The non-religious may just shrug, but the risk involves things that simply cannot be explained or measured by science.
That is all.
On this
@Ace Dragon: remember those poseurs and charlatans I mentioned earlier? They certainly want people to believe Wicca is the same as magic arts, because that lets them sell their arcane “knowledge” to the gullible.
Wicca is a religion steeped in the practice of witchcraft and Earth worship, does that not count as magic arts to you?
That’s why you never hear about nonbelievers / atheists being ‘possessed’ by ‘spirits’. Only those who play along do you ever hear these stories from and that is no coincidence!
Anyway, back to my main point, regardless of which religion you follow or don’t follow, willfully remaining ignorant of anything and further encouraging it is abhorrent.
Magic is not about making the impossible possible, it’s about making the impossible seem possible. It’s about making something appear to be something it is not. A good magician is actually just a good liar. Having said that, I know nothing about Wicca except that I used to work with a gentleman who said he was Wiccan, I asked him to tell me more about his religion and he said he’d bring me some reading material, but never did.
Maybe that’s why it is sometimes referred to as the dark arts, magic is about concealing the truth. As in keeping others in the dark…
Although you do hear a lot of ‘non-believers’ claiming interesting alien abduction stories which often sound rather reminiscent of demon possession stories.
There was a time for sea monsters, a time for vampires and a time for alien visitation.
You hear alien abduction stories from both believers and nonbelievers alike. I’m not sure about you, but most of the abduction stories I hear of involve humanoid beings with almond-shaped eyes who are bent on sticking metal objects in various orifices to collect data on their subjects.
Perhaps the OP can find a spell to ward away those pesky probe-happy demonic aliens?
@Rigby40: I’m not commenting on the validity of such stories. Merely commenting that there was a time where, and even still today, people claim demonic possession or otherwise unpleasant encounters with demons and today there are people who claim rather similar things, but from aliens instead of demons. Why is it that aliens are more believable than demons?
Personally I don’t find the stories any more believable than tall tales of encounters with sea monsters told from sailors looking to be the center of attention for a short period of time and maybe even make a few sheckles on the side.
Not saying the stories aren’t true, I certainly don’t know, but I do know people have a tendency to exaggerate, stretch the truth and outright lie for little more than a moment in the lime light.
I mean aliens are all the rage these days and ‘believers’ like to quote the volume of alien encounter stories as proof to their validity, but really there are just as many, maybe even more, stories of demon encounters, sea monster encounters, vampire encounters etc… Why is it that the volume of stories make the alien phenomenon believable, but the same volume does not make the other stories so believable? Of course that’s not to say that I do or do not believe in any of such things.
P.S. Maybe it’s a bit of an outsiders perspective. Everyone likes their own brand and likes to bat for their own team, I don’t have a team.
Well I’m not saying I believe in alien abduction stories either. I am much more inclined to believe in the natural over the supernatural though but again, I don’t give much credence to alien abduction stories. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and we would sooner get something even resembling an inkling of evidence for aliens on earth than ‘demons’.
And if we are ever to cross paths with demons, I would hope they would be the kind from that classic game, Doom. Boy, I really do love me some ‘cacodaemons’. And what about the ‘baron of hell’? They sure are mean.
Sadly though, beliefs, hopes and millions upon millions of like-minded followers are not enough to bring my imagination to light 
Oh there are all sorts of demons. You see them every day, sure they look just like anybody else, but make no mistake demons exist. It’s not like in the story books or the tall tales.
The liars and the murderers, the rapists and the arrogant. My friend, they don’t need you to believe in them, you’re surrounded. Use you and throw you away and then make you believe they did you some type of favor just for giving you the opportunity to shine their shoes.
Those clever wizards, make you clamor for the chance to serve them. They are rich and they are poor, they are male and they are female. Everywhere…
Possession (n):
the state of having, owning, or controlling something.
an item of property; something belonging to one.
Well you can call them whatever you want, surely they aren’t supernatural beings. They’re just the scum of the earth! Rich or poor, black or white, big and small, scumminess knows no boundaries.
I don’t believe anything is supernatural.
Supernatural (adjective):
Something might be beyond scientific understanding I’m sure, but don’t really think anything is beyond or above the laws of nature.
@Ace, et al, I simply think that when you are “studying Wicca,” or any other form of what-is-called “mystical” or “super-natural” thinking, you are simply studying … people. And, maybe you are regarding Nature in a different way, too. Humans have been doing that for many, many thousands of years. I happen to think, also, that thereby they have made important discoveries and come to important realizations that “science” (which, in a certain sense, is another “form of religion”) can’t teach you.
I think that one of the very best things you can do with, and for, your mind … is to broaden it. (Speaking impersonally, now …) Don’t be afraid to think new things. Don’t “pooh pooh” what other people think or do, especially not out of fear.
Unfortunately, many religions in-practice encourage narrowness of thought. Teaching you, literally, that there is a “narrow way” that will lead you to a nirvana of some sort, whereas every other way of thinking leads to bezillions of years of fire-and-brimstone. (Teaching you, also, that all those people “had it comin’.”) There’s no context to it; no balance. If you surround yourself (only) by others who think the same way, you wind up with: Groupthink. And I simply don’t believe that this is a healthy way to think.
And, by the way: I also think that scientists easily make the same sort of error. “Science,” specifically “science the way they (or, the group) see(s) it,” becomes the only thing that they can “see.” These people have long ago stopped “looking,” in their drive to be “looking for.” There’s no reality that doesn’t fit the hypothesis of the moment. So, for all the good things that “the scientific method” does bring, there is also a certain blindness to it.
But, if one couples “that way of thinking” with a study of other schools of human thought, a very different point-of-view emerges. Perhaps, a much better one. Perhaps “the so-called ‘mystics’” do bring a perspective to the table which also deserves to be heard. Perhaps, without it, “you don’t know what you’re missing.”
“So, go ahead.” Go find out more about how other people have been thinking about these things, over all these many centuries. Even if you do choose to adhere to a very dogma-driven belief system … and that’s entirely up to the individual and I am not saying that it’s “wrong!” … I think that the experience will make the beliefs that you do hold, far more meaningful.
“An unexamined Life is not worth living.”
Thanks for explaination.
Oh absolutely, really a collection of religions loosely held together by the common belief that the ideas behind those beliefs are ever evolving, however; much like traditional religion many scientists actually fight against evidence that contradicts their currently subscribed belief or theory. The idea behind science is that any theory can be proven incorrect at any given time and scientists who support such theory then move on to the next likely candidate, but in practice this isn’t always so cut and dry because scientists, not unlike anyone else, have an ego that doesn’t like to be called wrong.
I think Sheldon from the television show Big Bang Theory summed it up well when he said to Penny “When I’m wrong the universe makes a little less sense.” I think scientists, certainly not all of them, are often deified or considered infallible either by others or even by themselves and this deification makes it hard for them to admit when they’re wrong about something which hinders progress.
At the same time science isn’t the only religion that pretends not to be a religion, so too do politics fall into that category. Where science, like religion, tries to explain what the universe is and how it came to be, politics, like religion, tries to explain how one should conduct themselves while living in that universe.
People often defend their politics and attack the politics of others with the same religious zealotry that sparked the crusades, Spanish inquisition and protestant wars.
Is it any wonder why both religious and political discussion is often banned from on-line forums due to the inflammatory nature of the ensuing discussion? Really they’re the same discussion.
P.S. So of course, there’s really no such thing as a separation between state and religion, they’re just different religions. That is the state is a religion and the other religion, traditional religion, is also a religion and people try to justify subscribing to two different religions by pretending that the state is not one, when really it is. Often times the two religions contradict one another and in order to justify the two ideological subscriptions one must not accept that one is, in fact, a religion as well as the other.
Accepting the fact that the state is a religion would likely cause considerable cognitive dissonance upon the accepting individual because he or she must then realize that they are practicing two contradicting belief systems with two different gods and two different sets of commandments.
For example under, say, Christianity God is God and the one and only God, but under the state religion the state is God and, depending on where you live, not the only God because you might have a city government, a state government a federal government and a united nations government so the state religion is really polytheist.
I could see this being a result of two points…
1). Atheists never dabble in anything related to the spirit world, nor do they try to contact them, this alone significantly lowers the chance of such a scenario.
2). If one does get end up getting caught in a supernatural situation, chances are they will soon no longer consider themselves an atheist.
This based on what I gather anyway.
Ace you may not be aware, but many an atheist come from religious backgrounds, be it christianity, islam or some other type of religion. A lot of atheists were once clergymen. In fact, there are so many of them once or still belonging to the church that now there is a dedicated organization for those who were once or are clergymen who no longer believe. It’s called the clergyproject.
So, regarding your first point nothing could be further from truth, it’s a highly misrepresentative statement. It sounds as if you don’t know many atheists / nonbelievers or maybe the ones you know grew up without religion.
On to your second point, we could say the same about alien abductions. Do you believe in alien abductions? Why or why not? Because if one ends up abducted by aliens, they would surely consider themselves believes in little green men on planet Earth.
And no, the chances aren’t always that they would no longer consider themselves an atheist or a denier of probe-happy aliens on Earth. A lot of people are skeptical enough to dig deeper into their personal experiences. The mind does funny things when under stress or when feeding off the hype of other like-minded individuals.
A few years ago I was watching a documentary on the paranormal and supernatural. There was a man in the show who was recanting his personal experience for the crew. All sorts of funny stuff happening from auditory and visual hallucinations to feeling dizzy and ‘not alone’. What do you know? Turns out where this had happened, there was a high level of infrasound near the building and infrasound can cause mental funkiness in us humans. Movie theaters have also used this natural phenomena to induce anxiety and paranoia in their audience.
Darn those scientists, always trying to ruin a good ghost story!
“An interesting observation, Rigby,” and I happen to agree with you. “Athiests” often turn out to be “anti-theists.” And, yes, they often came from backgrounds in which “a religion” was forcibly imposed upon them from the earliest age … i.e. “when they were too young to know.”
At some point in their lives, they realized that (from their point-of-view …) they had “built their house on shifting sand,” in spite of the fact that they’d been led to believe (“by default,” as it were …) did not, in fact, live-up to its job-description.
And so, “being conditioned already to expect ‘absolutes,’” they flipped their position … absolutely. From “all” to “nothing.”
Nope, there’s no “1.0 … 0.0” here: to them, “it’s a bit.” 
If it can’t be ‘1’, then, “it must be ‘0’!”
(Of course … of course … “I am just trying to make a point here …”)
And, I rather feel sorry for those people, because there is a vast “middle ground” between those two extremes … if only you will (so to speak …) “allow yourself to embrace the possibility of ‘floating-point!’”
What if . . . you don’t . . . you can never (like it or not…) . . . “know?”
… and yet … what if this realization doesn’t “have to” drive you to: “the opposite extreme?”
No matter what you think, “you are not the first human being” who has thought these thoughts, who has walked this plank, who has looked up at the stars … or … has heard … “a still, small voice.” (And, instantly, instinctively, primally … … “recognized it.”)
Maybe, just maybe, the people who have walked this very path ahead of you … left behind some insights that you would do very well to listen to. Closely.
I hear what you’re saying sundialsvc4. BUT most atheists would not make the assertion that the thousands of supernatural beings or creatures spoken of by man do not exist, no, it’s just that they have not yet met their burden of proof and there is not enough evidence to support their existence. Same goes for Santa Claus and other cultural characters fabricated throughout our ethos.
And let us not be so open minded that our brains fall out 
To each their own though!
“Aye, @Rigby, and I shan’t deny you this!”
The people who choose to hold “the thousands of supernatural beings or creatures spoken of by man” … against the standard of “a burden of proof” or “evidence” … are, without question, entitled to their point-of-view.
Nevertheless . . . “I am not quite prepared to throw the people who held those very thoughts … under the bus.” Indeed, what about “Santa?” Or, all those many-other “cultural characters?” Should we (“if they do not meet our ‘standards,’” ‘therefore …’) “summarily excommunicate them from our thinking, and think of them no more?”
Me, I don’t think so.
After all, if we do such a thing, maybe we are not only dismissing “thousands of supernatural beings,” but also the “thousands of Our Ancestors(!)” who thought of them. Who “thought of them” across thousands of human years.
Perhaps we should not be quite so hasty . . . ? Is there, truly, nothing that their points-of-view might now offer us?
You’re talking about people who never had anything to do with witchcraft or spirit communication to begin with (all forms of practice that connect to the spirit world are forbidden in both Christianity and Islam).
Also, it is true that a lot of the paranormal stuff is indeed either fabricated or can be scientifically explained, still, a lot of the people who genuinely experience this type of thing are not going to respond by inviting a TV crew over.
Want to raise your Actual problem solving abilities?
Solve problems.
want to understand Mysticism - more power to you,
of all of the stuff I have read… Look into CG young.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung - it attempts to understand the mind,
Wrong again. There are indeed many an atheist who have partaken in witchcraft or ‘spirit communication’ as you put it. I’m not sure what you think of when you imagine an atheist, but they come from many different walks of life and to push this idea that a lot of atheists simply never believed in religions be they popular or off-the-beaten-path, is just dishonest.
There are even atheists who believe in spirits. Atheism is a response to a claim(an assertion) that a god or gods exist. It says NOTHING about whether or not you believe in spirits.
I would encourage you to take sundial’s advice and learn about more about atheists, agnostics and other groups of people. Should you decide to remain ignorant of the people around you, in this country and to an extent, in this world, that just reflects poorly upon you.
I find it funny that the same science you use to destroy these stories of paranormal activity you keep far far away from your own beliefs, perhaps for fear of it destroying what you hold so close to your chest?
Ultimately, paranormal activity and religious supernatural activity falls under the same umbrella, fabricated, exaggerated and / or scientifically explained.
It’s always easy to point at the other team and claim shenanigans but rarely does one take the same attitude and approach to themselves…