Our dumb and deaf spirits are hard to drive out

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 06, 2026

In my last post (How preoccupation with sexual sin can stunt holiness), I quoted Our Lord’s enumeration of the sins that defile us (Mk 7:20-23).* “These evil things”, he said, come out of a man, indeed “out of the heart of man”. And perhaps to our surprise, the first item on the list is not fornication but “evil thoughts”, and the last item on the list is not pride but “foolishness”.

Therefore, “foolishness” (in the sense intended by Christ) is not an unavoidable condition but an “evil thing” which comes “from within” and so “defiles a man”—that is, the person who exhibits it. And I daresay the ultimate foolishness is the refusal to take “the God question”, including Christ Himself, seriously. Sadly, I doubt very much that there is a more pervasive or destructive sin in the world today.

Deliberately obscuring Christ

This flat refusal to take “the God question” seriously has plagued humankind from the beginning, leading to all kinds of strange combinations of idolatry and indifference. The refusal is so pervasive that it is no wonder Our Lord and Savior told the story of the rich man who, upon his death, found himself separated from Abraham by an unfathomable abyss, and so cried out to him:

I beg you, father, to send [Lazarus] to my father’s house…so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment…. [I]f someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. [Lk 16:19-31]

But Abraham replied, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

This may well be the most chilling passage in all of Scripture, more depressing even than the description of the crucifixion of Christ Himself: “Neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

Yet this is the terrible reality which still dominates our fallen world: Huge numbers of people who are able to conceive of the “God question”, and who have been sufficiently exposed to Christ to conceive of the “Christ question”, and who have also sufficient experience of the Church to grasp the “Church question”—huge numbers of such people simply refuse to examine the claims of God, Christ, and the Church. It is not so much even that they take a fixed position on all this, including even millions who still loosely retain the Catholic name. They simply refuse to take the issue seriously, and to face it squarely.

In other words, they refuse to bother with it. And this lack of bothering with it quickly becomes habitual. Even as they age and experience harsh reminders of their own mortality, they remain encased in the life-long habit of a deliberate self-induced ignorance which amounts to a deliberate self-induced refusal. For those of us on the outside of that dark box, nothing is so frustrating as this—that billions of people throughout history, including very likely most of the people we know, have simply refused to take questions of God and eternal life seriously—and that millions upon millions of those in modern affluent societies today have also irresponsibly refused to take the very question of their ongoing existence seriously.

This is inconceivable to any truly thoughtful person. Indeed, it is the preeminent manifestation of foolishness, and it is no wonder that Jesus Christ considered it a sin.

Endemic foolishness

One of the most remarkable aspects of this foolishness is the widespread modern conviction that, since questions about human immortality cannot be answered through scientific study and material measurement (which represents only a small region of human knowing), we have a good excuse to ignore supernatural claims. Sadly, huge numbers of even those with a (very basic) religious upbringing have not been inoculated against this modern error of scientistic materialism. There are probably three major reasons for this in Western societies today. First, quarrels over religion even among Christians became so severe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the desire for political peace became so strong, that mere rationalism and scientism tended to replace religion as a basis for public life and political action.

Second, this led to a tremendous hollowing out of life’s greatest questions. Over time, religion, when not formally outlawed, was relegated to the area of “sentiment”—mere feelings about things which need not interfere with rational public behavior and public policy. Third, add to this the advancement of scientific learning and human material prosperity in the West over the past few centuries, and the result was a widespread contentment with a purely secular approach to the social order, leaving religion aside. Sadly even more destructive wars and an even greater moral breakdown have dominated this era of rationalization, with the result that most modern societies are essentially coming apart at the seams.

Indeed, Western societies and cultures are literally dying as peoples with greater spiritual vigor replace populations which have been secularized to the point of having no coherent understanding of reality and no coherent civilizational or even familial goals. Western culture, in a word, has become sterile. Both literally and figuratively, it is no longer fecund. Overcome by their own narcissism, Western societies are now largely content to dwindle out of existence. What we should have learned is the opposite of what our elites have sought: The exclusion of a coherent supernatural outlook has caused whole societies to fall into the secularist trap of believing that the future is meaningless.

The end of society, the end of humanity

The results were predictable. When we live with ultimate meaninglessness long enough, all that matters is the effort to enjoy the “now”. We learn to take our pleasures where we can and for as long as we can. Paradoxically, we become so immersed in the “now” that we lose our desire and even perhaps our capacity for eternity. We accept the inevitability of death by frittering our time away in present pleasures. Even if we deliberately include some social goods and preserve some generous instincts, our lives become increasingly self-centered and selfish. If we operate in a spiritual mode at all, it is most often in terms of our one remaining semi-pleasant myth: If there is an after-life, we will enjoy it, for God (if he exists) cannot be a monster; and if there is no after-life, well then, we will no longer care.

But this is only to say that Satan takes advantage of both human rationalization and even the benign vestiges of Christian sensibilities to shield us against any confrontation with reality that might frighten us into crying out for help. And so, if we cannot cry out to God, then the very best we can do is to “go gently into that good night”—as the mature but resigned pagans we have proven ourselves to be. We are far too spiritually weak even to follow Dylan Thomas and “rage, rage against the dying of the light”! Having exchanged our spiritual maturity for a worldly maturity, we exclude any need for conversion, and we assume that if anything good at all exists after death, then of course such enlightened persons as ourselves will experience it.

Well, ho hum, my dears. A separation of the sheep from the goats has become unthinkable, a children’s tale to frighten those who lack worldly wisdom. For what we have learned by forsaking religious quarreling is to have no fear of judgment. We shrug our shoulders in the loose conviction that it is not our fault if we have been wrong. And we are even trapped by our most recent religious memories which tell us that if God exists, then He must be rather indifferently kind. Either way, it is ludicrous to believe He would punish us for being so eminently sensible—or, perhaps more to the point, it is ludicrous to believe that there should be any great unhappiness in not knowing and loving Him.

I know I am playing with the word “dumb” in my title, but I am thinking of Our Lord’s exorcism of a dumb and deaf spirit (Mark 9:25**). Perhaps it is of just such a spiritual affliction that Our Lord said: “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer” (Mark 9:29). Are not too many influenced by dumb and deaf demons who have yet to fully manifest themselves? For this is an astonishing complacency: That in living such a life and dying such a death, these oblivious souls have never thought about Who God is, and what it must be like to be finally and definitively estranged from Him, and whether He is likely to force them to partake in goods they neither valued, nor desired, nor sought—nor joined Him in the sacrifice to win.

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* “What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man.”

** “And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, ‘You dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again.” [cf. Mk 9:16-29]. The disciples could not cast it out, and Our Lord explained that “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”