Posted on 09/25/2012 6:42:30 AM PDT by marshmallow
Evil has not fallen out of fashion. Exorcism is a rite developed and promulgated to meet a need that still exists, due to more people delving into New Age and occult practices.
And, yes, satanic worshippers are a reality.
They come in the church and steal the Blessed Sacrament to use in a black mass, explained Father Gary Thomas, pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Saratoga, Calif., and the exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose.
He has alerted his fellow priests to this danger and trained his extraordinary ministers of holy Communion so that they note whether people receiving Communion are actually consuming it, not simply transporting it elsewhere for obscene purposes.
Father Thomas, a priest for 28 years, has even addressed people who appear not to be consuming the Eucharist.
If I dont know them, Ill say, Excuse me, will you please finish consuming the body of Christ in my presence? he said.
Father Thomas the subject of the book The Rite and the 2012 movie of the same name was one of a half dozen exorcism experts to speak at the Southern California Renewal Communities Catholic Renewal Convention held Labor Day weekend in Anaheim, Calif.
In addition to the workshops on healing, the Holy Spirit and prayer, the convention offered two tracks called Christ Triumphant, which focused on exorcism and deliverance ministry a general track and a pastoral track for clergy and lay ministers.
The day preceding the convention, organizers also hosted a mini-conference for 175 registered priests and three bishops featuring the expert speakers (among them four active exorcists and one retired exorcist).
Which begs the question: Is exorcism simply a hot topic or has the need for the rite grown?
Its certainly a popular subject. The Rite was...
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
And you don’t brace one of satan’s helpers without paying a price. You can’t take on satan by yourself.
Not abstract to a believer. The evidence is everywhere.
See post 13 for example.
How do you know they are not possible?
Read TO KILL AND KILL AGAIN, the paperback edition. Wayne Nance. I have seen evil. I pray that you don’t.
—— I wonder why you don’t know the same? ——
I have eyewitness testimony from people I trust.
I have Jesus’ testimony.
I have experienced extra-natural (non-satanic) phenomena myself.
Preturnatural or supernatural phenomena cannot be dismissed a priori.
I have studied publicly viewable and testable phenomena that defy naturalistic explanation, like the Shroud of Turin, the tilma of Juan Diego, and the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano.
The Bible is clear on this - Satan rules the earth. He is the prince of the air.
In the Lord’s prayer, this is addressed explicitly:
“Thy will be done
On Earth, as it is in Heaven.”
We pray that God’s will prevails on Earth, and not Satan’s.
The entire point of the second coming of Christ is to establish Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. Revelation makes it clear that it will go on for 1000 years, and then something else is going to happen, and I’m not sure what.
Satan is as real as the nose on your face. What we think is consciousness, what we can perceive with the five senses is a powerful bias to overcome in terms of understanding the realm of the spiritual.
Man has free will. What he does with that is something for which each will account. To say that because man is corrupt, which is true, doesn’t automatically preclude the possibility of Satan, and his demons, acting of their own accord.
You may not believe in Satan, but I assure you he believes in you. I hope you live your entire life such that you never have cause to question your disbelief in the existence of an intelligent evil agency.
It doesn’t matter if you live through it either. There are worse things than death.
You should not have gone there. Now you’re going to be deluged with requests to prove a negative. Never mind that EVERY single scientific inquiry into levitation et al has failed to produce even the slightest measurable effect.
This seems like polytheism to me.
The Lord's Prayer is a Hebrew prayer for God's will to be done over Man's. It says nothing about Satan.
Jesus was a fine rabbi. And I don't think the United States could have been founded without Christianity. So in that sense, he was a messiah. Yet it seems to me too that he should have known about microbial contaminates in washing his hands before eating, (as he ostensibly knew about life after death) not that he would be obliged to express it and thus disrupt the flow of history. Though his continuation of the custom, rather than his flouting of it, would have been more in accord with what eventually became effective hygenic practice.
...doesnt automatically preclude the possibility of Satan....
Again, I'd ask for one example of Satan's existence in the pre-human world.
And you dont brace one of satans helpers without paying a price. You cant take on satan by yourself.
<><><><
And the price you paid was .... ? we’re all anonymous here, you can share.
Have you been able to look into others’ eyes to distinguish evil from mental illness? Seems you would be in great demand at psychiatric hospitals.
Exorcise! Get in shape! Move that body! Lift that weight!
He was there, man. It didn't happen.
It says in the bible, “through patience possess ye your souls”. People do not realize that it is through tiny irritations that grow to anger that is the main cause of demon possession and the fhu.com has a wonderful pathway to that patience for those that are willing...in the Be Still exercise.
Is that the devil’s bottle opener? I’ve heard rumors of its existence.
No, it’s a hand weight.
“Again, I’d ask for one example of Satan’s existence in the pre-human world.”
It’s an interesting request. You want prehistorical evidence of Satan’s intervention in things. I don’t know if it is possible, but I can lend a perspective:
According to some of the apocryphal texts, Lucifer was an angel, not a god, or not God himself. Apparently even angels have free will, and they are capable of sin, because the beef Lucifer had was being asked to worship God’s creation - man. Until the creation of man, Lucifer wasn’t all that concerned with Earth.
He and a third of the angels in Heaven that saw things likewise were cast from Heaven to Earth.
I don’t know how much evidence exists, and the fact that I switched from Satan to Lucifer is important, because I frankly don’t know if they are the same entity.
Jesus said, that Satan was a liar, and a murderer from the begining. Now, ‘begining’ to Jesus may mean something completely different than what it means to a human being.
The Lord’s prayer continues, in that we pray that we are not led into temptation, and to deliver us from evil.
This was the prayer given to us directly by Christ. It frankly scares the crap out of me, because it buries the cosmic lead, which is to say it suggests we are in the middle of a conflict between titanic spiritual entities about which we understand little.
It jibes, for me, the metaphor uses for His faithful on earth - sheep; His flock.
From a timeline perspective, there were no witnesses to the Fall of Lucifer, or where upon the Earth he landed. There’s rumors about some definitive physical location, but your request is difficult to fulfill on purely logistical grounds. This is why we call it ‘faith’.
Gosh, you’re funny. Maybe you can go to those graves in Missoula and tell them some of your jokes.
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