RZehr wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 8:14 pm
Neto wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 4:08 pm
RZehr wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 2:44 pm
Water is good, yes. Just like food and raiment is good. It is the method of obtaining that is restricted. A thief can acquire food and raiment by stealing, but we Christians are told not to do that. Same with the water divination. Water is good, but like stealing, divination is not acceptable for the Christian to practice.
Do you believe that any divination is sinful? Would you support an Haitian who went to a witch doctor to divine other good things beyond just water? How much divination are you comfortable with? Divination is also used to find far more than water. Is it okay to use it to find a gas pipe or gold too? What about a buried electric line?
To use a similar deductive reasoning as “water is good, so the devil must not have to do with the locating of it”, consider this: God doesn’t lie, so water witching should always be accurate”. But we know it is not always accurate.
People who think it is "of the devil" call it divination. I cannot confirm that it is the first, so I cannot consider it the second. My point stands, that I have never seen or heard of anything good that the devil did, whether it is stealing, or not. He cannot even steal something good for anyone.
I also didn't say that finding a water source in this way is a "spiritual gift", either. If it were, then one would expect that it would only work for believers.
I have had personal experience with only three people who have done it. Two were Christian missionaries. The third I actually didn't ever meet - I was out in the field plowing when he came, and went. I only heard the results from my uncle, whose house the well was being drilled for. That case was in Western Oklahoma, where you certainly cannot just drill anywhere and get water. But there WAS water where he indicated, and his caution about it being salty farther down was also true. (That part may have been more so just experience. I don't know, but he used a silver dollar on his forked stick to test again. That's the only time I've ever heard of doing that.)
Now if it's all just a fake, with results that are only due to experience or guess-work, then I can see where doing it
while also attributing it to Satan would be blasphemous, because all good things come from the Father, not the devil. I do not have an explanation for it. And I have tried it, but the copper wires don't do anything at all in my hands. Things like magnets have now been explained scientifically, although I couldn't explain it myself. I wonder what people thought, when they first found a magnetic rock. (Sure, Adam might have known about it, but sin degrades people's knowledge, so later on, someone somewhere found one, and had no idea why it acted the way it did.)
For now, setting aside water witching, what would your answers be to my questions?
I am assuming that you are referring to the set of questions I have underlined, and set in bold print in your post above.
Repeated here for clarity:
1.) Do you believe that
any divination is sinful?
All divination is sin.
2.) Would you support an Haitian who went to a witch doctor to divine other good things beyond just water?
No. I would not support any kind of divination, and tried to take every opportunity to teach against it (I'm particularly referencing the Banawa setting). We were also careful not to "dismiss it" as simple superstition. There really are evil spirits, and they really do appear to people, and do things to and "for" people. But everything they do is designed to further enslave their victim. And, they only do things that seem to be favorable to people where they are just temporarily "walking back" some evil they themselves have perpetrated. In this way, they appear to "heal" people. But they are powerless to deal with real sickness, or things like the bite of a real snake. Some of this is from a recording where a Banawa man told me about "How to Act Around a Shaman". Other parts are from our observations.
3.) How much divination are you comfortable with?
None.
4.) Divination is also used to find far more than water. Is it okay to use it to find a gas pipe or gold too? What about a buried electric line?
If you are referring to the use of the same procedures used to find water, then I would not consider that 'divination', so I don't know what to do with this question.
Divination requires some sort of 'tools' (various kinds of cards, or 'games' like the Owiji board), sacrifices, special incantations, dances, rattles, drug use (this was the case with the Banawa shamans), and other types of erratic behavior.
[The Banawa shamans were trained in shamanism through the use of certain narcotics, and required the deprivation of any intimate involvement with a girl or woman. At some point the trainee would experience some sort of crisis experience where his life was in mortal danger. A 'friendly spirit' would appear in physical form as an animal or bird, and rescue him from the lethal danger he was facing. This spirit would then become his constant companion, protecting him from the ill effects of other evil spirits. A shaman could take spirits into his blood stream without suffering any ill effects. These same spirits in the blood stream of non-shamans would cause serious "illness" or death through soul loss.]
5.) To use a similar deductive reasoning as “water is good, so the devil must not have to do with the locating of it”, consider this: God doesn’t lie, so water witching should always be accurate”. But we know it is not always accurate.
This one is not a question, but there seems to be an assumption you put into your reasoning here that I did not suggest. That is that you may have understood me to be saying that I think that the ability to find water is a special God-given gift, something God empowers his followers to do. If that is along your line of questioning here, then I'll just say that I affirm the following statement which you made here:
"God doesn't lie."
and, I didn't intend to portray this ability as a special gift from God. I do not know how or why it works, I just cannot accept the fast conclusion that "I do not understand it, so it must be the devil."
My reasoning is more along these lines:
1.) The devil never does anything that is good for people.
2.) Water is a good thing, a provision of God.
Therefore, the devil doesn't, or possibly isn't even able to provide pure water.
(I'm not very good at reducing my thinking into a sort of scientific reasoning process.)
There seems to be another assumption or question in the statements you make in what I've labeled as #5:
That what you call "water witching" is not always accurate. I do not know if it is, or isn't. I've seen it be consistently accurate in every case where I personally observed a water search being done on-site, with sticks or wire. (I specifically say "on-site" because at some point, someone will bing up doing something over a map. I had never heard of that at all until someone here on this forum made that claim. So I have certainly never seen that done, and I do not think it would ever work, either.) But since it doesn't work for me - never has - I cannot evaluate what sort of influences might cause a "false reading".
I have read studies that report a similar rate of error as that of trained geologists who are only allowed to observe the lay of the land, no test holes etc. (Speaking of drilling test holes, we did that in the village before doing the actual drilling. We pumped water down a 3/4" pipe, and just kept jabbing it into the earth until the water suddenly stopped coming back up out of the hole around the pipe. We were at 25 meters down. Couldn't understand what was happening, so kept messing with it until the pipe got trapped in the hole. Never could get it back out. The well driller who taught us how to hand drill the well said that what was happening was that we had hit a strata that was so porous that it was able absorb all of the water we were pumping down.) The conclusion of those studies was that the experienced person was able to trick himself into thinking that the wire or branches were telling him where water could found, when he was actually subconsciously just evaluating the area based on his past experience.)
So I don't think you can have it both ways. If it's the devil doing it, why would it sometimes fail? It seems to me that this would not only cause a loss of trust in the process by the party asking for the well location to be identified, but also cause the practitioner to have doubts. That is, if Satan knows where reliable underground water sources are located, why would he sometimes fail to accurately show the correct spot? Isn't that counter productive for a deceiver? (I am not even convinced that the devil knows where the good water sources are. But more than that, the Satan is a destroyer, and I cannot find a single place in Scripture where he did anything good for anyone.)
Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.
