magick VS religion

[Ryuji]

prayer or cast spell.

asking for guidance or divination.

isnt it all same in essense ? 

[sagetab]

Here is something that happened to me...

first, a little about me, I am a Witch that was forced to go into the "broom closet" when we rented rooms from a very Christian landlord. (for my kids' sakes I hid what I am), and this landlord basically 'forced' me to go to his church, (where he was an elder and my hubby was the drummer).

It was an interesting experience, (I was brought up Xtian BTW).

The Praise part at the beginning raised such a lot of energy that I felt it intensely. The worship, a softer, gentler form of worship with people "Invoking" God and Jesus, was preeety hypnotic, or meditative... so, being the evil little Witch that I am, I decided to use the raised energy to do a Chakra clearing...  So, I enter a meditative state (everyone is on their feet praying and "invoking by now), and I clear my Chakras 1 by 1. When I had finished, I opened my eyes and found myself to be the only one standing...  (They must have thought I had a lot to pray about...lol)

The moral of the story: The raising of energy et al is big in a church... the problem is that the Christains do not realise this and thats a LOT of energy going to waste....

So yes... in essence, it is pretty much the same, except in MAgick, we know what to do with it all....

[Ryuji]

interisting

[CFTraveler]

prayer or cast spell.

asking for guidance or divination.

isnt it all same in essense ? 

I believe it is the same thing- the difference is in the subjective interpretation.  When you cast a spell you are trying to achieve a specific purpose, and I believe that most religious  ritual started exactly that way, and ancient (let's face it, the roots of most religions are ancient, if not all) religions saw nothing wrong with this.
The more modern religions, I find, stress a lot of dependence on their hierarchial organizations -you must go to the [priest, minister, religious authority] to get help for any problem you have, instead of using some sort of technique (including meditation, which is direct interfacing with God, IMO) to do it yourself.
But then again, I don't know if modern Magick requires a hierarchical structure, so the difference might be in my head...