Navajo witchcraft

Sean Gerety has attempted to respond to my post:

https://godshammer.wordpress.com/2015/12/27/revenge-of-the-magic-lizard-people/

His reply is larded with irrelevancies. If I posted a recipe for peanut butter cookies, Sean would try to link it to the Clark controversy. 

even one who tells us there is “extrabiblical evidence” for the possible existence of shapeshifters (can Big Foot be far behind)…

Both questions are evidential questions. How to sift evidence. How to evaluate the credibility of alleged eyewitnesses. 

This makes sense since he believes in the probable existence of shapeshifters. 

I never said I believe they probably exist:

i) This might be an urban legend that feeds on itself thanks to horror films. 

ii) This might be a tall tale for tourist consumption.

iii) This might be a tall tale to intimate rival members of the Navajo community.

iv) This might be for real.

When dealing with reported occult entities, one question is the setting. Is the setting a plausible environment in which we might expect occult entities to manifest themselves? Likewise, do we have any reliable sources of information? It's difficult to acquire information on Navajo witchcraft for several reasons: the reservation is a fairly closed society. The subject is taboo. If they exist, practitioners engage in illegal actives, like grave-robbery, or murdering a relative as a rite of initiation. It will be difficult to penetrate that subculture and get to the bottom of things. 

Take the classic monograph on Navaho Witchcraft (1944) by Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who lived on the Navajo reservation, learned the Navajo language, and studied their traditions.  

According to his informants, Navajo witches practice sympathetic magic (spells and effigies). Likewise, they report the existence of were-animals. 

Is that credible? Hard to say. The Biblical worldview includes occult entities. Certainly there are people who practice black magic. Some witches will commit murder if they think they can get away with it. The question is what paranormal abilities sorcery can confer on practitioners. On a prima facie reading of Exod 7-8, that includes metamorphic abilities. According to Ezk 13, that includes the ability to strike people dead through magic spells. You also have reports of foreign missionaries and exorcists. I don't know the full extent of what's possible. Likewise, the fact that something is possible doesn't mean any particular report is reliable. 

That's how intelligent Christians evaluate such claims. By contrast, Sean simply resorts to posturing. He wants to appear rational, but his actual behavior is anti-intellectual. It's just like village atheists who labor to project an image of rationality, even though their discourse is patently irrational. 

First, neither Clark nor Robbins nor any Scripturalist I’ve ever met has any problems with the opening words of WCF 1; they simply refuse to impose empirical presuppositions on the text as Hays so foolishly has done.  Instead, Clark writes in the opening pages of What Do Presbyterians Believe (which evidently would exclude Hays):

Is it not possible that knowledge of God is innate? May we not have been born with an intuition of God, and with this *a priori* equipment we see the glory of God upon the heavens? In this way we would not be forced to the peculiar position that the Apostle Paul was giving his advance approval to the Aristotelian intricacies of Thomas Aquinas.
… In the act of creation God implanted in man knowledge of His existence.  Romans 1:32 and 2:15 seem to indicate that God also implanted some knowledge of morality. We are born with this knowledge; it is not manufactured out of sensory experience.

Problem with Sean is that he has no idea how to exegete a text. The question at issue isn't Clark's epistemology, but the epistemology of the Westminster Divines. Even if you think Clark had the right epistemology, it hardly follows that the Westminster Divines shared the same epistemology. When interpreting the Westminster Confession, the salient question is not what a 20C philosopher (Clark) believed but what this 17C text means. Not what the readers believe, but what the authors believe. It's a pretty elementary distinction in hermeneutics, which Sean fails to grasp.

The obvious problem with Clark's interpretation is that the text separates the "light of nature" from the "works of creation and providence" as two (or three) different sources of natural revelation. Even if the "light of nature" refers to intuitive knowledge, the goodness, the divine attributes manifested in the works of creation and providence are distinct from the "light of nature" in the text. These aren't interchangeable sources of natural revelation. If the "light of nature" denotes intuition or innate knowledge, then the manifestation of God's attributes in the works of create and providence must denote sense knowledge acquired through direct observation and testimonial evidence. Clark is superimposing on the text a gloss at variance with the wording of the text. 

First, Hays errs by not including man as one of the things that “have been made” and thinks he can see with the eyes in his head what Paul tells us is invisible. 

i) When Paul says we can see the unseen God, that's a paradox: a figure of speech. 

ii) The question at issue is not whether we can physically see God, but whether we can infer God's existence from the natural world. 

Second, this innate intuition of God is something God shows man and is not something man infers from observing the “empirical evidence.” 

A false dichotomy. We can perceive or discern what God shows us. 

Rather, the Confession begins, in good Clarkian fashion, by positing the truth of the Holy Scriptures and then inferring God from them; along with the entire system of doctrine outlined in the Confession. 

i) That's demonstrably false. Read the first clause of WCF 1. It begins with an appeal to natural revelation. It states the sufficiency of natural revelation to render sinners inexcusable, but the insufficiency of natural revelation to afford saving knowledge. 

ii) BTW, Sean's appeal to the Westminster Confession contradicts his own epistemology. Sean scorns extrabiblical evidence. Yet the Westminster Confession is an extrabiblical object. The Westminster Confession is nowhere mentioned or quoted in Scripture. So Sean's only possible source of knowledge for the existence as well as the content of the Westminster Confession comes from extrabiblical evidence. 

This is one of Sean's chronic problems. He's not sharp enough to apprehend the inconsistencies in his own position, but when someone does him the favor of pointing that out, his response is to repeat the same mistake. 

iii) In addition, Sean is very enamored with the phrase "magic lizard people." But, of course, unbelievers are fond of using the same type of rhetoric to ridicule talking snakes, talking donkeys, magic trees, angelic apparitions, and the virgin birth. 

I quoted Clark's statement that “Assent can never be hypocritical, for it is the voluntary act of according belief to a given proposition” (Today’s Evangelism: Counterfeit or Genuine?), 69.

To which Sean replies: That one is easy and the question itself belies Hays rejection of the Reformed doctrine of perseverance of the saints and a proper understanding of the Confessional doctrine of saving faith. Whether someone holds to the traditional and tautological threefold definition of saving faith, or Clark’s biblical two-fold alternative, it’s not always easy to tell the true believer from the feigned variety. 

Sean is still too slow on the uptake to get it. The question at issue isn't what I believe regarding the relationship between saving faith and the perseverance of the saints, but whether Sean's own position is contradictory. Clark says assent can never be "hypocritical", yet Sean says Sudduth's faith was "feigned."  It doesn't occur to Sean that a hypocritical faith and a feigned faith are synonymous, yet Clark denies what Sean affirms. Sean can never catch up with the actual state of the argument.

I remember Sudduth publicly flying off the handle years ago on a Yahoo Group’s Clark discussion group at Robbins. 

Notice how Sean unconsciously appeals to extrabiblical evidence, even though he disavows extrabiblical evidence. Sean's source of information about Sudduth is entirely derived from extrabiblical evidence, yet Sean is typically oblivious to how his confident appeal contradicts his stated epistemology. 

Oh, brother.  It also seems Hays does think the Amityville Horror is real too, writing:

There’s a difference between the horror film and the alleged experience on which it was loosely based. I haven’t studied that in-depth.

Is Sean just illiterate? I didn't say I think it's real. I gave a qualified, noncommittal response. 

Of course, Sudduth’s experience provides no evidence at all. 

For the record, here's the statement in question:

My two years in Windsor, Connecticut deepened my long-standing and recently re-wakened interest in survival. Within a couple of days of moving into the early Federal-style home built by Eliakim Mather Olcott in 1817, my wife and I (and dog) began to experience a combination of prototypical haunting and poltergeist phenomena. Although we critically investigated the various phenomena as they occurred, we were unable to trace the phenomena to natural causes. Given the fairly astonishing nature of some of the phenomena, my curiosity about our experiences peaked and I began research into the history of the home and the experiences of its former residents. This led to what has been a ten-year long investigation, including interviews with former residents, visitors to the home, and acquaintances of residents as far back as the 1930s.   My inquiry turned up testimony from several prior occupants to experiencing phenomena identical, even in detail, to the phenomena my wife and I experienced. What I found equally fascinating, though, was the fact that occupants of the home prior to 1969, including long-term residents, claimed not to have experienced anything unusual. 1969 was the year resident Walter Callahan Sr. committed suicide in the home. In this way, the pattern of experiences surrounding the home fit a more widespread pattern in which ostensibly place-centered paranormal phenomena are associated with a suicide or other tragic event at the location. 

http://michaelsudduth.com/personal-reflections-on-life-after-death/

What's especially striking about this testimonial evidence is that Michael has become very hostile to the postmortem survival of personal consciousness. Yet based on his firsthand experience and subsequent research, the obvious explanation is that this house was haunted by the ghost (disembodied soul) of a former owner who committed suicide. 

Back to Sean:

...the dead do not roam the earth and what Sudduth experienced, and evidently continues to experience, supplies no evidence whatsoever for “postmortem survival.”  With the possible exception of the transfiguration, Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus should have been enough to settle that question even for someone who once pretended to be a Christian.  What Sudduth claims to be valid evidence for life after death, Jesus said is impossible (Luke 16:26).

That's deeply confused:

i) To begin with, Lk 16:26 doesn't say there's a barrier between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead, but a barrier within the realm of the dead between the saints and the damned.

ii) In addition, does Sean think the topography of the Netherworld in Lk 16 describes literal geological barriers? 

iii) In fact, Lk 16:31 ironically foreshadows the disbelief of Jews who were unconvinced by the Resurrection. The parable anticipates a paradigm case of someone returning from the grave to bear witness to the living. Far from being impossible, that actually happened. 

iv) What about OT prohibitions against necromancy? But if it's impossible to successfully initiate contact with the dead, what's the point of the prohibitions? 

v) Moreover, we have an actual example in 1 Sam 28.