"I’ve got to tell the truth as I see it. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that the Devil is real. And I believe that the world is not what most of us in the modern West think it is. I don’t just believe that; I know that."
Amen! So do I!
And amen on dealing with criminals as Bukele has. We need more prisons and more violent and thieving criminals in them.
BTW, do you see that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu insists on going very easy on criminals? Guess where the next crime tourist hot spot is.
A bit of advice for everyone: do NOT read and/or collect lots of books about evil and possession. Read just enough to open you eyes then stop. Thats enough to change your life for the better. If you go further, Evil takes notice of your "interests."
In considering the Devil it is wise to keep C.S. Lewis’s observation in mind (from “The Screwtape Letters”):
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
I remember reading that Lewis himself felt rather unwell after writing Screwtape, as if he were himself something of a conduit, and was glad to see the back of that writing project.
I can well believe that. Nietzsche may not have realized just how accurate his perception was when he wrote, “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (or maybe he did know: he did go off his rocker).
I suspect Nietzsche did know. I remember attending a lecture years ago on him, and the lecturer made the point that in declaring "God is dead", Nietzsche was not being triumphalist, but wary.
I think that's sound advice. It's better to make the sign of the Cross and say an Our Father and a Hail Mary whenever such evil entities cross our mind.
I can attest that a series of odd and unpleasant things have happened to me since I wrote an article on Satan in art last Halloween, starting with the computer eating the article halfway through to a freak car accident two days ago. I'm considering seeking deliverance prayers. Although I know a fair amount about occultism, I have not practiced it and my collection of such reference books sits under holy icons.
After reading recommendations from a number of sources (including this blog) to listen to The Exorcist Files, I started to do so. One evening several months ago when my husband was out of the country, I was sitting in my living room with a cat on my lap, listening to an early episode. It was a clear, quiet night. My heart was already racing as the demon was about to start speaking (in the dramatic reenactment). Suddenly I heard a loud electronic crack when my speaker, along with the whole house including all of the lights, lost power. I was engulfed in darkness and the cat was startled. There was no storm or any other reason to explain the power outage. The power returned in about a minute, but I was so shaken that I took it as a sign to stop listening. I called my husband on the phone for reassurance. Later I started asking myself why God would scare me out of listening to the podcast; wouldn't God be gentle? Maybe instead it was the evil one who didn't want me to keep listening? My powers of discernment are not keen enough to know what that was all about--assuming it wad a sign, which side was it from?
I was thinking recently about resuming the podcast, but Fr. Venuti's caution is wise.
Or maybe it was some random power glitch.Those happen, especially if you live in an area with an older grid. Happened to me several times a year in Baltimore. And don't get me started on the sporadic but frequent internet outages I experienced in Delaware.
I have to agree with Jon on this one. Maybe I lean a little too much toward skepticism, but irregularities in the power grid are happening more and more. It's not just aging infrastructure but also more concerningly, nonstop cyber attacks. I think we're past the era of being able to mostly associate power outages with storms. At my last job, I used to listen to a variety of podcasts, including true crime ones, one of which was the very case in Matamoros that Rod wrote about. So far I have yet to have anything bad happen to me as a result of listening to any of them. If it still creeps you out, by all means move on to something else, but let's also be careful not to see a demon behind every weird thing that happens.
Something else which causes power outrages: car crashes involving utility poles. In my Baltimore neighborhood some drunk woman smashed her car into a pole and half the neighborhood (luckily for me, not my half) was without power for two days.
That also happened in our neighborhood a couple of years ago: guy negligently drove his truck into a telephone pole. His insurance company paid for lots of fried appliances, air conditioners, etc.
You guys have a point that it might just have been a coincidence and not a sign. How can I know? I cannot. Maybe I will try listening again. But I still take Father's caution seriously.
I would never tell anyone to ignore orx disbelieve in Hell. But as someone else posted above it's rate for spiritual entities to interact with the physical world (as opposed to misleading and oppressing us mentally and spiritually)
An exorcist in an interview I saw claimed that demons fear the Holy Mother the most. He also made the claim, that the prayer "The Holy Mother is the Queen of Heaven!" is among the most effective in forcing demons to leave. I'm afraid I don't remember who it was exactly as I saw quite a few of these interviews. Do you concur?
Also, if you don't mind my curiosity, in your view, what role does the Holy Spirit play in exorcisms? Jesus was known to use the Holy Spirit for healing, but I'm not sure about exorcisms. Whatever light you can shed on the issue, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance and may God bless you.
As CS Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, paraphrasing, that devils delight in both ignoring them and taking an undue interest in them. Know they are there. Know they are active and looking for opportunities. And leave it there.
I have seen this first hand. Many years ago I worked in a Barnes and Noble, and witchcraft books (this being the late 90s) were increasingly trendy. But B&N would only stock what they thought would sell, so really obscurist books were usually not on the shelves. That didn't stop people from asking for them, and we had a customer we thankfully encountered rarely who would routinely ask for esoteric stuff on demonology - the guy was scary, tall, had a low gravely voice, and reeked of cigarette smoke. He terrified my managers (who were all young-ish women). You could just feel that there was something wrong with the guy.
I remember well my first encounter with him. It was after 10 pm (we closed at 11), and he came in and loomed over the info desk where I was working at the time. In that low gravelly voice his words, slowly drawn out, were: "Demons. Where are your books on demons?"
No one aware of the invisible realm should give the slightest damn about whether the psuedo-rationalistic flatlanders imagine us to be crazy; that's like a circle calling a sphere crazy, or a blind man saying we're insane to talk about a thing called sight. What could they possibly know about that? If you see, you see—it's just a total asymmetry.
Of course. And personally, I think it provides a very coherent framework for explaining the mysterious things reported about Jesus after the Resurrection.
Just tripped over Sullivan’s book at B&N. Guess I gotta buy it. In somewhat the same vein, I’d recommend a very recent online essay in The European Conservative, “Civilization Is From the Jews.”
I'm off to buy and read Randall Sullivan's new book. I did not read much of Rod's review as of yet because I want to read the book first. But I the review. What Rod says about Sullivan's writing is true. Sullivan will particularly appeal to people whose logic makes them want all the details- who have skeptical thoughts - skepticism is healthy as there are many things trying to fool us out there, but Sullivan is telling truths and tends to address, in great detail, what could make a skeptic put down his book. And for me, I like the doctrine and the details both.
Oh, and having taught for a very long time in a "majority Mexican School" (almost all the kids were born there or brought there as children) I think this one is going to especially be a mind blower for me. Crikey, might explain some things I saw.
Reading "The Miracle Detective", by Sullivan changed my life. For years, I had denied God supernaturally intervenes after deciding Christianity was not logical. (Though it is indeed not logical, Rod has good ideas about how to deal with that fact).
I'd say it's potentially logical, in the sense that non-Euclidean geometry is still geometry: it depends on the dimensional parameters we have in mind. Logic only functions within a system established by extra-logical axioms and assumptions. On a flat plane a triangle's angles must add up to 180 degrees, but on a curved plane it can be more than 180.
Indeed. However even Non-Euclidian Geometry has postulates you must accept.
Mathematicians have no trouble believing in miracles if they accept the postulate "God is all powerful", that is how Geometry works, that is how things work, that is how I held my faith for so many years. I won't say a lot more here, in case I awaken worries about suffering (which is no logically explicable ) in someone else (not you, but someone reading.) - But you get the idea. Every Geometry depends on the acceptance of postulates - the postulates are *not* proven, you accept them. Euclid's unproven but accepted five postulates are accepted for Euclidian ("regular") geometry, not all are accepted for non-Euclidean Geometry. Postulates are unproven statements of faith, and they are not logical, just accepted.
Right—so I'd think that "There's a corruption running through existence, and it isn't God's fault" would be a postulate that helps us get at the things that perturbed the Buddha, in a way that doesn't undermine faith in God's perfect goodness. Basically, original sin is a postulate.
Yes, or as Sullivan was just explaining in the part I'm reading, Zoroaster subtracted a bit from the all-powerfulness of God in order to account for evil existing. I was saying Christianity, with an all-powerful God, is not logical. I did consider something along the lines of Zoroastrianism when I was basically a deist. But it did not make sense to me either in the end. Human logic it does not make sense, could we agree perhaps?
(I think you would love this book so much, by the way.)
(edit: decided to edit out a bit of detail on why I disbelieved Christianity and even something like Zoroastrianism for a time- would not want be a stumbling block to anyone)
My somewhat controversial view is that the corruption in existence is intimately connected to our freedom, so the corruption is outside of God's power in the exact same sense that our freedom is outside of His power. I'd say that His power is already mitigated by the fact that He will not force us to love Him (and for God, "will not" and "cannot" amount to the same thing, since there is no lacuna between the potential and the actual in Him).
Re: was saying Christianity, with an all-powerful God, is not logical.
By creating a world that is independent of Him with freedom to go its own way God has voluntarily limited his own omnipotence. Into the gap evil grows like mold in a dark crypt. This is why the Answer we have from him is not some gaudy Deus ex Machina fixing of everything by mere whim, but rather the Child born in obscurity who grows up to be the Healer who is then hung on the Cross-- and rising again, tramples down death by death.
I would add that in a sense, He thus never was "omnipotent", since the voluntary limitation is not a thing He chooses at a point in time; it is simply HIs own nature. From eternity He makes room for freedom and love, and He was never anything else, and He could not have been otherwise.
Would you be so kind as to tell me what you mean by "logical".
I have a very strong negative reaction to reading that Christianity is not logical. I am sure that this is a result of you and I having very different understandings of the word, "logical".
I am a math teacher and in teaching my students how to solve equations, I teach them the rules they can apply to an equation in order to find the solution. I was taught that logic is very similar. Given a set of premises, we can apply the rules of logic to the premises to obtain valid conclusions.
So, when I read that Christianity is not logical, it says to me that Christianity is asserting conclusions that are logically invalid, that are in fact false. That Christianity is asserting falsehood as truth and that God is the father of lies. Hence, I have a strong negative reaction.
Therefore, I am interested in what you mean by "logical" since I am very confident your understanding is not the same as mine.
If you'll forgive me, I think it could be harmful if I convinced someone here that Christianity is not logical. They might not deal with it as I eventually did - to go with the strong faith in their hearts, and the experience of awe they have both had and read of and choose to believe Christian doctrine. I might not convince you it is not logical, but I might convince someone, which would not be good. I'd offer PMs but like me, you are a math teacher and so probably have strong logic. I don't think it is impossible I would hurt your faith. I don't want to be guilty of that.
I might add there is something I accept as fact that would have to be true for Christianity to be illogical. I do consider that thing to be indisputable. But if it is not true then my argument would fall. I did think very hard for a very long time about ways in which is should be untrue, but could not.
Bottom line here - let's say a person cannot logically resolve something about Christianity. They should try, because it does mostly make sense. But if they still find something they can't resolve logically, they do not have to leave.
Pints with Aquinas on Youtube gets pretty deeply into this on a recent episode. The guest is philosopher, Dr Logan Gage, if you're interested.....it's a long discussion.
Though I have encountered no logical contradictions in Christianity, I have encountered a number of difficulties. There are things I simply don't like. There are apparent discrepancies. There are things I simply don't understand. (And wanting to understand things is an important part of my character.)
So, similarly to you, I treat these difficulties, not as reasons to reject Christianity, but as mysteries that God will reveal to me in time, even if that time is eschatological in nature.
I am sorry, I did not mean to imply that you did. All I meant to say was that though God has preserved me (and not you) from encountering an apparent logical contradiction in Christianity, I have encountered difficulties. And I have dealt with those difficulties by leaning on my faith in God.
I can personally attest to the very real existence of the Devil. The Devil is not an abstraction or a symbol, but an—entity, perhaps?—that actively, maliciously, and deliberately desires the enslavement and ultimately the death of each human being. And the Devil will convince you that that is what you want for yourself as well.
Take heed!
One favor the Devil did for me: he overplayed his hand and revealed himself too clearly. And the revelation of the existence of the Devil necessarily implied the existence of God. I'm not at all sure that I ever would have come to any sort of faith at all had I not seen the face of evil so clearly.
And how do I know that? I've seen that look in Gonzalo Aguirre's face in my own eyes. May those days be forever behind me!
I am fairly well read but not well educated, having struck out on my own at an early age, so I did not know the Baudelaire quote about the devil. A thousand times yes! I've thought for a long time that when he convinced us of his non- existence, he took with him our belief in enchantment, the mysteries of God, and all that is not readily seen. Even some so called Satanists appear to not believe in Lucifer, but follow a weird and self centered sort of humanist hocus- pocus. It is absolutely essential that we recover a firm belief in the devil lest we fail to have any understanding that there is a war going on and we'd better follow our leader.
The great text here is Baudelaire's "Au lecteur" (To the Reader), which opens Les fleurs du mal. If you have any French, try it. The best of the translations that follow is Roy Campbell's, in my opinion (Lowell is too clever by half). The two final quatrains are the most terrifying (in the sense of accurate) prophecy of where we have got to I know of. You may recognize the final line from a more recent poem.
People who say they are Satanists and then turn around and say- we don’t really mean it we’re actually secular humanists - puzzle me. Like Satan is really the ideal symbol of humanism. Ironically , they may be right.
Rod wrote: "....a true account of a spectacular, well-documented 1928 exorcism in the US."
That made me smile. Last year when I saw Rod, exorcists came up in conversation and I mentioned this event as I have family members who were parishioners at St Joseph's parish in Earling, IA at the time of the 1928 exorcism recorded in Carl Vogt's 1935 German language account, since republished by TAN books in English as "Begone, Satan". It was the mention of TAN publishing that drew a mild look of disbelief from Rod because, well, TAN has a well-deserved reputation for preferring the speculative side of Catholicism, especially unapproved, alleged private revelations.
The entire account is a bit much; the word 'spectacular' certainly applies. My gut feel is that it might be a touch embellished. Yet, I asked aged relatives (now passed - they had not read the book) about the event and they volunteered some info matching the book, particularly the levitation and that about six or so strong men could barely restrain the subject. Although the public was not allowed into the small convent next to the church (torn down in the late 1960s) where the sessions were held, word spreads fast in a small farming community. The nuns and some strong farmers were part of it. All this to say, relatives who lived in the time and place of the event asserted to me that the exorcism and some of its reported events really happened.
Could you say more? How did your relatives know of levitation and six people needed to hold someone down? I tend to think evil, evil spirits, etc. influence minds but have no physical power, e.g., levitation. But I am open to proof that I am wrong, in fact, I seek it. (Unusual strength is documented under stress, for instance, mothers lifting a whole car off a child fallen under it's wheel, but levitation by evil power is something I want evidence of if it is true. I've seen what I consider to be good evidence of levitation by the power of God, btw.)
As mentioned, the nuns and men assisting were witnesses and they talked. Small town. It lasted for months. The community was asked to pray for it to come to end after a while. It was all very much public knowledge and fairly well documented.
The levitation was more than just floating; she jumped up on the door frame and crouched there for a while. The classic signs of possession (exceptional strength, aversion/detection of holy items, fluency in languages never studied and knowledge of secret things) were all present in this case. For example, the exorcist had told those assisting to go to Confession prior to helping. Some did not and possessed person publicly stated their unconfessed sins to the whole room, much to their surprise and embarrassment.
Evil spirits are typically limited to tempting us unless we give them more 'rights' by occult practices / grave sin. Spirits have been known to occasional affect the material world but this is rare. As has been mentioned in blog multiple times, it's best not to delve too deeply into what the dark world's up to but to keep the focus on Christ. As this story is part of the family lore, I have a particular interest in it.
According to Biblical accounts, as well as that of demonic encounters from priests, victims and bystanders, the idea they cannot affect the physical world is simply not true.
Rod, I don't know if you'd seen this - fascinating new book about "Spiritual not religious" and how it is anything but - from a great reformed theologian, the first of what will be three volumes. Shaman and Sage is the title, I think it would be worth your time. There was a great interview on the White Horse Inn podcast/YouTube channel about the same. The thesis is that much of the "philosophical" tradition is a form of religion in disguise and relates to the worship of the self. How the very concept of superstition is tied up in this debate from the beginnings of the church and how there really isn't "disenchantment" in the sense that you can't hide from God and the spiritual beings that inhabit our world, but open the door to them by denying them.
Thank you for writing this installment. It's a book I will read with great if dismayed interest.
You may be able to find video of Westley Allan Dodd on YouTube. There was a segment about him on one of the ABC magazine shows, probably 20/20. He was interviewed, not long before his hanging. ( This was in Washington State, in the late 1980s, I think. I believe he was given a choice of methods of execution, and chose to be hanged. ) During the interview, he had a hard time not crying, not about his impending execution, but about what he had done. From all accounts, he marched boldly up to the scaffold and stood resolutely on the trap door. I have no doubt about his redemption. Why should any Christian be surprised by it? Our Christ Jesus is beyond all superlatives combined and multiplied infinitely.
About the matter of human sacrifice. Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of talk about what theorists had begun to call "The Smiley Face Murders." There had been for about a decade by then a weird phenomenon of college age young men having disappeared, to be found eventually in a lake or river near an abutment with a smiley face drawn in chalk on a nearby abutment. I think those who believed that something nefarious had happened attributed something like twenty murders to this weird plenitude of such deaths.
Of course, police departments in the upper Midwest, where most of these deaths happened, attributed them to lamentable terrible luck, not to any organized activity. The cops were not impressed by the remarkable similarities of the cases: all of the young men had been attractive, academic high achievers who had last been seen alive in bars.
This always struck me as typically opaque of the police. Look, I love police. A cop who had been extremely affable with me when I was a silly ass teenager ( the child is father to the man ) was a few years later shot to death by a drug dealer. In true Texas style, my dying friend had killed the dealer. But what staph can be to human beings, police bureaucracies can be to police investigations. I think that maybe the smiley face had been a red herring unintentionally planted by one of the early investigators of the phenomenon.
I've never believed these deaths were without a much deeper meaning than would be the case if these young men, all supposedly quite drunk when they left the bars, had accidentally fallen into water and been unable to save themselves. For one thing, it never seemed to happen to a woman. And I have personal experience of the fabulous capacity of police officials to be oblivious. Beyond that, I lived in Houston during the early 1970s, when the sexual psychopath Dean Corll and his paid teenage accomplices lured at least twenty seven boys to their deaths. Long before the existence of this monstrous thing was exposed by one of the accomplices' shooting Corll ( there is a deeply satisfying photo of Corll's naked body slumped against a wall ), parents of the missing boys, certain that something very wrong was happening, had been hammering away at the cops, begging them to investigate. Despite the fact that fifteen of the missing boys had gone to the same junior high school, the parents got the same genial turndown every time:
"You folks got to accept that your boy's a runaway. He's prolly out thar in California with a hippa ( received Texas pronunciation at the time ) chick."
There is no reason to believe that Dean Corll was an occultist. I bring him and his invisibility to the police up to point out that despite the cops' near universal dismissal of the "smiley face" idea, these killings still go on. The young man in Nashville this past spring is an example. But it's now the Austin area which is the locus of these disappearances, specifically, I think, the lake.
America is loaded with MS-13 and other psychopaths. But there's no reason to believe anything sinister is going on.
I am sitting while writing this in Lacrosse, WI where a number of the those drowned college boys were. The LPD insisted it was the binge drinking culture of the city and university in town that were to blame. 3rd Street, where most of the college bars are, is less than a 5 min walk from the river. Lacrosse did have the reputation at one time as having the most bars per capita of any city in the US. The question was why did the deaths start occurring only in the late 90's when the city has been that way for decades. I don't know if it is still going on, but some volunteer groups did start late night patrols in Riverside park along the Mississippi where most the victims ended up. Have not heard much more about it since. At the time, great way to start an argument with some people was to proclaim, "There is no serial killer in Lacrosse!"
Yeah, there have been a lot of strange deaths of men around Lady Bird Lake over the last couple of years, all with the same general MO. And something about seems dark and unsettling.
Yep, that's it, although I don't believe a lot of the victims were gay. My wife wife and I know some Austin PD and local DPS folks who all say the higher ups are ramping down any suggestion there's a serial killer because of the effect it would have on tourism. I believe them. They also say the public would be absolutely horrified by the true level of crime in the area. That I also believe. Something dark descended on Austin over the last few years.
When I lived in Florida before there were a series of disappearances of young gay men in the Tampa Bay area. Then the badly decomposed body of one was found in a junked car. There was enough forensic evidence to eventually lead to an arrest: a couple into extreme SM would pick up young gay guys in Tampa bars take them home for a three way, tie them up and torture them to death, They would dismember the bodies afterward and dispose of the parts in dumpsters. For some reason they were unable to do that with their last victim and left his corpse to rot in that junked car.
There's no limit it would seem to human depravity.
Serial killers exist. We had one, specializing in offing young women, in the town where I grew up. Given the facts you state I'm amazed the cops wouldn't suspect that possibility.
The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway of South Seattle, was one of the most evil. He had a hate for prostitutes. Of his 49 known victims, 48 were prostitutes. Most of his murders were done from 1982-85. He met a woman that year who became his girlfriend and eventually his wife and only three more murders happened during Ridgway's marriage. Did the three murders happen during low periods of his marriage? I don't know. But Ridgway proves that man can be so evil but also live an ordinary life which he largely did from 1985-2001. Apparently Ridgway and his wife loved to go to yard sales and were a couple of packrats. However, one thing Ridgway proved to be of value. Lie detector tests, at least those used in the 1980s, are pretty much worthless. Ridgway was a suspect by 1983 and he passed a lie detector test. Meanwhile, a South Seattle taxi-driver who knew some of the prostitutes failed the lie detector test.
In reference to the Houston matter fifty years ago, there are two excellent articles which I know about. The Houston Press has one. I don't remember its title. The Texas Monthly article has an unforgettable title: The Lost Boys.
One of the reporters applied for and got access to the entire Houston Police Department file on the case. He writes that there was not a single pre - discovery note in it. Not a single message by a patrol officer which said something like, "I think we should check this out."
In late 1971, several of the parents organized their own patrol. ( Most of the murders happened in The Heights, in northwest Houston. ) One evening, they saw a van which none of them recognized moving slowly through the dark. Instinctively, they got the license plate number on the van and took it to the police station, begging them to check out the driver. The cops laughed it off.
It was Dean Corll's van. The cops might have preempted at least a dozen murders, probably more. Really, if in a casual visit to someone's house, you spot two homemade torture boards, complete with handcuffs, you might conjecture that something unhealthy has been going on.
I remember both cases you mention, Bobby. Dodd took a young boy from a park, drove him to a motel room and strangled the boy. He accepted his death penalty. He chose death by hanging. Corll was a real nutcase. His accomplice was Wayne Henley who would lure teens and young men to Corll's house where Corll had a torture room. Corll kept the corpses, I believe, in some sort of boathouse away from his own house. Corll wanted to kill a girl Henley befriended and Henley killed Corll. Henley still lives today in a Texas prison. The attitude of the Houston police was how you portray it. Indifferent. "Face it, he's a runaway." That attitude wouldn't exist today. The media and politicians would be all on the backs of the cops.
Corll's first known victim, Jeffrey Konin, lived in my dorm at UT - Austin for the first few weeks of the school year. I remember the story in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, about his disappeance.
I hesitate to say the following, but it's true. Sometime in the spring or early summer of 1973, I was standing on the sidewalk waiting for a bus in downtown. Like everyone else, I was looking in the direction the bus would be coming from. From the other direction, some kid rammed deliberately into me. I looked at him. I was much bigger than he was, and reacted loudly and unpleasantly. He laughed, said he was sorry, and moved on.
The day in August, 1973 when Henley shot Corll and the whole thing came to light, of course, it was The Story. On NBC Nightly News, John Chancellor began the program by saying, "Our top story tonight is murder." I saw news film of Henley, and of course, more film and photos over the next few days. I was struck instantly by his resemblance to the kid who had tried to get something started with me a few months earlier. If I were forced to make a guess, it would be that it had been Henley. He has a conscience, and people who have written about him have written about his going increasingly out of control as 1973 wore on.
You know that "six points of separation" idea, that if you could figure it out, you'd find that you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows, let's say, Ringo Starr? I have a bizarre number of those, and they're close and unsettling: my mother's first boss had been shot by John Dillinger, a good friend of hers had been a childhood playmate of Bonnie Parker's, and it gets even creepier. The Henley possibility fits.
Funny how that is, the six points of separation. For instance, my grandfather worked in the mail room of the British Embassy from 1952-68. He remembers the Duke of Windsor, blind drunk, commandeering an Embassy vehicle and driving the wrong way on a one-way street in Washington DC. The Duke of Windsor was defended by Winston Churchill who knew..........
It is odd. When I was a teenager, the writer, Larry McMurtry, and I lived in the same neighborhood and were acquainted. I'm sure he thought I was a dolt, but if you think of the McMurtry novels which have been made into movies, it gives me two or three degrees of separation from all sorts of famous people.
But it's the sinister ones which fascinate me, such as the Dillinger connection. Wholesome stuff. Still, I think that in a highly meaningful Universe, these things come as close to being meaningless as anything ever does.
My Dad knew Jimmy Hoffa. Dad was in Teamsters Local 299 which Hoffa's original Local. Dad knew full well Hoffa was up to his eyebrows in shady stuff (and Frank Fitzsimmons too), and he gave the guy very wide berth.
Around 20 years ago I read Sullivan's "The Price of Experience," about the 1980s LA-based Billionaire Boys Club and its singularly evil leader Joe Hunt. One thing that stuck with me was Hunt telling a story about his mom taking him to a psychic as a young boy. The psychic runs out of the room saying the boy was the devil.
Anyways, here's the 60 Minutes interview with Hunt.
Rod wrote: "First, it reveals how deeply occultism is woven into the mentality of Mexicans"
FWIW, the Mexican convenience store in my old Chicago neighborhood of mostly aging East Europeans and 20-30 something yuppies sold candles of the occult figures St Muerte and Jesus Malverde next to the ones of St John Paul II and the Our Lady of Guadelupe. Something for everybody, I guess...
I do think it's a bit much to read extensively into the stuff, sometimes. There's a bar in town that had a Santa Muerte candle around Halloween (you know, sppoky!) and then a Virgin Mary candle a little later, probably because it was what they could find. As far as I could tell, nothing about the place instantaneously changed from evil to good. I think that spirits respond to intentions, and people doing one superficial thing or another in total ignorance might not amount to very much.
I would not expect candle substitution in a bar to change the ambiance. The observation was more that these would not both be sold were there not demand for each.
There is clearly a collective knowledge or intelligence that binds humans around the world. Think of depictions of Dragons. They’re the same in China as in Medieval Europe, but there was no way that this was an “idea exchange” - both cultures knew what a dragon looked like.
Think then of evil. It exists within this universal knowledge that we possess that links people around the world - which is tactically enhanced by the internet and social media.
It spreads. It multiplies. And everyone around the world knows what it looks like.
The above is the non-religious explanation as to why Evil is such a force. The religious explanation is more straightforward.
"I’ve got to tell the truth as I see it. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that the Devil is real. And I believe that the world is not what most of us in the modern West think it is. I don’t just believe that; I know that."
Amen! So do I!
And amen on dealing with criminals as Bukele has. We need more prisons and more violent and thieving criminals in them.
BTW, do you see that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu insists on going very easy on criminals? Guess where the next crime tourist hot spot is.
A bit of advice for everyone: do NOT read and/or collect lots of books about evil and possession. Read just enough to open you eyes then stop. Thats enough to change your life for the better. If you go further, Evil takes notice of your "interests."
Also, having an icon in your house of St. Michael crushing Satan is always a good idea.
Leo XIII's prayer to him is very powerful. I've shared it with a protestant friend of mine and he finds it helpful too.
I have been advised the same thing several times by priests in a position to know. So thank you!
In considering the Devil it is wise to keep C.S. Lewis’s observation in mind (from “The Screwtape Letters”):
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
I remember reading that Lewis himself felt rather unwell after writing Screwtape, as if he were himself something of a conduit, and was glad to see the back of that writing project.
I can well believe that. Nietzsche may not have realized just how accurate his perception was when he wrote, “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (or maybe he did know: he did go off his rocker).
I suspect Nietzsche did know. I remember attending a lecture years ago on him, and the lecturer made the point that in declaring "God is dead", Nietzsche was not being triumphalist, but wary.
I think that's sound advice. It's better to make the sign of the Cross and say an Our Father and a Hail Mary whenever such evil entities cross our mind.
I can attest that a series of odd and unpleasant things have happened to me since I wrote an article on Satan in art last Halloween, starting with the computer eating the article halfway through to a freak car accident two days ago. I'm considering seeking deliverance prayers. Although I know a fair amount about occultism, I have not practiced it and my collection of such reference books sits under holy icons.
Sorry to hear of your misfortunes. Your article is quite good.
After reading recommendations from a number of sources (including this blog) to listen to The Exorcist Files, I started to do so. One evening several months ago when my husband was out of the country, I was sitting in my living room with a cat on my lap, listening to an early episode. It was a clear, quiet night. My heart was already racing as the demon was about to start speaking (in the dramatic reenactment). Suddenly I heard a loud electronic crack when my speaker, along with the whole house including all of the lights, lost power. I was engulfed in darkness and the cat was startled. There was no storm or any other reason to explain the power outage. The power returned in about a minute, but I was so shaken that I took it as a sign to stop listening. I called my husband on the phone for reassurance. Later I started asking myself why God would scare me out of listening to the podcast; wouldn't God be gentle? Maybe instead it was the evil one who didn't want me to keep listening? My powers of discernment are not keen enough to know what that was all about--assuming it wad a sign, which side was it from?
I was thinking recently about resuming the podcast, but Fr. Venuti's caution is wise.
Or maybe it was some random power glitch.Those happen, especially if you live in an area with an older grid. Happened to me several times a year in Baltimore. And don't get me started on the sporadic but frequent internet outages I experienced in Delaware.
I have to agree with Jon on this one. Maybe I lean a little too much toward skepticism, but irregularities in the power grid are happening more and more. It's not just aging infrastructure but also more concerningly, nonstop cyber attacks. I think we're past the era of being able to mostly associate power outages with storms. At my last job, I used to listen to a variety of podcasts, including true crime ones, one of which was the very case in Matamoros that Rod wrote about. So far I have yet to have anything bad happen to me as a result of listening to any of them. If it still creeps you out, by all means move on to something else, but let's also be careful not to see a demon behind every weird thing that happens.
Something else which causes power outrages: car crashes involving utility poles. In my Baltimore neighborhood some drunk woman smashed her car into a pole and half the neighborhood (luckily for me, not my half) was without power for two days.
That also happened in our neighborhood a couple of years ago: guy negligently drove his truck into a telephone pole. His insurance company paid for lots of fried appliances, air conditioners, etc.
You guys have a point that it might just have been a coincidence and not a sign. How can I know? I cannot. Maybe I will try listening again. But I still take Father's caution seriously.
I would never tell anyone to ignore orx disbelieve in Hell. But as someone else posted above it's rate for spiritual entities to interact with the physical world (as opposed to misleading and oppressing us mentally and spiritually)
Watching Nefarious convinced me I had no need to dwell on demonic activity. Their demonic activity is dwelling on me. Keep your eyes on Jesus.
An exorcist in an interview I saw claimed that demons fear the Holy Mother the most. He also made the claim, that the prayer "The Holy Mother is the Queen of Heaven!" is among the most effective in forcing demons to leave. I'm afraid I don't remember who it was exactly as I saw quite a few of these interviews. Do you concur?
Also, if you don't mind my curiosity, in your view, what role does the Holy Spirit play in exorcisms? Jesus was known to use the Holy Spirit for healing, but I'm not sure about exorcisms. Whatever light you can shed on the issue, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance and may God bless you.
I would heartily recommend looking up videos by Father Vincent Lampert - he is a Catholic exorcist and talks quite frankly about the matter.
Yes, I think he was the exorcist in question, I just couldn't recall his name. Very informative indeed.
As CS Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, paraphrasing, that devils delight in both ignoring them and taking an undue interest in them. Know they are there. Know they are active and looking for opportunities. And leave it there.
I've thought about this. It's good that I'm aware that this stuff exists, but I want to keep it far afield.
I have seen this first hand. Many years ago I worked in a Barnes and Noble, and witchcraft books (this being the late 90s) were increasingly trendy. But B&N would only stock what they thought would sell, so really obscurist books were usually not on the shelves. That didn't stop people from asking for them, and we had a customer we thankfully encountered rarely who would routinely ask for esoteric stuff on demonology - the guy was scary, tall, had a low gravely voice, and reeked of cigarette smoke. He terrified my managers (who were all young-ish women). You could just feel that there was something wrong with the guy.
I remember well my first encounter with him. It was after 10 pm (we closed at 11), and he came in and loomed over the info desk where I was working at the time. In that low gravelly voice his words, slowly drawn out, were: "Demons. Where are your books on demons?"
No one aware of the invisible realm should give the slightest damn about whether the psuedo-rationalistic flatlanders imagine us to be crazy; that's like a circle calling a sphere crazy, or a blind man saying we're insane to talk about a thing called sight. What could they possibly know about that? If you see, you see—it's just a total asymmetry.
Sure! I just e-mailed you.
You've read Abbot's "Flatlandia".
Of course. And personally, I think it provides a very coherent framework for explaining the mysterious things reported about Jesus after the Resurrection.
Yep https://open.substack.com/pub/thomasfdavis/p/the-fourth-dimension?r=bbwgp&utm_medium=ios
See you in Dallas tonite!
Just tripped over Sullivan’s book at B&N. Guess I gotta buy it. In somewhat the same vein, I’d recommend a very recent online essay in The European Conservative, “Civilization Is From the Jews.”
As an alternative to Amazon, perhaps consider bookshop.org which assists independent local bookshops...
https://bookshop.org/p/books/living-in-wonder-finding-mystery-and-meaning-in-a-secular-age-rod-dreher/21292237
It's there and available for pre-ordering.
I'm off to buy and read Randall Sullivan's new book. I did not read much of Rod's review as of yet because I want to read the book first. But I the review. What Rod says about Sullivan's writing is true. Sullivan will particularly appeal to people whose logic makes them want all the details- who have skeptical thoughts - skepticism is healthy as there are many things trying to fool us out there, but Sullivan is telling truths and tends to address, in great detail, what could make a skeptic put down his book. And for me, I like the doctrine and the details both.
Oh, and having taught for a very long time in a "majority Mexican School" (almost all the kids were born there or brought there as children) I think this one is going to especially be a mind blower for me. Crikey, might explain some things I saw.
Reading "The Miracle Detective", by Sullivan changed my life. For years, I had denied God supernaturally intervenes after deciding Christianity was not logical. (Though it is indeed not logical, Rod has good ideas about how to deal with that fact).
I'd say it's potentially logical, in the sense that non-Euclidean geometry is still geometry: it depends on the dimensional parameters we have in mind. Logic only functions within a system established by extra-logical axioms and assumptions. On a flat plane a triangle's angles must add up to 180 degrees, but on a curved plane it can be more than 180.
Indeed. However even Non-Euclidian Geometry has postulates you must accept.
Mathematicians have no trouble believing in miracles if they accept the postulate "God is all powerful", that is how Geometry works, that is how things work, that is how I held my faith for so many years. I won't say a lot more here, in case I awaken worries about suffering (which is no logically explicable ) in someone else (not you, but someone reading.) - But you get the idea. Every Geometry depends on the acceptance of postulates - the postulates are *not* proven, you accept them. Euclid's unproven but accepted five postulates are accepted for Euclidian ("regular") geometry, not all are accepted for non-Euclidean Geometry. Postulates are unproven statements of faith, and they are not logical, just accepted.
Right—so I'd think that "There's a corruption running through existence, and it isn't God's fault" would be a postulate that helps us get at the things that perturbed the Buddha, in a way that doesn't undermine faith in God's perfect goodness. Basically, original sin is a postulate.
Yes, or as Sullivan was just explaining in the part I'm reading, Zoroaster subtracted a bit from the all-powerfulness of God in order to account for evil existing. I was saying Christianity, with an all-powerful God, is not logical. I did consider something along the lines of Zoroastrianism when I was basically a deist. But it did not make sense to me either in the end. Human logic it does not make sense, could we agree perhaps?
(I think you would love this book so much, by the way.)
(edit: decided to edit out a bit of detail on why I disbelieved Christianity and even something like Zoroastrianism for a time- would not want be a stumbling block to anyone)
My somewhat controversial view is that the corruption in existence is intimately connected to our freedom, so the corruption is outside of God's power in the exact same sense that our freedom is outside of His power. I'd say that His power is already mitigated by the fact that He will not force us to love Him (and for God, "will not" and "cannot" amount to the same thing, since there is no lacuna between the potential and the actual in Him).
I see nothing controversial there. That's straight-up Genesis 3.
Re: was saying Christianity, with an all-powerful God, is not logical.
By creating a world that is independent of Him with freedom to go its own way God has voluntarily limited his own omnipotence. Into the gap evil grows like mold in a dark crypt. This is why the Answer we have from him is not some gaudy Deus ex Machina fixing of everything by mere whim, but rather the Child born in obscurity who grows up to be the Healer who is then hung on the Cross-- and rising again, tramples down death by death.
I would add that in a sense, He thus never was "omnipotent", since the voluntary limitation is not a thing He chooses at a point in time; it is simply HIs own nature. From eternity He makes room for freedom and love, and He was never anything else, and He could not have been otherwise.
"Though it [Christianity] is indeed not logical,"
Would you be so kind as to tell me what you mean by "logical".
I have a very strong negative reaction to reading that Christianity is not logical. I am sure that this is a result of you and I having very different understandings of the word, "logical".
I am a math teacher and in teaching my students how to solve equations, I teach them the rules they can apply to an equation in order to find the solution. I was taught that logic is very similar. Given a set of premises, we can apply the rules of logic to the premises to obtain valid conclusions.
So, when I read that Christianity is not logical, it says to me that Christianity is asserting conclusions that are logically invalid, that are in fact false. That Christianity is asserting falsehood as truth and that God is the father of lies. Hence, I have a strong negative reaction.
Therefore, I am interested in what you mean by "logical" since I am very confident your understanding is not the same as mine.
If you'll forgive me, I think it could be harmful if I convinced someone here that Christianity is not logical. They might not deal with it as I eventually did - to go with the strong faith in their hearts, and the experience of awe they have both had and read of and choose to believe Christian doctrine. I might not convince you it is not logical, but I might convince someone, which would not be good. I'd offer PMs but like me, you are a math teacher and so probably have strong logic. I don't think it is impossible I would hurt your faith. I don't want to be guilty of that.
I might add there is something I accept as fact that would have to be true for Christianity to be illogical. I do consider that thing to be indisputable. But if it is not true then my argument would fall. I did think very hard for a very long time about ways in which is should be untrue, but could not.
Bottom line here - let's say a person cannot logically resolve something about Christianity. They should try, because it does mostly make sense. But if they still find something they can't resolve logically, they do not have to leave.
Pints with Aquinas on Youtube gets pretty deeply into this on a recent episode. The guest is philosopher, Dr Logan Gage, if you're interested.....it's a long discussion.
Thank you - I will check it out.
Thank you for your reply.
Though I have encountered no logical contradictions in Christianity, I have encountered a number of difficulties. There are things I simply don't like. There are apparent discrepancies. There are things I simply don't understand. (And wanting to understand things is an important part of my character.)
So, similarly to you, I treat these difficulties, not as reasons to reject Christianity, but as mysteries that God will reveal to me in time, even if that time is eschatological in nature.
I did not mean "wrong" by "not logical". I just have to take some things on faith, though they contradict human logic.
I just found an article that seemed to address what I was trying to say - apparently it is called fideism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism
"I did not mean "wrong" by "not logical"."
I am sorry, I did not mean to imply that you did. All I meant to say was that though God has preserved me (and not you) from encountering an apparent logical contradiction in Christianity, I have encountered difficulties. And I have dealt with those difficulties by leaning on my faith in God.
I can personally attest to the very real existence of the Devil. The Devil is not an abstraction or a symbol, but an—entity, perhaps?—that actively, maliciously, and deliberately desires the enslavement and ultimately the death of each human being. And the Devil will convince you that that is what you want for yourself as well.
Take heed!
One favor the Devil did for me: he overplayed his hand and revealed himself too clearly. And the revelation of the existence of the Devil necessarily implied the existence of God. I'm not at all sure that I ever would have come to any sort of faith at all had I not seen the face of evil so clearly.
And how do I know that? I've seen that look in Gonzalo Aguirre's face in my own eyes. May those days be forever behind me!
Glory to God, Geoff! Thank you for saying this.
I am fairly well read but not well educated, having struck out on my own at an early age, so I did not know the Baudelaire quote about the devil. A thousand times yes! I've thought for a long time that when he convinced us of his non- existence, he took with him our belief in enchantment, the mysteries of God, and all that is not readily seen. Even some so called Satanists appear to not believe in Lucifer, but follow a weird and self centered sort of humanist hocus- pocus. It is absolutely essential that we recover a firm belief in the devil lest we fail to have any understanding that there is a war going on and we'd better follow our leader.
The great text here is Baudelaire's "Au lecteur" (To the Reader), which opens Les fleurs du mal. If you have any French, try it. The best of the translations that follow is Roy Campbell's, in my opinion (Lowell is too clever by half). The two final quatrains are the most terrifying (in the sense of accurate) prophecy of where we have got to I know of. You may recognize the final line from a more recent poem.
https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099
People who say they are Satanists and then turn around and say- we don’t really mean it we’re actually secular humanists - puzzle me. Like Satan is really the ideal symbol of humanism. Ironically , they may be right.
Rod wrote: "....a true account of a spectacular, well-documented 1928 exorcism in the US."
That made me smile. Last year when I saw Rod, exorcists came up in conversation and I mentioned this event as I have family members who were parishioners at St Joseph's parish in Earling, IA at the time of the 1928 exorcism recorded in Carl Vogt's 1935 German language account, since republished by TAN books in English as "Begone, Satan". It was the mention of TAN publishing that drew a mild look of disbelief from Rod because, well, TAN has a well-deserved reputation for preferring the speculative side of Catholicism, especially unapproved, alleged private revelations.
The entire account is a bit much; the word 'spectacular' certainly applies. My gut feel is that it might be a touch embellished. Yet, I asked aged relatives (now passed - they had not read the book) about the event and they volunteered some info matching the book, particularly the levitation and that about six or so strong men could barely restrain the subject. Although the public was not allowed into the small convent next to the church (torn down in the late 1960s) where the sessions were held, word spreads fast in a small farming community. The nuns and some strong farmers were part of it. All this to say, relatives who lived in the time and place of the event asserted to me that the exorcism and some of its reported events really happened.
Could you say more? How did your relatives know of levitation and six people needed to hold someone down? I tend to think evil, evil spirits, etc. influence minds but have no physical power, e.g., levitation. But I am open to proof that I am wrong, in fact, I seek it. (Unusual strength is documented under stress, for instance, mothers lifting a whole car off a child fallen under it's wheel, but levitation by evil power is something I want evidence of if it is true. I've seen what I consider to be good evidence of levitation by the power of God, btw.)
As mentioned, the nuns and men assisting were witnesses and they talked. Small town. It lasted for months. The community was asked to pray for it to come to end after a while. It was all very much public knowledge and fairly well documented.
The levitation was more than just floating; she jumped up on the door frame and crouched there for a while. The classic signs of possession (exceptional strength, aversion/detection of holy items, fluency in languages never studied and knowledge of secret things) were all present in this case. For example, the exorcist had told those assisting to go to Confession prior to helping. Some did not and possessed person publicly stated their unconfessed sins to the whole room, much to their surprise and embarrassment.
Evil spirits are typically limited to tempting us unless we give them more 'rights' by occult practices / grave sin. Spirits have been known to occasional affect the material world but this is rare. As has been mentioned in blog multiple times, it's best not to delve too deeply into what the dark world's up to but to keep the focus on Christ. As this story is part of the family lore, I have a particular interest in it.
Thank you, that is very interesting.
According to Biblical accounts, as well as that of demonic encounters from priests, victims and bystanders, the idea they cannot affect the physical world is simply not true.
How does this conception of the devil/the demonic (the "paranormal," roughly, and for lack of a better word) compare to, say, Uncle Screwtape?
Rod, I don't know if you'd seen this - fascinating new book about "Spiritual not religious" and how it is anything but - from a great reformed theologian, the first of what will be three volumes. Shaman and Sage is the title, I think it would be worth your time. There was a great interview on the White Horse Inn podcast/YouTube channel about the same. The thesis is that much of the "philosophical" tradition is a form of religion in disguise and relates to the worship of the self. How the very concept of superstition is tied up in this debate from the beginnings of the church and how there really isn't "disenchantment" in the sense that you can't hide from God and the spiritual beings that inhabit our world, but open the door to them by denying them.
https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467467902/shaman-and-sage/
Thank you for writing this installment. It's a book I will read with great if dismayed interest.
You may be able to find video of Westley Allan Dodd on YouTube. There was a segment about him on one of the ABC magazine shows, probably 20/20. He was interviewed, not long before his hanging. ( This was in Washington State, in the late 1980s, I think. I believe he was given a choice of methods of execution, and chose to be hanged. ) During the interview, he had a hard time not crying, not about his impending execution, but about what he had done. From all accounts, he marched boldly up to the scaffold and stood resolutely on the trap door. I have no doubt about his redemption. Why should any Christian be surprised by it? Our Christ Jesus is beyond all superlatives combined and multiplied infinitely.
About the matter of human sacrifice. Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of talk about what theorists had begun to call "The Smiley Face Murders." There had been for about a decade by then a weird phenomenon of college age young men having disappeared, to be found eventually in a lake or river near an abutment with a smiley face drawn in chalk on a nearby abutment. I think those who believed that something nefarious had happened attributed something like twenty murders to this weird plenitude of such deaths.
Of course, police departments in the upper Midwest, where most of these deaths happened, attributed them to lamentable terrible luck, not to any organized activity. The cops were not impressed by the remarkable similarities of the cases: all of the young men had been attractive, academic high achievers who had last been seen alive in bars.
This always struck me as typically opaque of the police. Look, I love police. A cop who had been extremely affable with me when I was a silly ass teenager ( the child is father to the man ) was a few years later shot to death by a drug dealer. In true Texas style, my dying friend had killed the dealer. But what staph can be to human beings, police bureaucracies can be to police investigations. I think that maybe the smiley face had been a red herring unintentionally planted by one of the early investigators of the phenomenon.
I've never believed these deaths were without a much deeper meaning than would be the case if these young men, all supposedly quite drunk when they left the bars, had accidentally fallen into water and been unable to save themselves. For one thing, it never seemed to happen to a woman. And I have personal experience of the fabulous capacity of police officials to be oblivious. Beyond that, I lived in Houston during the early 1970s, when the sexual psychopath Dean Corll and his paid teenage accomplices lured at least twenty seven boys to their deaths. Long before the existence of this monstrous thing was exposed by one of the accomplices' shooting Corll ( there is a deeply satisfying photo of Corll's naked body slumped against a wall ), parents of the missing boys, certain that something very wrong was happening, had been hammering away at the cops, begging them to investigate. Despite the fact that fifteen of the missing boys had gone to the same junior high school, the parents got the same genial turndown every time:
"You folks got to accept that your boy's a runaway. He's prolly out thar in California with a hippa ( received Texas pronunciation at the time ) chick."
There is no reason to believe that Dean Corll was an occultist. I bring him and his invisibility to the police up to point out that despite the cops' near universal dismissal of the "smiley face" idea, these killings still go on. The young man in Nashville this past spring is an example. But it's now the Austin area which is the locus of these disappearances, specifically, I think, the lake.
America is loaded with MS-13 and other psychopaths. But there's no reason to believe anything sinister is going on.
I am sitting while writing this in Lacrosse, WI where a number of the those drowned college boys were. The LPD insisted it was the binge drinking culture of the city and university in town that were to blame. 3rd Street, where most of the college bars are, is less than a 5 min walk from the river. Lacrosse did have the reputation at one time as having the most bars per capita of any city in the US. The question was why did the deaths start occurring only in the late 90's when the city has been that way for decades. I don't know if it is still going on, but some volunteer groups did start late night patrols in Riverside park along the Mississippi where most the victims ended up. Have not heard much more about it since. At the time, great way to start an argument with some people was to proclaim, "There is no serial killer in Lacrosse!"
Yeah, there have been a lot of strange deaths of men around Lady Bird Lake over the last couple of years, all with the same general MO. And something about seems dark and unsettling.
These incidents over the past twenty years seem to fit a pattern, don't they?
Somebody, maybe Rod, mentioned Bukele. I love this guy. Unless he's changed it, on his X account he labels himself "the world's coolest dictator."
Are we talking about the Rainey Street Killer here? Some homosexual psychopath preying on wasted men down there, is the overall story I've heard.
Yep, that's it, although I don't believe a lot of the victims were gay. My wife wife and I know some Austin PD and local DPS folks who all say the higher ups are ramping down any suggestion there's a serial killer because of the effect it would have on tourism. I believe them. They also say the public would be absolutely horrified by the true level of crime in the area. That I also believe. Something dark descended on Austin over the last few years.
When I lived in Florida before there were a series of disappearances of young gay men in the Tampa Bay area. Then the badly decomposed body of one was found in a junked car. There was enough forensic evidence to eventually lead to an arrest: a couple into extreme SM would pick up young gay guys in Tampa bars take them home for a three way, tie them up and torture them to death, They would dismember the bodies afterward and dispose of the parts in dumpsters. For some reason they were unable to do that with their last victim and left his corpse to rot in that junked car.
There's no limit it would seem to human depravity.
Serial killers exist. We had one, specializing in offing young women, in the town where I grew up. Given the facts you state I'm amazed the cops wouldn't suspect that possibility.
The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway of South Seattle, was one of the most evil. He had a hate for prostitutes. Of his 49 known victims, 48 were prostitutes. Most of his murders were done from 1982-85. He met a woman that year who became his girlfriend and eventually his wife and only three more murders happened during Ridgway's marriage. Did the three murders happen during low periods of his marriage? I don't know. But Ridgway proves that man can be so evil but also live an ordinary life which he largely did from 1985-2001. Apparently Ridgway and his wife loved to go to yard sales and were a couple of packrats. However, one thing Ridgway proved to be of value. Lie detector tests, at least those used in the 1980s, are pretty much worthless. Ridgway was a suspect by 1983 and he passed a lie detector test. Meanwhile, a South Seattle taxi-driver who knew some of the prostitutes failed the lie detector test.
It seems like whenever one of these mosters is caught there are always comments by neighbors saying, "but he was such a nice guy"
Ridgway painted trucks for thirty years.
In reference to the Houston matter fifty years ago, there are two excellent articles which I know about. The Houston Press has one. I don't remember its title. The Texas Monthly article has an unforgettable title: The Lost Boys.
One of the reporters applied for and got access to the entire Houston Police Department file on the case. He writes that there was not a single pre - discovery note in it. Not a single message by a patrol officer which said something like, "I think we should check this out."
In late 1971, several of the parents organized their own patrol. ( Most of the murders happened in The Heights, in northwest Houston. ) One evening, they saw a van which none of them recognized moving slowly through the dark. Instinctively, they got the license plate number on the van and took it to the police station, begging them to check out the driver. The cops laughed it off.
It was Dean Corll's van. The cops might have preempted at least a dozen murders, probably more. Really, if in a casual visit to someone's house, you spot two homemade torture boards, complete with handcuffs, you might conjecture that something unhealthy has been going on.
I remember both cases you mention, Bobby. Dodd took a young boy from a park, drove him to a motel room and strangled the boy. He accepted his death penalty. He chose death by hanging. Corll was a real nutcase. His accomplice was Wayne Henley who would lure teens and young men to Corll's house where Corll had a torture room. Corll kept the corpses, I believe, in some sort of boathouse away from his own house. Corll wanted to kill a girl Henley befriended and Henley killed Corll. Henley still lives today in a Texas prison. The attitude of the Houston police was how you portray it. Indifferent. "Face it, he's a runaway." That attitude wouldn't exist today. The media and politicians would be all on the backs of the cops.
Corll's first known victim, Jeffrey Konin, lived in my dorm at UT - Austin for the first few weeks of the school year. I remember the story in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, about his disappeance.
I hesitate to say the following, but it's true. Sometime in the spring or early summer of 1973, I was standing on the sidewalk waiting for a bus in downtown. Like everyone else, I was looking in the direction the bus would be coming from. From the other direction, some kid rammed deliberately into me. I looked at him. I was much bigger than he was, and reacted loudly and unpleasantly. He laughed, said he was sorry, and moved on.
The day in August, 1973 when Henley shot Corll and the whole thing came to light, of course, it was The Story. On NBC Nightly News, John Chancellor began the program by saying, "Our top story tonight is murder." I saw news film of Henley, and of course, more film and photos over the next few days. I was struck instantly by his resemblance to the kid who had tried to get something started with me a few months earlier. If I were forced to make a guess, it would be that it had been Henley. He has a conscience, and people who have written about him have written about his going increasingly out of control as 1973 wore on.
You know that "six points of separation" idea, that if you could figure it out, you'd find that you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows, let's say, Ringo Starr? I have a bizarre number of those, and they're close and unsettling: my mother's first boss had been shot by John Dillinger, a good friend of hers had been a childhood playmate of Bonnie Parker's, and it gets even creepier. The Henley possibility fits.
Funny how that is, the six points of separation. For instance, my grandfather worked in the mail room of the British Embassy from 1952-68. He remembers the Duke of Windsor, blind drunk, commandeering an Embassy vehicle and driving the wrong way on a one-way street in Washington DC. The Duke of Windsor was defended by Winston Churchill who knew..........
It is odd. When I was a teenager, the writer, Larry McMurtry, and I lived in the same neighborhood and were acquainted. I'm sure he thought I was a dolt, but if you think of the McMurtry novels which have been made into movies, it gives me two or three degrees of separation from all sorts of famous people.
But it's the sinister ones which fascinate me, such as the Dillinger connection. Wholesome stuff. Still, I think that in a highly meaningful Universe, these things come as close to being meaningless as anything ever does.
My Dad knew Jimmy Hoffa. Dad was in Teamsters Local 299 which Hoffa's original Local. Dad knew full well Hoffa was up to his eyebrows in shady stuff (and Frank Fitzsimmons too), and he gave the guy very wide berth.
Where's he buried, Jon?
Around 20 years ago I read Sullivan's "The Price of Experience," about the 1980s LA-based Billionaire Boys Club and its singularly evil leader Joe Hunt. One thing that stuck with me was Hunt telling a story about his mom taking him to a psychic as a young boy. The psychic runs out of the room saying the boy was the devil.
Anyways, here's the 60 Minutes interview with Hunt.
https://youtu.be/r9CfBiG5q8w?si=bshKo8qvMbt0OzNq
Rod wrote: "First, it reveals how deeply occultism is woven into the mentality of Mexicans"
FWIW, the Mexican convenience store in my old Chicago neighborhood of mostly aging East Europeans and 20-30 something yuppies sold candles of the occult figures St Muerte and Jesus Malverde next to the ones of St John Paul II and the Our Lady of Guadelupe. Something for everybody, I guess...
I do think it's a bit much to read extensively into the stuff, sometimes. There's a bar in town that had a Santa Muerte candle around Halloween (you know, sppoky!) and then a Virgin Mary candle a little later, probably because it was what they could find. As far as I could tell, nothing about the place instantaneously changed from evil to good. I think that spirits respond to intentions, and people doing one superficial thing or another in total ignorance might not amount to very much.
I would not expect candle substitution in a bar to change the ambiance. The observation was more that these would not both be sold were there not demand for each.
Sure—I just meant to add that the demand appears to often be purely superficial, having no connection to spiritual beliefs.
There is clearly a collective knowledge or intelligence that binds humans around the world. Think of depictions of Dragons. They’re the same in China as in Medieval Europe, but there was no way that this was an “idea exchange” - both cultures knew what a dragon looked like.
Think then of evil. It exists within this universal knowledge that we possess that links people around the world - which is tactically enhanced by the internet and social media.
It spreads. It multiplies. And everyone around the world knows what it looks like.
The above is the non-religious explanation as to why Evil is such a force. The religious explanation is more straightforward.
"There is clearly a collective knowledge or intelligence that binds humans around the world."
Was it Plato who referred to the "cross cultural intuition of the soul?". My comparative religion class was a long time ago, so idk.
But I agree. I was raised Baptist with the notion that everything prior to Christ outside of the old testament was of no use. If not demonic.