Airbrushing the Devil
"Probably the Devil plays the greatest role in the production of that fiction from which he himself is absent as an actor." - Flannery O'Connor
It isn't only fiction in which the strategy of airbrushing Satan out of the scene suits his purpose.
I'll have a great deal more to say at a future date about the effects of adopting a purely therapeutic understanding of addiction. This subject looms large in some of the writing I'm doing about our life with our late daughter. I'm sort of steeling myself against the disapproval that always - always - comes when you draw attention to the lack of explanatory power that comes from viewing the world through a purely therapeutic lens. But I'm not writing it for people who are looking for a kissy-face validation of their therapeutic understanding, but for those parents who are living through their own slow-motion catastrophe, for whom time is of the essence and where lives are hanging in the balance.
Addiction is only tangentially biological or chemical. It is first and foremost spiritual and, ultimately, demonic. I use that term advisedly.