If you don’t believe there’s a devil, he’s already beaten you.

“Evil” is a word that gets slung around so much that it’s lost its meaning. We can see a war, watch boxes being sent home, see footage of atrocities, and call it “evil.”

And that’s true enough.

But it is unclear if enough people feel it.

We can hear of a mass shooting and call it “evil” and that’s true too.

We act like we’re outraged. But are we really?

We can tell a lie and watch as it spreads, causing a cascade of ever worse consequences and we know we’ve done an “evil” thing. But do we feel guilty?

And even if we may hate those who do evil and punish ourselves for doing an evil thing, evil goes on. It continues no matter what we say, do, or think.

Everything that comes from the president or out of Washington is best described by the word “evil.” I believe that good people aren’t fighting very much against the evil ones. And they are going to die.

It’s true that there will always be evil men and women whose cruelty leaves us stunned and then outraged. The entire world knows that rage; there is no possibility that any country regards him as a good man interested in peace and respect for human lives.

Say what you will about Russia being in bed with Trump or vice versa. There’s no way that when they’re finished with him that they will want him to remain prosperous, or even alive. Trump is being used and is clueless about it. His ego and tendency to delusion prevents it. Men far more evil than he are in the governments of both Russia and the United States, and Elon Musk is but one of them, and he only stands out because he was already a high-profile idiot (or a zombie, which is at least possible.)

I’m not here to tell you what to think, or to believe. I’m certainly not interested in telling you what to do; if you choose to follow evil, you’ll do so without any thought given to the well being of others.

“Evil” is not some concept made up by any religion to keep people in line. It’s not a mind control device to trigger shame. That’s what some people think (and have thought for thousands of years). It begs the question: “how has humanity managed to survive to the present?”

People who lack a conscience can still see the difference between right and wrong, but neither one seems to drive them. Even the worst of us can do good, and likewise the best of us have the capacity for great evil. Life is a constant fight, through hundreds of decisions a day, to do good while trying to survive. People without a conscience don’t care about those choices except when they will be harmful to themselves.

But you don’t have to be a sociopath to do evil things. You need temptation and you need the means. That’s it.

Another question is, why do people so quickly fall for lies, why does that lead to victims of liars on a larger scale, by which I mean following lies into the grip of mass delusion and cultism?

If we attempt to answer, we’ll be met immediately with variables threatening to stop us from learning anything at all.

Human behavior is a worthy study, but putting it under a microscope soon shows us how reckless our attempt is, and why most questions will be forever unanswered.

CHAOS

Let us suppose you have a swing set in your yard or at a nearby park. The supports form triangles with the ground, and a transverse metal tube of sturdy metal joins those triangles at each apex. Suspended by chains, three swings hang from the horizontal section.

Let’s say that we have been watching those swings for any length of time. We’ve seen children on them as well as adults. Everyone loves a swing, right?

We have observed that, young or old, people will impart motion to the swing by moving their feet and arms and hands. They remain steady for a period of time, or so it seems. In reality, every swing backward is not the same. As gravity and inertia fight unseen, the smallest of motions will cause the swing to move differently. The person fails to compensate, eventually wobbling slightly sideways and at an angle that, if not compensated for, results in a collision with the triangular support or another person in the next swing. The swinger then drags their feet to a stop, or bails, which is not the best choice, but one made in panic.

Because of course we’ve all experienced hand and knee injuries in a similar fashion. They’re not usually serious, but when I was young, the pain of mother’s merthiolate was worse than any cut or scrape, and we learned to “rub some dirt on it and stay out of the house.” The memory of things like tincture of merthiolate guides us to avoid the wobbling effect, either by never using the swing again or by stopping faster the next time.

The cause of the wobble is understood, if only crudely, to even a small child. They learn control and balance. They do not know, however, the complexity of the entire problem, and why it happens again, no matter what.

On a cold and windy day, let us assume that we are pleased to be inside, yet we watch through the window as the wind moves the empty swings.

Here we see the swings move in ways they’re not meant to. They wobble, then they go higher with a straight line wind coming in perpendicular to the horizontal bar. If the wind is hitting the swing from the front or rear, then, why do we see that the swings move irregularly, recreating the out of control wobbling effect? Why do the swings also move sideways?

After the winds lash it all night, we awake to see a mystery. Now, one of the three swings has been repeatedly looped over the bar, and is tightly wound around it. You can’t even reach it to unwind it.

The two remaining swings have tangled up together, tightly entwined, and it appears as though they will be impossible to separate.

Now how did that happen?

Chaos mechanics apply to this situation. It tells us that nothing can hold the same pattern of behavior in the open, where winds are variable no matter where they’re coming from, and that differences in the chains, even in single links, can be moved differently. There’s no way to control the swing or to predict how they will behave in a wind storm.

The wind hits one of the angled bars and is diverted to hit the chains from the side or at an angle. But that may account for the two entwined swings, yet not the third, which must have moved to the side, yet ended up looping around the bar until there was no chain left hanging.

As contrary and confusing as this seems, it has been observed time after time, even in controlled experiments. One would think that by attempting to limit chaotic results, chaos can be prevented or lessened. That’s not the case.

In Egypt, there lies a giant obelisk, still in its unfinished form, never raised to point into the sky like others. This is because it cracked significantly during its carving from the stone around it.

These ancient spires had been successfully raised before, and a few remain standing today. Clearly, the ancient Egyptian masons knew what they were doing. So why does the one in the Aswan quarry lie broken?

If the stone cutters knew what they were doing, how did it crack?

The granite did crack, almost certainly because it was larger by one third the size of the next largest ones. In cutting out the bottom, maybe the weight itself caused it to crack. No one is really sure. Here again, we see Chaos at work. The obelisk is indeed huge. The cutters and masons did not anticipate that the extra weight could be too much to go unsupported.

Whenever we try to control anything, we are proceeding from the assumption that we know everything.

Well, we don’t. Giant cranes fall over because their counterweights are not enough, winds come along, or an object is struck. Loose earth may be misjudged, and it doesn’t support the heavy machine. Watching the TV series Engineering Disasters will demonstrate quickly how chaos mechanics work.

Now that we’ve seen the effects of chaos on a small scale, it’s time to examine the phenomenon with people.

People who voted for Trump should have known what he had planned, yet they were driven by fear of continuing inflation. Too many were also driven because of evil agendas. They cry out for jobs that “are all taken by Latinos.”

Racism we know about. But ignorance is something that can rarely be combated. Ignorance feeds itself through a person’s fears, hatred and anger. What was already chaotic becomes even worse, and therefore more dangerous, when ignorance, hate and fear enter the picture. You never know what evil will drive a person to, and you can guess, but never know — until it’s too late — what an unstable mind will come up with.

Mental healthcare has been a black spot on America since it became a nation. I know the story: I’ve been in hospital before. I’ve met people that I became friends with, and I feel sorry that those friendships didn’t last.

I’ve likewise met some of the most violent people I’ve ever known there, and had to subdue two of them because the nurses were being attacked and security wasn’t there fast enough. One woman I’ll never be able to forget was one of the three people I’ve met in my whole life that truly terrified me. She set off alarms with her mere presence. There was nothing in her of civility, reason, or sanity. There was only a pervasive sense of evil and danger. She was like a snake: treat her gently, she would strike; provoke her, and she would kill. The only one she didn’t seem to be a danger to was me, and I have no idea why.

I figure it this way: cats and dogs like me (obviously they are very perceptive). An owner walking a dog often gets frustrated when their dog pulls on the leash to come and greet me. Twice, escaped cats, 3 in all, have gotten lost and been frightened. They sat right under a bush by my window where I could hear them crying. And yes, cats really do cry. You can’t ignore it. Somehow they seemed to know I would help, and readily came to my gentle voice. One only lived next door, but was obviously too scared to go there. I didn’t even need to pick her up. I just said, “Come on, let’s get you home.” She followed me right to the neighbor’s door, which he answered and with a startled look said, “I didn’t even know she got out.”

It wasn’t negligence on his part. We all know cats can be curious and find ways to go exploring.

I guessed that perhaps the scary woman being evaluated on my ward for criminal trial competency sensed that part of me. But I was very happy when she left.

Mental hospitals are not places known for great patient care. And that has always been true, but if you think that egregious crimes done by staff and patients are only in the past, you’re mistaken. It may be less true now, but legal restrictions prevent the best care for patients regardless of staffing, because of time limits and more.

****

Way back when, the bodies of dead patients would be buried in a communal graveyard without anyone to mourn them. But they’re not alone. The campus of the hospital I went to after my third suicide attempt has two “known” cemeteries. One sits on a hill under a huge cross at the top. The graves are numbered. Nobody knew or cared about their names. These are graves covered with nobody to mourn the dead; nobody was there except men with shovels.

The other graveyard is not marked. One can cross it on foot and never know what lies beneath.

It is a mass grave, and no records exist to give any names or how many bodies lie beneath the grass. This is a shameful place, a place where tortured and battered and butchered patients were unceremoniously dumped.

Human behavior is, because of these reasons, a futile study, an unending quest for control and the ability to predict and anticipate what someone will do.

Chaos mechanics in physics is something most practitioners avoid. It’s a black hole they can’t account for. Almost always, there is an underlying order to things: the swings hang on chains and go to and fro, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. When erected, the angled stands and the crossbar are almost perfectly placed. But eventually forces are applied that are not possible to anticipate. The weight placed on the seat, the tubing of the steel legs settle or rise up, the chains become worn, weathering is ever present. It cannot stand but for just so long, then it becomes unreliable and a safety hazard. Or it just collapses.

Chaos rules the galaxy. It has its tentacles wrapped throughout the cosmos, frustrating science and even the simple act of observation. Recently we were told that our universe is expanding much faster than was previously thought to be. Who could have seen that coming?

It’s true with almost everything we think we know. Sometimes a paper is published and later found to be embarrassingly wrong. While crank scholars do, and have always existed, they’re not often the reason for us tripping up. Chaos just does its thing and leaves us with red faces.

And forget what I said about an open system. There’s no such thing. Human behavior can be observed but only on this planet and a limited distance into space. The place we inhabit is a closed system. If that’s true, then, why haven’t we conquered more of humanity’s problems than we have so far? We should have mastered ourselves by now.

We haven’t, and never will, because of chaos and evil.

Wherever chaos exists on Earth, we find evil. The devil moves best, and does his best work, when people are confused, frustrated, frightened and angry. He and his demons know how to get to you. They know your vices, what tempts you and especially what scares you most. When you are so engaged and compromised, you’re wide open to attack. And they don’t waste opportunities to exploit fear.

You may ask, if you like, how I know that true evil exists. Evil that can act in ways, through demonic beings, that constitute a real attack, sometimes physical, always spiritual. How do I know?

I don’t claim to know anything, but I’ve seen enough to have little doubt.

One afternoon, when Autumn turned the sky dark early, I was heading out to get pizza with my friend. I got to the car, though, and I didn’t have my keys. No fobs back then; you had two keys, one for the doors and ignition and a different key for the trunk. I didn’t have them. I went back into the house to get them. I knew where they were: on a small desk on the far side of the room. That put the bed to my left, beside the desk, and the door behind me, right next to the closet door, which faced toward the desk also.

Knowing where the keys were, I chose not to turn the light on. Midway across the room, I froze. I was not alone.

Something incredibly evil was there, somewhere in the dark, and I was too terrified to move. How long I stayed so still, waiting to be attacked, I never knew. Then my father said, “Yeah, I’m in here” and stepped out of the closet.

He was the worst man I have ever known. His abuse knew no limits, and until he spoke, all I knew was that I felt evil in there with me. I can’t describe what it feels like to be in the presence of great evil, but, deprived of my sight in the darkness, I didn’t know that it was him. Why he went to my closet was a weird story, but for now, the major point is that in those petrifying moments, I felt evil. Evil that was dangerous and life-threatening.

I had felt evil before. The records say the house in North Shore was finished and sold in 1963. While still very young, I had a room to myself. It was upstairs and faced Dutch Ship Road. I was put down for naps on long summer days and the room, two levels up from the one I was just talking about, was… Inhabited.

Back then, the afternoon sun was descending on the opposite side of the house, and cars with chrome everywhere would drive by, neighborhood fathers coming home from work. I saw the reflections from the sun hitting the chrome traverse my ceiling and I knew what that was.

But the upper walls had a shadow,d too. It moved around occasionally, not like the reflections, but faster, just a blur. It would dart across the room. I’d see it on the ceiling, crossing to an opposite wall, where it stayed well within my sight.

I’d often call, “Mommy!” and she’d come, but she never saw it.

Children often see things that adults cannot.

Perhaps some dark spirits choose not to reveal themselves to adults.

It is also possible that they lack the power to show themselves to adults, while children are well equipped to see the things and, more importantly, to feel them.

The thing wasn’t exactly a shadow, not a black one, anyway. It was gray, and wasn’t filled in. Just outlines. Three or four inches tall, two dimensional, and the lines crossed to form what looked like a tornado wearing a fireman’s helmet. Below the Line that made the bottom of the helmet there was a single eye. Just a dot, but a big one that left no doubt that it watched me.

I could feel the bloody thing. It hated me. I knew it. It focused a lot of intense hatred right at me.

At night, it was there, in an alcove made for a desk or a toy chest or shelves. At the time, I had a truck called “Johnny Express” which was a plastic tractor-trailer with a rubber driver. With my Popeye night light, I could look at it and swear that the driver was moving.

Well it wasn’t, and the eyes play dirty tricks on us all in the dark.

Now, the shadow wasn’t always there, but it always came back. If that happened at night, it could really scare me, and that’s what it wanted. Our fear gives demons great joy and power. They eat the energy of intense negative emotions. They feed on your fears. And at night, I didn’t need to see it to know that it was there. The hate it projected was enough to know.

After almost ten years in that room, I was moved downstairs. But first, something terrible happened.

One night I woke up from this thing intensifying its power, feeding off some nightmare. And the hate woke me up. My father would sometimes beat me with a belt if I scared him at night by screaming. But this night I didn’t care. I’d take the belt, but I wanted that thing out of my room and I couldn’t understand why my parents couldn’t see it or chase it away.

This time it was on the closet wall. Both parents came in quickly and I suppose my voice had some extra fear in it. They were taking me seriously.

They turned on the wall switch and like I always had, I pointed at it. They hadn’t seen it, but this night, they did.

“What is that,” they asked in succession. They saw it!

And then the most dreadful thing happened.

It leaped a short distance, very quickly, onto my mother’s chest. I couldn’t process it, but I saw it. She felt the thing on her and ran from the room as if trying to brush it off like lint. My father ran with her. As bad as that was to see, I wonder even now how she felt. What it must have been like. Other times I fight that memory because it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

My mommy before that night, she joined my father in his many abuses afterwards. None of us, eight children total, were spared; every single one was raped or beaten in some way, week after week, year after year, and even after he was sent to prison I feared my father. And my mother took most of my resentment and anger; it was her betrayal that hurt me the most. The rug pull I never got over, so to speak.

Father Malachi Martin once said that some demons are generational, meaning that a demon, or demons, being (for now) immortal, could and did attach to families and their descendants. They are not omnipresent, but they can move so fast that you won’t know what’s going on. And they have a definite effect just by being present: see how an argument starts at the dinner table. See how people, friends, argue over the simplest things, petty issues. Don’t you think that maybe they are working to keep us divided? Their close proximity can stir anger, rage and jealousy where there should be none, and far worse: those deep suspicions you develop about your neighbor are insane, but you can’t know that; the emotional grip you’re held in renders you blind to reason.

People kill that way. And they cannot blame the devil. That doesn’t hold up in court. The fact is that we all make decisions in the heat of the moment, bad ones, and sometimes they are life-changing for the worst.

My life has been a bunch of train wrecks, so many that I barely had time to catch my breath between each one.

I’m not bitter anymore.

I’m old, worn out, more so with each day, and yet even though I hate the pain inside and out, I must continue to live as if God could call on me one of these days to help someone. He knows I’m willing, in a chaotic world, to hang on until I meet the person I can help, or until I die. That’s up to Him. I believe suicide is no option. It is an act which many regret before taking their last breath. Yet by then it is too late.

Evil, in the form of fallen angels, surrounds us. Remember in the midst of Yeshua’s ministry when a young man was exorcised, delivered from “legion,” or “many” demons? They begged not to be sent back where they belonged. A place described as very sandy, hot and dry. So Christ cast them into a herd of pigs, which of course the animals couldn’t take, and the lot of them charged off a cliff to their deaths. If swine can’t tolerate evil, then don’t believe me, believe that story instead.

The devil is real.

Evil is real.

You can see it all around you, and all you need to do is open your eyes. If you do, remember that you must open your heart, because with that sitting idle, evil can’t make as much of an impression on you. You’re protecting yourself. To feel love, sorrow and pity, to feel heartbreak, you must first open yourself up, revealing your heart to be a target. If you can be hurt, it’s a sign that you’re human.

At no time has this thing we call “humanity” ever been free of evil.

It has never known a day free of chaos.

And God won’t change that.

He is not a sadist, he loves us, but we were warned that it was going to be a long haul down a highway full of potholes. He knew what hardships would do us.

Because it is never in the calm, peaceful times that we learn. Our best learning tool is chaos, conflict and intense pain. Those teach us the lessons we need.

EPI

I’m thankful to God for my life. As bad as it was, I did have some good times, especially with my children.

You may not agree with the concept of chaos mechanics, or evil, but as long as you can freely love, forgive, and pass on what you know, you’ll be fine