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Your words sound defensive to me, at least. It seems like you're attempting to deny to yourself that the opinions of other people matter to you. Whether we recognize it or not, everyone on this forum is a role model, a sympathetic or adverse mediator for imitation, for everyone else. By reading and commenting, we are subjecting our own opinions for scrutiny by others, but especially for our own internal doubts as we make value judgments between old and new thoughts. Now, of course, Jesus debated his opponents. A good debate or discussion can help one clarify what one really knows, and the practice with words is an excellent meditative exercise. The Areopagus where Paul gave his sermon as recorded in the book of Acts was a place for open debate, a pre-internet forum. From the record it is clear that many disagreed with Paul. He did not attempt to force them to change their minds by arguing harder.
People were attracted to become followers of Christ by the example Jesus set. Only the apostate Church used force. I would argue that most of so-called Christendom never really converted but merely adopted the outward forms. John Dee's England is a good example of a land that belied its claim to be Christians. Furthermore, not everyone is suited to being a missionary. There is the monastic tradition of isolation and silence to work out one's own salvation or enlightenment. A blind man leading a blind man only leads to disaster. Anyway, these are my opinions, such as they are.
I used to think that only dead people couldn't change their minds about anything. I changed my mind on that, for now.
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These are all silly. It is crude binary level thinking which is laughably naive. Then again, maybe I'm just a different kind of fool, one who will attempt to explain a rather different point of view, thus:
1. Satan is the accuser.
9 But the devil answered and said before the Lord, “Does Job worship the Lord for nothing? 10 Have you not fenced around his things outside and the things inside his house? And everything that is around him outside, the works of his hands, you blessed, and you made his livestock numerous upon the earth. 11 But put forth your hand and destroy all that he has to see whether truly he will bless you to your face.” - Job 1, Lexham English Septuagint.
1 Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. - Zechariah 3, English Standard Version.
9 And the great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him. 10 And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of His Christ. For the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down— he who accuses them day and night before our God. - Revelation 12, Berean Standard Bible
2. Satan uses secret desire (called mimetic desire by René Girard) to create scandal.4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. - Genesis 3, ESV
11 He said to him, “Who told you that you are naked? Unless you have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you ‘From this one alone, do not eat.’ ” - Genesis 3, LES (Nudity and scandal seem to be deeply linked among most races of mankind.)
9 But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. - 1 Timothy 6, ESV (It is not riches themselves, but the desire for them which leads to scandal; a reminder to mages of advice against lusting for results.)
3. Satan's kingdom requires the war of all against the one in order to propagate itself.
This is the Scapegoat mechanism to restore peace in a group of humans. As desires compete, accusations accumulate, and scandals multiply, tensions rise threatening a war of all against all. Then something rather interesting happens as lesser scandals merge into greater ones. What seemed to be the verge of societal breakdown becomes a war of all against one, the unanimity of all against a scapegoat. The guilt or innocence of the one isn't important so much as the outcome: a restoration of peace following the killing of the scapegoat. Girard explains that the seed of the next crisis is within the newly found period of peace. Thus, it is a never ending cycle, unless humans mature spiritually enough to recognize the cycles of mimetic desire.
Girard defines The Mimetic Cycle as a social "structure of crisis and collective lynching (murder). ... The initial proliferation of scandals leads sooner or later into an acute crisis at the climax of which unanimous violence is set off against the single victim, the victim finally selected by the entire community. This event reestablishes the former order or establishes a new one out of the old. Then the new order itself is destined someday to enter into crisis, and so on."
44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. - John 8, ESV
Accusers can be liars. Remember the commandment, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor"? Here's what Girard says about John 8:44:
From the beginning [the devil] was a murderer.
If readers do not find the mimetic cycle here, again it is because they do not understand it. They have the impression of an arbitrary, inexplicable rupture between this sentence and those that precede it. In reality the succession of themes is perfectly logical, corresponding to the stages of the mimetic cycle. John attributes the mimetic all-against-one to the devil because he already views him as the source of the desire responsible for scandals. He could just as well attribute the whole process to humans, and occasionally he does so.
The text from John is a new definition, ultra-rapid but complete, of the mimetic cycle. In us and about us scandals proliferate; sooner or later they carry us along toward mimetic snowballing and the single victim mechanism. It makes us unknowingly the accomplices of unanimous murders, all the more deceived by the devil because we are not aware of our own complicity, which is not conscious of itself. We continue to imagine ourselves alien to all violence.
From time to time people go all the way in accomplishing the desires of their satanic father and fall back into the single victim mechanism. At the moment when Jesus speaks the word on which we are commenting, the mechanism that formerly mobilized the Cainites against Abel and subsequently thousands of crowds against thousands of single victims is at the point of being repeated against him.
Immediately after these fundamental assertions our text states that the devil "has nothing to do with the truth." What makes him our prince, or our "father," is false accusation, unjust condemnation of an innocent victim. It is not based on anything real or objective, but it succeeds no less in making itself unanimously convincing by virtue of violent contagion. The primary meaning of Satan in the Bible, we may recall, is the meaning found in the book of Job: the chief prosecuting magistrate, the prosecutor in a case at court.
The devil is obviously untruthful, for if the persecutors understood the truth, the innocence of their victim, they could no longer get rid of their own violence at this victim's expense. The single victim mechanism only functions by means of the ignorance of those who keep it working. They believe they are supporting the truth when they are really living a lie. - I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard
Lest anyone thinks this exonerates Christendom, it does not. It surely condemns most people who call themselves "Christian" because, as Girard pointed out "we are not aware of our own complicity."
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