You certainly are blind to how ridiculous your own superstitious religious beliefs are, even though you can clearly see that people who don't believe your religion are wrong. Has it ever occurred to you that your religion is just as foolish as all the rest? You should stop taking yourself and your superstitions so seriously. Just because your cult has a lot of members, doesn't mean it isn't a cult.

Now maybe my brand of Christianity was pretty unusually wacko (Lutherans are the real nutters right? Total extremists, rivals of those Westboro chaps really... /s), but I am pretty sure they explicitly endorsed homebrew divination. The idea that you could "do it yourself" is actually a rather central concept to that particular brand of religion, though instead of tea leaves it used sore knees...

I have hard time believing Lutherans really go against direct word of the Bible (which is, as far as I know, according to their faith, a direct word of God) and practice divination, but I admit, I don't know too much about the details of the Lutheran faith. If I had to choose, I'd rather point at Calvinists with their predestination and signs of being among the saved, even though even there you can't really solicit those signs AFAIK. But as for Lutherans - could you explain which practice of Lutherans you mean - what exactly and using which procedures Lutherans are using for fortune telling?

Lutherans, much like modern Catholics (the two seem to differ mainly in organizational layout these days, most of Martin Luther's grievances have been since corrected by the RCC..) and like most other protestants (I dare not say "all", but it probably is not far off) consult with their god. They ask their god for advice and guidance, and claim to receive responses in various forms.

You can clasp your hands and ask your god to tell you how to confront your son about that magazine you found in his backpack, or you can brew some tea and look into the tea leaves for a message from the gods. These are fundamentally the same concept, except the tea leaves method is not blessed by Christians, and presumably the clasp hands method is not blessed by whoever reads tea leaves...

Prayer is functionally indistinguishable from divination.

Divination that is whitelisted by your flavor of Christianity is called "prayer". The sorts that are not whitelisted are called "divination" or "witchcraft." This can be seen clearly within Christianity when you consider the schism between some of the more extreme flavors of Protestantism and Catholicism. I have, on more than one occasion heard protestants describe various aspects of Catholicism as witchcraft and idolatry. Most of the accusations center around the issue of saints and the Virgin Mary, and whether it is acceptable to ask them to pray on your behalf. Many[all?] protestants do not consider this to be a blessed form of divination, thus the less mellow among them consider it to be witchcraft or whatever.

I'm a Lutheran and we expressly deny divination.

Prayer is not divination primarily in that receiving a 'voice form God' would by met with extreme suspicion and would not be shared. In Lutheran theology, we expect to find God's word written in the Bible.

http://cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=D&word=DIVINATION

Whether or not you receive a message back is not particularly important. One-way telephathic communication with gods is still wacky.

Yeah, I get that you deny what you call divination. The point I am making here is that all the non-endorsed forms of magic get called what they are, while the endorsed forms of magic get endless circular arguments of "well you see this stuff is different..."

>>One-way telephathic communication with gods is still wacky.

Not at all. For example, if God would like you to have free will then return communication would be rather scant.

For example - if God made himself obviously known then your will to love perhaps would not be as genuine.

Your premise that Gods would come forms that you expect isn't logical.

>>> They ask their god for advice and guidance, and claim to receive responses in various forms.

I think you taking it too literally. When religious person says "God blessed me with the gift of children", they rarely mean that the God - as an actual supernatural being - came to them in person and produced their children as a gift. Most probably, they know exactly where the children come from, and were actually present when those were conceived and born, and even though God might have been mentioned on both occasions, rarely they would claim The Almighty was personally present there and did the work. It is a metaphor expressing the idea of the Providence and God's control and responsibility about what happens to people. In the same way, when they say "I prayed and God let me see the solution of my problem", they rarely mean God personally came down to them in a burning bush, spoke to them and gave them detailed step-by-step instruction of how to solve their problems. Etc., etc.

>>> Prayer is functionally indistinguishable from divination.

Prayer is nothing like the divination. Prayer is an expression of certain feelings or formulae about the supernatural. Divination is a mechanistic procedure in which one would, after performing required ritual, receive information about the future or otherwise inaccessible information. Of course, you can pray for success of your divination, or you can try to divine if your prayer would be followed by some event, but those are two functionally very different actions. Note that for prayer, one usually is required to be a believer, while for divination you don't really have to believe in anything as long as you perform the ritual properly. This, btw, is a big different between modern religion and old religions - most of the old religions couldn't care less what you think as long as you do proper procedures. Modern ones rather concerned about morals and feelings and beliefs and all that immaterial stuff.

>>> I have, on more than one occasion heard protestants describe various aspects of Catholicism as witchcraft and idolatry.

I have heard the whole Christianity described as idolatry. So what? The question if Christianity is idolatry or not from the POV of anybody is not the question we were discussing.

>>> whether it is acceptable to ask them to pray on your behalf

I can imagine how it may be a problem for an ostensibly monotheistic religion, but that does not make a prayer a divination. Of course, that does not mean actual Christians never engage in practices which are, in fact, divination - but people violating the premises of their own religion is nothing new. I can give you Jews eating pork, Muslims drinking wine and Christians hating their fellow man. It happens. However, the religion as a belief system and as a social mechanism does not endorse it.

I don't think you are thinking about this critically. Just skimming the surface off:

">>> I have, on more than one occasion heard protestants describe various aspects of Catholicism as witchcraft and idolatry. I have heard the whole Christianity described as idolatry. So what? The question if Christianity is idolatry or not from the POV of anybody is not the question we were discussing."

I was making a very specific point here. Christians accuse other christians of practicing witchcraft when they practice forms of prayer that they do not approve of.

Asking the Virgin Mary to pray on your behalf in Catholicism is whitelisted, therefore according to Catholics it is not witchcraft at all. According to tackless hardline protestants, it is not whitelisted, therefore they label it as what it really is, a form of divination.

Furthermore, your definition of divination is steeped in Christian bias. What you are really saying is "prayer is not divination because it is [magical woo] while divination is [magical woo what does not fit the Christian perspective towards relationships between gods and men]".

Whether or not you demand an immediate answer or need to be a "true believer" when you engage in the practice are both completely inconsequential. They are still both blatant magical thinking.

> Asking the Virgin Mary to pray on your behalf in Catholicism is whitelisted, therefore according to Catholics it is not witchcraft at all. According to tackless hardline protestants, it is not whitelisted, therefore they label it as what it really is, a form of divination.

Er, its not divination in any case, and that isn't what hardline Protestants call it. The issue some Protestants have with intercessory prayer isn't that it is "divination" but that it is, as they see it, inconsistent with monotheism (incidentally, this is the same problem that, e.g., many Muslims have with Christian trinitarianism.)

> Furthermore, your definition of divination is steeped in Christian bias.

Its what the word means. Whether or not that fact is a result of a history of Christian bias is, really, beside the point; if you want a generalized term for superstition modern English has one; abusing a term with a different and clear definition for that purpose just obstructs communication.

You claim various strands of Christianity disagree on what is allowed and what is not. Not exactly news, but you have no argument from me here - they do. Neither of them, though, endorses fortune telling or divination - and I explained elsewhere in this thread why prayer is nothing like divination, and never is equated to such by any official religious authority either.

>>> therefore they label it as what it really is, a form of divination.

Could you quote any reputable source that expresses it like that, that calling to Virgin Mary is not just wrong or prohibited for a protestant, but is actually a form of divination?

You argument seems to suggest that if some Christian faiths disagree on some specific account, then there can be no agreement between them on any account. This is of course false.

>>> Furthermore, your definition of divination is steeped in Christian bias

That's a funny accusation, given that I am not a Christian and never felt a desire to be one. I gave specific criteria on the difference. You did not show any flaw in my argument, you just labeled it "magical woo" and dismissed it.

>>> They are still both blatant magical thinking.

I'm not sure what you mean by "magical thinking" - does saying "magical woo" and expecting this to win an argument qualify? Divination and prayer are completely different practices, and while different religions could endorse both, dominant religions in relevant demographics endorse one and do not endorse the other. If you want to change your argument by conceding prayer is not divination and instead claiming prayer is "magical thinking" - be my guest, but then I'd recommend to actually learn what prayer means for people that actually pray and for religions that practice it. I'm pretty sure magic plays very little role there.

Divination or guidance? Saying "Please God, help know whether to take the job in Cleveland when I wake up" and then sleeping on it was probably acceptable. "Please God, let me roll snake eyes if I should move to Cleveland" is probably less acceptable.

There is no fundamental difference here. Clasping your hands, asking a god for guidance in your head, then interpreting your own thoughts as the advice of a god is really no different from asking a god a question, putting your hands on a Ouija board, letting the ideomotor effect do its thing, then interpreting the output of the ideomotor effect as the word of your god.

The only difference is that mainstream Christianity blesses one method, and derogatorily refers to the other methods as witchcraft or divination.

Different religions all have their own forms of blessed divination, and forbidden divination, and they all assert that their blessed methods are fundamentally different from the others, but it is all the same stuff.

There is a major difference: physical manifestation.

Physical manifestation? It is all physical! You cannot escape the physical. Whether you are making the decision in your mind then convincing yourself the conclusion is an idea that came from a god and not yourself, or if you are making the decision in your mind, spelling it out, then convincing yourself the conclusion is an idea that came from a god... either one is magical thinking and either one is taking place in the 'physical world'.

You don't need the Ouija board for one of them, but you are just listing your personal whitelist criteria to me. Either one is still magical thinking.

Only if the mind is not part of physics.

My point was that Christianity forbids practicing Hinduism just as much as it forbids practicing divination. Being forbidden by religions does not make something non-religious.

That is true, I can imagine a religion which encourages divination and for such religion divination would be a religious practice, of course. However, if such religion exists it is nowhere common in Western world. So a claim that significant amount of religious people belong to such religion would still be wrong.

If anyone ever makes that claim, be sure to tell them that.