Problems With Attributing Too Much To Demons

Since Christians so often suggest that something or other is demonic, and much of the time they seem to do it with a lot of carelessness, it's worth considering the problems with falsely attributing things to demons. My focus here will be on attributing paranormal activity to demons, but the principles I'll be discussing also have a broader application. I'm not trying to be exhaustive. I'm just providing some examples:

What originally attracted people to platforms like YouTube and Twitter?

They've changed since they originated, and we need to distinguish between what these platforms are offering today and what they offered in the past. The fact that Twitter now allows people to post larger amounts of material doesn't change the fact that you could only post smaller amounts when the platform originated. And now that people can post more, how many users make use of that feature? The large majority of users don't post anything. And among those who do post, probably the large majority of those individuals still just post brief comments, often one sentence or a fragment of a sentence, typically without any supporting arguments, documentation, etc. And when a user posts something lengthier, there will often be complaints that it's too long, even if it's only a few sentences or some other small amount. Similarly, the fact that you can get somewhat good transcripts of YouTube videos today doesn't mean that you could do so when YouTube originated or that more than a small percentage of users access that feature now that it's available.

The Evangelical Tabloid

It seems that one of the consequences of the societal changes I referred to in my last post is that some aspects of the culture are taking on more of a tabloid nature. For a long time, there's been a noticeable decline on conservative political radio programs, on conservative political web sites, and in other parts of our culture that have usually been thought of as traditional to some extent. You can see differences in a lot of contexts. There's more of a personal nature to things, such as a tendency to get overly emotional about certain individuals and to be overly focused on topics that are of a less significant and more personal nature (e.g., responses to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). Or if a famous comedian, athlete, etc. says something that seems favorable to political conservatism, Christianity, or some other part of the culture that's more traditional, what that famous person said will get a lot of attention, much more than it should. Some web sites have a section highlighting which posts are the most popular at the moment, and what's most popular often resembles a tabloid far more than it ought to. Posts are getting more sensationalist headlines, and the audiences seem to like it and frequently take the bait. There's been a problem for years with even conservative radio programs and web sites, for example, having inappropriate ads, and that's gotten worse with the passing of time. (And not just in sexual contexts.) That's probably largely because the audiences like those kinds of ads so much and are responding favorably to them. There's also a problem with inappropriate photographs accompanying articles. Material and practices that used to be more associated with tabloids have become more mainstream. The examples of this type of thing go on and on. It's not universal, and it's occurred to different degrees in different contexts, but you see it to some extent in many places.

That includes Evangelicalism. Because people have delegated too much of their work to other individuals (as part of the shortcuts referred to in my last post), it's become more significant when somebody like pastor So-And-So exhibits some kind of perceived weakness. Therefore, a controversy that pastor is involved in gets more attention. And there are other factors involved, like the enjoyment people get from following scandals. They treat it like watching a soap opera. They like gawking at trainwrecks. Even if they didn't like it, they have a tendency to follow the crowd, and the crowd is chasing after scandals. There's also the fact that people like going after easy targets. You aren't risking much, and it gives you an easy sense of moral superiority to look down on a person who's done something that's widely agreed to be inappropriate.

There are other factors involved. I'm just giving some examples. And to whatever extent I'm wrong about how these problems have gotten worse in recent years, the fact remains that they are problems that exist to whatever degree. My main point is that the problem exists to some extent. I'm not suggesting that it's as bad as it could possibly be. And I'm not denying that the problem is accompanied by other things that are good. But it is a problem, and it needs to be addressed.

Looking For Shortcuts

Because of factors like advances in technology, the increase of political freedoms, and the effects of capitalism on the world, people have more access to more information (through television, smartphones, and so on). The large majority of people don't want to make the changes needed to sort through that information responsibly (such as decreasing their time spent on less significant things and increasing their time spent on more significant things). They look for shortcuts. They become more dependent on emotions, intuitions, and such to sort through issues. They look more than they should for political leaders, social commentators, pastors, or other people to sort through the information for them, to fight their battles for them, and so forth. And it isn't just a problem with people looking for shortcuts too much. There's also a problem with poor judgments being made about which shortcuts to take. They're taking too many shortcuts, and they aren't even choosing the best ones.

It's been popular to criticize the political left in the United States for being overly emotional (style over substance, feelings over facts). Something that's occurred over time, especially in the most recent decades, is that the right (the political right, the religious right, etc.) has become more emotional.

You see it in Evangelical circles, even if it takes on a somewhat different form than it does elsewhere. I occasionally see hosts of Evangelical YouTube channels, for example, commenting in one way or another about what needs done now to get and keep a bigger audience. It's not good, and you can tell that a lot of the YouTube hosts don't like it. (Though that doesn't seem to keep many of them from doing it.) If a famous pastor gets involved in a controversy, people show a lot more interest in that than they show in a post or video about God, theology, the afterlife, or some other such topic. A tweet about a scandal pastor So-And-So is involved in will get hundreds of likes and comments, whereas something significant that's tweeted about God, apologetics, or church history will get much less of a response. A joke or family photograph will get more of a positive response than even the best theological or apologetic work. It happens in contexts as trivial as thumbnails. The first two parts of a three-part video series will have a much higher view count than the third part. The first two included an image of a famous person in the thumbnail, whereas the third didn't. What and who's popular in Evangelical circles seem to be determined by things like emotions and insignificant personality traits far more than they should be.

We should ask ourselves how we're being impacted by these things. Are we taking too many shortcuts, and are our judgments about our shortcuts as good as we like to think they are?

Leave The Bulbs Alone, And The New Flowers Will Come Up

To demand the continual experience of the pleasure is to cut ourselves off from the subsequent pleasure that God intended. This principle - that memory is the capstone of pleasure - is for [C.S.] Lewis one instance of Christ's teaching that a thing will not really live unless it dies, and it has many applications. "On every level of our life - in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience - we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison." Many Christians look back with longing on the bright days after their conversion or after some great spiritual moment. They lament that those fervent desires have in some measure died away. No doubt sometimes the death of those initial pantings is due to sin. But not always. Lewis suggests that God intends those intense passions to pass away. They were the explosion that started the engine of the Christian life. But man does not live on explosions alone….

In addition, God has built us so that we can't keep these explosions going. Our bodies will not suffer the intensity of thrills for long. Lewis calls this the law of undulation (a fancy word for a wave-like rhythm)….Undulation is the natural, bodily way that God regulates our desires. Self-denial is the supernatural way that we join God in ordering our loves. As fallen humans, we're sorely tempted to ignore undulation and seek to get maximum and repeated joy out of the same pleasures. Self-denial is our resistance to this temptation, not because we wish to hinder our joy, but because we believe that God wishes to give us additional joys.

[quoting Lewis] "It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go - let it die away - go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow - and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life."

Instead of being tormented by the lost golden moments of our past, Lewis encourages us to accept them as memories. When we do, we find that they are entirely wholesome, nourishing, and enchanting. "Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year's blooms, and you will get nothing." The past joy is to die if it is to live.

(Joe Rigney, Lewis On The Christian Life [Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2018], 159-60)

Greater Suffering Producing Greater Zeal

"Let us then, when we desire to effect any thing great and noble, not regard this, the greatness of the labor which it brings, but let us rather look to the gain. Mark, for instance, Paul, not therefore lingering, not therefore shrinking back, because 'there were many adversaries;' but because 'there was a great door,' [1 Corinthians 16:9] pressing on and persevering. Yea, and as I was saying, this was a sign that the devil was being stripped, for it is not, depend on it, by little and mean achievements that men provoke that evil monster to wrath. And so when thou seest a righteous man performing great and excellent deeds, yet suffering innumerable ills, marvel not; on the contrary, one might well marvel, if the devil receiving so many blows were to keep quiet and bear the wounds meekly….So then, though we be in peril, beloved, though we suffer ever so greatly, let us with the greater zeal apply ourselves to our labors for virtue's sake." (John Chrysostom, Homilies On First Corinthians, 43:6)

Deceptive Nostalgia

Nostalgia is often misleading. Our reasons for valuing something in the past were trivial or sinful. One of the questions Christians should ask themselves is how Christian their nostalgia is. And how much has it matured over time? If your most valued memories are trivial ones, that's a problem. If the memories that move your emotions the most and the ones you want to talk to other people about the most are sinful or are focused on less significant aspects of life, that should change.

There's nothing wrong with being nostalgic about holidays spent with relatives, a trivial song, or whatever. But are those things accompanied by nostalgia about your relationship with God, time spent doing more significant things in life, music of a more Christian and mature nature, etc.?

When I hear people talk about their most valued memories, their best experiences in life, and so forth, I'm often astonished at how immature they are. Even Christians often express sentiments of such an immature, and sometimes even anti-Christian, nature. What's going on in your life if what you most value has so little to do with God and has matured so little over time?

I love to tell the story; more wonderful it seems
Than all the golden fancies of all our golden dreams.

Duty

In Steve’s memoir, he said “most of what I post on my blog is written from a sense of duty rather than personal interest” (page 74).  Steve and I had a couple of email exchanges along that topic over the years.  A lot of what drove that feeling is the difference between writing about what interests you and writing about what people need to hear.  For example, if I wrote about what interest me, I would write about Chaos Theory, mathematics, logic, music theory, and trying to become a polyglot.   Yet these topics would not be very useful for the church as a whole.

Indeed, I remember something my father once told me about a complaint R.C. Sproul made around the time when I was in high school.  It’s so long ago, I don’t have a way to verify the quote, but it seems accurate enough.  Essentially, Sproul’s complaint was that publishers kept having him dumb-down his books for a wider audience, so he was never able to talk about the things he wanted to talk about in the detail he wanted to express it.

But there’s another aspect to Steve’s quote that does need to be examined as well.  In using his quote as my launch pad, I should clarify that I do not believe what I’m going to discuss was Steve’s primary reasoning in the slightest—but it’s also not completely alien, given our conversations behind the scenes.  And that is the dichotomy that arises from writing about what you know to be true at times when you do not feel it to be true.

There is a reason that I use the distinction between knowing and feeling here.  Steve mentioned how for him it was a no brainer that God exists, but that the emotional problem of evil was far more difficult to tackle (see page 43 of his memoir).  This is something that I have also struggled with.  I’ve never doubted the existence of God—logic makes no sense unless theism is true.  But given theism, the question of God’s goodness definitely still remains one that can be struggled with.

Now at this point, I want to speak solely for myself.  While Steve and I did discuss the topic, as I mentioned, it’s in the midst of some emails that I am unable to dig through at the moment, given the nature of the events that were going on in my life during the time we had these exchanges.  So while I’m fairly confident I can accurately reproduce from memory what we discussed, I don’t want to inadvertently put words in Steve’s mouth that he would never have actually said simply because I mis-remembered the conversation.

So to my point.  There can be a radical difference between what you intellectually know to be true and what you feel at any given time.  My personal struggle arose from a time when I felt God had betrayed me.  This feeling of betrayal was a real feeling, but even a cursory logical look at the circumstances indicated that there was no such betrayal.  While confidentiality requires that I not give too many specifics, it involved the fact that at one point while I was in prayer and fasting, I believed God answered my prayers by affirming that I should remain faithful to my word and continue to pursue something that all my reason told me was impossible to achieve.  What I concluded from this was that God had told me, “If you remain faithful to your word, I will work out the details so you will get the result you want.”  But the truth was that never was the “message” that I got from the prayer—it was a simple command to be faithful without any indication that God was promising to do anything further.

The net result was, of course, that not only did I not get the ultimate desire I was hoping to achieve from my prayers, but it turned out that by remaining faithful to my word I ended up in a far worse position than I would have been in had I ceased my efforts when I knew it was hopeless.

Now here’s the rub.  The feeling of the betrayal was a real feeling, but it was not a reasonable feeling.  I could logically tell myself repeatedly all the facts.  I knew God had never promised to give me the end result I wanted, contingent upon my following through on my word.  For that matter, the affirmation to be faithful to my word was merely the bare minimum of what God wants us to do anyway!  In short, had I broken my word, that itself would have been sinful, and God is not obligated to bless you simply because in one instance you avoided sinning.

But reason doesn’t enter into matters of the heart.  I felt pained.  I felt betrayed.  I felt that God was unjust.

But I still knew God was just.  And here is where this ties back into the topic of this post.  At the time that I was struggling with this dichotomy between what I felt and what I knew, a former friend of mine who had apostatized to atheism started to engage me in debates on Facebook.  He would consistently make arguments about how if God existed, He would be nothing more than a moral monster.  That God was actually evil, not good.  Etc.

I engaged with this friend by arguing from reason.  I would object to his claims by showing the flawed logical assumptions and presuppositions underlying the claims, and how they had no teeth in an atheistic universe.  I used every bit of my intellect to focus on the reason his claims were false.

Yet the reality was, as soon as I hit “Submit” and turned off my computer and went to bed, my prayers would be accusing God of the very things the atheist had accused Him of, and which I had just spent so much time to refute.  And I was well aware that those emotions were genuinely felt, even though irrational.  I knew I had answered all my own questions, but it wasn’t an intellectual issue.  It was the emotional pain driving everything.

Why did I bother debating my atheist friend on logical grounds when emotionally I felt the same way he did?  Because I had a duty to do so.  I know that God is real and good and just.  And I know that my emotions, while genuine emotions, are not reality, nor can they be used to condemn God.  I can’t jettison what I know on the basis of what I feel.  As a result, I would write what I knew to be true despite how I felt.

I believe there is a sense where some (by no means all!) of Steve’s writing was based on that same balance sheet.  That some of what he wrote he did so because he knew it was true, and the sense of duty that compelled him to write it was required because the reality of evil in this world had hurt him in the same way it had hurt me. 

It’s easy to throw in the towel and let emotions rule the day.  It’s easy to vent, to rage, to cry out, to despair, to throw a tantrum against God.  It’s much harder to acknowledge that those emotions aren’t truth, and the truth still needs to be said.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9).

"And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32).

The point of this somewhat lengthy meandering post is thus to assert a simple claim: To write the truth despite how one feels is actually a very good thing.

The emotional problem of suffering

The Christian (Calvinist) philosopher and ethicist John Feinberg discusses the emotional problem of suffering. He offers his own experiences with suffering after his wife was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease as well as advice on how to help those suffering. The following excerpt is taken from his book The Many Faces of Evil (revised edition).