Just this week, Dr Phil was promoting the use of psychics in missing persons cases. Now this?!
The man is a menace, alright. Disgusting.
Okay, no one can claim Dr. Phil is a good Christian!
Witchcraft is a belief that predates Christianity. Animists, for example, often believe in demonic possession and supernatural curses. Murdering/executing witches started among pagans. In fact, the Church in early medieval times condemned witch accusers. Many Christian kings and priests condemned the persecution of alleged witches and sorcerers.
Witchcraft ‘murders’ are quite common in aboriginal, pagan peoples even today. Many witchcraft murders occur in animist communities. The concept of witchcraft is often associated with the concept of jinx. If a people near a particular person are suffering misfortune, then the people near by will try to kill that person to get rid of the ‘curse’. The tribe may not even think the jinx does it on purpose. If the person didn’t plan it, then he is possessed. ‘Possessed people’ get killed, too. When witch hysteria starts to spread, the Church tends to hop on this animist bandwagon
The tide turned in the late medieval period. Towards the very end of the medieval period, just previous to the ‘Enlightenment’, there was a witch hysteria that by far exceeded anything witchcraft hysteria by pagans. The churches of the day, both Catholic AND Protestant, promoted the trial, imprisonment, torture and execution of witches for supernatural crimes. With the help of the Church, sincere Christians burned and hanged tens of thousands of people on the basis of magical crimes.
The Christian supported persecution far exceeded anything done before maybe because advances in technology and secular. The ‘burning times’ occurred very soon after Gutenbergs ‘invention’ of the printing press. Books on how to find and torment witches were widely circulated. The invention of a very efficient printing press (not the first printing press) impacted society much like the internet does today.
Further, the law was purposely slanted to find witches. The secular laws were twisted so that someone could be condemned for witchcraft for evidence that had been previously unacceptable. Evidence could be the testimony of someone being tortured. Evidence could be someone else bad dream. This started a chain reaction that soon generated tens of thousands of convictions.
I suspect that much of the resurgence in ‘witchcraft’ accusations is being driven by the Internet. Again, churches and mosques are jumping on the’witch-hunt’ bandwagon. I don’t think this will get very far unless the secular law starts to accommodate the witch hunters.
There were also translations of the Bible which talked about witches. There isn’t a word in Hebrew that precisely corresponds to the supernatural witch. The Bible condemns psychics, which are people who openly claim to have supernatural powers. The Bible condemns pagan priests, who claimed supernatural powers. However, this concept was more like heresy than supernatural witchcraft.
Control of the weather was seen more as proof that the prophets were talking to God. In the Bible, the Prophets seem to have a direct in with the god of the storm. Ahab persecuted Elijah because he thought Elijah caused the drought. Ahab was pagan, accusing Elijah of witchcraft. It was the God of the Hebrews who was thought of as a ‘Devil’, not Baal of Tyre. Elijah didn’t believe that the priests of Baal had magic powers. It was the Hebrew Prophets who were accused of supernatural witchcraft, not the pagan priests.
Someone should tell the religious leaders.
Make no mistake, though. The belief in supernatural witchcraft is very fungible. Christians can easily
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt
‘Christianisation and Early Middle Ages[edit]
The Councils of Elvira (306), Ancyra (314), and Trullo (692) imposed certain ecclesiastical penances for devil-worship. This mild approach represented the view of the Church for many centuries. The general desire of the Catholic Church's clergy to check fanaticism about witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees of the Council of Paderborn, which, in 785, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch.
The Lombard code of 643 states:
"Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds."[15]
This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which, following the thoughts of Augustine of Hippo, stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. The Council of Frankfurt in 794, called by Charlemagne, was also very explicit in condemning "the persecution of alleged witches and wizards", calling the belief in witchcraft "superstitious", and ordering the death penalty for those who presumed to burn witches.[16]
Other examples include an Irish synod in 800,[17] and a sermon by Agobard of Lyons (810).[18]
King Kálmán (Coloman) of Hungary, in Decree 57 of his First Legislative Book (published in 1100 AD), banned witch hunting because he said, "witches do not exist".[19] The "Decretum" of Burchard, Bishop of Worms (about 1020), and especially its 19th book, often known separately as the "Corrector", is another work of great importance. Burchard was writing against the superstitious belief in magical potions, for instance, that may produce impotence or abortion. These were also condemned by several Church Fathers.[20] But he altogether rejected the possibility of many of the alleged powers with which witches were popularly credited. Such, for example, were nocturnal riding through the air, the changing of a person's disposition from love to hate, the control of thunder, rain, and sunshine, the transformation of a man into an animal, the intercourse of incubi and succubi with human beings and other such superstitions. Not only the attempt to practice such things, but the very belief in their possibility, is treated by Burchard as false and superstitious.
Pope Gregory VII, in 1080, wrote to King Harald III of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death upon presumption of their having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence. Neither were these the only examples of an effort to prevent unjust suspicion to which such poor creatures might be exposed.[note 1]
On many different occasions, ecclesiastics who spoke with authority did their best to disabuse the people of their superstitious belief in witchcraft. This, for instance, is the general purport of the book, Contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis ("Against the foolish belief of the common sort concerning hail and thunder"), written by Agobard (d. 841), Archbishop of Lyons.[21] A comparable situation in Russia is suggested in a sermon by Serapion of Vladimir (written in 1274/5), where the popular superstition of witches causing crop failures is denounced.[22]’’
http://www.pctii.org/cyberj/cyberj10/onyinah.html
‘As was done in the past, protection from witchcraft activities has become a common concern.* Formerly such protection was sought from the priests of the gods or from sorcerers and medicine men.* From the early part of the twentieth century, however, a variety of exorcistic activities (anti-witchcraft shrine) have dominated African states.* Even when the colonial regimes suppressed witchcraft activities because they thought they hampered progress, they re-emerged within the Ingenious African Churches and later in a form of movement within the classical Pentecostal churches.[if !supportFootnotes][13][endif]* As soon as one of these movements expends itself, another of a similar nature springs up with a larger following.** As a result, at present, almost all churches include exorcistic activities, referred to as ‘deliverance’[if !supportFootnotes][14][endif] in their programmes, since failure to do so amounts to losing members to churches that include such activities.* Thus some scholars now observe the ‘Pentecostalisation’ of Christianity in Africa.[if !supportFootnotes][15][endif]’
*
:sigh:: if only I had a time machine) to point out that, 3 years later, I've since learned that Mark Shurtleff never met a scam he didn't like. It's no surprise that Byington is able to get away with so much mischief in Utah. 
