I know you believe it. The trouble is that you have no good reason for believing it.
Charlemagne II: Translation: “There’s no evidence that this being exists?! Why, that’s actually evidence that this being does exist!!”
No, my argument is that there is absolutely zero evidence that any such being exists at all. I’ve seen the devil plenty of times, in movies and TV shows. I just don’t see any reason at all to think that it’s a real being, in the exact same way that I don’t see any evidence that the Tricks Rabbit is a real being.
I’ll say it again. The night my father died, he turned up in my room. He died in a suburb called Nundah, and I was trying to sleep in a suburb called Yeronga. I didn’t know he’d died, and wasn’t told by normal means for another four days. And I still remember the scream 31 years later. It was so terrifying that I started to scream, and yet all I could see was his terror. I was unable to see what horrified him so badly. Just him.
When my uncle (my mother’s brother) turned up physically to tell me he’d died four days later (for the simple reason his body wasn’t found for four days - shades of Lazarus - “he stinketh”, except that he didn’t come out of the tomb), I still remember turning towards the bedroom and thinking, “Then what the hell was that the other night?” My uncle saw my expression and asked me if I was all right. I said I was, and did not mention the incident to him.
Have it your way. But I ***know ***the devil exists. Padre Pio used to be thrown around his room by demonic forces. Talk to people who have been involved in exorcisms. They’ll tell you whether he exists or not. To quote an American priest in an article in “Time” magazine, when it was reported that the Vatican was increasing the number of exorcisms ti was dealing with, he stated that “when youj’ve got someone floating around the ceiling”, you knew you had more than just a psychiatric state on hand.
But the devil is not going to disillusion you with a display like that because that would make it obvious to you he exists. I remember a pastor on TV years ago who’d joined the church on account of the devil (I think he might have been a Seventh Day Adventist. it was a long time ago.). He said at one stage he’d joined a satanic cult, but his reason was purely sexual. He’d heard they were pretty sexually orientated. As a young bloke, sex was pretty much on his mind, and he thought that he was going to get a bit. But he said to the interviewer, “When I saw the things that happened there, I realised there was a devil! And if there was a devil, there was a God. And I’d better find Him, and quick!”
I go to a Catholic psychiatrist, only a couple of times a year now, mainly for reactive depression, which is usually caused by prolonged and negative influences. I blame this on my father. However when I told him about a couple of incidents when a voice had cut clear across my thoughts in relation to two specific topics, the psychiatrist said, “That’s interesting. Did I tell you about my experience?”
I said he hadn’t. He said he’d been sitting in his office one day typing on his computer when a voice just suddenly said, loud and clear, “Go to Maclean”. Maclean is a town in Northern New South Wales in Australia. He lives in Brisbane in Queensland which is only about 100 kilometres or so from the New South Wales border.
Since no context was given whatsoever, he simply noted it. A couple of months later he was involved in a ‘family healing mass’ in Lismore, another town in Northern NSW, when an Aboriginal woman came up to him later and said, “I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself etc. … but I seem to be getting told you should go to Maclean”.
Now if a strange woman came up to you and said “… I think you ought to go to Woop Woop…”, you’d probably be a bit wary. But because he’d been primed by the very clear voice in the office about two months before he went. He ended up on some island in one of the nearby rivers which was used as a lock-up for aborigines in the early days of European settlement. It seems there was some unfinished spiritual business.
Now that voice came from somewhere. And he had no reason whatsoever to even consider Maclean two months before the “family healing mass”.
There’s a spiritual world out there whether you believe it or not.
