Defence against Psychic Attacks of the totalitarian-materialist kind

Traditional psychic attacks are (or were) of a spectacular nature; such as a person being made sick, or becoming possessed with mind and body under control from some evil spirit, or demon. 

While (apparently) still happening to some extent; modern psychic attacks are very different in form, much less spectacular, much more insidious, and so common as to be completely unnoticed. 

Traditional psychic attacks (supposedly) depend - to some degree - with someone inviting possession, or surrendering will to another being - a being that is motivated by self-gratifying emotions such as lust, power, or pleasure in inflicting pain. 

Modern psychic attacks are usually mundane, mainstream; indeed, so normal as to be completely unremarkable. 

They involve surrender to materialism, to the will of the totalitarian system, to the guidance of some external "group-mind", and abrogation of personal responsibility.

Such psychic attack is pervasive and continuous, and happens via official sources, educational institutions, the mass media, laws and regulations - and pretty much all of the major social institutions - the arts, science, the police and military - and the churches. 

In a world where all social institutions and groups are more or less, and increasingly, corrupted by the totalitarian agenda of evil; anyone who chooses to serve any institution; who chooses to take their facts, concepts, motivations etc. from the civilizational and social group-mind - any such person (and this may be a majority) has yielded willingly to this evil form of psychic attack.    

And in a societal world of pervasive spiritual corruption it all slips by unnoticed. 

And most Christians are as much willing victims of such psychic attack as anyone else - because they have chosen to put their faith primarily in a social institution, to serve and obey a social institution. They devoutly blot-up the psychic attacks, along with their religion. 

Such psychic attacks are simply a part of the major strategy of evil; which is to induce people to deny/ ignore/ subordinate the spiritual; to think materially and put materialist reasoning first, to focus primarily on this mortal life and its conditions; and to be orientated-towards (and motivated-by) the normal, ordinary civilizational group-mind. 

So we find that victims of modern psychic attack are just normal, ordinary, decent, respectable people - thinking and doing what such people think and do. 

The fact that their minds and bodies are colonized by demonic will seems absurd because theirs is a majority behaviour. 

There is no defence against this, unless it is acknowledged to be happening; and the Christian churches are net-agents of exactly this form of psychic attack - so they are not going to acknowledge it!  

As with all psychic self-defence, the Big Thing is Not to invite evil into one's self, Not deliberately to surrender one's will to an external will that is opposed to God and divine creation.

And instead to adhere to the principles of Christian faith that the material is only a sub-set of the larger spiritual world; that this mortal life is only a finite episode in our eternal lives; and that we are committed to following Jesus to eternal resurrected life in Heaven. 

Against the siren calls of materialism - of the escapist illusions of safety, power, pleasure; there is a determination to consider first love as primary value; and our personal and creative destiny in this mortal life; and to be rooted (as best we may) in that which is divine within our-selves; and our personal and direct relation with the Holy Ghost.    

   

Why does (a supposedly Good) God allow "X" to happen? A legitimate question, versus idle curiosity

Why does (a supposedly Good) God allow "X" to happen? This is a very serious question - or, at least, potentially so; and inadequate answers to it have probably led to more Christian apostasy and failure to convert than anything else in the past century. 

But there are (at least) two ways that the question gets asked. The first is to ask about some-thing, some incident, some phenomenon of which we have direct and personal experience - including of the actual degree and nature of personal suffering entailed. 

The second, and most usual, form of the question is to ask about some-thing of which we have only indirect and essentially hearsay knowledge, usually from the mass media or educational institutions. This version of Why does God allow X refers to something somewhere place, involving strangers, often remote in history - something such as the Spanish Inquisition, or the Holocaust, or the victims of some "natural disaster or catastrophe (the Lisbon Earthquake was a popular example in the 18th century - see the novel Rasselas by Samuel Johnson).

The second form of the question cannot be answered satisfactorily, because it is an ill-formed question which contains assumptions that make it intrinsically unanswerable. It assumes the validity of our secondhand, remote knowledge, the competence and honesty of those who generated and transmitted this information, and many links of inference involved in constructing it. 

And it assumes that we know what was the nature and degree of suffering of (often) large numbers of individual persons - and indeed it assumes we know what these people's attitude was, to whatever they experienced. 

None of this is solidly knowable, so we are debating insecure inferences - and such debates never go anywhere useful or valid. 

Indeed, I would regard such discussions of big, remote abstractions concerning phenpomena of unknowable validity as fundamentally unserious: merely idle curiosity, the dishonest seeking of excuses, or moral grandstanding ("virtue-signalling").  

But even when we stick to valid questions concerning that suffering of which we have direct and personal knowledge, so that we feel absolutely confident of what we are talking about; such that we would literally stake our lives on its truth...

Even then, if a Christian answer is desired, then a Christian context must be assumed: and here must means must. 

If the questioner asking "why does a Good God allow..." demands a this-worldly answer, an answer in terms of providing a reason for suffering that is justifiable purely in terms of some kind of measure of mortal-life gratification, an explanation within bounds of time only between conception and death - then he has already assumed that Christianity is untrue. 

Because a Christian answer will ultimately strive to explain things, including all instances of suffering, in a large context of time - indeed an everlasting context that includes resurrected eternal Heavenly life. 

If we have a valid question about the origin of suffering in this divine creation of a Good God, and with eternal life beyond salvation, then this question is what absolutely needs a satisfactory answer. 

That is, an answer which is sufficiently clear and concise to be comprehensible, and whose assumptions are endorsed by that person's intuitive understanding. And an answer that really answers the source of suffering in the divine creation of a Good God - and which does not merely kick the can a but further away from the initial question.

To say "the devil did it" is just a can kick; if we assume that God made the devil - entirely, and from-nothing; and made the devil with his demonic nature. 

And any explanation in terms of randomness is likewise an evasion; if God is asserted to have made everything as it actually is.  

Also, it is not Good enough for Christians to say that such questions can't be answered because God the creator is too different from us - too Great, too inscrutable, or that His ways are not Our ways...  

Christians can't coherently plead divine incomprehensibility because Jesus was a Man. 

 

All Christians ought to have such answers thought-through and ready for deployment when required - because the question is vitally important, and not one that is going-away.  

Where did I come from? Where am I going?

Where did I come from? Where am I going?

What was I before I was born, what will happen to me when I die? 

These questions are probably spontaneous among many people - if not all people. 

They arise from a sense of trying to understand "my" situation in life, in this world.  

The current options in answering include the following:

1. The questions make no sense. There is no you except in this temporary life and world, a current by-product of brain activity. And indeed "you" is probably only the same thing as itself here-and-now - and was not so when you were a young child, and "you" may be obliterated before your body dies by brain pathology. This is mainstream secular atheism, as taught by Western culture.  

2. The second question: Where am I going? is a real question, and the answer is [some kind of afterlife, such as heaven]; but the first question: Where did I come from? is an illegitimate question that has no answer; because "I" did not exist until my-self/ my-soul was created from nothing, some time before it was incarnated in a body. This is the conviction of mainstream orthodox Christianity, and some other religions.   

3. The reincarnation answer, which varies in its ultimates on either side of this particular mortal life (eg, varies concerning explanations of the ultimate origin and destination of "me"); but reincarnation belief generally has the take-home message that where I came from was a previous mortal-earthly incarnation, and where I am going is another mortal-earthly incarnation. This is asserted by the likes of Hindus and Buddhists and Eastern influenced Westerners of a New Age and/or Esoteric flavour. 

Answer 2 - we came from nothing, and/but will live eternally after death - is the mainstream, orthodox Christian answer. 

I would draw attention to its intermediate position in the above list; in that it asserts that (like mainstream atheism) there was a time in the past when we did not exist. 

This mainstream-orthodox-Christian asserted non-existence in the past of some essential "self" that is me; is something contradicted intuitively in some people (including myself) - to put it simply, I (like may people) have some kind of an inner conviction of a pre-mortal existence*. 

That mainstream, orthodox Christianity decided to assert that each soul is created-from-nothing was, I believe, a very unfortunate decision. It is impossible to know how many people through history have rejected Jesus Christ because they were thereby compelled (by the churches) to reject their intuition of pre-mortal existence - but it must have been A Lot of people.

Especially unfortunate as there are many scriptural references that plausibly refer to pre-mortal existence - especially the Gospel discussion of whether John the Baptist was, or was not, another "incarnation" of one of the ancient Hebrew prophets (e.g. John 1: 21-5).

At present, the only widely known option with respect to pre-mortal life is reincarnation; but there is another possibility that seemed to go unnoticed until Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet; which is that we all existed eternally before this mortal incarnation, but as not-embodied, not-incarnate, spirit beings. This is indeed my own intuition with respect to myself. 

(i.e. The phases of life, according to Mormonism, go roughly as follows: eternal pre-mortal spirit life; temporary mortal incarnation on earth; resurrected incarnate eternal life, of some kind - whether Paradisal or Heavenly in various degrees, or Hellish**.)  

But I see no Christian grounds for excluding the possibility of reincarnations preceding this mortal life. I just don't feel this is true for me.

I wish that more people knew of, and had seriously considered, the Mormon idea of eternal, pre-mortal, spirit existence because, well... I think the idea has "a lot going for it!" 

In other words, I think it is true that I lived a a spirit before this incarnation - so the idea is true at least for people like myself: those whose intuitive sense, direct knowledge, or memory rejects both creation from nothing, and (multiple) prior incarnations - but is convinced of prior existence. 

However, looking forwards from this mortal life, I think that a Christian will - almost by definition - not desire further reincarnation, nor a return to spirit existence; but the Christian will instead desire to attain resurrection to eternal Heavenly life. 

Of course, in principle, a Christian might feel he was not ready for resurrection, and therefore needed further reincarnations to prepare for the final choice of resurrection. 

However; I think that resurrection is not the kind of thing that can be delayed in such a fashion; because (now that Jesus Christ has made this possible) future reincarnation actually involves rejecting the chance and possibility of resurrection, after we end this mortal life - which doesn't seem to me like something a Christian would want to do...     

But that's just me!

* Mainstream Orthodox Christians find themselves in the difficult position of having to argue that our soul is immortal going forwards, but not going backwards. Such Christians must argue that it does not make sense to suppose our souls can be annihilated into nothingness after death; but that is does make sense to suppose that the soul emerged from nothingness before birth. I say this is difficult to argue - it is not of course impossible! Yet such arguments very rapidly become extremely complex and abstract, and thereby (for most people) are not compelling.

**This is the orthodox Mormon understanding. My own is broadly similar in terms of phases, but somewhat different in terms of detail in that I believe reincarnation is a pre-moral possibility; and that resurrection to eternal incarnation is only for those who choose Heaven, and that other choices will to remain post-mortal spirits.

James MacMillan - Ave Maris Stella - sublime modern choral music

I just heard, for the first time, Ave Maris Stella by James Macmillan done live at an advent service in our local church; and it was a thrilling and beautiful experience. 

I'm genuinely astonished that this music is not better known - but judging by the YouTube numbers, word seems not to have spread about this modern choral gem. 

It is highly accessible, consisting almost entirely of block chords in diatonic harmony against high pedal-point sustained notes from the trebles; but with periodic extraordinary dissonances - so it rewards close attention. 

The Amen is a wonderful climax - my hair literally bristled when it happened. 

 

What kind of diseases does everyone "battle"?

According to the mass media, everyone with "cancer" (which is a pathological process - not a disease) "battles" it - even if the sufferer is a new born baby, even even when there is a swift and effective cure. This has been the situation for decades. 

(Also, anyone who does not die of "cancer" is a "survivor" - even when the expected death rate from that type of "cancer" is near-zero.) 

But now it seems that people with dementia are battling that, as well. 

What is it about cancer and dementia that make a sufferer battle these pathologies? When it seems that hardly anybody - or only the rare celebrity* - battles heart disease, strokes, pneumonia, duodenal ulcers, renal colic... or most other diseases. 

*Because celebrities "battle" everything... They even battle self-chosen and self-inflicted health threats such as alcohol or drugs. And it is still a battle even when they have sought-out and spent vast sums on their inebriant, organized their lives around getting and taking it, and written/ sung/ or otherwise bragged-about their adventure in auto-intoxication. Some particularly admirable celebrities are courageous enough to battle "sex addiction".