Posted on 02/02/2011 6:31:30 AM PST by marshmallow
Ping!
ping
Drugs and pornography DEFINITELY lead to harassment by demonic spirits. Anyone with experience with either (or anyone with experience with those how have such experience) knows that.
Screwtape
I don’t know I was somewhat into that sort of thing as a teen, power is very tempting but after I hit 14 I realized it wasn’t real. The devil is just a metaphor for humanity indulging his own evil.
I wish more people understood this. Most people I know are so lost they think Jesus is in heaven, God is merely a spectator, and Satan is some kind of folklore/fairytale thing. Yikes!!!
In my house, we DO NOT even so much as check the daily horoscopes, let alone visit fortune tellers, read tarot cards, etc. And I dont allow my child to watch such garbage as “Wizards of Waverly Place” nor will she be permitted to read Harry Potter or vampire pop culture trash.
Anyway....I was in Barnes and Noble on Saturday looking for Spanish and English literature for youth. I was greatly surprised the enormous volume and percentage of fiction devoted solely to the topic of vampires, witches, and magic driven fantasy. In the Spanish section for youth it was nearly entirely vampire and witchcraft. I bought the **only** non-vampire/witchcraft book on the Spanish literature shelf.
This must reflect the curiosity that youth have in the occult. From the covers of the books these fiction seems to be dark stuff...not many cute little red slippers there.
The devil is not a metaphor!!!! Please realize Satan is very real & does indeed exist!!
This is happening near my hometown as well. Last year I went to a large book retailer and all the front shelves featured vampire, ghost and werewolf books. The store also sold official Twilight vampire dolls. I went in there to look for a Bible to purchase as a gift. It was a spiritually bizarre experience.
I’ll second what you are saying! I have a 3 year old so it hasn’t impacted her too much yet but I have noticed reading for school-aged kids (like 2 grade) is inundated with magic, wizards, vampires, etc. And shows & movies are just as bad (think “twilight”). Fortunately, my little one is into EWTN’s Faith Factory shows and we together pray St Michael’s chaplet. It is my hope that she never strays away from our Lord & that St Michael will protect her from evil influences.
That's certainly not the way Satan is presented in the Bible. Satan is a live, conscious, sentient being with power and the will to exercise it for evil.
Christ himself believed in the devil. You know something he didn't?
The devil is not a metaphor.
My husband and his teen friends were playing with a Ouiji board. One of his friends asked the Ouiji board if they were going to move. It said, “Yes.” and then predicted “6 months”. When asked where, it spelled out a name that meant nothing to anyone at the party.”
Well...Six months later the father was transferred and his friend and his family moved to house on a street with the exact **same** name as that spelled out by the Ouiji board. ( CREEPY!)
Personally...I will have nothing to do with the occult. While references to witches, fairies, magic, werewolves, Harry Potter etc. are part of the culture and are found in movies and literature, when we encountered these things I always was clear with my children to *never *never never* dabble in these things.
If he does exist why has he not been destroyed? If he is a living entity who can impact events why hasn’t someone destroyed him? If not holy water surely extreme heat, cold, or force could destroy him. And if he is real and as powerful as as you say than why does he manipulate and dabble with occult toys or weak human souls? Why wouldn’t he manifest himself?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. Honestly. I do believe satan exists, and I think there’s ample evidence in the evil we see around us everyday and from a historical perspective. There are lots of questions regarding religion that we simply don’t know the answers to, and probably won’t until we die. That doesn’t mean that the devil (or God for that matter) doesn’t exist.
Some things have to be taken in faith, and if you don’t have that, then nothing will convince you anyway.
Frankly, because it isn’t time yet for him to be destroyed.
He was the highest of the Archangels and stood daily in the presense of God Himself before he fell. Do you really think that he can be destroyed by mortal means? As it is written, we are made a little lower than the angels, yet you expect us to be able to destroy the Chief of all the Angels?
Bluntly put, he manipulates humans because he desires to destroy them, not just physically but spiritually as well. The occult is just one of many avenues that he uses to further this goal and, frankly, it’s one of his most productive. Your attitude, that this is just some kind of human subconscious defense mechanism, is another of his greatest ploys. Mankind’s two greatest weaknesses are either they don’t pay enough attention to Lucifer and dismiss him as a figment of our collective imagination, or they pay too much attention to him and worship him. You yourself admitted that you went from one extreme to the other, so you prove this to be the case.
As for the driving rage behind Lucifer’s hatred of Man is pride. God showed love to mankind and Lucifer, because of his own pride, hated it and was determined to destroy the object of God’s love. Ultimately Lucifer will eventually manifest himself in human form, but it won’t be to dominate humans, it will be to challenge God’s authority to rule.
Choose very carefully which side you pick. There’s only two sides and a selection of neutral will automatically put you in Lucifer’s camp.
I do have faith I believe in god though not in the same way that many do I think. I’m just not convinced in the devils existance as a tangible entitiy. I think humanity has a great deal of good within itself and a great deal of evil. I’ve felt the presence of god a few times in my life whether he tips the odds slightly in my favor or gives some insight which helps me overcome an obstacle. The only evil I’ve ever felt is from within me.
The Catholic church has long been very dubious about the whole thing, because superstition is about as reprehensible as it gets—often a throwback to old pagan practices.
Despite the demonologies of the past, in which church scholars imagined all the details of Hell down to, literally, Hell’s pastry chef, eventually the church decided that some distinctions had to be drawn.
1) Just because something is unknown does not mean it is demonic or evil. Likewise, the unknown far tremendously outstrips the demonic by many orders of magnitude. So the assumption should be that the unknown is just unknown, until it becomes known. Not that it has evil or malign character by default.
2) The church also recognizes that mental illness is almost invariably an illness, and that almost all illness is not caused by demonic or evil forces, but are congenital and genomic, or caused by pathogens, parasites, malfunction and injury.
3) However, the church also recognizes that many are the times in our lives in which we need solace in many forms. Just because people are mistaken in the cause of their problems does not diminish their need for ministration.
4) Unfortunately, people will adopt heterodoxical or even heretical beliefs, as well as rampant superstition. But an important distinction needs to be drawn, that these are objectionable *not* because they are demonic or powerfully evil, but because they are empty and meaningless.
What is offensive is that people waste themselves, putting their faith into mindless and powerless things instead of how it should be directed, in enriching their lives and faith in what does matter.
The church recognizes that people can terribly harm themselves in the pursuit of such things. In investing the life, their hopes and desires, their strength and their character in foolish ways. It becomes like other sins, indicated more by obsession and excess than the thing in itself.
People need to eat, but if they gorge themselves they are gluttons.
It is good to procreate, but insatiable lust makes a person jaded.
Prosperity is good, but greed steals away from your life.
People need to explore the unknown, to make it part of the known. But obsession with not just the unknown, but the unknowable, saps the strength. A graven image may be worshiped all day, but it just sits there.
5) Then finally, after all that argument, there is an admission that demons exist. But claiming that from the start is a fool’s errand.
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