If we believe in a force for good (AKA God) then logic (Ying/yang) would dictate a force for evil Likewise belief in an empowering spirit for good (AKA The Holy Spirit) would dictate the existence of at least one spirit for evil, and to make it many is not too big a leap.
Paul certainly describes a spiritual war.
It may be that this war runs without us, but I am almost certain that we can get sucked into it. I am also convinced that people who play with Ouija are playing with fire. There is much of the Spiritual that goes basically unnoticed by the majority. Christ Himself said that the Holy Spirit is invisible to many. We can bury our heads in the sand with all the consequences of such actions or we can at least bare it in mind. I certainly would not advocate going looking for evil in any form be it spirit or otherwise. But to ignore it completely would IMHO be rash to say the least.
People have felt scriptures intend to teach slavery, genocide, sexism, and racism. So it has been demonstrated that feeling is not such a good guide for the interpretation of scriptures. The demonstrable findings of science, however, has changed the world because its discoveries are more highly accurate than what people have “felt” to be the truth. Thus this looks to me to be a much much better guide for the interpretation of scriptures.
Not at all – logic dictates no such thing.
Yes. …and an adversary. And not only Paul but Jesus and other scriptures. This is the only reason I believe they exist.
Demanding that people believe in devils does exactly that. Could do more harm than good. In fact, I think it does do more harm.
I don’t think that is the way scripture was written either. The Bible simply accepts the reality that people did believe in demons. …and I think you can either take this as a cultural affectation or as a reality. I don’t don’t see that the latter is greatly superior to the former even if they do exist.
I quoted this whole bit because I have read your paragraph five times now and can’t figure out how it connects with the Lewis quote. What Lewis said was about demons and how they view things, while yours is about what humans do.
He says they are two equal errors, and I don’t think they are equal. Only the latter part is about “what demons feel.” Of course, I doubt Lewis can really tell us what demons feel. Was this part of the “Screwtape Letters?” That was a fictional work right?
I am certainly much more concerned with the practicality of beliefs. I uphold what I call the maxim of pragmatism: "the effect of believing something is part of its truth value. And this is a big part of the truth I see in religion and Christianity. Also I tend to think God contribution to scripture is more motivated by effects of believing rather than just making sure we have the facts straight. So when I don’t see positive effects coming from a belief, then this is a cause for me to doubt that particular belief.
I recently wrote in another thread, or this one, that events that just happen, can be random or perfectly purposeful.
It’s a claim that I have come across before, and it’s a perfectly possible statement to make about what is happening… last time I checked quantum foam is still a thing
Put “given that we see evil in operation all around us” ahead of that and you’ve got a robust syllogism.
The interesting thing is that it doesn’t work if you start with a force for evil; logic does not necessitate one for good.
Those are freaky. When I was in New York City on the Oddfellows & Rebekahs United Nation Pilgrimage for Youth, my mom and sister got a Ouija board one night and asked it what I was doing. The response was, “Playing with matches”. They thought that was hilarious and so called to tell me about it. When the phone rang I had just finished filling two ash trays with match heads and stacking them, open side to open side, so I had a whole bunch of matches enclosed by heavy glass with a small opening on each of the four sides, and was preparing to light a match to stick into one of the openings. The response when I told my mom that was dead silence on the line for half a minute. That was when she asked if my room was on the Xth floor; I said it was, then she asked if the room number was Y, and I said it was. It turned out that they had asked a lot more than what I was doing, including a question if I was awake before they called.
This led to another incident: the Methodist Church was having a rummage sale, and in among the games was a Ouija board. It didn’t have a price on it so we went to ask what the price was, and the lady insisted they didn’t have a Ouija board at all, and continued to insist that until we took her over to the games table and showed her. At any rate, she just matched the item with the price of a Monopoly game and we bought it.
Our intent was not to use it: After I returned from that trip, a friend and I took a Ouija board and asked it some questions, roughly–
“Are you real?” “Yes”. “Do you have a name?” “Yes”. “What is your name?” No response. “Can you tell us your name?” “Yes”. “So what is it?” No response. “Is there a place where you live?” “Yes”. “What is it like there?” “Darkness”. “Is there ever light?” “No light”. “Could you get some light?” “NO LIGHT!” (I use the caps because it felt like our fingers were being jerked around the board). “You don’t like light?” “NO LIGHT!” That was when one girl asked to switch in, and she asked, “Do you know who Jesus is?” – and the pointer flew off the board and smashed into the wall.
That was when we decided to buy the Ouija board that one girl in the Methodist church said her mom was putting in with some games to be sold. Eerily, the board we bought was not that one from her mom, so we went back to the rummage sale and started poking into closets, Sunday School rooms, and storerooms, and someone found the Ouija board her mom had donated stuck on a shelf behind some office supplies. We didn’t want to freak out the sale lady again so we just hid it and walked out with it.
The rest of the story is that we took both of them to a picnic in a city park and threw them in the fire. Some adults thought we were crazy, right up until some said, “Who’s screaming?”
The screaming was coming from the fire.
One of my Greek professors at grad school told us at the start of the term “Forget everything you learned in Sunday School – this is about the text and what it actually says”. (That pissed some people off.)
Only to the overly-curious. Most people I’ve told that demons are real react with, “Huh. Well, as long as they leave me alone…”
But yeah, occasionally someone goes the wrong way with that.
When I was working at a church in Miami, everyone at church took the existence of demons as just a fact of spiritual life; with various versions of Santeria around there were dark practitioners and too many instances of bizarre occurrences for anyone to maintain demons weren’t real. I had a couple of encounters that fell in that category, though my one encounter I was (and remain) positive involved a demon was my second year in college, so I wasn’t freaked out when people asked for help in those terms.
It’s from the introduction; as I recall he was talking about why he wrote the book – he intended it to a large extent to be a practical book for people to be able to understand how we get led away from the core of the faith.
You are right. I wouldn’t talk about quantum foam though (bit too fringe). I think the point is that scientists might say vacuum fluctuations don’t have a cause. Though you could also say @St.Roymond has a point also, and that the vacuum can be named as a cause for vacuum fluctuations. Though perhaps the real issue is the idea of Stephen Hawking that the universe began with a quantum fluctuation. And while that always sounded reasonable to me before, now I am not so sure, since that cannot qualify as a vacuum fluctuation. I wonder if that is why Stephen Hawking seemed to forget about that idea.
They say that too. I forget exactly how it’s described, events (causes) that happen and don’t happen. Looks to me like a murky singularity where events are caused by something that doesn’t happen… or still the persistent illusion of nothing not willing to reveal itself, or the proverbial tip of an infinite regress.
Does the Uncertainty Principle apply to the quantum vacuum? or a variant of it, something like whether or not a particle will pop into existence at a given location cannot be determined?
I think the use of the term “event” here doesn’t work well if the quantum vacuum is a field, as fields cause things sort of on their own, right? (Okay, physics folks, tell me if I’m out in left field).
My thought about a quantum vacuum field tripped a mental relay to trigger another question: could mind qualify as a field? if so, can decisions by minds count as uncaused?
And another question: should this discussion of the idea of uncaused events be spun off into its own thread? (I direct this question into the local field known as “moderation”.)
Scientifically the only thing that is self-evident is that neurons fire before and while an action is initiated and carried through. The argument is whether this involves some emergent phenomenon that can be reduced to brain chemistry or whether mind is a distinct entity that acts on the brain.
