If you instead think it was evil, "Slaves of Satan" by Patrick R. Bell is a solid work. For the rest of us, well, maybe. It requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. The 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell proposed if you create a closed system and introduce a contradiction anything can be proven. Dan Brown used this to fantastic effect in books like "The Da Vinci Code" and if you believe in evil as an external control, like demons, it can explain a lot.
Bell covers a lot of ground because evil can accomplish anything if it can do everything. Hitler wasn't just mentally a mentally deranged guy who, according to a US report, liked feces, he was possessed.
The Virgin Mary punching Lucifer in the snout is not in the book, but it would be in any book I wrote about evil. Owned by the British Library.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that's where I have a disconnect. Instead of evidence it is a lot of circumstantial claims, like you see on The History Channel about one of their dozens of alien technology shows. Or a Dan Brown novel. Many will not agree that a soap opera romance writer is possessed by evil, or even that an abortion is evil. Certainly a whole lot of Catholics don't feel that way. A rapist, evil, but the victim, if she doesn't want the rest of her life to be a reminder? That is a hard sell.
Where it becomes a lot more fun is chapter 7, which discusses wealthy elites and their running of international occult organizations. It's Bilderberg stuff, except with Larry King involved, and no one who's ever managed even a half dozen people can be convinced conspiracies like this happen without collapsing soon, but I am here for it. I want to see your new hot take on the Illuminatus and how "The Boys From Brazil" really happened and Hitler clones are running European environmental groups. If all you need is circumstantial evidence, it certainly explains the anti-Semitism of environmentalists, you just have to suspend belief that they are not simply mentally challenged and believe they are evil.
Bell can, of course, flip this same logic on me. If it's ridiculous for evil to account for bad behavior, it could be deemed intellectually lazy to do the same thing using mental health issues. Not every Democrat who shoots at a president was born evil so Bell could argue they were possessed later. I agree even as I recognize it's postmodernism, and anything can be anything if everything is equal.
Bertrand Russell would be proud of that.
My rating: 3 Bloggys, because this is a science site and psychiatric medication is a greater indication of potential evil than hidden manifestations of darkness until weight of evidence shows otherwise.
 | | |
(1) As a result, there was a great deal of inflation pressure in low-end housing, the same issue we now face with health care. Both President Bush and his Treasury Secretary warned in 2005 that increased housing values were creating an artificial economic expansion, and the political party that made student loans and then mortgages unlimited said he just didn't want to raise the minimum wage and was making excuses not to do it.
Comments