James's object, which he never quite states in so many words, is to show that the objections to natural religion raised by Hume and Kant are irrelevant, because natural religion has demonstrable good effects as we see them. Arguments for or against the existence of God are beside the point, because we see a clear and consistent longing for something outside itself in the "sick soul". This is nothing like the sophistication of Feser's Five Proofs, but it works for certain tasks.
As I begin to withdraw myself from the St Mary of the Angels story, I'm coming back to William James's method. Whether we can prove the existence of demons is beside the point, because we can observe their effects in what we see. Take just the perplexity I saw in Judge Daniel Murphy this past Thursday. He's looking at a situation where parties are expending millions in time and treasure to squabble over a property in a real-world Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
But I have another observation -- while some long-term parishioners were on the sidelines here, the prime movers who began the dispute in 2011-12 were all newcomers. Mrs Bush hadn't been to church in 40 years. The Kangs, named in the damage suit, were new to the parish. Fr Bartus was a newly-minted priest, ordained a "continuer" only in early 2011. A woman closely associated with Fr Bartus and a godmother to his daughter, while in middle age, had only recently been baptized.
The events of 2012 would simply not have occurred without these neophytes taking very active roles. And new to the game, they were utterly consumed by it, driven sometimes by a frightening level of anger. Let's go back to the neo-rationalist principle of sufficient reason. The link quotes Leibnitz:
Our reasonings are based on two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge that which involves a contradiction to be false, and that which is opposed or contradictory to the false to be true. . . . . And that of sufficient reason, by virtue of which we consider that we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us.We've got a strange cabal of people new to a parish, new to Anglicanism, new to Christianity, new to the priesthood, who've suddenly got it all figured out, to the point that they're breaking laws to get what they want. Yet what they want isn't at all clear. Do they want to steal the property for themselves? Some may have wanted baksheesh of some sort out of the deal, or some tangential advantage, but certainly not the property itself.
At this point, I can't exclude the idea that the sufficient reason in this case is demonic. I hear presentations by priests who say that the demonic can enter via the occult or via pornography, but I've got to consider the hypothesis that the demonic has inserted itself via something in the St Mary of the Angels parish. The late Fr Carroll Barbour had a point when he said the devil sits in the front pew of every parish.
It seems to me that there was a constellation of very weak characters who came into the parish around 2010 and fell under some very bad influences. Those who've emerged from this story without a lien on their souls should probably be thanking the angels and saints and working on an exit strategy. And in addition to my other devotions, I've begun saying three Hail Marys at morning and night.
