Good vs Bad Spirituality

Spiritual warfare is resisting, overcoming, and defeating the enemy’s lies (deception, temptations, and accusations) that he sends us.

Preface

Exploring a spiritual journey.

Risks of being misled on your spiritual path.

Many people will experience a shift in their spiritual curiosity and appetite and will chose to decipher their own moral compass. This individualized journey may cause many people to stray from generational religion practices as many people may observe flaws within their generational religion and witness judgment and hypocritical actions from those who follow certain religions . Therefore, many people seek to understand different beliefs and spiritual practices to help cope with the world, promote peace and positivity the best way they can, and help them find purpose in their lives. Although the spiritual seeking process may seem like an innocent course of action, it can be counterproductive when dabbling in different practices because it can open doors for spiritual warfare.

I first heard about modern witchcraft from a remarkably close friend whose mom considers herself a witch. I would listen to my friend talk about his encounters with others in the spiritual practices of writing down affirmations upon a full moon, possessing crystals, smudging (sage) their home, and other commonly heard activities. Hearing about it, I did not put too much thought into what they do, but it was interesting, and I saw nothing negative about their spiritual rituals. It seemed positive. One day, I asked another friend who goes to bible study with me about how he felt about those spiritual practices. He told me that he felt as though it was unnecessary to put praise on objects. Simply talking and praying to God is more than sufficient. He passionately believed that all that practice brought the opportunity for evil spirits to have access to you. I had also seen his perspective on this to be a good point.

So What Exactly Is Modern-Day Witchcraft or A demonic entity?

Modern-day witchcraft looks like the simple things we see daily: engaging in zodiac signs, intuitive horoscopes, tarot cards, possessing crystals, utilizing sage (funny one: I was told smoking weed was considered a form of witchcraft), etc. My main question is, how could something that many people are into and seems spiritually innocent be deemed harmful? Whenever I would try to do a basic search on the topic on Google, I thought it was crazy that I could never find ONE opposing argument on how it could be deemed harmful. Why is that?

Let’s Do The Research

A year later, I took a research writing course intended for business majors after graduating with my bachelors degree. There was a layered project, for this course, aimed to enhance the student’s skills on how to conduct in-depth research on any given topic of interest and then turn your findings into an informative business and social media proposal. What I liked about the school I took the class for was the class size. Probably only 7 students, including myself, were taking this course online; therefore, the discussions regarding each other’s topics brought attentive feedback on your topic and helped tremendously construct one’s project each week.

The topic that I chose was “Is the Normalization of Modern Witchcraft Dangerous?” I chose this topic because it would allow me to scholarly research, my prior curiosity on the topic, further, and I wanted to see what information I would pull from it. By doing this topic, I would have the opportunity to educate myself and those around me with my findings.

I got a lot of good feedback from my peers, who thought it was an intriguing topic, and one particular student considered himself a witch. He thought it was cool that I was researching the topic and gave me some starting points to research and insight into his experience.

The Challenges

It was still challenging to find an article about witchcraft that took an outright negative stance or to state if there were any harm at all in the matter. I thought that was extremely odd. The approaches within my research was: I first looked up the history of witchcraft and saw how people felt about it back in the day because newer sources are ALL pro the matter. I felt like I was learning some interesting information; however, I noticed that EVERY TIME I started to learn about the subject through the articles, my head would hurt.

The class had reach the finalization period of constructing the layered research project, and I decided to change my topic at the last minute from the instant headaches that followed my research process. As I changed my subject to something completely “normal” (the topic change: Lack of Financial Literacy in Schools), those moments when I would allocate time for in-depth research, my head would not hurt at all.

Odd.

I assumed my original topic, Is the Normalization of Modern Witchcraft Dangerous?, was not something I should delve too much into to understand. However, after the fact, I ended up getting the conclusion and evidence of for my original research topic after all. I believe I was getting headaches within my research topic because the topic of Witchcraft has long layers of demonic energy and entities attached to it. Therefore, the headaches served as a warning sign from God, to stop. However, God knows I am a curious being and still felt like I was left hanging with no answer to my question. Coincidently, I came across this YouTube video that served as my conclusive answer to that question: Is the Normalization of Modern Witchcraft Dangerous? And this source was spiritually credible, and did not leave my head hurting.

The video I found was a pastor sharing his thoughts on those who delve into intuitive horoscopes, fortune tellers, and those who proclaim their practices to be positive spirituality and do them with good intentions. I will never forget that he said, most honestly, that the enemy (Satan) would like to relay the message of what will happen in your life before God does. He lets people know that right now, especially, there is a war on the soul going on and that distinguishment between prophetic and deception mirrors the same. Therefore, this allowed me to infer that everything labeled spiritual is not good and that many people must know this. Having faith in the unknown is what God wants, and we must pray for discernment each day to help us distinguish what is truly God or deception.

To further get more insight on this conversation I watched, I placed it below (The heart of the conversation that I mention in the conclusion starts at 15:36) :