherapist and collaborated with Freud. She died July 28, 2014, two days ago, from terminal cancer.

 

Of course, she had a right to believe anything she wanted, but for three decades she was on the payroll of National Public Radio and hosted a popular radio program. Adler’s salary was in part possible due to a $200 million gift to NPR given by the widow of McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc. (Think of that the next time you get a Big Mac.) In addition NPR and PBS (Public Broadcasting) get $445 million in taxpayers’ largess every year. NPR says it gets a minimal amount of that. But imagine NPR hiring a Catholic priest or a Protestant Pastor to host a radio show. Unthinkable. The devil has such a grip on our culture, and witchcraft is so widely accepted, that no one blinked at the idea that a witch was on the government’s payroll (whatever the amount doesn’t matter) at the expense of the public. I take no pleasure in her death, and it’s sad when anyone who obviously doesn’t know the Lord dies. Her life is over, but I pray that the legacy of Uncle Sam’s implicit promotion of witchcraft doesn’t live on. 

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I’ve always liked most of Tom Petty’s music. It’s not that he’s a great singer. He isn’t. But his songs have that certain feel, and a hook you can’t get out of your head. My favorite? “I Won’t Back Down.” To me, it sort of a personal spiritual warfare anthem, although I’m certain that was nowhere what Petty had in mind when he wrote it:

                Well, I won’t back down, no I won’t back down.

                You can stand me up at the gates of Hell,

                But I don’t back down.

                No I’ll stand my ground, won’t be turned around . . .

                I won’t back down.

But let’s get one thing straight. I won’t be buying his latest album Hypnotic Eye. Why? Petty has taken a sudden turn in the direction of attacking Christianity. Petty calls the release a “moral album” about “social betrayal.” You’d think that there’s enough social betrayal out there to sing about: abortion on demand; Obamacare chipping away at personal, spiritual liberties; child sexual trafficking; the rapid acceptance of legal weed, to name a few social ills. (Have you heard? The New York Times last week endorsed marijuana legalization.) But Petty had to get petty and go after Christians. He attacks the Catholic Church and its sex abuse scandals and rails against “every man of God that lives with hidden devils.” He also infers that faith in God starts “all wars.” But he’s really past the pall when he claims that “no one’s got Christ more wrong than the Christians.” For such a smart rocker, that’s downright dumb. But it will play well with the cynical millennial crowd. For a guy who admits being raised in the territory of Southern Baptists, he’s awfully selective in his ignorance of religion. Instead of a clever tunesmith, he’s starting to sound like a cynical, old rocker.

 

Not all that’s on the album is bad. He laments drug deaths at concerts and financial corruption that is “power drunk.” But whether he mean it or now, he’s fighting the culture war on the wrong side. The devil likes songs like this that buy into the anti-God bitterness of this generation that is soaked in social media, progressive politics, and demonic entertainment. It reinforces a hateful attitude toward Christianity that is demonically self-serving. I still like his earlier stuff, but as far as listening to Petty’s petty, new rant against the Lord, count me out. And I won’t back down!

 

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In an effort to keep readers of my blogs abreast of significant spiritual events, I check out all kinds of web sites and blogs. Yesterday I came upon a well-read site with an entry entitled, “How Harry Potter shaped a generation.” Written by a 20-something, the blog recounts the author’s obsession with the boy wizard and J. K Rowling’s seven books focused on spell casting and witchcraft as something that is neither objectionable nor evil. A few quotes caught my eye:

• “Harry Potter is part of a rare subset of entertainment that defines a generation.”
• “When I got my hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I had been reading about Potter for seven years of my life!”
• “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Potter has impacted almost every major friendship in my life. It became a code word to test out new friendships.”
• “A generation who celebrated Harry Potter as a hobby is now old enough to turn those fandom-honed skills into careers.”
• “Seven years have passed since that final book, but my place in the Potter generation continues to shape my life for the better.”

 

If, like me, you consider the Potter books to be diabolical and a clever way for Satan to mainstream witchcraft, then these comment are disturbing. What they point out is a cultural shift in thinking for an entire generation; in some ways, for those who grew up reading these book, they set the theological benchmark for how today’s young adults think and act: 1) they have abandoned Christianity in droves, and 2) they have embraced an occult worldview, influenced in large measure by a boy with a wand casting spells. Satan must be somewhere in Hell laughing at how easy it was to change the belief system of millions of youth with just seven book (which, by the way have sold 450 million copies, the most of any book series in history). If you are reading Potter, stop. If you have read Potter, repent.

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Hinduism, the idolatrous, pagan religion of India and faith of many in America, has gone upscale with marketing that would put a New York, Madison Street maven to shame. Traditional Hindu deities, such as Shiva, pictured above, have undergone visual changes. Instead of the traditional pale, passive, contemplative depiction of the past, modern Hindus are going for a flashy, masculine makeover. Comic books and graphic novels in India now depict the pantheon of gods and goddess in Hinduism with flare. The idea is to connect these ancient deities to a new generation of youth. An India company called Holy Cow Entertainment (Hindus worship the cow as a god, get it?) says, “We’re trying to give cutting-edge art to the same old mythological stories.”

 

As an exorcist, I recognize these deities as demons. The Apostle Paul said, in First Corinthians 10:20, “The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God.” Shiva, for example, is part of the Hindu trinity of main gods: Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer). In Revelation 9:11, John calls this demon, Shiva, Abaddon (in Hebrew) and Apollyon (in Greek). I’ve done hundreds of exorcisms on people whose ancestors were Hindu and inherited generational curses from this cruel and violent evil spirit. What a clever strategy of Satan to take his most hideous demon gods and revise how they appear to a generation raised on Marvel Comic heroes. But Shiva is no Master of the Universe, he is a demon from Hell no matter what kind of transformation he makes to the comic book crowd. 

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In the beginning God created. For millennia those simple words have defined the belief of humanity’s majority regarding the origin of all things. As of March 17 this year, findings were announced by scientists intending to debunk the biblical account. The event was the supposed confirmation of the theory of primordial gravitational waves. The idea has been debated for decades. Now some scientists who put no stock in the creation story of Genesis believe they have confirmed that in a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second a volume of space no larger than an atom expanded to the size of our solar system. That’s fast and that’s big. It’s called the theory of inflation. But, boy, is that a lot of inflation. It all boils down to this. In the words of one scientific pundit, the beginning of the universe was the “chance result of a quantum fluctuation in the nothingness beforehand.” Huh? Nothingness? Out of nothing came something? I’d call that “faith” not “science. And it’s a little harder to understand than the fruit of a forbidden tree and a beguiling serpent which is just too simple for scientific inquiring minds.

One observer of this new idea of how things all began says, “The deepest truths of the material universe are to be fond by gazing out into the deepest, earliest recesses of space.” Really, and I thought that the deepest truths could be found in the Divine revelation of God’s Word. There’s nothing wrong with scientific investigation, but why does it always seem to lead away from God? Scientists, whether they admit it or not, are philosophical and theological products of our culture, and our culture is godless and immoral, for the most part. Is this latest theory of how it all started a giant leap for science but a setback for sanity? Ironically, James 2:19 tells us that demons believe the Bible and “tremble” at what God’s Word says. Perhaps a little respect for God’s words “in the beginning” is in order for those who believe in the inflation theory.

 

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The crime was unfathomable. I was reminded of it this past weekend while I was in Canada. On July 30, 2008, Canadian police responded to a call about a stabbing on a bus in Manitoba. Upon arrival, the authorities discovered that a man named Vince Li, a Chinese immigrant and paranoid schizophrenic, had not only stabbed but also decapitated his seatmate. Then, Li cannibalized the dead body. According to witnesses, Tim McLean (the victim) was sleeping with his headphones on when the man sitting next to him suddenly produced a large knife and began stabbing McLean in the neck and chest. The attacker then decapitated McLean and displayed his severed head to other passengers outside who had fled the bus in horror. The driver and two other men had attempted to rescue the victim but Li slashed wildly at them from behind the locked bus doors. Li severed McLean’s body parts and consumed the victim’s flesh, particularly his eyes and part of his heart. For four hours police cordoned the bus with Li inside before the killer was finally arrested. He was eventually tried and ruled insane because he said that God told him the victim was evil and had to be executed.

 

One of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police officers at the crime scene was Cpl. Ken Barker. Last week, the 51-year-old policeman killed himself. He had been suffering from PTSD and was estranged from his wife. Those who knew him traced Barker’s problems back to that night of the beheading. Afterwards he was never the same. Several observations, here. First, how could anyone not think this crime was totally demonic? Yes, mental illness was likely involved, but the extreme measure of this crime indicates that more than mental instability was a factor. Li had demons. Second, and sadly, Cpl. Barker likely got some of those demons as well because of his close involvement in handling this crime. So did some of Li’s fellow passengers who witnessed the murder. Demons don’t play fair and will enter any way possible, even by an open door of extreme fear and trauma, just by someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I realize this may be hard for the non-exorcist to accept, but those of us who do deliverance encounter similar spiritual phenomena all the time. If you’ve been the victim of, or witnessed, a horrible event, get counseling and talk through it. Get prayer and process your feelings. Get deliverance and cast out any evil that took advantage of you. The effect of evil events is contagious. Make sure you aren’t, as Cpl. Barker was, a victim of collateral spiritual damage.

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