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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 327482" data-attributes="member: 4937">MT: Howdy, Bro.  Yep, that's a pretty orthodox view.  You don't get burned as a heretic by the Jesuits. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Ok, so maybe I'm being too glib myself, but I figure that its easier to make jokes when I know we have some common ground.  If I'm offending someone, shout out and I'll apollogize.  I got one (maybe two) little theological quibbles:"These things are more evil than "ordinary" sin (lying, adultery, murder, idol worship) and it is very rare for those who perform such acts to repent."The orthodox view is that all sins be it 'mere' indifference or be it murder are from the prespective of God equally heinous.  White lies or no less sinful that any lie.  One of the difference is in, as you say, the likelihood that the sinner will repent.  This relates largely to the motivation for the sin (someone that thought they had a good motive is more likely to repent than someone who deliberately acted evilly), but all relates to the degree by which the particular sin damages the soul of the person performing it.  I wouldn't want to claim that practicing magic in any form was necessarily worse than murder in terms of how much it damages your soul, any more than I would want to claim that murder in any form is more spiritually damaging than slander (since in fact, Jesus claimed they were spiritually the same thing).  The other difference is of course the degree to which any given sin reaps a harvest of evil in this world.  Repentance or not, sin carries consequences unrelated to its spirituality."Contrary to common knowledge, the knowledge of how to perform such acts is not considered evil (Daniel was trained as an Astrologer), only actually performing them." I'm not actually even willing to go that far.  I think that this is one of those questions that relates to the extent of your own understanding (see Romans chapter 2-6), in that if you know that God has forbid the practice of Sorcery (without getting into to specifically what was forbid which is a whole other question) then certainly practicing it is evil.  But (based on the above scripture) I wouldn't want to go as far as (say) the Jesuits (again, I pick on the Catholics because I have something in common with them) and claim that all religious worship or practices of magic not ordained by 'the church' (whatever that means to you) is by necessity Satan worship and power granted through these means by necessity comes from Satan.  So (getting back onto topic) it is not necessary I think in this (quite innaccurate and hopefully light hearted model) to insist that all non-Christian spell casters are Satan worshippers.  Certainly some are (its kinda hard to argue otherwise for say Aztec priests and Baal and Asteroth worship), but by no means do I think that the Magi from the East who venerated the Christ were not followers of a non-Judeao-Christian tradiation and practicioners of (as they say it and for all I know) magic.  Would they have been better off otherwise?  Sure, but if you lack perfect knowledge (and we all do), God seems willing from what I've read to take that into account.This is the spiritual rule I refer to as: "You are not saved by the correctness of your doctrine."</blockquote>

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