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…
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?
@FlickOfTheBean
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.)
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