Tag Archives: occult

The soccer ball and the witch doctor

In Spiegel this weekend there was a report on witch doctors in Africa messing with soccer games. A taste: “They bend the lines, bewitch the ball, befuddle the referees (and) paralyze goal keepers,” Bartholomäus Grill, the Africa correspondent for weekly newspaper Die … Continue reading

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Author Mitch Horowitz Says Adolf Hitler was Not an Occultist

And an Alternet reviewer of Horowitz’s new book on occultism says that he’s persuasive on this score: He convincingly knocks down the trendy idea that the Third Reich was an occult phenomenon. “However tantalizing some may find it to conceive of … Continue reading

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Blogging UFOs: Are UFO Memories Even Reliable?

In recent posts I know I’ve been raining on the UFO believers’ parade, and I’m trying to keep an open mind about what I’ve discovered after a few weeks of looking into the UFO phenomenon, but the fact that eyewitness testimony … Continue reading

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Blogging UFOs: A Fresh Baked Alien Cookie

This afternoon it occurred to me that aliens, being a source of sexual and nightmare anxiety for a lot of people, might lead them to make images of aliens into food. You can’t be too scared of something that you can fashion … Continue reading

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Blogging UFOs: What’s the Evangelical Christian Take on Extraterrestrial Visitations?

In the early 1990s, an Evangelical filmmaker produced a pretty good documentary on UFOs. Below is part 1 of 8 from YouTube. As a teenager, I actually saw the first person interviewed (Dave Hunt) at my church a couple of times. Hunt was … Continue reading

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The Virtue of Doubt. An Agnostic’s Call For Intellectual Humility and Openness to the Ontological Mystery

Being an agnostic, I am very far from wishing to defend theism, but if I were to attempt to do so I think I would start with love. I know that sounds corn-ball, and like you, I can come up … Continue reading

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Witches in Africa: Still More Context for Sarah Palin’s Witch-Hunting Exorcist, Thomas Muthee

A fascinating article, from the London Telegraph, on “child witches” in Nigeria here. Money quote: The devil’s children are “identified” by powerful religious leaders at extremist churches where Christianity and traditional beliefs have combined to produce a deep-rooted belief in, … Continue reading

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“We Have Found a Witch, May We Burn Her?”: A Monty Python Retort to Sarah Palin’s Witch Hunting Exorcist Supporter, Thomas Muthee

Given Sarah Palin’s link to Thomas Muthee (see here), a Kenyan witch hunter and exorcist, and all the irrationality that witch hunting and exorcism in the 21st century entails, this seemed like a fitting retort:

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