Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: God could not create us like slaves. God, in His infinite love, could only create free human beings.
Now, the Stop Radio Network presents another episode in our continuing series on therapeutic theology with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco and Richard Lloyd Jones. In
Richard Lloyd Jones: our last program, Cláudia, you talked about how there's no suffering that comes from God. Let me just put us back into where we were then.
So if there's evil, it can't come from that source. So if we have problems on the planet, it's not coming from the creation, the way things were created. In order to understand this, you have to have a theological vision that includes God, of course, that all forces from nature are good. All are to propagate life, to continue life, to preserve and propagate life.
So this evil then, you said, comes from the transcendental, non-physical, invisible, not perceived by our senses, spiritual beings. That's where we left off last time.
Cláudia: Yeah, and I think it's very, very important that we touch this subject. Because many people blame God. Yeah. But if he didn't create evil, why does he allow evil to exist?
Richard: That's the question people ask all the
Cláudia: time.
So here we enter a field that is much bigger than our intellect. But you can, by intuition, grasp this metaphysical situation. God could not create us like slaves. God, in his infinite love, could only create free human beings. His freedom, and freedom according to the real, the true metaphysics and Keppian metaphysics, is the freedom to be. And being is being beautiful, it's being good, it's being truthful.
It's the truth, beauty, and goodness in itself.
Richard: Yeah, being is not this
Cláudia: mixture of being good sometimes and being bad other times. In the origin, by creation, God created us totally free in what we could do and think infinitely in goodness, beauty, and truth. But he didn't want to create us like robots, good robots or robots of goodness. So he wanted to create a being like the human being that would freely accept him or not.
Therefore, metaphysically speaking, evil does not have an essence by itself. It was not created by God. Evil is the denial, the rejection, misrepresentation, distortion. It's to say, no, I don't want to be good. I don't want to be. I do not accept being free to do and to live and to enjoy happiness and goodness and beauty. In fact,
Richard: I'm kind of irritated that I have to do good things.
Why should I be a prisoner of having to be good? Why can't I be?
Cláudia: So all evil, all illness, metaphysical and physical, immaterial and material, organic, in nature, in anything, it's an absence of goodness. It's an absence of health. It's a denial of energy. It's a blockage of energy. Shouldn't exist. So it's just a movement. Evil is an attitude. Evil does not have an essence.
Evil is an attitude. And we can adopt this attitude because we were born free to accept him and to live in total wonder of the universe. Or we can say no and stay in absence, depriving ourselves from something. So evil is always a deprival. It's a slavery, we could say.
Richard: Yeah, and it makes sense, Cláudia, that we should be free to choose because this is the question that comes up.
If God wanted me to be good, why did he give me this decision, this opportunity to decide to be bad? This is the question people ask all the time. But it makes sense that there's a choice. But
Cláudia: he didn't give this suggestion or this choice to
Richard: say no, but he respects our choice. He would prefer that we don't choose that, but of course...
Cláudia: And he advised.
Richard: And he advises us not to. He
Cláudia: advised. Yeah. But love, Richard, needs acceptance.
Richard: Yeah. It's the same thing as a human being, you know. If I force, I don't have children, but if I force my children to love me, this is not... This is not love. No, you want them to choose to be with you, you know, to respect you.
Cláudia: So this is the minimum thing from our part to correspond. Our part, the only thing we can do is accepting. So this acceptance is the way we can show love to God in retribution to all that we get from Him. So love needs two elements, two beings, two subjects, like two people, two beings. In order to love, you need two objects, at least one being and subject and an object.
Richard: Yeah, a giver and a receiver or an acceptor
Cláudia: in some way. Or resonant love. So it's a common, it's a resonant love to each other. So love needs this acceptance. From the other part. Otherwise, it's just one-way love. It's not a fulfilled love. You cannot even enjoy the love you get, you receive.
Richard: So this is how we started with this idea. And then I was thinking that...
Cláudia: So how evil started then?
Richard: Yeah, where does...
Cláudia: All beings good, there was a big one. A mastermind, according to scriptures, according to revelation, there was a mastermind that didn't accept. He wanted himself to be the God. But it's not, so as it is, you cannot be another God. It's impossible. Yeah. So the only way, it's like to
contradict, to oppose. He is the big opposer.
And
Richard: by opposing himself to God, he opposed himself to himself, to his essence. You're talking about Lucifer now. Yes, I
Cláudia: am.
Richard: The mastermind, the
Cláudia: king of the hell.
Richard: Yeah, it's like king of hell. If we look at this as a mythology, it's kind of a nice story. But if you look at it as something real, that there was a created being who was the greatest angel or whatever the story is, in heaven saying well you know what this is very nice God but I really don't want to. I want to be you.
Or I don't
Cláudia: want to be you and I don't want to be anything that you created. I
Richard: don't accept anything. I don't want to follow your will. I want to be myself.
Cláudia: I will follow my will. And his will is to say no because he has no other will other than denying. You know Kant, this Immanuel Kant.
Richard: The German philosopher.
Cláudia: He described freedom as the capacity to say no to what is.
So he understands that freedom according to human understanding and this angel's understanding, decayed angels, is the capacity to say no, to contradict. So I say no, no matter what. This is freedom for Kant and for many, many, many, many, many thinkers and people. And not that freedom is the opportunity to be. Freedom to be. You cannot be free without being who you are.
And this is very tricky, very profound, but very revealing.
Richard: Shakespeare maybe was a little bit superficial to be or not to be, as if there was a choice for that, which is the choice you're talking about. Yeah. But this is
Cláudia: not any sense of freedom,
is it? But let's talk about Lucifer then, because this is, Dr. Keppe has
Richard: said in his work, oh, by the way, I was doing a little research on this, that there are 68% of Americans, sort of, around that, who say they believe in God today.
In Canada, it's about 65%, which is down quite a bit from about 15 years ago. But it's only about 30% in England today believe in God. 60% in France, and it's increasing among young people there at the moment. I was just doing a few countries, but I think Brazil's 90% or something. It's very high in Brazil, belief in God. But the belief in Satan is interesting because while people may believe in God, there are many people who do not believe in Lucifer, Satan.
It's pretty high in the United States. It's about 70%. And about 50% there believe in demonic possession. This is increasing a lot in the United States. But
Cláudia: how come? You said in the United States 70% do not? 68% believe
Richard: in God and 70% believe in Satan. So it's about the same. 90%
Cláudia: believe in Satan. Believe in Satan. Okay, in the United States.
Richard: In the United States. Great.
Cláudia: This is important. This
Richard: is important. But other countries, European countries I'm thinking about now, it's not well accepted, this idea. In fact, I was reading an abstract from a new paper relatively recently, the last five years, from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. And in this study, they suggest that belief in demons and evil spirits is harmful to your mental health.
This is the conclusion of this. So there's this big sort of movement in the world where the people are starting to understand that there are problems that come from spiritual entities. But the academic world, the official scientific world, is totally dismissive. They
Cláudia: don't consider that this rationalization, they are intellectuals. Intellectuals generally don't realize that there is a mechanism of defense, very, very sick, very, very harmful, which is this one, to rationalize things, to intellectualize things, not to go deep in the feelings and even less to the unconscious and to unconscious forces.
Or
Richard: even the intuition, right?
Cláudia: Yeah. So this academic world, who pays too much attention only to intellect, they tend to become very sick because of this mechanism of defense that Freud brought very clearly. And other psychoanalysts in the world, they know, we know, that a person who is too intellectual, he never does analysis. So
Richard: this story you're talking about from the biblical times, the biblical stuff in the biblical times, from the Bible of the fall of Lucifer, the expulsion from paradise or whatever the story is, is not a mythology.
It's a real energetic experience. It's really something that happened.
Cláudia: It's not only a mythological knowledge, right? It's not only a revelation. It's not only supernatural. It's natural. As well at the same time. It's supernatural and natural because it's energetic, because you can verify it. The inner self of the human being is a very important field of research and scientific research. It's not because our feelings and thoughts and beliefs and values are not tangible to the five senses, that they are not real and they are not powerful and they are not an object of scientific research.
They
Richard: are. And when you say natural, you don't mean like it should happen, but natural in the sense that it's concrete. Nature. Yeah. It happened. It's a concrete
Cláudia: occurrence.
Richard: It belongs to nature. To natural phenomena. Right.
Cláudia: Phenomena in nature.
Richard: So what happened if we take this dialectical point you're making that evil doesn't exist by itself. Lucifer was created as the whole of the universe was created and then chose not to accept.
Cláudia: Yeah, and now he's stuck in his attitude because if he would not or if he would change his mind, something that seems too difficult for him to do, he would go back to his previous essence. You know? The difficulty is that he's in eternity and he seems to be very firm in his choice and his followers too. It's like a psychopath. Psychopaths are very possessed, very much like an example of possession because they go until the end of their lives saying, if people ask them, would you do the same?
Would you be like killing people and chopping their bodies and, you know, torturing people? Would you do this again if you could? And they would. They find this is correct. This is their choice. So Lucifer is in this situation. He has this permanent attitude, you know.
Richard: So crazy, isn't it? Yeah,
Cláudia: but it's a permanent attitude which creates hell to himself and to others.
