Non-Jews Are Dogs

 Don't shoot the messenger. Jesus says so.

News from Hell

 

I do not trust Father Chad Ripperger. Just an instinct; I feel what he says does not cohere. Rather like Jordan Peterson: everything must be taken on his personal authority.

But I am interested to hear him claim that exorcisms take less time recently. In the Sixties, he says, a typical exorcism took a couple of days. Five years ago, a typical exorcism took years. Now the times are declining rapidly: currently about a month or so.

This sounds right to me. We are entering a period of general disillusionment.

The Rage in Our Hearts

 

Asmodeus, the Demon of Wrath

I had been asked to review two short story manuscripts recently. Both had the same odd and disturbing flaw: they had the main character slaughter an animal, gratuitously, and in detail, early in the story. 

This did nothing to further the plot. Either incident could have been removed without affecting it; in fact, they distracted from it. 

If it was meant to establish character, it was bad practice: it alienated the reader from the protagonist. If the reader does not identify with the main character, they are no longer interested in what happens to them, and tune out. Even if you want to tell a sympathetic story of a killer, you start by showing them being nice to a puppy.

And what an odd thing for two random stories to have in common.

I suspect this shows what lurks in the hearts of men currently. When you compose a story, you start by letting your imagination run free. When these two authors did so, this is almost the first thing that came up.

Pent up male rage? That sounds plausible on its face, given how men are repressed currently. Both authors were young men. 

But rage does not work that way. It does not get stronger if not expressed. That’s Freud; Freud has been disproven. If you repress an emotion, it goes away. If you express it, it grows. Over time, it can become a settled vice—or virtue. 

Once it becomes a vice, it becomes part of our programming. When we let our minds go, it will come out, unbidden. Even, eventually, against our interest. It begins to seem to have a will of its own, which is why vices are traditionally imagined as demons. 

This is why, to be a good writer, you need to have nothing to hide; you need to be a fundamentally decent person. Artists are, in my personal experience, always naive innocents in person.

Yes, there are all those stories about bohemian types being libertines. I suspect this is to discredit the enterprise.  And often the writer or artist will play along with it, for cover. Jim Morrison was supposed to be the ultimate womanizer, for example. And yet—no paternity suits. I go with W.B. Yeats, who said you can either live the life of a poet, or be a poet, but you cannot do both. 

I think our society as a whole these days is nursing the demon of anger. It is behind all these claims of victimization and oppression. It is also nursing the demons of lust and pride. There are even parades.

The gravest sin any more is pointing out someone else’s sin.

The next worst sin is not sinning yourself.

And this may explain why the arts are moribund.

Demonic Activity

 

Although he calls himself a secular man, Tucker Carlson believes in demons. He suggests that there is no other way to account for what is happening in the world. He sees a demon wherever there is a strong drive to do something that is in nobody’s best interests. He cites sexual transitioning for children. How can anyone actually want that?

And he is right. This is what demons are: independent wills that seem to supersede our own. The classic example is alcoholism. First the man takes a drink; but eventually, the drink takes the man, and is in control. So too with addictions generally. Because these are independent wills, they are by definition independent persons. There is a “demon rum.” 

It does not follow, as Carlson goes on to suggest, that UFOs or UAPs are demons. As purely spiritual beings, demons cannot act on the physical plane except through human agency. We should not be able to see them.

Although, who knows? That may be no more than a rule of thumb. Perhaps from time to time that veil is lifted. This, indeed, is understood to be so in ancient beliefs around the world. Djinn are “hidden ones,” not exactly “invisible ones.” Greek gods could reputedly manifest at times, as swans or rainbows or old men on the road or showers of gold.

Leaving that aside for now as too esoteric, we can understand demons as more or less what we commonly refer to as “vices” or “addictions.” (But without postulating some independent external will, where do they come from? Surely it cannot be “our” will if it leads us to our own destruction? If it is a will against our will? Can we have two selves?)

Look for some human behaviour that seems destructive and does not make sense, and you have probably found a demon. 

And by this standard, demonic activity does indeed seem to be growing. Aside from “gender transitioning” for children, the growing epidemic of fentanyl and other dangerous drugs is demonic. The mobs celebrating October 7, chanting “from the river to the sea, and demanding the elimination of Israel are demonic. Antisemitism generally is demonic. The rash of statue toppling, street renamings, and church burnings is demonic. 

I would argue that the entire edifice of feminism is demonic: it has always been against the best interests of women as well as suicidal for the culture as a whole; and I think this was evident from its start. The early feminists had to hold “consciousness-raising” sessions to convince women that they were oppressed by being allowed to stay at home, grow flowers, and raise babies. And by not having casual sex.

Envy and lust were at work here.

Marxism is demonic. Marxism presented itself as a scientific theory, and it was long ago disproven in scientific terms: its predictions did not come true. The proletariat did not grow and grow more impoverished, wealth did not become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. We did not get worse and worse depressions;  nowhere has the proletariat spontaneously seized power. Communist revolutions were supposed to happen in  the most industrialized societies: in Germany, Britain, the US, perhaps, but certainly not agrarian Russia, China, or Vietnam. And of course, anywhere Marxism has been applied, the results have been disastrous, including history’s worst mass murders. So how, other than demonic activity, to explain its continuing vitality, especially in intellectual circles?

Behind the Marxist mask are the vices of sloth, greed, pride, and envy.

Psychology is another demon. People cling to it, and to their favourite psychological theory, with an irrational fervour, despite the fact that all these psychological theories have heretofore been disproven in scientific terms. And the basic premise, that one can study the human soul objectively,  as an object, is ridiculous. And none of its techniques can be demonstrated to work.

Postmodernism is another demon. It is immediately self-invalidating. It asserts that there is no objective truth, so that we can have “your truth” and “my truth.” Yet, if there is no objective truth, “there is no objective truth,” as an assertion of truth, cannot be true. And yet postmodernism in various forms keeps spreading.

Where does this all end?

It more or less must end in some religious revival. The only question is how bad it can get before this happens. I cannot predict; I hope it happens in my lifetime. And there are inklings. Like Tucker Carlson, a secular man, becoming convinced there are demons.

Blowing Hot and Cold

 

The latest reports on “UAP,” which used to be called UFOs, seem to up the ante. There is a video circulating of a craft that is invisible to the eye, but emits a heat signature detectable in infrared. And it shifts from hot to cold—yet is still visible to infrared in its cold state. Which means it shifts not just from warmer than its surroundings to the ambient temperature, but from warmer to colder than its surroundings. Why? And there are reports of people entering an alien craft about forty feet square, and finding the interior “the size of a football field.”

Before this, it seemed to me—not following this closely—that all could be accounted for by someone somewhere figuring out time travel. And so the likeliest explanation was not aliens, but a visit from our own future.

But if these latest reports are legitimate, time travel does not seem sufficient to account for it all. That does not allow invisibility, or the distortion of space itself.

Neither does mass psychosis—we have video.

How about a government conspiracy? It makes sense: governments are currently in a low-intensity war with their own citizens everywhere. A good scare about a common enemy is a way to grab more power. Covid is no longer frightening enough; global warming may be losing its potency. The principalities of this world may need a new wolf.

Really large conspiracies, as this would have to be, are intrinsically unlikely, due to human frailty and incompetence. Yet, if we believe these UFO sightings are all real now, we must also believe there was a general conspiracy among governments to suppress UFO reports previously. If the first conspiracy was possible, so is the second. The simplest explanation is that there is only one conspiracy, and it is the second…

The fact that we have video is of no significance on the hypothesis of government conspiracy. Much can now be computer generated, and in the case of something alien, a fake becomes difficult to detect. What is it supposed to look like? What is it supposed to be able to do? If it can violate any of the laws of physics, how can a fake ever be discovered?

Indeed, the comment often heard is that these supposed craft “violate the laws of physics.” 

What does that actually tell us? 

Unless we somehow have the laws of physics all wrong, a thing that violates the laws of physics is not a physical object. 

So, it might all be a government invention.

The other possibility is that these are spiritual objects. “Violates the laws of physics”?  That defines a miracle. We know by deduction that God exists, God can necessarily produce miracles, can break the laws of physics. He may be sending us a message. 

The problem with this explanation is that, if so, it is hard to tell what that message is. Angels are heralds; they speak plainly, or they are not doing their job. Prophets speak plainly, “make the ways straight for the Lord. It is ungodly to be ambiguous.

Demons, on the other hand, love ambiguity. What demons love is to disorient, to sow doubt and confusion. Demons will also always want to mask their identity. 

And demons, too, reputedly can perform miracles. And, if I may say so, demons also typically work in tandem with and through governments, "the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world "

Could there be any practical reason for alien explorers to create a craft that shifts quickly from very hot to very cold? 

Hearing Voices and Casting out Demons

 

John said to him, "Teacher, we saw someone who doesn't follow us casting out demons in your name; and we forbade him, because he doesn't follow us." 39 But Jesus said, "Don't forbid him, for there is no one who will do a mighty work in my name, and be able quickly to speak evil of me. 40 For whoever is not against us is on our side.

 Mark 9: 38-40

This first part of today’s mass reading suggests that anyone is capable of casting out demons and qualified to exorcise—even a non-Christian—so long as it is done in the name of Christ.

This does not seem to be the common understanding in the Catholic Church. A formal Catholic exorcism requires special permission from a bishop, is done only by a designated exorcist in each diocese, and often requires a lengthy bureaucratic process designed to find some reason not to do it. By canon law, the Church will not sanction an exorcism until and unless something uncanny happens, that seems to rule out any physical cause.

This is not logical. Demons are intelligent beings. Why would a demon make their presence obvious in order to get exorcised?

One suspects the Church is primarily concerned here with bad publicity—about being accused of being “unscientific.”

Yet from the point of view of someone hearing demonic voices, it makes much sense to try being exorcised. At worst, it will not work; but, unlike the various psychiatric treatments, exorcism is entirely non-invasive and has no side-effects. And it does not require avoiding any other treatment.

The good news is that we need not rely on the Church for exorcism. The Bible itself says that anyone can exorcise. All that is strictly necessary is to call upon the name of Jesus Christ. 

Origen writes:

For it is not by incantations that Christians seem to prevail (over evil spirits), but by the name of Jesus, accompanied by the announcement of the narratives which relate to him; for the repetition of these has frequently been the means of driving demons out of men, especially when those who repeated them did so in a sound and genuinely believing spirit. Such power, indeed, does the name of Jesus possess over evil spirits, that there have been instances where it was effectual, when it was pronounced even by bad men…