Demon Denial

It’s noteworthy that Satanists are growing more active and brazen in a time when you’re not supposed to talk about demonic influence seriously.

Sure, you can make Church Lady jokes. But raising the possibility that the Evil One is involved with the overt increase in evil these past years isn’t tolerated in polite company.

Even prominent Christian personalities downplay a phenomena that we know with certainty from Scripture and Tradition are real. They give reasons for walking on eggshells around the devil topic, and those reasons amount to “We’d rather turn friendly fire on our brethren than be disliked by the Church’s enemies.”

And that’s an approach to theology, I guess.

But they’re never gonna like you, whether you adopt their epistemic frame or not.

Just seems like we’d be better off examining our problems without fear of losing face with moral idiot heathens biasing our approach.

Another argument goes that dialing back talk of demons is good, because if our forefathers hadn’t stopped blaming demonic possession for epilepsy, we wouldn’t have smartphones now, or something.

The “You can either believe in demons or have whiz-bang technology” canard always strikes me as ridiculous.

It’s a variation of the “Christian Dark Ages” meme thrown around Reddit by fedora tipping nuAtheists.

What it seems like we have since we bought the lie that the Devil doesn’t exist is technological decline and skyrocketing levels of absurd evil.

The unstated assumption these guys make is that acknowledging the reality of demons will somehow result in us losing knowledge of telecommunications, indoor plumbing, and the wheel. But they never explain why ongoing demon denial would be necessary to maintain our tech.

It just doesn’t sound that convincing to me. I’m pretty sure we could keep our current scientific and engineering capabilities while understanding that demonic activity is exploding across the West. For that matter, it seems like a safe bet that admitting the possibility of and taking steps to root out demonic activity would help us maintain technological aptitude that’s eroding by the day.

Greco-Roman intellectual traditions coupled with the Christian revelation that the natural order is founded on constant laws decreed by the One perfect God instead of countless fickle, squabbling deities seems to explain why science developed in the West like nowhere else.

So it would follow that the West’s collective decision to turn its back on God is the root cause of our current scientific crisis.

The Catechism teaches that demons are in rebellion against God and seek to recruit human beings into their rebellion. That makes it sound like the civilization-wide rejection of God is a development the demons would welcome as advancing their revolt.

A simple Cui bono? test would indicate that demons are at least tangentially involved in the technological decline. Therefore, trying to discredit people who say, “It’s demons” in the name of science just sounds self-defeating.

So in the interest of keeping your WiFi connected and your lights on, let’s talk about demons.

Demons are real.
We could talk about the devil convincing the world that he doesn’t exist, but that would be an exaggeration. Belief in in the spiritual–including evil spirits–permeates human history up to the present day, and every culture has a tradition of spiritual warfare.

Don’t believe in spirits? Yes, you do.
“Spirit” just means “non-material being”. What doesn’t exist is coherent and internally consistent materialism. That’s because pure materialism, followed to its logical conclusion, rules out the existence of reason – the spiritual faculty required to know about anything, including materialism. Materialist philosophies are therefore self-negating a necessarily false.

Demon deniers may attempt to argue that reason, love, humor, etc. are epiphenomena of physical processes. But such arguments address the source of spiritual faculties; not their existence (in fact, their existence is presumed).

Whether or not brain chemistry causes thought is certainly an argument we can have, but unless you can show us a “thought particle” with measurable physical properties, we must conclude to the existence of a non-material dimension of reality that we all experience constantly.

If spiritual being exists, it can have a moral dimension.
In classical philosophy and Christian moral theology, goodness is fullness of being. The goodness of a thing can be measured by how completely it fills out the ideal of what it’s supposed to be. Evil has no independent substance. Instead, evil is a defect or lacking with a parasitic relationship to the good.

For example, illness is the absence of health, ignorance is a lack of knowledge, vice is an imbalance of virtue.

Whether a given being is physical or spiritual doesn’t affect its moral character. If a spiritual being has defects that degrade its existence from the fullness of what it’s meant to be, it can rightly be said to exhibit some degree of evil. Thus, we’re faced with the reality of evil spirits.

How can evil spirits affect human beings?
Several attributes of evil spirits follow directly from their non-material nature.

• Being made of no parts, they’re effectively indestructible.
• As pure intellect and will, they’re really, really smart and ferociously determined.
• Having no physical properties, they don’t take up space.
• As a consequence, they don’t need to “move” or “travel”. Though not omnipresent, they can be anywhere they think about without traversing physical distances.
• Therefore, it’s less accurate to say that a demon can “get inside of” someone/something and better to describe its activity as “attaching itself” to a person, place, or object (remember: a demon is “located” wherever it focuses its thought).
• How can nonphysical beings interact with the physical? Probably not that differently from the way your own spiritual faculties can affect your body (e.g. psychosomatic and mental illness).

Areas and signs of demonic activity
There are two types of demonic activity: ordinary and extraordinary.

Ordinary demonic activity is temptation, whereby an evil spirit is the direct cause of, or a contributing factor to, the temptation to sin.

Extraordinary demonic activity may occur in various ways. Some refer to these phenomena as “stages”, but they’re more properly called “areas”, since they don’t necessarily follow an orderly progression.

The areas of extraordinary demonic activity are:

• External physical attacks: pain and/or harm inflicted by a demon.
• Oppression: various external torments that often masquerade as extreme bad luck.
• Obsession: uncontrollable, irrational thoughts induced by demonic activity.
• Infestation: refers to demonic attachment to a place, an object, or even an animal.
• Possession: one or more demons takes control of a person’s body (not the soul).
• Subjugation: voluntary submission to demonic influence.

In this area, we are referring to an “out of character” sudden attacks of obsessive thoughts. These can be of an ongoing and even absurd nature. There is an added inability to be freed from these thoughts which range from desperation to suicide.

One of the most puzzling attributes of the Death Cult is the striking dichotomy between its destructive, malevolent forms of political expression and their relative normality in other areas of their lives. Who doesn’t have a friend or relative who conducts himself as a sane, rational, and emotionally well-balanced citizen at all times–except for when he’s engaged in politics?

Many Death Cultists even perform regular acts of objective moral good, such as loving and caring for their friends and families and charitable volunteering/giving. Yet without batting an eye, they can immediately turn to defending infanticide and advocating for bigotry against straight, white, Christian males. How to explain this Jekyll-Hyde dynamic?

Looking at the description of demonic obsession, it’s not difficult to map these symptoms to typical Cultist behavior. Their ongoing preoccupation with critical and intersectional theory, their seemingly involuntary spouting of absurdities and tragically, their penchant for self-destruction, would indicate that they are demonically obsessed rather than suffering from full-blown possession.

An explosion of demonic activity

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