Christianity

[attofishpi]

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[Alexis Jacobi]

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Official SoundTrack for this post
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Did you start getting a bit dismayed when this chap started talking the heavens and the earth into existence?

OR

Did you start questioning EVERYTHING?

I have said from time to time that it is best if we reveal (and be clear about) *what we are up to* when we write here (and of course in life). For example I think Nick knows what he is up to. Clearly IC also knows -- and what he is up to is trying to preserve the *good sense* in the notion of literal, metaphysical, man-transformative salvation.

Who else has defined intentions? I am uncertain.

It likely seems when I confront IC that I am 'just one more' who seeks to undermine the Christian metaphysic. Yet I say that is far from the truth. I think at least somewhat I incline to Nick's mystical position. And that is how I interpret it (and certainly the position of Simone Weil as far as I can tell though I have not read her).

You have gathered that I find it quite difficult indeed to *take the stories at face value*. But that does not mean that the truths that the Stories illumine do not have validity and value. But what are they and where have they come from? What we must understand is that for most of humankind -- those who had their 'horizons erased' in modern processes (like being extruded from a machine) -- they cannot distinguish the sense, the subtler meaning, that (may) exist behind the story.

So when the horizon was wiped away what happened? That is the core question that must be asked. Then answered. It is too easy to refer to the word 'nihilism', though nihilism is real, and therefore a fuller definition must be presented. And here is the key: We need look no further than our own selves to find out *what happened* because we are the results!

What I try to point out is that belief has been undermined (fait accompli). Some will take the escape hatch exit into a concrete atheism which often seems to mean 'no more bothering with the existential questions' and then, as a counter-project, the building-up of other world definition-sets replete with ethical admonishments and outlooks that demand activism.

Many of these types seem to be drawn into Progressive social activism. Others exit the realm of hard and sharp religious and metaphysical definitions into a sort of netherworld of non-concretized fluffy beliefs (New Age perhaps). Some go the archaic route and, say, go to shamanism workshops in the jungle with a bona fide American Indian guide. There was another manoeuvre (as I call them) which was to employ analytical psychology of the Freudian sort as a religion substitute. This went big around the turn of the last century.

And then, of course, there is the Jungian approach which, let's face it, has reached far and wide and dramatically influenced religionists and laity alike. Jungianism opens a conceptual road to a wide-ranging landscape of metaphysical dreaming and, as well, it opens the pathway for a return to suppressed pagan modes of being (seeing, perceiving, appreciating, interacting with).

I can think of two giant and influential figures who tremendously influenced contemporary culture in this post-religions sense: Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi) and Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan).

At the same time as we consider our own situation (largely, we are people in whom the old metaphysics has collapsed and in us it cannot be recovered) we should consider that in no sense has Christianity collapsed when the global South is considered (India, China, Africa, Latin America). Pentecostalism spread like social wild-fire and still spreads.

What else? Well there are quite a wide number of religion substitutes and these can be recognized when people establish life-paths based around some activity or other, activities that become a totalizing life-occupation.

We need to face the fact that as Mass Man we have had the ground removed from under our feet. But the interesting corollary is that this 'loss of ground' has also had a whole range of positive effects or, perhaps I can say, outcomes.

[Nick_A]

Alex

I have said from time to time that it is best if we reveal (and be clear about) *what we are up to* when we write here (and of course in life). For example I think Nick knows what he is up to. Clearly IC also knows -- and what he is up to is trying to preserve the *good sense* in the notion of literal, metaphysical, man-transformative salvation.

My grandfather associated with the Imperial Russian Navy barely escaped to the U.S. during the Russian Revolution. Being born here, I am like a fish out of water. One of my ancestors was an archbishop in the Armenian church and another was an artist with few peers in his ability to depict the interactions of elemental forces as they create water.

A modern philosophy forum has as its goal to argue fragments of truth. Yet my concern is how to join those needing to sacrifice the joy of arguing opinions for the sake of experiencing the purpose of our universe and Man within it. Simone Weil is an example of such a need. She cannot be classified since she is beyond classification

At one time I was a nihilist and my life was saved because of humor. When I was free to laugh at absurdity, it made life tolerable and as a musician, it kept me going. I needed help so I began to meditate on reproductions of the art work I was a part of. Then one day I had my inner ass kicked. I discovered G.I. Gurdjieff. I quickly verified why I knew nothing and rather than being offended felt gratitude. Now my questions such as art, the uses of sex energy, Man's conscious potential began to make sense within a conscious universe. I don't discuss these things on the internet since ideas dealing with relative wholeness or levels of reality are disruptive and create negativity. A person can inwardly hurt another by adding negativity to the sacred. But I learn by rejection. Why does Man live in Plato's Cave and is there a way out?

When Gurdjieff came to the west it for a specific purpose. He knew that the quality of Man's knowledge was growing day by day while the quality of Man's Being remains the same. How does a person feel the importance of working on their being? There is no natural conflict preventing Man from becoming aware of the poor quality of their own being. A person must begin to awaken to the reality of their situation to feel the need.

Ouspensky made Gs ideas understandable to the scientific mind. But like anything of quality, these ideas are easily abused and charlatans are a dime a dozen. How to keep them pure so a person can inwardly profit from them?

My unique heredity makes it easier to acquire "inner taste"and smell out the charlatans. This is good for me. But is it possible that I can express such ideas in the quality of art my distinguished ancestor was capable of? That is my intent for the coming year: to allow the emotional depth of this quality of art to communicate the validity of intellectual ideas. Can they be verified? "know thyself". But what does that mean. How does one write from the depth of their being rather than from their heads? Gurdjieff explained this in his book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" I have a way to go. Gurdjieff and Prof Skridlov meet Father Giovanni who is speaking:

I must tell you that in our brotherhood there are two very old brethren; one is called Brother Ahl and the other Brother Sez. These brethern have voluntarily undertaken the obligation of periodically visiting all the monasteries of our order and explaining various aspects of the essence of divinity. Our order has four monasteries, one of them ours, the second in the valley of the Pamir, the third in Tibet and the fourth in India. And so these brethren, Ahl and Sez, constantly travel from one monastery to another and preach there.

They come to us twice a year. Their arrival at our monastery is considered among us a very great event. On the days when either of them is here, the soul of every one of us experiences pure heavenly pleasure and tenderness. The sermons of these two brethren, who are to an almost equal degree holy men and who speak the same truths, have nevertheless a different effect on all our brethren and on me in particular.

When Brother Sez speaks it is indeed like the song of the birds in Paradise; from what he says one is quite, so to say, turned inside out; one becomes as though entranced. His speech purls like a stream and one no longer wishes anything else in life but to listen to the voice of Brother Sez. But Brother Ahl's speech has almost the opposite effect. He speaks badly and indistinctly, evidently because of his age. No one knows how old he is. Brother Sez is also very old, but he is still a hale old man, whereas in Brother Ahl the weakness of old age is clearly evident.

The stronger the impression made at the moment by the words of Brother Sez, the more this impression evaporates until there ultimately remains in the hearer nothing at all. But in the case of Brother Ahl, although at first what he says makes almost no impression, later, the gist of it takes on definite form, more and more each day, and is instilled as a whole into the heart and remains there forever.

When we became aware of this and began trying to discover why it was so, we came to the unanimous conclusion that the sermons of Brother Sez proceeded only from his mind and therefore acted on our minds, whereas those of Brother Ahl proceeded from his being and acted on our being.

Yes, professor, knowledge and understanding are quite different. Only understanding can lead us to being whereas knowledge is but a passing presence in it.

--G.I. Gurdjieff, in 'Meetings with Remarkable Men'

[Immanuel Can]

Just above I presented the Christian story in brief. Did I get it right or did I get it wrong?

I listed already the various ways in which you got it wrong. It was on that basis that I stated you haven't really read it. Nobody who read it could get it that wrong.

[Immanuel Can]

You don't see any similarity between the days of creation described in Genesis one and the Great Chain of Being?

If you mean that Creation procedes from inanimate things to animate things, from what we call "lower" forms to "higher" ones, then yes; but if you mean that these are in a "chain" of authority, as the GCB presupposes, and as the Medievalists believed, -- expressed in such things as that a tremor at the "higher" levels is automatically magnified down the "chain," to the "lower" levels, or that kings have "divine right" and rich people are "above" poor people in moral significance, -- then no.

[Dubious]

Without citing references, though I could do it, Carl Jung emerges as a major intellectual and cultural figure within the Germanic world and that of the continuation of young German nationalism, recovery of Germanic *identity*, resistance to Roman Catholicism, and the rise of a radical Germanic Protestantism, and all connected as well to a sort of 'rebirth' of what I might call romantic paganism. I de-emphasize the political element in order to accentuate, shall I say, the *spiritual* element. The quote I submitted some posts up, from After the Catastrophe, quite clearly indicate where Jung's sympathies (in the sense of resonance) lie. And in order to understand CG Jung's relationship to all of this one would do well to examine the life of CG Jung's grandfather who directly participated in the early Volkish movement (a movement within Germanic ideation beginning approximately in the early 19th century).

The "locality" as you describe the term, is now quite different from the days of Jung. The "volk" paradigm seems to be of far less concern, at this late date, to Germany or any appeal to Germanic Identity. It seems the Germans now have to a great extent divested themselves, silently but not unconsciously, of the older type of volk and its mythological connotations. Jung may have described the psychic content of the periods he was alluding to but it's too late now to think of "volk" as a distinct identity among Germans in the old manner. With the vast influx of foreigners from Africa and other countries, the "locality" aspect is in severe danger of losing its identity. The same is true for most of Europe, especially its Western regions. It seems to have weakened itself more after the war than when the war was active.

I think, among Germans, this kind of metamorphosis happened more than elsewhere in Europe simply because of the guilt complex which left them open to a collective neurosis which called into question its entire previous mindset. The Japanese, for example, are still far more culturally and ethnically distinct than what Germans have been able to maintain for themselves. I believe that's due to them having suffered far less psychic trauma after the war compared to Germany who seemed to have a will in divesting themselves psychically from its former history. Their "identity", in effect, can no-longer claim to be what it was. One can already tell that by its current lack of creativity compared to how miraculous and original it once was. The only thing which remains are their engineering skills which requires almost nothing by way of that spirit which once possessed a near endless creativity.

But overall, it's Europe as a whole, its culture and accomplishments, that is indeed suffering a strange death.

[Dontaskme]

The earlier aesthetic God of the ancient Greeks named Zeus and his son Hercules was changed by Chritianities God.

The old gods or the new gods change human history but they cannot change natural history because the gods are man made and serve man. Nature's god does not serve man. It serves nothing. Humankind wants to serve this god but the god of this universe has not interest in such servility. I use the word god as human language has its limits.

[Alexis Jacobi]

A few thoughts on recent exchanges [Official Soundtrack] (Hope I am not repeating meself).
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Just above I presented the Christian story in brief. Did I get it right or did I get it wrong?

I listed already the various ways in which you got it wrong. It was on that basis that I stated you haven't really read it. Nobody who read it could get it that wrong.

By way of correction what you did was something you do often (and I think are known for): you avoided completely the entire issue and certainly any discussion of the issue. It is left to me to try to decide, as fairly as possible, why this is. And doing that is part-and-parcel of this on-going conversation. I do not think I have ever carried on a conversation with a dyed-in-the-wool and a true religious fundamentalist like you. My impression of you had been a degree of intellectual openness which made discussion possible. But as things have progresses I determine (still it is in the realm of strong hunch) that you are incapable of intellectual work. I asked you to examine the 'metaphysical predicates' and the core terms of Christian belief by providing a list. I asked you if my assessment of what was at stake in them (the fall of man, the exile from a protected state, and the 'story-line' of exile that leads to the descent, from Heaven, of 'God's only begotten son' who enacts the rôle of 'the second Adam') was accurate. I asked if you would assent to my encapsulation that the Fall was instigated by Satan and also if you would assent to the core Christian description that Satan as the primary 'fallen angel' was given free and extensive reign in our world, the world of our Earth.

For reasons I can only guess at -- but guessing is necessary because you refuse to reveal yourself, you refuse to reveal your core tenets in an honest and direct way -- you did again what you often do when, shall we say, you are 'confronted' by those persons, moderns, who have a spiritual and material existence outside of Christian belief. What I notice about you is that you are the worst apologist possible for the task you seem to have set yourself to. You achieve the diametric opposite of what you indicate (without saying so) you are trying to achieve: a return to 'belief in' the Christian metaphysic which, according to you, leads to 'becoming saved'.

In regard to 'salvation', and in other recent posts, I have pointed out the fact that *we* moderns, due to shift in how *the world* is visualized, perceived and understood, cannot understand and can make little sense of what *salvation* is. Salvation from what to what? Yet you are incapable of any sort of examination of this important question, and by your incapacity reveal, to me in any case, that you have little comprehension or even interest in our contemporary, existential 'crisis' (as it might be called though different words could be substituted, or a group of them, to indicate 'where we are at' now).

Time and again you present your interlocutors with the initial, and the final, terms of your argument and presentation: Either except what I tell you about *what Christianity is* and *what it demands of one* or go to Hell. That's it. There is no more dimension to your relationship to Christianity. I do acknowledge that you put it in these terms: "It is not me telling you this, I am just repeating to you the worlds of Jesus Christ himself and of the Apostles". What this indicates, from where I sit, is simply that you man the walls of a simplified and reduced Christian fundamentalism. But as I say your personal position is strange: you 'leap over' everything that Christianity in fact was, and still is, and you then revisit and re-visualize what it is to be now by refusal to understand what it actually became. It is an odd manoeuvre of historical revisionism.

So in this sense, and if I am right (I have to guess and intuit since you have no self-consciousness about your own self and 'self-consciousness in this sense is anathema to your self-visualization and your presentation), you are a Modern who has opted for a really strange method of remaining within a sort of 'bubble', and in this bubble you cannot have any influence, or very little influence, on anyone who is a product of our culture and who has (as I say) been extruded through modernity's processes out onto the non-vertical ground of today. Now who does that leave you with? You have to turn to the Global South and to people who are sort of pre-moderns. Or people who have not really been brought into full modernity (if such exists) and who are in a liminal state. And thus my reference to your evangelical work among the peasants of Central and South America.

You say: It is to these, these underdeveloped, ignorant, non-intellectual types that God always directed His evangelical work. God 'loves' therefore those who do not have enough defenses established to resist your sophistical evangelism. You can hardly speak, or you can hardly speak uprightly and honestly with people of your own cultural level, and when thwarted you redouble your energy among the third-world peasant-class who, as I say, cannot actually distinguish you for what you are. Oddly -- but this is a delicate territory and one hard to talk about becuase it has numerous sides to it -- you become a sort of 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. You become someone who takes advantage of ignorance, lack of education, and poverty, to preach your message of 'salvation'.

This is a harsh and rather binary analysis because, like Peter Berger's view of pentecostalism in the Global South (the wild fire that is only comparable in scope to the wild fire of the expansion of Islam), sociologists notice that there are a range of positive effects when people become Evangelical or Pentecostal Christians. One of their motives is to achieve modern status, that is to rise up out of pre-modernism. Their primary motives are often not those of 'gaining salvation' but of gaining much more of a foothold within material conditions. But this leads, again, to the primary question: What is salvation? And you are completely outside of comprehension of the inner and deeper implications of all of this.

How proud you must feel!

[henry quirk]

Who else has defined intentions?

I think I've been pretty clear about mine (though not so much, mebbe, in this thread cuz mine aren't Christian).

[Immanuel Can]

I asked you to examine the 'metaphysical predicates' and the core terms of Christian belief by providing a list. I asked you if my assessment of what was at stake in them (the fall of man, the exile from a protected state, and the 'story-line' of exile that leads to the descent, from Heaven, of 'God's only begotten son' who enacts the rôle of 'the second Adam') was accurate.

And I told you it was different from the Genesis narrative on various points. Here is my exact response:

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 07, 2022 9:57 pm
Where, on Earth, do you get this narrative?

It's nothing I've ever heard of. "Man fell from heaven?" The Bible doesn't say that. Do you know what "Adam" means?

And what is a "realm of Divine Protection"?

Moreover, mankind fell through sin, not through a mere "error."

And man was already in the world, so couldn't "fall down into" any world.

??????

Now...this is very clear: on the business of "man falling from heaven," or "a realm of Divine Protection" (I have no idea what that even means, and it's certainly not Genesis), and on the matter of "error vs. sin," and on the business of "falling down into the world," you've just got the story completely wrong.

I could not be more clear. And you could not be less willing to hear it. But all you have to do is check the early chapters of Genesis, and you'll find I'm 100% right.

For reasons I can only guess at -- but guessing is necessary because you refuse to reveal yourself, you refuse to reveal your core tenets in an honest and direct way

You didn't ask all the things you listed above, until just now.

So let's not pretend you've been hard done by...you haven't.

Salvation from what to what? Yet you are incapable of any sort of examination of this important question,

You didn't ask it.

I'm more than capable, as a matter of fact. What do you want to know?

Salvation is from a condition of being estranged from God and subject to His judgment against sin, to a condition of having been forgiven and born again to Him. It's all in John 3.

Time and again you present your interlocutors with the initial, and the final, terms of your argument and presentation: Either except what I tell you about *what Christianity is* and *what it demands of one* or go to Hell. That's it.

Not at all. What I say is of no consequence, unless it is according to the Word of God.

And that's the only important question: not "What does IC say," but "What does God tell us?"

And as unpalatable as you may find the idea of a lost eternity, I'm no friend to you or anyone else if I do not tell you what God says in Scripture about that situation.

You say: It is to these, these underdeveloped, ignorant, non-intellectual types that God always directed His evangelical work.

I have never said this.

I have only said that God does not despise them. But His Word is for everyone, not merely for the poor.

But the proud, the arrogant, the self-confident...God has a special word for those folks: God is opposed to the proud, but He gives grace to the humble. (1 Peter 5:5)

You become someone who takes advantage of ignorance, lack of education, and poverty, to preach your message of 'salvation'.

And yet here I am, talking to you without fear or hesitation. So there goes that theory.

We will get farther if you stay on point, and avoid rambling into long, circuitous retellings of your historical theories. If we stay on point, and keep our messages back and forth brief, it will be much more clear what is being asked and what is, or is not, being answered in a given exchange.

So let's try that.

[Dontaskme]

What I say is of no consequence, unless it is according to the Word of God.

Don't you mean according to the Word of Bible?

Thank you for not answering.

[Alexis Jacobi]

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And I told you it was different from the Genesis narrative on various points.

These are some of the elements expressed in Genesis. Can you indicate if all of these are substantially correct and, if not, can you please indicate (using the numbers as reference) where I have gone wrong? My √ indicates what I think is substantially correct, obviously.

1) God created Heaven and Earth and placed a man in a divinely created Garden. √

2) Then he took a part of man and created woman. √

3) There, they were to live (one presumes for all eternity) under the protection of God. √

4) But Satan entered in and corrupted the will and obedience of this Primeval Couple. √

5) As punishment they were evicted from the primeval garden and an Angel with some weird spinning sword was sent to block any attempt at *return*. √

6) And thus, cast out (I used a prepositional term 'down') from the Garden, Man & Woman as humankind were thrust into another sort of world, a world in which death reigned. A world (according to the story) of trials and tribulations. √

7) That Story line has to do with movement through the world -- Exodus in different forms -- but leading to an eventual reconciliation with the offended God who established the punishment in the first place (exile essentially and the couple's alienation from God through disobedience). √

8 ) That reconciliation took place through God's own effort and decision, since it is asserted that Man cannot do it on his own, through an act of intervention in the kosmos, in the world, and in the worldpicture: God sent 'his son' down into the world to 'save' the world. √

9) However, this only led to another dimension to The Story (a cosmic set-back). The Savior, who would have righted everything had He the chance to do so, was adamantly resisted and opposed by Man. But behind this resistance and opposition, that is the one doing it, the one leading the effort, is Satan himself. √

10) And where did he [Satan] fall to? He fell from a celestial dimension or domain -- the angelical world of non-incarnate celestial being -- down into our World. So, as the Story goes, we all live in Satan's Kingdom. Here, Satan has an unusually free reign. √

[Dontaskme]

You won't find any "Great Chain of Being" or anything like it in the Bible. Sorry.

Don't you mean in the man named Jesus. In his story. That story he told before he died, but then didn't actually die because that would have meant his story would be dead as a dodo.

How do you keep his story alive? you keep history alive by believing hisstory to be happening right now, though some of the more intelligent ones among us know that hisstory never happens in the hear and now.

Oh wait, history repeats right...must be the great chain of being.

[Dubious]

What I say is of no consequence, unless it is according to the Word of God.

I agree! What you say is of no consequence having a mind that never travels beyond your barbed-wire biblical purity, maintaining its absolute confidence and obedience to all the camp commander's injunctions so as not to forfeit salvation. Your belief in Jesus resembles a theological concentration camp where it is written anyone who seeks to investigate the horizon beyond will result in the execution of one's expected after-life.

The religious scenario in which you hold such credence is one of degradation enforced by a mind incarcerated, hardly able to move beyond its own confinement.

And that's the only important question: not "What does IC say," but "What does God tell us?"

God has never deviated to tell us what the religious establishment told god to tell us. God is our little puppet who, clearly, never made or induced to make an actual appearance. This, of course, served theism extremely well. That kind of incognito personality, which includes Jesus, is indispensable as the main medium upon which all scriptural mandates are inscribed, subject to our dictation.

[Immanuel Can]

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And I told you it was different from the Genesis narrative on various points.

These are some of the elements expressed in Genesis. Can you indicate if all of these are substantially correct and, if not, can you please indicate (using the numbers as reference) where I have gone wrong? My √ indicates what I think is substantially correct, obviously.

I did that. I even quoted the passage where I did that, in my last message.

Pay attention, now...

1) God created Heaven and Earth and placed a man in a divinely created Garden. √

Okay.

2) Then he took a part of man and created woman. √

Okay.

3) There, they were to live (one presumes for all eternity) under the protection of God. √

We don't know.

4) But Satan entered in and corrupted the will and obedience of this Primeval Couple. √

There's something to discuss there, but okay, let's go with that.

5) As punishment they were evicted from the primeval garden and an Angel with some weird spinning sword was sent to block any attempt at *return*. √

"Spinning sword"? No. No such mention. But they were barred from returning and eating of the Tree of Life, since that would make the sinful nature they'd acquired permanent.

Would you want evil that cannot die?

6) And thus, cast out (I used a prepositional term 'down') from the Garden, Man & Woman as humankind were thrust into another sort of world, a world in which death reigned. A world (according to the story) of trials and tribulations. √

Not "another" world. The same one, but one now under the curse of sin.

7) That Story line has to do with movement through the world -- Exodus in different forms -- but leading to an eventual reconciliation with the offended God who established the punishment in the first place (exile essentially and the couple's alienation from God through disobedience). √

It has nothing to do with Exodus, which is a different narrative. But you'd have to nuance "leading to" by explaining precisely how that was to come about. Here's where we get to the issue of salvation.

8 ) That reconciliation took place through God's own effort and decision, since it is asserted that Man cannot do it on his own, through an act of intervention in the kosmos, in the world, and in the worldpicture: God sent 'his son' down into the world to 'save' the world. √

Yes, okay.

9) However, this only led to another dimension to The Story (a cosmic set-back). The Savior, who would have righted everything had He the chance to do so, was adamantly resisted and opposed by Man. But behind this resistance and opposition, that is the one doing it, the one leading the effort, is Satan himself. √

Actually, Satan is not in that part of the narrative. Rather, the emphasis is on the personal decision of every man or woman. As John puts it,

He came to His own, and His own people did not accept Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God. (John 1:11-13)

So the gospel focuses on the personal responsibility of mankind. Their alienation from God is the result of an act of wilful rejection that originates in the human will, not in a spiritual force outside of him.

10) And where did he [Satan] fall to? He fell from a celestial dimension or domain -- the angelical world of non-incarnate celestial being -- down into our World.

No, you got that idea from John Milton, or through the Catholic tradition. We are not told that. What we are told, though, is:

We [i.e. the sons of God] know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. (I John 5:19-20)