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Yesterday I was out for dinner with some friends who were all non-Christians. They began talking about how they really want to see a psychic, a fortune teller, or even someone who contacts dead loved ones. I stayed pretty quiet, just listening, not really sure what to say. I’m struggling to formulate how I can talk to them the dangers of the occult without quoting the Bible or saying the typical things like, it’s evil and opens up doors for demons to enter. I have no concept of these things and this would mean very little to them. Would you be able to give a brief explanation of how the occult works in reality in a way that could make someone who thinks it’s just something neutral, innocent fun games and think twice about it in terms that someone not versed in spiritual concepts would understand? Thanks for any help you can provide. So there are a few things, there are a few angles to think about. One is of course the problem of the psychic and the fortune teller, which is that the idea of trying to know what’s going to happen to you in the future is something which is very dangerous because that’s not how the world works. The problem of seeing a fortune teller and trying to ask them what’s going to happen to you in the future is in some way submitting yourself to strange principalities because the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is something that actually is real. And so when you ask someone that has the power to know what the future is, when you ask them to tell you what your future is, you are submitting yourself to them and you are putting yourself in danger of basically subjecting your future to that person and not just to that person but to whatever principality that person is in contact with. And so it’s like the very desire to know your future in that way is dangerous for us. It’s not even a simple understanding that it has nothing to do with the Bible or spiritual things. It’s just a dangerous practice. And the thing is that a lot of the fortune tellers and people who do this will know that. I know someone who once went to have his cards done and someone did a reading on him. And the person told him before, it was like a new age obviously situation, but the person told him before, he said, I just want you to know that if I do this for you, like if I read your cards, you’re going to have bad karma for a while. And I think that that’s an inevitable thing. If you go see a fortune teller and you ask those kinds of questions, you’re actually bringing a curse upon yourself. And it’d be interesting even for people to ask fortune tellers, like if I do this with you, is there some negative effect on me? Like will it have a negative effect on me? Possibly the more honest fortune tellers would tell you that yes, although they probably believe that the positive side outweighs the negative side. So the second one is the problem of talking to dead people and channeling in general, which is that the idea that you’re actually talking to dead people is very suspect, to say the least. It is a mix of things that’s happening when you’re talking to a fortune teller and talking to dead people. One is the projection of the person that is there, right? It’s like you’re not talking to dead people, you’re talking to yourself. You’re talking to your memory, your fantasy, your desire of what that dead person is going to tell you. The fortune teller is sensitive and capable of channeling that back to you. Whatever aspect of a dead person that you encounter in that way is going to be something like a shell, like an empty shell of a person, either your fantasy of them, either some, let’s say, what you could call psychic residue that the person has left. That’s a weird word. People struggle to understand that. What we mean by psychic residue is the effect that that person has left. Often, it could be the trauma or it could be the things that that person did will leave traces in others. You can encounter that kind of thing, but that is not encountering the dead person. I would try to help them because you could maybe even ask them what they think is happening when they’re talking to these types of characters, what exactly they think they’re doing. Pressing that a little bit might be actually interesting to just say, where is the dead person that they’re talking to? From where are they hearing these things? Pressing them in these types of questions can maybe help you enter into an actual discussion about life and death and about God and about what souls are, all of these things. It could be an opportunity and you don’t have to be moralizing about it, but it is an opportunity to bring up these things and show them maybe to some extent how Christianity understands these things in a more profound way and that the prescriptions against them are not based on just kind of more moralistic ideas, but are based on understanding what exactly it is these things are and what’s happening. We’re prescribing them because the mechanisms by which they’re invoking these principalities and dead people is suspect and is dangerous because it’s catching all this projection and chaos and it’s catching all these things that are not actually the dead person. Yeah, I hope that makes sense. The other thing, the basic thing about occultism to understand is that the difference between, so let’s say, what’s the difference between praying to a saint or praying for my dead mother, or praying for my dead grandmother? What’s the difference between that and going to see a medium to invoke a dead person? The answer has to do with the purpose and it’s pretty simple. The first one is praying to the saint is making myself, let’s say, asking the saint to pray for me to God. It is not, how can I say this? I’m not trying to get something in a direct way from the saint. I’m asking them to intercede for me so that God will answer my prayer. The second one is, of course, praying for my, let’s say, my dead relatives or the people that I love. It’s done out of a desire for their good, not my good. When we go somewhere and we ask to talk to dead people, it’s like, what do we want? What do we want? It is clearly a desire to talk to someone, to get something from someone who is no longer there. It’s a desire to resolve something that I’ve never resolved with that person or to do that kind of thing. That is a selfish, applied desire. That is what occultism always boils down to, is that it is using things that look like religion and spirituality, but in order to weaponize reality towards my desires, to basically make things happen that fulfill my own hopes and desires and fantasies. That’s the difference between true religion and occultism. Hopefully that will give you a few tools.