Are you afraid of the Ouija board still?

by cyberjesus 193 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Nickolas
    Nickolas

    Plenty of people don't believe in a deity but have no trouble believing in UFOs.

    "I have interviewed some of the hundreds of thousands of people who claim to have had direct encounters with spacecraft, or the crew of spacecraft, from another galaxy. Some of these are so vivid and detailed (and so comparable with other depositions from other people who cannot have compared notes) that a few impressionable academics have proposed that we grant them the presumption of truth. But here is the obvious Ockhamist reason why it would be utterly wrong to do so. If the huge number of "contacts" and abductees are telling even a particle of truth, then it follows that their alien friends are not attempting to keep their own existence a secret. Well, in that case, why do they never stay still for anything more than a single-shot photo? There has never been an uncut roll of film offered, let alone a small piece of a metal unavailable on earth, or a tiny sample of tissue. And sketches of the beings have a consistent anthropomorphic resemblance to those offered in science-fiction comics. Since travel from Alpha Centauri (the preferred origin) would involve some bending of the laws of physics, even the smallest particle of matter would be of enormous use, and would have a literally earth-shattering effect. Instead of which—nothing. Nothing, that is, except the growth of a huge new superstition, based upon a belief in occult texts and shards that are available only to a favored few. Well, I have seen that happen before. The only responsible decision is to suspend or withhold judgment until the votaries have come up with something that is not merely childish." Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything.

  • Judge Dread
    Judge Dread

    If you Google "Ouija board stories" you will get over 4 million hits.

    If you Google "Ghost stories" you will get over 5 million hits.

    How many actual experiences are within all of these hits, I do not know, and I sure the hell am not going to read all of them. Of those experiences how many are true and how many are false, that is another thing I do not know, and have no way of knowing.

    How many experiences have been written down in books prior to the release of the internet? That also, I do not know.

    How many experiences have never been written down, or even spoken of, because of fear of being ridiculed? I do not know.

    How many experiences thru all of history are buried in all of the cemeteries of the world? Impossible to know.

    I have had friends relate some of their own experiences. Most of them never having been JW's. Are they making them up?

    What or who took the tools down from their proper place in the garage and laid them out on a work table? Was my friend sleep-walking? Did he do it himself and just forget? He swears he didn't do it and his wife swears the same. As of 3 years ago, it was still happening on occasion. Who did it? I do not know.

    Who threw a key out of the side door of my former employers home, striking his sisters friend on his forehead? No one was in the house. Maybe it was the cat or the dog. They would have had to pull it out of a lock before they threw it. Was she lying to me? I don't know. She was never one to lie.

    What I do know, are MY OWN experiences, some of which were not very pleasant.

    I've had a dancing light come into my workplace and dance up and down the walls, ceiling, and even move to the other side of the room when I move to "its" side of the room. On several occasions.

    I've heard growling at my workplace when no one else was around. More than once.

    Go to your bathroom and put up the toilet seat, but make sure no one else is home. Go back in in, say, in 45 minutes. Is it still up, or did it come down? Try doing this for a few weeks and see how many times the seat comes down, no one going into the bathroom between you checking it. Try doing it multiple times in 8 hours. Tell me what happens. In my workplace, the seat came down multiple times, all by its little old self. Then, one day it just stopped.

    How about the door to the office all of a sudden just rattling, like someone was trying to get in. The door was not locked. You can see thru the door, and there was no one there.

    How about one of the phone lines being put on hold, and the phone that was used to put that line on hold was in a locked room that only the owner had the key to, and he had not been into work yet. I know, because I opened the office that morning. When he got to work, he took it off hold and said "How did that happen?".

    So there you have it. Not all of it, but most of it.

    JDW

  • caliber
  • CandleLight
    CandleLight

    Sweet baby...

    Powerful enough to possess a herd of swine and make them stampede off a cliff but not quite powerful enough to move a small planchette on a wooden game board.... without someone's help.

    Well, they haven't been sent by the son of God to be confined to a swine now have they? Besides their lack of power in what you quoted is what stands out. They have to submit to Jesus power.

    What do they care about a planchette... If they decided to move it, it wouldn't be because they were trying to escape it.

    Is there any chance you might still believe this because you still have remnants of old preconceived opinion as a child that evil spirits hung out around Ouija boards? If not, then what, specifically, are you basing those statements on?

    Seems like a fair question. The answer is no, preconceptions are gone. The word preconception means: An opinion or conception formed in advance of adequate knowledge or experience.

    Experience trumps conception. Not gonna be specific. No need. It is not evidence for any other person. ;-)

  • SweetBabyCheezits
    SweetBabyCheezits
    You do not have to believe in angels or fallen angels to experience the supernatural. Plenty of people don't believe in a deity but have no trouble believing in UFOs.

    Do supernaturalists ever try to explain Ouija board action as UFO-related phenomena? If not, no offense, but your argument is not really relevant to my specific Ouija board questions: "What if I don't believe in holy or fallen angels? ....If a true skeptic, a scientist, gets his mitts on an Ouija board and nothing supernatural happens, does that mean he got a dud?"

    Second, if I read your post correctly, it seems you're saying "There are atheists who believe in UFOs, therefore even those who lack belief in the spirit realm experience the supernatural." That doesn't quite follow. For some atheists to believe in UFOs does not show they experience anything... anymore than a Muslim believing in Allah shows that he experiences Allah's blessing or malediction. It still comes down to faith.

    Either those two sentences don't belong together (which I might've wrongly assumed they did) or they need to be modified for consistency if we want to keep them together:

    • "You do not have to believe in angels or fallen angels to experiencebelieve in the supernatural. Plenty of people don't believe in a deity but have no trouble believing in UFOs."

    OR

    • "You do not have to believe in angels or fallen angels to experience the supernatural. Plenty of people don't believe in a deity but have no trouble believing inexperienceUFOsdemon attacks." (Granted, in this case you'd have to provide evidence of unbelievers experiencing verified demon attacks.)
  • Nickolas
    Nickolas

    What is so wonderful about Jesus of Nazareth casting out a bunch of demons from one possessed so that they could enter into a herd of swine instead? Sounds more sinister than devine, more like voodoo or black magic. Why not just cast out the demons?

  • StoneWall
    StoneWall

    As I've stated on other threads...who came up with this notion that demons/spirits inhabit inanimate objects? (Such as a Ouija board, picture etc.)

    Even back as a JW when I read in the bible about demons and them possessing something it was always animate creatures, in essence a herd of swine,a man called Legion etc.

    Has anyone ever came across a scripture discussing a object being demonized?

    I've looked for Ghosts,demons,angels all my life and you know how many I've found? As of todays date...ZERO

    I can remember being a youngster and all the stories being circulated about the D&D books(Dungeons and Dragons).

    Oh they're demonized some would say. When I asked anyone how they knew this, it always got back to the ole story of a "friend told me about something that happened to one of their friends" (not even second hand information) that experienced it.

    So they were basically saying the reason they "knew" it was demonized isn't from self-experience, but because a freind of a friend said it was.

    Just for the record, I played D&D for years and never had one demon show up or not one bad occurence happen to any of the guys/girls that also played in our group. No suicides, no killing of parents, no casting of spells on others. Just a highly imaginative game to go on a made-up,ficticious adventure without damaging any real/living creatures. And we slayed many dragons in our quests ,just for the record.

  • SweetBabyCheezits
    SweetBabyCheezits
    The word preconception means: An opinion or conception formed in advance of adequate knowledge or experience. Experience trumps conception.

    Hi, CL. I know it seems that way, but we (if I may be so bold) at one time had a preconception that eerie, unexplainable things that scare us must be the work of demonic powers. Maybe you never did but most JWs I know thought that.

    The problem is when we later experience something unexplainable, even if we've left the WT, that old preconceived idea could cause us to attribute said event to demonic powers if we don't see any other explanation.

    All I'm saying is that I think strong presuppositions can get lodged deep within the subconscious and then we might settle on THAT before considering all other plausible options.

    Not gonna be specific. No need. It is not evidence for any other person. ;-)

    This is true. Thanks for your honesty.

  • Nickolas
    Nickolas

    You might be onto something, JD. There are people out there who will pay big bucks for the smallest shred of proof in the paranormal. I personally like the toilet seat phenomenon. My guess is irate girl demons. Sure pisses off my wife when I do it.

    "At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event" http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html

    Wiki lists a couple of dozen prizes, including one from Eng. Sanad Rashed and Dr. Ahmed Khaled for proof that ouija boards function as claimed. Sounds like a natural, given the context.

  • truthseeker
    truthseeker

    What is so wonderful about Jesus of Nazareth casting out a bunch of demons from one possessed so that they could enter into a herd of swine instead? Sounds more sinister than devine, more like voodoo or black magic. Why not just cast out the demons?

    Mark 5:13 "And He gave them permission. Then the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs, and the herd of about 2,000 rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned there."

    The demons were angry because they had been residing in a human and Jesus expelled them.

    This was to show that the demons can not only possess a person, but an animal as well; why they asked permission, was because at that time, they did not know if Christ was going to let them leave or have them abyssed.

    Had the demons not entered the swine, they would not have been driven into a frenzy; it was the action of the demons that caused their deaths; possession results in erratic behavior that's not wholesome.

    Should the swine have known better than to be infuriated by the demonic influence, since they have natural instinct given by way of nature from God? An animal is of lower intelligence; they do not worship God; instead, they are a component of nature for the continued cycle of animal life.

    Matthew 7:6 "Don't give what is holy to dogs or toss your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them with their feet, turn, and tear you to pieces."

    Why are dogs mentioned? Are they unclean like a pig? No; they are spoken of because a dog has no need of the things pertaining to Salvation; they are already under God's care as part of the animal kingdom. The pigs represent unclean beasts like God views the fallen angelic class, and that is why they (the swine) are associated with the human confederates that are unclean in God's sight; they, like pigs of nature - doing what their hearts motivate them to do, trample upon the things that are Holy and consist of God given truth.

    The demons that entered the swine, manifested their ouster in a very forceful way, which made it apparent to all that were observing the event, that demonic possession causes harm to those that are under the influence of such a malignant force; the event also served to reveal both the power Jesus held over demonic forces, and his willingness to help those that are demonic possession.

    The swine also serve to expose the fallen angels as being animalistic in their perverted nature in their inability to have recognized the value of the pearls they once shared an association with in good standing; allowing impure thoughts to pervert them away from God’s Law governing their conduct.

    Matthew 8:30-32 "Now a long way off from them, a large herd of pigs was feeding. "If You drive us out," the demons begged Him, "send us into the herd of pigs." "Go!" He told them. So when they had come out, they entered the pigs. And suddenly the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and perished in the water."

    Those swine were busy feeding in their daily activity and were unaware they would be targeted by a force they could not comprehend until the demons entered them and adversely affected their thought process; the reason the swine went off the steep bank was two-fold.

    1) They were driven to a frenzy by the demons that were mad because Jesus ousted them from the two human vessels.

    2) It revealed the demons disregard for all life but their own; during the Flood, the demons escaped that judgment by going back into the spirit realm to safety as the people of that world drowned in water; likewise they escaped drowning with those pigs because they were already residents of the spirit realm; and they were also sending a visual message to Jesus, that they are intent on destroying lives of all that come in contact with them if they cannot be shown mercy.

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