On Challenging the Gods and God

On Challenging the Gods and God
Psalm 82

Two friends who live in the Philippines had lunch with us a week or so ago while on a visit home in the United States. One of them, a Chinese American, told us that in the Philippines he had a sense of the presence of evil spirits that he did not have in the United States. It reminded me of the comment of a former colleague when she came back from a time in India, where she had the same experience. I do not infer that countries such as India and the Philippines are more affected by evil spirits than the United States or Britain; my wife’s comment was that there is so much evil in our Western countries that evil spirits do not have to bother with us very much. To put it another way and adapt a comment from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the devil is sometimes clever enough not to make his activity so obvious that we forget that he exists...