Hello....Is there anybody out there?

First of all, I just wanted to say that it is hotter than I should be for this time in May. I am sitting here in my "office" just sweating my skin gross and it feels so nasty. At times like this I really wish that we had central air.

I just finished watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I must say that it was a very interesting movie. I have always been intrigued by things in the spiritual realm. I remember being big into studying demonology during High School. It was almost to the point where I was looking for demons around every corner. Part of it probably had to do with my conversion experience. I won't get into that here, but I will just say that the subject of angels and demons played a very large role. Did I mention that it was hot? I'm sitting here having to towel myself off every few minutes.

I personally don't know quite what to make of the subject any more. I have always been taught that there really is no middle ground; most forces in the world are either angelic or demonic. I would still like to believe that but there are a few things that I usually end up thinking about. What can I say? I am a reluctant disciple.

I am not really willing to go to arguument about it, but when it comes to the biblical portrayal of demonic posession I just don't know quite what to think. I find it most interesting to note that there is virtually no mention of such a thing in the majority Hebrew literature. I know that the Talmud speaks of demons, but it is in a rather bizarre light. It offers very stange rituals that can be done in order to detect a demonic presence, but by today's standards they seem a bit much like the practices of witch doctors. I really do feel bad about seeming to take the attitude that we are more enlightened now than they were then, but I just can't help it in this case.

The issue is coming closer to home lately...literally. In some ways our house is "haunted." Well, at least it has certain things that happen from time to time that lend to us thinking so-

• Every once in a while we hear the footsteps of what sounds like a smaller child about our daughter's age running up and down the hall upstairs. We go up to check and sure enough, our daughter truly is out cold.
• Occasionally our daughter says that she doesn't want to go in a room because "there's a guy in there." We have learned to be able to discern some of her stories from when she is actually telling the truth. Whenever she tells us about him she is serious.
• She has an acquaintance that she calls Mokajeez. Usually her descriptions of him are pretty consistent. The only discrepency is that sometimes she says that he is a kid and sometimes he is a man. But the constant attributes is that he wears a baseball cap backwards (colours are red, white, yellow and green), he wears sunglasses, and has a beard. His apprearance is usually that he is sad or mad. However, he does not talk to her.
• My wife occasionally feels some kind of "presence" watching her if she vaccuums in the guest bedroom upstairs and she will sometimes see what seem like light beems coming out of nowhere in our bedroom if it is dark.
• One day as I was coming downstairs to the main level I heard what sounded like my daughter in plunking at the piano only to find out that she was in another room and none of the cats were anywhere to be found.

How do we explain these things? Many would say that they were demons or demonic manifestations but I just don't know.

Concerning the footsteps, I read something on a paranormal website about something called a "time slip." This is supposedly something that compliments the idea addressed in quantum physics concerning parallel universes. Perhaps there is a parallel universe either from the past or the future where another small child lives in the house and has my daughter's room, and what we are hearing is that reality "slipping" through the time gap from then into now. It could be a very far stretch but who knows.

I don't want it to sound like I'm buying into all this and trying to throw out the Bible. It is just that there is much in the Bible that could just be a correlation to the understanding of the day in which it was written. Could another name for various types of psychosis could have been labeled demonic posession? It could have been. Is that what the Gospels are talking about? I have heard equal numbers of accounts from people who believe in angels/demons and those who believe that they could be the ghosts of people in the past. Both sides have some good arguments. Do people go directly to Heaven or Hell immediately after they die? I know that the Bible tends to teach so, but the only real implied teaching of that is from what Jesus is credited telling the criminal next to him on the cross, and Paul's "vision" that he had after being stoned and left for dead. Paul even said of that event that he didn't know if it was real or a dream.

I would continue this, but now it is 03:40 and I am burned out. I'm glad that I'm not working tomorrow.

What are your thoughts? Demons? Spooks? Have any stories of the bizarre? Let's talk about them.