Does Satan Really Exist? Hell, Yes!

Today's age of reason, age of relativism and age of education have led us backward rather than forward in terms of spirtuality.

It's led us back to the Tower of Babel (see Gn 11); back to the idea that man can ascend to God based only on his own reason, solely on his own strengths. Not only is it shades of Babel, but it is no less than shades of The Fall (see Gn 3). Man aspires to be God -- not be like God, but be God Himself. In this retro-journey -- which occurs with regularity throughout history -- man discards the notion that God is anything but a product of his own mind. An equally dangerous fallacy -- a corallary -- is that Satan is a product of the mind of man as well.

While the first supposition causes us to turn our back on God, the second has us walking in lock-step with the Satan in whom we do not believe. Satan loves nothing better than to ruin a soul by a) convincing people there is no God, b) convincing people there is no Satan or c) both of the above. Any of the three scenarios repeats the circumstances -- the deception -- surrounding The Fall; that is, that man is totally capable (and worthy) of eating of the tree of life so as to know himself what is good and what is evil.

Never mind what God has said, Satan tells Eve. God knows that if you eat of its fruit that you shall be like Him; your eyes will be opened and you will know good from evil. The Father of Lies is at work all the harder today, still convincing people that it is they who should decide what is right and what is wrong; that their conscience should lead the way. Conscience is a wonderful thing, to be sure -- when one does not know what is the right thing to do, conscience helps point us in the right diection. Conscience does not shove us in that direction. But conscience used to redefine what is right and wrong is the sin of pride.

Satan is the Father of Lies; the Father of [Sinful] Pride. He dared to presume that he knew better than his Creator. He not only ruined his own soul -- his own existence -- but he led others in a revolt against his Creator, preferring to rule in the Dark than serve in the Light. Satan cares nothing about you or I. He doesn't desire our allegience, our worship -- although he says otherwise. He has an ulterior motive; he wants only to strike back at God. Every soul he ruins is an attempt to hurt his Creator again. It's pure hatred. Misguided, blinded hatred.

So, when Satan convinces the secular-minded that he does not exist, there is a good chance that he's convinced that same person that God does not exist. After all, how many people believe in God but not Satan? How many believe in good but not evil. How many believe in day but not night. How many believe in wealth but not poverty? To believe is to believe in the opposite, is it not? When Satan has removed our belief in the Father of Life and in himself -- the Father of Death -- he has suceeded in convincing us that there is no better judge of good versus evil than ourselves.

It's each person's personal version of The Fall (after all, original sin comes only from Adam and Eve), repeated ad infinitum. It's like watching The Wizard of Oz year after year -- you know that the witch is going to end up being melted. Satan uses the same bag of tricks; he just upgrades the scenery and the props. And we, as a people, fall for it too often.

Satan is real. He exists. He exists for one purpose as he sees it -- to ruin souls. For us, let us be on our guard against him in all his forms. Let us consider that Satan exists for perhaps another reason -- so that we may be the better, that we may choose the better, in spite of him.

Don't let Satan convince you that he doesn't exist. Remember that he has no power other than that we give him. We are created good through Baptism. It takes a conscious decision to ruin our soul. Some say we were put on this earth to rise above nature. I prefer to think that we were placed on this earth above nature, and that it is an unfortunate fact of life that there are those who choose to sink to (or below) the level of nature.

Comments? Discussion? God bless you!

Is God Responsible for Evil?

It's been argued, "If...God is responsible for all the good then you must admit he [sic] is also responsible for all the bad in this world (either by causing it or allowing it)...when it comes to natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, etc. Where was God in Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God in Darfur? For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being murdered or raped or abused?"

As will all my blogs, what follows is my opinion based upon my religious upbringing and my study of Catholic Church teachings (plus a dose of common sense).

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Those are excellent questions. Is God responsible for evil? If not, does God allow evil, and if so why?

Is God responsible for evil? This one is easy. Absolutely, positively not. God only creates good. It is man, through his willful (i.e., free will) disobedience to God, who allowed evil to enter this world. Satan already ruled a kingdom of evil (Hell) and, through trickery and deception, expanded the realm of evil to this world.

Does God allow evil? This one is easy as well, but more difficult to accept in faith. The answer is yes, God allows evil to exist that mankind might be the better for it. That requires some thought and some leaps of faith.

Without the ability to choose evil, man has no free will. God gave man free will. Man allowed disorder, both man-made and natural, to enter this world in the The Fall (original sin). From here we can branch into two types of evil -- man-made and natural.

Man-made : Why does God stand by and allow genocide, war, murder, rape, etc? It is because man has free will that some men choose to use their will to control others. God "allowed" his own people (Israel) to be subjugated for years under the Egyptians before delivering them out of Egypt. God heard their cries -- He did not ignore them. God chose the specific time and place for the appearance of the deliverer for a reason. That reason is not fully disclosed to us. God allowed his own Son to be imprisoned, tortured and then nailed to a Cross. He allowed His own Son to die a horrible death. Why?

Free will. Jesus had it the same as we do. Jesus could have passed on the "cup" set before Him. Satan tried to win Jesus over three times in the desert. Jesus laid down His life (no one took it) for us. What loving father or loving mother would not step in front of a bullet meant for their child? In the same manner, Jesus (God Incarnate) stepped in front of a Cross for us -- to save us.

Natural disaster : Why does God allow the evil of natural disasters? Tsunamis, earthquakes, disease (e.g., cancer), pestilence, etc. St. Thomas Aquinas stated that from every evil action (both man-made and natural) God can extract a measure of good. Whose fault was it that the man cured of blindness in the Gospels was born blind? This is/was a natural disaster for that man (albeit on a smaller scale than listed above), but if God wasn't responsible what purpose did it serve, if any. Perhaps the purpose was "to show the glory of God in the blind man's healing." Why did God allow a young woman named Anne Sullivan to go nearly blind from a childhood fever? Ask Helen Keller. Ask the countless millions of blind and/or deaf persons who owe their educations -- their lives -- to Anne, Helen and those who followed. "To the glory of God!"

So, why does God allow tsunamis, earthquakes, disease (e.g., cancer), pestilence, etc? We may not be able to reason it out as clearly as we can in the example of the blind-man's or Anne Sullivan's blindness, but we must make a leap of faith that God can and will extract a good from these evils. God gives each of us a Cross to bear in life -- but never more than we can handle (although sometimes we may feel we are overwhelmed by ours).

In bearing our Cross, we achieve some good through God's graces. Perhaps not for ourselves, but for someone else. How many lives can we save (have we saved) in our sufferings?

Pray for those afflicted with heavy Crosses. Pray that God will ease their suffering and grant them the power to display "the glory of God" in their lives.

What a Christian is Not

I've been an active commenter on some blogs devoted to matters of faith, and I've tried my best to be polite and understanding of others, in spite of their personal attacks on me, on Catholicism and Christianity. It's amazing how some non-Christians will insist they know how to define a Christian; how some non-Catholics purport to know more about the Catholic faith than a Catholic. So, then, what is a Christian? What follows is my opinion only, based on my religious upbringing and my study of the Catholic Church teachings.

Simply put, a Christian is a person who 1) recognizes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God -- that He is God Himself [manifested in His Nativity, His Passion, Death and Resurrection] and 2) spreads the Good Word -- the Gospel. It's not enough to simply believe in Jesus, or to believe that He existed.

What a Christian is not -- in my opinion -- is a person who uses the Bible as a weapon against his or her fellow man, as a tool to deliver this message: "Believe in what I believe or go to hell."

I hear it all the time from self-appointed judges who use the Bible not as a weapon aginst Satan but as a weapon against those who choose to worship and love "God" in their own manner. How ridiculous. To think that God would write off two-thirds of the earth's population (http://encarta.msn.com/media_461533092_761565187_-1_1/media.html) -- many of whom simply haven't "heard" the Good News flies in direct contradiction of a loving, forgiving, compassionate God.

Quote all the Scripture you wish, line by line, but I believe the Bible was written to convey a total message -- a message of brotherly love and love of one's Creator. You get that message by reading the entire Bible and coming to a conclusion as to God's overall plan.

Many different groups of people call "God" by a different name. Native Americans are among the most deeply religious people on the earth; their ceremonies speak beautifully of the wonder of Creation that is God.

The biggest argument I get from the "protestant" faiths -- who blithely place their faith in the hands of a man who willy-nilly rewrote Scripture at his whim; check what Luther did to Romans 3:28 for an example -- is that there are numerous places in the Bible that say that only through Jesus is the path to Salvation. Fine! I don't necessarily disagree with that. But how about the man who travels from point A to point C without realizing he has been through (and had to pass through) point B. Point B still is the only way to point C. Now, subsitute man for point A, Jesus for point B and God the Father for point C. How can God indiscriminately write off such a person? The answer is, He won't.

If my protestant brethren insist on cherry-picking lines out of the Bible, how about these (paraphrased) --

You shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind and with all thy strength, and you shall love your neighbor as you love thyself.

Judge not, lest ye be judged. [Note -- Judging people is to be avoided; judging behavior is another story. Murder is wrong [a judgment]. Murderers are still children of God and, regardless of their turning away from God, deserve compassion and "Christian" love. This does not mean we don't hold them acountable for their actions.

You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

And specifically on the subject of who can be saved...

For man it is impossible, but for God nothing is impossible.

My protestant brethren should spend less time spreading their judgments of others and their "believe-in-what-I-believe-or-go-to-hell" attitude and go back to spreading the Good News -- that God loves us and wants us to be with Him forever; that through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ He has ransomed us from death and purchased for us the rewards of Eternal Life.

The Death Penalty: What Do You Say?

I grew up – and continue to consider myself – a social and political conservative. Many would label me as a right-wing Republican conservative. I have always advocated personal responsibility over government-mandated programs. I have always advocated charity, but I prefer charity of the individual as opposed to forced-charity.

It is not hard to believe, then, that I grew up a defender of the individual’s right to bear arms and a proponent of "natural consequences." Most striking of these was the belief that heinous acts of murder, rape, abuse, etc. should be punishable by the death penalty. I took comfort in Lev 24:17, where Yahweh says, ""Anyone who strikes down any other human being will be put to death." Leviticus is filled with a list of crimes punishable by death, although even in the past I did not support use of the death penalty in today’s society for all those crimes listed in Leviticus.
Jesus addresses many of the laws of the Old Testament when he states that He came not to nullify the law but to fulfill it. When questioned about the punishment for adultery, He forgives the adulteress her sins and sets her on her way with, "Sin no more." When confronted with the question of divorce, Jesus stated that the Mosaic law was given to Israel in light of the stubbornness. Jesus states that a man who puts aside his wife and marries another commits adultery!

I remember in an episode of Star Trek: the Original Series when Spock asks the "Guardian of Forever" if it is "being" or "machine." The Guardian responds, "I am both, and neither. I am my own beginning and my own end." Spock laments that he sees no reason why an answer should be couched in riddles, to which the Guardian responds, "I answer in a manner most suited to your limited intelligence."

Jesus’ statement, I take, is essentially saying that the Mosaic Israelites were incapable of hearing/understanding what Jesus was preaching – love of neighbors, love of persecutors, forgiveness of those who do us wrong. Can you blame the Mosaic Israelites? They had just been liberated from generations of bondage, brutality and persecution under the Egyptians.
Paraphrasing some of what Jesus said throughout the Gospels, "Love your neighbors. Bless those who persecute you. Forgive your brother not seven times, not seventy times – but seven time seventy times." Jesus states that a man who puts aside his wife and marries another commits adultery! He similarly puts a new spin on Mosaic law by saying, "Love.… Bless…. Forgive…."

Recent reading of The Catholic Catechism coupled with a deeper reading of the Gospels and my life-long advocacy of "The Right to Life" have led me to a very severe reappraisal of my feelings on the death penalty. I no longer can support the use of capital punishment by the State. While I must abide by the law of the State, I cannot in good conscience support the use of capital punishment. I came to this conclusion based upon a deeper inspection into the sanctity of life. While it does not mitigate the brutal acts which warrant a penalty of death, I have come to realize that all life is a gift from God. From conception to natural death, God is the "author of life." His "copyright" must not be infringed. By unjustifiably taking a life, we ascribe to the "author of death" – Satan (sin).

I believe that the taking of another human life is justifiable only in active defense of one’s own life (or the lives of others). The taking of life in a war can be justified – but not all wars are justified. But if the war is not "just," one must be willing to abide by the laws of the State should one "conscientiously" object to serving during a time of war. Should someone be coming at you with a knife intent on killing you or others then the taking of that life to protect one’s own (or those of others) can be justified if no other means of protection are available.
A different set of circumstances must be applied to those who commit heinous acts and have been apprehended and separated from society. If -- and this is a big ‘if’ -- it is possible to assure that they remain separated from society without the ability to commit further acts of violence, then all reasonable avenues should be exhausted in this effort. Life in prison without the possibility of parole is humane and justifiable. I don’t particularly relish the thought of financially supporting these felons through their lifetimes, but it is the morally right thing to do.

I’ll briefly touch on a few related issues. Abortion is murder, plain and simple. Conception creates a life, unique and valuable. Regardless of the circumstances of conception, that living being has been created in the image of God. It is not anyone’s place to regard it as not worthy of life. In cases where the mother’s life conflicts with that of the developing child, I believe self-preservation can be the only mitigating factor in abortion. I am not insensitive to arguments for abortion in cases of incest, rape, etc., but I must, in conclusion, side with the life of the unborn child.

Euthanasia is murder. Suicide is murder. Mitigating circumstances in both cases, including mental disorder, can and do justifiably exist.

Might I ever kill someone unjustifiably or advocate the use of the death penalty, especially if the acts of violence have touched me personally? Support the abortion of an unwanted/ill-timed pregnancy? Euthanize a loved one who is in prolonged pain as the result of a terminal illness? Euthanize myself under similar circumstances? Only God knows what I will do. I pray to God for the strength to resist such temptations when and if the time arises to face them.

And what of the people who do kill unjustifiably? Those who rape? Abuse? Those who abort their children? Those who euthanize? Those who attempt – or succeed in – suicide? I say, pray for them! Assure them of God’s wish for their petition for forgiveness. Forgive them (without needing to release them from the natural consequences of their actions). Catholics believe that although our sins are forgiven in Reconciliation we must still expect to face the consequences of our sins – either in this life or in the next. But "Purgatory" is another subject, for another week.

Respectfully submitted,

Dan

Welcome to Catholicism: The Facts

This blog has been created to facilitate the polite discussion of the Roman Catholic faith -- both for Roman Catholics and for those who think they know what Roman Catholics believe and why. I ask that you keep some simple ground rules in effect as you post comments here.

1. Civility is job one.
2. State what you believe.
3. Don't tell others what they believe.
4. Please punctuate your entries. I ask you to capitalize all references to God, including pronouns referring to Him.
   

Before you post, start with these basic facts about what I believe --

• I (and I don't pretend to speak for all Catholics) believe that all God's people have the opportunity for Salvation. I believe non-Christians can obtain Salvation, as well. Salvation is a gift from God -- and no one is worthy of that gift. Since it is a gift, I try not to dictate to God with regards to whom He can and cannot give His gift. Christ came for all mankind.
• Catholics do not worship saints (or the Blessed Virgin Mary [BVM]). We worship only God. We honor and revere the saints and the BVM. They are living examples of how we might imitate Christ more perfectly.
• Catholics do not pray to statues. We pray to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The statues allow us to focus ouir prayer and thoughts. Just as song helps others focus their praise of God, the visual image of the saints help us focus our prayer.
• Catholics do pray to saints (including the BVM) to ask for their intercession in behalf of our petitions. This means we ask them to add their prayers to ours in our behalf. Yes, there is one mediator between God and man, and that mediator is Jesus Christ. But we believe praying that the saints intercede for us is no different than asking a neighbor to pray for us when we experience troubling times.
• Catholics believe that in the holy sacrifice of the Catholic Mass that we receive Jesus' real (yet mystical) Body and His real (yet mystical) Blood. Catholics are not cannibals. Jesus, Himself, stated that His flesh was real food and His blood real drink.
• I will not argue Scripture verse for verse. Scripture can be translated and analyzed to the user's advantage. I rarely quote Scriture verse for verse and when I do I reference it properly and place it in context.
• I use the Catholic Bible for reference. I don't make judgments about other versions -- I simply use the Catholic Bible.
• When in doubt I defer to Mark 12:29-31, which I paraphrase as "The greatest commandment(s): The first is this; the Lord our God is the one, only Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this; you must love your neighbour as yourself."
• The Pope (Peter's successor) is the Head of Christ's Church on Earth only. Christ is the Head of the Church and the BVM its mother.
• The Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals only, and then only when speaking ex cathedra; that is, from the Chair of Peter. The Pope can sin. So can we.

Welcome! May God bless us all!