How to Explain Spirituality To A Faithless Generation According to Guillermo del Toro

When dogma and religion are rejected, it is often the case that fantasy and art replace them to fulfill the human need for something that is beyond the everyday and mundane. When Dostoevsky said in The Idiot that "beauty will save the world," one way this can be interpreted is by looking at fantasy and art that explore spiritual themes metaphorically.

For director Guillermo del Toro, who early on rejected the dogmas of Catholicism, questions of faith are continually explored through metaphor. He said in a 2008 USA Today interview:

Saint Paisios the Athonite on Deluders and the Deluded

"While evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deluding and being deluded."(1)

Regarding the Delusion of the Pentecostals

- Elder, the things that are said by those who go over to the Pentecostals – that is, about seeing visions, speaking in tongues etc. – are those things from their own imagination, or from demonic influences?

- They are energies of demonic influences; because when they go over to the Pentecostals and are re-baptized, they are actually disregarding, denying Holy Baptism: “I confess one Baptism for the remission of sins” as the Creed declares – in which case, they un-baptize themselves and become susceptible to demonic influences and then they jabber-jabber, supposedly in tongues. “It is the Holy Spirit of Pentecost talking” they tell us. But it is not the Holy Spirit; it is a whole mess of unclean spirits. What tongues? They are merely uttering gibberish, which not even they can comprehend. They even record that gibberish and then produce statistics and reach conclusions: “That tongue has so many ‘hallelujahs’ in it, and there are so many in the other tongue.” Well, it’s to be expected, among so much jabber-jabber, you will surely hear something that resembles the word ‘hallelujah’ in one of the languages of the world! And so you can see, while it is something demonic, they actually believe that demonism to be the energy of the Holy Spirit, and that they are supposedly experiencing what the Apostles had experienced on the day of the Pentecost! Blasphemies are the things they believe, which is why they become demon-possessed.