Temptation. Like most religious words, that one's been banalized and reduced from its original meaning. It means literally a trial or a test. A moment in your life when you have a choice to be faithful or not.
Today, that's like faithful to a diet or a spouse, to a virtue or an ideal. But the original sense was to be tested in your faith to God. Something Job-ian - no matter what life throws at you, you stay the course.
But temptation is secondarily related to allurement or seduction to sin. And here we're into a less popular usage. Nobody likes to think in terms of "can't" and "don't" anymore, do they? "Who says I can't!", goes the language of modernity. "Who are you to tell me what's right and wrong?"
These are tricky waters. "You can't do that!" has been used to control and restrict by those wanting to remain in power, for sure. But is there something to this obligation aspect of temptation that deserves a more careful consideration?
A Study of Temptation, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this program.
Showing posts with label demons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label demons. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 09, 2019
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Seduction by Evil
"The idea of being a victim of evil is quite a comfortable one," writes Norberto Keppe in his book, Psychotherapy and Exorcism. "But what's really going on," he continues, "is that the human being actually selects the type of evil he wants in his life."
Well, that's sobering. I hope this happens unconsciously because the conscious choice for evil seems rather terrifying. Keppe's view that we summon evil contradicts the common idea that we are victimised by it. Even the exorcists, those most graphic of illustrations of possession by evil, show the possessed as being unwilling recipients of the accursed spiritual invasions.
What Keppe is trying to alert us to here is the very real presence of evil spirits in the human experience, and our considerable role in giving them so much freedom to run amok on our planet.
But there's another aspect at play in this process ... the subterfuge of the demons. And that's not a once-in-awhile thing. It's constant.
Seduction by Evil, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Well, that's sobering. I hope this happens unconsciously because the conscious choice for evil seems rather terrifying. Keppe's view that we summon evil contradicts the common idea that we are victimised by it. Even the exorcists, those most graphic of illustrations of possession by evil, show the possessed as being unwilling recipients of the accursed spiritual invasions.
What Keppe is trying to alert us to here is the very real presence of evil spirits in the human experience, and our considerable role in giving them so much freedom to run amok on our planet.
But there's another aspect at play in this process ... the subterfuge of the demons. And that's not a once-in-awhile thing. It's constant.
Seduction by Evil, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Friday, February 08, 2019
Man's Greatest Enemy
All of us, if we've lived a little, have had to contend with the lure of temptation. From the mundane, "Just one more piece of chocolate cake," to the come on of a cold beer when you've got a drinking problem, to the more serious attractions to violence and crime, we all know the experience of that voice in our ear.
Our modern scientific perspective prefers evidence-based interventions as solutions, leading us to explain away vice and bad habits as weakness, upbringing, chemical imbalance, even genetic disposition. We seldom in our modern world even think of putting temptation down to influence from nefarious spirits. Reason over superstition would read the promotional literature for the modern point of view.
But are we missing something in excluding the theological view? After all, Jesus warned us time and again of our unhealthy subservience to demons, and perhaps we should listen more carefully to that advice.
Man's Greatest Enemy, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Our modern scientific perspective prefers evidence-based interventions as solutions, leading us to explain away vice and bad habits as weakness, upbringing, chemical imbalance, even genetic disposition. We seldom in our modern world even think of putting temptation down to influence from nefarious spirits. Reason over superstition would read the promotional literature for the modern point of view.
But are we missing something in excluding the theological view? After all, Jesus warned us time and again of our unhealthy subservience to demons, and perhaps we should listen more carefully to that advice.
Man's Greatest Enemy, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Our Entangled Spiritual Reality
We are assailed in our modern world with all sorts of problems. There are money worries, health of ageing parents, stress and depression, crime and taxes. Coping with all of that can make us forget the beautiful things around us every day.
But there’s another influence no one talks about in our modern, number-crunching world, and that’s the very real influence from the spiritual world. That’s not the topic of dinner conversations these days. Well, actually, we don’t even have conversations anymore, do we? … everything being pushed into the digital world of email, chat and Instagram. Which emphasises the point – the deeper levels of the human experience are not being plumbed anymore – and to our great detriment. It’s like spirituality is something we feel at times, something we sense is important, but something we keep at arm’s length for fear of being branded weird or fanatic.
But spirits were not dismissed in the past. Shakespeare exploited the knowledge of them for great art. Let’s explore spiritual relevance more on our program.
Our Entangled Spiritual Reality, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Click here to listen to this program.
But there’s another influence no one talks about in our modern, number-crunching world, and that’s the very real influence from the spiritual world. That’s not the topic of dinner conversations these days. Well, actually, we don’t even have conversations anymore, do we? … everything being pushed into the digital world of email, chat and Instagram. Which emphasises the point – the deeper levels of the human experience are not being plumbed anymore – and to our great detriment. It’s like spirituality is something we feel at times, something we sense is important, but something we keep at arm’s length for fear of being branded weird or fanatic.
But spirits were not dismissed in the past. Shakespeare exploited the knowledge of them for great art. Let’s explore spiritual relevance more on our program.
Our Entangled Spiritual Reality, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Click here to listen to this program.
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