This Week in Witchcraft (S1 E17)

Welcome to This Week in Witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat, and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan. Can you spot it out in the wild? I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Derham, David Kassin, and Andrew Hudson.

Abortion as Witchcraft After Roe v. Wade

This time Michael has found us some witchcraft out in the wild, and he's going to present it for us.

So in light of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, we have been hearing a lot of witchcraft out in the wild as people try to make sense of and try to respond to this momentous occasion in the history of our nation.

There was an op-ed written in The Nation by Sophie Lewis, and I'm going to read a selection of that. We humans do kill when necessary. Victims of assault sometimes kill in self-defense. Targets of persecution sometimes kill for justice, or just to reduce the number of their persecutors, and the colonized sometimes kill for liberation.

Mothers living in unspeakable conditions, including chattel slavery, have been documented to kill their children as an act of mercy. Of course, these examples are instances of necessary violence generated by the conditions for which we struggle to render extinct.

When it comes to abortions, it seems possible that the conditions that necessitate them may never be wholly eliminated. Even if vasectomies become generalized and perfected ectogenetic technologies become universally acceptable, as long as people are performing pregnancy on this earth, they must be free to change their minds about seeing it through.

For millennia, those of us who have helped a friend terminate a pregnancy, be it with herbal abortifacients, progesterone blockers and ulcer tablets, or vacuum extraction devices, are well situated to understand that something is killed during a uterine evacuation, much as a flower dies when it is plucked.

But what's the point of acknowledging this now, at a time when abortion rights are so imperiled? For one thing, it would seem hard to deny that the euphemistic, apologetic, placatory, pro-choice strategy hasn't worked out thus far.

So why not risk coming out for what we actually want, namely abortion, a clearly documented public good?

Is that honest witchcraft?

Oh, it's still full of witchcraft.

Unapologetic.

Yeah.

So what happens here is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, abortion is killing babies, but hear me out.

Yeah, but we kill people all the time for good reasons, right?

Yeah, exactly. Self-defense, right? And in fact, the reason why killing is a common good is when the people doing the killing of the weak and the innocent, they're doing it because they are the oppressed, right?

This is why we have to do it. In fact, notice that it is for a common good that we kill our babies because of our miserable.

Oppression.

So we must be free to kill babies because we're oppressed. Secondly, we must be free to kill babies because we've been doing it for a long time. Women have been helping each other kill their babies for millennia.

So why stop it now? So we have precedent here that goes way beyond Roe and the Supreme Court. Forget 49 years. This has been going on for millennia. We've been killing our babies. So leave us alone. We'll do it anyway.

Okay.

And then thirdly, her point is that we need to be free to kill our babies because that's left entirely up to the one who's performing pregnancy and it's entirely up to us whether we want to finish it or not.

So her point is, rather than using our euphemistic approach of saying pro-choice, since this has not worked, okay, because it hasn't worked, now we need to talk about it in a different way. What just happened?

Our spell broke. Our spell stopped working.

It was ineffective.

We need a new spell. That's why it's still witchcraft.

They were using, he said, a euphemistic strategy to make it more palatable to the general public. Let's get those people in the middle by using these particular kind of words. We didn't get those people in the middle.

It hasn't worked. So let's try a different approach.

Yeah.

It's killing something. She could not come out and say, we're killing a person. Killing something.

In this, she's agreeing with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said, you know, abortion is more than terminating a pregnancy. There's a lot more going on here.

So they're changing spells, but the outcome is still the same. The goal is still the same. It is a public good. This is for the greater good. This is why you should support this.

Yeah.

If you support self-defense, you should support this.

Exactly. You have the idea here where we're going to stop using our magic word, pro-choice. We're going to stop using our magic word, fetus. We're going to stop using our magic word, termination of a pregnancy.

We're going to stop using our magic words that we crafted to try to win this right. Because Roe was overturned. Apparently, our spells aren't as strong as their spells. Our witchcraft wasn't as strong.

So we need to brew up something better. And what we're going to do now is that we're going to use some sorcery. And we're going to mix together all kinds of situations that don't really belong together.

We're going to change the ethics of our claims. And we're just going to come at this from a whole different angle. And we're going to show how ethical it is to kill babies. And this is, again, all in the name of the common good.

It was interesting, the changing, changing spells. They said, well, we just need to start being honest. Not being honest.

No.

Claiming to be honest. No, no. Some of the new words, the new spells I heard was performing pregnancy. I got to tell you, that was a new one.

And she goes on, and her article is rather lengthy and so on. But it comes down to, as well, that as long as there's no abortive option, as long as a woman is not free to kill her baby before it is born, then this is misogyny and it's a forced birth.

So all we're left with is forced births. We're going back to misogyny, patriarchy. This is oppression. And we're just going to be killing our babies anyway because, again, we're oppressed. The reason why we kill babies is that we're oppressed.

It's the basic argument. So to try to take that away from us just makes things worse. That's their claim.

The Logic of Oppression and the Rebellion Against God

All right.

So the response to these word spells, to this new tactic of this is for, we are killing something, but it's okay, and it's our right anyway.

The problem with this is this kind of argumentation knows no bounds and knows no end. Because, again, aren't those who are considered misogynists and patriarchs, aren't they an impediment to the common good?

And aren't there several examples throughout the history of millennia we've been killing people to deliver ourselves from oppression and slavery? So let's just go kill all the patriarchy. Let's go kill all the misogynists because that's the same kind of common good as it would be when we kill our babies.

We kill our babies, society improves. Let's go kill everybody who is anti-abortion because they're misogynist in their patriarchy. So let's go kill them because that'll be for the common good. There's no end to this argumentation.

Okay, so first of all, it's absurdity on its face. It's ludicrous on its face. The other side of it is, when these people are feeling oppressed, it is not a patriarchal structure that is oppressing them.

It is not a misogynist system that is oppressing them. They're being oppressed by God because God has told them what sex is for. And God has designed what a man is and what a woman is. And God has declared that life is life and you shall not...

If anyone takes a man's life, if anybody sheds blood by a man, his blood shall be shed. God has set the rules. He's the creator. He's the master. He's the one in charge of everything. And when you live your life in rebellion against God, you're going to feel it.

You're going to feel the oppression. You're going to feel that everything is working against you when you try to rebel against God.

And then so you killed the blessing that he gave you.

That's right. It's a striking out against God himself. But the reason why they're feeling oppressed and doing what they're doing is because they're trying to rebel against God and his Christ whom he has enthroned.

This is just Romans chapter 1. They're suppressing the knowledge of the truth in unbelief. They are purposely, willingly rebelling against what they know to be true. And they are doing it in a vehement, violent, angry way.

Because they ultimately, as rebellious sinners, they hate God and they love themselves.

I mean, for example, take a young man who runs away from probably a broken family. He's going to go do his own thing, and he pursues a homosexual lifestyle. He gets sick because of it, and he's struggling with disease.

He keeps on having horrible outcomes in relationships. And he has trouble just living. He has trouble just making any progress in life. Everything just seems like it's against him. This isn't society oppressing him because he's gay.

This is what it's like when you're made in the image of God and you rage against him. But people take this up and they say oppression, oppression, oppression, and put it through the Marxist sifter and then come out the other side and become revolutionaries.

It sounds, and a lot of this sounds like ravings of like lunatics, right? And I've seen that, but I think we need to make a distinction as Christians. A lot of times when you see people who you agree with on the way that people react, they'll say you need to treat these people as though they have a mental illness.

No, they have a spiritual sickness. And it does have mental ramifications, but these people have a spiritual illness rather than a mental illness. And I think that's one of the witchcrafts that we can sometimes agree with, or see ourselves agreeing with without really knowing it.

And that type of raving or raging against God, it looks like lunacy. And it is lunacy, but it's one of a spiritual kind and not a secular-mindseted mental kind, I would say.

Those innocent flowers are not hers to pick.

Don't belong, yeah. Good point.

Recommended Reading, Documentary Viewing, and Podcast Listening

Well, I think that about wraps up our witchcraft this week. Michael, what is your recommendation for content?

My recommendation is Monsters from the Id by Michael E. Jones. This is a heavy read, both in terms of terminology and in topic. But basically it comes down to this, that the Enlightenment has inseminated Western culture with the Revolution.

And the Revolution has brought horror. So Michael Jones examines the genre of horror literature and movies and investigates its origin and its development and expression and demonstrates that this genre from Frankenstein to Dracula to more of the modern horror films of our day is built upon this idea that having engaged in the Enlightenment, the outcome in this Revolution has been nothing but disaster.

And there's very little way to explain it and there's no way to control it. And it's just chaos. And the only way out is some horrific further problem. And if you read a horror novel or you watch a horror film, very often things start going wrong.

Everybody begins to be affected. They don't know why things are going wrong. They can't explain it. And they spend most of their time trying to explain it while suffering from it. Until some chaotic end.

They try to get on to the other side. But nothing's ever really truly resolved. There's no assurances that this won't happen again. And honestly, the horror genre fits very well with pagan despair. It makes it a very popular genre today.

And it also works well because we're living in horror. We're living in horror with so much violence and people dying every day and diseases and disaster and whatever, war and food shortages and so on and so forth.

We're just living in horror. We're living in various elements of the collapse of Western society. And why? Why is it not doing well? Well, you have to go back to the Enlightenment's denial of God and the revolution's rage against God, which brings about the horror of mankind living the way that we do.

Again, it's a heavy read. Some people have described it as dark. It has taught me to hate sin better. My ability to hate sin has been greatly enhanced by this book. And for that, I am appreciative of his writings.

My recommendation, and I'll have to put a caveat on it, but my recommendation is a documentary of sorts by Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. And it is What Is A Woman? And there have been some critiques of this documentary, and I got it.

I got access because I really wanted to watch it, and it was something that my wife and I watched together. This is not family-friendly, so don't make this with the kids, but this is definitely something that I enjoyed watching with Amy, and it was a really good critique of the modern trans movement is what it is.

The people that he interviews, from academics to medical doctors to scientists, these are heavy hitters. And their argumentation is so empty and weak and vapid, it's comical. And he has a deadpan delivery that you're rolling laughing and then you're crying.

But he is Roman Catholic himself, and The Daily Wire is Ben Shapiro, a Jewish. So this isn't really going to be a biblically-based critique. However, he does make the comment that truth cannot be severed from God.

And he does say that, but his purpose is not to make a positive argument for what is a woman. His whole point is that it's pretty obvious, and don't listen to these people that have all these degrees and letters after their names, and I'll show you why.

And he shows how incredibly absurd their arguments are. It does require a little bit of filtering. It does require you to understand that the source of what a woman is comes from God, and it is that he outlines that in Genesis.

There is a critique there, but take it for what it is. A really good analysis of how empty modern academia and scientists and medical doctors are, and how dangerous they are because they cannot or will not define a woman.

So there you go. Daily Wire produced Matt Walsh. And do take it with a grain of salt. I did. But I did enjoy it very much.

I'm going to recommend the Trinity Foundation podcast, ostensibly a Presbyterian ministry. However, they tend to focus on, I guess, Reformed issues. And recently they have had a guest, Timothy Kaufman, who is a man who came out of Roman Catholicism, the cult of Roman Catholicism.

And his critique on the latest episode is how the apparitions of Mary are quite contrary to the Word of God. And he gives a critique of how the visions of Fatima and Lourdes, all these apparitions are abiblical, anti-biblical, and how they do not actually teach what the Christian faith is.

And it rhymed.

Yeah, well, I mean, I did a little bit of that. So he wrote, quite contrary, a biblical reconsideration of the apparitions of Mary. And so he came on the program to discuss how his Marian devotion, whenever he was a child, was all built on lies.

Okay. I appreciate that. I'm going to recommend physical labor, production of food, and sunshine. Recently, I have been forced into situations where those three things are essential for us. But I've enjoyed them quite a bit.

I've learned quite a bit. And I think if we can do some of those essential things for our families and our bodies to get the necessary nutrients that we need and also get the necessary physical labor that we need, we are to work against the thorn in the bramble.

And in doing so, we actually learn a lot about ourselves. And when I say learn a lot about ourselves, learn a lot that is wrong with ourselves. And I have learned a lot that is wrong with myself in toiling against the soil and against the thorns.

And that wraps it up for today. We are always very thankful for our listeners tuning in every week and for supporting us by rating, reviewing, and sharing the show. And we hope you can join us again for another week of uncovering and rebuking witchcraft in the modern world.