Are the False Gods Real?

Are the False Gods Real?
I just finished reading Jonathan Cahn’s book Return of the Gods. For those of us who got into the faith once delivered because of the pagan roots of the biggest tenets of mainstream Christianity, this book is very familiar territory. Cahn takes the knowledge we all share about Baal, Molech, and Ishtar and brings it right into modern times. He also provides a great refresher on the reality that these gods were worshiped under different names by different cultures. Diana of the Ephesians is the same goddess as Artemis and Ishtar, for example.
Cahn traces the modern-day debauchery of sexual sin in the western world directly to the return of these gods. He does so in a remarkably convincing fashion. Cahn shows the largest success of Christianity was the removal of idolatry and the institution of biblical morality from most of the known world. Idolatry and these abominable sexual practices we see returning are tied together throughout scriptures. Romans 1 tells us this for the New Testament reference, but we can read the horrific practices of sacrificing children and temple prostitution all over the Old Testament when Israel went astray. Which was a lot more often than not.
For those who may wonder about the overwhelming slaughters Israel was ordered to bring to the Canaanites, well, it was because of these practices. Israel was to purify Canaan of idolatry not just for the sake of idolatry but to remove the behaviors of the people of Canaan from the face of the earth. Child sacrifice and abominable sexual practices had to be completely purged from the land along with the idols.
A disappointment is that Cahn doesn’t also tell his readers that Christmas and Easter are both pagan holidays tied inextricably to these abominations. It’s a shame that he clearly knows this information but doesn’t make the connection so his readers can take the appropriate action to purge the paganism from their lives today. Easter is the worship of a pagan fertility goddess and the resurrection of her lover called Tammuz. It’s not about Messiah at all. Christmas with its worship of evergreen trees and its timing at the winter solstice is also a fertility celebration. The 12 days of Christmas, the yule log, the mistletoe, and all that stuff were also tied to abominable sexual practices and idolatry.
But now to today’s question, one I poised to the assembly on Shabbat. Are these false gods real? The bible seems to say both things.

The prophets of Pharaoh could do some of the stuff that YHVH let Moses and Aaron do. The false prophets in the end times will be able to call down fire from heaven. When the witch of Endor brought up Samuel… it worked. So these beings seem to have powers and seem to be quite real. That also explains why we see the same abominable idolatrous practices all over the world spanning thousands of years. To reconcile the contradiction about gods made with hands not being gods at all, I would equate that to the physical idols. Those trinkets or statues held no power. But it appears whatever they represented did. And we should take care to avoid any practices that might open ourselves up to them. Shalom.