You guys don’t see the irony in the statement, “He does not rule out the idea that God could alow the spirit of a dead human to appear on earth, but the key is that God is in charge and none of this can happen or occur without His will or approval.” and the claimed fact of possessions of humans by demons for which exorcists are supposedly needed? To be clear, David FW did not just mean dead spirits, he meant everything, as asked by EnchantedEve.
So you say God wills and approves of possessions and demons entering our world, yet exorcists are then supposedly needed to get rid of them. Exorcism is rubbish.
I say Theology is useless when it can be used to pretend to rationally provide an explanation for fairies, leprechauns, unicorns, and ninja turtles. As a means for determining truth, theology is useless.
Lol. Scary witchcraft is what is needed to dissuade you huh? Good thing we have nonsense beliefs to limit the amount of nonsense beliefs we have.
Forgive me, I am not sure I see a framed argument here, however I will do the best I can with what I have been furnished.
Allow and approve are not the same thing, and if we are going to have a “rational” discussion of theology, than we had best keep are word defined.
Yes, God, in accordance with traditional understanding, permits all things. This contrast to saying He wills all things. If God did not wish something to occur, He could stop it from occuring. But this is not how God works. He is infinite, and therefore does not make finite decisions. When God is viewed in the former way, He becomes the partisan gods of old, who acted in finite knowledge in spaces of time, and not infinite prisms of existence, as He does. The finite nature of our being causes us to decide to choose or choose not. God does not do this. He just Is. God thinks nothing of the past and has no consideration of the future, and, in fact, does not consider at all. These are all things we do, and when we understand God otherwise, we understand Him within the narrow limits of our human “rational” understanding.
Excorcism is not rubbish if you understand demons to be finite beings acting in infinite space and time. The priest merely calls upon grace, already present in the world from the beginning of time, and calls upon it in Christ’s Holy Name to overtake the negative forces of demonic physical power and basically “push” the demon, who is the absence of love and grace, and replaces it with love and grace. Demons are merely spirits of negation, and the filling of a soul with love leaves no space for a demon, for nature abhores a void. A demon, therefore, is like a spiritual “black hole,” which the priest eliminates with the Love of God.
Theology would not explain any of the things listed above because theology is the study of God, greek Theo, not folk spirits and legends, though you may say otherwise. Theology does not determine Truth anymore than we determine the sky is blue. Theology is an active excercise in defining and discovering the Truth as it has always existed. Truth is out there, we need only to find, but first you must have a foundation from which to build understanding from, and that foundation we call theology.
It is easy to dismiss ideas and concepts as inconsequential, and we have the mind to do so. One should simply not be shocked when no one finds it admirable to dismiss ideas rather than seek them.
