Liberalism, Thought and Temptation

[Just edited this piece a little, and so re-posting.]

First to quote St Maximos the Confessor (580-662) from the book, The Philokalia: “For the war which the demons wage against us by means of thoughts is more severe than the war they wage by material means.” And St Philotheos of Sinai writes: “It is by means of thoughts that the spirits of evil wage a secret war against the soul. For since the soul is invisible, these malicious powers naturally attack it invisibly.”

And another line from the First Epistle of Peter is:”Be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking who he may devour.”

And again, the means of attack is temptation through thought suggestion, and this can be a very subtle, prolonged process.

Whether one believes in the reality of the spiritual and the negative-spiritual or demonic, what is the attitude of the devil to sin? He is very liberal about it. And in the spiritual or Christian view of the influence of the demonic on us, their potential influence is through the world of thoughts, which acts  as a lure into a spiritually dark, corrupt realm. This realm of degradation is not simply divorced from truth morally, or is unholy, but it is also corrupt intellectually, and is ultimately insane. So a demonic thought or temptation appears which we in our extreme self-centred myopia and naivety accept as our own. Civilisation in the positive sense depends on some kind of generally accepted filtering mechanism or moral code by which not all thoughts are legitimised and given free rein. Thus murder, rape, disturbed, delusional thoughts of many kinds are discouraged, and potentially punished if acted upon. 

The current “liberal” attitude though is that the very existence of a thought legitimises it and the desire it provokes, and the moral and intellectual filter is done away with. It’s a kind of extreme, weird materialism where the existence of even a thought blatantly at odds with physical reality, is real and legitimate on the basis of its appearance within the mind. So very tellingly within this ethos it is thoughts that are placed at the top of the material hierarchy, and physical reality must bow down to its whims. This is exactly as one would expect to see through this lens of spiritual temptation. The means of the demonic manifestation, which is temptation through thought, is given the highest status within this liberal thought-system. “You identify as something you are not? Fine. That’s the way we’ll say reality is now, and nobody better disagree!” Thus, people in a psychiatric hospital identifying as Napoleon or whoever are to be taken seriously! Reality is relative, there is no real self, and any inner state is as real as any other.

To see this ethos of total relativism within the mathematical field. Here, for the liberal ethos, the true answer to some mathematical problem is bigotry in action, as it by deprives all wrong answers of the right to identify as true. So if you say that 7+7 can only equal 14, but someone else says that there are literally hundreds of correct answers here, or answers which can identify as true, such as 7+7=19, then truth has become the enemy. Truth and falseness are inverted under this ideological system, not just morally but simultaneously also intellectually.

Thus, as began with above, the demonic is extremely liberal to sin or inner disturbance. Every desire as a thought is legitimate due to its existence within the mind. And “sin” here is inverted to be the bigoted denial of the legitimacy of every thought or desire, including for example pedophilia, which within the unfolding of the ethos would quickly be justified as another desire, and so a legitimate inner reality, to be legitimately satisfied.

So it’s quite easy to see how liberalism in this unfolding genuinely amounts to the ethos of anti-Christ, and just as is expounded as the historical process within the New Testament, and where the human person of a final antichrist is really a kind of natural incarnation of, and perfectly in sync with, the prevailing ethos rather than some haphazard human appearance within the flow of history.