[Cowthief]

Hello.

In Saudi Arabia a woman was beheaded for the practice of witchcraft.
I have very carefully read the Koran and can find where it is prohibited but no explicit punishment.
There is nothing that permits beheading from what I can find.
Next is the issue of worship.
If one worships god this is considered prayer.
However one can pray to the devil and this is very clearly forbidden, to include the casting of spells and other such acts.
Could one pray to god and by the use of the power thereof cast a spell? is this even possible?
Please remember that 100% of my questions are based on the framework that is the Koran.
It is the Koran that deals with the devil in this manner, I just want to know how it all works.
I do not want to cast spells, I just want to understand the scheme behind it all.

Thank you.

[BaronChairman]

No, it's not possible to cast spells and use them in a framework of good.

[EirinnMoChroi]

I find this very interesting. I was a month away from being initiated into the Wiccan priesthood and was a practitioner of Celtic Paganism for 8 years before I converted to Islam.

Im not going to get into the science of what exactly a spell is, or the difference between high magick and earth magick and the psychology behind them, but I will tell you that magick deals with a realm that is not of our physical state. Magick is energy manipulation and the energy that we manipulate comes from a realm that we dont see which is where things like jinn exist.

The issue stems from the fact that dabbling in the supernatural realm is not safe for us and often results in polytheism, something that God is ferociously against since often times witches will ask for the help of another deity or creature. God is the one who wills things to happen, not us. He did not create the supernatural realm for humans to dabble in it and witchcraft, or manipulating the energy fields around us, is NOT our job. It is Gods.

Now, there are things that neopagans do today that are NOT considered witchcraft. Things like meditation, aromatherapy, appreciating the natural world, etc. are things that I even do on a regular everyday basis (not meditation though because my mind cant focus on anything for too long at a time) and don't conflict with God. God wants humans to find value in our planet and love our world because He made it for us to use. Muslims also do believe in the supernatural realm because that is where we would find the Jinn, beings that God created that are not humans and live in a dimension different than ours. As an ex-priestess of Wicca, I dealt with this realm often and it is not always a safe place to dabble. Gods rules exist for the purpose of keeping us safe.

Witchcraft can also result in a feeling of hubris, a false sense of "godhood", since neopagan faiths like Wicca basically teach us to be our own gods. To find power within ourselves and not necessarily through a higher being all the time (sure there are higher beings but they dont "lord" over us the way Allah does.) This is very sinful because we are NOT equals to God. Not even close. Pretending we are or even assuming we could be is not ok. This concept can be taken from the story of the Tower of Babel when Gods followers built a large tower to try to be close to God and to reach Him. God punished these people by giving them all different languages (which is where we get the word "to babble" or "a babbling idiot") so they couldnt communicate to finish the tower. We are not MEANT to be equals to Him.

Yes, energy manipulation (spells) CAN be used for good. but NO, spells cannot be used if you are Abrahamic. If you worship God, you cannot do magick. It is said plain and clear in all of His holy books.

One last note on Paganism since we're on the topic...

"Paganism" is an umbrella term for any religion that is not Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Pagans all across the globe do not share a religion with each other. Celtic pagans differ from Norse pagans who differ from Egyptian pagans who differ from Shamans. They do NOT share a religion. Some pagans are polytheist while some are monotheist. Some pagans dont worship a God at all. Some pagans do witchcraft, some pagans dont. It would be like comparing Islam with the native religion of Australian Aborigines. Two completely different things. Just want to make that clear since too many people judge "witchcraft" on the same scale all across the globe.

[BaronChairman]

 EirinnMoChroi, on 28 January 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:

I find this very interesting. I was a month away from being initiated into the Wiccan priesthood and was a practitioner of Celtic Paganism for 8 years before I converted to Islam.

Really? That's quite a shift. I hope you're not averse to giving us a fairly detailed explanation as to what changed your mind.

[EirinnMoChroi]

 BaronChairman, on 28 January 2012 - 11:38 AM, said:

Really? That's quite a shift. I hope you're not averse to giving us a fairly detailed explanation as to what changed your mind.

lol. My take on neopaganism and Islam would be incredibly unpopular by the majority of Muslims. Neopagans and Muslims are connected on a lot more than Muslims would like to think we are and Neopagans arent as oblivious to the teachings of truth as Abrahamic followers like to claim they are. Neopagans are often thought of as barbarians who have no idea about the word of God or blatantly disregard Him and His rules. Funny enough, pagans from all over the world had a concept of a messiah nailed to a cross (or tree), born to a virgin mother, and had 12 followers LONG before Jesus ever walked the planet (sorry, Christians). Also, Allah existed in all pagan faiths. He was just inaccessible since He was so vast and magnificent. Humans, in their need to be able to relate to Him, created smaller, or "lesser" gods, to relate to. This is why we have gods of war, gods of the hearth, of the animals, of the trees, etc. They are aspects of this greater God that humans find very intimidating. To make Him more relatable, they just broke Him down into different symbols, faces, and names in order to relate to Him on a more human level.

I switched because Neopaganism does not offer a relationship with God the way Abrahamic religions do. If you are in a rut in your life and you are a Celtic pagan, you are on your own. There arent gods that will hold your hand and help you through issues. I missed having a hand to hold and a God who obviously loved me. I think humans need to feel like each of us is special and significant and Abrahamic religions offer that wonderful reality through a relationship with God. I couldnt accept the concept of a son of God and knew nothing of Judaism, so Islam was the religion I studied.

I still have issues with the Islamic view of paganism since I have a respect for my old religion. I have absolutely no issues with pagans and, many of them, I still get along with and respect deeply. Celtic pagans are a very peaceful and down-to-earth people and I agree with much of their philosophy and much of their lifestyle is very natural and organic--something that I think Islam appreciates and accepts completely. I dont have an "us and them" mentality that too many people have. I dont break human beings up into groups based on their religion. It's too small minded and God isn't broken up into pieces like that.

I think that paganism is so much older than our organized religious faith and not everything that they practiced was wrong. Pagans share philosophy with Abrahamic religions too. Afterall, pagans were one time Gods only people. He reached out to them on levels that we dont have record of. Abraham didnt even start off as a monotheist prophet. He was a henotheist (the concept of God being great but lesser gods existing) and Judaism, in the beginning, was a henotheist religion. It wasnt until later that Judaism emerged as a complete monotheist faith. There were thousands of years of human survival long before God was ever a monotheistic thought. These people all need to be accounted for. They cannot just be lost in space and assumed to be bound for hell because they did not have the Torah, Gospel, or Qur'an. They had religions and their religions came to them SOMEHOW. Perhaps God exists to us today because, through time, He developed His own identity based on our ability to grow mentally. He gave us more and more of Him as we grew as a species; as we grew in the idea of complicated and abstract thought.

The story of Allah is a complicated story and, if you look at the older religions, you can actually SEE how God himself evolves through time. Abraham was chosen by God and Gods message to Abraham was very basic and simple: Worship me. thats it. Nothing too fancy since God needed to start small for His religion to be able to grow. Can you imagine God handing over a Qur'an to Abraham and asking Abraham to give it to his small tribe of bedoins? It would be like Star Wars being handed to Queen Elizabeth and her being told that this is the true religion. The religion would have been laughed at and tossed aside immediately. God had to start off small for it to stick and grow a foundation. Abraham had one commandment: worship me and you will be given a land (the covenant.) Gods rules got more and more complex as time progressed. Moses was given more commandments (Deuteronomy) that expanded on Abrahams commandment. Suddenly, Gods religion had LAWS, something that it really didnt have as much of when it was given to Abraham. The laws wouldnt have stuck if He had given it to Abraham right away. He needed to develop a foundation first.

Then came Jesus who gave more laws based on the mistakes made by the people who preceded him. Then, Muhammad came with the same intent. God revealed more to us based on what we were able to take in at one time. In the beginning, He didnt emerge as a concept completely alien to what we worshiped as pagans. He had to have connected with us on a common ground or we would have rejected His teachings if they were TOO alien to what we already knew. Therefore, not everything in paganism is entirely wrong or unrelateble to Muslims. Their religion was once our religion too and God had to connect to us based on it.

This also opens the door to allow our religion to evolve with the changing in time. This is why its so important to know Jewish and Chrsitian history in order to fully understand our own. We watch Gods image evolve over time and it doesnt just STOP with Muhammad. A religion given to us 1400 years ago needs to be able to exist in 2012 and the only way for that to happen is if we take lessons from the beginning, watch them evolve to the present, and understand that evolution is how we survive. Religion has to evolve as well. The basic foundation is there, but some of the cultural things in Islam that too many of us hold on to being purely religious has to allow for evolution to todays times.

[BaronChairman]

I never looked at it that way before. I know a little about the Pagan religions and I've studied some of them, but I am by no means any kind of expert.