why christians must face their demons
Only on atheist blogs does it seem people are aware of the harm religion does…but dammit, that’s the wrong type of people who need to be fighting crap like exorcism! The f’ing CHURCH has to fight this too, and they won’t. So atheists are stuck with the job, and the theists hate us for it and won’t listen to us at all. 😦 It’s all deeply sad and disturbing to me. Ain’t No Shrinking Violet
I’ve posted about exorcism before and linked to the Where’s the harm? page, which details over a thousand stories about people killed or harmed in these religiously inspired acts. But until reading the comment above from Ain’t No Shrinking Violet, I hadn’t considered why there isn’t an outcry from the saner elements of the Christian faith about this superstitious, dangerous, highly ignorant and, all to frequently, deadly practice.
Then Jesus demanded, “What is your name?”
And he replied, “My name is Legion, because there are many of us inside this man.” Then the evil spirits begged him again and again not to send them to some distant place.
There happened to be a large herd of pigs feeding on the hillside nearby. “Send us into those pigs,” the spirits begged. “Let us enter them.”
So Jesus gave them permission. The evil spirits came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the entire herd of about 2,000 pigs plunged down the steep hillside into the lake and drowned in the water. (Mark 5)
And this is why. Christians of all stripes and educational backgrounds must believe that Jesus existed and that the stories about him in the Bible are real. If they come out openly fighting in the rational battle against exorcism, they are undermining a key story in the Bible – the supernatural tricks performed by the character Jesus that supposedly prove he was a deity.
The character Jesus cured a mentally ill man by sending demons into pigs and making the pigs commit suicide. He didn’t treat this ill man with medicine, therapy or even by supernaturally altering the chemical imbalance in his brain.
It appears that all the educated Christians in this world, who clearly know better about the difference between superstitious ignorance and treatable medical conditions, would rather stay silent to avoid facing the embarrassing fact that this story is nonsense, when they should be openly and loudly opposing the continued use of such a damaging and dangerous practice in the name of their supposedly benevolent god.
Loooooove the spider pic! It’s a little ominous…like this post.
I’m interested to see what people will say about this issue.
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I’ve asked a few Christians to join the conversation. I hope some of them turn up …
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I have a feeling they’re going to avoid this topic like the plague. I mean to admit stuff like exorcism is still going on is to admit to a certain level of crazy. It’s going to take a rare type of person to have that conversation.
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Looking forward to St. Valentine’s Day in Chicago, all over again – great plan to get them all together under one roof!
Ark – arm the nukes!
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Violet, I appreciate this post. I read your other post when you published it, but I didn’t feel like getting involved in discourse because of certain comments — excuses about Jesus not being aware that demons didn’t exist. I guess Jesus was also not aware of how harmful his ignorance and example would be. Utter BS from an apologist.
One of the greatest healing moments I ever got was from an ex-pastor. I had made a post in my other blog last year about the teachings of demons and how it played a major role in my husband committing suicide. Here’s what he said:
I wept. When this happened to my partner, there wasn’t a single Christian who said “I’m sorry—this is a barbaric, superstitious teaching and practice. In fact, one preacher warned me that my infant daughter and I should go through a “deliverance” because it was highly likely that a “suicidal spirit” had come upon us since we were in our home at the time my partner took his life, just hours before he was told by a pastor during a “counseling” session, and previously by church elders, that demons were trying to posses and oppress him.
Worse still, this kind of abuse is allowed to be taught and performed in the name of religious freedom.
IMO, they have lost their humanity, their empathy and compassion when they’d rather make excuses, or stay silent, as you say, to avoid facing the embarrassing fact that this story is nonsense, when, as you also stated, they should be openly and loudly opposing the continued use of such a damaging and dangerous practice in the name of their supposedly benevolent god.
From Father Joe’s blog, here’s an excerpt from his post titled “How True Was The Exorcist Story“:
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Thanks for the additional information. Glad to see some people do come round, but it’s all just so shocking! I still can’t believe there are so many people who have had any kind of education that can believe in demonic possession, and perpetuate such superstitious nonsense in the face of modern medicine. And the religious leaders that allow it to continue are taking advantage of people who are at the most desperate and vulnerable points in their lives, without exception.
If the rest of the Christian communities would come out and condemn these practices, citing the evidence showing it is meaningless and can cause untold harm, I think it would force those who continue with it to confront their ignorance head on. But they won’t do this, because it would undermine their whole belief system. Perhaps civil authorities need to get in on it. It’s just as much a matter of ‘religious freedom’ as stoning would be.
Note not a single Christian turned up to explain their point of view.
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“Note not a single Christian turned up to explain their point of view.” – So far, some of your invitations were issued rather late last night, American time. I can’t imagine Brandon passing up an opportunity to practice his smarmy.
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I wrote this before I issued the invitations. DP is the only one who turned up without one.
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Crawled out of the woodwork, no doubt.
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Ah, yes… an excellent example of the fundamentalism rooted into the core of all religious beliefs. Of course, most religious people will claim they are the moderate and reasonable ones… not due paying members of those fundamental extremists whom they nurture right up until they dare to act on their fundamental beliefs.
All religious people are by definition fundamentalists. The honest ones who adhere most closely to holy scripture are the ones who scare the shit out the rest of us – believer and non believer alike – because they are willing to put their trust and confidence and hope in lies, tall tales, and magic ahead of legitimate concern and responsibility for causing real people in real life great suffering and harm. The believer’s inability to differentiate a hallucinogenic belief in agencies like demons from reality devoid of any evidence for such causal agencies means all of us get to pay the price having to respect not just the absurdities as this Jesus tale but live with demonstrations of astounding ignorance, cruelty, and indifference to real suffering like those promulgated by various religious institutions, organizations, and governments acting on behalf of imposing religious beliefs in the form of punitive laws on real people. Of course, even great immorality compelled by religious stupidity and cruelty doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to far too many colluding religious people as long as this harm is done in the name of honouring some god and the harm removed far enough from sight to be done to ‘those’ people.
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“The honest ones who adhere most closely to holy scripture are the ones who scare the shit out the rest of us” That’s a great point, couldn’t agree more. The moderate and liberal Christians who have a reasonable outlook on life and cause the least harm are desperately lying to themselves about what’s in the Bible. The nutters are trying to follow every word written in it.
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“and the entire herd of about 2,000 pigs plunged down the steep hillside into the lake and drowned in the water.” – Not to mention the pig farmer who was EXTREMELY pissed!
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I am surprised there was no riot. Last year a truck hit about 70 sheep on one of our roads and there was such a riot the road was blocked for two days until the farmer was compensated
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I wonder if farmers had animals in such numbers in those days. 2000 pigs? It’s one thing being deluded and making up stories, it’s another to exaggerate the delusion beyond the physical realms of possibility as well. Like you say, the consequences of such a story would have something to write about.
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“I wonder if farmers had animals in such numbers in those days. 2000 pigs?” – See my question as to why, in a land where pork was a forbidden fruit, anyone would raise pigs at all.
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Why punish pigs anyway
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I’ll admit I’m a bit confused as to why, in a land where the consumption of pork was forbidden, anyone would bother raising 2000 pigs – maybe he owned a football factory.
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I had not thought of that. Maybe pigs were for sale to their neighbours who did not have dietary laws
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The towns on that side of the Sea of Tiberias were heavily populated by gentiles.
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ah, so they handled pigs for commercial purposes? That explains a lot now.
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The scene takes place in pagan territory. The pig herders would most likely have been gentiles.
As for your Jew-baiting: real classy.
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Is a herd of 2000 realistic? And to all have committed suicide with no other reference to rioting or furious farmers? Do you think any of it is possible?
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Didn’t the village elders ask Jesus to leave, or am I conflating it with a different story?
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The village pleaded with him to leave.
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In the Infancy Gospels (which i LOVE) the villagers demanded Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the whole “Smith” family (what was Jesus’ last name?) bugger-off after the 5 year-old Jesus went on his murderous rampage killing kids.
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How I wish they’d chosen that for the final edition!
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Me too, it rocks. I mean, that Jesus kills a whole family of fire breathing DRAGONS when he was only two years old! How cool is that? I can’t possibly imagine why they didn’t include it.
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Where was he when they tried to throw him off a cliff?
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Oh, there’s two versions isn’t there? In one version there’s only one man possessed by demons, and in the other there are two. Inerrant.
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Sounds like he was lucky he lived to be crucified – if I had a herd of 2000 critters, I wouldn’t care if they were gerbils, if some dude came along and ran them off a cliff, his next move would be in a full body cast.
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Did I bait any Jews? I am just trying to get to understand the story dp and if anyone can shine any light, I will be more than happy
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Sorry if I misread you.
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“As for your Jew-baiting: real classy.” – What are Jews biting on these days? Anybody know? Matzo balls? And what’s the custom, catch and release?
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Maybe dp knows. I have no idea Jews are being used as baits
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Raymond Brown comments in his Introduction to the New Testament,
‘There is a major geographical problem in Mark’s location of the scene where the pigs run down the embankment and drown in the sea. Gerasa is a site over thirty miles from the Sea of Galilee, and the alternative reading Gadara is no real help since it is about six miles from the sea.’
Should issues like this cause us to doubt the inspiration of such stories?
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Personally, I found myself derailed at, “In the beginning, god…” —
But to answer your question – “Should issues like this cause us to doubt the inspiration of such stories?” – it should certainly scream, “Clearly I wasn’t there and have no first-hand knowledge of this whatsoever, but I heard it from a friend who heard if from his Uncle Charley, so it must be true!” That story and the location of the “cliff,” off of which they were going to throw Yeshua in the valley where Nazareth is located, raises a great deal of doubt about the reliability of the authors. I can’t speak to “inspiration,” as in religious matters, the word generally refers not to a brilliant idea, but to some form of magical thought transference which I decline to recognize, but stories that blatantly reveal that the author was never a witness and was dealing strictly in hearsay evidence, doesn’t do much to establish his credibility regarding anything else he may have to say.
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Makagutu, what? How does one truck hit 70 sheep? Were they in one large pile? In another truck? Lined up precisely along the road for easy smacking? I’m not doubting your story, it just boggles the mind.
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http://www.shomonews.com/narok-tragedy-riots-as-truck-kills-110-sheep/
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“The lorry is said to have lost control and ploughed through the flock” is a great line. Thanks, Mak, for a hearty laugh.
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Anytime. You can’t make these up you know.
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Domino-effect —
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Exorcisms aside, I am eternally fascinated by the refusal of Christians (even the really crazy right wingers like Tom and Colorstorm and Insanitybytes) to not denounce Gary North and his fellow Dominionists who want to stone children to death in American public squares. I am forever throwing this utter nutcase in front of them, asking if they agree with him and his proposed methods, but none (count that, none) have ever done so. So yeah, I think you’re right: they won’t condemn anything if they think it’ll then challenge their delusion.
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Great point. I wonder how many more we could list. I’ve seen you throw Gary North at them, and they blank it like it’s irrelevant. More ‘new covenant’ nonsense, which doesn’t make sense when it comes to humans punishing subservient humans. Surely they can only use that line for animal sacrifice? Demonic possession is an even bigger hurdle for them to face, because Jesus did it – no glossing over the OT there.
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“Demonic possession is an even bigger hurdle for them to face, because Jesus did it – no glossing over the OT there.” – At least someone SAID that Jesus did it —
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Hey V-
Saw your request. Based on the premise of your post, and your last paragraph, I respectfully decline to acquiesce your request. Many reasons, but Genesis 1.1 is the best one.
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Thanks for coming over anyway, although I’m not sure I understand. Is it a case of just having to trust your god because it doesn’t make sense? Bowing to the authority that he has the answers?
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No offense Violet, but the point I was making: it is waaaaaaaaay too involved to engage, beginning with your observation of ‘authority.’
But yes, scripture explains it all. Maybe it would be worth an entire post (s). A very serious topic.
Tkx for the invite tho.
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Okay, would be good if you could paste the link here for anyone interested when you do that post. Like you say, a serious topic.
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“Many reasons, but Genesis 1.1 is the best one.” – This is what I meant when I said you had turned blithering into a new language!
Gen 1:1 – ah, that would be the chapter written in the 6th century BCE Bronze Age, by anonymous, superstitious, scientifically-ignorant Aaronid priests in captivity in Babylon, that was intended to replace Gen 2, as they felt that the Gen 2 authors, writing in Jerusalem, in c.950 BCE had featured a god who was too user-friendly, in that he popped down to earth to take strolls, “in the cool of the day,” because the heavenly air-conditioner was on the fritz and personally sewed clothes on his Celestial Singer.
But then you moderated that comment on your blog, didn’t you, CS? Karma rocks, doesn’t it?!
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I must admit I am very tempted to follow ColorStorm’s example here, in that it’s hard to see how your invitation ultimately amounts to much more than an invitation for Christians to march out into the little public square that is your blog and promptly tie themselves to the whipping post. Are you genuinely interested in hearing input, because you truly desire to understand something better, or are these sorts of topics just much better sport for atheistic jibes when you have a line-up of “nut jobs” to throw tomatoes at?
I see that you gave IB’s comment a reasonably fair hearing though, so I suppose I might say something, but like CS said, this is a very deep and complex topic, and your post itself of course comes right out of the gate in pre-assuming that there is no such thing as the supernatural, and assuming that it is all nothing more than “superstitious ignorance”, so I’ll confess I’m not holding my breath that anyone is really that interested in entertaining any new paradigms of thought here… But who knows.
I would say that probably the thing that first and foremost desperately needs to be pointed out, is that there is actually a massive difference between the concept of an “exorcism”, and that of “deliverance”. “Exorcism” is a rite, as dpmonahan already mentioned below, which comes out of Catholic tradition, and even that tradition itself is actually far more derived from pagan/occult backgrounds than anything which is found in the Bible.
Jesus in fact did not perform “exorcisms”. Nor did any of the apostles or disciples in the Bible…
They simply cast the demons out of the person, under the authority of the Name of Jesus Christ. There were no “rituals” being performed. No incantations or special water sprinkled, and CERTAINLY none of the types of things you read about in that list on the “Where’s the harm?” website, such as drowning, beating, tying people up, etc. So really, the BIBLICAL directive on casting out demons is really no more than speaking the name of Jesus in authority over an evil spirit. You don’t need to touch the person, or have some long, drawn-out episode, or anything like that. It’s no more “dangerous” than when I prayed on a comment here on your blog the other day. Did you find that “dangerous”? Obviously, you don’t believe in the power of Christ, so to you it was simply empty words, but to the demonic, the name of Christ is that which they fear more than anything. Not as some “magical word”, but the Judge Himself. Those examples on the “What’s the harm” page included rituals performed by shamans, and indeed, shamanism throughout history has it’s own traditions of dealing with demonic possession, but it is totally different, (and quite often violent) because ultimately what is going on is people trying ot use the power of demons, to cast out demons… This is why Jesus is different.
But then, I suppose this is a large part of why I am hesitant to even attempt to underline this very significant distinction to you, because from the experience of past conversations, it seems pretty apparent that you are content to just lump ALL “religion” into one big over-simplified pot, and never bother to try and learn anything about the massive differences in both belief AND practice found under the umbrella of “religion”. I find this incredibly frustrating, but I suppose it’s also understandable, if the end-goal is to simply find excuses to write-off the Bible or God as possibly being anything “good”! But still, under this type of twisted logic, you would basically be arguing that there is ultimately no difference between some midnight occult ritual where some poor soul was being raped and sacrificed, and a group of elderly church ladies singing songs in a choir. It’s all “religion”, right? Sorry but this is really nothing more in the end but willful ignorance…
I have to wonder if perhaps something you don’t quite realize here, is that I would have to say that even I myself spend FAR more time addressing the problems and pitfalls of various “religious” beliefs and practices, than I do addressing things like atheism or Evolution. (of course, I ultimately believe Evolution is ITSELF a religious worldview, but I realize that you don’t see it that way, so…) What I mean is, I am really NOT worried about “atheists” taking over the world! I do not in fact believe that those who are in the highest positions of power and influence over our world, (in what is sometimes referred to as the so-called “deep State”) are themselves atheists.
If you’re really hungering for some “superstitious craziness” to try and pick apart, then honestly, you’re not even scratching the surface here.
There IS in fact a great, great deal of TRUE EVIL that is done in the name of “religion”, but most of it I would say is still completely outside of your scope at this point, believe it or not…
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Tistf says that this is a very deep and complex topic. What is the topic? The topic is about the harm caused to real people by the continued use of exorcisms based on the belief that because Jesus believed in demons therefore demons really do exist. Tistf tells us that the criticisms are misguided because they mention today’s exorcisms including rituals and symbols. He says a proper understanding of the Gospels reveals that Jesus and the disciples simply cast the demons out of the person, under the authority of the Name of Jesus Christ. as if this offered us reasonable grounds to think exorcisms remained a reasonable response… but done strictly by invoking the name of Jesus Christ. By doing this, he assures us we’d get rid of the harm caused by exorcisms and therefore, it would be quite reasonable an undertaking!
So where’s the complexity?
Well, like most apologetics, the complexity is introduced by a believer in a lunatic claim – that demons are real causal agents in the world – to cover up and obfuscate why the claim is ludicrous, and try to divert attention to some detailed quibble involving metaphysics (and sure enough, Ttistf, concludes his diversion by talking about ‘true’ evil as if this had anything whatsoever to do with the original criticism about the lunacy of believing that demons are real but incorporeal malevolent spirits that cause real effect on real people.
Is this claim complex in some way to reduce or mitigate the effects of exercising this lunacy in the treatment of others? Not according to anything Tistf offers us. All Tistf tries to do is divert the cause of a harmful treatment not on its founding principle – that demons are real when they’re not – but on the practices that he claims isn’t the correct biblical version.
This is a typical apologetic tactic.
So here’s the challenge to Tistf:
Do you believe that demons like the one cast out by Jesus are real? How do you know?
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Wow. I guess tomatoes it is…
Yes, obviously I believe that demons, like those cast out by Jesus, are real.
What is kind of funny, is that for the majority of my life to start out with, I really didn’t “believe in them”, other than perhaps in a vague doctrinal-assent kind of way. They certainly weren’t something I ever expected to come face-to-face with personally. I walked away from God for many years, and then even as I eventually came back around to being unable to intellectually deny that He is real, and the Bible is indeed true, I still did not put much stock in the notion of the “supernatural” being something that could tangibly interface with our “modern, scientific world”. Ha… How wrong I was.
Demons are very real, but obviously, if they are real, and working according to the agenda which the Bible says they are, then of course they aren’t going to just jump out and go “Hi! I’m a demon!”, just to satisfy the demands of Mr. Tildeb. 🙂
I really was hoping that you could at least try and refrain from doing what I most expected, and simply launching into some diatribe that presupposes an empiricist worldview. I am not “diverting attention” whatsoever bud, I am answering the question quite directly, even knowing that your predisposition towards disregarding anything remotely supernatural is only likely to invite scorn and ridicule. Like I said at the beginning of my first comment, if that is the only real reason for “inviting” Christians to comment, then wow, that is pretty lame…
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How do demons stay inside a body traveling 30Km/second elliptically and 465 meters/second orbitally through space if they are incorporeal?
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This question itself is rather pointless, isn’t it, if you don’t believe in spiritual dimensions? They answer would of course be the same as to how your own spirit stays attached to your body as it moves through space/time…. (which you already reject, so….)
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What is a ‘spiritual’ dimension and how do you know of this?
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(do you at least comprehend the basic concept of a “dimension”…? Call them “higher dimensions if you wish. “Spiritual” is in the end really just a term….)
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So you’re using a reference to another incorporeal claim as if evidence for your incorporeal claim? And you see no problem with this?
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You’re the one claiming we have spirits. I have no knowledge of any such ‘thing’. You, apparently, do. So, again, my question is HOW do you know of this ‘thing’?
Until you can answer the ‘how’ question, your claims are empty of knowledge value and full of your own ungrounded beliefs indistinguishable from the medical condition known as ‘delusion’. Why should I take you delusions seriously unless you can demonstrate by reason why they aren’t? My question shouldn’t be something you must avoid; it should be the starting position you yourself assume before lending confidence to ANY claim no matter how outlandish or common it may be.
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that epistemology dictates ontology. I want to know your epistemology because if the conclusions you reach – your ontology – are based on it, then it should be supported by more than just your beliefs. Reality should independently verify that you have insight into it and I will be eager to learn new stuff. If it isn’t supported by reality but is made up only from credulity and gullibility of superstitious beliefs, then I am going to quite reasonably have a laugh at your expense because the claims are clearly a joke.
The difference is one of epistemology… specifically your epistemology. After all, you must use some kind of means to come to ‘know’ about demons. I’m asking you to define this or these means. If the means exists independent of your beliefs then I will pay close attention. If the means are wholly dependent on your assumptions, assertions, and assignments, then you’ve got nothing but these. And that matters to me because it allows me to treat your claims as either worth pursuing or discarding. As far as I can tell, your claims are lunacy because you are deluded into believing stuff contrary to how we know reality operates for no good reasons except an absurd religious demand that you must believe it is so.
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I did not “demand” you must believe it is so. I was “invited” to come in and comment, and so I have. You of course should know that the things you are demanding to have “proven” to you, are indeed very involved topics/conversations, and really are completely related to everything I have already been endeavoring to explain in every comment I have left on Violet’s blog thus far. My “epistemology” touches everything I have said, in regards to the veracity of the Bible, the question of things like “absolute morality”, the inherent self-contradictions in the Theory of Evolution, as well as my own personal experience, and I have now taken many a “tomato-to-the-face” for having bothered to do so.
I could talk to you in more detail about my own experiences with the demonic realm, but honestly… If you are already intent on denying that there is anything akin to a “spiritual reality”, then how is any amount of further elaboration going to make any difference? If I had the displeasure of meeting Baalzebub face to face, and then went and told you about it, it’s not like you would believe it!
I’m sorry that I can’t put God, or an angel, or a demon, or the spiritual realm, onto a little glass slide and put it under a microscope for you Tildeb. I’ve tried and tried, but they just don’t seem to want to stay they long enough for you document them in an empiricist fashion…. 🙂
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Transcription of comment: “I don’t know but I’m going to pretend I do and blame you for doubting my sincerity.”
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Transcription of your comments: “prove to me that the spiritual realm is real, within the confines of my pre-determined worldview of scientific naturalism”…(!?)
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No, that’s bullshit and you know it’s bullshit.
If your claims are true, and you know them to be so by some yet not yet enunciated means, then tell me HOW.
Simple question.
It should have a simple answer… if it’s true.
All this diversionary crap you now submit as comments about incorporeal causal agents similar to ‘other’ incorporeal realms and dimensions and what have you is just an avoidance tactic.
Tell me how you know what you claim to know so that I too can know. Don’t be so selfish and special.
I’m not the one refusing to consider how you know any of this stuff; you’re the one refusing to tell me how you know what you claim to know. Blaming me for this is not rational. Blaming me for ‘demanding’ it must come test tube ready is dishonest. Blaming me for holding a priori naturalist beliefs is a lie.
Why do you need to be irrational, deceitful, and dishonest when challenged on your belief in demons? Why not simply present how you know what you say you know… unless you also know that you are relying on your affection for your own beliefs informed only by assertion, assumptions, and assignments that make you feel like you have some special insight?
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Stating that you have an a priori belief in naturalism is a “lie”…?
Hmmm, so if I asked if you were truly open to the possibility of a spiritual reality, you could honestly answer “yes”?
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Yes, and I can even tell you how. But you first.
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“I have now taken many a “tomato-to-the-face” for having bothered to do so.” – Not from me, I’m too fond of salad. Get your own tomatoes —
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By what mechanism are these incorporeal critters able to intervene and cause changes in chemical outputs?
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What mechanism allows you to “intervene” in your own body and cause it to move, speak, etc…? (same basic issue as your other comment re: mind/body connection…)
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You’re not answering my simple questions. If it’s the same mechanism then demons are indistinguishable from normal neurological activity, which reveals that you have no means to say this is neural, that is demon. Yet you say you know… So my question remains unanswered: HOW do you know?
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“If it’s the same mechanism then demons are indistinguishable from normal neurological activity”
No… Because “normal neurological activity” does not include speaking in languages that the individual has never learned, or speaking in a completely different voice (even different gendered voice), or reciting large swaths of information that the individual would have no way of personally knowing, etc. When a demon is truly “manifesting” it quite an “abnormal” event…
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And you know this how?
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Where do demons go when cast out?
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How do you know demons are real… other than asserting they are?
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Because I have encountered them personally, and seen that they are not simply “chemical imbalances in the brain”…. Although I already expect that you would not believe me in saying this, so I’m not sure why I’d even bother to answer.
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“Because I met one” doesn’t explain how you know demons are real.
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“I have encountered them personally”
I’d be interested to hear more about this. If you don’t feel comfortable giving details here, would you do it on your own blog and give a link here?
I have a three-year old who suffers the usual chemical imbalances in the brain that many three-years do. The change in her personality is seriously phenomenal and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I would wonder if it was a demon, if I believed in such things.
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Like I said, I do not ascribe all “disorders” etc. as being caused by demonic agency. I have a “special needs” child myself, and through this experience have come to learn about the many ways which are children (and all of us) are exposed to a whole host of chemical assaults upon our combined neurological/digestive systems, resulting in the alarmingly large number of children today being diagnosed somewhere on the “spectrum”, and so much of this really does just have to do with the many ways that things like GMO foods and pharmaceutical drugs are bombarding the body and causing all sorts of harm to normal development. In so many of these cases, learning proper nutritional treatment options is often the best and most effective response.
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Fiction, thanks for joining the conversation. I appreciate this is a difficult topic to discuss with a group of atheists.
I think you’re right that the demonstration of ‘casting out a demon’ written about in the Bible by the character Jesus is not an example of any of the kind of torture stories we often read about.
But the point is that even having this belief that demons are commonplace leads people to misunderstand serious problems. We have two people on this thread alone who have had the traumatic experience of being told close family members have demons inside them. Can you not see how harmful this is to the mother of a baby with autism? To the wife and child of someone who has had serious depression and has taken their own life? These kind of beliefs compound the distress and horror that people are living through and can lead them down seriously dangerous paths.
The fact is that belief in evil spirits has absolutely no grounding in any kind of evidence base, and as tildeb so eloquently says it’s “contrary to and incompatible with our understanding of how all of reality works and all the applications, therapies, and technologies we have produced that work reliably and consistently for everyone everywhere all the time”.
http://www.livescience.com/37274-toddler-exorcism-death.html
“Parents and caregivers who believe in spiritual possession may look for signs their child is possessed: According to police, Guzman-Rodriguez said he believed his daughter was “gesturing to him as if she wanted to fight.”
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“The fact is that belief in evil spirits has absolutely no grounding in any kind of evidence base, and as tildeb so eloquently says it’s “contrary to and incompatible with our understanding of how all of reality works and all the applications, therapies, and technologies we have produced that work reliably and consistently for everyone everywhere all the time”.
That is your assumption. Not mine.
Do I believe all cases of “mental illness” are really just manifestations of demonic possession? No. But I do believe a good many are, more than even most “Christians” are willing to believe these days, because they have essentially been cow-towed by the very sort of scientismic dogma being spouted here. The fact is, Science DOESN’T have it all “figured out” as to how the brain/mind works, and like IB said below, most of the time what is really being done in terms of “treatment” is merely drugging the person to the point where their brain’s functions become so chemically-impeded, that the symptoms are “pushed down”, but not at all “cured”.
When you mention the two people on this very thread who have experienced loss which they perceive as the direct result of “fallacious belief in the demonic”, I’m having a hard time following the logic here. Is it being claimed that the Depression itself, which eventually led to suicide, was the fault of those who believe in angels/demons? Was there some attempted “exorcism” which triggered the downward spiral? I’m not sure. Again it really just feels like you’re simply just grabbing at things willy-nilly, and slapping labels on them, without much interest in delving into the details. Maybe I’m wrong, but again, if you’re already coming at it all from the standpoint of “everybody knows demons aren’t real, so there”, then of course the whole conversation isn’t really that “open”, is it…?
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Speaking of demon belief – you won’t believe this one —
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“Based on the premise of your post, and your last paragraph, I respectfully decline to acquiesce your request.”
I just realized who Colorstorm reminds me of – former American League Baseball catcher and later coach and manager, ‘Yogi’ Berra, who once said, “If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.“
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Where I live we have many practices I deem harmful that are done in the name of non-belief and alternative medicine. Our rather powerful anti-vaccinators are all non believers. People try to treat infections with crystals and homopathy, with assorted herbs and some rather toxic concoctions. In spite of all this, I really believe people have a right to control their own health care choices. We try to educate and inform them, but beyond that people have bodily autonomy and the right to make their own choices. They aren’t always wrong either. Often institutional medicine has done a great deal of harm. Many drugs have been recalled after the fact, many interventions and practices have been abandoned.
As to demons, there really are some powerful mind body connections related to illness that modern medicine has hardly began to address. Scientists have begun to study it, we know about things like the placebo effect and the mind over matter aspect of controlling your own blood pressure and heart rate. When it comes to mental illness, we’re starting to recognize that heavily drugging people up with medications that often have harmful side effects is not always the compassionate thing to do. There’s a woman right now that treated her own schizophrenia by talking to her voices, casting out her demons. She’s not even a Christian.She’s a heavily educated woman that advocates for the mentally ill, that believes that it’s rather cruel to simply pack them down with medications to try and silence their voices, when in fact our brain has the capacity to heal itself and to realign our chemistry and often those demons can be used to do exactly that.
So, rather than knee jerk emotionalism and dismissal of all things deemed Christian, there’s some real value in taking a deeper look at the idea of exorcisms.
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Thanks for taking the time to give a thoughtful reply. I think you make some useful points about the failings of modern medicine and the rights of people to make their own decisions. However, there are some important aspects to these you fail to consider:
1. Modern medicine is built on an evidence base. Our practitioners respond to evidence that something isn’t working and make the necessary adjustments – treatment becomes more effective as our understanding of the human body increases. Also, as a result of prominent failures in the past, testing becomes more rigorous. How does this equate to continuing antiquated exorcism practices that are based solely on ignorance?
2. People have the right to make their own decisions, certainly. But how many people who are surrounded by religious authorities they trust, and are in the desperate situation of having a family member who is ill, will know about the controversy surrounding exorcisms? Will they be directed to read about people who have died in similar rituals or told about those who missed the window for treatment by attempting to have a religious authority pray over an easily identifying and treatable condition? When you speak to medical practitioners they will be very clear about what the chances of success are and why, what possible side effects are and why.
“There’s a woman right now that treated her own schizophrenia by talking to her voices, casting out her demons.” I would add “so to speak” to that. Good. And if the evidence shows that this form of treatment has more positive outcomes than medication then it will be used. It doesn’t mean that Jesus throwing evil spirits into pigs makes sense.
Did you read the stories on the ‘Where’s the harm?’ website?
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There are actually two schools of medicine: evidence-based as you point out and science-based. The latter evaluates how well some idea comports with current understanding that reliably and consistently produces efficacious treatments, meaning that a contrary idea isn’t worth equivalent consideration. This is a really important aspect when it comes to assigning research dollars, for example.
Yes, it seems to be the case that there is no compelling evidence for disembodied and malicious spirits inhabiting humans. This is evidence-based reasoning and quite powerful in that it assigns the burden of proof to those who think there may be something to it.
But in science-based medicine, this claim is so contrary to and incompatible with our understanding of how all of reality works and all the applications, therapies, and technologies we have produced that work reliably and consistently for everyone everywhere all the time that it is LUNACY – batshit wingnuttery – to hold all of this on one side while pretending that it may be possible for demons to exist on the other side… because Jesus supposedly cast them out of a person and into a herd of swine.
These two claims are not equivalent in reasonableness unless and until someone can explain how a disembodied spirit without mass or physical properties can be immune to physical forces yet intervene in the material world and actually cause physical effects. Moreover, the claim requires a reasonable explanation that doesn’t by fiat overturn all of physics, all of chemistry, all of biology, in order to have disembodied malevolent spirits suddenly subject to the effect of words, the sprinkling of water magically endowed with supernatural powers by more words, exposure to the signs and symbols representing some hypothetical divine critter. Without any such explanations that reveal how our understanding could be so very wrong yet have all of these products based on the understanding work, the presumption of equivalency of the claim is utter nonsense because it is contrary in theory to and incompatible with all human understanding of everything that physically works.
Assigning research dollars and education dollars to the pursuit of exorcizing demons because some people are so dull of mind that they think this may be possible is more LUNACY not because some people may believe it isn’t possible but because the theory itself is incompatible with reality as we understand it to be. The belief in demons is anti-scientific, anti-intellectual, and the polar opposite of what can be considered by definition ‘ reasonable’. It is wholly and fully irrational and anyone – anyone – who believes in the possibility is equally irrational and equally delusional.
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If I could “LIKE that multiple times, I would! Well said, Tildeb!
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I would like to compliment you on your fine use of words. I’m impressed by the sheer number of times you managed to squeeze in “lunacy” (very fitting), and also the fine verbiage of “batshit wingnuttery.” I’m forever your fan. 🙂
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Well, thank you, ANSV. Your literary criticism is a far cry from what I am usually offered free of charge from my legion of detractors, namely, the most common complaint describing my explanations as long-winded rants liberally speckled with other charming terms of endearment like militant, strident, hateful, intolerant, angry, and bitter. Your very nice compliments are causing me cognitive dissonance! And you know what that means…
As Ed Grimly would say, it makes me completely mental, I must say.
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Yeah, Tildeb’s a cool frood.
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“In spite of all this, I really believe people have a right to control their own health care choices.” – Does that include the right to abortion and the right to choose when to die? And what about parents controlling the health care choices of their children? Would you defend the right of a parent, whose child has had its appendix burst, to choose prayer over an appendectomy?
“In Idaho, despite more than a dozen child deaths linked to one small sect called the Followers of Christ, Republican state legislators introduced a bill in February granting parents broader leeway to harm children—as long as their motives are religious. The bill secures faith healing exemptions from medical neglect laws; reduces the court’s power to protect abused children; discourages doctors and teachers from reporting suspected abuse; and excuses religious parents from education requirements that otherwise apply to Idaho residents. On March 23, 2015, it passed the Idaho Senate 27-7, along straight party lines.”
~~ Valerie Tarico ~~
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IB22, the placebo effect (and nocebo effect) is not an example of mind over matter but exactly the opposite. This is a common misunderstanding. The effect is on the self-reporting aspect of changes in subjective terms. There is zero physical changes or alterations to physical properties. As for ‘mind’ over blood pressure and heart rate, you pretend there isn’t a very great deal of research into examples of these kinds of physiological changes. There is. Such changes are caused by activating very specific neurological pathways that produce or inhibit chemical changes in the brain. You make it sound like our minds can affect matter when the only evidence in favour of the idea carefully denotes a very physical brain causing very physical changes by very physical means. No woo is required or supported by any of this. That’s why we gain a better grasp of what it is we’re talking about when we understand that the mind IS what the brain DOES. And the better we understand how our brains work, the better equipped we are to bring about changes to its functioning. And our brains come with this capacity. That’s how some of us are able to learn… by making specific changes to our own brain neurology. Again, no woo is required.
Your presumption that learning to respect reality and how it operates must be a “knee-jerk emotionalism and dismissal of all things deemed Christian” is just another empty broadside you like to lob at others as if this respect for reality was somehow a bad thing when it is you who are so easily fooled into attributing stuff you don’t understand to magical interventionist invisible agencies. That acceptance of pseudo-explanations involving woo is not a good way to learn anything about reality but an excellent way to avoid it while replacing it with superstitious nonsense and lunacy.
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I have no idea whether or not purported cases of demonic possession are real, and I can’t speak for what may or may not happen in developing countries.
You do have to keep in mind however that many Westerners who seek an exorcism have often exhausted medical options and see exorcism as a last resort, so we are not talking about a readily treatable medical condition.
I briefly met an exorcist when I lived in Italy, named J.A. Fortea (we had mutual friends) and out of curiosity read a couple of his books. He describes “possession” as a very specific kind of disorder that he does not feel is reducible to a combination of schizophrenia and epilepsy, and that medications don’t have much effect. According to him, if possession is a natural event, it only has one known treatment, and that is exorcism.
Seems reasonable enough. Fortea of course actually believes that the devil takes possession of people. I don’t know if he is a fruitcake or not. (But he has a charming blog – completely unrelated to the devil.)
The marks of “possession” do make it seem an affliction which is sui-generis: extreme and involuntary aversion to anything religious, and trance-like states in which the subject shows heightened mental awareness. It also seems that unlike most delusional people the afflicted don’t interpret their experience as real: their first reaction is not “The devil is attacking me, I need a priest” but “I’m going crazy and need a doctor.”
As for the dramatic nature of exorcism, having read the rite I can say that it is just prayers, exhortations, and sprinklings of Holy Water. But maybe that is what these people need.
Fortea also claims that the normal victim of possession is someone who has dabbled in the occult, and unless the subject makes a sincere effort at reforming his life, the “treatment” does not work, so there seems to be some kind of co-relation to the individual’s habits, conscience and lifestyle.
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“extreme and involuntary aversion to anything religious – Strangely, DP, you say that like it’s a bad thing – many of us call it sanity.
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If another man’s piety drives you to extreme and involuntary reactions, please do yourself a favor and see a doctor. With therapy and some pills you can take control of your life again.
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If the day ever arrives when another man’s belief in magical beings doesn’t automatically nauseate me at such derangement, THEN I shall certainly seek medical intervention.
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Oh the agony of living in a world where people might disagree with you! The outrage, nausea and eternal martyrdom you must feel.
Or you could just lighten up.
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And permit idiots to rant on, unchallenged? Naaaah —
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“You do have to keep in mind however that many Westerners who seek an exorcism have often exhausted medical options and see exorcism as a last resort, so we are not talking about a readily treatable medical condition.”
You’re completely making this up! Most Westerners who seek exorcism are part of a faith group that tells them they or their family could well be possessed by demons. And as I’ve quoted above:
“Parents and caregivers who believe in spiritual possession may look for signs their child is possessed: According to police, Guzman-Rodriguez said he believed his daughter was “gesturing to him as if she wanted to fight.””
http://www.livescience.com/37274-toddler-exorcism-death.html
The same article says:
“According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, signs of demonic possession in adults include superhuman strength, spitting, cursing, aversion to holy water, and the ability to speak in unknown languages.”
When superhuman strength and spitting come into it, it becomes physical. Obviously there will be a physical response, if only for self-defense.
Interview with an exorcist:
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/interview-with-an-exorcist
“In general, the animation of legs and arms during the prayers, where their using their limbs to either intimidate me or put their hands in the form of fists with every intention of using them to injure me or the people around them. All these things can be signs.”
http://www.catholic.org/news/international/europe/story.php?id=59239
Spanish priest and official exorcist of Valladolid, Jesus Hernandez Sahagun was arrested and is now facing charges of gender violence, causing injury and mistreatment, according to the Daily Mail. The priest has allegedly performed 13 exorcisms on the girl, who was being treated for anorexia since 2012, after the parents had contacted him saying she was being possessed by the devil. … During the ritual, the girl was reported as being tied up with crucifixes hung above her head, which they say led her into attempting suicide.
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I said many, not all or most because I don’t have any statistics. I doubt such statistics exist.
Obviously some people will jump to a supernatural explanation where none exists, and where there is credulity there are con artists. But to reduce a little understood phenomenon to a common psychological problem can also be jumping to conclusions. If someone fits the profile of a possessed person and nothing else works, why not try?
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If it was a simple prayer with no strings attached I would agree. But it comes loaded with the idea of evil spirits inhabiting people’s bodies and controlling their actions. And I read the instructions you sent – it’s clearly a traumatic experience.
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It is said that people in a possessed trance don’t remember the exorcism. But I’ve never witnessed the rite.
It seems your main objection is to the supernatural belief, not the potential of being a treatment of last resort.
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What is ‘it’ that can be treated?
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See discussion above.
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A ‘treatment’ in this sense suggests a response to a condition of illness or injury. What is the illness or injury being treated?
It seems to me that if one cannot define or identify the illness or injury, then the ‘treatment’ has no link between them. If that is the case (as it seems to me with ‘demonic possession’) then anything and everything is a legitimate ‘treatment’. This means you cannot use any response to the ‘treatment’ itself as any kind of evidence for the believed in condition! That’s why first identifying the ‘it’ the treatment is aimed at is essential.
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Since when did I propose exorcism as proof of the existence of demons? I said that if what we call possession is not reducible to some familiar form of mental illness, if it is a disorder sui-generis, then one may as well try the treatment developed to treat it. There is no need to know the ultimate cause, just to find something that works.
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But what you describe as “something that works” is, in fact, feeding the delusion that the treatment addresses the psychosis as if it were the legitimate cause. This approach causes harm in a variety of ways, not least of which is offering an anti-reality placebo by someone who has agreed to practice on the condition of meeting professional standards.
That should concern you.
Will you then offer homeopathy, crystals, the Grapefruit Diet, chakra cleansing? Where does the woo end and science-based medicine become the way forward when you’ve already ejected your professional standards on the basis of “But woo might work!”
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it doesn’t work. Sure, the client may believe it does but all you’ve done is enabled the psychosis to gain legitimacy. This is nothing more than granting the so-called ‘treatment’ legitimacy under the guise of your professional standing. But you know better. Addressing the symptom with woo is no more professional than ‘treating’ the alcoholic with a double scotch or the drug abuser a meth fix and then claiming that these are somehow okay because they bring about an effect that looks like success is not upholding professional standards of care but really a means to avoid it.
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How dogmatic. No, if possession is a disorder distinct from schizophrenia, the proper therapy is whatever works. Theoretical questions are secondary.
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“if it is a disorder sui-generis, then one may as well try the treatment developed to treat it” – What does that say to the victim, except that the concept of demon infestation is believed? Why not electro-shock? I mean we won’t know if it will work unless we try it, right? OR – and I know, it’s a radical idea – how about we keep searching until we find the actual cause?
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Here are the possibilities:
1) The cause of the phenomena of possession is known to science (a compound of advanced schizophrenia with hallucinations, paranoia, depression and epilepsy). In this case, exorcism is a horrible form of treatment and should not be preformed.
2) The cause of possession is unknown to science (this is my understanding based on casual reading about it). Then there are two possibilities:
2A) The cause is supernatural, in which case science can never define it, and the only cure is a supernatural one.
2B) The cause is natural, and science may or may not one day be able to define it. In this case exorcism may be a cure on a purely natural level for an unknown reason: it seems to work for some people, not for others.
If the phenomena of possession falls under 2A or 2B, it should be preformed in the most responsible way possible.
Since the hypothetical patient is currently suffering (apparently, possession is a horrible experience), a possible treatment is better than none.
As for what one tells a patient, it would be better for a person to believe he had once been possessed by a demon, even if he wasn’t, and otherwise lead a normal life, than for him to be assured there is no demon and continue to suffer the effects of the phenomena called possession.
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Anyone who could believe in demonic possession couldn’t be living much of a “normal” life anyway.
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2A The cause is supernatural, in which case science can never define it, and the only cure is a supernatural one.
This is a common trope that makes no sense. If the cause is supernatural then how does anyone make a link to the natural effects that supposedly represent it? No one can. Why is it that so many faitheists completely fail to grasp this fatal flaw in reasoning that assigns an un-linked cause to a supposed effect?! The effects using this reasoning must also be supernatural, in which case no one can know anything about either the cause OR the effect. To arbitrarily cross this boundary that links cause with effect and randomly assign some supernatural element to either cause of effect demonstrates broken thinking.
2B) The cause is natural, and science may or may not one day be able to define it. In this case exorcism may be a cure on a purely natural level for an unknown reason: it seems to work for some people, not for others.
This is magical thinking in action. Point out some reasonable doubt about some hypothesis, then rephrase it to cast doubt on the scientific method, then offer the possibility of some kind of woo, then assign causal effect to the woo using anecdotal evidence. Hey, that’s why it rains after dpmonahan dances, you see; no one knows why rain dances sometimes cause rain but, hey, science doesn’t know everything. Cold fusion and Pitdown Man. Pdmonahan is living proof of the supernatural element of rain dancing. Not everyone can do it, of course, but for some unknown reason dpmonahan shows us that those militant doubters are just arrogant assholes but we know better.
If the phenomena of possession falls under 2A or 2B, it should be preformed in the most responsible way possible.
There IS no phenomena of possession; there is only magical thinking that creates it. There IS no ‘responsible way’ to perform treatments for a magically created but wholly imaginary phenomena. There is lunacy treated by more lunacy under the guise of being reasonable because, hey, maybe there will be an effect, maybe there won’t, so what’s the harm?
Plenty.
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Someone once wrote, “The greatest flaw of Humanity, is their ability to believe in things that don’t exist.“
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It seems like you are carrying on a mental argument with someone else that has little to do with me. Pity about the people living rent-free in your head.
Science studies efficient causality, and only on a material level. If a hypothetical immaterial being were to cause a material effect, science just won’t be able to make sense of it. It just doesn’t compute.
Of course you are right that the relationship between exorcism and a recovery from possession could be purely incidental. Or it could work as a form of suggestion. Or it could cast out a demon. I don’t make any claim to know.
As for there being no phenomena of possession, the phenomena include auditory and visual hallucination, depression, extreme emotional reactions to innocuous religious objects, and entering a trance-state during which the subject displays a different personality, all while seeming to maintain a functional day to day existence outside of these problems. If the descriptions are correct, I don’t think it is reducible to schizophrenia, but is a disorder of its own.
But hey, just be a big ol’ snot and tell the guy suffering all the above to stop clowning around with magic thinking because it offends your materialist presuppositions.
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You leave me with the distinct impression, DP, that you sleep under a mirror, so that when you wake up in the morning, you’re the first thing you see. I don’t know when I’ve encountered someone so entirely full of themselves. Well, full of something anyway —
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Sleep under a mirror? Brilliant!
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After checking with the crowd in my head, We have decided to point out that your statement If a hypothetical immaterial being were to cause a material effect, science just won’t be able to make sense of it. It just doesn’t compute. is another common apologetic trope. It is wrong.
And here’s why:
The method of science allows us to establish unambiguous links (correlation) even if we cannot firmly identify the cause.
But, of course, you already know this… as a doctor. After all, that’s how many causes are finally identified… by narrowing down the correlation through the use of following the symptoms. That you seem unaware of this practice cast serious doubts that you are a doctor who uses either evidence-based or science-based medicine.
Want an example?
Let’s take prayer.
Let’s say that praying is hypothesized to be efficacious. We do standard group testing and find out that one group in particular yields somewhat consistent results of efficacy statistically atypical to chance. In fact, we find out that prayer to Jesus is significantly statistically different than prayer to Allah. We don’t know the cause in detail because we can’t link the efficacy specifically to a ‘thing’ with properties but we can correlate to a significant extent that the link is evidence for some kind of connection between the prayer and its efficacy.
Can we do the same of exorcisms? Sure. What do find? No correlation, no efficacy beyond chance. That tells you that the hypothesis – that people are inhabited by malevolent spirits that can be exorcized – is unlikely to be true. When combined with a science-based approach, we quickly realize that the very idea of demons means all other explanatory models of how reality operates is wrong. All. Our physics is wrong. Our chemistry is wrong. Our biology is wrong. All of it. All the applications that work do so for reasons other than our understanding of these sciences. All the therapies that work do so for reasons other than our understanding of these sciences. All the technologies that work do so for reasons other that our understanding of these science. To make room in our understanding of how reality operates and by what mechanisms for demons as malevolent invasive spirits means that all of our explanatory models are, in fact, wrong.
This is what you’re asking people to do when you suggest we should make room in our understanding for the possibility because some people respond in a symptomatically favourable way to exorcisms.
This request is not reasonable. In fact, it is gobsmackingly stupid and deeply anti-scientific because you offer nothing in return for this suspension of confidence in all of our understandings of how reality works. The inevitable result of urging some people most in need of medical intervention to further suspend confidence in demonstrably efficacious applications, therapies, and technologies is at the extreme end of anti-professional treatment. This is what you are advocating, whether you recognize the depth and scope of your intellectual rejection of your supposed profession. You are a danger to your patients because you advocate for doubt of the very method that best produces efficacy in your supposed profession and turn instead to making room for batshit crazy lunacy as a reasonable alternative when you don;t have easy access to efficacious treatment. This means you are capitulating the patient’s welfare in order to make yourself feel better that you’ve done something. This is exactly what “I’ll pray for you” is: a substitute for actually doing something efficacious so that you can feel better for your failure.
At least, this is what the crowd-sourcing consensus opinion is in my head.
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Tildeb, it’s Brandon (anaivethinker) who claims to be a doctor – other than a hunter of defenseless animals, I have no idea what DP is. Well, I do, but Vi doesn’t allow me to say it and I am, after all, a guest here.
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Yes, indeed, Arch; I got all mixed up. Thanks for straightening me out.
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I’m right, you are arguing with somebody else, I’m not a doctor. I do hope the doctor is a real human being and not a disembodied voice.
Has anybody really done a scientific study on possession? I’ve seen debunking arguments based on individual cases, but nothing with a large sample size.
Your overwrought hyperbole about the whole order of the universe being overturned if a ghost goes bump in the night is cute, but false. The whole premise of an preternatural event is that it is extraordinary, a temporary suspension of ordinary laws, otherwise it would be completely unremarkable, wouldn’t it.
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dp, preternatural means outside or beyond what is usual and natural. Advancing the notion that demons as quite possibly real incorporeal but causal agents in the natural world is so far beyond that definition that you are simply being dishonest if not intentionally disingenuous camouflaging the point.
You say Your overwrought hyperbole about the whole order of the universe being overturned if a ghost goes bump in the night is cute, but false. Maybe you missed the point but we’re not talking about the cause of unknown sounds in the night but demonic possession of real people in real life. That’s not ‘cute’. That’s a hypothesis that really does – when you think about it and follow the suggestion to its logical conclusion – overturn all of our current understanding of how reality operates.
That’s not a trivial claim.
That you have failed to follow your own line of thinking to its logical conclusion is not a fault of mine but a demonstration of the kind of sloppy and fuzzy and shallow and magical thinking you are willing to engage in order to keep certain fantastic religious claims alive . Rejecting reality and what’s true about it seems only to you to be a small price to pay for maintaining this fiction.
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Coming from a theological background, preternatural has the same definition but generally refers to angels, supernatural refers to God’s grace, but in common parlance the two terms are often used indiscriminately. Very sorry to see your panties all bunched over it.
Modern science does have philosophical presumptions, but materialism is not one of them. There is a radical difference between saying “ghosts are not a subject of scientific inquiry” and “only material reality exists”.
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For years I had favored no demons due to an Occam’s Razor approach. But, recently my view has changed. I think demons do exist. Many conditions once thought to be caused by demons, even in the New Testament period, we have found organic causes. We have MRI and CT scans, cerebral spinal fluid analysis, neuropsychiatric examinations, autopsies and so on. Mental illnesses have been more difficult to pin down as being organic. We know that certain medicines altering neurotransmitters are effective for some people — anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants, dopaminergics, dopamine antagonists, etc. This leads to a general theory about mental illnesses as chemical imbalances, but it is still very problematic. There is a huge amount of scientific mystery waiting to be worked out here, and the psychiatric community knows this.
All the scientific success might make one want to just go ahead and conclude that all neuropsychiatric conditions are organic. The data pushes in that direction, but jumping to the conclusion that all conditions are organic, even with the weight of current data, is a logical fallacy. Even so, for the longest time, as a doctor and scientist, I thought demons had been entirely replaced by organic disease. Then, I had an experience that changed my mind.
As for the New Testament, it makes no sense to judge it outside of the cultural context of the time. When Jesus cast out demons, whether he was really casting out demons or just curing organic disease, or some of both does not change the meaning. Anyone judging an ancient text by modern standards is a fool.
As for exorcisms in modern times, I agree that it has the potential to be harmful. But, to conclude that it is always harmful is not warranted. It does not surprise me that people with naturalist prejudice would want to view it as somehow always harmful. But, if one really wanted to demonstrate that it was always harmful, you need credible data, and I have yet to see any. When I say credible, we need a proper diagnosis of demon possession or oppression. There are two major errors one can make when diagnosing demons. 1) Overdiagnosis, which may be psychologically harmful and delay appropriate medical treatment, and 2) Underdiagnosis because of the naturalist and deist prejudices of society. There is a middle way that is more reasonable and humble. It requires one to be open but also to be careful and thoughtful about approaching these issues.
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“we need a proper diagnosis of demon possession or oppression.”
Whoa nelly, you’ve just gone into the area of diagnosing demon possession. What a topic!
In 2013 I went to a catholic counselor as I was having a crisis of faith. She didn’t have any counseling credentials, but I was only looking to converse about faith, so I didn’t think it was necessary. It came up that my child constantly screamed 18 hours a day, as loud as a chainsaw, and I had to wear earplugs to stay sane. She asked me if the doctors had diagnosed anything, and I said no (he wouldn’t be diagnosed as an autistic until after three years of age). She told me that since the doctors hadn’t found anything, then an exorcism might be performed to see if that would help him. The exorcism would be the priest and few believers praying over my child, and they’d sprinkle holy water on him and make the sign of the cross on his forehead. My child was quite young (about a year old) and had just been baptized six months ago, so I felt demon possession was unlikely (but still a possibility in my catholic mind).
At least in my case, the diagnosis of demon possession was this: a women with no education other than high school hears me say that my kid cries, doctors have found nothing, and so she says “let’s try it.” That’s one fancy assessment my kid was given…they never even saw him!
Was this experience harmful? Thankfully it didn’t turn out harmful to me or my son, as I was starting to come out of my post-partum depression at that time. Had it happened a few months earlier when I was in the extreme throes of depression, it could have had a very, very serious outcome. To suggest to a highly religious mother (I was an extremely devout catholic) that her child might be demon possessed, can result in the death of the child. The stories of mothers in postpartum depression who have killed their children due to thinking they’re demon possessed are ENDLESS.
Ever hear of Andrea Yates? She’s just one of many. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Yates
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This is exactly the kind of thing that worries me. I don’t think we should jump to the conclusion of demons so loosely and without being able to communicate with the patient on top of that. Further, the use of such paraphernalia as crosses and holy water is superstitious and not part of the biblical model of healing and exorcism in the name of Jesus.
To me the association of postpartum depression with the belief that children are possessed is strange. I am not sure what is the inspiration for this, but it is certainly not biblical in any way. Further, Andrea Yates did not just have postpartum depression, she had psychosis. This degree of postpartum mental illness is rare.
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I worked as a psychiatric nurse at Mayo Clinic for over a decade and we saw quite a bit of postpartum depression and psychosis. Plenty of these moms thought their children were demon possessed, and some had even tried to kill their kids and themselves. It certainly wasn’t a “rare thing” in my experience.
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Brandon (anaivethinker) claims to have held human brains in his hands, yet doesn’t feel we should be too quick to dismiss demons – I wonder if his patients know that? It’s a fact that certainly should go on his resumé.
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I’ve held a human brain in my hand during an autopsy (the guy committed suicide by shooting himself in the head after he misplaced his keys). I assisted the physician in the write-up. I am eternally chagrined to say I believed in demons at the time too. Gah! Crazy holds no bounds, I tell you, no bounds!
Well, at least I’ve come to my senses now…better late than never, right?
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Right.
Sorry I didn’t respond sooner, I was making sure I knew where my car keys were —
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Sure PP incidence ranges in the 1-2/1000 childbirths in women. I’m not sure how common the delusion of demon possession occurs in PP, but actual homocidal behavior is rare. This is just a scientific fact, and that’s what I was referring to in the case of Andrea Yates.
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“Meta-analyses of studies mainly based in the developed world found the prevalence of PND to be around 10-15%. Higher rates are found when self-reported questionnaires are used than when structured clinical interviews are performed, and higher rates occur in developing countries.”
http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/postnatal-depression-pro
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Postpartum depression (or postnatal depression) is distinct from postpartum psychosis (PP), so it is no surprise that it is found at a higher rate than PP. Psychosis is always defined by the presence of hallucinations or delusions. You can have depression and psychosis, and I think these represent a spectrum of illness. PND may just be a less severe manifestation than PP, for example.
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… except the DSM V makes a special exemption for religious beliefs that otherwise perfectly fit the definition for delusions. Funny, that. A special exemption because…
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I know. I’m a doctor. You’re point is?
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Sorry that was rude of me. Still, seriously I am unsure of what your point is.
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Oh, just that by apparently divine fiat religious belief is granted the magical power even in psychiatry to turn what constitutes a psychosis, namely, the presence of hallucinations or delusions, into a rational belief… all by the pious power of POOF!ism!
Amazing to what extent even some parts of the medical professional will grant to religion that it wouldn’t dare grant to a cult without being ridiculed as hypocritical by peers!
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Speaking of which, Tildeb, the state of Idaho just passed a bill that would allow parents to withhold medical treatment for their children, without consequences, as long as their objection was a religious one.
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Yes, I just read that. Religion is the human version of the cloaking device, where it makes all kinds of harm-causing crazy disappear. POOF! It’s a Murickle.
Harming children by willful neglect is almost always a crime but, cloaked in piety, becomes invisible and morphs into religious freedom. POOF!
Actively discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation is almost a crime but, cloaked in piety, becomes invisible and morphs into religious freedom. POOF!
Withholding treatment to the extent of allowing pregnant women to die by medical neglect is almost always a crime but, cloaked in piety, becomes invisible and morphs into religious freedom. POOF!
Not upholding and exercising one’s professional standards is almost always cause for dismissal but, when cloaked in piety, becomes invisible and morphs into religious freedom. POOF!
And the the long depressing list of harm caused by piety just keeps on growing under the playing card I thought was a joker called Religious freedom! What harm cannot be POOF!ed into religious freedom under what I now find out is not a joker at all but actually a get-out-jail-free card?
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Wonderful! Definitely comment of the month material.
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Let’s think this one through buddy. 90% of the world believes in something divine. You being a heartfelt atheist think they are delusional. They obviously don’t all meet criteria for conditions like schizophrenia, depression with psychosis, acute psychotic episode, etc. So, what are you going to diagnose them with in the DSM-V since you’ve read it? You will diagnose them with delusional disorder which has virtually no effective treatment. You can’t just give 90% of the world antipsychotics and expect improvement.
You strike me as someone who doesn’t understand psychosis at all and has no clinical experience. Just a ranting militant atheist. Maybe you’re the one who is delusional. Maybe your brain is the one not functioning properly. Maybe your delusions are getting a pass from the medical community.
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Yes, maybe I’m all of those things and what you say is true. So I ask how might I know if this is indeed the case. So I look to reality to arbitrate these claims. You might find this a useful method yourself and come to the realization that privileging lunacy has a very real cost in human terms. And you’re facilitating this harm by pretending it’s okay. It’s not, and you should stand against it if not as a reasonable and rational person (you’re failing this test so far) then as a medical practitioner… if that’s indeed what you think you are. I think you’re a woo peddler and apologetic accommodationist armed with a medical license you abuse. You should test that claim against reality, too.
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You’re living in a fantasy world if you think you can control people’s beliefs. And with totalitarian desires. Get over it, medical practitioners are not accomodationists. You sound completely ignorant of reality and arrogant on top of that. Time to relent arrogant militant atheist rant mode.
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You’ve gone of the rails here.
If you were a licensed mechanic facing people who had brought in their cars for repair and didn’t know what was wrong, would you (and be honest here) be following the standards of your professional standards bringing in an unlicensed person specially trained in mechanical exorcisms to perform the ‘treatment’?
A plumber okay with people pretending to help by performing certain commands in the name of Jesus to clear blockages?
An electrician standing aside and going along with a person saying the magical words to fix a short circuit?
Seriously, why are you making a special exemption in medicine that (I sincerely hope) you wouldn’t go along with in any other profession?
You are free to accuse me of all kinds of dastardly intentions and nefarious motives presented in a militant and rude totalitarian fashion – a diversion worthy of any faitheist – but what you have utterly failed to do is provide a reasonable explanation of why it’s okay to go along with people performing exorcisms in principle for medical reasons. The best you’ve come up with so far is because it may treat symptoms psychosomatically even though you know perfectly well that the very real and pernicious cost of this is at the very least not treating the cause but enhancing it while pretending the root problem it is something it is not.
That approach is no more professional than the man in a dress and funny hat commanding the evil spirits to leave that Nissan’s engine or blocked drain in the name of Jesus… and just as efficacious at treating the underlying problem. Why you as a medical practitioner don’t see accommodating delusional thinking as pernicious and deeply anti-medicinal tells me you have a brain problem that no doubt goes by the name of some religious belief.
May that be the root cause of your own delusional thinking?
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This is another demonstration of arrogance. This is the reason I unfollowed almost all the atheist blogs I was following including this one. There is nothing I can do about arrogance.
You can’t even see the issue clearly, instead you assume your worldview is true and make a series of bad analogies to support it. You realize that if medicine aligned with atheism that it would be the end of freedom of conscience and freedom of thought. You would have psychiatry become a tyrannical regime? Seriously? That’s disgusting and many of your compatriots would agree with me. This is my last response, you can have the last word.
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“You can’t just give 90% of the world antipsychotics and expect improvement.” – What do you say we start with you, Brandon, and see how it goes? We could call it, “Curing Religion, One BasketCase at a Time”!
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“Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a statistician!“
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And I’ve often been accused of having green blood to go with my surgically rounded ears.
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To get on my psychiatric ward people had to be either suicidal or homicidal (it was a locked ward). They didn’t have to succeed at it, they only had to “feel” suicidal or homicidal. You can still have major distress just by “feeling” suicidal or homicidal without actually committing the act.
While I don’t have scientific numbers on how many women felt their babies could have been possessed by the devil, this is a rough guess: over my 13 years as a full time nurse, I say there were at least 75-100 cases that I can remember. Only a few actually tried to harm themselves or their children, but they “felt” they were at risk for it and thus ended up on my unit. Again, these are not scientific numbers…but I don’t believe this could be called rare.
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I apologize, it seems I can’t figure out how to use these reply buttons, and so I keep replying to the wrong people. I’ll try to get it figured out.
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Correct, there is a difference between suicidal/homocidal ideation and behavior which I am sure you are aware of. I’m just quoting the literature: “Homocidal behavior rarely occurs in PP.” And again this is what I refer to about Andrea Yates.
I am not disagreeing with you, but you are not disagreeing with me. 🙂
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Yes, I do understand we’re not in disagreement about suicidal/homicidal *behavior* being rare in the postpartum period. The problem is with the ideation part, which is much more common.
My point is that there can still be massive suffering by women who feel either themselves or their babies are possessed, and if a clergy member suggests exorcism (as mine did), this is seriously harmful. Though I did not go through with the exorcism for my son, I was constantly considering the idea that my child was possessed by a demon, and did for two years until I fell out of my catholic faith. That caused SUFFERING.
As it turns out he had autism. I actually considered putting my neurologically disabled child through an exorcism. Does that not strike you as harmful?
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The child would have been terrified and scarred for life.
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Sure, as below, I never denied that false diagnoses are harmful.
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I can see this is an important issue for you, and you seem to want activism. I thought maybe you could file a lawsuit, though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, I think courts do not want to deal in mental anguish related to religious-sanctioned activities. Now, my thinking is different. If you really want change, it might be good to write a letter to the Diocese alerting of the specific activity that caused harm. Help them out by suggesting an improved policy that would have prevented harm. This would be a diplomatic way to help people in your situation. Also, you could go to the media. Journalism can help expose bad practices in a way that is levelheaded (not based on anger or revenge) and could bypass metaphysical issues that atheist organizations are already fighting.
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Writing a letter might be a good start, for sure, thank you for the suggestion. My life is much too difficult already to be messing in lawsuits, and I’m not sure media is the right personal course for me either…I highly doubt christians would acknowledge the harm anyway. A letter though, seems like a reasonable way to begin, even if I expect it to go straight into the circular file.
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I am going to respond to you here.
There is no statement in tidleb’s response that is arrogant. You keep telling us you are a doc as if anyone of us care how you earn your living. What you write here and other atheists blogs are not any different from what a
lunaticdeluded fellow would write. If there is one thing it seems your education hasn’t cured you from is superstition. And you think there is some virtue in being superstitious.Who cares about how many blogs you unfollowed. Am sure no atheist is going to come looking for you.
I agree with ark when he said you seem to have donated your brain before you died. What do you use this days?
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A koala bear could have generated a more reasoned response than this foul vomit of yours, Mak.
Yes, tidleb’s response was intellectual arrogance by any scholarly standard, but apparently “comment of the month material” on a toxic militant atheist blog. The absolute only reason I am here at the moment is because Violet invited me to respond. Otherwise, I have resolved to release the majority of these to their arrogance.
You can have the last word here, but please make it worth reading.
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Brandon for a guy with the intelligence of rotten potatoes as yourself, am surprised you know something about koalas.
Is it really true you donated your brain to the medics before you died?
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Sorry to have invited you to a conversation you so clearly don’t enjoy Brandon. I’m going to try to avoid psychologically evaluating you, as we have been prone to in the past, but I’m sure you recognise some buttons have been pressed and you’ve snapped into angry, snarky mode.
I appreciate it must be difficult for you as a doctor to take some of the comments about how your belief in demons makes you unprofessional. But nothing said it more clearly for me than tildeb’s comment about a plumber performing an exorcism because they couldn’t find the problem with the pipes. How you can believe that your god only made this world explicable in material terms up to the point of our current understanding is beyond me.
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Violet, I am not angry.
Let me be clear, my action is not at all because I do not enjoy talking with atheists. The reason to disengage is that you feed on theists here. We are substrate for the arrogant exchanges that keep your community alive. This is demonstrated by your adoration of tildeb’s comment and all the “like” it would generate. And, the militant atheism community may not exist apart from this feeding. The atheists of old like Russell, Hume, Nietzsche, were not like this. This is new phenomenon on the internet, a sort troll-infested toxic culture that feeds on community arrogance. It is a tribe and cult enabled by modern communication technology. Are there fair minded moments? Yes, you have shown me and I sincerely appreciate that, Violet. But, what seems to keep it alive as a whole is something dark.
I would be willing to stay with communities espousing arrogance, hatred, Christianophobia, pseudointellectualism, fools, and trolls. But, the fact that the community is driven by these, especially arrogance, without any respect or dignity given, and a genuine exchange being uncommon, is good reason to hand it over to the darkness. It will die there.
There is nothing unprofessional about holding a worldview that allows for demons, it is absurd to suggest otherwise. And, the fact that you cannot grasp someone with my view is disconcerting. You need to dig deeper and stop feeding this.
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You’ve had plenty of opportunity to make your case and plenty of opportunity to respond to the criticisms made against your willingness to go along with treating those who believe in demons with exorcisms. Yes, I think what you’re doing is not just unprofessional but anti-medical and I’ve explained my reasons. I have done with a tone you obviously don’t like. Big deal; if your position is professionally tenable, you have failed to make the case. That’s not the fault of my tone and it’s not the fault of whatever projected motivations you assign to me. The fault of failing to defend your views successfully utilizing reality and respect for it lies fully with you and your willingness to support credulity and gullibility in place of and in direct contradiction to science-based medicine. I think your reasoning is highly suspect and I’ve done my best to show you why. What you do with that is entirely up to you but remember this next time you go along with superstitious nonsense: you are not representing your profession but your own agenda.
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You are ignorant of what I am doing here (review my comments), unqualified to say what is unprofessional in medicine, audacious and foolish to think you understand anything about medicine, and worse, your silly term “science-based medicine” is only a semantic distinction from EBM. You would be laughed off stage for bring this up at any professional conference, because it is pseudointellectualism and nitpicking, annoying, marketing inanity. Further, your tone is irrelevant compared to the content which is intellectually arrogant. Most likely you don’t engage on any professional level, because this immature attitude would be bled out of you in the peer review process. But, here is the internet where you can be your own little king with your own little rant.
You need to go back to the drawing board and learn how to read others comments, respect others, and interact in a productive scholarly manner, not looking like atheism’s trollmaster, but someone who can parse the nuances of a serious conversation.
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You have no idea how I would love to hear you hold forth on your demon theory at the next medical conference you attend – I would pay money!
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Arch says: “You have no idea how I would love to hear you hold forth on your demon theory at the next medical conference you attend – I would pay money!”
And you have no idea how much I’d love to hear your definition of probability, but I’m pretty sure at this point that no amount of money will help in that regard.
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Well YOU certainly don’t have it – how long did it take you to get your car fixed? I told you to lay hands on it and pray for its repair, but did you listen to me? Noooooooo —
BTW, did you ever get back to Ruth with your poppycock? You said you would.
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Don’t tell that to Dr Steve Novella. You might hurt his feelings with your arrogant tone.
“Before I get into the study itself, it is important to review what we mean when we say the the scientific evidence demonstrates efficacy. There are two ways of answering this question, one is the evidence-based medicine (EBM) approach and another is the science-based medicine (SBM) approach. EBM essentially looks only at the clinical evidence, while SBM considers the clinical evidence in the context of scientific plausibility.
A reasonable EBM threshold for concluding that a treatment works is that multiple high quality and independent clinical trials show a statistically significant and clinically significant effect. A key component there is independent replication. SBM also requires the same level of evidence, but would take a Bayesian approach – given the overall scientific plausibility of the treatment, is the clinical evidence sufficiently robust to conclude that the treatment probably works?”
You might want to re-examine your assumptions.
Dr. Novella is an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. He is the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society. He is the host and producer of the popular weekly science podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. He is also a senior fellow and Director of Science-Based Medicine at the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and a founding fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine.
He also says:
“In the final analysis, the field of research into spiritual and ghostly phenomena lacks any scientific rigor. The field is fully and unreservedly a pseudoscience.” He did a major peer reviewed and published study on this topic… so obviously he doesn’t know anything near to what you do.
Oh, and lots of conferences as well as presentations to them… and no laughing off the stage at any of them, strangely enough. I don;’ know how that can be… if what you say is true.
I wonder how just how arrogant reality must be – and how philosophically naive – to dare to reveal that your claims made about it are, in fact, bullshit. It’s so… militantly arrogant, don’t you think? You’d think reality should learn to be a little more mature and reasonable and tolerant when arbitrating claims made by someone trying to champion batshit lunacy. I agree with you that reality and the method we use to discern and adduce reliable and consistent information about it needs to go back to the drawing board and learn how to read others comments properly… no matter how ludicrous and crazy the comment may be. Reality needs to do a better job respecting those who like to conflate criticisms of really bad ideas with criticisms of the person’s character rather than the failure of the critical faculties being used, someone who just so happens to push under false professional pretenses these really bad ideas. Yes, reality needs to interact in a more productive scholarly manner… especially after the lunatic dismisses all scholarly approaches in favour of special treatment for the continuation of more lunacy. It’s not reality’s job to be atheism’s trollmaster just because someone dares to use reality as a final arbitrator for woo-laden claims made about it and then dares to write as much. No, what we need reality to do is withhold this adjudication process and spend much diversionary time parsing the nuances of some supposedly serious conversation with a party that has already ruled out both reality and science to be such an adjudicator… because it’s nice and friendly to make room for demons. Yeah, that’s a reasonable criticism.
Not.
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Like I said there is no meaningful distinction between EBM and SBM. In the drug development pipeline, clinical trials require preclinical evidence from the basic sciences. But, you wouldn’t know this if your only source is propaganda. All treatments have different theorical mechanisms which are known to different degrees, but to try to separate them somehow requires more distinction than EBM to ESM.
Reality is not on your side. Naturalism is struggling to be coherent, and you will not find this by just inundating yourself in atheist blogs and podcasts. Reality is on no one’s particular side. And, scientific method is not on your side either. You have no monopoly on these things. It’s time to leave that fantasy and come back down to earth.
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At least when he’s snarky, he’s not smarmy. I prefer snarky, it’s real.
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Brandon, does your employer know you have these thoughts and believe in demon possession? Have you told them? Do you think they should know? Do you think your patients should know?
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Excellent question, John – I think they should know they’ve hired a witch-doctor.
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Hey John, there are many worldviews compatible with practicing Western medicine. In fact, so long as one operates within what we call the “standard of care”, you may believe anything. The standard of care is the professional and legal expectation. Within this standard of care, the diagnostic process will differ depending on the chief complaint. If the complaint is obviously a physical disease (broken leg, bloody diarrhea, etc.), there is no conflict with spiritual beliefs. Psychiatric complaints are different though because they frequently have no detectable physical lesion. Of course, certain physical conditions can lead to psychiatric complaints — thyroid hormone alteration, anemia, brain tumor, traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative diseases, nutritional deficiencies, drug intoxication. But, when there is no physical lesion, we use SUBJECTIVE data from patient interviews in order to place the patient in a proper diagnostic category in the DSM-V. Still, these categories are defined without physical correlate, and psychiatrists are working on moving away from this. We are trying to find blood tests or imaging results that could become diagnostic criteria for mental illness, but I do not think the effort has met much success yet.
When all of this fails or cannot adequately characterize the nature of the problem, then I am open to consider the possibility of demons. I do not think it looks anything like a Hollywood horror movie. People are not levitating and ghosts are not hiding under the bed. But, there do seem to be spiritual forces in my view that can influence people. And, groups of people as well. They can make ideas appealing by lying and shifting things in the mind. Think of how ISIS ideology becomes appealing and desensitizes young adherents to a murderous end. Is there any DSM-V category for this? No.
You might take all of this and say, well in that case what you think of as demonic, a secular humanist would agree is bad and pervasive and may behave in a very insidious way as if it were a demon, but it’s really just naturally occurring in the brain as bad motivations and bad ideas that spontaneously take hold of neuropathways like a quantum fluctuation leading to these problems. You might say that calling it a demon or thinking of it as having supernatural origin gives us no extra mileage. On the contrary, maybe it does. If there are really spiritual problems, they will have spiritual solutions.
Like DP said somewhere, I think the best cases for demons today, even if they are more frequent than these “best” cases suggest, are the ones of former occult members. John Piper has seen it once in his career if you do a YouTube search.
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Hi Brandon, thanks for that, but you didn’t seem to answer the question
Is your employer aware that you have these thoughts and believe in physical demon possession?
If they’re not aware, do you think you should inform them? Would you be comfortable informing them of this belief? If they are not aware, do you think it might be wrong of you not informing them?
Further, do you think you should inform your patients that you believe in physical demon possession? Do you think your patients should know?
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Are you now or have you ever been a communist?
Observers will note the way that John personifies the ways in which this aggressive new London financial atheism movement is mimicking inquisitions of the past. He wants to use designated “Other” status to threaten the personal finances of people based on belief alone, rather than by objective standards of behavior. The more things change, eh?
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Sweet Jesus, how do you know of the New London Financial Atheism Movement!?! We’re a secret organisation who can only be identified by our three-tanned Bespoke shoes.
Now, will you please let Brandon answer the question/s.
Thank you.
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Sorry, I didn’t answer that directly. It is none of my employers business my views on this. Equal opportunity laws in the US protect employers from discriminating based on religion, race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Yes, I would be happy to discuss it with my employer in the appropriate context.
No, it is not wrong for me to keep my beliefs private in the workplace. In fact, that’s probably what they prefer. It is unethical to abuse the doctor-patient relationship.
If my patients asked a question like this, I would tell them the truth about what I believe. My job, however, is to practice medicine by the standard of care in which most spiritual inquiries are left as open-ended inquiries for hospital chaplains of various religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. I am not there to do exorcisms as if there is some protocol for “doing” an exorcism. I don’t think it works that way.
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Thanks for the answer. While you’re certainly right in saying laws exist to protect employees regarding discrimination based on religion, race, gender and sexual orientation, a functioning belief—as you hold—that “demons” are real, physical, freely-acting, conscious, scheming, malicious entities that can physically possess and usurp a human body seems to go well beyond this general umbrella of protection of rights in your chosen profession. Belief is one thing. I, for example, believe the Great Lord Veles shaped this world so the pleasantly mischievous will in-time uncover the hidden universe of enchanted woodland creatures, re-commune with First Feeling (why sprites giggle when they’re born, but human babies cry, because they have lost contact with First Feeling) and live in kinship in a twelfth dimension… A magnificent realm which humans generally first recognise as that place where odd socks and the forgotten punch-lines to already bad jokes go to. This belief doesn’t affect my professional work. It is my private belief, and apart from a lot of sometimes seemingly out-of-place giggling, doesn’t alter my behaviour or professional conduct. You, however, are a doctor. I’m not sure what kind of doctor you are, but I’m assuming you have at least some contact with patients with very real physical needs, and these patients trust you to conduct yourself to the best of your training. Moreover, your employer trusts you to conduct yourself to the best of your training. Granted, I know very little about the ins-and-out of modern medical schools, but I am almost certain there isn’t a semester dealing with the presence of conscious ghouls and the treatment of demonic possession according to the particular religion you follow. It seems to me that “demonic possession” is on your list of possible diagnosis, and as that exceeds your training, I would stress that both your employer and patients should know you harbour these beliefs, as to me, that would appear to say you have been seriously compromised and are now a very real danger to your employer, and those under your care.
I think even you can agree that in secretly diagnosing “demonic possession” you are no-longer practicing medicine, correct?
Now, there might be something to your beliefs. Who am I to say? You might be right. I will not rule that possibility out. It seems to me, though, that given your beliefs, and how they clearly compromise your professional orientation, that you should perhaps best serve yourself, your patients, and your employer (who you are endangering with professional misconduct) by getting a job at the Templeton Foundation where you can freely direct/encourage research into demons and their effect on human lives. Wouldn’t you be more happy there, and you could freely express your views, and be encouraged to research them without fear of being fired the very moment your employer discovers what you believe, or sued by a patient for malpractice/wrongful death.
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Hi John, while I completely appreciate how relevant and also beautifully written this comment is, I think we should bear in mind that Brandon is quite sensitive. He’s already started ranting a bit and being very personal in his responses, which isn’t a good sign. So I’m a bit concerned he might feel cornered and a bit threatened by some of the tone here. I understand that you are pushing him to admit he would never in a million years diagnose some with ‘demons’, an admission which would thereby undermine his declared faith and open him up to further unnecessary ridicule. But I think it’s a bit unkind to keep going at such an easy target, especially as he’s not a completely anonymous blogger. I’m sure he’s completely competent and ethical in the workplace.
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Actually, my point is that if Brandon is going to secretly diagnose a patient with demonic possession (of course, he can’t do this candidly, or he’d be fired immediately and probably lose his license) then he’s running the severe risk of endangering both the patient and his employer… and his profession, of course. How will his “diagnosis” affect the treatment he prescribes? Is he capable (in the strictest professional sense) of recommending any treatment? Given this danger, and it is real, I believe Brandon should inform his employer that he is having these thoughts, and let them decide if he is professionally competent to continue seeing people.
I suspect Brandon is not professionally competent. In fact, I think he is a real danger to the health of patients. This, however, is not to say that he cannot pursue this “belief” of his in some professional capacity. The Templeton Foundation is geared entirely to exploring such beliefs, and they have over $2.5 billion in research funds to hand out. They are, in fact, desperate for people like Brandon to join them.
It would be my recommendation then that Brandon forget “practicing” medicine, as he has divorced himself from his training, and pursue a research career where he’ll be more happy, and not endanger anyone.
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I feel bad for inviting him. He’s been torn apart on two fronts and the only effect is to make him more angry and resentful about atheism than he already was. Before this discussion, he may have had a passing belief in demons that would never have surfaced. I hate people being pushed into their dangerous ideological corners. We do it enough with Muslims and face the consequences.
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Sorry Violet, but I think we’ve moved well passed the “teaching your child the earth is 5,000 years old is bad” type thing here. Brandon is clearly a danger to his patients.
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Well, he might become one if you keep attempting to push his buttons like this and he feels he has something to prove. Don’t poke a sleeping dog with a stick.
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JZ says “Brandon is clearly a danger to his patients.”
You really are an angry, miserable and pathetically insecure little manchild aren’t’ you John? You are less qualified to make a pronouncement like this than Arch is to tell me about probability. You are hell bent on spreading your empty meaningless life to as many other of your fellow human beings as you can.
You would destroy Brandon’s livelihood if you could. In the name of the gloriously liberating and joyous religion of unbelief. You are the Fred Phelps of your church pal. What’s more is that you won’t even have the minimal courage to go where he is and assault his integrity and competence face to face or meet with his superiors over this life and death matter. You’ll sit in your little self appointed throne in your house and attempt to ruin his life long distance like the pitiful little coward you are.
You couldn’t care less about his patients you liar. This is ALLLLL about YOU and attempting to squelch what’s left of a still breathing conscience. You’re a nauseating whimpering excuse of a man. You’d probably hide behind your wife if somebody ever broke into your house.
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Goodness, that’s quite an impressive rant there. I’m guessing you type really, really loud.
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“You are less qualified to make a pronouncement like this than Arch is to tell me about probability.”
I got your probability – you are probably an idiot.
“What’s more is that you won’t even have the minimal courage to go where he is and assault his integrity and competence face to face or meet with his superiors over this life and death matter.” – Can’t speak for John (he IS in Brazil), but I would in a heartbeat – just tell me where he works!
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“You really are an angry, miserable and pathetically insecure little manchild aren’t’ you John? ”
I think that’s quite inaccurate. In all the years I’ve known John (all two of them in Blogland) I’ve never once seen evidence of him being miserable or insecure. He’s been angry a couple of times but he always keeps his sense of humour about him. You’re quite the enraged defender at times!
I can see how John has genuine concern about a doctor who could potentially diagnose a patient with ‘demonic possession’. If Brandon was a Catholic doctor and one could infer he might recommend a Catholic exorcism to patients I expect your response would be different. You’re picky about your delusions and the rituals that accompany them.
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Before a problem can be treated, it must first be identified… as uncomfortable as that may be for those who don’t wish to hear the Good News!
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“I think we should bear in mind that Brandon is quite sensitive. He’s already started ranting a bit and being very personal in his responses, which isn’t a good sign.”
I felt John’s response was more than respectful. What’s that they say about those who can’t stand the heat? As far as his rants are concerned, I think he should follow his own medical advice – eat right and get plenty of exorcise —
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Most of what you said is absurd and does not account for the things I said. Thankfully, we are not under your tyranny of thought crime. Bye
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“Bye” – Again?! Vi needs to install a revolving door, just for Brandon. How many times now has he flounced off in a huff?
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Brandon,
Do you think you’re professionally competent?
Would you feel entirely comfortable standing before your peers and employers in an internal enquiry into malpractice/wrongful death (or worse, in public before a judge and jury) saying you diagnosed patient X with “demonic possession,” and you stand by that diagnosis?
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You’re taking it too far John. There are lots of Christian doctors who believe in demons and keep this separate to their professional life. It’s part of the everyday cognitive dissonance required to be a Christian. There’s a UK Christian doctors website that openly discusses it, but they’d be struck off if they took their beliefs into work.
http://www.cmf.org.uk/publications/content.asp?context=article&id=619
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You refuse to read and understand anything I type here, so I’m done with this conversation. That was the purpose of “Bye”.
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Yet here you are —
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*to protect employees and applicants from employers discriminating based on. . .
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Soft shoe time, John – I’m thinking, “Tea For Two” —
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Exactly, Aint No! In my days of Special Ed. work, I used to play with a little autistic boy at recess – we would toss a beach ball between us, bouncing it once on the concrete enroute. He would never look at me, nor directly at the ball for that matter, but he always caught it and fairly beamed. I always wondered what happened to Paco.
I once watched a little Down’s Syndrome boy in a San Diego Special Olympics race, a full half-track behind the other runners. He had no chance of catching up – I certainly would have quit – but he hadn’t come there to win, he had come to do his best, and that’s exactly what he was doing. We could learn a lot from these special children.
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Unlike their parents, for others in the field of Special Ed., these special needs children pass through out lives on their way to someone else, and we never really know what happened to them.
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Yes, I’m quite familiar with Andrea Yates. She’s in prison, but those who indoctrinated her in the first place need to be right in there with her.
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Brandon, thanks for taking the time to give your opinion on this.
“The data pushes in that direction, but jumping to the conclusion that all conditions are organic, even with the weight of current data, is a logical fallacy.”
Why? I don’t understand what you’re saying here at all. Would it not be a logical fallacy to believe invisible spirits were involved if there was no data to support this?
“Then, I had an experience that changed my mind.”
Can you give more details? Either here or on your blog?
“When Jesus cast out demons, whether he was really casting out demons or just curing organic disease, or some of both does not change the meaning.”
I would agree with you if he was reported to have said, “In God’s name, be well!” or something unspecific, and then the story writer guessed it was a demon. But it’s quite specific in Jesus referencing demons, speaking to them and moving them to pigs. If he cured an organic disease, 2000 pigs wouldn’t have committed suicide.
“As for exorcisms in modern times, I agree that it has the potential to be harmful. But, to conclude that it is always harmful is not warranted.”
It’s not just potential. They are exceedingly harmful, as illustrated by two people here on this post, and countless stories linked to.
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Hey Violet, thanks for hosting an interest discussion. 🙂
If we ever conclude that a demon is the cause of some problem, it will not be on the basis of scientific evidence unless ghostbuster-like technology is invented. It will be on the basis of Rationality. And, it will likely be what we call in medicine a “diagnosis of exclusion” meaning we exclude known organic causes. This is the logical fallacy I meant:
Some organic brain disease causes mental conditions, therefore all mental conditions are caused by organic brain disease.
Is the form:
Some X causes Y, therefore Y is always caused by X.
Some gusts of wind causes the tree branch to move, therefore the tree branch moving is always caused by a gust of wind.
This is an inductive fallacy in logic.
This aside, there are schools of psychology which consider inorganic causes of mental disease, i.e. diseases of the mind and not brain. The most famous of course is Freudian psychology with the Id and Ego and Superego, which are inorganic entities in the mind influencing psychological states. Modern psychology considers Freudian psychology to be refuted, but the point is that there are ways to reason to inorganic entities and causes of mental problems. Naturalism will reject these because of the Causal Closure Thesis, but even Platonists can accept something like demon possession or oppression. It does not take a theistic or Christian worldview.
As far as my personal experience, honestly I cannot give more details. Let’s just say it was strange enough to make me rethink everything I thought about this whole subject.
On Jesus casting demons into pigs, well, maybe the Legion story was bona fide demon possession and they went into the minds of the pigs. 🙂 This story is very was very difficult for me to rationalize when I was against an expanded spiritual reality. So, I think it’s a smart find.
“They are exceedingly harmful. . .”
Again, I agree that when it is superstitious and not carefully diagnosed, then it can be harmful. But, a few anecdotes don’t prove anything any more than my experience proves anything if we adhere to strict scientific standards. Just because you’ve drawn a few atheists who had bad experiences does not mean there are legitimate cases of exorcism.
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Just to clarify, neither neuro’s husband or I were atheists when we had our “bad experiences.” Had I been an atheist, I would never have considered doing an exorcism on my disabled toddler. In neuro’s case, if her husband had been an atheist and not been told he was demon possessed, his life might have been spared from suicide.
You can say we’re just a couple of anecdotes, but we’re real people…our lives and our families were affected in terrible ways. I’m sorry that even one case of this kind of horror is not enough for christians to stand up and STOP THIS CRAZINESS.
Alas, this reflects how it went in our real lives too. Neither Neuro or I have ever had a christian say, “I’m sorry this terrible thing happened to you in the name of Jesus.” Funny how the atheists are the ones who have treated us with kindness and compassion.
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“Funny how the atheists are the ones who have treated us with kindness and compassion.” – That’s likely because we see so many more victims of the insanity of religion, than the religious do.
Even now, I am deeply concerned about a child I’ve never met – the special needs child of a man who not only claims to believe in demons, but claims to have seen them – Fiction.
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I suppose atheists are the only ones who *can* see the damage, because the religious people are blinded by their belief system. Yet people claim the atheists are the morally depraved ones. *sigh*
It’s just all so backwards and frustrating.
I hope that kid is ok…:(
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Me 2.
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Which would have been a psychosis or hallucination in any other ‘entity’ but, thanks to the widespread but unwarranted acceptance of religious privilege, is medically considered normal. I’m not sure with psychosis and hallucinations are normal so I’ll ask my good friend Harvey, who will stop time for me, and check this out.
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This clarification changes nothing of my stance on the issue.
If you want more Christian activism, you should gather a coalition of people who have been harmed, and lobby Vatican or whatever church to increase the stringency of its exorcism policies. Would I support this? Yes.
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I see… because the very institution that sells the idea of a demon-infested world and graduates hundreds of ‘educated’ exorcists a year because the demand for their ‘services’ is so high, you think it behooves this institution to better ‘regulate’ these ‘practitioners’ to reduce the harm you arbitrarily assign to just these symptomatic ‘treatments’ while leaving the root of the problem not criticized.
What kind of apologetic woo doctor are you? A naturopath? There’s something badly askew in your thinking here. How, I wonder, can you not even see what you’re actually doing is promoting the very antithesis of medicine?
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“What kind of apologetic woo doctor are you? A naturopath?” – I’m thinking a coroner, he can preach to his patients as long as he likes, and they can’t run away screaming —
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“Some organic brain disease causes mental conditions, therefore all mental conditions are caused by organic brain disease.”
This doesn’t make sense at all. We have no other explanation for mental conditions and as we investigate the brain we find more organic reasons. Your reference to Freud’s theories is irrelevant. I don’t recall him believing the id or ego existed in some spiritual plane. They are labels and explanations for behaviour, not the physical home. There is no other form of explanation that has been reliably discovered, tested and verified. Why should we imagine there is magic at play?
“As far as my personal experience, honestly I cannot give more details. Let’s just say it was strange enough to make me rethink everything I thought about this whole subject.”
That’s convincing. Like I said to someone else, my daughter’s mood swings are demonic. Thankfully I don’t have to wonder if it’s anything other than natural.
“Just because you’ve drawn a few atheists who had bad experiences”
Did you read the Where’s the Harm? link? It’s not just a ‘few atheists’.
Also, I’m insulted for the two bloggers who have shared their traumatic stories (which they experienced as Christians) that you could write off their experiences so lightly. For me it proves you’ve had to put your cognitive dissonance goggles to deal with this issue.
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I would suggest digging deeper into the founding beliefs of naturalism.
As for your final comments, they make no sense in light of what I said and how I have treated those two bloggers.
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Digging deeper into the founding beliefs of naturalism?
You’ve got to be joking!
Are you seriously trying to assign philosophical naturalism to anyone here after reading at length about your utter disregard for methodological naturalism of your supposed profession when it comes to demons?
Do you ‘dig deeper’ into the founding beliefs of naturalism when you can’t find your car keys? I rather doubt it. I think it’s a line of bullshit that you would ever consider either making a burnt offering, commanding their presence by utilizing the power of some god, in contrast to go looking for them. No philosophy required. And the fact that you dare to ‘assume’ naturalism might be the best approach to finding them I don’t think ever surfaces when you pat your pockets. Not for a moment do I think you do anything other than turn to reality to arbitrate where your keys may be… because you have learned over time that reality really is the final arbitrator of your beliefs about it. Reality will determine where your keys are and not your wishful thinking nor any beliefs you may have about incorporeal malevolent entities.
But do you have the intellectual integrity and intestinal fortitude to actually admit that you yourself use this method almost all of the time… with one exception being religiously motivated?
But now you pretend that when others do the same and consistently allow reality to arbitrate claims made about it containing malevolent spirits that ‘possess’ people, all of a sudden the specter of obfuscating metaphysics must be taken into consideration… because it’s nothing more and nothing less than a shield you want to raise not to respect reality, nor let it arbitrate your willingness to go along with your belief that maybe there are such spirits, but to divert those who dare criticize to effect your credulity.
Why are you being such a tool? Why the prevarications, misdirections, excuses, and misrepresentations? Why can’t you deal straight up with the criticisms offered… that YOU make the exception without reality’s merit to back you up? I think it’s because you know perfectly well that the only grounds you have to base your approach on is accepting woo… for your reasons that have nothing to do with the welfare of your hypothetical patients (because I have a very hard time believing you have actually graduated from an accredited medical school with this kind of gullibility still active) and everything to do with you trying to make compatible with an unwilling reality your religious exceptionalism.
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This is almost a good comment. Minus the arrogance and ad hominem attacks which are trolling, you brought up interesting points. For that, I mildly congratulate you.
You are still too thick-skulled to see the nuances of this conversation. There are doctors and scientists with all sorts of worldviews. To think that an education in medicine and science and practicing these automatically leads to philosophical naturalism is stupidity. It’s anti-scientific because surveys disprove this notion, and this is well-known in respectable atheist circles.
Further, to think that I disregard an appreciation of natural causation is idiotic when I clearly delineated my view that we should pursue all known physical causes before entertaining spiritual causes. At the very least, we cannot ever ignore one in favor of the other. And, my acquiescence to the profession of medicine clearly delineating the role of the physician, did you not read about this? Don’t be a fool! Read and think.
Whether or not scientists really must assent to methodological naturalism is not a settled matter, it is controversial. But, I doubt you understand controversy. Everything is black and white to you just like a fundamentalist. You can’t appreciate controversy, because this takes one thing you lack – intellectual humility. And, that is the stumbling block that prevents you from ever making strides in knowledge and diplomacy.
Lastly, you misunderstand what I really want Violet to look into. I’m not going to spoon feed it to you. It’s time for you to grow up as a person and humble yourself; then we can talk about these issues.
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“There are doctors and scientists with all sorts of worldviews.” – How many do you know who believe in demons?
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To think that an education in medicine and science and practicing these automatically leads to philosophical naturalism is stupidity.
Hey, we’re in total agreement. But note that this is you applying it falsely to others here.
Further, to think that I disregard an appreciation of natural causation is idiotic when I clearly delineated my view that we should pursue all known physical causes before entertaining spiritual causes.
This is my fundamental criticism: the idea that you agree that we pursue all known physical causes (presumably using methodological naturalism that we know links effects with causation and reveals the mechanism that we can affect with great success to change outcomes) BUT– and this is the Big But that I disagree with strenuously – you go off the rails of science-based medicine you are supposedly licensed to practice by suggesting that when we reach the end of our current understanding that its fine and dandy that we then switch over to woo and ‘entertain spiritual causes’ under the guise of MEDICINE. It’s not medicine. It is full blown woo.
This is the part that is anti-scientific, anti-medicinal, and is a capitulation to credulity and gullibility because you’ve left behind the only method that WORKS to link cause with effect by a mechanism we can affect. The main problem I have with any professional practitioner of medicine is that by doing this ‘entertaining’ and thinking it is fine and dandy you have abdicated any means by which you can do efficacious medicine. This should be obvious to you, yet you prevaricate and pretend it is sometimes efficacious and so therefore it is fine and dandy… except when it causes demonstrable harm and then it’s the fault not of the anti-scientific beliefs but those who actually do the ‘treatments’ of woo on woo.
I think this abdication from practicing responsible medicine when physical causes are not yet understood is loaded with problems not just for the patient but for the practitioner. You do not address any of these problems but simply wave them away and make accommodating gestures towards different ‘worldviews’ without seriously dealing with why leaving the rails of MN is a major problem in and of itself because this is the doorway to woo. If your goal is to seek treatment that works, then pretending MN is just one of many efficacious methods is dishonest and disingenuous and very much part of the problem of excusing and accommodating woo to continue to cause real harm to real people in real life. That’s not what a professional medical practitioner does; that what a woo-meister does.
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This is a better response. Regarding your fundamental criticism. . . Most importantly, as a licensed physician, I would never diagnose demons because it is clearly not within the professional domain (the standard of care). Secondly, I need to clarify the idea of ruling out physical causes. It may sound like I am suggesting a diagnostic algorithm, but that is not my intention since I would never in medical practice diagnose demons. My real intention for saying this is in finding convincing cases of demonic activity. The most convincing cases will rule out all known physical causes. And this does not mean that demons and organic brain disease cannot coexist, rather that the most convincing cases will be individuals with normal brains. Does that make sense?
Still, you might say this is “anti-scientific, anti-medicinal, and a capitulation to credulity and gullibility because [I have] left behind the only method that WORKS to link cause with effect by a mechanism we can affect.”
By concluding that a certain case has demonic activity, we are not spurning science or medicine. In fact, as I have emphasized, we should always pursue physical causes through diagnostic testing and scientific research. We should never settle for a supernaturalism-of-the-scientific-gaps (just as I do not settle for naturalism-of-the-scientific-gaps either). Then, you might ask, how in the world could we conclude that demonic activity was involved? As I stated to Violet, this can only be determined by reason, aka capital R Rationality. We must have ontological criteria to conclude that a demonic agent is involved. This is NOT science, it is reason. The same reason that is used to conclude that, say, naturalism or multiverse theory is true. These are not scientific claims, rather based on reason.
Of course, there is the question of efficacy and safety of exorcism just like there is for Ritalin or deep brain stimulation or electroconvulsive therapy or lobotomy. I’m not sure if I agree with the Catholic methods of diagnosing and exorcising demons. Clearly, it is imperative to find the correct diagnosis because it guides the treatment. Electroconvulsive therapy is not used to treat glioblastoma, correct? And, corpus callosum ablation is not performed on patients with severe depression, correct? Both are effective treatments for certain diseases, but again, the proper diagnosis guides one to an effective treatment.
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He seems to have regained his composure – having your own prescription pad must come in handy from time to time.
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“I would suggest digging deeper into the founding beliefs of naturalism.” Gladly. Give me an idea what you mean. Links would be useful.
“As for your final comments, they make no sense in light of what I said and how I have treated those two bloggers.”
Really? I haven’t seen you express regret (as a fellow demon believer) or concern for the trauma they experienced at all. You’ve just referred to them as ‘a few atheists’ with ‘bad experiences’, as if it’s of no consequence.
Another point I wanted to pick up on is that you seem to think that people within the churches should be complaining, which is ludicrous. As both Victoria and Violet experienced, when you believe that kind of nonsense (and you must admit, it was ‘misdiagnosis’ in both cases) you accept what your spiritual superiors, and the Bible, tell you. It’s only when people leave the church, and can evaluate the experience with the knowledge that there is no evidence for evil spirits possessing people, that they are able to recognise just how harmful belief in demons has been to their understanding of their situation.
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Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy is a good starting place for philosophical questions.
Over a year ago, the first conversation I had with Victoria on your blog was about this subject, and I expressed my empathy. Maybe I could be more explicit with ANS Violet, but I did suggest some actions she could think about taking.
The difference between us is that I am unwilling to draw broad conclusion based on a few cases. There are a few cases of all sorts of things doing harm — driving a car, surgery, medicine, vaccines. Science does not work by anecdotal evidence.
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Oh, I’m insulted! I did study philosophy at uni, please don’t suggest generic texts. If there’s something in particular you are thinking would aid my world view, I’ll happily look at it. But if you think I need a basic education … I’m insulted!
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I mean no insult, please don’t interpret it that way. I’ve just never seen you defend the foundational beliefs of naturalism or pay heed to them. Your rhetoric never seems to go into epistemology and ontology and what is required to make naturalism coherent.
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I don’t understand. Why would I? I don’t base my understanding of the world on the work of others.
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That’s foolish.
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That’s an opinion (from someone who believes in invisible evil spirits and invisible creator deities), not an answer.
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I’m willing to bet a good deal of atheists (the non-intellectually arrogant, non-troll types) would agree with this opinion.
If you are willing to search for scientific articles (i.e., your latest blog post), then why not the basis of science as in the philosophy of science? Or, other areas of philosophy? To prima facia reject any sort of engagement is foolish. And, like I said, many of your buddies would agree.
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“I’m willing to bet a good deal of atheists (the non-intellectually arrogant, non-troll types) would agree with this opinion.”
And this would concern me because …?
” To prima facia reject any sort of engagement is foolish.”
I didn’t. I asked you for specific links and you suggested a general philosophical encyclopedia. Philosophy isn’t science. It’s just the opinions of mainly depressed, mainly men, who have been overthinking life in dark rooms for far too long. The kind of men who created religions. There’s nothing odd about having a general education in philosophy and feeling entirely bored by it all. I understand what I understand of the world, why would I care about the tiny details of what people have been wrangling about to no conclusion for centuries? Like I say, if you think there is something that might be of particular interest to me, I’m interested to know what it is.
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Philosophy isn’t science. It’s just the opinions of mainly depressed, mainly men, who have been overthinking life in dark rooms for far too long. The kind of men who created religions.
Oh, snap!
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I’m not entirely surprised by this answer.
I’m done here. Bye
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“I’m done here. Bye” – Should I count the times you’ve said that?
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And still no link.
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Brandon. If I may. I am reading through this thread picking out comments at random so I need a bit of clarification.
You are a qualified medical practitioner and also a Christian – as I am sure many MDs are.
I don’t (recall) know what branch of medicine you practice but I need clarification on this point regarding demons.
Am I reading this correctly?
You as a degreed professional, believe in Demons: i.e. some form of evil/bad spirit capable of possessing an individual as one reads in the bible – re: Legion.
And you also believe in exorcism – not as a mere placebo, but as a genuine effective treatment where/when normal medical channels have supposedly been exhausted?
You believe this is 100% real, yes or no?
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Mostly yes. There are nuances which can be found in some of my other comments.
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I am shell shocked.
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Brandon, do you really expect to be vindicated by throwing big words as if you did not even understand what they mean? If big words scare you, do not be fooled to think they have the same effect on others. I bet you do understand their meaning on some level, but be adviced, if you use them like this, it is going to make you look like you did not.
Have you ever heard of this?
Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there.
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there, and shouting “I found it!”
Science is like being in a dark room and looking for a switch. The light will reveal a cat… if there is one.
“Naturalism” (presuming you are not referring to people who like to go butt naked in public) as you put it, is the default position, because we can all experience and observe the material reality of the universe around us. There really is no need to defend it through any more “epistemology”, nor “ontology” as it is all the time here to be observed and experienced.
All else, than what we actually do observe through our senses in the nature around us, is add on, and as such very extraordinary claims indeed. Such a claim requires extraordinary evidence. Has anything ever been presented, that could be considered extraordinary evidence for the existance of unnatural phenomenons or entities? Not to my knowledge. On the contrary, we are constantly reminded, that we are expected to take such matters on faith, wich is an anathema to any intelligent approach of the matter. Is it not?
The more our understanding of the reality grows and the better we get at evaluating the objectivity of any information the less we are inclined to jump into absurd conclusions about invisible forces we have traditionally tended to imagine have humane characteristics just to cope with them. Such as demons, gods and what not juju-spirits.
If there is a noise in an old house, wich is it more likely? A ghost, or the woodwork? Why? If it indeed is a ghost, should we not be able to first determine that it indeed is a ghost (or a demon) before jumping into the conclusion? What then, if we can not determine what made the noise? Should we exorcise demons despite it might bring down the real-estate value of the house, because of some supertitious people, or should we be contend, that old houses sometimes make noises? Is there no danger that if adults take such nonsense for real, they instill needless fears to children living in the house? From wich house has there ever been found a ghost by any sane method?
I must say, I was really disappointed at your performance here, as I thought you of all the Christians participating here would have been one of the more modern faithfull, who would have admitted, that the demon possession story in the New Testament is – if not total hogwash (pun intended) – more like a metaphor for something other, than a story of Jesus really being an ignoramus about mental illnesses and pig herding, and you could have been very creative in inventing an interpretation of what it could be a metaphor of…
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I am really sorry, Brandon. I did not notice you had said you were done. Not trying to pull you back, if you feel done. For the record, I think everyone has the right to step down from a discussion at any point, without losing face, when they have made their point.
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I agree Rautakyy, thanks. I had already unfollowed Violet’s blog for some time before being invited back for an opinion on this issue. And Violet treated me with respect, I really appreciate that. I had simply decided to be more selective about following blogs at this point. There are some group mentalities that can only be engaged for a certain amount of time. And, what seems to drive certain blogs is very toxic and dehumanizing. This is not every atheist or agnostic blog out there, not yours, for example.
I’ll never be done talking with my fellow humans, regardless of belief, but there are certain groupthinks and toxic forums that need to be avoided IMHO. They feed on arrogance and drama. They hate being challenged, they hate empathy.
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“They hate being challenged, they hate empathy.”
Choke. Said the toxic blog host.
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Unfollowed my blog?? Well I never! 😉
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“Science does not work by anecdotal evidence.”
And I love that you’re giving me a science lesson! That could well be a comment of the month from someone who believes in demons. 😀
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Might be useful for reference: rites of exorcism for Catholic and Orthodox churches.
Click to access EXORCISM_T_S.PDF
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“He ought to have a crucifix at
hand or somewhere in sight. If relics
of the saints are available, they are
to be applied in a reverent way to
the breast or the head of the person
possessed (the relics must be properly
and securely encased and covered).
One will see to it that these
sacred objects are not treated improperly
or that no injury is done
them by the evil spirit. However, one
should not hold the Holy Eucharist
over the head of the person nor in
any way apply It to his body, owing
to the danger of desecration.”
Yeah, sounds just like how Jesus and the apostles did it. My goodness, if anything can demonstrate how out of hand and superstitious this nonsense is, you’ve brought it here.
“While performing the exorcism
over a woman, he ought always to
have assisting him several women of
good repute, who will hold on to the
person when she is harassed by the
evil spirit. ”
It clearly gets very physical.
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Enjoy the reading. I think it is interesting.
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Can I ask you for a specific question of interest Violet? I can’t write a treatise on demons and demonic activity at the moment. That’s not irritation or impatience. As I say I’m gratified that you though of me. it’s simple forthrightness.
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Well, I’ve now realised I may have been hasty in assuming that the average Christian would concede that what was previously thought to be demonic possession is clearly a long list of medical, and usually treatable, conditions. I feel dismayed and even more concerned.
What level of death, injury or misdiagnosis do you think is required before Christians concede that exorcism and belief in demon possession is generally harmful?
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Very cute Violet. (just like your friend) I will overlook your flagrant begging of a flagrantly loaded question because this is now the 2nd time you have specifically tried to ambu… uh.. I mean invited me here to talk.. 😀 Regardless of your intention I am gratified.
A few things real quick.
I fully believe that every case of demonic activity in the bible is exactly as reported.
Most of what is attributed to demonic activity today by undiscerning Christians is not.
The rite of “exorcism” is a Roman Catholic invention and itself a satanic lie.
There is at least as much authentic demonic activity today as ever.
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And you know all this how?
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Wow, late for this party . And some of my all time fav. Dickheads gathered in one spot as well.Violet, how do you do it, you little devil, you?
I know nothing about Demon Possession. Though Deep Purple made a song called Demon;s Eye which was quite a rocker, back in the day.
All sounds a bit Dickhead to me, and who hasn’t seen the Exorcist?
Yawn …
And as for DPs claim that there were lots of gentiles living on the other side of the lake: An accurate historical reference would not be out of place, I warrant, right?
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“…how do you do it, you little devil, you?” – She did something neither you nor I would ever have thought of – she asked nicely — who knew?
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Like Archy-boy says, I asked them. I thought it was important to get feedback on this one in particular, and some of them were kind enough to oblige. It’s been interesting but not very gratifying to read some of them think they’ve had personal experience of demons. And none of them are outraged by the horrors that are committed in the name of this clearly superstitious act that is often performed on people with treatable conditions.
You could ask DP about that. I thought a herd of 2000 in those days in any case seemed a bit odd.
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Nothing is odd about the bible because it is … er, the bible, right? God;s word and all that?
2000 head of swine is a shit load of pigs, s’cuse my French.
And I always understood pigs were kept and raised in a closed environment, them being a tad smarter than sheep and cows?
Topic you might like to consider:John 14: 6
What happened t all those unfortunate schmucks who didn’t know JC or his dad?
You would do this so much better than me.
BTW, can I swear at Brandon, and DP yet?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapolis
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Thank you.
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Yes, of course. I remember researching the Decapolis for a humorous piece I wrote a while back.
Getting old like Arch.
What struck me during the initial research was, Damn, they must have been seriously fit pigs to run that far as it’s about 8kms.
ps. Did you see that picture of that woman who shot a monkey with a bow and arrow? Doing the rounds on Facebook. Just up your street , I shouldn’t wonder.
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“Getting old like Arch.”
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Love is?
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Ark asks: “BTW, can I swear at Brandon, and DP yet?”
That really hurt man. You don’t wanna swear at me anymore?
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Oh I will, count on it. But I have to have the nice lady’s permission first.
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Permission never granted for swearing at anyone on my classy blog. (where’s that emoticon for the middle finger??)
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Misery guts!
Can at least call Brandon a Dickhead?
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“(where’s that emoticon for the middle finger??)” – Here, Vi, you can use this:
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Hey violet, a couple of side questions:
(1) If you were a self-aware, malevolent entity with the power and desire to possess people, is it possible that you would act differently during (A) eras in which they hadn’t yet developed magnetic resonance imaging, and (B) eras in which they had developed magnetic resonance imaging?
(2) So-called “historians” claim that it took the so-called “Emperor” Napoleon years to reach Moscow. We know better, because anyone with a plane ticket can get to Moscow from anywhere in the world in less than 72 hours. Does this mean that (A) Napoleon didn’t exist, or (B) people must have been making up the long march to Moscow?
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Thank you higharka, that comment made my morning when it came up on my phone! I guess the demons are hiding where the fairies and dragons went.
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Aww, you didn’t answer!
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I made you one of my comments of the month!
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1) Yes
2) Neither
So, my questions for you:
1. If you were a fairy in the age of video recordings and you could hide in another dimension, would you stay here or hide in the other dimension?
2. If you were a demon would you take a plane or walk to Moscow?
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Follow-ups to my questions:
1) If demons made the same choices as you, is it not then possible that they understood the plausibility differences between hearsay evidence and video recording evidence, and acted accordingly?
2) All right, so then, if neither of those options is the correct solution for explaining historical accounts of Napoleon, couldn’t there be other options available, also, for dealing with the demon situation? You can explain the length of Napoleon’s journey to Moscow by the absence of internal combustion engines and/or airplanes, so isn’t it possible to explain the reversed correspondence between demonology then and now? What if, for example, the development of the internal combustion engine caused a reduction in the sensory powers of humanity’s third eye? Or what if, thousands of years after Napoleon, his chroniclers are considered as insane and fantastic as Jesus’, and common opinion becomes that Napoleon never existed, and that none of his battles were ever won or lost, except as fictional stories made up by twentieth century historians to justify post-Enlightenment philosophy?
Replies to your questions:
1. If I were a fairy whose sacred duty was to assist lesser beings in the development of humility by demonstrating the fallibility of materially sensory perception, I’d frequently hide in the other dimension.
2. Neither. I presume I would fly using my own leathern wings. But if I had a lot of free time, I could see walking, so that I could commit a lot of really hot fornication along the way (I’m presuming that I have mental powers). If I had a budget, I’d take a cruise ship instead of an airplane, and if I had a budget and mental powers, I’d commit fornication on the cruise ship.
❤
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So I take it you can’t fornicate on the fly? Guess you’ll never join us in the Mile High Club —
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C’mon violet, you didn’t respond to the follow-ups.
And arch, if I were a demon, I presume I’d have a 17″ with Everhard technology (© Satan), studded with nailheads, that would be good to go even on the fly.
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Where do they crawl out of, I’d like to put a lid on it.
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Sorry higharka, I wasn’t taking your questions seriously. Let me try.
“1) If demons made the same choices as you, is it not then possible that they understood the plausibility differences between hearsay evidence and video recording evidence, and acted accordingly?”
Why would demons hide from MRIs? They were commonly understood to exist in the time of Jesus, no detectors required other than observation. Why would they want to hide now? I really can’t imagine a powerful, benevolent being taking the time to hide as our knowledge of the world increases. Just to make superstitious people look stupid?
“) All right, so then, if neither of those options is the correct solution for explaining historical accounts of Napoleon, couldn’t there be other options available, also, for dealing with the demon situation? ”
I don’t find the situation comparable in any manner, and I’m sorry you do. 🙂
Thanks for replying to my questions!
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Hey there, about time. 😉
violetwisp: “Why would demons hide from MRIs?”
Well, why would a parasite or a virus hide from MRIs? Easy answer: because it increases said organism’s survivability. That’s kind of like asking, “Why would a staph infection hide from methicillin?”
How many years will it be before humanity encounters cancers that have adapted so as to not show up on formerly-reliable diagnostic machines? (Or are we already there?)
As far as demons go, if they have at least human-equivalent intelligence, and they’re engaged in some kind of battle over people’s souls, it makes perfect sense that they would operate in ways that gave them plausible deniability, and that caused humans to argue like this. That doesn’t mean that demons do exist, but rationally, one has to allow for the possibility that, if they did exist, they might behave in a way that specifically produced the kinds of philosophical discussions we’re now engaged in.
violetwisp: “Just to make superstitious people look stupid?”
Of course. If you were a demon, and the “superstitious” people were the only ones onto your methodology, then making them look stupid would benefit you.
Example: do you believe in global warming? If so, do you believe that, sometime during the past twenty years, a team of oil company public-relations employees has not held a meeting discussing how to make people like you appear to be fringe lunatics? If yes, does that mean (1) that you are a paranoid, superstitious, narcissistic nutjob, or (2) that oil companies make money by discrediting people who believe in global warming?
violetwisp: “I don’t find the [Napoleon] situation comparable in any manner, and I’m sorry you do. :)”
That’s because you’ve been raised to trust the words of a series of historians who wrote about Napoleon. You’ve never met Napoleon, nor met anyone who’s met him, nor seen a video recording of him. And yet, you’re quite confident that he existed, because a majority of your culture has accepted as factual the series of ancient records describing his deeds.
When a bunch of Christians decides to believe the same thing about Jesus, though, you think it’s stupid–even though they draw upon a tradition of cultural acceptance that is far larger and more world-historically significant than that underlying your own perspectives on Napoleon.
Don’t feel bad, because I suffer from your delusion, too. I think it’s “more likely” that Napoleon existed than that Jesus did. But no matter how superior it makes us feel, we should admit to ourselves that we’re having faith in the same types of sources as the Christians are. Just because our sources are French, rather than, say, Aramaic, doesn’t mean that we’re automatically more accurate–that only means we’re being racist and ageist.
In the long term, there’s really not that much difference between my faith in Napoleon and someone else’s faith in Jesus.
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Thanks higharka, certainly food for thought. Did we meet originally on Bigot’s posts?
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Bigot the who what? Err, I don’t think so, but then, there are a lot of bigots on the internet.
You free for dinner this Saturday?
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Em, no.
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Okay, I’m here and you’re not, so I guess we’ll have to do it next week.
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Higharka, it’s after 3AM Violet’s time. She’s in the UK. You might think about showing up at a decent hour her time.
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I’ve been here for almost nine hours already. I just wanted her to know that I waited that long for her before giving up.
Anyway, we were talking about Napoleon.
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I see. She was active this morning, but she does have an infant and toddler to tend to.
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In the long term, there’s really not that much difference between my faith in Napoleon and someone else’s faith in Jesus.
When you arrive at such a conclusion that compares faith in Jesus (presumably as an historical figure regardless of claims of supernatural powers made about him) to be at least equivalent to ‘faith’ in Napoleon (as an historical figure with no claims supernatural powers), you know you’ve taken a wrong turn in your reasoning somewhere. Mixing up history to be the same kind of faith with religious belief is neither a rational nor coherent stance. As P.Z. Myers once said, such a view doesn’t mean that you’re standing on some inclusive middle ground, but are only halfway to crazy town.
If you were to speak only of historical scholarship between Jesus and Napoleon, you quickly find why there is such a pronounced difference. But you don’t do this… for a rather important reason; because it conflicts with your thesis, that all of us use the same kind of ‘faith’. As you very well know, this claim is unmitigated bullshit but you spread it anyway because it suits you to do so. Finding out why historical scholarship is not ‘faith’ of the religious kind whatsoever is far, far too easy to do, but you can’t even be bothered to try. And that reveals your agenda, which isn’t to respect what’s true, or better understand how we come to know about the past; it’s to promote the idea that assigning confidence to claims is always a matter of faith no matter if it’s based on a priori religious belief or the finest critical and reviewed scholarship. The only ‘winner’ in this approach is to make crazy just another kind of sane and I’m noy buying your snake oil for a second.
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tildeb and violetwisp, you’re temporally narcissistic, in the sense that you’re using the term “supernatural” to mean “anything that my people are unable to duplicate.”
Lots of different people wrote about Jesus, and lots of different people wrote about Napoleon. Over the years, millions of people have claimed to believe in both of them. You sit here in 2015, and you have books which reference both Jesus and Napoleon. You’ve never met either of them, nor watched movies starring either of them–what is it that makes the “Napoleon” sources so much more reliable than the “Jesus” ones?
When you answer this, keep in mind that a jetliner, heart surgery, and moon landings are supernatural from a certain perspective. After the collapse of civilization, new little tildebs and violetwisps might grow up in 2215 claiming that written records which refer to microwave ovens cooking pre-prepared frozen meals are supernatural, and therefore, Barack Obama clearly didn’t exist, as numerous sources indicate that he lived in an era where batshit crazy religious fanatics believed in magical “cooking boxes,” ergo accounts of his doings are “faith-based.”
In 2715, portable matter reorganizers might be common technology, at which point anyone with a used PMR they bought off eBay could produce fish, bread, and wine for 4,000 people out of thin air. All of a sudden, the Bible doesn’t look so supernatural anymore, does it?
So–other than the warm fuzzy feelings of being on the currently popular bandwagon–what makes you two so confident that your preferred cultural texts are accurate, and others’ preferred cultural texts are inaccurate?
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Higharka, you tell me that I’m “using the term “supernatural” to mean “anything that my people are unable to duplicate.”
No, I’m not. I’m using it to mean what religious people use it to mean, namely beyond or outside of what is natural, a suspension of the normal operating rules of the universe. Divinity is supposedly bolstered by the evidence of miracles and not equated to the same kind of mystery of how microwave ovens work.
You’re just playing word games, H.
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I said to tildeb: “I’ll wait until I can back to Ruth. You are absolutely wasting my time.
I must confess that I said this with a bit of hurried exasperated arrogance. You spent considerable effort on a response and I should have treated that with more gratitude and respect regardless even of the content.
I apologize.
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Okay, then clearly, the Bible doesn’t reference anything supernatural–Jesus had just been carrying a matter-reorganizer. It allowed him to send nanobots into the bodies of sick people to cure their illnesses, and after his own death, the nanobots restarted his systems and caused him to get back up again.
So withdraw your claim that the Bible is supernatural, because the Bible does not describe anything that is “beyond or outside of what is natural, a suspension of the normal operating rules of the universe.” Yahweh and Jesus were just using advanced technology.
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You don’t know that any of those things happened, all you know is that some anonymous someone SAID they happened. Not much magic in that.
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You’re quite correct. Unfortunately for you, you also don’t know that Napoleon existed. All you have is a set of old records that talk about things he supposedly did.
You can visit France, look at battlefields, and look at paintings, just as you can visit Palestine, look at mountains, and look at paintings. You can read hundreds of secondary source books, which describe Napoleon’s doings in great detail–based upon other secondary source books, which are based on other secondary source books, which are based, in theory, on primary sources of people who claim they saw Napoleon or witnessed his incredible martial prowess.
By the same token, you can read hundreds of secondary source books, which describe Jesus’ doings in great detail–based upon other secondary source books, which are based, in theory, on primary sources of people who claim they saw Jesus or witnessed his incredible prowess.
Have you walked around ancient Nazareth? Have you toured the palaces where Napoleon’s officers stayed when they held Moscow? Have you ever spoken with someone who had talked to Napoleon? Have you ever spoken with someone who had talked to Jesus?
Why is the primary source material of “the Bible” so much less reliable than a history textbook one thousand times removed from anything resembling a primary source on Napoleon? You can giggle and snort at me for being an idiot all you’d like, but aside from that kind of behavior, what is the substantive basis on which you base your claim that believing in Napoleon is logical while believing in Jesus is not?
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Napoleon was a major figure living, and making history, in a time when people kept records of such persons. Yeshua, if he ever existed, did so in a culture with a 3% literacy rate, and the first stories weren’t even written about him until 40 years after his alleged death, the actual historians writing even decades after that. I think that constitutes a significant difference.
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Everything that you said about Napoleon is based on secondary sources. Again, you’ve never met Napoleon, have you? No. Nor have you met anyone you deeply and personally know and trust, who has herself or himself met Napoleon. You don’t even have hearsay evidence of Napoleon–you only have hear-hear-hear-hear-hearsay evidence.
Similarly, everything you said about Yeshua is based on the transsecondary sources of modern historians, who choose to exalt their own work at the expense of older work. You have no idea what literacy rates were at 10 C.E., because there are no comprehensive studies. All you have is the suppositions of your own century’s Wise Men.
All the “evidence” you have of Napoleon has been filtered through by centuries of self-serving imperial or royalist historians in various parts of Europe, many of whom may have just passed through brutal warfare against said historical figure, and who cannot therefore be trusted, anymore than Napoleon’s hypothetical friends or enemies among the French nobility and bourgeois.
The evidence you have of Yeshua is nearly as unreliable, as current forms of the Torah are purportedly several thousand years old, and passed through the hands of many different movements that claimed the mantle of Judaism, including Rabbinical Talmudism, and many Christian texts were (purportedly) destroyed. Imperial Rome destroyed countless primary sources, and propagated its own money-making version of the Gospels, which may or may not have anything to do with someone named Yeshua who may or may not have existed.
So I can completely understand your hesitancy to believe in the Bible. But your completely unfounded faith in the self-serving nobilities of various 18th century European courts is a thing of legend. The Vatican Boy-Rape Association has made trillions of dollars off their own gospels, but so too have BNP Paribas and the Bank of England made even more money off their own gospels.
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Secondary sources? Perhaps – I haven’t studied the life of Napoleon enough to be able to say with certainty, but I would imagine that a man whose ego was bigger than he was, would certainly have taken a personal historian with him on his campaigns, whose account, however exaggerated, would have certainly been a primary source.
“The evidence you have of Yeshua is nearly as unreliable” – NEARLY as unreliable? Surely you jest. And what does the Torah, its age, or the number of hands it has passed through, have to do with Yeshua?
This is why I’ve so far ignored your comments, most of them make little sense. I’m still not sure why I made an exception is this instance.
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Many Christians that I’ve met find it equally difficult to pay attention to the inane ramblings of people who are so stupid that they don’t understand just how much Jesus loves them. I hope that your patience will be able to exceed theirs.
Did Napoleon bring along a “personal historian”? No–or so our sources seem to tell us. Was he followed by dozens, perhaps hundreds of people who kept a record of him, perhaps being cognizant of his likely historical import? Yes–or so our sources seem to tell us.
But the same can be said of Jesus. And after the Sino-Russian Alliance and NATO fight in World War III, so-called “records” of Napoleon might become just as scarce and unreliable as so-called “records” of Jesus.
After all, tomorrow’s children may know as a scientific fact that radioactive decay kills all people before they reach the age of thirty, and therefore, records which portray Napoleon and/or Jesus as living past their thirtieth birthdays are clearly supernatural. Some wackos (like future versions of me) might claim that said radioactive decay was caused by WW3, and that it is possible Napoleon and Jesus did exist, and that records of their respective eras were simply destroyed in the interlude.
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I see you’ve got your script and you’re going to stick with it regardless of any contrary and justified points anyone might raise. Good for you. I almost sure the intransigence you demonstrate of believing in your own belief is a surefire method to describe reality accurately and you’ve got yours so you’re set. After all, you’ve demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that that historical scholarship is identical in all ways to whatever batshit crazy religious belief people want to hold and that’s that. Brilliant stuff. Really. Now go forth and shut down those faculties of history. Don’t need ’em. We’ve got Higharka to tell us why yesterday is nothing more than any other belief.
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I gather he’s taking lessons from Orwell’s “1984.”
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What is the difference between “historical scholarship” and “batshit crazy religious belief”?
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Good question. Why don’t you go and find out if there is a difference rather than simply believe they are equivalent by a surface scan?
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Like you, tildeb, I feel that there is a difference between the two. However, I’m aware that my prejudice is a cultural one, based upon my own quite-temporally-and-spatially-relative stereotypes about which kinds of sources I prefer to believe are “reliable,” and which ones I prefer to believe are “not reliable.”
What I am asking you is, what is the difference between “historical scholarship” and “batshit crazy religious belief?”
Since you’ve shown you enjoy using communication games to upset the process of exchanging information, I can fill in the implied clauses in my question. Let’s try again:
What do you, tildeb, believe to be the difference between what you, tildeb, would at this time call “historical scholarship,” and what you, tildeb, would at this time call “batshit crazy religious belief”?
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Unlike you, I defer to expertise that follows scholarly methods accounting for factual material of past events. Batshit crazy follows no equivalent method but simply imposes contrary beliefs on reality and then claims equivalency. That’s what you’re doing and it’s really quite stupid.
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“Unlike you, I defer to expertise that follows scholarly methods…”
That’s interesting–so if you encountered, say, a trained and licensed physician, trained in the physical sciences, who held a degree “Doctor of Medicine” from an internationally-accredited university, and that person told you that he believed in demons, you would agree with him?
What about a trained historian who believes that the U.S. moon landing was faked?
Something tells me that you wouldn’t be willing to defer to scholarly expertise in those cases. Obviously, then, your answer is incomplete. What is it that makes you decide one “scholar” or “expert” is more reliable than another?
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Really, H? Can you really be that badly confused? Or are you intentionally trying to be as dimwitted as possible? Is this your strategy for ‘discussion’, to present idiotic questions as if they are somehow meaningful?
It’s like me suggesting that because you believe in woo, I ask you if you would really make a burnt offering in place of seeking medical attention for an injury. Although you’ve given cause to be considered dim, I still don’t think you could possibly be that dim so I wouldn’t ask such an idiotic question. But I see you don;t seem to suffer the same urge to restrain yourself onmy behalf as I am on yours.
We were talking about Napoleon… remember?
Try again.
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Tildeb, while I’m sure you’re having fun with someone who is likely as high as his name implies, there’s an interesting debate shaping up on Nate’s site (https://findingtruth.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/frustration) that might interest you – look near the bottom for comments by someone named “Crown,” who claims to be an international attorney, as well as a theist. His opponent is an atheist, GaryM.
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Thanks, arch1.
Crown’s argument is based on credulity. He assigns causes to effects for which he has no evidence. His links are empty. I don;t doubt his sincerity or motives. But this is a shining example of how even clever people can fool themselves: not once in anything Crown has written reveals any propensity to utilize his formidable critical thinking skills and ask himself the most basic question and then answer it honestly: how do I know if what I believe, what I assume, what I attribute, what I assign, is true?
All that aside, the next question people like Crown almost never ask themselves is, if what I believe is indeed true, then how does this new understanding affect our current understanding of reality and how it operates?
When one realizes that such an answer means that our entire scientific endeavor, and all it has produced comes crashing down if the belief is true, then why does this computer still work?
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It’s a miracle!
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tildeb, please help me understand your viewpoint better by answering my questions. I don’t mind if you call me names or express amazement at my lack of intelligence, but it would be kind of you if you would also clarify why you feel the way you do. Perhaps laying it all out in a simple way would help me learn more.
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Because if you’re honest you’re not here to learn anything or you would phrase intelligent and important questions… a skill you have yet to demonstrate. You’re here to pretend that all historical and batshit crazy claims are equivalent because they supposedly occurred before. This is very stupid as you very well know and you are quite capable of figuring out why. Demanding my time to do your work I do not find appealing.
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Forgive me, tildeb, but I don’t understand why the methodology of the court historians of the European and west Asiatic aristocracies is so much more reliable than that of the court historians of the Grecian and Middle Eastern aristocracies of a few centuries earlier.
I’m sure that you don’t feel the difference is a racial one, so what is the difference? What makes the scholars in London and Paris so much more reliable than the scholars in Rome and Athens?
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I’m really not in this, Higharka, Tildeb is quite able to hold his own, but I can’t help asking what “the scholars in Rome and Athens have to do with anything. We’re talking about a bunch of illiterate Hebrews in a most desolate part of the Iron Age world, it’s not exactly like everyone was running around, wearing graduation gowns and mortar boards.
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(tildeb, if you’d prefer to disregard Greece and Rome, you may amend the question to read “the Hebrew scholars” instead.)
(arch, I was under the impression that Greek translations/compilations and Italian translations/compilations were generally considered a part of the process.)
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“(arch, I was under the impression that Greek translations/compilations and Italian translations/compilations were generally considered a part of the process.)”
Jews, after the Alexandrian conquest translated the first five books of the Bible, aka, the Septuagint, into Greek around 300 BCE, and the entire Old Testament was eventually translated in to Greek, but of this, only fragments remain. The Romans didn’t touch it for another 500 years, so I’m really not clear with where you’re going with this.
I get the impression that you are someone with small scraps of information, and are trying to fill in the gaps with your imagination. It don’t work that way —
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Arch,
I don’t see how what you shared conflicts with my statement that, “I was under the impression that Greek translations/compilations and Italian translations/compilations were generally considered a part of the process.” It seems more like you described part of the process as it involved Greece and Rome, which was exactly the process I was asking tildeb about.
In the event tildeb only wants to keep reminding everyone how dumb I am–or even if he doesn’t–do you think you might be able to explain what made those Jews in Greece so unreliable in contrast to French court historians in the 1800s?
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All I asked, if I recall correctly, was what Rome had to do with it.
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Arch, when I said “part of the process,” I meant the process of versions of old Hebrew sources, part of which came to be called “the Bible”–being available to a modern person–such as one who might be reading this blog. Some of that process of getting those materials to us involved scholars in Rome, just as some of the process of getting Napoleonic materials to us involved scholars in Paris.
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You’ve already assumed the answer to this question, H: it must be because I’m biased against ‘the scholars of Rome and Athens’. That’s why it’s not a thoughtful or important question and demonstrates yet again that you have no honest desire to learn anything from the likes of me, which makes your questioning dishonest in both purpose and intention. It’s a rhetorical tool you use no matter what answers you may receive for them. That’s why it’s a waste of my time. You have your script and you’re going with it no matter what I say or think so that you can feel justified that historical scholarship and your batshit crazy beliefs are equivalent. And this is the tactic of the intellectually challenged: to pretend religious beliefs and scholarly knowledge are really from the same source so we can just choose whatever we want to believe and – POOF! – it becomes so.
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tildeb,
I apologize; I seem to have offended you again. First I went too slowly by asking questions that you felt had obvious answers, and then I went too quickly by assuming the answers to questions that you had not had time to answer.
Would it help if I said that I don’t know whether or not you’re biased against the scholars of Rome and Athens? I asked the question because I don’t know whether you are or not. I am trying to figure out why you feel that the work of one set of scholars is more reliable than that of another.
tildeb: “[Y]ou can feel justified that historical scholarship and your batshit crazy beliefs are equivalent.”
I’m trying to figure out how to differentiate between what you call “historical scholarship” and “batshit crazy beliefs.” You said that this had something to do with their methodology, so I asked what makes the Parisian and British methodologies of the 19th century C.E. so much more reliable than the Italian and Grecian ones of the 3rd century C.E.
Unfortunately, asking this question offended you. I apologize–please do not be offended. It is only through my intellectual challenge, as you put it, that I don’t know what you mean when you say that the Parisian and British methodologies are better. Can you help me by laying out some of the specific ways in which the western European historians were more reliable in their compiling of textual references?
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Violet, the things that Yeshua did were not about showing people that he was a deity, they were to show that he was the Messiah, the Son of God.
Yeshua cast out demons to show people that the kingdom of God was upon them.
Matt 12:28 8 But if I cast out devils [demons] by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.
The Holy Spirit is what casts out demons, exorcism is not what casts out demons.
Also Mark 7:21-23 proves the truth that demons aren’t fallen angels, demons come from inside a person, demons are a result of sin.
Demons A.K.A. devils A.K.A. unclean spirits are all neuter gender
The Greek word for angel is masculine gender, that also proves the truth that demons are not fallen angels.
Mark 7:20 And he [Yeshua] said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.
7:21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,
7:22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness:
7:23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
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BFA7…good to see you around! You have some very odd views on things and tend to be a little heavy on the bible banging, but I enjoy how you’ve always been a good sport and maintained your sense of humor during discussions.
Oddly enough, I think your thoughts on evil coming from inside people is remarkably compatible with an atheist viewpoint. What a shock that we AGREE on something (of course without the references to the bible or Yeshua). 🙂
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Ain’t No – An Atheist’s viewpoint about evil coming inside people is the truth that Christ taught, so as a Christian I have absolutely no problem agreeing with that viewpoint because it is the truth. Also the purpose of me sharing verses from the Bible is to show others that the majority of people that claim to be Christian do not speak the truth that is in the Bible.
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Dunno about a Messiah. Yeshua made a bloody Mess that’s for sure.
As for truth? I think you may have erred just a tad, BFA, In reality, a more accurate meaning for bible would be ”A fallacious, potentially dangerous, collection of ancient books, not to be taken seriously. Parts of the text are sordid, brutally violent and some passages could easily be considered pornographic.This material is not suitable for children.”
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Speaking of which, a young clerk at a Barnes and Noble book store in one of the New England states was fired a few months ago for filing a new order of Bibles in the “Fiction” section of the store. You go, Boy –!
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Serious?
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As serious as Colorstorm is bat-shit crazy!
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Wow!
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LOL! That’s your belief, not mine, the truth is, evil comes from within, & that truth is found in the New Testament 🙂
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But the New Testament is full of lies so how do you discern the truth?
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Ark, do you believe evil comes from within a person ?
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I don’t believe in evil. Period.
Ask a sensible question.
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OK, if you don’t believe in evil, I respect your belief, I asked the question to see what you believe, are you an Atheist ?
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What? Have you not guessed by now?
Jesus H! And I thought I was a bit on the slow side.
Of course I am an atheist.
( I still haven’t made up mind whether to forgive you for selling that guitar, btw)
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OK, so some Atheist’s believe evil comes from within, & some don’t? My question is based on Ain’t No’s comment to me,
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BFA — where within?
Define evil.
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Neuro, my definition of evil is found in Mark 7:20-23, evil comes from within the heart of a person.
Mark 7:20 And he [the Messiah] said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.
7:21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,
7:22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness:
7:23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
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BFA, thanks for your reply. Did you know that there are extensive studies showing that adverse childhood experiences are the leading contributors to those behaviors you mentioned? Adverse, meaning traumatic experiences. Did you know that if a child experiences a traumatic brain injury in a specific region of the prefrontal cortex (the forehead being the most common place for injuries) that they never develop moral or social reasoning?
Did you know that traumatic brain injuries occur approximately every 15 seconds in America, and is the leading cause of death and injury in children? Are you aware of attachment disorders, caused by any number of circumstances in a child’s environment, such as adoption, neglect, an inability to freely move their limbs, being in extreme poverty, any kind of environment where a child doesn’t feel safe and secure, etc, atrophies the brain and can cause pons dysfunction (in the brain stem)? These children are at a high risk for antisocial behavior.
Did you know that studies have found damage to circuits In the brain’s lower frontal lobe, the orbital cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex predispose people to impulsive and/or psychopathic behavior? These damaged circuits lead to aggressive impulses originating in the amygdala impacting moral and ethical choices.
I’m just scratching the surface here, but what is apparently clear is that Jesus didn’t know anything about the brain and how easily it can be damaged. Nor did Jesus and Yahweh know the actual causes of antisocial behavior. Zip, notta.
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Well, I believe God makes everything happen for His purpose, also “evil” is defined by God, not man, God is the judge, if someone has mental issues, then God made that happen, God is the one that makes a person do evil, & God is the one that makes a person do righteousness, I don’t believe in free will 🙂
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I don’t believe in evil. But if I did, what you did wrote about your god would be, IMO, an example of evil.
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The Bible makes it very clear that God makes evil happen, that’s a truth that the majority of people that claim to be Christian hate
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Correction: what you
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“God is the one that makes a person do evil, & God is the one that makes a person do righteousness, I don’t believe in free will” – Then there’s no way we can be responsible for anything we do, right? In which case, the character of Satan is entirely unnecessary, in fact, redundant.
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The devil in the New Testament is man, the Bible does not agree with the belief that says Satan, the devil is a fallen angel, a person is led by a spirit, & that spirit is either the spirit of the natural man (Adam), which is sinful, or the Holy Spirit, which is not sinful, a person is held accountable for their sin, but no one can control what he or she does, a person is either under control of the spirit of the natural man, or under the control of the Holy Spirit, that’s what the New Testament teaches 🙂
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And what exactly determines which of these spirits control us?
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Arch, the New Testament teaches that everything that happens, happens according to God’s will, also everything that happens has been predestined to happen, therefore God determines which spirit controls a person
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So what you seem to be saying, is that your god has already determined who will be saved and who will not, and there’s really nothing we can do about it. So why should we make any effort to pray to him, attend church, or concern ourselves with anything religious, as if we are going to be saved, we already are, and if we’re not, same song, second verse. Great! That means I can continue to live my life as I’ve already been doing, without concerning myself about consequences.
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Arch, yes, God has already made the choice in who will be born of the Spirit, & in who will not, & there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to be born of the Spirit, God does all the work, God only answers prayer that is according to His will, if anyone desires something that is according to God’s will, the person will receive it, the church are all who are born of the Spirit, a person born of the Spirit is the church, church is not a building, I worship God because the Holy Spirit in me makes me obey God, if a person is truly born of the Spirit, he or she will obey God, God by the Holy Spirit does all the work in those who are born of the Spirit, everyone lives as they are supposed to live, & then when it comes time to die, judgment will happen, those who live according to the flesh will be held accountable for their sin, the only way a person can repent, turn away from sin, is if God makes that happen
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Hypothesis confirmed.
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Arch — understand that when you receive my next email, it will be the last email you ever get from me. I have lost complete respect for you.
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I understand, but evil just smacks of religion, and god belief and you surely know how I feel about this?
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Ark, I do not believe the New Testament is full of lies, if an Atheist, Muslim, or anyone else that speaks something that is the truth that is written in the Bible, I will definitely agree with what the person says 🙂
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What? Of course the bible is full of lies.
There is a plethora of pseudoepigrapha for a kick off.
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Here’s the truth, the Messiah never said that the Bible will guide you into all the truth, the Messiah said that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13), I am Christian & I don’t believe any English Bible is 100% truth, I believe there is truth in the Bible, & it is the Holy Spirit that shows me that truth, if a Muslim says Christ isn’t God, I know that that is true because the New Testament agrees with that truth, if someone tells me that the devil is man, I know that that is the truth because the New Testament agrees with that truth, the truth that I believe isn’t tied to only what a person who claims to be Christian says, if an Atheist says something that the New Testament agrees with, I will accept that truth, I fully understand that God can use anyone to speak something that is true, & it is the Holy Spirit that shows me when someone speaks truth 🙂
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So we are merely discussing the amount of lies in the bible not that there aren’t lies, yes?
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Ark, according to BFA, his god created lies to benefit his own purpose.
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Ark, the English Bible does not agree with the Hebrew Old Testament & the Greek New Testament in some places, I definitely believe that English Bible has things in it that are not true, but I do not believe that the English Bible is 100% false
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So false means lies, yes?
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Yes
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Good. Then the bible is replete with lies as I said right at the beginning. So how can you a) follow a man made book full of lies?
b) discern which are the truths?
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The Holy Spirit shows me what is true, Isaiah 9:6 is translated wrong in the English Bible, which leads to false teaching, the Holy Spirit that dwells in me makes me follow the truth that is in the English Bible, & the Holy Spirit makes me reject what is false in the English Bible
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Ah … so you’re guided by a holey spirit?
Does this Wholly spirit identify all the interpolations and incorrect words as well?
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Ark, if one verse says Yeshua is the Son of God, then no verse in the Bible can say Yeshua is God, that’s how I discern what is true & what is false in the Bible, the wrong translation is what causes the contradictions that are found in the Bible
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So how do you view the interpolation in Mark ( long ending) for example?
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Well, the KJV Bible was made long before the NASB, therefore I go by what the KJV says, the KJV New Testament comes from the Textus Receptus, & the NASB comes from a Greek text by Westcott & Hort, the Textus Receptus was around before the W&H, that should tell you how trustworthy the W&H text is, the W&H removes many verses that are in the TR
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“Well, the KJV Bible was made long before the NASB, therefore I go by what the KJV says, the KJV New Testament comes from the Textus Receptus, & the NASB comes from a Greek text by Westcott & Hort, the Textus Receptus was around before the W&H, that should tell you how trustworthy the W&H text is, the W&H removes many verses that are in the TR”
Ya really gotta knock this off man. I’ve been wincing watching you embarrass yourself over, but this is a few hundred thousand light years away from the truth and as usual, you haven’t the first flickering clue what you are talking about.
You know even less about New Testament textual criticism than you do about Koine Greek if that’s even possible.
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LOL !!!
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Tiribulus, so you are saying the TR wasn’t around before the W&H, the TR was made before the W&H, the W&H has removed many verses that are in the TR, that shows you how the Greek New Testament has been changed over time
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As I’ve written on other blogs, in 1514 CE, printer John Froben, of Basle, engaged Desiderius Erasmus as translator, who produced a dual Greek/Latin version and the Greek New Testament which was printed for the first time in 1516, based on only five Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which dated only as far back as the twelfth century. With minor revisions, Erasmus’ Greek New Testament came to be known as the Textus Receptus or the “received texts.” It was hardly that, however, as the edition was full of errors, and not traceable to particular Greek originals.
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The TR was written long before the W&H text, I don’t believe the KJV or any English Bible is 100% correct, the KJV was written long before the NASB, which shows how much the W&H changed the New Testament, & that explains why the NASB leaves out verses that are in the KJV, did God make a mistake in the KJV that He corrected in the NASB? That’s a question that every person that claims to be Christian should be asking
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I was under the impression that your god didn’t make mistakes. Was I misled?
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There are no mistakes in life, God makes everyone do what they do for His purpose, God had man change the Bible so that only those who are led by the Spirit can see the truth that is written in the Bible, God made man change the Bible so that God’s chosen people can see who speaks truth & who speaks false when it comes to Christianity & the Bible 🙂
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BFA says: “God had man change the Bible so that only those who are led by the Spirit can see the truth that is written in the Bible, ”
And there we have it folks!!! God made man change the bible so that only Mark can understand it 😀 Move over Jim Jones!!
It’s good thing you’re not a dynamic and persuasive leader type Mark or you would be truly dangerous. As it is, you haven’t been able to dig up even one simpleton dopey enough to buy this charade you’re selling.
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Do you even listen to yourself? And you have a child? Poor kid.
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Arch, I think you are confusing me with someone else, I don’t have any children
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You are absolutely right, BFA – I sincerely apologize, it was the other whack-job – thetruthisstrangerthanfiction —
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See? My condition is contagious. Blame me, Arch… it seems the thing to do to gain at least some sympathy from the woo-meisters.
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But the Textus Receptus was a crock from the word go. Don’t you ever study history?
So, again, how do you view the interpolation of the long ending of Mark for example and also the fraudulant letters of ‘Paul’?
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Ark, I am led by the Holy Spirit, there is only 1 Holy Spirit, what interpolations & incorrect words are you talking about? The incorrect words in the Bible?
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I have already mentioned the ‘long ending’ of Mark’s gospel. This is an interpolation. An add-on if you prefer.
Touch of Pseudoepigraha.
Fraud.
So are at least six of ‘Paul’s’ epistles.
Isn’t that good enough for you already to realise the NT is a crock?
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Ark, there is nothing in the epistles that shows me that they are false, there is, however, wrong translation, I deny the wrong translation, but I don’t deny everything, Philippians 2:6 for example, is translated wrong, Phil 2:6 is a verse that is often used to say Christ is God, but Phil 1:2 makes it very clear that Christ isn’t God, therefore the English translation of Phil 2:6 is wrong
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Really? Then you have not done any genuine research. Look up pseudoepigrapha.
And the long ending in Mark?
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Seven of Paul’s alleged 13 letters have been shown to be forgeries by someone or someones who wanted to say something and didn’t believe they’d be listened to if they wrote under their own name. I’m sure they had no idea at the time that their crap would still be around in 2000 years.
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Arch, if that’s what you believe, I respect that, I know based on what God has shown me on my life, that not everything in the NT is false 🙂
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“I believe there is truth in the Bible” – Me too, I’m reasonably certain I can rely on the publication date.
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LOL !
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You really are a blast. 😀
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Yeshua cast out demons, devils, unclean spirits, evil spirits, for only one purpose to show the people that he was the Messiah, after Yeshua was resurrected, God gave the Holy Spirit to His (God’s) chosen people, & the Holy Spirit that dwells in God’s chosen people is what casts out the unclean spirit or spirits in those who are born from above (born of the Spirit). The only way anyone can have an evil spirit cast out from them is by being born of the Spirit, the baptism of the Holy Spirit is what casts out the evil spirit in a person.
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— says the man who claims to have personally seen demons —
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https://bornfromabove7.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/demons-come-from-within-3/
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This, from Kuba’s latest Knowledge Guild entry, Christians, Sex and Misery:
HPV, [the human papilloma virus] is now the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States. The virus infects over half the American population and causes nearly five thousand women to die each year from cervical cancer; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that more than two hundred thousand die worldwide. We now have a vaccine for HPV that appears to be both safe and effective. The vaccine produced 100 percent immunity in the six thousand women who received it as part of a clinical trial. And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex.
“Reginald Finger, an Evangelical member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recently announced that he would consider opposing an HIV vaccine—thereby condemning millions of men and women to die unnecessarily from AIDS each year—because such a vaccine would encourage premarital sex by making it less risky. This is one of many points on which your religious beliefs become genuinely lethal.
~~ Sam Harris ~~
Letter to a Christian Nation
There are about 30 to 40 types of HPV that can affect the genital area. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are about 6 million new cases of genital HPV infections in the United States each year. It is estimated 74% of them occur in 15 to 24 year olds.
What’ll you bet Reggie’s last name is the butt of many, many jokes?
(BTW, Harris’ remarks were from 2006 – the vaccine does now exist, and is being marketed commercially, no thanks to Mr. Finger)
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I don’t agree with the so-called right wing Christian conservative, the right wing is not led by the Holy Spirit, a person led by the Holy Spirit will never force their beliefs on others, those who claim to be Christian that force their beliefs on others are led by the flesh, a Christian is someone who is led by the Holy Spirit
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Question, BFA – you’re the biblical expert, what’s your take on this?
“At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”
Note that in Matthew 27:52, the zombies were raised to life when Yeshua died, but didn’t come out of their tombs to hitch-hike into Jerusalem until after the resurrection – what could they have been doing for three days in those tombs, you can only play so much solitaire.
And why is “Matthew” the only man in the entire world to mention this monumental event? One would think it would have been in all the papers and even make the evening news.
Suppose they eventually went back to their tombs, or do you think they may still be out there?
I would really like your expert opinion.
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Arch, I wasn’t there so I cannot truly say that that happened, I believe it happened, but truthfully that doesn’t have an effect on anything that I believe, the main thing is, I believe God’s Son Yeshua is the Messiah, & by that faith that God has given me I don’t practice sin, that is how I know without a doubt that I am born of God, my faith in the Messiah doesn’t depend on the Bible, my faith in the Messiah depends on the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not a book, I don’t need the Bible to obey God, I need the Holy Spirit to obey God. The Bible is a tool for me to use so that I can see if someone that claims to be Christian is speaking the truth, or speaking false, a person led by the Holy Spirit will never say something that does not agree with Bible
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But how do you know of this “Holy Spirit”? From the Bible, which we are proving, book by book, to be untrue.
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Arch, I know that I have been born of the Spirit because I don’t practice sin, all the Bible does is reinforce that I am born of the Spirit, I know that the Bible has errors in it, & teach about those errors, but the Bible is not the final authority, the Holy Spirit is the final authority
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You’re evading my question, which was, “But how do you know of this ‘Holy Spirit’?” Do I need to rephrase it? How did the concept of a “Holy Spirit first occur to you and how did that come about? Is that better?
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I learned about the Holy Spirit by what is written in the New Testament, the things that are written about the Holy Spirit in the New Testament have been confirmed in my life, that’s how I know that the New Testament is not all false, also I identify with what God had Paul write about in regards to being led by the Spirit, that’s how I know that there is truth in the New Testament, I accept what is truth in the Bible, reject what is false, I do not agree with the teaching that says the Bible is 100% truth, I used to believe that false teaching, but not anymore, HalleluYah !
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Then you’re telling me that your Holy Spirit has informed you as to which 7 of the 13 letters attributed to Paul are forgeries – would you mind listing them for us? I’d like to see for myself just how accurate your Holy Spirit is when it comes to separating truth from falsehood.
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Arch, I do not believe any are forgeries, but I do believe there are wrong translations, the wrong translations I reject, but I have found no proof that everything is false
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I never said everything WAS false, I said that seven of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul were forgeries. Possibly your Holy Spirit’s sniffer isn’t working too well.
I’m not trying to tell you that everything in the Bible is false, but enough of it is that certainly no one can call it inerrant, and if it isn’t inerrant, where does one draw the line?
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Arch, I agree with you, the Bible is not 100% true, but I am not sure if 7 of the 13 letters attributed to Paul are forgeries, can you please show me why you believe that, & if they are forgeries does that automatically mean that they are false? Obviously the letters have been translated over & over again & that is where the wrong translation has occurred.
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If I write something and sign it Abraham Lincoln, no matter how it may be translated, I’m not Abraham Lincoln, what I wrote was a forgery.
I’m not trying to avoid your question, after all, I initiated it, but I relaxed this evening and just now saw it, and it’s nearly midnight here – I really don’t want to start anything that complex this late at night. I’ll flag the email and get back to you on it in the morning. If for any reason I should forget, and that’s not likely – bug me about it, OK?
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Definitely, please comment back when you have time
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First thing tomorrow – my lips to Odin’s ear!
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That’s very interesting Arch, I believe that the letters in the New Testament were written before Jerusalem was destroyed, otherwise the New Testament would not make sense, I believe people have taken the letters that are in the New Testament completely out of context to say that the New Testament is about our time period, I believe everything in the New Testament was fulfilled after Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70.
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“ I believe that the letters in the New Testament were written before Jerusalem was destroyed” – All sources with which I’m familiar, and that includes not only established biblical scholars, but the Catholic Church itself, indicate that pseudo-Mark was written in 70 AD, and the other three between 75 and 100 AD. Who are your sources? Besides your beliefs?
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Matt 10:23 proves that the Messiah would return during the generation of the disciples.
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“Matt 10:23 proves that the Messiah would return during the generation of the disciples” – No, Matt 10:23 proves that an anonymous author, who wouldn’t be called “Matthew” until some time in the 3rd century AD, wrote 45 years after Yeshua allegedly died, and who never met him, SAID that Yeshua said that he would return during the generation of the disciples.
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LOL! In Matt 10:23 Yeshua the Messiah is talking to the disciples, the English translation may have been written in the 3rd century AD, but the original definitely was written during the generation of the disciples, the Great Tribulation spoken of Matt 24 is the destruction of the temple, which happened in AD 70, the second coming of the Messiah happened after the temple was destroyed
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You’re clearly not paying attention to what I’m saying. You say, “The English translation may have been written in the 3rd century AD” – No, if you would read a book other than the Bible, you would know that the translation into English didn’t occur until the 1600’s – why would anyone even know what “English” was in the 3rd century AD. Further, I said that the anonymous author who wrote the gospel that we now know as “Matthew,” wasn’t given that title until the 3rd century – this is why paying attention is so important.
Further, you say, “but the original definitely was written during the generation of the disciples,” but I’ve already told you that all four of them were written after 70 AD, and given you sources, including “The New American Bible,” that say the same thing. I then asked you what your sources are for believing otherwise, and all I’ve gotten from you is scripture.
Either provide your sources or don’t reply and continue wasting my time. Using the scripture of an anonymous man whom biblical scholars say didn’t write his gospel until 75 AD, to attempt to prove that he wrote it earlier, does not prove that he wrote it earlier, it simply proves that you do not know anything about how the Bible was written and put together.
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LOL! Those who say Matt was written after the destruction of Jerusalem don’t speak the truth, I have nothing more to say
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That’s fine – I’m tired of trying to explain to someone who thinks they know all the answers, because an Iron Age book, written by anonymous men, say do.
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Your problem lies in believing that the Bible is 100% true, and that is caused by the fact that you know nothing about how the Bible was written and how it was put together. Read more about this, from genuine, qualified biblical scholars, and then get back to me.
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No, I do not believe the Bible is 100% true, but there is no doubt that the Messiah words in Matt 10:23 are to the disciples & no one else
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“there is no doubt that the Messiah words in Matt 10:23 are to the disciples & no one else” – But the Matt 10:23 was written by an anonymous author who wasn’t there, so just because the anonymous author wrote something about a situation in which he wasn’t present, that doesn’t make it true. JK Rowling told us that Harry Potter spoke to Hermione Granger too, but that doesn’t make it true.
I’m trying really hard not to go all Ark on you (I’m the good one!), but you really don’t seem to be understanding a word I’m saying.
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Is that it? Is that the only proof you have, except for your beliefs?
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Arch, who is the Messiah talking to in Matt 10:23?
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“who is the Messiah talking to in Matt 10:23” – What you’re asking is, “Who does the anonymous author who wrote Matt 10:23 in 75 AD and never met the Messiah, say that the Messiah that he never met was talking to?” That would be more accurate.
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No, I am not saying that, the Messiah is clearly talking to the disciples in Matt 10:23, Matt 10:23 makes it very clear that the second coming of the Messiah happened during the generation of the disciples
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“the Messiah is clearly talking to the disciples in Matt 10:23” – While the book erroneously ascribed to Matthew does in fact say that, I agree, it was written by an anonymous man who wasn’t there, never met Yeshua, and had no idea what your Messiah said, or to whom he might have said it.
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I agree with you, Arch, that those Iron Age men aren’t trustworthy. That’s why I don’t trust them, or their successors, about when those sources were written or where they originally came from.
What makes you mistrust their text, then trust their own claims about when the text was written? You seem to be cherry-picking the interpretations that suit you, much as many Christians do with the Bible.
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“What makes you mistrust their text, then trust their own claims about when the text was written?” – As always, H, I have no idea what you mean. I mistrust their text because they weren’t contemporary with Yeshua, if he ever existed, but the anonymous gospel writers don’t make any claims about when they wrote. Am I misunderstanding what you’re saying, or are you not saying what you mean?
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Arch,
You say that you mistrust certain people about when the gospels were written. And yet, you trust others about when the gospels were written.
(1) What allows you to distinguish between the trustworthinesses of those who said, either, “This manuscript dates from 33 A.D.” or, “This manuscript dates from 75 A.D.”?
(2) If you discover the oldest known copy of a text, what makes you certain that no earlier copies existed?
(3) Have you personally (or has someone whom you implicitly trust) inspected the oldest known texts of the Bible?
(4) What makes the 300 A.D. Catholic historians so reliable when they describe the texts they’re working with as the most accurate available records?
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Oh, not this stupid argument again, that there’s no way – golly gee whiz – to tell the difference between scholarly history and batshit crazy beliefs about the past. Nothing anyone can say is going to change your false equivalency one jot or tittle so why comment as if inviting commentary? You don;t want commentary; you want your false equivalency to stand unencumbered by anything reasonable.
Come on, Higharka… move along already.
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Oh, not this stupid argument again, that there’s no way – golly gee whiz – to tell the difference between acceptance of the One True God and batshit crazy beliefs in a whole pantheon. Nothing anyone can say is going to change your false equivalency one jot or tittle so why comment as if inviting commentary? You don;t want commentary; you want your false equivalency to stand unencumbered by anything reasonable.
Come on, tildeb… move along already.
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Sorry, H: the substitution doesn’t work.
There is a slight epistemological and qualitative difference between ‘scholarly history’ and ‘the One True God’ you missed there because you cannot demonstrate any difference between belief in your One True God (TM) and belief in batshit crazy pantheon of Multiple True Gods (TM).
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Sorry, T: the substitution works.
There is no epistemological or qualitative difference between ‘my example’ and ‘your statement’ you missed there because you cannot demonstrate any difference between your batshit crazy subjective belief in one set of historians and your batshit crazy subjective disbelief in another set of historians.
When challenged to explain why one set of historians is more reliable than another, you gag in disbelief at how stupid I am for not understanding. Your reaction is faith-based, and fairly comparable to Christians who gag in disbelief at how stupid I am for not understanding some doctrinal point on which we disagree.
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“…you gag in disbelief at how stupid I am for not understanding. Your reaction is faith-based, and fairly comparable to Christians who gag in disbelief at how stupid I am for not understanding some doctrinal point on which we disagree.” – So then it’s unanimous! By your own words, both sides gag in disbelief at how stupid you are —
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“Come on, tildeb… move along already.” – Consider yourself severely chastened, Tildeb!
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“You say that you mistrust certain people about when the gospels were written.” – If by “certain people,” you mean you, then yes.
“(1) What allows you to distinguish between the trustworthinesses of those who said, either, ‘This manuscript dates from 33 A.D.’ or, ‘This manuscript dates from 75 A.D.’?” – As I’ve already explained to you, because these people are recognized experts in the area of biblical scholarship – I’ve seen none that say any of the manuscripts date from “33 A.D.”
“(2) If you discover the oldest known copy of a text, what makes you certain that no earlier copies existed?” – Which would be more logical, to live as though none did, or to fall to my knees and praise a god on the possibility that one day in the unforeseeable future, an earlier copy might be discovered?
“(3) Have you personally (or has someone whom you implicitly trust) inspected the oldest known texts of the Bible?” – Yes, the authors I’ve already cited.
“(4) What makes the 300 A.D. Catholic historians so reliable when they describe the texts they’re working with as the most accurate available records?” – To which 300 A.D. Catholic historians do you refer? Be specific. And while you’re at it, give me a good reason as to why they would describe texts as being the most accurate available, if there were others more accurate available? What would they gain by lying and risking their entire credibility?
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As long as we agree that the Messiah is talking to the disciples in Matt 10:23 that’s all that matters, because that verse confirms the truth that the Messiah returned during the generation of the disciples, now you may be correct that Matt was not written before AD 70, but that does not change the truth that the Messiah said that he would return during the generation of the disciples, which means that those who say the New Testament is about our time period, do not speak the truth
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“As long as we agree that the Messiah is talking to the disciples in Matt 10:23 that’s all that matters”
I didn’t say that BFA – again, you’re not paying attention. I said that an unknown writer, who never met your Messiah, wrote in 75 AD that that is what your Messiah was doing. It matters that it was written in 75 AD, AFTER the temple was destroyed, and it matters that the author never met the man and has no idea what he said, nor to whom he said it, or even if he actually said it at all! Please pay attention, I’m getting of saying the same thing over and over.
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You’re getting so tired of saying the same thing over and over that you’re too tired to even use the word ‘tired.’ Now that’s tired!
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You’re RIGHT, Tildeb, I didn’t even see that. I can deal with intelligent christians who debate with me, but when you have one who has never read anything besides the Bible, and has no intention of ever learning anything about how it was written, yet still is trying to get me to agree with him over and over, regardless of the fact that his premise is based on a falsehood – well it just frazzles my nerves.
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I don’t pay attention to bullshit, I reject what you are saying
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I expected as much, BFA – you’re not learning anything and you’re not convincing anyone of anything, so why are you here? Are you really that much of a social outcast that you just need somewhere to hang out?
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LOL! You are the one that isn’t learning anything, you are no different than the false church, the difference between you and I, is I don’t give a shit if you believe what I say, I’m not here to convince anyone of anything, I speak the truth & let what happens, happens 🙂
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You wouldn’t know “the truth” if it bit you in the ass – even Christians decline to associate with you, and that’s pretty pathetic.
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LOL!!! No one led by the Holy Spirit would deny the truth that I speak 🙂
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Bornfromabove7, the way you’re responding to him there is similar to the way that he and tildeb have responded to me in this same thread. By simply laughing at him every time he doesn’t understand you, you’re essentially calling his viewpoints “batshit crazy.” That’s all well and good, but if you can’t express why his viewpoints are so wrong, in a rational, follow-able way, you won’t be able to help him understand why you feel the way that you do.
Try approaching things from a different angle. For example, you might discuss the values of an unverifiable belief system (the values of faith), and what benefit they can bring to someone’s life and/or immortal soul, in contrast to the values that can be obtained only from verifiable belief systems. That probably won’t change his mind, but it might help you understand your own perspective on faith even better, whereas mocking him will only reinforce your own negativity.
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Higharka, I’m laughing because I honestly think it’s funny, I appreciate what you are saying, but I am not mocking Arch, or anyone else, I’m sure what I believe makes many people laugh, & I accept that, I don’t believe in pushing my beliefs on others 🙂
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BFA7, are you of the opinion that you, and you alone have the “truth”? If not, then who else has the same theology, excluding the characters in the Bible.
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Neuro, I believe what I teach is the truth, I do not believe I alone have the truth, I believe the Holy Spirit guides one into all the truth, the belief that the tribulation happened in AD 70 used to be the belief of the majority of people that claim to be Christian, the belief that Revelation was about the future of John’s time period used to be the belief of the majority of people that claim to be Christian, but then people started saying that the tribulation did not happen yet, and that’s where the false teaching that says Revelation was written about events that would happen after AD 70 came from
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BFA – thanks for the “Much Ado About Nothing,” now that your commercial is over, would you please answer the question?
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Arch, he did answer my question.
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I answered the question 🙂
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Pathetic to you, but not to me, I don’t associate with anyone that claims to be Christian that speaks false, I’m glad they don’t associate with me 🙂
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But to answer the question you asked inaccurately – In Matt 10:23, the anonymous author, writing in 75 AD, who never met Yeshua and couldn’t possibly know what he said or to whom he was saying it, wrote that he was addressing his disciples.
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But whenever they persecute you in one city, flee to the next; for truly I say to you, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes. Matt 10:23 NASB
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Same pseudo-Matthew I just responded to.
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Hi BFA7 of all the books in the New Testament, 2 Peter is one that is subject to the most questions. The first certain reference to it in antiquity was by Origin in the early 3rd century. It was only reluctantly and with considerable reservation that it was accepted into the Biblical cannon.
What has always puzzled me is why ‘Peter’ felt the need to copy large parts of the Epistle of Jude.
The virtual unanimous view of scholars is that it was not written by the Apostle Peter. But of course the scholars might be wrong.
The first church historian Eusebius writing early in the 4th century expressed his doubts about it noting that none of the early church fathers ever referred to the letter.
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RE BFA7:
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Hi Arch/BFA7 the argument about when the Biblical books were written is unlikely to be resolved. Because in the end we don’t have sufficient evidence one way or the other. There are a couple things we can be reasonably certain about:
– ACTS can’t have been written before 65 AD given its reference to Paul being in Rome;
– The Gospel of John must have been written by around 125 AD as the a fragment of the text has been found which has been dated to that time (+/- 20 years).
Beyond these facts we have a lot of speculation..
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Peter, are you at all familiar with The Acts Seminar?
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Arch, yes I am aware of that work. Based on my previous views of predecessor groups like the Jesus Seminar I felt it best not to mention such groups as most people of faith dismiss them as ‘critical scholars’ which I could rephrase as ‘tools of the Devil’.
Until recently I had dismissed the Jesus Seminar for these very reasons. Though earlier this week i listened to a one hour lecture by John Dominic Crossin, the former lead of the Jesus Seminar. He made some interesting points that I had previously not understood. He said it was all about ownership of land and economics. The Jewish attachment to the land put them on an inevitable conflict course with the Romans. The Romans were prepared to give conquered people a fair bit of latitude provided the Romans were allowed to control the land. To the Jews this was anathema.
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Alexander’s Greeks were much better administrators, which explains why there were so many uprisings under Roman rule. The Greeks had a much more laissez faire approach to governorship.
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Hi Peter, Paul was killed in Rome in AD 67, Acts may not have been written before AD 65, but it definitely was written before AD 70, that’s all that matters, the Messiah returned after Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70
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“Acts may not have been written before AD 65, but it definitely was written before AD 70, that’s all that matters – According to biblical experts, Acts was written on or after 100 AD. See the link I gave Peter.
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LOL! That makes a lot of sense, because Paul was killed in AD 67, more bullshit from so-called biblical experts, I don’t give a shit what they say
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Around 50% of what we know about the first couple of hundred years of Christianity comes from one source, ‘The History of the Church’ by Eusebius. The blurb on the back of my copy says ‘Eusebius’s account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years.’
Modern historians are somewhat wary of the reliability of everything Eusebius wrote. One reason for this is because they compare what he wrote about Constantine to what we know is historical fact and find that he was far from objective.
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“Modern historians are somewhat wary of the reliability of everything Eusebius wrote. One reason for this is because they compare what he wrote about Constantine to what we know is historical fact and find that he was far from objective.
With possibly good reason, Peter – he knew which side of his bread held the butter – this from Encyclopædia Britannica:
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There was a man named Narcissus of Neronias? Ahahahahahaaaaa! That just made my day 🙂
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That’s just not something a man lies about, John.
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No, no its not, Arch
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Arch, just to complicate matters there were two people called Eusebius around at the time. Eusebius of Nicomedia was the person I think you were referring to, he was a church politican in the worst sense. Rather than the historian Eusebius of Caesarea. However both of them supported Arianism which ultimately the church condemned as heresy.
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Which of the two were considered a traitor to the Jews and an all around suck-up to the Romans? I did a piece on him a couple of years ago, but at the time, I wasn’t aware there were two.
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@bornfromabove
What evidence s there to confirm this?
What is your source?
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Look it up 🙂
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Where?
There is no record.
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He’s asking what is YOUR source – how can he look that up?
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Ark, there is a book entitled “Foxe’s Book Of Martyrs” that explains how the Apostles were killed, that book should say when & how Paul was killed 🙂
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Ark, would you say he’s being deliberately evasive –?
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Arch, I answered Ark’s question, I gave him the source, so why would you say that about me, that book that I mentioned will show how & when most of the Apostles were killed, check it out, you can probably find more info about the book online 🙂
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Lol… are you serious! You are offering me this piece of garbage.
Sorry Brandon, your ( already bogus ) credibility just committed Hari Kari.
You are a complete and utter plonker; a fraud or a credulous fool … or suffering some form of mental illness.
I hope you have no contact with kids.
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LOL! I’m not Brandon, I think you are confusing me with someone else 🙂
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Sorry, BFA,I am getting bombarded with mind-numbing Christian bullshit right left and centre.
Apologies to Brandon, as well. As seriously short of camels in his caravan he is, he’s not quite that off his rocker (yet?) to recommend Foxe’s book as a source.
I would never of credited anyone doing that. Glad to be surprised once again. So there is something dumber than soup after all – You!
Got any other pearls?
Jesus hand-written letter to Herod maybe?
And I am still waiting for you tell me how your god informed you, BFA?
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(Pssst! I realize that many parts are interchangeable, but it’s BFA, not Brandon – FYI –)
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Sorted.
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Also, we have to understand that the New Testament was not written about our time period, everything in the New Testament was fulfilled after the temple was destroyed in AD 70
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All of which doesn’t tell me why, if the event really happened, no one but pseudo-Matthew mentioned it. How many falsehoods do you have to be shown before you say to yourself, “You know, it just could be the Bible isn’t being entirely honest about some things –“
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I know that the English Bible isn’t entirely true about some things, the Bible is not the foundation of my faith, the Holy Spirit is the foundation of my faith, without the Holy Spirit, I could not be born of God, the Bible has nothing to do with me being born of God
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Stunning capture of the flower and that beautiful spider V! I love it! 😀
Maybe some of these folks takes the series ‘Supernatural’ way too serious. I only watch it to see Sam and Dean. They’re such hunks. 😆
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Ah, here you explain Sam and Dean! I’m so behind on comments. Yeah, very cool spider and so tiny!
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It’s the “Winchester” brothers, Vi – a couple of hunky dudes, if you’re into that sort of thing. Sonel’s horny is showing —
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Ark says: I have already mentioned the ‘long ending’ of Mark’s gospel. This is an interpolation”.
This is actually almost certainly true and well known by people not led by whatever spirit is leading BFA. The worst though is 1 John 5:7-8 which even the most rabid KJV only nuts are forced to admit is a VERY late papist intrusion upon the original.
While of course Erasmus received text is, as a collection earlier than Westcott and Hort’s, who lived a couple hundred years later (duh), their more recently DISCOVERED manuscripts date from MUCH earlier than those available to Erasmus with more still coming to light.
Far more scientific methods for manuscript dating and family analysis and compilation are available now as well. Also the Nestle/Aland text is the most frequently used today. Not Westcott and Hort, which is itself quite old. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I am no expert textual critic.
You’d know some of this Mark if you spent less time listening to lying familiar spirits and a bit more actually using the mind God gave you. (there’s your cue again Arch) As usual, you are a deplorable, self appointed and deluded false representative of Christianity. You are not only wasting these people’s time, but harming the cause of the real Christ, whom you do not know in the process.
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Don’t you just love Christian pissing contests?
(I’ll decide when my cue is.)
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This is not a Christian pissing contest Arch. It is a Christian calling mortal heresy on a one man anti Christian cult. BFA denies the most basic and foundational of actually Christian beliefs held by almost literally everybody calling themselves Christian since the early church counsels.
He is doing the equivalent of my saying I’m an atheist even though I believe in God and the bible. His beliefs are not Christian. They are…. whatever. I never have been able to get him to tell me even one single other human being alive today who shares them.
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“mortal heresy” – I’m not even sure how you can say that phrase with a straight face, yet somehow, I strongly suspect you are.
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Wow! Tiribulus, once again, you reveal that you are not led by the Spirit, you are so arrogant, I’m so glad I’m not part of the church that you belong too, please keep your arrogant comments to yourself, asshole !
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BFA says: “Wow! Tiribulus, once again, you reveal that you are not led by the Spirit, you are so arrogant, I’m so glad I’m not part of the church that you belong too, please keep your arrogant comments to yourself, asshole !”
Well thank you so very much for that airtight scholarly exposition. You’ve outdone yourself this time. No need to be gittin all twitchy there Sporty and you don’t get to tell me what I can say on a site that belongs to neither if us.
BFA says: “Philippians 2:6 for example, is translated wrong, Phil 2:6 is a verse that is often used to say Christ is God, but Phil 1:2 makes it very clear that Christ isn’t God, therefore the English translation of Phil 2:6 is wrong “
Yeah, because he knows it couldn’t be the other way other around. Some spirit told him so. The new Testament teaches (old too actually), as has been conclusively affirmed for 1700 years, that Jesus of Nazareth is the one and only man born God. Fully divine and fully human. The hypostatic incarnation.
THAT’s what it says. These pagans don’t pretend to believe the bible Mark, that’s they have more credibility than you do.
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LOL!!! You are nothing but a devil, I will waste no more time on you, goodbye
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Not entirely true, T – I believe there’s some history in there, if you can separate the bare bones from the exaggerations, there’s a great deal of sociology in terms of viewing an ancient culture, and there’s some lovely poetry, written by men who clearly longed for there to be a super-daddy out there somewhere who will make everything right in their tiny little world.
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“please keep your arrogant comments to yourself, asshole !” – Da Holy Spirit made him say that!
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It is the truth
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In the course of the twentieth century, textual critics, Kurt Aland, Bruce Metzger, Cardinal Carlo Martini and others built on the works of Brooke Westcott and Fenton Hort and produced what is called the Nestle-Aland or United Bible Society Greek (NA/UBS) text. Metzger wrote:
“The international committee that produced the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, not only adopted the Westcott and Hort edition as its basic text, but followed their methodology in giving attention to both external and internal consideration” (James Brooks, Bible Interpreters of the 20th century, p. 264).
http://www.kjvtoday.com/home/q-dont-christian-leaders-prefer-the-nestle-aland-text
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(in a hurry. Messed up my tags above)
BFA says: “God had man change the Bible so that only those who are led by the Spirit can see the truth that is written in the Bible, ”
And there we have it folks!!! God made man change the bible so that only Mark can understand it 😀 Move over Jim Jones!!
It’s good thing you’re not a dynamic and persuasive leader type Mark or you would be truly dangerous. As it is, you haven’t been able to dig up even one simpleton dopey enough to buy this charade you’re selling.
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The devil always causes trouble, you speak false Tiribulus, that’s the truth about you, you are a false accuser, which means that you are a devil, you don’t speak the truth about me
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