esgaroth wrote:Some noted that there was a limitation of dowsing to the priesthood. Might it not make sense that these men, who have dedicated their lives to the service of God, and spent hours upon hours meditating and studying the word of God, might not be more disposed to wanting to protect a craft they found useful in administering the faith? For lack of a more intelligent analogy, I am thinking it would be the difference between a secretary of a doctor's office giving medical advice and prescriptions and the actual doctor. There has to be a 'proper alignment' don't you think to obtain the most information and thus come to a proper response? I tend to think that if spiritual men were wishing to protect a spiritual tool, they would want to safeguard those less skilled from coming to harm.
There are three points I wish to make:
First, regarding my point regarding divination being restricted to the priesthood: anyone who wasn't a Jewish priest who was caught practicing some form of divination would have either be guilty of impersonating a Jewish priest or guilty of paganism.
Why? Because all divination, from an old-world point of view, required an appeal to a deity. Today some dowsers today use modern jargon in place of the notion of a deity ("higher self", "akashic records", "extended consciousness", "information field") but back there and then such these notions did not exist, so DIVINE-ing was, in the ancient world, always an appeal to some deity or spirit, and either way you were
undermining the authority of the "real" Jewish priests by practicing divination illegally.
This is the
real reason why divination was barred from the laity, and lest we forget, if you were found "guilty" you were
killed (Exodus 22:18). So much for wanting to "protect" people.
I notice you avoid the much more obvious analogy of the protectionist attitude of the medical profession towards complimentary and alternative therapies - I guess because such an analogy would never wash in a place like this! Are doctors really trying to "protect" us from the "less skillful" herbalists?
I realise I'm putting words in your mouth, almost, but did you really not think of this analogy when you were just oh so
close?
Second point, what makes you think that ancient Jewish priests were more skilled diviners than priests of other religions? Were pagan priests somehow less in touch with the divine than their monotheistic counterparts?
Really this is all a diversion because the
central point I was trying to make was that
divining was never regarded as intrinsically evil, or else the Jewish Priests and Christ's apostles would never have used it themselves. That's the point.
Ian
) had this small Y at the top. Yes, and they were made of hazel! 