Accursed

According to dictionary.com, accursed means

1.

under a curse; doomed; ill-fated.

2.

damnable; detestable.

In Joshua 6, the children of Israel are going around taking over Canaan. While they were sacking cities, the Lord gave them some specific instructions. One such instruction was that they were not to take things that were "accursed" because then they would become accursed themselves. The footnotes in the Bible say that things that are accursed are

"those things under a ban for the people to take, or dedicated for a sacrifice to the LORD."

The principle here that I believe the Lord was trying to teach was that what we influence ourselves with will determine what we will become. In this case, the Lord did not want the children of Israel to be influenced with certain booty that was probably more heathenistic than useful to them. Likewise, God does not want us to be influenced by objects, activities or people who would draw us away from Him. Like so many of God's commandments, this was more Him using His all knowing intelligence to tell us to stay away from that which is lethal to us.

What makes something accursed? I believe that something is accursed when it separates you from the Holy Ghost. An example could be when you are drunk. It is not just your senses and mind that become dull, your ability to be spiritually in-tune becomes significantly weakened to the point where the Holy Ghost cannot talk to you.

I do not think that God points a finger and curses things - I think that things become accursed through a series of choices that change its nature until it cannot be in the same place as the Holy Ghost. If the Holy Ghost is light, as Christ often said in the scriptures, then it cannot be in the same place as darkness. This is one issue where the physics and the doctrine unambiguously agree.