If we accept the phenomenon as genuine, then why is posession by evil spirits so rare? After all, there are plenty of demons (“my name is legion, for we are many”), and there are more humans around than ever. So, there ought to be plenty of these possessed folks, screaming and cursing and making nuisances of themselves.
The RC church has revive the office of exorcist, so clearly there is a recognition of the danger. What is the official church position o is? If one is posessed, is one responsible for one’s ctions while under the thumb of Satan? Can you commit sin while posessed?
Why would you assume something so irrational? There’s no rational answer to an irrational question. What demon laws of physics to expect us to cite for you? Its all fairytales and makebelieve nonsense that really hurt and continues to hurt people with serious mental illness in need of proper profession help.
In the civilized world we call this schizophrenia and we try to help them.
If you accept the phenomenon as genuine then the only people who could answer your question are the demons themselves.
Good luck with that one.
Only kanicbird can answer such a question.
…must…not…make …political…statement…(arrrggg)…
Folks, what ralph124c is asking is: How do people who believe in demon possession account for the relatively sparse rate of [what they would diagnose as] its occurrence?
That’s what ‘If we accept the phenomenon as genuine’ means in this context.
Well thank you, I think, In truth God can use anyone He wants to answer this.
What makes you think it is rare, and just not accepted by the world unless it gets really really bad?
From my understanding of scripture, deliverance requires a request (actually a request of the heart), by the victim or parents, which God will hear a honest cry of the heart and send His people to do this.
I would imagine that anyone who believed in demonic possession would say that it was a combination of prayer and God’s will that we don’t have more cases. That seems to be the catch-all in anything they cannot explain.
“Why did he die?” It was God’s will.
“Why did he live?” It was God’s will.
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I hesitate to post this link ('cuz man is it crazy), but here’s a ‘deliverance’ ministry. (The site has a really annoying MIDI file playing on every page, so mind your speakers.)
The general thrust is that damn near everyone is possessed, but any ‘bad’ trait or habit is caused by a demon. Are you gay? That’s a demon. Into kinky sex? Another demon. A woman who disobeys her husband? Enjoy Tolkien’s works? I think you get it, but if not, there’s probably a demon preventing you from understanding.
Of course things like schizophrenia are demonic in origin too, but if you cast a wide enough net, you can call anything a demon.
(Boyce and Boice, the electronic demons are my favorites. Anything that goes wrong with your devices is because of them, not because you didn’t read the manual or downloaded a virus.)
This is really a GD/IMHO question, isn’t it? I’ll bite anyway.
As someone who believes demon possession occurs, but rarely, I would offer a few possible reasons.
- A lot of the things we used to call possession are clearly not, such as addiction, epilepsy and schizophrenia. (The fact that possession can be misdiagnosed does not necessarily mean it doesn’t exist).
- Even the Bible is quite clear that we’re fully capable of luring ourselves into sin. Modern psychology calls this the subconscious/id while the Bible calls it the flesh. Thus, demons are not necessary to explain garden-variety sinners under either world view, though they have been (and sometimes still are) blamed for that.
- How does it help the demons if they possess so many people that we all go running back to God?
- Are we going to include psychics and mediums among the demon possessed? Most Americans don’t, but the Bible provides at least one example of a fortune teller who got her abilities by being possessed.
- Sheer numbers? If you take a very literal reading of part of the Bible, you get 100 million angels and a third of those are fallen demons. 33 million was a lot when the world population was only 100-200 million; today, it’s not even enough to get you elected President. (Of course, the 100 million may have just been an expression for “way the heck more than I can begin to count,” but, by any reckoning, the human:demon ratio is 30 times higher than it used to be and that alone could reduce the incidence of demon possession to just 3% of its historical levels.)
Plus, who’s to say that what we now diagnose as schizophrenia etc. isn’t demons? Sure, we know what schizophrenia is, but to know that schizophrenia isn’t a demon, we’d also have to know what demons are. Maybe chemical imbalances in the brain are just one way that demons can manifest themselves in the world.
Demons do not exist, therefore they are unable to possess people.
Moving to GD from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I admit it; my first thought was “Because they got smart and decided to run for office instead of vomiting and making heads spin. Except metaphorically.”
What’s in it for the demon?
Going with the OP’s “what if?” then if demons were real what benefit would they gain from possession? Potentially they get a human-skin / puppet to wear around and do ill with, but does that work? Little Regan in *The Exorcist *isn’t exactly a high-functioning individual; she’s not going to be tempting a whole lot of people into sin. And a possessed body isn’t itself sinning if it has no free will is it?
If getting mortals to sin is the infernal goal (cf. The Screwtape Letters) then possession doesn’t seem a winning strategy. The demons would be better engaged tempting individuals into sin; the more forward looking ones (like Crowley in Good Omens) finding ways to mass produce anger, etc by causing cell phone networks to cut out, or forums to eat posts, etc.
And by demons of course he means thetans.
What makes you think it’s rare? The sort that believe in this stuff seem to think “demonization” pretty common–they blame various mental woes on it.
I guess this has been covered.
OK, I’ll bite.
The Roman Catholic church is one of the few mainstream religions that takes demonic possession seriously enough to have an official office of Exorcist. And even they believe it’s really damn rare.
The Roman Catholic church also believes in miracles. They investigate claims seriously and thoroughly – and they believe those are really damn rare, as well.
So why do both God and Satan manifest themselves rarely? Because the battle between them extends across the universe for all time, and we only occupy a tiny part of that space and time. So we only see a tiny part of the battle.
Well, not until after puberty (find the links yourselves, perverts).