My First Outline Outside of Oral Presentations

My Second Outline Outside of Oral Presentations

God, Your Parents and You

This is an outline of Theistic Psychology by Leon James (2004)

By Sabrina Favors

Instructions for the oral presentation can be found at:

1. God’s Omnipotence

God is all-powerful. That means no one else can be powerful. All of us get our power from God. The evil spirits that grab hold of us aren’t doing so by their own power, but by God’s. This sections notes, “Anything that is not connected to a prior source cannot occur.” This means that God’s power flows through all things, and nothing, not a single person or spirit, acts without His help.
This is one of those concepts which seems easy to accept in theory, but difficult to put into practice. Most Christians already believe that God is always there and works through them or helps them through difficult times, but I think even they would have difficulty accepting the fact that God also allows evil spirits to influence our affective organs. I honestly don’t know how I, personally, feel about this concept.
This morning I was watching a comedy show. The comedian (whose name slips my mind) had a joke about how after a sports game, the winners attribute it to God, while the losers blame themselves. He wanted to see a loser say, “Well, we were doing fine, unless Jesus made me fumble.” It was pretty funny, but in theistic psychology, one could say he did, in a sense. Not that God literally trips a person, but He can give an evil spirit the power to influence the player’s motivation to win, which could result in clumsiness.

2. The Filtering of God

God’s love and wisdom comes down to every person, at the exact same moment. Unfortunately, depending on where they are in their mind, His love can filter down through the layers of our minds until the result is its opposite—hate and stupidity.
I think this is valid. It is so easy to misconstrue a message or lesson when you are in a bad mood, assuming someone offended you when they meant nothing of the sort. Like this, when you are in the hell of your mind, you aren’t willing to accept any talk of love and selfless happiness.
God’s message is like a game of telephone, only you aren’t passing the message onto another person, but yourself in a different level of your mind. If you are in your heaven, the final message will be about God’s love and wisdom, but if you’re in your hell, it will come out twisted and full of anger.

3. A Child’s Character—Blame the Parents

When we are born, we are surrounded by the same vertical community which surrounds our parents. If they are surrounded by evil spirits, so are we. If we weren’t, our parents wouldn’t recognize us. Of course, as we grow up, God brings us into contact with good spirits as well, and he provides a controlled alternation between heavenly and hellish thoughts, so that when we are teens, we can begin to choose for ourselves.
This makes sense to me. If children already are affected by their parents’ physical appearance (through genetics), and their opinions, by what children hear and see, it makes sense that somehow, children would also come into contact with their parents’ emotional states, such as through evil spirits.
A young child who watches their father act abusively towards their mother, influenced by the angry feelings of evil spirits, will also be influenced by these spirits. If the child accepts these spirits later, the child will also grow up to be abusive.

Other websites:

http://www.newchurchissues.org/hell/h94pr.htm (an article which mentions how God doesn’t force anyone into hell, but allows them to choose for themselves)

http://www.baysidechurch.org/studia/print.cfm?ArticleID=88&detail=1 (article about Swedenborg’s take on Luther and talks about free will)

http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499f99/dimensions/dimensions.html (a site by Dr. James detailing the various levels of the mind and different dimensions of the mind)