[Magdalen] Exorcism

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

After the discussions here, I am sure of one thing: that I don't know for
sure how evil works.

However, I have generally found that people who do evil things do so due to
not thinking things through.
A person seems to decide that family is more important than anything, and
if they over emphasize this, it leads to a lot of very horrible things.
A person, faced with a choice, takes the way which involves a quick path to
their desire which does not prepare them to handle it.
And of course a person can make some decision early on which sends them
down the wrong road, and years later, they are so mired in the results of
their decisions that they cannot conceive of how to change, how to repent.
A great example is a person -- a basically good person -- who gets into
organized crime.  After a while, they are trapped in what they did, and
cannot get out. He who rides the tiger can never dismount.

People ask why we go to church, and I think a lot of it has to do with the
good counsel one gets in handling all of these trivial little temptations
that erode your goodness. Folks decide on some course because it seems easy
now, even though it is probably not easy in the long run.

There was a stupendous scene in the short-lived show about an Episcopal
priest who had visions of Jesus at times.  He is getting a big for a
building from a syndicate, and the actual building is going to be fully
legitimate, but it is built on organized crime.  At one point, one of the
lieutenants of the group lags behind and talk to the priest about how he
has no hope of salvation. He is involved in this criminal organization and
it's all he knows.
"Well, you could change," says the priest, somewhat lamely.
The guy looks at him without a trace of anger, and says flatly, "No I
couldn't." And he walks out, knowing that he is going to perdition, and
cannot escape it.
The most well expressed statement about how our lies and deeds eventually
can trap us. I was very sorry to see that show hounded off the air. It
asked some great questions.

I do not think there are evil people, Scott Peck's very insightful and
compelling observations notwithstanding.

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 Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 8:23 AM, 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> 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> 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:;>> 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.
> >
> >
>