A Father Learning to Love: Lucifer

Showing posts with label Lucifer. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today

In the last section, we explored how John of Patmos unveiled the spirit of the Accuser within the Domination System of the Roman empire - and he named this the Beast. But what would the Beast look like in action today? How does the Beast work within the political and economic systems today?

Let's go back to Revelation for a brief moment. In Revelation, the second beast that appears (13:11) looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon - this is the propaganda machine of the empire. It is the false prophet (see Rev. 16:13, 19:20, 20:10), and it is this beast that compels the earth to follow the first beast (see Rev. 13:12). This is a personification of religion subverted by empire.

To understand how, we need to understand the system of the Roman cultus - the worship of the emperor. Caesar was spoken of as the "son of a god", and the cultus declared that it was Caesar - and Caesar alone - who brought peace and prosperity. For example, In 45 B.C., a statue had been erected in honor of Augustus with the words "To the invincible god" inscribed. And in Myra, Lycia, there is a temple with the inscription: "Divine Augustus Caesar, son of a god, imperator of land and sea...." The Wikipedia article on the Roman Imperial cult is actually a pretty good resource if you are interested in learning more about this.

This practice continued with successive emperors, and those who would not bow and worship the emperor were killed (see Rev. 13:15). This is the religion of nationalism at work - the propaganda machine functions as an idol manufacturer. And it was the only thing keeping the chaotic empire alive for so long - because if you can cause someone to worship a lie, you cause them to be immune to the truth. As studies of cognitive dissonance show, the religious do not surrender their beliefs in the presence of facts, but rather reject, ignore, or adjust their beliefs in order to neutralize the facts (see Col. 2:8). Other studies have shown that presenting facts that contradict people's ideologies in certain scenarios will actually cause them to become more ideological - showing that ideologies can often act as "demons", possessing their adherents.

This is why Paul writes - in Colossians 2:20-23 - that we must die with Christ to the "principles of the world." We must cease to live by its decrees ("do not handle, do not taste, do not touch"). These things have an "appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence." Paul seems to be directing this more towards the religious than the secular of his day.

Paul also writes of how the "god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Cor. 4:4). So when we're thinking about "spiritual warfare", we might want to take a look at how the mechanisms of our culture work to "blind" our minds - and we might want to see how the religious structures themselves often work with these mechanisms, or at least turn a blind eye towards them.

One of the hardest lessons we must learn, as we seek to unveil the Beast, is to love those who are still within its grasp - because they, too, have been deluded by the deceptions of the Dragon. As Frank Garvey writes:

In this country people are rarely imprisoned for their ideas because they're already imprisoned by their ideas. The wage-slaves of today aren't ripe for revolt because they don't know that they're slaves and no more free than the slaves of yore, despite the fact that they think so…

In "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination", Walter Wink writes:

A popular saying of the 1960s ran, "The hardest battle isn't with Mr. Charlie. It's with what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind."

Naming the Beast
Now you might have suspected that I was leading up to identifying the beast as a certain country - and your guess would not have been far from the truth, as I do believe that this is where the most recent problems in the world may have started. But I do not think the real problems can be isolated to one country any more. Rather, I believe that the Beast we are up against today is an economic machine that has been elevated to a form of spiritualism.

In "Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now", authors Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther write:

In our world, formal religious institutions are largely irrelevant to empire's self -serving proclamation. In its place, an array of government officials and government-supported economists proclaim the “divine inspiration” of the “free” market. Many commentators have spoken of the religious nature of belief in the free market and the promotion of this religion by government functionaries and journalists at the service of global capital-controlled media. For example, journalist William Greider notes: “Respectable opinion is now enthralled by the secular faith [in the market]…. This faith has attained almost religious certitude.” David Korten adds: “free-market ideology has been embraced around the world with the fervor of a fundamentalist religious faith…. the economics profession serves as its priesthood… to question its doctrine has become virtual heresy.”

Korten notes the “dogmas” proclaimed by this priesthood:

Economic growth is the only path to human progress.

Unrestrained free markets are the best mode of trade.

Economic globalization is beneficial to almost all.

Privatization improves efficiency.

The primary role of government is to protect property rights and contracts.

The religion of the "free market" - or Theocapitalism, as Brian McLaren calls it in "Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope" - tells us that if we just leave corporations alone, they will regulate themselves and everyone will benefit. But the only law these corporations are bound to obey is their own self-interest - they are legally bound to make as much profit as possible in order to satisfy their stock holders. This is a system literally built on greed - and yet we are supposed to naively believe that if we just leave these demons of greed alone and "deregulate", they will naturally act in ways that help others.

As a result, the richest 1 percent own 40 percent of the wealth, and the richest 5 percent own 70 percent of the wealth. Combine the assets of the richest 3 people in the world and you have a higher GDP than the combined GDP of the 48 poorest countries.

There are many other harmful effects of our current American culture that I'd like to explore. Have I mentioned that living in America will literally drive you insane? In “Why Do People Hate America?”, Merryl Wyn Davies writes:

The US has simply made it too difficult for other people to exist … The US has structured the global economy to perpetually enrich itself and reduce non-Western societies to poverty, “Free markets” is simply a euphemism for free mobility of American capital, unrestrained expansions of American corporations, and free (unidirectional) movement of goods and services from America to the rest of the world.

In American politics, “Free Market” has become a euphemism for selfishness as a virtue. But Philippians 2:3-4 says:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

But in “Free Market Capitalism”, looking out for the interests of others is a sin, and it’s referred to by the name “Socialism”. I once posted the following video - which demonstrates how bad wealth inequality has become through this economic system - to my Facebook profile:

The next day, I saw a friend who asked me: “Geoff, are you a socialist?” I could feel the pressure in that question - the pressure to admit to my friend that while the video I posted might be true, it would be a sin to do anything about it. And the conversation went down that road - with my friend asking me if it was right to “steal” from the rich in order to fix this issue. But the mere fact that it has become this way is only because the rich set up a system that would help them to centralize wealth and keep it at the top in the first place!

This reminds me of Hélder Câmara's famous quote:

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.

My friend's attitude is why this form of economics is deserving of the name Theocapitalism - it has become a heresy to challenge it! In Theocapitalism, Fox News becomes the priests (acting as the propaganda distribution system - studies show their viewers are consistently the most misinformed), our malls become cathedrals, the clothing we wear and accessories we buy become a form of worship, TV becomes an altar, and corporations become like denominations - it’s a new way of forming identity and forming community through what we buy, rather than through spiritual doctrines and practices. But is it really just a new form of doctrine? This is a new form of "anonymous spiritual discipline", as Tom Beaudoin puts it.

Theocapitalism has its very own creatio ex nehilo - it creates desires and needs where before we had none. And through this mechanism, we find ourselves within a perpetual unsolvable identity crisis - we must constantly adapt to the latest trends in order to stay within the religion.

Brian McLaren writes of Theocapitalism's “Law of Salvation Through Competition Alone” in "Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope":

Even religious fundamentalists who reject Darwin in biology typically celebrate an economic or social Darwinism, which reveres inequality in order to reward the fittest - the most industrious, the hardest workers, the most task-oriented (as opposed to people-oriented). The poor, this law states, should and must be poor because they are unfit (individually or as a group); the rich, even though they concentrate great wealth “in the hands of a few,” should and must be rich because they are the fittest competitors. To violate this law would be to work against the very structure of the universe, and would run counter to the will of God and his “gospel of wealth.”

The believers of Theocapitalism believe the impossible - that our resources are unlimited and our waste goes nowhere and does no damage. Theocapitalism encourages its adherents to think only of themselves, and in doing so commits future murder by refusing to consider the consequences of our suicide machine to the future generations. The result is what I call "backwards socialism." You see, socialism is when wealth is shared amongst society. But backwards socialism is when costs are shared, but not wealth. As McLaren's 4th law of Theocapitalism states: “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic economy, and in the communion of unaccountable corporations.”

Through backwards socialism, corporations are able to gobble up all the profits of fossil fuels while refusing to share the responsibility for any of its external costs. Energy corporations engage in fracking - which results in a whole host of damages to the communities, including flammable water coming from household faucets and a number of public health risks. Concern is rising that processed foods are related to cancer - but the cost of organic food rises (recall Rev. 6:5-6?), and the lower and middle class is trapped within an unhealthy cycle of self-destruction. We are facing mass extinction rates - Worldwatch.org reports that we are currently operating at one hundred to one thousand times the normal extinction rate, and due to overfishing there may be no fish left within 50 years. We deny climate change while the North Pole melts, while 97% of scientists agree it is both real and mankind's fault, while every major insurance company believes in climate change, and while the remainder of scientists who deny it are funded by billionaires with vested interests in fossil fuels! Can you see the madness? One fifth of our planet’s rainforests have been cleared since 1960, and mass deforestation may be the cause of the recent mudslide in Washington State. And as the business machine of Capitalism makes everything generic in order to be more efficient, even music is losing its soul (I would highly recommend watching the documentary "Before the Music Dies" if you have the time).

Interface CEO Ray Anderson says “Every living system of earth is in decline. Every life support system of earth in in decline.” and he calls this legacy “inter-generational tyranny - a form of taxation without representation,” because we’re dooming our ancestors by taking away their natural resources without giving them any voice. It is the ultimate form of selfishness. We even allow corporations to bio-engineer plants that have a suicide gene - the plants that grow from these seeds are sterile, and this new feature spreads among the crops of the world! (Gee, I couldn't possibly see that turning out badly.) We’ve taken something natural, which we didn’t create, and tried to change it so we could control it and so that others would not be able to benefit from it without paying us - that’s the way of the plunderer! Do you understand now why the best CEO's are psychopaths?

In the worship of wealth, we bailed out the Wall Street bankers while the middle and lower class continued to suffer for years - whereas, had the government given the money straight to the middle and lower class homeowners who were about to go bankrupt, this would have not only saved them from foreclosure but saved the banks as well! Indeed - the stock market itself is actually built on the idea that the powerful should have a way to avoid consequences: "If farming were to be organized like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out”, says John Maynard Keynes. Our tax codes help those who don’t need it while leaving those who do to drown. Our Domination System is built on the worship of the rich, and the belief that the rich will bring peace and prosperity - but the foolishness of this idea is so obvious that it hurts: a rich man only needs one pillow, and so the pillow company slowly fails as less people are able to buy their product at all!

The illusion of this form of backwards socialism is so obvious, as can be demonstrated through the stock market collapse of 2008: the DOW was at its highest point ever on the eve of its destruction (Oct. 9, 2007). The stock market gives strength to the delusion of this form of Capitalism that is really just a worship of the idol of Corporatism. We’ve taught Americans especially to measure the success of the nation based on where the rich are - if the stock market is doing well, America must be doing well. This is the whore of Babylon at her greatest.

While giant corporations can file for bankruptcy, students trying to get their foot in the door of society cannot (you have to die to get out of your student loans) - and while student loan debt has grown 511% since 1999, the yearly income for 24-35 year-olds has declined $10,000 since 2000! But we believe in "trickle down economics"! Can you say "Deuteronomic code"?! This form of worship of the rich has put a choke hold on the world, and it is slowly strangling it to death!

Noam Chomsky - Professor Emeritus at MIT - writes:

What is called "capitalism" is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close co-operation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. That is dramatically true of the United States, contrary to much illusion. The rich and privileged are no more willing to face market discipline than they have been in the past, though they consider it just fine for the general population.

And still they cry "free market!" This is the religion of Theocapitalism at work! Its adherents are bound by fear that any imposition of rules will result in an economic collapse. And often those who believe in this religious form of Capitalism believe that if we merely abolish all laws, it will fix everything. But what the anti-government free marketers miss is that we cannot solve our problems by amputation - we must put in place better systems which are designed to prevent these problems from coming back (see Mt. 12:43-45). If we were to merely abolish all government now, I am afraid what we’d find is not that we are without a government, but rather we would find ourselves with a new government ruled directly by the super-rich. The only obstacle between them and rule would have been removed. Democratic government is held accountable by the voters, but corporations are held accountable by nothing but their desire for more profit. The solution to our problem of power centralized in the hands of a few elites is not “no government” - it is making government more democratic: putting it directly into the hands of its citizens.

And perhaps the most frustrating thing for someone who sees this is that the only political issue that the pastorate seems willing to discuss is making abortion illegal - but I have to ask: will this fix the problem?

Religion, economics and politics are really all joined and cannot be separated, as much as we’d like to pretend they can.

In my mind, one of the most insidious myths at work is the myth of the invisible hand of the free market - this is the religious (honestly) belief in the goodness of the nebulous idea of the free market. To be more specific, people who speak of the free market in this way believe that if we just take away all those pesky laws that are limiting how we do business, everything will just naturally work itself out. This puts an extraordinary amount of faith in the goodness of people, as well as turning this "invisible hand of the free market" into a god, really. But to illustrate how mistaken this is, I'd like to consider a study that Dan Ariely conducted and wrote about in his enlightening book "Predictably Irrational".

Ariely suspected that when an item is "Free!", there is some power behind this idea. He explores this idea in a variety of ways through various studies, and each study illuminates some of the ways that the quality of an item being "Free" manipulates us. In one of the studies, he had some of his students set up tables with Starbursts candy. There were two versions of the experiment - in the first version, each piece of candy was sold for one cent. In the other version, the pieces of candy were free. In the results of the experiment, when the cost of the candy went from one cent to free, two interesting things happened - the first being that more individual people came and took candy when it was free. But I believe the other effect is more interesting - and I'll let Ariely explain:

When the Starbursts cost a cent apiece, the average number of candies per customer was 3.5, but when the price went down to zero, the average went down to 1.1 per customer. The students limited themselves to a large degree when the candy was free. In fact, almost all the students applied a very simple social-norm rule in this situation - they politely took one and only one Starburst.

Later on he clarifies:

What these results mean is that when price is not a part of the exchange, we become less selfish maximizers and start caring more about the welfare of others. We saw this demonstrated by the fact that when the price decreased to zero, customers restrained themselves and took far fewer units. So while the product (candy, in our case) was more attractive to more people, it also made people think more about others, care about them, and sacrifice their own desires for the benefit of others. As it turns out, we are caring social animals, but when the rules of the game involve money, this tendency is muted.

Throughout the book, Ariely continues to explore, through a variety of experiments, how our social sense of morality actually makes us less selfish and more caring, but when we put money into the mix, this becomes completely negated (even one cent erases the social morality in the case of the Starbursts experiment).

I think that this highlights the dangerous misconception of placing our trust in some nebulous concept of the goodness of free market forces. Because of this idea, we've already deregulated the American market in many ways - but to be scientific, we ought to observe the results to see if this is helping. So let's look at what deregulation has given us so far:

Reaganomics at work.

As Karl Marx wrote:

Economists are like theologians.... Every religion that is not their own they characterize as human invention, while their own religion is a revelation from God.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on. I'd like to note that the problem is not necessarily the formation of corporations itself - this is just another form of community. Nor is it necessarily their size. Rather, the problem is in the desire to avoid responsibility - when corporations were small, they would naturally avoid doing things that would destroy their environment, because that would cause their customers to turn on them. But in Theocapitalism, corporations have become so big, and are so revered that they are out of control - they share no responsibility for the damage that they have done as they seek their own self-interest at the cost of everyone else. We celebrate the products they create, but those who create them are never around to take a share of the gross national destruction incurred through the production process. Any attempt to hold corporations accountable for the damage they have done is seen as heresy - an assault on “the free market”, which is held in highest esteem and really functions as a god, as it is this mysterious force “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

And before I move on, I'd like to point out that there is a good Biblical case to be made for Christianity as antithetical to the greed-based system of Capitalism - as Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann points out well in this quote from "Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now":

In his Sermon on the Mount, [Jesus] declares to his disciples:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matt. 6:24)

The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.

The War Machine
I'd like to examine one more area of our Beast at work - the way the corporate idol feeds the war machine, as demonstrated by the vicious cycle started when America entered into the arms trade business. In Voltaire's Bastards, John Ralston Saul explains how this happened when he writes about Robert McNamara, the architect of the failed Vietnam War:

McNamara concluded that it would be rational to limit armament costs by producing larger runs of each weapon and selling the surplus abroad.... The United States also happened to be running a three-billion-dollar general trade deficit. Foreign arms sales would be a way to balance the situation.

The worship of military might thus became the fuel for Theocapitalism itself. Can you now understand now how the U.S. ended up with a military budget that outspends the next ten biggest countries combined?

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney berates President Obama for not spending enough on the military - and yet 1/10 of the US military budget could feed all of the world's poor. In 2010, the US cornered the market on weapons sales - bringing in over 60% of all arms sales. In 2003, 80 percent of arms buyers were labeled undemocratic by the State Department. In 1999, the US weapons industry supplied the weapons for 92 percent of the world’s conflicts, and often supplied both sides of those conflicts. Between 1998 and 2001, the US, Great Britain, and France earned more income from the sale of weapons than they gave in aid to developing countries. With the “War on Terror”, the U.S. sold weapons and/or training to almost 90% of the countries it has identified as harboring terrorists. Meanwhile, on our own home turf, while gun violence is on the rise the NRA stifles the research that would help us to unveil the truth - as Ralph Nader says, we seem to have "a government of the General Motors, by the Exons, for the DuPonts."

As we saw with the Beast from the Earth in Rev. 13:11-17, propaganda is the only thing that keeps the myth of redemptive violence alive. David Korten writes:

[E]mpire's hierarchy of dominance creates an illusion of order and security. Feeding on its own illusions, Empire becomes a kind of collective addiction - a psychological dependence on domination, violence, and material excess.

Chris Hedges writes in the same vein:

Wars that lose their mythic stature for the public, such as Korea or Vietnam, are doomed to failure, for war is exposed for what it is– organized murder…. Each side reduces the other to objects - eventually in the form of corpses.

Hedges also confesses:

[N]early every reporter has seen his or her mission as sustaining civilian and army morale…. The press usually does not lead. Mythic war reporting sells papers and boosts ratings.

While the weapons manufacturers profit, 700,000 Vietnam War vets have PTSD, and a large number end up in prison - the Justice Department estimated the number of incarcerated Vets at 223,000, with the majority having served in Vietnam. At least 80,000 Veterans have committed suicide since the conflicts began in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the number of Vets that have died from drug overuse / overdose and other self-destructive behavior is not even calculable. In 2012, 349 active duty soldiers killed themselves - more than died in combat that year. And while the Republican party claims to be Pro-Military, they filibuster bills like the Veteran's Jobs Bill (Sept. 19, 2012).

In "Pack of Lies Volume Three: Debunking the 40 Most Destructive Conservative Myths in America", John-Paul Bernbach writes:

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) periodically assigns letter grades to all members of the House and Senate, based on their support for troops and veterans. The IAVA Congressional Report Card for 2010 assigned a total of 154 D and F grades – 142 went to Republicans and 12 to Democrats. Meanwhile, 94 congressmen received A or A + grades, of whom 91 were Democrats and three were Republicans. 141 Overall, 97% of A grades went to Democrats while 92% or D and F grades went to Republicans.
In the Senate, all 9 Senators who received an A rating were Democrats. Among 33 Senators who received a rating of D or F, all were Republicans, except for one Democrat (Russell Feingold of Wisconsin).

The Veterans Jobs Corp Act would have cost a fifth of what we've been spending on the Afghanistan war every month since this conflict began. The bill would have created job training and career counseling programs for vets, as well as created jobs in national parks and historic sites that were reserved specifically for vets. It also would have given priority to vets in the area of jobs as firefighters, EMT's, and police officers. Around the same time that this bill was shot down by the Republican party in the Senate, Paul Ryan led the Republican majority in the House to cut $6 billion a year from the budget by cutting veteran benefits (note also that this hero of the right seems to fit the A.P.A.'s psychopathic checklist - and here is another link on that subject since some of my readers will probably want to argue with that one). In contrast, in 2009, when Democrats still held the majority in the House, they voted to expand veteran benefits by expanding the qualification for receiving health benefits (which resulted in covering more than a quarter million more vets) as well as increasing the VA budget by $350 million.

We need our own Tianenmen

The Republican party manages to fool military members into thinking they are more the “pro-military” party because they talk about patriotism more and have sold this image of patriotism as being an unquestioning loyalty and obedience. Additionally, Republicans portray a more testosterone-driven image of male aggression and love of weapons / war. The lie is also made more effective because Republicans want to spend more on the military - not on the people in the military, mind you, but rather on more expensive weapons technology. This kind of spending does not benefit the troops, however, but only the defense contractors.

In group thinking also explains a great deal of the disconnect from reality here - surveys show that while the military is consistently Republican, the lower ranking levels of the military are much more mixed in their political views, while the officers - who make up only 14% of the entire military - are almost exclusively Republican in their political views. Additionally, the media almost never invites a lower ranking member of the military onto their shows, and so the perception is that in order to be in the military, you have to be a Republican. And so, due to the pressures of conformity, when new members who are less right-wing enter the military, they begin to be reshaped in the image of their leaders who put them under extreme pressure to conform.

In short, Republicans are very good at wrapping themselves in the flag and singing the praises of the troops, but that’s all the troops are ever going to get from them: praises. And bigger guns.

Note that while this may sound partisan, the Democratic party is far from innocent. For example, I could talk about Obama's drone strike policy as one that I am deeply troubled by. However, I think it is also important to note that - as Noam Chomsky frequently points out - the current political system in the U.S. is not a two party system any more, but is rather made up of Republican extremists and moderate Republicans who call themselves Democrats. So the problem is more that the Democratic party is not so much offering alternatives to these problems as they are doing less to contribute to them. (This seems like a good place to drop one of the best political headlines I've seen in recent years: "The left’s gone left but the right’s gone nuts: Asymmetrical polarization in action".)

It's also important to note how confused we've become in America about the labels "Conservative" and "Liberal". A friend of mine from Europe has pointed out to me that in his country, Conservative and Liberal have completely different meanings - what they call "Liberal", we'd call "Communist', and what they call "Conservative", we'd call "Liberal". But for them, what we call "Conservative", they'd call "Fascist" and our "Liberals" are considered very "Conservative". This illustrates how successfully the word "Liberal" has been stigmatized through Fundamentalist Christian societies here, even though we don’t even understand what it means any more. It's hard to tell what the scale looks like when you're so far to the right that you call everyone who is not like you an extremist and refuse to deal with their reasoning. And add to this that the Right has declared Liberalism itself to be an unforgivable sin, and you have a section of the population trapped in insanity because they're too afraid to explore what's outside. But why are the realms of truth so frightening?

And as a result, there has been a complete break with reality on the Right in America - as Karl Rove himself said:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

In "Pack of Lies Volume Three: Debunking the 40 Most Destructive Conservative Myths in America", John-Paul Bernbach writes:

This refusal to consider even the possibility that you may be missing something, that there may be more to the story, that the other point of view may have some merit, this close-mindedness and reflexive rejection of anything that differs from orthodoxy has become the defining characteristic of conservatism in our time.

Quite often, I have found, the difficulty in explaining the problem with our systems lies in the fact that people all too often look only at surface issues and refuse to look deeper for their causes. To illustrate what I mean by this, I'd like to quote a section of Arthur Kleinman's 1988 study, "The Illness Narratives", from which comes this story from a medical internist named Lenore Light - I think it is very revealing of how, often, the problem we see is not the real problem:

Today I saw an obese hypertensive mother of six. No husband. No family support. No job. Nothing. A world of brutalizing violence and poverty and drugs and teenage pregnancies and— and just plain mind-numbing crises, one after another after another. What can I do? What good is it to recommend a low-salt diet, to admonish her about control of her pressure: She is under such real outer pressure, what does the inner pressure matter? What is killing her is her world, not her body. In fact, her body is the product of her world. She is a hugely overweight, misshapen hulk who is a survivor of circumstances and lack of resources and cruel messages to consume and get ahead impossible for her to hear and not feel rage at the limits of her world. Hey, what she needs is not medicine but a social revolution.

Later on she says: “what we need is prevention, not the Band-Aids I spend my day putting on deep inner wounds.” Likewise, I believe that as long as we refuse to deal with the Beast of unfettered Capitalism, we will only be putting Band-Aids on deep inner wounds.

I know this has been a long one - thank you for bearing with me. At this point I am going to take another break, and in the next post we will examine how Jesus answered the Domination System.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
In my last post, we explored the story of the Gerasene demoniac together. I proposed that, rather than there being some supernatural entity that had taken control of the demoniac, his symptoms might be better explained as a psychological break with reality as a result of the Roman oppression, and his people's response. Now, this may upset some of my readers - but I'd like to ask: is it more important to believe demons are personal entities, or to understand how to properly resist them?

Indeed, belief in demons may actually function as a mask for the true problems - as we saw in the story of Matthew Murray. Or it may exacerbate the issue of collective violence - as we saw in the story of George Tiller.

So I'd like to explore a few more passages where demons appear, and then go on to explore some conclusions.

The Accuser often appeared within the temple itself.

It's interesting to take an in-depth look at these cases, and try to get to the heart of the real problems behind them. In the very first case of Jesus confronting a demon - in Mark 1:21-28 - the demon is within the Synagogue: one of the sacred structures of the religion of Judaism itself! This demon may be symbolic of a religion that was no longer re-ligamenting or re-binding people to God, but was actually causing further separation from God through its condemning nature - and so Jesus’ first task was to cast out this spirit of separation. I don't believe that the importance of this story lies within an argument over whether demons are personal entities or not, but rather lies in the significance that the "unclean spirit" of the Accuser's Domination System had invaded the hearts of the religious elite! And it seems that - before Jesus - no one had confronted it directly from the pulpit! Rather, the Synagogue had been either passively complicit with the System, or had actively supported it - and a look at history will tell you that the temple in Jerusalem did, in fact, actively support the Domination System of Rome in more ways than one!

Another passage where demons make an appearance - Matthew 12:23-28 - teaches us a valuable lesson about the spirit of Accusation: if someone is doing work which causes the structures of the Accuser to fall, we shouldn’t stand in their way, whether they are in league with the Accuser or not. In this passage, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting out demons by the very power of Satan himself! But Jesus points out the folly in their reason - if Satan's kingdom is destroying itself, why should we stand in its way? Why not give Satan enough rope to hang himself with?

This is a teaching that stands in opposition to the cultism of purity politics. It is also a teaching of mimetic competition - the Pharisees want to be seen as the go-to for demon expulsion, and they can’t stand to see someone who doesn’t agree with them 100% on everything doing this work. But Jesus is pointing out that this competitive spirit of theirs is self-harming - they are binding their own two feet together by insisting on this kind of ideological purism.

Note also that the version of this teaching which appears in Mark 3:23 identifies it as a parable. Looking at the teaching as a parable opens us up to the possibility that there are more lessons to learn from it - it’s not just an argument Jesus employed when he faced an accusation. If it is a parable, we are not to take the language of demons and Satan as a character too literally - they are, rather, symbolic of accusation and violence. Jesus uses parables because those who are caught in the lies cannot see - their senses are defective (see Matt. 6:22-23 and Matt. 13:10-14). Through parabolic language, Jesus is teaching us that we cannot defeat accusation with more accusation - we can’t fight fire with fire. In this light, it becomes a teaching of non-violence. If we resort to violence in order to cast out violence, we end up harming ourselves - we become a house divided against itself. The kingdom of God has no room for violence, division, expulsion, and accusation. But because the kingdom of Satan is established through these tools, they act as an infection through which the kingdom tears itself apart in the end. The irony of those Christians who believe in an eternal Hell is that they often take on the role of Accuser - they take on the mantle of expulsion and accusation, and then they try to make a place within the kingdom of God for their own private Hell. They fight Hell with more Hell. But the kingdom of God is an end to all expulsion and accusation, and so there is no room in this kingdom for Hell. The kingdom of God is a release of all forms of Hell - it is an end to satanic mimesis and scapegoating.

The teaching from Matthew 12:23-28 pairs well with another story - when Jesus' disciples complain of others casting out demons who are not followers of Jesus in Luke 9:49-50, he responds: "Do not hinder him; for he who is not against you is for you." This provides a valuable lesson on pluralism - if we see another religion that is truly helping people, is it really productive to call that religion evil? (This might be a good place for me to promote my post entitled "Christianity and Meditation: Enemies or Long Lost Love?")

If you're still not convinced that there's a possibility that "Satan" and "demons" are symbols of a reality - rather than personal entities whom are invisible and supernatural - you might want to check Matthew 17:14-23. In some translations, we are told that this boy is an epileptic, and in others a lunatic. But the passage goes right on ahead and declares that Jesus cast a demon out of this boy. Does Jesus believe that this is a personal entity? Or is he accommodating the beliefs of the people around him in order to get to the heart of the matter and deal with it? Interestingly enough, the very word "epilepsy" comes from the Greek word epilambanein - which means "to seize" - and alluded to the belief that epileptics had been seized by a demon. And I doubt you'll find a high percentage of people who blame every epileptic episode as a possession from a personal entity.

I think that what we can learn from Matthew 17 passage is that Jesus’ goal was not to correct people’s scientific views, but to deal with spirituality. Jesus never told the people in this story "um, guys, that's not a demon - it's a central nervous system disorder" (can you imagine the conversation that would follow from that one?). He also never told his audience: "guess what, the earth isn’t flat!" He never prophesied that one day, a man would come who would reveal that the earth revolves around the sun. He didn't predict Quantum Mechanics, either. These were not Jesus' priorities - Jesus' goal was to speak to the heart!

And interestingly enough, the very word "demon" has some fascinating psychological roots. The Greeks had a concept where the human being was split into a duality of "eidolon" and "daimön". The eidolon was the lower self, often expressed through our carnal desires. And the daimön (which means divinity, or god) was the higher self - the inner spirit of a person which was transcendent. Often, a person's higher self could guide them through transcendent knowledge (maybe speaking through dreams or visions) and could be a source of inspiration. The Romans picked up this concept, and daimön was changed to daemon. The Latin equivalent spoke of a person's genius (from which the English word genie comes, and which was derived from the Arabic jinn). But Christianity - in competition with these "pagan" worldviews - often sought to...uh...well, to demonize them, and so daemon became demon. When you understand the nature of the Accuser, this evolution becomes quite ironic.

The Enemy is Fear

In an earlier section of this series, I told a little bit of the story of my own wilderness journey. I mentioned realizing that I had been infected with the disease of tribal-thinking. But if we truly examine this disease, I believe we will find that its root is fear. Fear is the source of the voices of Accusation.

Jesus said (in John 8:44) that Satan is "a liar and the father of lies." And fear prevents us from thinking rationally. It keeps us from even examining the evidence. I recall an incident where I was speaking to a very good friend of mine, and I had asked him what he was reading at the time. After answering, he had asked me the same question. I told him I was reading a book that presented two perspectives on the historical debate over Jesus. What happened afterwards amazed me - this man I had been friends with for over a decade became upset very quickly, and his voice raised to "outside" levels. He asked me "why are you reading that crap?" He said that Satan was trying to deceive me, and that he was trying to use me for evil. And all because I was reading a book! A book that presented multiple perspectives, no less! This shows you how much trust my friend put in my own ability to perceive and discern truth. And it betrays a deep fear in my good friend (I still consider him that, despite the pain this incident caused me). He is afraid to listen to perspectives that are not his own. And I believe that until he overcomes this fear, he will become more and more confused about the nature of reality. Fear is a liar, and the father of lies.

I John 4:18 has become a personal mantra for me. I try to remember it as often as I can. It says:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

What's interesting about this verse is that it uses the very same language that is used for exorcism - perfect love casts out fear. Could this verse be subtly implying that demons are merely our inner psychological realities?

Scientific studies have shown that guilt, shame, and fear have negative effects on brain development. Studies of the brain have identified a place called the the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) as the location of reasoning, logic, strategy and planning. Brain studies have also identified sections called the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) as the location where feelings of guilt and awareness of socially inacceptable behavior reside. In "The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life", Dr. Timothy Jennings writes about this, and notes how "[i]nterestingly, brain research has shown that when the VMPFC or conscience is active, the DLPFC or reason is less active, and vice versa."

But perhaps more interesting is the interplay between these sections of the brain and another section which has been identified as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), where feelings of empathy, compassion, and love reside and which has also been identified as the place where we make moral decisions between right and wrong. Studies have shown that the more we use our ACC, the stronger our DLPFC (the center of reason) is. These studies have also shown that the fear centers of the brain shrink the more we use our ACC. Dr. Jennings writes:

Brain-imaging studies have demonstrated that the more time a person spends in communion with the God of love, the more developed the ACC becomes. Not only that, the person experiences decreases in stress hormones, blood pressure, heart rate and risk of untimely death. Even in our mortal and defective bodies, love is healing. Conversely, the more time spent contemplating an angry, wrathful, fear-inducing deity, the more damage to the brain and the more rapidly one’s health declines, leading to early death.

Another article backs up Jennings' point when it states:

Once the fear pathways are ramped up, the brain short-circuits more rational processing paths and reacts immediately to signals from the amygdala. When in this overactive state, the brain perceives events as negative and remembers them that way.

I want to be very careful about how I communicate at this point. I have implied that "Satan" and "demons" are symbols, and psychological realities. But I want to be very careful to communicate that I am not saying that the experiences are not real. A further example may illustrate what I mean - in the Will Smith movie, “After Earth”, his character has a quote that I found to be absolutely brilliant:

Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice.

The experience of fear is very real - even if the imagination of our fears is not - and it matters not whether we attribute this experience to an outer or inner cause. The real problem we must deal with is: how do we handle and/or prevent this phenomenon?

Fear has a way of making horrible imaginings seem very real. I recall a number of scary movies that planted a fear in my heart that seemed very real at the time - and were difficult to overcome. When I was away from the church - an agnostic leaning towards atheism at the time - I watched "The Exorcism of Emily Rose". There is a theme in the movie of manifestations of the demonic occurring at 3am, because this is supposed to be the witching hour - the inverse of the time of day when Jesus was supposed to have died. And though I was an agnostic leaning towards atheism at the time, for months afterwards I would wake up near 3am, too scared to look around the room or get up to walk around. Waking up at this time of night had not been a habit before, but I developed it after watching the movie, and it took a good deal of time for me to overcome this fear. Another movie that comes to mind is "The Fourth Kind" - with Mila Jovovitch - which is an alien abduction story. The story of this movie is supposedly based on real events, and the movie cleverly weaves footage from these events into the film - giving it a feeling of realism. I have always been a skeptic of alien abductions, but after watching this movie I dealt with a terror regarding alien abductions that I had never struggled with before. Again, it took me quite a while to overcome this, and in the end I had to research the facts in order to reveal the lack of evidence for alien abduction, as well as discover the alternative explanations before I could cast aside my new fears.

The most common command in the Bible has nothing to do with money, or politics, or purity, or sex, or religion. The most common command in the Bible is: "do not fear." It appears every time God or a messenger (angel) of God appears to man, revealing not only that the divine comes not to cause fear but to dispel it, but also revealing that often our fears disguise the divine and prevent us from seeing the sacred! "Do not be afraid" - this should be the mantra of every Christian, and should be taught as often as possible from the pulpit, because as long as we fear we cannot experience the sacred. The mission of the Christian - and the mission of the Church - should be to eradicate fear. And I John 4:18 reveals that it is perfect love - unconditional acceptance of "the other", who is made in the image of God just as we are - that casts out the demon of fear.

It's time for another break. In my next post, we will continue to explore the implications of the Biblical principles on exorcism.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?