Jack Burton: “Great. Walls are probably three feet thick, welded shut from the outside, and covered with brick by now.”
Wang Chi: “Don’t give up, Jack.”
Jack Burton: “Okay, I won’t Wang. Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China
Never make a deal to buy a guitar from the Devil. There are always strings attached.
The Exorcist is a feel-good movie. Well, at least it is for me.
I wanted to watch it when I was an especially wee Wilder, but for whatever reason, Ma and Pa Wilder felt that exposing a first grader to that particular film would be considered a war crime. I don’t remember how old I was when I finally saw it, but as I recall it was rented on a VHS tape.
By the time I’d seen it, I’d already been exposed to much more brutal horror: Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Norman Lear sitcoms. I’ll say this about reading horror – the things I conjured in my mind while tearing through the pages of The Stand were far scarier than anything I’d ever seen in a movie.
But I made a pretty bold statement: The Exorcist is a feel-good movie, so I guess you’re gonna make me back it up. Thankfully, I have that not only on my authority, but on the authority of the author of The Exorcist. William Peter Blatty summed up the reason I like horror films with this very simple quote:
“My logic was simple: if demons are real, why not angels? If angels are real, why not souls? And if souls are real, what about your own soul?”
Blatty even described The Exorcist as his ministry – it seems he’s religious. Who would have expected that?
What don’t demons wear hairpieces? Because there would be Hell toupee.
Much of what we see in the world we explain through simple materialism. But when I read novels where the demons are mere humans, well, (with the exception of Hannibal Lechter) I’m generally let down when the Scooby Doo® ending explains away the supernatural mystery at the heart of the story. Mr. Blatty’s quote describes exactly why.
“If demons are real, why not angels.”
Now I know that several readers are atheists. As I’ve pointed out before, this blog is sort-of a litmus test. People that are the kind of atheist that just hates God will generally not opt-in to reading this blog for any length of time. I have no idea why, but they just don’t. Actual, rational atheists that don’t turn rabid when the supernatural is discussed don’t seem to mind.
Maybe they look at it like I look at the WWE®: they can watch it and be amused, even though they’re certain it’s not real. They especially like it when Hulk Hogan® hits me in the head with a chair.
Where did Randy “Macho Man” Savage™ work out? The Slim-Jim©.
Regardless, I think most readers here share the same view of Evil (or even evil) in this world. It’s visible in the raw naked lust for power that we have seen repeated again and again from the Left. It’s also visible in their unbridled joy at the destruction of Truth, Beauty, and Society.
The Left revels in the Lie, the inversion of Truth, the inversion of Beauty:
- Billions of dollars in damage in Minneapolis is a “peaceful protest” while a march on the Capitol is, according to President* Biden: “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
- They demand, using free speech, to restrict the free speech of those that offend them.
- The Left demands you look at what is obviously a man, and claim it to be a woman.
It’s simple, really: everything that’s Bad is presented as good. And everything Good? Well, it’s Bad. How dare you think self-restraint and hard work is virtuous?
Sniff. “Smells like fraud.”
Let’s look at how a simple Good thing like a married man and woman having a baby is turned on its head:
- What about the woman’s career?
- Why not live the childfree life?
- Why have the baby at all?
- There are too many people on the planet already.
The last argument is especially Evil, because when the propaganda works, the headlines then sing out: “since we’re not having enough babies, we need to import multitudes to grow our economy.” “Meet the New Americans.”
It’s fun to use this technique on Leftists. I can recall a Twitter® exchange with a Leftist where I Tweeted™ that I opposed immigration to the United States on the grounds that people in the United States had the highest carbon footprint, so by bringing in more people into the United States they were destroying the planet.
Brain lock ensued when they couldn’t deal with the conflict between their two opposing beliefs. It’s fun to come up with these couplets to invert the Evil right back at them, though, in the end, there is no conversion for a True Believer outside of a gentle helicopter ride. They have given in to the Evil. They’ll avoid the conversation.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: three ways to dispose of a dead Leftist.
It is especially difficult for parents of children: what is innocent is sexualized. A first-grade boy isn’t old enough to decide what he should eat on a regular basis – why would the world think that he should be turned into a she?
It’s all around us, every day. It’s sold to us in media, it’s in the news, it’s everywhere.
And it’s attacking the Values of what we all know, deep inside ourselves, to be True and Good. That which is Good, True and Beautiful hasn’t changed within the lifetime of mankind on this planet, but when you’re confronted with people trying to sell that which is a Lie as the Truth?
You can be sure those people are Evil.
Not to say that people on the Right are immune to that – far from it. Eaton Rapids Joe has a great little story to that effect here (LINK).
To be clear, the ultimate aim of the propaganda of Evil is simple: to make Good people feel despair.
Why despair? Despair is the opposite of hope. It is the opposite of Truth. It is the opposite of Beauty. Despair is Evil.
And when propaganda wins? Evil wins.
H.P. Lovecraft was tormented by doubt all of his life. Imagine if he hadn’t slept in despair bedroom.
But that’s not what happened in The Exorcist. Father Karras, who had lingering doubts and was on the verge of Despair, conquered it.
Because he conquered Despair, Father Karras conquered Evil.
When you feel Despair, know that’s nothing more than Evil. And you can conquer it, too.
Yeah, I told you that The Exorcist was a feel-good story. And I was right.
———————————————
Extra Meme and Tagline, because I made one too many:
In other news, the 2024 election will be postponed until they find the results in Biden’s desk.
I truly believe that a majority of people, at least prior to the last 10 years or so, do not know if they are on the left or right. They are in a go along get along existence. It really takes a certain event to knock someone out of their stupor and realize that their intelligence is being insulted on a daily basis from people in positions of trust. The minute I started looking at events occurring in our society thru the lens of right and left, everything suddenly became crystal clear and it all made sense. “Truth” takes much more work to find these days and that is a tragedy.
I used right/left glasses for most of my life. Then I had to switch to good/evil glasses because it explains the world far more clearly. It’s a tough sell to convince people to try them. I like to think it’s because most people don’t want to believe that true evil exists, but I suspect it’s actually because most people have salad-like IQs.
The American Left has been evil for over 150 years. That makes it a bit more simple.
Only a little bit. The folks pretending to oppose them sold out on the good so hard it gets confusing to people who just want to live their lives and not be political wonks.
I am such small beer and so far down the totem pole, I do not mind confessing all the myriad ways the Left (and the Right) fooled me. If ypu cannot get it correct from the gey-go, at least you can be an educational bad example.
It is. Everything, and I mean everything is political now. And Truth is the first casualty.
The Exorcist is kind of a spiritual version of Rocky. The plucky underdog priest overcomes his personal issues, casts out the demon and saves the day. In the real world the Catholic Church at the time of the filming of the Exorcist was covering up child sexual abuse by her priests. I am not singling out the Catholic Church, simply pointing out that evil is everywhere and often where you least expect it.
I prefer The Omen as it seems more in line with real life, because more often than not evil wins the day. You can almost imagine Damien as a child with that small, evil smile on his face while the news reports that The Usurper “won” the 2020 election.
One need not subscribe to a formal organized religion to recognize the existence of evil in the world, I would argue that most religious systems are simply in part a means to explain the evil that has always been a part of humanity. Clearly there are evil people and I think just as clearly there are some forms of evil so awful that they suggest a supernatural influence. It is never black and white, I shudder to think of the things I am capable of.
Yeah, but The Omen III is still my favorite . . . plus, the first time I saw Sam Neil.
I haven’t hit despair yet, but then I haven’t had to deal with the direct personal tragedy that others have faced, like T4C’s post on The Burning Platform this morning. One of my sons and his wife took the jab, so I may yet have to face it.
I do get depressed about how things are going sometimes. I usually work through it and it ends up hardening my resolve to resist these MFers. I’m not Christian, but that Revelations chapter seems to be making connections these days.
I have a spiritual approach to life. For me, being true to your highest idea of yourself trumps any other consideration. A person’s life is like a work of art wherein he creates that which most clearly expresses who/what he is. It clarifies a lot of decision making, but doesn’t necessarily make anything easier.
I know the “helicopter ride” meme has been around for a while, but c’mon. Mother Earth is going to kill us all in 2022 and if we cut back on fossil fuels *now* she might spare us until 2023. Besides, America is blessed with an abundance of underutilized resources that can readily solve the problem. We have a great, big, beautiful – some might even call it a Grand – canyon. And gravity, Scientists! assure us, works from any height.
I look at the Grand Canyon and feel awe. As in Awwwwwe-l right! Great idea.
My view on religion comes from a wisdom saying commonly attributed to engineers:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
The universe and God (if real) are both far too complex for mortals to understand, so we create models to simplify it to a level we can understand. It is no more wrong to say, “God wants us to be fruitful and multiply” than it is to say “walking under ladders is bad luck.” They are not factually accurate as God likely doesn’t exist and luck is a lack of knowledge of the starting conditions. However, groups that are not fruitful get out-competed and replaced, generally not in a friendly way. People tend to erect ladders to go up them while carrying heavy things like hammers and 2x4s so statistically it is more dangerous to walk under a ladder than around them.
Religion is just a model, the question isn’t whether it is 100% accurate as the human mind cannot handle 100% accuracy, but whether it works. Actually, there are people that take in the entirety of their surroundings without filtering the data through a simplifying process into symbols: we call them severe autistics, and they spend most of their time in bland colored rooms hugging inanimate objects while rocking back and forth.
I do not believe in demons and angels, but I firmly believe that our Enemy does. Look at all the satanic crap in halftime shows, satanic ceremonies by CERN, elite gatherings featuring symbolic cannibalism (“spirit cooking”, often organized by satanist Marina Abramovic who appeared in a recent ad for Bill Gates), child disappearances centered around DC, etc. etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymXw40TvHZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjlT50ZZ2e0
Is the rational response to people who believe and act on satanic impulses to clinically analyze them, or would a more useful model be to revisit the rational reasons for witch burnings and Crusades?
If God doesn’t exist, on what basis do you call them evil? They’re culling the weak, cowardly, and lazy and the human race will be stronger after they’ve done so. That’s certainly their view. It’s rather unsettling that 90% of the population fits those categories.
I call their actions totally evil and depraved because I believe in the God of the Bible, who has told us that all morality starts with Him, handed us a small fraction of what it looks like via Moses, and later clarified it further via Jesus Christ.
Hindus and Muslims will call them evil based on their own beliefs, and the morality those beliefs engender. So will white-path Witches. Atheism is the only religion that can’t do this (excluding all the religions who are Evil’s allies), which is probably why I know a number of atheists who looked at the Evil all around them (as you have), and concluded that there must be something Good as well, and what might that be, and eventually concluded (correctly) that there is some kind of higher power whom we generally refer to as God or perhaps Gods. We might not be capable of understanding this God, but surely whoever that God might be they are capable of reaching out to us.
Team Evil will accept *anyone* who believes in a higher power (*cough* Freemasons), but they won’t take Atheists. It isn’t because Atheists are based and wise and see everything clearly. It’s because they view Atheists as great morons and fools. They have no use for people running in the Spiritual Special Olympics.
Don’t stop seeking. You’re certainly correct about the evil side of what’s going on.
I’m not an atheist, I’m agnostic. If I saw conclusive proof of God’s existence I’d probably be less shocked than many supposed Believers. The universe is weird, and there being a God isn’t as weird as some of the things science has already revealed.
I’m not sure why you think team Evil doesn’t take atheists; I’d be willing to bet there are a fair number of atheists who don’t believe in any of their mumbo-jumbo, they are just there for the power.
“They’re culling the weak, cowardly, and lazy and the human race will be stronger after they’ve done so.”
I highly doubt this. Their actions will lead to the genetic destruction of the most productive, creative strain of humanity, and they have openly announced they are doing so intentionally and that this is a good thing. They don’t want a race of hard to control thinkers, they want a race of subservient slaves.
I’m right. Team Evil doesn’t take atheists.
This video by Altiyan Childs explains it thoroughly. It’s 5 hours long but totally worth it. You’d spend hundreds of hours digesting this from other sources. I’m tossing out the BitChute link but I’m pretty sure it’s still on YouTube and other places. I downloaded it so I could watch it in pieces as time allowed, I think most of the Freemason stuff ends by about the 90 minute mark and the Satanism begins about there. The last 90 minutes or so covers the “Christian Response.” Yeah, I didn’t know who the guy was either but after doing more research on him he deserves more than mockery and insta-disqualification. YMMV.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Yhv9ZMby68Ig/
They don’t want a race of hard to control thinkers, they want a race of subservient slaves.
Which requires a religion: a demonic one*. You get only so far with pure-quill rationalism, because Reason is God’s hand-maiden. You need a materialist magician, a Jordan Peterson type, to really run the Satanic Mills. Atheists, in the spiritual wargame, are Marx’s useful idiots.
The honest atheist simply cannot get the job done.
Agnosticism, sir, is either an excuse for moral or intellectual laziness, or base camp for the greatest intellectual ascent of all: What is real, what is true, what is arete? Assuming the latter (since you are here): Godspeed.
Okay, Mr. Zorost, I’m going to add you to the God blesses for truth-seekers. Fair warning though: If you honestly seek Truth, God’s been known to respond. I pray that God’s angels will surround you and destroy any demonic forces that try to trip you up; that the Spirit of love and truth will quiet your worst impulses, and that Christ will hold out His hand to you.
If I saw conclusive proof of God’s existence
And what, O wise would that be?
“…if I saw conclusive proof of God’s existence…” two things to ponder in your search for Truth, Z… the first is this: the evidence of God is all around us, you don’t see it because of your bias in perception. As the saying goes: “the only thing satan has to do is convince you that the supernatural doesn’t exist.” Successful strategy that’s worked for millenia. Much like the wind – you’ve never seen the wind. You’ve seen the effects of the wind – but you’ve never seen it. And yet, unseen – you don’t doubt its existence. The second thing is this: “faith”.
You won’t see “conclusive proof” because you must simply believe. The answer to this is how childlike and innocent ‘we’ must be to believe. Which is correct. The Lord knows His creation so well, that He told us we must be as little children and have faith; because He knows us – given free will, He wants us to “choose Him” over satan.
I actually believe that God is the simplest and most rational explanation for my life and experiences.
People are sometimes wrong. You can’t pick the thorns to judge the rose.
“I opposed immigration to the United States on the grounds that people in the United States had the highest carbon footprint, so by bringing in more people into the United States they were destroying the planet.”
Take the next logical steps, John:
Shooting illegals, and those who facilitate their entry, on sight, is therefore Carbon Abortion. “For the good of the children, and the planet.”
Shooting Leftists is exorcism.
Of course they’re evil.
And Evil can be tolerated by Good as much as Turd can be tolerated in Punchbowl, and to the exact same percentage: 0%.
It’s going to come down to that, and the sooner people wrap their heads around both the inevitability and the absolute necessity, the shorter the distance to a long-overdue societal correction.
The alternative is cultural extinction.
The Left wants to steer the ship of state into a whirling maelstrom.
It’s time to push them overboard. And toss them a handy boat anchor.
Air Pinochet FTW!
Every day, in every way, Communists are preparing to conquer and destroy us all.
Turnabout is fair play.
In the New Republic, that should be the only airline.
Norman Lear sitcoms? Oh, the horror !
I watch the societal changes, and how evil pervades society masquerading as good. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but considering the good envisioned by the founders of the U.S. – regardless of who they were – evil has a hard time functioning with a society founded on the liberty of all individuals. It’s what it is, and evil never accomplishes peace.
It took 200 years to get from George Washington to BJ Clinton.
Mr. Lear *intentionally* created his sitcoms as vehicles to destroy Christian communities, normal male/female sexual relations, and a free, capable American sociery that could and would tell wanna-be oligarchs to piss off.
Yeah. A bit of a horror show.
His heirs and serfs cannot (and are not allowed) tell an appealing story to save their lives. But Mr. Lear and his cohort did. And we let them.
Oddly enough, Norman Lear is yet another anti-American Jew in the media. Go figure. It must be a cohencidence, and nothing at all to do with the “rural purge”.
https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-lyrics
That was an Easter Egg. Glad someone noticed.
Well, Norman was peddling cultural change, and none of it good. He was Leftist, through and through.
Thias is your “You will have paperwork to fill out on the way to the guillotine / gulag… on a government app moment.”
Your friendly neighborhood library* can get you your books using an app. Sign in, set a pick up time, and arrive within that 15 minute window, and you’re good.Library staff pull the books, check them out using an excellent online catalog, print your reciept and sets it out for you.
Yeah, I know, which is why you *really* have until closing (and we’ve been known to ignore that if we’re slow turning off the computers.) Still, it is a Covidiotic pain in the posterior and the app kind of sucks. So you can ring the back doorbell and we’ll do the same thing, but slower. I have it down to a Gilbraith-level science. Everything that can be preloaded is ready to roll.
The Top Level ladies running this show, with $200k salaries, have decided that EVERY entry which is 100% tracked by the current excellent computer catalog, must be ALSO entered in the ordering-and-pickup app. I kid you not.
Your tax dollar at work
(*and we are friendly, and neighborly. [Redacted] management rules are just opportunities to exercise our creative skills to get you what you want anyway. Unless you’re the Karen who threw his wallet at my head when I asked you for something to distinguish you from all the other John Smiths. You get to enjoy the letyer rules. Besides, you’re not local.)
Ahhh, yes. Hand plus computer. Oh, and print off all my emails.
Blatty, the author of the Exorcist, was military intelligence. This is known about him. The ruling elites in the world have a keen interest in pushing a belief in the judaic form of the supernatural. Thus, our never ending stream of jew-produced and written horror movies.
There is a simpler explanation . . .
Is Ron Paul the only American who still cares about freedom?
Who still couldn’t transmit his values to his own son. That’s how rare the desire for liberty is.
If a person believes there exists a ‘God’ to hate, they aren’t an atheist.
I don’t think big government fans’ brains are ruled by an passion for Evil that gives them unbridled joy when they destroy. Only villains in James Bond movies have brains wired like that. Instead I think most big government fans’ brains are ruled by self-loathing, and when they destroy Truth, Beauty, and Society they get a temporary reprieve from crushing feelings of guilt. Yes, bullies and tattletales exist too and function as enforcers, but the far largest group of big governments fans are persons eaten up inside by the mental illness of self-loathing.
Government is an organization claiming the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Thus, the God you imagine exists is a government. ‘God/Government is Good and Just because it says so in the Book/Constitution He/It dictated, which is ultimate truth because it came from Him/It.’ The same circular argument. But unlike God, at least Washington, DC exists.
“I don’t think big government fans’ brains are ruled by an passion for Evil that gives them unbridled joy when they destroy.”
You obviously haven’t seen the news for the last 100 years or so.
You overlook the obvious: James Bond villains, and real ones, from the Caesars to Atilla to Robbespierre and Napoleon to Hitler, plus the whole pantheon of ardent communists to fifteen seconds ago, all think that when they perform their perfidies, that they are doing good, not evil.
That is the essence of psychopathy and sociopathy, in one sentence.
The truly evil are insane, because they cannot grasp reality, nor appreciate what their actions actually are.
Like rabid dogs, the solution is always a lead injection to the brain at 1000fps or greater, et al; there is no other sufficient cure.
You have 10,000 years of recorded history on that side of the argument, and absolutely nothing against it.
Your sophomoric argument against a God are even more circular than those you object to, because you assume a priori that God does not exist.
Which is rather the entire question under discussion, isn’t it?
One must prove their conclusions, not assume them.
50 yard penalty, and loss of possession.
Re-think.
> because you assume /a priori/ that God does not exist.
Don’t try to shift the burden of proof; that’s a fallacy, an error of the rational thinking process. The burden lies on the person making the positive claim of existence.
> Caesar(s), Atilla, Robbespierre, Napoleon, Hitler
These one-in-ten-million humans are psychopaths (enjoy hurting), but they’re rare. Without millions of supporters they’d just be crazy people plotting, but not getting far. A few percent of their supporters are sociopaths (can’t empathize with the victims they hurt), but most of their supporters have normal empathy and are driven by self-loathing, or belief that loyalty to team trumps conscience.
1) There is no “burden of proof” here. I constructed no edifice. I merely pointed the gaping lack of foundation for your contentions. This is the difference between architecture and building inspecting.
You’re simply guilty of fallaciously assuming your conclusions.
An atheist could point that out to you (in fact, may have just done so for all you know) and you’d still be just as wrong.
Clearly, I misspoke. It’s not that you need to re-think.
It’s that you need to think about the question at all.
All you’re doing is gainsaying, while ignoring the abyss that forms the foundation of your argument, and you act as if closing your eyes to that fact, and sticking your fingers in your ears while saying “LA!LA!LA! I CAN”T HEAR YOU!” is the same as winning.
You’ve run right off the cliff from the outset, Wile E., and everyone knows what happens after that.
You must deal with that flaw before you come to the table, or there’s no point addressing the question further.
2) “These one-in-ten-million humans are psychopaths (enjoy hurting), but they’re rare.”
a) What a sheltered life you must have led to be so convinced of that.
b) They’re anything but rare. Do a ride-along with any police agency in any city, or pull a shift in any emergency room, then get back to us.
c) The only thing rare is getting name recognition for making it to the gold, silver, and bronze levels of competition. They aren’t rare, those few are simply the tip of an enormous iceberg of evil humanity.
I refer you to no less an authority on human nature than Perry Cox:
“Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’ya know what they are, mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds4nEz59oRw
Truer words were never spoken.
I like to believe our thoughts create our reality. Our focus on being helpful to others is major concern. That “help” can come in many forms from healing, teaching, leading, etc. Unfortunately, it may also require us to send (help) a soul to it’s maker for modifications.
I like to reference the functions and chemistry of the human body to prove Jesus does exist. Think about how a finely tuned machine it is from reproduction to healing itself. That did not come from a damn tadpole out of the ocean. Besides if they don’t believe they will be left behind. Headed to church now to pray for humanity and the fellow commenters here have a Blessed day.
ps Any movie with Max Von Sydow is outstanding may he rest in peace.
Yup. Prefer to use a helicopter and the Gulf of Mexico for that.
Years ago, I read of a gentleman – a physician – who specialized in reconstructive surgery, of the human hand; of folks who had a severe hand injury. This Doctor was an agnostic. Then, one day during a very intense surgery, he found himself marveling for the first time, at what he described as ‘eyes being opened to the incredible design, of the musculoskeletal, nerves/blood vessels’ etc. of the hand he was rebuilding… he said after the surgery that he was astonished by the complexity and amazed at the design, of the human hand… He was awakened that day, to the Truth… the evidence is all around us -the human hand being a great example… if there’s a design (which there is, in all this great bio-diversity) then, there is a Designer. Yes, yes there is.
Yup. When I stop and look and see the amazing connectedness of things, the idea that I can’t shove a steak into a computer to make it work, we are amazingly designed machines. Stunning.
Like the Bard said, “What a piece of work is a man . . . .”