[Magdalen] Exorcism

[Sally Davies]

I don't know....surely no one is born evil, but we can become identified
with it, and we can be ransomed from it. I have a hard time seeing any
person as wholly evil. Some people who have been seen that way had
histories featuring profound emotional damage in early life.

A conscience is formed and the failure to form one is not the child's
fault...


Sally D

On Saturday, December 12, 2015, Lynn Ronkainen <houstonklr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sally your post suggested this question to me - is a person evil or a doer
> of evil? Or is it the same?
> Lynn
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Dec 12, 2015, at 2:14 AM, Sally Davies <sally.davies at gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
>
> "It is not possible for God to lie"....quite right Jim! We could not depend
> on a God who could and would do anything. Though I suppose that if the
> Temptation of Christ means anything practical, it means that God could have
> decided to do wrong, but never has?
>
> At risk of sounding like a Mediaeval Scholastic, perhaps one could say that
> "all things are possible" means all wholesome things. Or even that lies and
> acts of evil are negations and non-things, therefore outside of God's
> repertoire.
>
> I don't understand it either but God created us and we do evil. Nature
> itself is "red in tooth and claw" and our close relatives the chimps also
> do some appalling and needless things that would be called evil if we did
> them.
>
> Sometimes evil seems to be an emergent quality, like Jacob Zuma emerging
> from apartheid and the ANC, or Donald Trump emerging from a post-cold-war
> Republican Party. There's a point at which we can say "that one is evil"
> but struggle to see the process by which that ugly thing emerged, in which
> many if not all of us have a part to play.
>
> Somehow this discussion feels very appropriate for Advent, as an antidote
> to all the Christmas claptrap that goes on this time of year; and also
> fitting for a week in which mathematicians announced that at the most basic
> level of matter, there is an unsolvable question!
>
> Sally D
>
>
> On Saturday, December 12, 2015, James Oppenheimer-Crawford <
> oppenheimerjw at gmail.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
>
> > I would not say something like "A Good God _couldn't_ do that!". I said I
> > can't see how that can work.  Just saying that if God just feels like
> being
> > mean --- well, your mileage may differ, but I don't think that's the God
> > described in the Bible.
> >
> > And I respectfully disagree. If you take the description of God in
> > scripture seriously, then all things are not possible with God.
> >
> > If we believe that we can depend on God, then we firmly maintain that all
> > things are NOT possible with God.  If anything is possible, obviously you
> > can't depend on God. I think that's fairly obvious.
> >
> > To say, "Well, God can do whatever God decides to do," sounds very pious
> > and good, but is it, really?  If God is good, then it follows that God
> will
> > do not evil.  I don't think we ought to say, a la Old Testament, that God
> > creates both good and evil and sends them on whomever he pleases.  That
> > just makes God a supernatural Taliban.
> >
> > I also think I am encouraged to press the point a bit more because what
> it
> > looks like we are doing is trying to use these hypothetical evil entities
> > to say that we are not really so awful at heart; it's those evil demons
> > running around causing problems. Not our fault.
> >
> > I'm afraid that I still have to say, if this is the case, then we have to
> > wrestle with the question of how a good god can create evil entities and
> > approve of their actions.
> >
> > James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
> > *“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
> > except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy
> >
> > On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Sibyl Smirl <polycarpa3 at ckt.net
> <javascript:;>
> > <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> >> Thank you, Sally! This one I'm going to keep to study over and over!
> >>
> >> I'll add, apropos to the kind of theology that says "A Good God
> > _couldn't_
> >> do that!" that "With God all things are possible" and "My thoughts are
> > not
> >> your thoughts, nor your ways my ways".  I don't think that God uses the
> >> same logics as humans do.
> >
> >
>