Malachi Martin:

For one week the police of a southern Nanking city precinct had been looking for Thomas Wu...Wu...had killed his victims and eaten their bodies...Father Michael Strong...sent word...that he had found the wanted man..."I am conducting an exorcism. Please give me some time."

...They could see Father Strong standing in the middle of the floor. Over in one corner there was another figure, a young, naked man, suddenly ravished by an unnatural look of great age, a long knife in his hands. On the shelves around the inner walls of the storehouse lay rows and rows of naked corpses in various stages of mutilation...

"YOU!!" the naked man was screaming... "YOU want to know MY name!" The words "you" and "my" hit the captain like two clenched fists across the ears...it was the voice that made the captain wonder. He had known Thomas Wu. Never had he heard him speak with such a voice.

"In the name of Jesus," Michael began weakly, "you are commanded..."

"Get outa here! Get the hell outa here, you filthy old eunuch!"

"You will release Thomas Wu, evil spirit, and..."

"I'm taking him with me, pigmy," came the voice... "I'm taking him. And no power anywhere, anywhere, you hear, can stop us. We are as strong as death...And he wants to come! You hear? He wants to!"...

"The voice of Wu pursued them over the noise: "It's all one. Fool! we're all the same. Always were. Always."...

Then the fixity of Thomas' grin broke: his face semed to be replaced by another face...At the top speed of a kaleidoscope, a long succession of faces came and went, one flickering after the other...Faces and expressions Michael never had known...Some he had seen in history books, in paintings, in churches, in newspapers...Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Korean, British, Slavic. Old, young, bearded, clean-shaven. Black, white, yellow. Male, female. Faster. Faster. All grinning with the same grin...

... "Cain..." he began to say weakly to himself...."Wrong again, fool!
Cain's father. I. The cosmic Father of Lies and the cosmic Lord of Death. From the beginning of the beginning...."

Hawaiilawyer, do yourself a favour and check the label on your medication, I think you may be over-indulging.

Hawaii, when I mentioned the Titanic I meant it as a metaphor not the movie. The excorcist huh? The passions of christ was based on a book too, ironically written by an anti semetic nun, maybe her spirit possesses Mels mouth when he drinks.

It is nothing less than moral panic to need a deity to remind a person what the diffence between right and wrong is. Children can only believe in god when they reach the 'monsters under the bed ' stage of psychological development. 100% of Infants are atheists and the fact that infants cannot concieve the concept of a god is the only universal spiritual conceptualisation amongst humans. We are born atheist and we die atheist (corpses dont believe in gods either, or monsters under the bed ). The very young and the dead dont know anything about right and wrong either. Right and wrong (morality) are purely cultural , are not universal and morality evolves to suit the social climate. In the middle ages a good many European women were executed for blasphemy , the blasphemy of mourning for a dead child which is clearly against gods will. To the community at the time it was wrong to see children as precious. We have more in common with pagan Rome with our attitudes towards our children than did the Christian era, belief Vs economics? Infantcide was just as rampant in Christian Europe as it was in China early in the 20th Century.

In reality we 'learn' right and wrong through experience akin to Pavlovs dog.

Speaking of dogs, dogs are domesticated wolves made immature through domestication. Oliver, community is primo to a wolf. Wolves have evolved into a true operalisation of all for one and one for all. All primates of course have rather loose loyalties compared to wolves and lets face it chimpanzees and humans have been known to be sleezy at times. I guess to draw an ecological fallacy from this is chimps need jesus too, why are there not missionaries at zoo's?

Hawaiilawyer,

Psalm: 82

Thanks. I understood God singluar to refer to El the Head of the Council.Yehwah was just one of the gods, plural. Will check.

West,

Agree with your comments about wolves and dogs. There is some debate on this matte, whether dogs and wolves are separate species. From what I have read, the majority side with what you have said about dogs being immature" wolves". I saw a TV pragramme on primates where it was said said that chimps are more promiscuous than apes who normally stick to one parter [like birds]. Trivia: Some called called E.B. Twitmyer discovered Pavlovian conditioning, before Pavlov. However, that person was a grad. student, so took any notice at the time.

All,

-- Please, excuse the aside to our topic

I swore i wouldn't read this article cause this author reminds me of why i always fell asleep in church, but unfortunately the number of posts has piqued my curiosity.

"Perhaps Athanasius, for all his thuggery, saw how things would go if Arius had had his day, a deficient theology that could not be at the centre of the flowering of the culture of the West. So perhaps the logic was more about the outcome than of seeing the invisible things of God!"

Yeah like the West is some kind of wonderful utopia that we have to thank this Athanaius character for steering the Christian theology in the direction he did. Otherwise those wise Christians who started the flowering of our western culture might have erred and set us on a path towards decadence, social decay and a society steeped in "sin". Thank God that didn't happen!