Evil is strategic, it has long-term plans - and these are long-term because behind evil are demons, they spirit beings, who are not mortal, and who don't need sleep. Therefore; behind evil are wills that are active 24/7 and across a timespan greater than human lives. In other words, evil can be unrelenting - when it wants to be; in a way that is impossible for humans.
Modern Western people are materialist hence cannot understand evil, and don't believe that demons are real or possible. This is a disadvantage when it comes to understanding life, and therefore living one's life as it should be lived.
Humans don't behave strategically, or only seldom and partially. Most people, most of the time, simply adjust to (take for granted) whatever strategy is governing their lives. They look to be successful, happy or whatever within... whatever context is given.
For instance; nearly all modern Western people are unaware of, indifferent to, or lazily misinterpret their leaders' recent and current activity of long-term, step-by-step, purposively engineering a global and maximally-annihilative war to include their own nations. People may be very concerned by micro-issues (such as the "climate-destroying" usage of a plastic covering to laminate paper notices) - but unconcerned or disbelieving that the contextual, ongoing, strategic intent is to unleash mass destruction in their direction ASAP.
Modern people have been systematically degraded on multiple fronts - by alienation; passivity of expectations; PSYOPS confusions, contradictory ideology and statements; by praising and encouraging negative, destructive and sinful motivations; and maximizing addiction to mass and social media - and many other things. We are unhealthy; damaged, disordered, distorted, disorientated... all to an unprecedented degree.
The means operate in support of the ultimate end of corruption; which is at the deepest level of false and destructive metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality, themselves, and the relationship - the purpose and meaning of life.
All this (and more could be said) seems to make evil so powerful that our situation is hopeless...
Yet Christians know that - in principle, from first assumptions - this cannot be true; because God is the Creator, and we are each a beloved child of God.
So, we can be sure that our life will have potential for ultimate salvation, and potential for positive learning - for as long as we are sustained alive.
But how can this work - given the vast and sleepless strategies of evil?
It seems hopeless only in terms of the double-negative life purpose of resisting evil.
My current best answer is therefore to frame the question in positive terns: asking what is the basis within each of us, from-which we can each pursue good?
And we can then assume that we each have within us a core self, untouchable and uncorrupted, with sufficient innate divine nature (being God's children), and sufficient capacity for receiving divine guidance (from the Holy Ghost - who is Jesus Christ).
We cope with evil by comparing and evaluating whatever The World throws at us, with the ongoing transcendent purposes of this core self.
When the core is (overall) orientated towards good; then the quantity, strength and variety of evil is a nuisance, maybe a horror; but cannot drive us off-course for long, or in the end.
So long as we locate our aspirations within this self, and no matter our many and inevitable sins, errors and lapses; and because God is creating from love of us -- when we have chosen to be on God's side then nothing can touch us - not even the world-dominating power of sleepless strategic evil.
3 comments:
I've understood evil to be desribed in a negative and positive forml. One, that evil is really just a negative entity, as in the absence of good, or separation from God and the goodness that derives from that. So that the experience of evil is not considered to be a conscious positive entity, but just an absence.
But the other conception of evil is that it is a positive entity, aiming at the the destruction of good and the creation of harm and chaos.
Given that you describe demonic spirits as agents for evil in the world, does that mean you would describe evil in the second version, as something more than just an absence??
I tend to think there ARE active malevolent agents in the world, and that evil is not just a privation of God's goodness. It just seems very compelling at times, not as a passive absence of something, but an active purposeful thing.
But I've never been clear how demons, if they are spiritual agents, actual interact with humans (or anything else) in the physical world. Can they affect physical processes?? How do they affect humans without some material mechanism to interact with human functioning?
To effect humans, even in mental processes, would seem to require some means to alter brain chemistry, signalling etc to do it -- at least in part. We are physically bound beings. Just wondered how you understand this.
I'm not a materialist, but I don't understand how material and non-material interact precisely.
@Cecil - By my understanding, All evil is "positive" in the sense you describe.
Theoretically it is possible to opt-out of creation and revert to unconsciousness, either isolated unawareness of other Beings or loss of the knowledge of separateness. Maybe a Being incapable of love (i.e. inter-personal love) might choose this.
This opting-out itself isn't evil; but those who claim to be doing it and advocate doing it - are Actually engaged in subverting or attacking creation!
You actually Are a materialist! in Barfield's sense of "Residual Unresolved Positivism" (word search it on this blog, or my Barfield blog).
This "interaction" is a non-problem, because spirit is primary, the material secondary (and optional); so "the material" is always spiritual, and never disconnected from the spirit - material is a "subset" of the spiritual as it were, analogous to concentrated or condensed spirit.
Thank you for this post, Dr. Charlton, and for all your efforts. Your words are a comfort.
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