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July 10, 2023

Tailah Scroggins felt dead inside. After growing up in a Christian home, she somehow fell into the occult, embracing astrology, witchcraft, and the New Age.

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But after embarking on a dark journey and losing the will to live, she had an incredible interaction with Jesus that changed everything.

Today, Scroggins is an online evangelist, writer, and truth-teller on a mission to help others escape evil. She recently shared her story with “Billy Hallowell’s Playing With Fire Podcast,” explaining how she was raised in a Christian home and believed in God before stumbling into the occult.

She said she was first introduced to the New Age in high school when someone she trusted in her family told her about astrology.

“They had this big … textbook of everything astrology, and they were like, ‘This describes my personality so perfectly look what it says about you,’” Scroggins said. “I was caught off-guard, and I remember … I was like, ‘But how can this be true? If God created all of us and he made our personalities, how can a planet dictate my future or dictate my personality?’”

She said this was the first “seed of deception” the devil planted in her life, and her perspective started to shift. With her family friend stating God created astrology as a system “He put in order,” she started down what she now believes was a dangerous path.

Listen to Scroggins’ story:

“They provided me some explanation that was totally false, but I didn’t know the word of God enough,” Scroggins said. “I knew a lot about God, but I didn’t know … what the Bible said about the occult about the darkness, about the battle. I just knew the good things, and so I became an astrologer.”

Scroggins spent 11 years as an astrologer, describing it as her “worldview” and “life.”

Still, she attended church and clung to some Christian ideas. She said the entire experience opened her up to “so much deception and confusion” as she lived life as a “lukewarm Christian” plagued by her occultic practices.

As Scroggins entered college, she said she was disappointed in God, feeling frustrated he hadn’t answered her wants and whims on her timeline.

“It’s spiritual immaturity,” she said of her perspective at the time. We don’t trust God’s timing, and so I’m young, I’m 18 at this time, and I’m mad I’m mad that God didn’t open the door that I wanted him to open, and that’s just kind of part of being a baby Christian.”

Her spiritual immaturity also led her to join in on the party lifestyle. Scroggins said “the enemy lied” and she “took his bait” and began down a negative path, getting drunk every weekend.

“The more I rebelled and lived in this party lifestyle, the more I craved astrology, the witchcraft, the divination, and all of that,” Scroggins said. “It was like this hunger exploded … it was like this black hole … I needed to be consuming it.”

She said depression soon took hold and suicidal thoughts reigned. Scroggins would find herself crying for two hours every day for no reason, as she grappled with the emptiness left by the abandonment of her relationship with the Lord.

Scroggins added, “It was like I had no reason to live.”

A family friend aware of her situation ended up intervening and the experience brought Scroggins true healing. The woman was at Scroggins’ home one day, and she candidly spoke with the then-college student.

“She just looked at me one day, and she said, ‘Today is the day of your freedom,’ and I said, ‘OK, I don’t know what that means, but I have no will to live,’” Scroggins recalled. “I hadn’t attempted to do anything or take my life, but I was dead inside. And so I was like, ‘You can pray and do whatever you want to me because there’s nowhere else for me to go. I’m already at rock bottom,’ and so she prayed for me.”

Those invocations, which Scroggins described as “deliverance prayers,” had a profound impact. Scroggins said they “cast every spirit of death and depression out,” and she immediately felt “huge weights being lifted off.”

She now believes the entire experience was “supernatural,” leading her to a fruitful and meaningful relationship with Christ.

“The depression never came back, the suicidal thoughts never came back ever,” she said. “It’s been over six years. I was delivered.”

Scroggins continued, “God completely healed me, set me free.”

Over time, she abandoned her occultic practices and clung close to Jesus. A few years later, though, she found herself alarmed by how many others were being enraptured by the same world she had escaped.

Scroggins said she was shocked during COVID-19 to see how interest in witchcraft, Tarot cards, crystals, and the occult exploded online.

“It grieved me, because that was my story,” she said. “I was into New Age. I was into the false spirituality in witchcraft.”

Realizing she had been “set free…by Jesus,” she decided to counter occultic videos getting millions of views with content of her own that would instead point people toward Jesus.

“I was like, ‘I’m gonna share my testimony, and I’m going to expose astrology. I’m going to expose the New Age, I’m going to expose all of it,’” she said. “And I just started telling people what I went through and what God saved me from. And what came into my life when I started doing those practices and it was all evil.”

Listen to Scroggins explain her journey and why she’s openly shared her testimony.

***As the number of voices facing big-tech censorship continues to grow, please sign up for Faithwires daily newsletter and download the CBN News app, developed by our parent company, to stay up-to-date with the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***

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Politics

The lesson of El Salvador’s failed Bitcoin experiment

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The lesson of El Salvador’s failed Bitcoin experiment

The revolution is dead in El Salvador. It’s a lesson for developing nations who aim to seek out economic autonomy by making crypto legal tender.

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UK

Nottingham killer allowed to avoid vital medication because of ‘fear of needles’ claim, report reveals

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Nottingham killer allowed to avoid vital medication because of 'fear of needles' claim, report reveals

The man who killed three people on the streets of Nottingham was allowed to avoid taking long-lasting antipsychotic medication because he did not like needles.

An independent review also reveals that Valdo Calocane punched a police officer in the face and held his flatmates “hostage”.

He frightened one neighbour so much, she jumped out of a first floor window and seriously damaged her back.

Mental health staff did not visit his home alone.

Calocane, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order after killing 19-year-old students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates, before attempting to kill three other people in June 2023.

NHS England initially planned to release only a summary of the report because of data protection laws, but reversed its decision “in line with the wishes of the families”.

Grace Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates
Image:
Grace Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates

Those relatives say the revelation that Calocane was refusing his meds shows he may have been “spared prison on the basis of incomplete evidence”.

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Prosecutors accepted a plea of manslaughter after experts agreed his schizophrenia meant he wasn’t fully responsible for his actions.

But in a statement, the families said: “This was a man who actively avoided his medication and treatment, knowing that when he didn’t take his medication he would become paranoid and violent.

“He was responsible for his actions and was allowed to make these decisions by his treating teams, but yet when he came to court, we were told a very different story.”

A “theme” running through Calocane’s clinical records is that he “did not consider himself to have a mental health condition”, the review found.

That meant the importance of medication “never appeared to be understood” by him.

The report detailed four hospital admissions between 2020 and 2022 and multiple contacts with community teams before he was discharged to his GP because of a lack of interaction with mental health services.

Investigators found that “the offer of care and treatment available for VC (Valdo Calocane) was not always sufficient to meet his needs” and this was “not unique” to his case.

Health officials have admitted it is “clear the system got it wrong”.

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Dr Jessica Sokolov, regional medical director at NHS England (Midlands), said: “It’s clear the system got it wrong, including the NHS, and the consequences of when this happens can be devastating.

“This is not acceptable, and I unreservedly apologise to the families of victims on behalf of the NHS and the organisations involved in delivering care to Valdo Calocane before this incident took place.”

Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s national mental health director, added: “Nationally, we have asked every mental health trust to review these findings and set out action plans for how they treat and engage with people who have a serious mental illness, including how they work with other agencies such as the police.

“And we’ve instructed trusts not to discharge people if they do not attend appointments.”

The report, which found Calocane’s risk “was not fully understood, managed, documented or communicated” should be a “watershed moment”, a mental health charity boss has said.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of mental health charity Sane, said there had been “one hundred such inquiries in the last 30 years”.

She added: “Today’s findings expose the same flaws and fault lines that have resulted in tragedies, yet little seems to have changed.”

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Technology

Toyota Motor posts nearly 28% drop in third-quarter operating profit, missing estimates

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Toyota Motor posts nearly 28% drop in third-quarter operating profit, missing estimates

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Toyota is pictured in Cuautitlan Izcalli, Mexico, January 30, 2025 

Raquel Cunha | Reuters

Japan’s Toyota Motor on Wednesday reported a second consecutive fall in quarterly profit, while announcing that it will set up a new company in China to make electric vehicles as it plays catch up with automakers focused on EVs. 

Here are Toyota’s results compared with estimates from analysts, compiled by LSEG.

  • Revenue: 12.39 trillion yen vs. 12.1 trillion yen
  • Operating profit: 1.22 trillion yen vs. 1.39 trillion yen

The world’s largest automaker by sales volume saw a nearly 28% year-on-year drop in operating profit during the quarter ended December.

The results mark Toyota’s second consecutive year over year decline in operating profit after the company saw profit fall 20% year over year in the previous quarter.

Net income attributable to the company, however, jumped to 2.19 trillion yen from 1.36 trillion yen a year ago.

The automaker’s consolidated vehicle sales for its financial third-quarter dropped to 2.44 million from 2.55 million units a year ago.

Still, Toyota maintained its full-year dividend forecast at 90 yen, compared with a dividend payout of 75 yen a year earlier.

Toyota said it will establish a wholly-owned company for the development and production of Lexus BEVs and batteries in Shanghai, China. The new company is expected to start production in 2027.

Toyota shares rose over 1% in Tokyo on Wednesday.

The company saw its operating profit drop in the key North America region by 113.7 billion yen in the December quarter, year on year, while it declined by over 46 billion yen in Asia. 

Toyota has been slower than competitors at embracing fully battery-powered electric vehicles, and instead has focused on hybrids, according to local reports.

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