Belief in God, the devil falls to new low: Gallup
Belief in God, the devil falls to new low: Gallup
Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday. Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God…
Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday. Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God…
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I'm telling you there's no difference. Ideas are more alive than man. Look at Kenneth Copeland, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis. They're possessed with murderous ideas and they will destroy themselves and everyone around them before they'd seek forgiveness and absolution.
I’m telling you there’s no difference.
I just spelled out the difference.
Ideas are more alive than man.
Have more longevity != more alive. See the definition of life here. Ideas/memes are not comprised of matter with biological processes.
Look at Kenneth Copeland, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis. They’re possessed with murderous ideas and they will destroy themselves and everyone around them before they’d seek forgiveness and absolution.
I agree that they all contain, spread, and celebrate many sociopathic ideas, but that does not life make. Memes are interesting in that they propagate in a similar way to biological organisms, like pathogens do, and can be studied in many similar ways, but that does not make them alive.
I think most of the confusion here has to do with your use of the term, "literally," which you are literally using incorrectly.
Ok, I can see you're limited by your materialist mindset. I don't need to convince you. I will only tell you that understanding that there are angelic and demonic ideas that can possess and control our lives allows you to develop a tactic to counter or utilize their effects. Everything that's known about resisting and defeating demons is reflective of the necessary tactics one needs to resist and defeat demonic ideas. The Temptations of Christ are parables designed to teach the reader how to avoid the temptations of ignorance and malice. Everything known about invoking angels and Gods is reflective of what needs to be done to utilize those ideas in your life.
Ok, I can see you’re limited by your materialist mindset. I don’t need to convince you. I will only tell you that understanding that there are angelic and demonic ideas that can possess and control our lives allows you to develop a tactic to counter or utilize their effects. Everything that’s known about resisting and defeating demons is reflective of the necessary tactics one needs to resist and defeat demonic ideas. The Temptations of Christ are parables designed to teach the reader how to avoid the temptations of ignorance and malice. Everything known about invoking angels and Gods is reflective of what needs to be done to utilize those ideas in your life.
Hoo boy, sorry to discover you have a propensity for magical thinking. Yes, I am proudly a materialist, and my beliefs are founded in physical evidence. Since beliefs that are not founded in evidence are seldom dispelled by it I'm going to wish you a good day and stop wasting my time here.
When man invented machines, he began believing God was a machine. Now that man is creating computers, we believe the universe is a simulation. Invariably when people say there is no God, they're completely unable to satisfactorily define God.
when people say there is no God, they’re completely unable to satisfactorily define God
Because there isn't one. So there's no way to define something that doesn't exist.
So what you're saying is that something that doesn't exist doesn't exist. I agree with that. You haven't said anything about God though.
I'm loving this thread, thanks to all the contributors.
People are meme/idea factories, creating new ones or refining existing ones. I think that it's difficult (impossible?) To find this in any other instance of nature or even in man made AI.
Some ideas are bad/demonic in that they stifle the creation or refinement of new/existing ideas.
Some are "angelic" in that they open new threads and avenues for thinking.
What's a fictional God got to do with any of that?
God is just a word. The word points to an understanding. The universe as far as we can tell is infinite, expanding, subject to entropy and the laws of physics. What is it expanding into? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does it share features across immeasurable distances? Why did it start? What is time? What is conscious experience? All of these questions point to a higher order of organization than could be comprehended with infinite accumulated lifetimes of research. God is just shorthand for the fundament, the reason there's something rather than nothing.
Matter isn't the basis of our universe, it's energy. We're in the God-field. Information cannot be created or destroyed, only occulted and translated. Your entire life exists as a 4D worm traveling through a 5D minkowski space of probability. Your perspective is bound to a single point in 4 dimensions you know as the present. Your whole life and every possible choice you could make is nothing more than a series of coordinates in an infinite fractal field. You are simply a memory or an idea of God. You're a dream. The eye of God is consciousness and the light that shines through this matrix creates a shadow play that you see as your material life. All those ancient stories you deny carried this information, but the translations are nonsense because you don't have the perspective of a civilian from 4-6 thousand years ago.
Super hot takes, genuinely. I agree with a lot of what you're saying but would point out two corrections
All those ancient stories you deny carried this information, but the translations are nonsense because you don’t have the perspective of a civilian from 4-6 thousand years ago.
It's presumptive to assume that I don't understand the stories from thousands of years ago. Knowledge evolves just like we do. We possess that same knowledge in a condensed and efficient format. Just as massive dinosaurs evolved in to chickens or whatever other analogy you like, a 15 minute story in the bible can be condensed in to "help others in need" or "don't steal"
Is information lost in these condensations? Absolutely, evolution comes at a cost, chickens are missing some things that dinosaurs had. The great part about ideas though is that they can always be picked back up and reassessed. If there is some old story that contains a grain of wisdom that society has missed, by all means pick it up and share. But to address your specifically quoted piece, you would be directly contradicting yourself if you are saying that knowledge has been lost. It's laid out and available for anyone to pick apart.
God is just shorthand for the fundament, the reason there’s something rather than nothing.
I think this misconception comes from our perspective on time. You and I were born so our consciousness began "somewhere" so it is easy to fall in to the trap that all things are conceived. While all actions have a cause and an effect, you can "see" the effect 10 seconds in the future, just as you could have seen the cause 10 seconds in the past. There doesn't need to be a beginning of time, things always were. A rock floating through space at x speed in y direction can be predicted to be at another point days, years, infinity in to the future, just as it could be done in reverse.
Long way to say that there need be no fundament, just varying states of the universe. It always was and always will be.
The information is there, but it's occulted by spectacle and authority. You can seek it out, but you also have to seek out the supporting context, weed out bad information, and fill in gaps. It's important to realize that the maps are not the territory as well. You don't need any of that historical information. Meditation can reveal these secrets because the mind is part of the holographic fractal of high order reality. I believe that the technological singularity will be the moment all gnosis is restored. Until that point in our future history, the theme of our civilization will be a balance between the community building of the awakened (woke) and the violence of ignorant authoritarians (not-sees).
I agree that there is no beginning or end. I was just suggesting otherwise because of the popular notion of the big bang. I don't think of a fundament as the beginning, but rather the substrate.
The word points to an understanding.
The word points to a MISunderstanding. Fear of the world, nature, and the universe is where it originates. Drug-fueled pseudo-scientific woo woo doesn't change that it is an outdated concept.
My post was far too elegant and intellectual for a dipshit response like that.
Hey, your imagination exists so, thus, the god you think exists does. He's stuck in your skull, thankfully.
Once again, you're talking about your fantasy, nothing else.
to teach the reader how to avoid the temptations of ignorance
I think you failed that one. We passed it though.
If Yahweh doesn't speak to you he doesn't listen to you either. The first thing would be just as easy as the 2nd thing.
I wasn't talking about Yahweh. That name is a religious invention. I'm not religious.
I’m not religious.
Then I don't know why you use words like "God" when it is a completely meaningless word except as a character in ancient fictional stories.
Well there's a lot of things you don't know, but that doesn't stop you from acting like a dickhead. Religion is a function of authority. It's a hierarchy enforced by violence. Spirituality has nothing to do with the ignorance of religion.
but that doesn’t stop you from acting like a dickhead.
You're the only person who used words like dickhead. You came on a rational group, spouted superstition and ignorance and even contradicting yourself, and then starting throwing insults like a child. You've added no value here.
You: I believe in God and Demons
Also You: I am not religious.
These are contradictory, so one of you is a casual and habitual liar. Why would people listen to a liar? A liar has nothing to teach anyone.
Lol, if you look at the responses I've been getting it's a serious stretch to call any of you rational. You never once tried to understand my perspective, you just applied your preconceived notions of the words and religions and assumed I agreed with your strawman arguments. For one, religion is not spirituality or philosophy. Religion is a hierarchy of violence and ignorance. Religion serves Mammon. Spirituality is the study of one's place within the universe, i.e. one's relation to God as a phenomenon, not a myth. Second, you need only look through my replies to see you're so off base about your fantasies, that you're completely delusional. You're arguing with your "rational" self about your own ignorance.
You got a good enough idea: that humans embody the demonic ideas and essentially become the demon they act out while they act it out. I can agree with that but not in a literal sense, only figuratively/metaphorically.
Your inflexibility makes your illustration very fragile though. Insisting you mean literally in the dictionary sense will break your idea over from "ok, sure maybe" into "this fellow's mind may not be fully functioning as it normally would"
I'm not here to call you names like conspiracy theorist, but you're insisting in the same style as one, which is a major turn off.
That said, ideas live longer than man, that is easily seen. The fascism you're talking about is just that, weird fascist leavings of some of the worst parts of our society that have been left alone to simmer for too long now. What do you think about that? It being political rather than it being demons?
All I can say is that before you judge my perspective, you should ask yourself if you've got the necessary theological and spiritual background to understand what you're critiquing. I'm not talking about pop-religion. I'm referring to ancient concepts and frameworks for understanding reality that existed long before modern capitalist materialist concepts of the mind.
“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” ― John Dominic Crossan
Well, not gonna lie, I wasn't expecting to be insulted. If you're just going to question my intelligence when I try to engage in good faith with what you posted, you would have done better to have just not responded.
There's a "mystical stuff that only I can understand so I won't bother explaining" air that you have about your reasoning that is very representative of people who have nothing to back up what they're trying to say. I'm calling you out as ignorant of what you're saying now, partially because I'm annoyed at you, partially because I'm pretty certain you can not coherently put a narrative together that will make any sense.
That's a direct challenge to you to tell your story and theories. If you don't want to, that's totally fine, you don't have to, but don't insult my intelligence when I'm trying to give you so many benefits of the doubt that you've done nothing to earn.
You're the one who decided to take offense. If you're so troubled by a quote then you'll never survive on the internet. I didn't say I wouldn't explain, but I certainly don't want to tiptoe around your sensitive feelings. If you get nothing from this exchange, it's no skin off my back.
Oh, I see your reading style now, that is certainly not ideal...
I told you why I got annoyed with you: because you insulted my intelligence. Do you think the quote was the insulting part? It wasn't, it was the "check yourself before you wreck yourself" you brought out in your first line.
Let's try this again:
I think your ideas are wrong. I want you to show me how I'm wrong. You are engaging in an argument instead of showing me your ideas. This is not what I want nor what I am interested in.
I don't care about this particular conversation, we can stop having it when/if you decide to start telling me why you believe these things.
Like damn, dude, can you not see I'm trying to get why you have the position you have?
So you're annoying to me. Big fucking deal. Does it not mean anything that I'm still trying to engage with your ideas despite you constantly twisting away to say more inexplicably cryptic stuff? Stop engaging with this pointless internet argument and tell me something interesting, please!
I swear, the worst I have to offer is a "that's interesting" and then I'll be on my way.
You don't have be embarrassed by your ignorance, but if you are then it's your own doing. Don't expect me to accept your ignorance as fact, or give it the same respect I would give a person who had done the research. Are we done? Cuz if we're just gonna talk about how you're big mad about your deficiencies I've lost interest.
Not quite yet, because you've still failed to give yourself a position.
You're focusing too much on this argument.
You've yet to have a position which would kick off the conversation I tried and am still trying to have with you.
You have done pretty much nothing this argument but glom on to key words and completely ignore every request I've sent you to tell me anything worth anything, which does not bode well for your reading comprehension abilities, which is probably why you're bored right now.
If you're so bored, then change this into a conversation about what you believe. And not about me, I don't give a shit about me, which you seem to be overly focused on, I'm talking about demons.
So I'll ask you directly: what is your full position on demons? How do they work, how do they operate, what's their motivation? Are they purely human generated? Are you unable to say because people will come after you? Is that why you keep twisting away and ignoring what I'm requesting from you?
You're unlikely to get a reply, @TrismegistusMx was presumably banned for refusing to comply with the magazine's rules. Straight up told the mod that they wouldn't. Now they're bitching about how "cantankerous" Atheists on the fediverse are. 🙄
Ohhh rip,I read this right after I responded lol oh well. Fun enough while it lasted. I do enjoy collecting different theories about how the spiritual world works, that one felt like it could be some feels logic which is why I kept wanting to dig at it.
There's nothing wrong with being spiritual but I do think there's something to uncover if you're not able to articulate what you believe while professing to know how things supposedly work. I figured they were either completely full of it or had something waaaay different story-wise than most people.
Given that they were starting to connect demons to daemons, I'm thinking it was likely the second option.
Tldr; thanks for the heads up! It was fun while it lasted 😆
I haven't had a chance to give any opinions because you keep nitpicking everything you come across and taking offense at anything you can.
Since you asked, I will tell you, although I still doubt your sincerity and integrity.
You can think of demons as many things on many different levels. The gnostics knew them as archons, which were beings that would not allow one to advance spiritually until they crossed a threshold of temptation. I know them as malicious ideas that gain life of their own by blinding the ego to its own ignorance and rewarding sociopathic behavior. These ideas work the same as they ever did, programming the subconscious into acting out in hostile and antisocial ways. Have you ever heard of a daemon in programming? It's a program or algorithm that waits in the background for a specific set of circumstances to take over and direct an action. The demons as I refer to them in my very first post are your unexamined thoughts and preconceived notions of who and what you are dealing with.
Ignorance as a demon? Now we're getting somewhere!
How did you come to know them by any entity? Seems you must have a lot of personal experience with them, which, since I already showed my position trying to get here, I would say likely has other explanations, though by your sincerity I would think you would have already explored other options instead of assuming a structure then looking for evidence to support it. Was it primarily thought experimentation that revealed what demons are? Or was it more like a personal experience?
And I nitpick because that's how I get to the heart of matters. Some people vibe into it by feel but I like to use my eyes and mind. It keeps me from falling into surface level rhetorical traps that I would otherwise fall for. Sorry for doing that too much at you, I just didn't know how else to get to your ideas.
You sure do like to sling assumptions that most people will take as insults though. how do you grok the level of self-examination of my thoughts without being me? Wouldn't it be more good faith to assume I just have a different point of view from you rather than I'm a self blinded idiot, as you seem to have been implying? Or is this one of those things that seems so obvious that the only kind of person who would miss it must be blind to it in the first place, like how some evangelicals like to reason reprobates can exist in a god created world without knowing god?
(It may feel like I'm harping on the insult part. I don't care about being insulted anymore, the initial one was the only mild shock that you inspired, I'm more wondering why you react the way you're reacting in this realm. I understand being defensive though, so if that's all it is, I get it.)
I want to preface this post by clarifying that when I say "ignorant" I mean it entirely in the spiritual context of one who ignores or denies the spiritual truths of the universe. I mean no judgement.
I grew up with ignorant, hostile, angry people. I was a soft hearted child who felt everything intensely, and I was destroyed repeatedly until I learned how to take emotional (and physical) blows without experiencing emotional harm. Since then, I've met people who can change lives by virtue of their presence alone. I studied heroes and villains, and I learned the only thing that separates them are their beliefs and the heart that leads them. I learned the nature of ego is a lens by which we observe the universe, but it's one made of a combination of our experiences as translated by our senses colored by our beliefs about those experiences. A well honed ego is a powerful tool for discernment, but ego doesn't know its own limits and it seeks to grow and survive at all costs. Believing in threats and reinforcing our fears and adversarial beliefs is how the ego trains us to reinforce itself. It has no concept of its limitations and it will not change unless the only other option is ego-death.
After years of research into the psychology of the mind, I came to philosophy. Working back to first principles, I realized that religion and spirituality split long ago, and the original purpose of these symbolic stories was to help people understand the nature of reality. Over time, hierarchies of violence laid claim to these stories and manipulated their meanings to reinforce their own power. The meaning of the word "occult" means hidden. The nature of the occult are those spiritual teachings that threaten authority. Every witch hunt and crusade in history has been motivated by a threat to authority. When investigating into occult teachings you find a lot of magical thinking, but it's part of the occulting process. Authority uses misinformation, violence, and other narcissistic tactics in order to eliminate the threat. The common themes underneath all of the gaslighting and misinformation is a worldview in which the material world rests within a greater context. Authoritarians and egos all demand separation, categorization, classification, control, segregation. All of these ideas are delusional. There is no real separation between you and I, except that which we believe in, and those beliefs require a physical/mental/spiritual effort to maintain. The gnostic (opposite of ignorant) perspective of reality contains this understanding of ultimate oneness, which I describe in the link at the end. All of history has been a grieving process and a balance between ignorance and gnosis. Those who have passed through the grieving process come out the other side as gnostics, and those who do not remain ignorant. The ignorant in denial are atheists, capitalists, and opportunists. To them, the world is a playground where they can explore their individuation. The angry ignorant are the crusaders, witch hunters, narcissists, fascists, and other ideologies of ego supremacy. The bargaining ignorant are starting to see signs of a bigger pattern. They experience ego crisis, illness, and economic instability. The depressed are no longer ignorant, but they haven't been able to reach acceptance because the harsh reality of the world can be too much to bear without the underpinning of community and good programming.
Those who can reach acceptance can see reality for what it is, without judgement or fear. The brain isn't the source of consciousness. The universe is consciousness and the brain is a lens. The ego is one facet of that lens. The grieving process is how that lens is honed. When the lens matches reality, we understand things as they are. When it's warped, we understand things as reflections of ourselves. The other facet of that lens is the right brain perception. According to Iain McGilchrist in his book, "The Master and His Emissary," The left brain is ego, logic, language, individual mind. The right brain is a different kind of perspective. It sees the universe in a holistic sense, without judgement, without ego, without language. It is an unfiltered perspective, aligned with the true nature of the universe. There's a possibility that it contains a perfect picture of the universe, but at the very least it contains all of the information encountered by the individual. The left brain often doesn't see the value of the right, but it's a powerful tool for discernment if used correctly. Most of us have egoic beliefs that we enforce on the world, and think we're victims of our emotions. What we should be doing is using the ego to hold up beliefs against our right brain perception and take note of the quality of our emotions. Modify those beliefs until they progress through the grieving process until we reach acceptance of reality. If your beliefs cause you to have discordant emotions, they're half true. This is the core of egoic delusion and psychosis. It is always a case of clinging to a half-truth at all costs, for the preservation of the ego. The unhoned ego cannot tolerate nonduality and spectrums, but the universe doesn't deal in binaries. The highest understanding of any dualistic concept is a nondual union of apparent opposites.
I know it sounds like I've drifted from your questions, but this underpinning is important. I'll describe angels and demons then I'll explain why it's important to grok them as external entities
Angels and Demons are abstractions of fundamental truths of the universe. They're reflections of thresholds of consciousness one must cross before expanding into higher levels. Even in mythology, demons are angels. The difference between them is their orientation to the highest truth of the universe, which was the original meaning of God. The gnostics knew them as archons, because they recognized that despite their manifestations, they're working towards the same goal; the purification and enrichment of the individual soul. Giordano Bruno developed a technique for understanding reality. He would imagine a palace and populate it with symbols for ideas. He would fill these rooms with great detail until they became real in his mind. Any time he needed information, he would go into the relevant room and interact with the things inside, which would allow him to answer confidently and correctly about a vast number of fields. He described the nature of angels and demons and he would invoke either at will in order to imbue his consciousness with their qualities.
Compare the worldview I've expressed to that of individuals like Kenneth Copeland, Donald Trump, or Ron Desantis. They see themselves as kings, with the right to use violence or coercion for to accomplish their goals. They're surrounded by pretense and justifications, protected by other ignorant individuals, exploiting the weak and sucking up to the strong. They see themselves as winners, but in fact they're completely mired in delusion. When their brains inevitably fail, their consciousness will expand into the whole, and in the process they will come to encompass all of the suffering they've caused in this world. The collapse of a life is the same as the collapse of an ego. It can be an epiphany (appearance of the divine) or it can be torture. Even before the moment of death, could you imagine the life of Marjorie Taylor Greene? Every thought dripping with hatred and paranoia, surrounded by ill gotten gains and a family that despises you, routinely humiliating yourself on the altar of public perception. She doesn't really believe in demons, but she'll demonize everyone to protect her ego. As a result, she's as demonic as a person can be.