While there’s plenty of evidence for the reliability of the Bible and the existence of a triune God, most atheists and agnostics reject it out of hand without really looking for the truth. Writing at The Federalist, Samuel Buntz posits that perhaps these folks would be convinced God exists once they’re faced with evidence that Satan exists ~ Watching William Friedkin’s Documentary About Exorcism Can Make You Believe In God.
‘The Devil and Father Amorth’, released by Friedkin last month, features portions of the actual exorcism of a 30 year-old Italian woman – a grueling nine-month long process ~
Friedkin received special permission from the Vatican’s chief exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016), to film him performing an exorcism on a young Italian woman. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in late August, and has yet to be widely released, but by all reports, the documentary is disturbing. Friedkin not only captures the demonic possession on film, but interviews leading psychiatrists, who find his footage to be inexplicable within given medical language.
Buntz points out that non-believers generally seem to be less skeptical when it comes the existence of Evil ~
People with no belief in the supernatural are capable of being scared by demon-possessed teens, vengeful spirits from Native American burial grounds, sewer-dwelling evil clowns, and demonic puppets when they are presented on the screen or the page. Why? If these things are utterly outside the realm of plausibility, wouldn’t it make more sense to be afraid of beings that are found within nature (rattlesnakes, bears, Kim Jong Un, serial killers…) while laughing off this Satan business as completely ridiculous, otherworldly nonsense?
Despite what their intellects say, supposed skeptics still fall prey to a primal fear of something beyond mind and matter. The fear of cosmic evil—of evil that is more than just bad neural wiring in the brain of a murderer—is innate within us all. It is a healthy and sane emotion.
It follows that atheists should recognize the contradiction in their worldview. Once they realize that the supernatural does exist – in the form of Evil – it follows that the Good (God) is real too ~
(S)ecularists tend to see the world as a machine without an inventor. Even the human mind is just an amped-up calculator: “The mind is a computer,” declares Harvard’s Stephen Pinker, while philosopher Daniel Dennett claims to have explained consciousness entirely in physical terms (falsely, by the way—the chapter “Qualia Disqualified” in “Consciousness Explained” is a fiasco). Gone is the ancient sense that the universe is shot through with spiritual life, with symbolic meaning, on every level.
Nevertheless, the fear of real evil slips through the cracks in this self-satisfied and smartly shallow worldview. All it takes is a nip of “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Omen.” One can dismiss someone like Charles Manson as a mere product of bad brain chemistry—on paper. But confronted with the real flesh-and-blood Manson, or with the spooky eyes of the suicide-cult leader Marshall Applewhite, one starts second-guessing one’s excessively comfortable convictions.
At one time or another we all – if we’re honest with ourselves – have a sense that there has to be more to the universe than just what we experience through our five senses. And maybe movies like “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” and now “The Devil and Father Amorth,” that focus on the evil side of the supernatural are actually, as Buntz says, advertisements for Good ~
Evil is like Wile E. Coyote pursuing the Roadrunner: the coyote’s attempts to be clever lead to his inevitable failure while demonstrating the roadrunner’s speed and grace. That is the universe’s greatest irony, after all. No matter how hard evil tries, it merely ends up testifying to the existence of good. It must be frustrating.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Even if this battle against Satan concerns all men and all times,
there is no doubt that Satan’s power is felt more keenly in periods of
history when the sinfulness of the community is more evident. For example,
when I view the decadence of the Roman Empire, I can see the moral
disintegration of that period in history. Now we are at the same level
of decadence, partly as a result of the misuse of the mass media (which
are not evil in themselves) and partly because of Western consumerism
and materialism, which have poisoned our society.” ~ Fr Gabriele Amorth
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Related:
Deliver us from Evil
‘The Devil and Father Amorth’ ~
A sharp rise in demonic activity is being reported throughout the United States, owing to increases in drug and pornography addiction, the explosion in occult activity and other mortal sins.
According to Fr. Vincent Lampert, an exorcist in the archdiocese of Indianapolis, society’s present condition is a natural result of its drift away from God. “The decline in faith,” he observes, referencing Scripture, “goes hand in hand with the rise in evil.”
