The whole point is, relying on any other advice besides that of God is evil. Asking a Ouija board where your car keys are is evil because you should be asking God where your car keys are, not the Ouija board. Ditto chicken intestines and tea leaves.
No, the Ouija board itself is not intrinsically evil, any more than chicken intestines and tea leaves are intrinsically evil. It’s what you do with them that counts.
<< Yes, divination is evil, according to the Bible. >>
As I quoted above, sculpting with clay is also evil, according to the Bible. So is eating shrimp or lobster or pork. Do you take a similar stand against clay as you do against ouija boards? Do you oppose seafood restaurants or pork ribs as evil?
Asking the ouija board about the future is evil, you say. How about looking at the weather channel to learn about tomorrow’s weather? Is that not the same thing? How about asking your stockbroker to predict the future of your investments? Is that also evil?
It seems to me that assigning the term “evil” to an inanimate object , to an animal, or to a plant (like ouija boards, tea leaves, or modelling clay) is to miss the point entirely. A thing – like money, say – can’t be evil. Lions are not evil when they murder zebras. But people are evil when they commit murder. Evil requires a conscious decision by a sentient being.
Any other definition of evil is, IMHO, a satanic twisting of scripture.
One big difference between looking at the Weather Channel and consulting a Ouija board–the keyword “supernatural”.
From Merriam Webster online.
Most normal weathercasters and stockbrokers don’t consult supernatural powers to make their predictions, although I bet they all wish they could. 
(Would John Hope sell his soul to the Devil to know exactly which hurricanes would come ashore, and where? )
Here’s a couple of sites I found on the history of the Ouija board.
http://www.hauntedhamilton.com/ouija_history.html
http://www.spiritualitea.com/articles/historyoftalkingboards.shtml
Just put in history of the Ouija board and it’ll bring up all kinds of sites to check out if you’re interested.
The point is, whether you believe the board works or not, it’s an occult tool created specifically for communication with the dead or spirit world and this is forbidden in the Bible, period. That should be reason enough to stay away from it. Also, the fact that when you look up the history of the board it’s always listed in relation to the paranormal or the occult should tell you something.
As to modeling clay, unless an image is created specifically to be worshipped as an idol, what’s wrong with it? Clay wasn’t created specifically for an occult purpose, whereas the Ouija board was.
It is a piece of cardboard combined with a piece of plastic, and no matter how hard you believe in it’s “powers” it holds no mystical abilities whatsoever.
It is a toy.
It is make-believe.
It is fantasy.
But all the evidence shows there is nothing supernatural about the ouija board. You both seem to be saying that even if the ouija board doesn’t work, it’s still evil. Decades of testing have never shown a ouija board do anything other than slide around to wherever the person(s) doing the pushing wanted it to go.
So if there is never any divination going on, how can it be evil? It looks like to me that the people who invented the thing didn’t actually do it for evil, they did it to create a tool to wow the unsuspecting, and skim a few coins from the marks. This is bunco, not divination.
How can you say a ouija board “is forbidden in the Bible, period” and ignore the fact that playing with modeling clay also seems to be forbidden in the Bible, period. This would seem to be some selective interpretation on your part.
Ugly
yes, but if you use it to get information that cannot be gotten by any normal means (asking someone, looking it up)
its divination.
True, its a board, so if you hang it on your wall, or use it as a placemat, its not evil.
Just like a friend I had, who rolled dice for the I Ching.
Dice are not evil, but heck, he wouldn’t even go to the store if it rolled the wrong way!
Even if you’re not successful?
Right, that’s the “thin end of the wedge” thing that I was talking about earlier. It’s considered evil because it could provide an entry-level starting point for further exploration into the occult.
Okay, let’s stop this “modeling clay is evil?” train before it goes any further.
Um, no, that’s Dex taking a verse out of context and throwing it at His4Ever and Vanilla. Dex, that’s dirty tricks and I’m surprised at you–you should know better.
And I hope you don’t really believe that sculpting with clay is forbidden by the Bible, because you’d be wrong. However, the alternative–that you know that it isn’t prohibited but are just posting that to jerk His4Ever and Vanilla’s chain–is equally unappetizing, and dismaying, because now you’ve got other people in the thread misinformed, like RJKUgly.
The Bible does not prohibit making things out of clay. The Bible prohibits making idols out of clay. An idol is defined as a statue you make and then worship. It’s just idols that are forbidden, not representational ceramics in general.
Sure, you can take Deut. 4:16 out of context and point to it and say, “See, the Bible says that modeling clay is evil.” But that’s not what it says at all.
Deuteronomy 4 is here, courtesy of the Bible Gateway.
The chapter begins by reminding the Israelites what God did to the people who were worshiping the Baal of Peor (which is recounted here, in Numbers 25–basically, they all died), and then the rest of the chapter is a series of reminders of the Bad Stuff that will happen to them if they start making, and worshiping, idols, again, like the folks at Baal Peor.
“For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.”
And if the Bible really did prohibit the making of three-dimensional art, whether in stone, clay, wood, or whatever, representing “an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below,” then how do you explain basically the last 2,000 years of Western sculpture, much of which was produced under the auspices of one Christian church or another, including, but not limited to, the careers of Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini…
Or Tilman Riemenschneider.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/tilmanstyle.htm
I mean, geez, Dex. There’s a difference between “art” and “idols”.
I hate to tell you this but it has worked for some people. Do I have do get out the book I have about it and quote more stories on what’s happened to some of the people who’ve become involved in it? Christians have come in contact with people who’ve become demonized as a direct result of messing with the board. I hardly think that every single one of these people are lying. Maybe you need to do some further investigating. So it doesn’t do anything for everyone. The demons pick and choose when and where they manifest for their own purposes.
Let’s give it a rest with the modeling clay. It’s not forbidden and has nothing to do with this conversation for reasons I and others have stated.
You can quote stories until you turn blue, and it proves nothing. I can dig out old issues of Fate magazine and show you stories if people who have seen fairies, brownies and gnomes. I can show you websites where people claim to have visited the cernter of the Earth and seen giant green lizards. I can give you radio transcripts of people who claim they are abducted every other Tuesday by aliens.
Have you ever considered not relying so much on stories for your worldview?
http://members.aol.com/curiostybk/index.html
http://greatdreams.com/stories/ojindex.html
For any lurkers who may be thinking about using the board.
<< As to modeling clay, unless an image is created specifically to be worshipped as an idol, what’s wrong with it? >>
My point exactly. It’s not the clay that’s evil, but the use to which it is put. It’s not the ouija board that is evil, but the use to which it is put.
If a church displays a huge statue of Jesus, people who worship the statue are committing idolatry. But, I presume you would say that people who view the statue as a mere representation and do not “believe” in it (do not worship it) are not committing idolatry. The statue itself is not evil, what is evil is the use to which it might be put.
So, if I have a ouija board and am using it for “divination” (whatever the hell that means), that’s one thing. If I am using it for the fun of it, as a silly but meaningless game (I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits or divination), then why is that evil?
On the question of image vs idol, one can translate scripture from the ancient Hebrew as one pleases, of course. The cite given by Duck Duck is one translation, but a more literal translation of that line would be: “…not to act wickedly and make for yourself an idol [pesel] of the visage of anything [temunat kol], nor a statue [semel] which is the likeness [tavnit] of a man or a woman.” The final phrase “a statue which is…” continues through verse 17 18.
I agree, DDG, that I was hitting below the belt. I find it peculiar that people take THIS line from Deuteronomy and not THAT line, and so we get people condemning ouija boards and homosexuality, but finding it perfectly OK to eat pork or lobsters or make images or charge interest on loans.
In any case, I do apologize for adding a tangent, but I find it appalling that people would condemn an object as evil. It’s not the idol that’s evil, it’s worshipping the idol.
In terms of Christianity making idols (sorry, images) for the last two millenia, well, yeah. Christianity REJECTS almost all of the commandments of Deuteronomy. And whether the icons and idols in churches are objects of worship is a completely different topic, for Great Debates.
His4ever, I’d be curious to know whether you yourself have ever personally known anyone who used a Ouija board and then became demon-possessed, or obsessed with the occult, or was otherwise “damned”. I grew up reading the same books and tracts that you apparently did, preaching against Ouija boards in the same very strong terms, and I have known exactly two people in my life who “fooled around” with a Ouija board, both of whom were converted Christians, and both of whom experienced a “falling away” as expressed by their “going back to” their Ouija boards.
But while they may have “turned their backs on their salvation and returned to their evil ways”, still I never noticed that either of them became actually demon-possessed.
I personally went to a slumber party where we fooled around with it, and I didn’t become demon-possessed or obsessed by the occult. We also took turns going into the bathroom and chanting “Bloody Mary” into the mirror, succeeding in scaring ourselves half to death in a most satisfactory manner (although I was too chicken, myself).
So, have you ever personally known anyone who used a Ouija board? And was it a Christian person, or an Unsaved Person? And what actually happened?
You would have a little more credibility, in my book at least, if you had had some actual personal experience with Ouija boards, instead of merely parroting the Fundie “Don’t touch it, don’t go near it, don’t even THINK about it, it’s EVIL personified!” party line.
No, I don’t know anyone personally who’s become possessed through using the board. So what? Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. The closest I’ve come is having one at a slumber party when I was young at a girlfriend’s house. I didn’t remember it, my mom reminded me. She said I was scared when I came home, something about the thing moving by itself. My girlfriend’s family considered themselves Christians so I have no idea why they allowed the board in their home.
So, in your opinion those Christians and pastors who’ve had dealings with people who’ve become oppressed and demonized through use of the board are all lying? Anyone who gives their story about what’s happened to them in a book as a result of using the board are all lying? Hmmm…well, whatever you say. Like I said, use it if you want at your own risk. I’m not going to because as I said diviniation and communication with the dead are forbidden by God.
It’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they might be more susceptible to thinking the board “does” something, since they’ve been told by pastors that it does, despite little or no evidence to support it.
No, they’re probably not all lying. Some of them probably are, but it could be a small percentage.
The thing is, it doesn’t take a lie to get this kind of thing started or to perpetuate it. Misinterpretation of perfectly innocent events makes it easy to think one thing happened when something else did.
Likewise, it’s easy to attribute an effect such an apparent demonic possession (which itself is almost certainly misdiagnosed in some way IMHO) with the wrong cause. Lets see, this guy acts possessed. Has he had any contact with demons lately? Oh, he played with a ouija board? That must be what did it.
When playing with a ouija board, someone gives someone else’s elbow a small bump. Neither notice it, but the cursor jumps. Everyone jumps and goes “wow!”. Now 3 or 4 people think they saw a ouija board move by itself.
Mix into this (and dozens of other possible scenarios) a few people who actually lie, whether for fun or for profit, and you’ve got plenty of stories to publish in the next book by the credulous.
If the kinds of things I’ve described are true, then you’d expect that when you test under controlled conditions all of the weirdness would go away, and nothing special would happen. This is, in fact, exactly what happens when tests have been done.
On the other hand, if something actually was happening beyond mistakes, misinterpretations, and lies, then you’d expect that at least one proper test would show something. They never have.
So I don’t think that you are lying. I don’t think all your friends or the people you’ve read about are lying. I think that in this case, you’ve been occasionally lied to, but more often than that you’ve been misinformed for other more innocent reasons.
Ugly
It’s not “lying” so much as spreading information that may itself be a lie at heart. It happens with urban legends all the time. So, some very well-meaning and well-intended pastor hears a story from a friend of his about a person he knew who… This things always happen to a “friend of a friend.” And so the tale gets passed on, in all innocence and all ignorance, while there may be nothing behind it at all.
Thus, “common knowledge” is one thing, and scientific testing is something else.