Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: People who choose to be evil, they make this
choice because they get pleasure. The pleasure of being powerful. Now, the Stop Radio Network presents another episode in our continuing series on therapeutic theology with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco and Richard Lloyd Jones.
Richard Lloyd Jones: So, I wanted to talk today about this attraction for evil that Dr. Keppe talks about in his book. In fact, he says here in Psychotherapy and Exorcism, the first chapter, he doesn't waste any time getting into this.
He says "the human being chooses his demons" and then says "the idea of being a victim of evil is quite a comfortable one. But in fact, what's really going on is that the human being chooses and even summons his demons, thereby actually selecting the type of evil he wants in his life." That's the first sentence of the first chapter of this book.
Cláudia: Yeah, very strong, isn't it?
Richard: My God.
Cláudia: Challenging. Challenging
Richard: everything everybody thinks so far. So how is that? How do we do that? What's the process?
Cláudia: Well, Richard, now we have to start giving examples so we can get to this understanding.
Richard: So
Cláudia: children, they get very much surrounded by demons. So demons want to corrupt children. They really do manipulate children's minds. So that's why parents, teachers, need to be vigilant all the time, take care all the time, and orient children all the time.
Because children don't have this discernment to know what is good for them, what is not good for them. They have it already, but not so clear, because they can have a lot of accidents, and they do have a lot of accidents.
Richard: Which are not really accidents in this case.
Cláudia: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes children, they have like an inspiration, and they do things that can cause even so much disaster, like putting fire on things and causing the death of brothers and sisters.
Sure,
Richard: playing with animals, cutting the
Cláudia: wings off birds. But this is already some manifestation of evil, you know? I know it is.
Richard: This pleasure
Cláudia: to hurt. This is another kind of manifestation.
Richard: Can I tell you a story from my teenage years when this came clear to me? I was involved in a gun club when I was a kid. It's pretty common in Canada.
I was never very comfortable, but my friends were doing it, so I joined them. And one day we decided to go out hunting in our little woods around where we lived. And I was sitting on the ground, and there was a little squirrel on a branch. He was about 20 meters away maybe. And I took at least 10 shots and didn't hit this squirrel.
And I said to myself, "you know what, Richard, God doesn't want you to kill." I put my gun away, and I never picked it up again after that.
Cláudia: How beautiful.
Richard: Isn't that something? I had such an experience, because it was so easy to, and nothing, I mean, I felt like such a, at the time I was thinking, you're so terrible, Richard. But then I thought, wait a minute, there's a message here. There's some spiritual lesson for you to
Cláudia: have. So you heard your good angel as well,
Richard: not only your evil angel.
I get very emotional about it because I don't have so many spiritual experiences to talk about that I'm aware of. But that one was really powerful for me. And I remember it was God that didn't want me to kill. So
Cláudia: parents need to teach these things to their children because they will not learn from themselves or spontaneously. Even more, having this society which is so evil and decadent around, parents and teachers need to orient their children to virtue.
Virtue in terms of realizing their true essence, goodness, beauty, truth, and the validity of those things, those metaphysical values and realities.
Richard: Are suggestions then always spiritual, do you think? The first
Cláudia: suggestions, they come from the spiritual world. So we are born very pure, coming from God. We have an opening or a tendency or a chance to get involved with the suggestions. And little by little, bit by bit, with society and our own choices and wrong choices, we can develop to a more serious pathological situation.
For instance, the drug problem. Richard, let's speak a little bit about drugs. Do drugs cause a person to kill or to be evil? The answer is no. Drugs, they open up the mind to release, to let, to show in more freedom the evil side of each one, like we all of us have inside.
Richard: Let's loose in some way. To loosen, yes, the
Cláudia: evil tendency, yes.
To loosen the evil tendencies and to allow evil suggestions to come in freely also. It's like turning the key.
So now you are in this evil world, you are in this evil dimension, and everything you do and communicate is with evil spirits and evil people, and everything becomes evil. As soon as you consent with evil temptations and evil tendencies, you enter an evil dimension, an evil
Richard: universe. Is this only because it diminishes our restriction, our good
Cláudia: sensibilities? Yes, the sense of ethics, consciousness.
Richard: It takes that away somehow, doesn't it? Yes, it does. Like
Cláudia: alcohol. You don't care anymore. Alcohol is terrible. But, you know, good people, they can drink and they can never, ever do anything bad to anyone. They
Richard: become victims if so.
Cláudia: They are good. They just go back to bed and they sleep and they fall and the other day they wake up and they are the same people.
Honest, working, hardworking sometimes. And they never hurt anyone.
They just hurt themselves. But there are people who really, when they get a little drink, then they are ready and free to do what these inner demons want to do.
Richard: Do you think in this case, maybe they use the drugs or the alcohol to release that? Yes.
Cláudia: They already have that intention? Yes, they have. Because it gives too much pleasure to be evil, to perform evil.
It's like very much pleasurable for those who choose this. For people who make a choice to be evil, they make this choice because they get pleasure, they take pleasure. And not only this, but the pleasure of being powerful. How come a drug addict can feel himself powerful? Yes, people in evil, they are powerful to destroy God's kingdom. They are evil to destroy the purity, the goodness, the innocence, the happiness, the gaiety, the enjoyment of other people.
They have the power to do this. Evil people, they have the power. So these crazy lunatics, rapers, if they see a virgin, which is innocent, or a beautiful woman, or a girl, a child abuser, they get tremendous pleasure in hurting, attacking what is divine in that person. The power to destroy, the power to say no to God, to goodness, the power to destroy other people's expectations, for instance.
Richard: And their future, maybe. Their future.
Cláudia: Take away everything. And you see this, Richard, and this is something, a trace of genius that Keppe has. He applied the study of pathology of power in all situations, in everybody, everybody, in many thousands, millions of instances you can take from this study. That as soon as you have this intention to say no, and you have the feeling that someone is expecting you to be good.
If not a true like human person, God expects you to be good.
So he created you for this purpose. Yeah. So you feel this, that when you are not good, you are contradicting, you are opposing, you are denying someone that is expecting you to be good, to be beautiful, to be truthful. So this is a human problem. And demons, they don't have that much work to do anymore because Satanists are not only those groups, but Satanic is also Satanic.
All attitude.
Richard: That's what we wanted to talk about. As you were speaking, I was thinking of Jekyll and Hyde, right? The story, the pleasure. Robert Louis Stevenson, he captured perfectly this sense of kind of being addicted to the power of having no constraints, doing whatever you want. This wild craziness thing. So, then let's think of some specific examples. You were talking about the movie you saw recently, about the famous case in Canada, actually, of Paul
Cláudia: Bernardo and Karen Homolka.
Yeah, the name of the movie is Karen.
Richard: Yeah, story about her. Yeah. And her, she never showed any remorse.
Cláudia: That's what they said.
Richard: For any of the, I should tell people the case, Paul Bernardo was a kind of a stalker, and I don't think he had been accused of anything more serious than that until he met this girl, Karen Homolka, and they became a kind of a partnership, if you want to call it, like Bonnie and Clyde.
And then he let loose with some really horrible things and started with rape and then raping, torturing, and killing people, all with the consent and apparently the participation of this woman with him. At least this is what the movie shows. So
Cláudia: do you see the similarity of what Jesus said? "When two or more get together in my name, they will be powerful.
And I will be with them." So he can apply this to Lucifer, to Satan.
When two or more get together in my name, I will be there and give them a lot of power. Wow. So that's what happened with him and Karen, Paul and Karen, right? Yeah. It's like an exchange of strength and support, a pact, an evil pact. And the pleasure they got from this pact was so big that they could not split.
Richard: Wow. Then let's talk about this.
Those are extreme cases. Let's talk about this in the day-to-day life. I remember Dr. Keppe talks a lot about this, and I've studied a little bit about Edward Bernays, who was Freud's nephew. Many people don't know his name. He is considered the father of public relations, and he worked a lot with stimulating this kind of narcissism, this envy, this desire to be bad.
He was the one who found a way to encourage women to smoke in public with a big campaign he did in the 1920s in New York.
And so there's this pull that we have for bad things inside ourselves that's used by social power, social systems. Am I getting that right? Is this the dialectic, the comparison? Yes,
Cláudia: yes. The pull? Like we have another instance, which is Faust. Faust,
Richard: yeah.
Cláudia: Yeah. So a person wants always to be beautiful, to be famous, to be rich, to be young, to be
Richard: loved, to be influent, power, money, prestige.
So some people do
Cláudia: whatever they can to take and they do whatever they can and they ask demons to help them and they accept many offers that are not so good in order to get there, in order to preserve it. In order to achieve these expectations, which are not virtuous expectations. And this is very common, Richard. This happens day by day in our lives.
We see so many instances of women manipulating and using sex to manipulate men and men manipulating other men and women in order to be more powerful.
And in the field of commerce and marketing, this is so, so, so present. Why do people use some techniques to sell more and better? They don't sell the best. They don't sell the healthiest articles. They don't sell virtues, but they sell what people want. And people get very much in trouble. They get a lot of debts because they want to achieve that pleasure that will feed their narcissism, their feeling of being powerful in society and materialistic.
So it's not a virtue to be like this. It's not healthy. It's pleasant. It's pleasant in sick terms. And the
Richard: pleasure is so big that they don't give up their pleasure anymore. Because you talk about Faust. And I think there's many stories about this pact with the devil. And in a sense, this is what's happening. There's the whole blues music, the crossroads that the great guitar player makes a pact with the devil.
You make me a great guitar player and I will, you know. And there's a young musician I was reading about recently. I don't want to mention her name, but she said they were talking about her selling out. She came from the church and she did a lot of gospel music. And then she started to enter the world of pop. And they said, "but this is a much inferior music world." And she says, "yes, I guess I made a pact with the devil." And so there's this idea of a pact with the devil exists.
Cláudia: And exists. It doesn't need to be formal, like in satanic masses. But it's something inner, psychological. In the innermost of the person, when the person give up fighting the evil tendencies and restricting them, because all of us have temptations, if we stop, if we condone, if we free them, then it's like a tsunami that doesn't stop.
And you
Richard: don't want to stop because you can't stop because it's so pleasant. You don't want to be deprived from that pleasure. Have you heard the expression in English, a slippery slope? No. I don't want to give you an English class, but slippery slope is you start down that incline and it gets very, like ice. You start down there and you start going faster and faster and faster.
Cláudia: So that's the danger of it. For instance, there are so many examples of children that they enter the drug world because they have this evil little bit notion, I'm going to do something against my parents and against the good expectations from me. What am I going to deprive myself if everybody does? So then they start, and they can get to a point where they kill parents, grandparents, family members, strangers to get some money to buy drugs.
So I was listening to a preacher, and he was speaking about demonology and how demons do this temptation and how people should deal with temptations. And he said "there are two temptations, two sins that people could never, ever condone, that people should avoid at any price, that you cannot dialogue with them, absolutely cannot dialogue with them, which are for the priest to deny the faith in God and lust." So when I heard that, I thought, oh, how come?
How come he's giving so much importance to lust
Richard: if arrogance,
Cláudia: pride, envy, avarice, laziness are so much worse than lust? Because lust and gluttony seems to be very similar. They are like...
Richard: A type of voracity. Yes,
Cláudia: because they come from an instinct, natural instinct, which is distorted. But the beginning is an instinct, and it's natural, it's healthy, it's godly.
It's a godly instinct to eat and the sexual instincts. But according to the majority of the priests, lust, all the time for centuries, was one of the worst. So I think, oh, my God, where did this idea come from and why? So I still am researching. Thinking about that. And thinking and researching with my practice in my practice. And I get to some ideas.
And one of the ideas I got these days was the devil is smart. He wants to get as many people as possible.
Richard: In his web. In
Cláudia: his web. So this thing about the faith, it's very clear, it's obvious. If you start denying the existence of God, he's the first door to deny everything that comes after this. If you deny the existence of God, and as a father, he's lost, he has lost.
So you can see, okay, I don't see God as religious people tell, but I see him as a force, a cosmic force that originates an energy that originates everything.
So this is not God. This is like a Penteistic. To believe in God is to believe in, it's one God, and it's a person, and we are created at his image. So there is all this, all this reality about this. And if you start denying this, then you open the doors to anything. And if you deny the existence of God, so you deny the necessity of love, beauty, and truth.
If you start denying the validity of being loving and merciful, if you start denying the necessity of statics and beauty in life, and if you start denying the necessity of truth, that lie rules the world and it's okay, so you get to hell.
Richard: That's the slippery slope. So
Cláudia: this is hell. This is hell. And in here. Now, why lust? I thought lust is very much present instinct in people.
It's godly. So if the devil enters in the fantasies, enters inside the world of lust, which is very easy, very easy to achieve or to get to a person through lust, through sex.
Later this vice let's say if you give too much attention to this, if you distort too much your sexual life, if you don't use it that much for affection but you use it just as a form of taking pleasure and perversions, so this will open the door to other demons that are much worse, like this couple Paul and Karen, like Charles Manson and his group.
Richard: Bonnie and
Cláudia: Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde. So they get together, they get attracted through sex, but then they channel very evil spirits that rule the couple, like become violent assassins, thieves, and everything becomes normal to them. So it's lust, in my opinion, it's a door that is much easier to be open in human beings. Yes. Like gluttony. There are so many saints that were gluttonous.
So it's something that we see. It's more like a weak part of a human being. It's not in such an evil, but it's a weak.
And being weak, you can like give up to other sins that are much, much worse. And I say sins because we are talking about evil spirits, but
Cláudia: we should name them pathologies.
