Jinn Rubbish?

Spirit Problems? Call the Islamic ghost busters

Apparently, the Islamic world still believes in such things as ghosts and demons. For example, if you live in Saudi Arabia and suspect that your house is haunted, you can call the Jinn police and they'll come and rid your home of spirits, much like a spiritual exterminator.

What's a Jinn? That's an Arabic term for a spirit. According to Islam, Jinns aren't always bad spirits. Islam classifies some Jinns as good and helpful, just as some churches claim that Christians have guardian angels at their side.

The Bible informs us that true Christians are protected by God's angels. (Psalm 91) But nowhere does the Bible reveal that Christians have their own personal angels who've been assigned to them by God. That's an unbiblical heresy taught by the Roman Catholic Church.

Here's what the Bible says concerning God's protection of His people: 

If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,” and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the cobra; you will trample the great lion and the serpent. (Psalm 91:9-13)

 The reality that spirit beings such as angels, demons and ghosts exist is repugnant to many folks in the west who consider any belief in such beings to be primitive superstition.

Hugh Fitzgerald, who writes for the conservative weblog, frontpagemag.com, is one such skeptic who lampoons the Muslim world for its belief in spirits. Here's what he wrote recently:

The Saudi witchcraft-hunt offers us a glimpse of the Bizarro-World that we enter whenever we penetrate the world of Islam. In the West, we hardly bother to denounce those who claim to be witches and wizards, exorcists and fortunetellers, that is, all who lay claim to supernatural powers, because we know, as rational creatures, that they are frauds and fakes, they cannot possibly have these powers. And because we don’t believe any of that stuff, we don’t worry about them in this, our Western world, the dutiful child of the Enlightenment and rationalism. If we punish any fortunetellers or magicians at all, it’s only because they have charged for services we know are worthless and we want them to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. Witchcraft has not been taken seriously, i.e. as effective, since Salem, when outside it was 1692.

Fitzgerald shows his rank ignorance of the spiritual realm by equating the belief in the demonic with witchcraft. If Fitzgerald bothered to do the research, he'd discover that witchcraft--although vile and evil--is taken very seriously these days by a lot of folks, including many of his own on the left. Witchcraft, or Wicca as it's more popularly referred to, has grown exponentially in the western world, despite the so-called triumph of rationalism and science.

Fitzgerald might also want to explain how some children and adolescents acquire the ability to speak with adult voices, or speak in languages they've never learned. I'm sure that Fitzgerald believes that science has a plausible explanation for that.

And he can believe that all he wants. But science has no explanation for that. Or, for furniture and other objects that move themselves around rooms, in full view of people. That's what happened in the famous Roland Doe case in the late 1940s.

Who was Doe? Doe was an adolescent boy who tried to contact his deceased grandmother with a Ouija Board. Soon after his attempt, Doe began acting strangely and he started speaking Hebrew, a language he never learned. The furniture in Doe's house began to move by itself, and Doe eventually was committed to a hospital after he became extremely violent. In fact, he became so violent that he couldn't even be restrained by chains.

Compare Doe's story to the biblical account of a man that Jesus and His disciples encountered one day:

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones. (Mark 5:1-5)

Doe became demon possessed via the Ouija Board. In fact, the horror film, The Exorcist, was based upon Doe's story. However, modern intellectuals such as Hugh Fitzgerald would try to explain away Doe's behavior to some psychological malady. After all, science has provided all the answers for that type of behavior, hasn't it?

No it hasn't. We're living in a post-Christian world where, for millions of people, science and rationalism have replaced faith in God and the reverence for His word in the Bible. Even many professing Christians no longer believe in Satan, demons, or Jinns, if you prefer the Arabic term.

But they still exist, and they operate best under the cover of secrecy and darkness. The less you know about them, the greater damage they can inflict upon you and the world.

For Hugh Fitzgerald, the damage has already been done. His god is science. And like all false gods, Fitzgerald's god won't be able to rescue him from eternal damnation after he leaves this world.