Rod Dreher on evil as a spiritual force

Rod Dreher, a traditional Christian, summed up his beliefs about evil:

1.  The world is not what we think it is. What is unseen is as real as what’s seen.
2.  People are not who we think they are; they are not even who they think they are. People will go to extraordinary lengths — including telling themselves outlandish lies, accepting what ought to be unacceptable and making their own lives and the lives of others miserable — to avoid facing truths that would compromise the worldview upon which they’ve settled.
3.  The battle lines between good and evil, and between order and chaos, are not drawn where we would like them to be. The front is everywhere, most particularly within our own hearts.
4.  Be wary of the treachery of the good man who believes in his own goodness.
5.  “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:12)
   

Source: The American Conservative

Is the supernatural as real as the natural?

Source: Candorville

On not believing in the supernatural

I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits or the occult.   But I thought The Boy Who Was Possessed Remembers and The Devil and Latoya Ammons posts and comment threads from Rod Dreher’s web log were extremely interesting.  They consist of first-person accounts by people, including freethinkers and rationalists, of seemingly supernatural phenomena they couldn’t otherwise explain.  I think Dreher is right to say that paranormal experiences are much more common than most people are willing to let on.

When I encounter something I can’t explain, my reaction is to say that this is something I can’t explain, and suspend judgment.   Some statistician said that a million things happen to the average human being in the course of a month (I don’t know the basis for this) and therefore it would not be surprising if once a month something happened that the odds were a million to one against.  The video above shows that even the highly improbable can be true

Then, too, the ability of human beings to process sensory input into perception of reality is a more complicated process than we realize, and most human cognition takes place below the level of consciousness.  When things emerge into consciousness from our unconscious minds, it can do strange things to our perception.  I have often awakened from strange dreams, and mistaken the dreams for reality until I get my mind together.

Yet, for all this, I admit I don’t have a logical basis for not rejecting the possibility that the supernatural is real.  I believe that everything that happens is either the blind working of natural laws or the actions of sentient beings.   The supernatural, if it exists, would be the working of natural laws and actions of sentient beings that I don’t know about.

The late Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.   Yet what constitutes an extraordinary claim?  And just what kind of extraordinary evidence would satisfy him?  To the vast majority of human beings in history, and billions in the world today, the existence of ghosts and spirits is taken for granted.  Darwin’s theory, quantum theory and string theory would be regarded as the extraordinary claim.

Scientists try to make sense of the universe.  The great wisdom teachers of the world’s great religions try to give meaning to human life.  I think the occult is probably false, and, if true, to be avoided, because, to the extent that the world really is governed by arbitrary and irrational magical forces, it is a waste of time for human beings to try to make sense of life.