How do I get strength from God?

[JWBlue]

How do I get strength from God to deal with the evil in the world?

 

[URAVIP2ME]

How do I get strength from God to deal with the evil in the world?

1) prayer to God in Jesus' name
2) Scripture reading and study
3) good association that uplifts one's spirituality

 

[Spice]

Learn to see God's spark in everyone.

Always remember that the "evil" energy you feel is just mis-shapened energy. Safely catch it, hold it close, change it to love within your heart, and release it back into the world.

In other words, greet everything and everyone with a loving smile and energy.

 

[Tinkerpeach]

How do I get strength from God to deal with the evil in the world?

You don’t.

The evil in the world is not your burden to deal with it is Gods.

Your job is to be faithful in prayer and make yourself available to God for any purpose He may have for you.

That may be dealing directly with evil in the world or not but He will let you know.

You can do good deeds but you can’t fight Satan, only God can but He can do it through you if that is His plan.

 

[SalixIncendium]

How do I get strength from God to deal with the evil in the world?

I could better answer your question if I knew what specific evil you're dealing with.

But as a general rule, wake up each day with a smile and gratitude, and share that smile and gratitude with everyone you encounter.

 

[RestlessSoul]

“Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you:

For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”

It’s my conviction that our sincere prayers are always answered; but they are answered on God’s terms, not our own. Sometimes blessings come disguised as curses; but your Heavenly Father will never let you down.

 

[Hermit Philosopher]

How do I get strength from God to deal with the evil in the world?

You pray… for the will to see the goodness that is here too.
You pray… for insight and clarity and a better understanding of circumstances in general (both small and large).
You pray… for perspective and for the humility and patience that perspective brings.
You pray… for the ability to forgive.

You act from the state of attentiveness, selflessness and humility that you pray for, thereby contributing to goodness as opposed to only to the dislike/hatred of evil.

 

[Quintessence]

Depends - what is meant by "deal with" (aka, what are you wanting to do) and what is meant by "evil" (aka, what specifically are you targeting)? Once you figure that out it becomes more straightforward which god(s) would be appropriate to invoke.

"Deal with" as in ruthlessly destroy and eradicate from existence? You want a war god or brutal god for that.
"Deal with" as in protecting yourself and your sovereignty from? You want defending or guardian gods for that.
"Deal with" as in existentially accept the inevitable presence of? You want gods of change and peace for that.
Are you targeting a specific individual? A group of individuals? An abstract concept or idea? What methods would actually be able to make a difference against it?

From there, just practice an invocation that is appropriate for your tradition and the relationship you have with those gods. If you have not been practicing your religion and lack experience (or if you have not built strong relationships with those gods) work towards that first. It is a process and a journey. Do divinations as needed to self-reflect and check in from time to time, or talk to other humans about your work. There is a very real risk of getting in over your head with grandiose nonsense like "dealing with evil in the world." That's not to say it is not one's path to walk, but it is a path to be walked with caution and mindfulness given the harm such crusades are capable of leveling.

 

[Banach-Tarski Paradox]

Depends - what is meant by "deal with" (aka, what are you wanting to do) and what is meant by "evil" (aka, what specifically are you targeting)? Once you figure that out it becomes more straightforward which god(s) would be appropriate to invoke.

"Deal with" as in ruthlessly destroy and eradicate from existence? You want a war god or brutal god for that.
"Deal with" as in protecting yourself and your sovereignty from? You want defending or guardian gods for that.
"Deal with" as in existentially accept the inevitable presence of? You want gods of change and peace for that.
Are you targeting a specific individual? A group of individuals? An abstract concept or idea? What methods would actually be able to make a difference against it?

From there, just practice an invocation that is appropriate for your tradition and the relationship you have with those gods. If you have not been practicing your religion and lack experience (or if you have not built strong relationships with those gods) work towards that first. It is a process and a journey. Do divinations as needed to self-reflect and check in from time to time, or talk to other humans about your work. There is a very real risk of getting in over your head with grandiose nonsense like "dealing with evil in the world." That's not to say it is not one's path to walk, but it is a path to be walked with caution and mindfulness given the harm such crusades are capable of leveling.

Ooooo…I like this.

I’m going to have to try to figure out what it means.

Maybe I’ll read some more history first, and ponder it.

Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825

Slaves also sought freedom extra-legally, and flight was typical across the Pacific lowlands. Some escaped slaves traveled as far as the cities while others formed maroon communities, or palenques, along the margins of the mining region. The most important palenque that was formed within the jurisdiction of Popayán was located east of the Pacific mines, in the Patía River Valley. This palenque was significant because it evolved into a town that, as we shall see in later chapters, was central to the royalist defense of Popayán during the wars of independence. Runaways settled in a place called "El Castigo," taking advantage of the frontier area around the Patía River Valley north of Pasto and east of Barbacoas, which was not colonized by the Spanish until the 1720s. By then, when exploration of the area and land titling began to take place, the palenque was populated mostly by renegade whites and runaway slaves from the mines of Barbacoas and Iscuandé and from the haciendas in the Cauca River Valley. During this period Spanish colonial officials unsuccessfully attempted to conquer or destroy this palenque.

Yet, as occured in the neighboring palenques of Esmeraldes and Baudó, and in other runaway communities in colonial contexts, the inhabitants of El Castigo sought the presense of representatives of the church in their territory. Between 1731 and 1732, they sent three messengers to the city of Pasto to request that a Priest visit Nachao and Nalgua, two towns they had established, each of which had built a church within its boundries. This request exposed their strategy of aligning their community with the Catholic precepts that were central to social and political life in Popayán.

The Quito Audiencia tried to take advantage of the maroons' interest in the church, attempting to co-opt the palenque into establishing civil government in the area in exchange for a pardon from the state. The runaway community resisted the audencia's attempt to include them within its juristiction (reducción) but succeeded in securing a permanent priest for their settlement. Morover, the Popayán municipal council conceeded their right to name two people from the palenque to "administer justice in the name of His Magisty to all the individuals who currently are congregated in those towns," with the condition that they not admit any more runaways to the community, detaining the fugitives and informing the Popayán authorities to their presence. Thus, the maroons of Patía not only used religion for the purpose of community building; they also seem to have preferred to establish a relationship with the church rather than with the civil authorities.

In the Hispanic context, the crown promoted a corporate organization of society, and thus collective rights could be secured to a greater extent than individual rights. This constituted an incentive for enslaved and free blacks to link their legal strategies to the colonial corporate logic. Indeed, the politics of freedom and community building among free people of African descent pivoted around the struggle to gain recognition, aquire political rights, and overcome racist assumptions of the larger society. During the eighteenth century, those goals coincided with the crown's interest in integrating the maroons into society - to "reduce" the community of runaways to legitimate towns - by negociating and extending certain concessions in exchage for their professed loyalty. The integration of free blacks in to civil life reminds us that maroon communities were forged within the colonial would and not outside it.

In Popayán, free and enslaved blacks of African origin and descent upheld justice through their underlying pattern of engagement with imperial legal institutions. This was visible in instances when, as in Patía, maroons negociated their conditions of integration into colonial society. Yet legal freedom was not the only goal of the enslaved. As we will see next, in the Pacific mining region, garnering greater rights within the institution of slavery may have been their most realistic goal.

(pages 104 - 106)

 

[Banach-Tarski Paradox]

You don’t.

The evil in the world is not your burden to deal with it is Gods.

Your job is to be faithful in prayer and make yourself available to God for any purpose He may have for you.

That may be dealing directly with evil in the world or not but He will let you know.

You can do good deeds but you can’t fight Satan, only God can but He can do it through you if that is His plan.

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

Michael T. Taussig

PDF:https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/taussig_devil_commodity.pdf

snip----

Part II: The Plantations of the Cauca Valley in Colombia

CHAPTER 3: Slave Religion and the Rise of the Free Peasantry

Two generalizations are necessary to any discussion of black slave religion in Latin America. First, the whites were apprehensive of the supernatural powers of their subjects, and vice versa. Second, religion was inseparable from magic, and both permeated everyday life—agriculture, mining, economy, healing, marital affairs, and social relations in general. The Inquisition, for instance, regarded the occult arts that were drawn from the three continents not as idle fantasies but as the exercise of supernatural powers, including an explicit or implicit pact with the devil. The African slaves brought their mysteries and sorcery, the Indians their occult powers to cure or kill, and the colonists their own belief in magic (Lea, 1908:462).

The magical lore of the European was joined to that of the despised African and Indian to form a symbiosis, transformation, and adaptation of forms unknown to each group. This process was most obvious in beliefs concerning illness and healing. The Europeans had few efficacious medical resources, and their curing depended heavily on religious and magical faith: masses, prayers to the saints, rosary beads, holy water, and miracles wrought by priests and folk curers. The indoctrination of African slaves by Catholic priests focused on curing, which exploited the miracle-yielding power of the Christian pantheon to the utmost (Sandoval, 1956). Conversely, the Europeans availed themselves of their subjects' magic, which was not distinguished from religion. In fact, the Europeans defined African and Indian religion not merely as magic but as evil magic. "It is in this trance," writes Gustavo Otero, referring to the first days of the conquest, "that the conquerors became the conquered" (1951: 128). That restless dialectic of magical counter attributions persists in popular culture to the present day.

Colonization and enslavement inadvertently delivered a special mystical power to the underdog of colonial society—the power of mystic evil as embodied in the Christians' fear of the devil. The quasi-Manichaean dualistic cosmology of the conquerors coexisted with the polytheistic or animistic monism of the African slaves and Indians, so that the conquerors stood to the conquered as God did to the devil. Thus, the popular religion of Spanish America was stamped with ethnic and class dualisms of this momentous order —ever susceptible to mercurial inversions in accordance with the shifting currents of caste and class power.

The Inquisition was founded in Cartagena in the early seventeenth century for reasons that included the Church Fathers' judgment of the colony as the "most vicious and sinful in the Spanish Dominions, [with] the faith on the point of destruction" (Lea, 1908 :456). Female slaves served as healers to such exalted personages as the bishop of Cartagena and the inquisitors themselves, while others were lashed when their occult powers were defined as evil, especially when epidemics of witchcraft were raging. Male sorcerers (brujos) became important leaders in the runaway slave camps (palenques} which caused the authorities endless concern (Borrego Pla, 1973 :27, 83; Tejado Fernandez, 1954:117-32). As intermediaries for Satan, such leaders supposedly initiated their converts in a ritual that mocked Christian baptism and denied God, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in order to achieve salvation in the afterlife and wealth and power in the here and now. This system of belief expresses the specter of social inversion. Teleologically ordered by the Supreme God, the hierarchy of social forms defined by class, color, and ... engendered its mirror image in the fears or hopes of an underworld allied with Satan.

Blacks were notorious for their militantly anti-Christian outbursts, which were macabrely ritualized in the sine qua non of slavery, flogging; at such times it was not unusual for the victim to cry, "I denounce God!" (Medina, 1889:106; cf., Palmer, 1975). They also destroyed symbols of the church—hardly surprising in a society in which, for example, a woman slave owner might measure the duration of a flogging by the time it took her to recite her rosary (Meiklejohn, 1968:216).

Writing in 1662, the chief inquisitor attributed much of the sorcery and idolatry in the mining districts to the heedless materialism of the mineowners, who "live only for profit. . . and keep watch only that the slaves accomplish their daily labor and care for nothing else" (Medina, 1889:12,0). Ostensibly, this sorcery could not only kill and maim people but also destroy the fruits of the earth—a claim still heard in connection with alleged devil pacts made by plantation laborers in the southern Cauca Valley. The pact will increase their productivity and their wage, but renders the canefield barren. Yet, the same laborers, working as peasants on their own or their neighbors' plots around the plantations or as independent subsistence dwellers in the jungles of the Pacific coast, reputedly spurn such pacts. Zaragoza, the mining area referred to, was the scene of one of Colombia's greatest slave revolts, which, according to observers, attempted to exterminate the whites and destroy the mines, as well (Vazquez de Espinosa, 1948 :34i).

The spasmodic moment that bridged the lash and the cry of renunciation of the master's God epitomizes the slaves' devil. He can become a figure of solace and power in that war of attrition against the African's culture and humanity itself. In their devil worship, the slaves appropriated their enemy's enemy. Ironically, through its very attempts at suppression, the Church indirectly validated devil worship and invested it with power. By acknowledging fear of the slaves' spiritual powers, the credulous Spanish inadvertently delivered a powerful instrument to their bondsmen. The Spaniards believed that the devil had spawned the heathen African and that the slaves were part of his ministry. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, after all, the most intense years of the witch cult in Western Europe, the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition—an epoch in which the whole of Christendom trembled before the threat of the diabolic and the magician's manipulation of nature.

Ambiguously but persistently, Europeans equated slave folklore and religion, African identity, with the devil (cf., Genovese, 1974: 159-284). But for the African slave the devil was not necessarily the vengeful spirit of evil. He was also a figure of mirth and a powerful trickster. As Melville J. Herskovits pointed out, West Africans understood the European devil as their divine trickster, and their moral philosophy resisted the sharp dichotomy of good and evil espoused by the missionaries (195 8:2 5 3). Today, along the virtually isolated rivers of the Colombian Pacific coast, where blacks were largely left to fend for themselves after emancipation, they have, not one, but several devils, who tempt rather than threaten. The idea of hell among the blacks of the Raposo River only vaguely corresponds to the Christian idea; some people place it in the sky (Pavy, 1967:2,34). Finding their spirits defined as devils or one in particular defined as the devil, the blacks did not readily attribute evil to the "devil," at least not at first. And even if they did, the attribution could have signified hostility to the new order.

 

[Pancho Frijoles]

How do I get strength from God to deal with the evil in the world?

First of all, it is a great thing that you recognize that God is the source of your strength.
Second, it is good to recognize that God is interested in you becoming strong.
Third, if you are interested and God is interested, it is perhaps a good idea to interact with Him.

Praying and studying the Scriptures is a good thing, but not enough.
But God is everywhere as a source of strength: in your human fellows, in nature, in all kind of experiences. Yeah, even in pain and problems. In fact, perhaps especially in the middle of pain and problems.