Posted on 02/18/2023 2:01:50 AM PST by spirited irish
In his own time, Paul warned against becoming slaves of the elemental spirits. And with good reason since they can pass right through the earth, enter into animals and speak and act through them as easily as through water, trees, statues, and humans.
(Excerpt) Read more at patriotandliberty.com ...
Makes me wonder about CHATGPT. Couldn’t that be a conduit for a spirit?
What a tragedy that most 'modern' Westerners reject the supernatural, souls, and spirits in the name of science but unknowingly embrace evil spirits and their doctrines and devices in the ideas of extraterrestrials, mindfulness meditation, shamanism, and many other occult devices and philosophies.
Absolutely. Artificial Intelligence and Metaverse present no barriers whatsoever to fallen Powers and other evil spirits.
Artificial Intelligence functions very similar to evil spirits. Evil spirits lack feminine aspect of consciousness which has empathy, compassion and emotion.
AI is pure logic. It’s all binary switches.
Good point.
Absolutely. High tech ouija board.
So true.
Jesus and his disciples cast many spirits out of people. Do Christians believe that evil spirits are gone now?
Many priest-exorcists today report that demonic forces are quite adept at interfering with and manipulating common electrical and electronic devices, including cell phones.
“Evil spirits lack feminine aspect of consciousness which has empathy, compassion and emotion.”
OK. I can accept that as a possibility, but that also defines my ex-wife perfectly.
Here’s the most enlightening and fascinating book I’ve ever seen on spiritual warfare. It does a great job of separating truth (based on the infallible divine revelation given to us in Holy Scripture) from popular but unreliable, misleading info derived from human experiences.
What the Bible Teaches About Spiritual Warfare
by Dr. Robert Dean and Dr. Thomas Ice
New copies are available FREE here:
https://deanbibleministries.org/news
Scroll 3/4 of the way down that page.
In the far left column, click “Book Order Form.”
In the window that pops up, order the “Spiritual Warfare Book.”
(The “God’s Powerful Promises” book is excellent too.)
Both books are FREE.
To read the book’s Amazon reviews (it’s ranked 4.8 stars out of a possible 5) and/or purchase used copies:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0825424879/
Pong
I think that many people who entertain or even embrace New Age beliefs and practices for a time do so as searchers for spiritual meaning. Yet they are usually left unsatisfied and frequently turn to conventional religion. Some may do so after bad, even alarming or dangerous experiences with occult practices and beliefs.
Remarkably, the most recent Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three researchers who spent their careers investigating and disproving the possibility that quantum entanglement can be explained by one or more "hidden variables." In essence, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement shows consciousness to be real, with a major, even superior role over matter.
Some decades ago, reflecting on quantum entanglement, the great German physicist Max Planck wrote that "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness." On balance, the idea of 'matter as a derivative of consciousness' can be taken as similar to the essential point of Genesis.
Sometimes, what seem to be New Age type beliefs and experiences collide with the materialism that is dogma in much of modern science. For example, the reality of the human soul is suggested by near death experiences and work in recent years using hypnosis. These point toward life after death, with reincarnation over a series of lives, supervised by advanced spirits as guides subject to the authority of a Supreme Being with universal consciousness.
This cannot be rejected in a genuine scientific sense because once one accepts the findings of modern physics that consciousness is real, the question becomes how consciousness is organized and how it manifests and progresses over time. Both universal consciousness and enduring individual spirits are logically plausible.
Barry Weiss, one of the most notable researchers of past life regression, was a well-regarded psychiatrist in Miami when he stumbled across accounts of past lives when using hypnotherapy to treat psychological disorders. Weiss found that he could achieve dramatic improvement for his patients by accepting their accounts of past lives while under hypnosis as real for purposes of therapy.
When Weiss shared his results in the local medical community, he was ostracized and his findings were rejected as absurd. Weiss then took up a post at Johns Hopkins and continued and expanded his work. Research now underway by Weiss and others aims to give greater scientific credibility to past life regression and its findings. It is hoped that consciousness will in time become more than a vague concept in physics and philosophy, but with consciousness seen as manifested in spirits -- human and otherwise -- that exist in an organized and coherent realm outside of our own.
Indeed, modern cosmology indicates that ordinary matter and energy are only a small fraction of the energy and matter that exist in the universe, with so-called dark matter and dark energy making up most of existence. Some physicists contend that what we may perceive as paranormal phenomena and spirits are intrusions into our lesser realm of forces and beings that mostly reside in dark matter and dark energy.
It may well be that twenty, thirty, or fifty years from now most New Age and shamanistic type beliefs and faiths outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition will be sorted out as false or explainable. Judaism and Christianity may then be widely recognized as true enough in a scientific sense to be worthy of belief in full. I am confident that as the falsehoods and follies of our day fall away, the God of Exodus who became flesh at Bethlehem will endure.
Not in general, but a demonic entity can take up almost anything as a weapon against a specific person.
Agreed. Yet many 'modernized' churches are of no help to those who have had frightening experiences. If such people are to find a church home there needs to be a wholesale return to a supernatural worldview in its entirety.
Remarkably, the most recent Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three researchers who spent their careers investigating and disproving the possibility that quantum entanglement can be explained by one or more "hidden variables." In essence, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement shows consciousness to be real, with a major, even superior role over matter.
When Atomism--physical matter bumping around in a void---began its reign in Ancient Greece and Rome, Plato foresaw the misery, nihilism, and social destruction unleashed by a philosophy that reversed the order of spirit before matter.
In our own time we can clearly perceive the madness, nihilism, and evils unleashed by this ancient but revamped and revised pagan philosophy.
It appears to me that there are two streams of thought/action deriving from the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and the reality of consciousness.
1. An embrace of mystical pantheism
2. Embrace of the supernatural God (John 1) Who created all matter, both physical and nonphysical
Oh very easily it could be.
Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon.
12 It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.
13 And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people.
14 Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.
15 The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed.
16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,
17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
Granted, a vulgar understanding of modern science may seem to support materialism or pantheism, but the common coin of New Age thinking is against that. Near-death and other out of body experiences, past life hypnotic regression, and the most credible mediums yield a fairly coherent account of human life as immortal, purposeful, and accountable to a Supreme Being.
Research now underway is placing such beliefs on a more solid footing, with the scientific credibility of replicability the goal. And there is a fair prospect that over the next few decades, physics and mathematics may develop a coherent and scientifically reliable model of that realm of existence where consciousness resides.
If so, it may be that New Age beliefs, Christianity and other conventional religious faiths, and modern physics will reach an accommodation of sorts in which they recognize the immortality of the human soul and that a Supreme Being exists. Plato and Descartes may also get restored to the highest rank of philosophy.
Call me an optimist, but I think that would be considerable improvement over the current intellectual climate.
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