A feature on our website is the live traffic feed, which gives details of where our visitors come from and what they are reading. We find the information useful: we see the nations from which readers arrive; in one month there were 93 including 13 Islamic countries. However, we have no control over the advertisements at the bottom of the front page visitor list. Today I noticed “psychic” readings being advertised. This is deception from the pits of hell and you should avoid it. If this kind of rubbish starts to crop up we will reluctantly have to drop this feature.
I once worked full time for a psychic organisation so know exactly what it is about. It is one of Satan’s end times deceptions, persuading gullible and ill-informed people that they can get advice from the dead, or contact deceased relatives. This practice is roundly condemned in the Bible and the full details are in our books, Goodbye America, Goodbye Britain and Cults and Isms: True or False? which are available from our web shop and are an antidote to all the misinformation flying round the web. Get one to show any relatives mixed up in anything “psychic,” even palm reading or visits to psychic fairs.
Here’s an except from a chapter I wrote for the Cults book Spiritism, channeling and psychic fairs, by Alan Franklin.
“Believe not every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they be of God. 1 John 4:1
“Life goes on,” says a sign on our local spiritualist (sic) church. Indeed it does. Unfortunately for the spiritists – the Bible’s term for dabblers in the occult - it does not go on very well for them once they are “beyond the veil,” as they like to put it.
Although I attended a spiritualist church as a young man and became a member of the Spiritualists’ National Union inGreat Britain, the world’s largest organisation for spiritualists, according to its website, spiritualism seemed on the way out. Something for little old ladies trying to contact their dear departed.
But those of us hoping that this anti-Christian practice would die a natural death – with no contact hereafter - were too optimistic. I moved on to become a magazine writer and was recruited by a New Age organisation which, I was amazed to learn, was really spiritualism in a new form. They didn’t use this term, though. They were “healers” and business people, aiming to usher in the Age of Aquarius. But they didn’t take a business decision without contacting the “friends”. The friends were spoken to at séances, just like the old-style spiritualists held. When Satan has a good con trick going, he won’t let it go in a hurry. Why try new tricks when the old ones work so well? So spiritualism is not only still with us, it is stronger than ever, with psychic channels on television in which you can “call the psychic” on a minute-by-minute charge basis. Lucrative and popular.
I realised this when I borrowed some ladies’ magazines to research an article. I was amazed to see many pages of classified ads offering tarot readings and occult consultations of all forms. Whole new generations have discovered that there is a spiritual world out there, something they can, perhaps, tap into. Except that the Bible expressly forbids this. Leviticus 19:31: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” Leviticus 20:27: “A man or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.” In Isaiah 8:19 there is another warning about practising spiritism, the seeking after “familiar spirits,” today called spirit guides. Odd that in the spiritualist churches I attended they never read those passages out.
Of course, today’s psychics usually don’t bother with church: they are often busy touring the country with travelling psychic fairs, which pull in the punters at town halls near you. This is in the long tradition of occultism as a stage show. The Fox sisters founded modern spiritualism on March 31, 1848. This was the day Kate and Margaret Fox, of Hydesville, New York, claimed to have contacted the spirit of a murdered peddler. The alleged spirit communicated through rapping tables, sounds which onlookers heard. Thus started a whole tradition of rapping, tapping and ouija board consultation. The Fox sisters became the showbiz sensations of their time.
As a young reporter I sometimes rustled up a “spooky story” to sell to the more lurid tabloids. This is how I made my living and the cases were often convincing. Something was going on…so in the days of the Fox girls the papers splashed the story and soon the girls’ alleged “communications with the dead” became a stage act eventually managed by PT Barnum of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus fame. The Fox family were the world’s top mediums and modern spiritualism was launched.
Unfortunately for the credibility of spiritualism, however, Margaret Fox later confessed that the whole thing was a hoax and the knocks were produced by, among other things, the cracking of her toes! She added that the Hydesville events were a pre-April Fools’ joke prank which was taken too seriously! Her confessions were reprinted in “A Skeptic’s Handbook To Parapsychology” by Paul Kurtz, 1985, Prometheus Books). However, she later withdrew her statements and tried to resume her career as a medium. It didn’t work and the Fox sisters are said to have died as penniless drunks. There is always a price to pay if you allow Satan to use you, even if it seems like a joke, or just fun.
