Reading Time: 8 minutes By Sarah Braasch In the early 80’s, the primary preoccupations of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were Armageddon, Smurfs, Michael Jackson and demonic attack, but not necessarily in that order. As a young Jehovah’s Witness girl, my worldview was what you might describe as surreal. Smurfs were little blue imps disguised as Saturday morning cartoon characters. They […]
demonology
Posted inGeneral
The Witch Children of Nigeria
Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ve written on several past occasions about how belief in malignant supernatural forces causes real harm to real people. There are examples of this from every region of the world, but some of the most wrenching are from Africa, where Biblical beliefs about demons and evil spirits still run rampant. In January, I wrote about […]
Posted inGeneral
Emptying the Haunted Air
Reading Time: 4 minutes Almost two hundred years ago, the English Romantic poet John Keats wrote a poem, “Lamia“, in which he lamented that the advance of scientific understanding would rob the world of its beauty and wonder. Keats’ chief villain, though not named in the poem, was Isaac Newton, whose use of the prism to split white light […]
Posted inGeneral
Why Does God Let Satan Roam Free?
Reading Time: 3 minutes “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” —1 Peter 5:8 “Only-begotten Son, seest thou what rage Transports our Adversary? whom no bounds Prescribed, no bars of Hell, nor all the chains Heaped on him there, nor yet the main Abyss Wide interrupt, […]
Posted inGeneral
Rebuking the Devil
Reading Time: 5 minutes I have written several times in the past about how religious superstition, when it is taken seriously, causes harm and suffering to real people by dissuading them from seeking the evidence-based treatments they need. But a new story from the March 31 edition of Newsday, Trying to change minds in the Congo, is one of […]
Posted inGeneral
Witch Hysteria Is Alive and Well
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the great tragedies of the human species is the violence and turmoil still happening in Africa. Africa is the continent of our origins, the place of our species’ birth, and the one place on Earth to which everyone now living can trace their ultimate ancestry. It should be a place of peace and […]