Message #10817 - Metaphysical (Magicknet) 
   Date : 25-Oct-90 06:38
   From : Thomas Frost
     To : All
Subject : S.j. Mercury News Article, Oct. 20 1990 (1 Of 3)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@EID:488c 155934d1
(brought to my attention by Eric Marsh)

From: emarsh@hernes-sun.Eng.Sun.COM 
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca.
Message-ID: <144057@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.pagan


                          The Witching Hour
                           By Joan Connell
                 Mercury News Religion & Ethics Editor
                San Jose Mercury News - Sat. Oct. 20 1990


                        **********************************************
                        As Halloween approaches, fundamentalists march
                        to the Bay Area to begin a crusade against
                        the devil and thousands of pagans and goddess
                        worshippers prepare for the onslaught
                        *********************************************

          A peaceful prayer crusade? Or just another witch hunt?


    The term "holy war" will take on a whoe new meaning in San Francisco on
Halloween, as Pentecostal Christans and goddess-worshipping pagans square off 
to prove who's holier than thou.

    Texas telvangelist Larry Lea is mustering 10,000 Christian soldiers in
San Francisco's Civic Auditorium Halloween night, to do battle with the 
forces of Satan. And memberso fhte normally low-key pagan community in the 
Bay Area - practitioners of Wicca, nature religions and New Age 
spiritualism - have launched a counter offensive, claiming Lea's spritual
warfare interferes with their constitutional right to practive their
religion.

    Lea, a protege of Oral Roberts and former pastor of the Church of the
Rock in Dallas, has made a name for himself among Pentecostal and chrismatic
Chrstians for a tendency to preach in Army fatigues and hand out "prayer
army dog tags" to his followers. He is a proponent of "spiritual warfare" -
using prawer to exorcise demons.

    Last month with the backing of 500 pastors of Bay Area churches, Lea
announced a three-day San Francisco crusade to "reverse the curse" of 
Halloween and march through the city to convert those they consider 
possessed by Satan: drug addicts, gay people, the secually promiscuous, 
believers in New Age religionists and Wiccans, those spell-casting, 
goddess-worshipping filks commonly called witches.

    "These are not just kids having fun," Lea said at the time. "There
is actual worship of the devil."

    Janet Christian, spokeswoman for the Bay Area Pagan Assemblies, an
organization of Wiccans and nature-worshippers in the South Bay, is outraged.

    "We're goddess worshippers: Witches don't have anything to do with
Satan. Who do these people think they are?" asks Christian, who's group
is sponsoring a Witches' Ball at the Palo Alto Hyatt tonight, an open-to-all
costume party designed to build bridges of understanding between the 
practitioners of Wicca and the community at large.

    "What if we brought some big-name witch to town on Christmas day to
do a ritual outside their churches? We's never do that to them," Christian
says. "Why are they doing this to us?"

[cont.]



--- msged 2.05
 * Origin: The White Knight Cafe  (1:109/409)