David Madore's WebLog: Gratuitous Literary Fragment #36 (Evil at work)

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(Saturday)

Gratuitous Literary Fragment #36 (Evil at work)

“Do I believe in this? No, as a matter of fact, I do not—but this hardly matters if many enough think otherwise. For faith, and particularly collective faith, is often sufficient to cause its object to come ipso facto into being—in a manner of speaking. Let a man think himself accursed, and his curse will be real, as real as his own life. Let him think himself cured and he often will be. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I can hardly deny the verity of God: a God brought into existence by the very fact that millions of worshippers pray to Him daily and might be willing to give their own existence for His greater glory; I can but concede that God has made and unmade empires, caused and put a stop to wars—which is considerably more than most real people of flesh and blood have been able to do.

“And if you ask for my opinion, we may have something of a similar nature here: after all, what works for God might quite well work for the devil also. No, I think nothing of the old adage that the devil's greatest ruse is to make people disbelieve in his own existence: that would be his undoing; quite the contrary, the saying in question is part of the devil's plan, we might say. Yes, I trust we are witnessing a very ancient and very malignant evil at work here. Which I have full certainty will in the end prove to be quite explainable by the laws of nature as we presently know them, but it might turn out to be easier to make sense of things if we forget those laws for just a little while.”

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