Palm Tree,
Um, excuse me? If demons aren’t real, then why are there so many mentions of them in the Bible,
especially in the new testament? Take the passage PJM just posted, for instance, among many other examples.
How is it a sin to believe in demons? Are you also not allowed to believe that Satan exists?
If demons do not exist, why does the Church have exorcists? Why is there a chief exorcist in Rome itself? See
this book, for instance, written by exactly that person, FATHER GABRIELE Amorth.
If it is a sin to believe in demons, why does he believe in them, and why has he been to
thousands of exorcisms?
It must be nice not to believe in anything dark, but that’s simply not reality.
Sorry I’m being kind of harsh in this post, but you are being rather patronizing.
You’re not being harsh to me, you’re being harsh to the what the Holy Father wrote. I gave you a direct quote from the Holy Father and your response to that was that he seems to be contradicting all these mentions of “demons” in the Bible and how the Church still sticks with the belief in exorcisms and demons today.
And, I think you have a good point. How did the Holy Father seem to be forgetting that exorcism and demons are still part of the Catholic faith? But, in his defense, it is well-known that the people in Jesus’ time (including the people in the time the New Testament was written) were primitive people that didn’t understand the world around them and attributed much of what they didn’t understand to the work of demons and spirits that were all around them. For example, because they didn’t know about viruses, bacteria, etc, they thought that demons were causing disease. To protect themselves from the demons and spirits they “felt” all around them, they turned to magic charms and incantations to help ward off the demons. For example, the way they tried to cure people from disease was by use of exorcism to dispel the demonic possession that they thought was causing the disease.
So it’s not surprising that we have all these elements of demons and exorcism in the Bible and it’s not surprisng that many of the early Christians, including many Saints, believed in demons and exorcism, and it’s not surprising the Church today doesn’t outright reject the belief the in demons and exorcism that were such a big part of our history.
As for “FATHER GABRIELE Amorth,” he doesn’t seem like he’s a prophet worth trusting enough to believe that the Holy Father is wrong. Fr. Amorth has some pretty far-out claims (like how he performed over 50,000 exorcisms, like how Nazis were all possessed by Satan, how Harry Potter novels are evil, etc). From what I understand, Fr. Amorth is more like an irrational side-show that the Holy Father allows to hang around his diocese because the Holy Father believes that God can work even through the most irrational priests we have, as long as that priest sincerely believes in God. Or, he might believe that being rational, realizing that demons aren’t real, isn’t going to work with the people that aren’t willing to be rational, so if a non-rational priest is winning over the non-rational people for Christ, so be it, etc.
Since the 1600s, (Enlightenment), it was rare that anybody in Western Civilzation worried about exorcisms until William Peter Blatty’s novel, “The Exorcist” (1971) and the film version (1973) got many people into a frenzy and got them started thinking they need an exorcism (this is similar to what I was talking about above about how movies can get the imagination to believe in something that isn’t real). As a result of “The Exorcist” novel and film, there was flood of people begging for exorcisms. It eventually died down until Father Gabriele Amorth showed up in the 1990’s working people into a frenzy again about how they need exorcisms and what not.
After the Enlightenment, the practice of exorcism has diminished in its importance to most religious groups and its use decreased, especially in Western society. This is due mainly to the study of psychology and the functioning and structure of the human mind. Many of the cases that, in the past, were candidates for exorcism are now often explained by psychology.
Anyway, as your belief in this presence that is causing you fear, what is wrong with just looking at it like it is a “monster in the closet”? Now yeah, let’s say for years you have tried to convince yourself that “the monster in the closet” isn’t real, but it isn’t working for you. What about some other strategies such as telling yourself that this presense isn’t a demon, but it is in fact God’s loving presence and you are just scared of that? You said it was a “very warm sensation,” isn’t feeling warm a good thing, a sign of God’s presence? It could be that you are feeling the same loving presence of God that I am feeling, but that you don’t like it because you don’t like believing in God’s presence as much as you like believing in demons and the occult and what not. You were very quick to reject the Holy Father’s writing, so why would it be surprising that you are also quick to reject God? Yes, I honestly think that you want to believe in God, but you have to actually believe. You have to forget about all your occult nonsense. You say you rejected the occult, but if you still believe in it, then you really didn’t. And let’s say you already thought of that and that isn’t helping you, this demon is still real to you, still scaring you, yeah, it’s sad to see for all of us. Why not talk to the psychogist you are seeing about it? What can it hurt? Why don’t you tell your loved ones about it? What can hurt? They care about you, don’t they?
