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{"id":1494,"date":"2009-12-01T21:15:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T21:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2009\/12\/anglican-vicar-on-evil\/"},"modified":"2009-12-01T21:15:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-01T21:15:00","slug":"anglican-vicar-on-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2009\/12\/anglican-vicar-on-evil.html","title":{"rendered":"Anglican Vicar on Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who is also a journalist for London\u2019s Daily Telegraph. <\/i>He seems to be a pretty typical liberal sort of Anglican. He writes here<\/a>\u00a0about a fellow vicar who is upset because he thinks there is devil worship going on in his parish.<\/span>

<\/span><\/span>
There was certainly a witches coven in the town where I worked as an Anglican priest, and England has always had a reputation for a lot of occult activity. The witches were not a laughing matter. They took their worship seriously, and when you heard what they were up to it made you shudder. While not becoming hysterical or silly about it, at the same time I would take such stuff very seriously. In that town I had direct experience of a teenaged girl who became infested with an evil spirit after messing about with the witches.<\/span><\/span>

<\/span><\/span>
However\u00a0Rev George pooh poohs the whole thing and makes fun of such an outmoded idea as devils and demons. He waxes pseudo intellectual about \u2018dualism\u2019 and \u2018Miltonesque battles between Satan and God, supposing that if one believes in the devil and the battles against evil that one has to be dualist. He also ridicules the idea that the crucifixion was a victory over Satan. Never mind all that stuff in the New Testament\u2026 Instead of the devil, George tells us that, \u201cEvil is the absence of the divine in humanity, made potent by the power of human imagination gone wrong.\u201d<\/span><\/span>

<\/span><\/span>
Honestly, you couldn\u2019t make it up! It sounds just like that wonderful modernist bishop on the bus in C.S.Lewis\u2019 Great Divorce<\/i>. \u201cReally, my boy, one can\u2019t honestly conceive nowadays of a \u2018god\u2019 who is somehow \u2018up there\u2019 and a devil who is some sort of smiling fellow in red long johns with a pitchfork who is \u2018down here.\u2019 I mean to say, we now understand that all of this is really a projection of the conflict that goes on within all of our minds when we want something and realize we can\u2019t have it\u2026.\u201dblah blah blah.<\/span>

<\/span><\/span>
I think The Rev\u2019d Humphrey Blytherington was at theological college with George Pitcher. They used to play croquet on the lawn and make googly eyes at the principal\u2019s daughter. George used to take Humph \u00a0for a ride in his Morris minor estate out to a country pub where they\u2019d have a half pint of lager shandy, eat a pickled egg and discuss the cricket scores and agree on how awfully brilliant Bultmann was.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"