Article April 30, 2012 Issue

Superstition and witchcraft–null and void

Lyle Young

Superstition takes many forms around the world—from beliefs in good and bad luck held in many cultures (note, for example, the proliferation of lotteries in many countries); to feng shui in China and increasingly in other places; to voodoo in Haiti and candomblé in Brazil; to witchcraft in Africa and elsewhere. What all of these systems have in common is that they are belief systems—systems that indicate what the human mind believes, not what God, the divine Mind, knows.

God, divine Being, must be all-harmonious in order to have existence and to be eternal. To be harmonious and eternal, God must be composed exclusively of good qualities, such as joy, freedom, intelligence, and wisdom. If Being were made up of both good and evil, harmony and discord, or light and darkness, it would be a kingdom divided against itself that couldn’t stand (see Mark 3:24). Thus, only good qualities comprise Being—and Being expresses its infinite range of good qualities in its creation. Each individual is a unique expression of that infinite gamut of good qualities.

You might think of all-harmonious Being as a wall that goes on forever, stretching up infinitely high and as far in either direction as you can see. The notion of something opposing God supposes that on that infinite wall of good there exists a little pencil dot of something ungodlike. But, of course, that pencil dot isn’t there. If good and evil were both real and at war, the universe would have no moral principle sustaining it. So Being can’t be divided against itself, and nothing can oppose it. The Bible emphasizes that God is infinite, and we prove that infinity by obeying the First Commandment (see Exodus 20:3).

About the author

Lyle Young is a Christian Science practitioner and teacher from Ottawa, Canada. He now makes his home in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a member of the Christian Science Board of Directors.

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