<![CDATA[Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

<![CDATA[Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum - Religions & Spirituality]]> https://www.scivillage.com/ Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:34:30 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[The present isn't real, therefore we live forever]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20698.html Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:36:52 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20698.html
But such static present being is an illusion. The present is empty of all substance, like the lingering afterimage or phantom of the past. This is not to say that the present isn't an a priori or necessary idea or principle that structures our very being-in-the-world. Just like the horizon that the traveler can never reach and isn't real but which continuously persists and makes possible his whole journey to elsewhere. It is the repeatability of the just fading moment, as the barren possibility of projected "againness", that creates the illusion of immediacy in which the repeated and its repetition get confused with each other and fuse together in one seemingly timeless and changeless moment. The present is the blurring together interlude --the distorting static or liminal limbo zone-- that haunts where past touches future.

"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.---Henri Bergson

edit: Contemplating this further, the past not only is projected in possibility as "againness" or repetition but also as "never againness" or finality. Relatively rare, it is a largely negative experience implying the futurally projected and absolute cessation of the present as non-existence or death. But this is paradoxical in that the present already entailed being an illusory eternal state of staticity or non-change. How can this ideal state of non-change itself cease to be in itself? The answer is that the present was never really real or "in itself" to begin with and so it is inherently indistinguishable in its persistence and in its oblivion. It is roughly analogous to thinking we could kill a ghost. Or like trying to destroy energy. What never existed in itself thus can never not exist in itself. A lingering hint here of our immortality then? Only as we re-cognize ourselves not as static and changeless objects but as the inherent lunge of pastness into future becoming. We are, iow, transcendental in essence--the enablement of what is fading away to renew and encounter its own return in the form of nascent and novel possibility.

"Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been."--Heidegger

"Be ye in the world, but not of the world."--paraphrase of Jesus]]>
But such static present being is an illusion. The present is empty of all substance, like the lingering afterimage or phantom of the past. This is not to say that the present isn't an a priori or necessary idea or principle that structures our very being-in-the-world. Just like the horizon that the traveler can never reach and isn't real but which continuously persists and makes possible his whole journey to elsewhere. It is the repeatability of the just fading moment, as the barren possibility of projected "againness", that creates the illusion of immediacy in which the repeated and its repetition get confused with each other and fuse together in one seemingly timeless and changeless moment. The present is the blurring together interlude --the distorting static or liminal limbo zone-- that haunts where past touches future.

"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.---Henri Bergson

edit: Contemplating this further, the past not only is projected in possibility as "againness" or repetition but also as "never againness" or finality. Relatively rare, it is a largely negative experience implying the futurally projected and absolute cessation of the present as non-existence or death. But this is paradoxical in that the present already entailed being an illusory eternal state of staticity or non-change. How can this ideal state of non-change itself cease to be in itself? The answer is that the present was never really real or "in itself" to begin with and so it is inherently indistinguishable in its persistence and in its oblivion. It is roughly analogous to thinking we could kill a ghost. Or like trying to destroy energy. What never existed in itself thus can never not exist in itself. A lingering hint here of our immortality then? Only as we re-cognize ourselves not as static and changeless objects but as the inherent lunge of pastness into future becoming. We are, iow, transcendental in essence--the enablement of what is fading away to renew and encounter its own return in the form of nascent and novel possibility.

"Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been."--Heidegger

"Be ye in the world, but not of the world."--paraphrase of Jesus]]> <![CDATA[Human sacrifice in Inca Empire may have been driven by politics, not religion]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20690.html Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:12:06 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20690.html https://phys.org/news/2026-06-human-sacr...riven.html

EXCERPTS: Three decades ago, researchers working atop the Llullaillaco volcano, located on the border between Argentina and Chile, discovered exceptionally well-preserved remains. The find included the mummified bodies of three children along with associated artifacts. The site became known as the Capacocha burial, which was linked to the Inca ritual by the same name, which involved sacrificing children and young women.

In a recent study published in Archaeometry, researchers turned to the coca leaves, manioc seeds and maize grains found among the offerings surrounding a buried maiden. By combining radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis of these short-lived plant remains, researchers were able to pinpoint a more precise timeframe for the burial.

The resulting dates were then compared with the timing of major religious and political events to determine whether the burial coincided with them.

The analysis places the capacocha ritual atop Llullaillaco volcano sometime between 1462 and 1507 CE, a window that aligns neatly with the reigns of two Inca emperors, Topa Inca and Huayna Capac. That timing suggests the ceremony may have been about more than honoring the mountain gods, as it could have served a political purpose, too. Given the era, both reasons seem likely.

[...] The researchers note that political motives behind the sacrifice remain plausible, but it was not a single act celebrating victory over an enemy. They suggest that capacocha may have been part of a broader Inca strategy to strengthen their hold over the empire while promoting shared beliefs and responding to social or environmental challenges. The timing also does not match any major volcanic eruption or extreme climate event, suggesting that the burial was not simply a response to a natural disaster... (MORE - missing details)]]> https://phys.org/news/2026-06-human-sacr...riven.html

EXCERPTS: Three decades ago, researchers working atop the Llullaillaco volcano, located on the border between Argentina and Chile, discovered exceptionally well-preserved remains. The find included the mummified bodies of three children along with associated artifacts. The site became known as the Capacocha burial, which was linked to the Inca ritual by the same name, which involved sacrificing children and young women.

In a recent study published in Archaeometry, researchers turned to the coca leaves, manioc seeds and maize grains found among the offerings surrounding a buried maiden. By combining radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis of these short-lived plant remains, researchers were able to pinpoint a more precise timeframe for the burial.

The resulting dates were then compared with the timing of major religious and political events to determine whether the burial coincided with them.

The analysis places the capacocha ritual atop Llullaillaco volcano sometime between 1462 and 1507 CE, a window that aligns neatly with the reigns of two Inca emperors, Topa Inca and Huayna Capac. That timing suggests the ceremony may have been about more than honoring the mountain gods, as it could have served a political purpose, too. Given the era, both reasons seem likely.

[...] The researchers note that political motives behind the sacrifice remain plausible, but it was not a single act celebrating victory over an enemy. They suggest that capacocha may have been part of a broader Inca strategy to strengthen their hold over the empire while promoting shared beliefs and responding to social or environmental challenges. The timing also does not match any major volcanic eruption or extreme climate event, suggesting that the burial was not simply a response to a natural disaster... (MORE - missing details)]]> <![CDATA[Entertaining NHIs unawares]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20639.html Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:24:53 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20639.html https://www.kylebeshears.com/p/entertain...telligence

"In the first essay of this series, I tried to show that Christians have been thinking carefully about non-human intelligence (NHI) for the better part of two thousand years, and that the tradition is in remarkably good shape. While they wondered how the science and theology worked, none seem to have worried about whether human beings would still be special if the universe turned out to be crowded.

So, if the historical Christian conversation about NHI was that confident, why is the contemporary Christian conversation so anxious? Why do thoughtful believers hedge or qualify or change the subject when the topic comes up?

I want to suggest, in this essay, that the answer is not in our theology; rather, it’s in something further down stream, something we don’t usually think about, because its part of the Zeitgeist in which we live, part of the air we breathe. We have, somewhere along the way, stopped genuinely believing in the NHI our own tradition tells us are already here. We profess them, sure, but we don’t actually expect them.

At any case, my central proposition for the essay is this:

We probably don’t inhabit the world that the Bible assumes.

And because we don’t, we’re not equipped to think about—let alone discuss—the prospect that humans aren’t the most intelligent things in God’s creation.

Entertaining Angels Unawares

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

Read that again.

Notice how straightforward, even nonchalant, the author is about the incredible hypothetical that we have interacted with angels without knowing it. The book of Hebrews is, implicitly at least, assuming that encounters with angels happen, in ordinary life, and often enough to warrant a general rule of Christian conduct.

Such encounters are framed as a live possibility for everyone, as mundane as a person inviting a traveler in for dinner. They aren’t remarkable visionary experiences beholding terrible creatures levitating with wings, ringed with unblinking eyes. There’s nothing mystical about it.

The angel looked like Carl from Accounting.

I’ve heard arguments that “angels” here simply means ‘messengers of the gospel.’ They’re human evangelists. This is, in my opinion, a modernist’s take mapped onto the New Testament, maybe even an embarrassed sensibility trying to make the book of Hebrews palatable to a skeptic’s tongue.

Yes, the Greek angelos can mean “messenger.” But the word appears thirteen times across Hebrews, and in every other instance it unambiguously means supernatural beings. The whole argument of chapter 2 is that Christ is superior to the angels. No one reads that as ‘Jesus outranks traveling preachers.’ Of course He does. Besides, any first-century Jewish-Christian would have heard “entertained angels unawares” and thought immediately of Abraham at Mamre and Lot at Sodom. If angelos just means “human evangelist,” the verse is nonsense: Be hospitable to strangers, because some of those strangers might turn out to be strangers. There’s nothing to be unawares of. It’s eisegesis driven by the presuppositions of a disenchanted world.

And that’s precisely my point.

We’ve become so modernized—so ‘sophisticated,’ so ‘material’—that we can’t take this advice seriously. This verse is telling Christians that God may send non-human, angelic intelligent beings to receive your hospitality, and that you can’t readily distinguish them from humans, so the appropriate response is, therefore, to be hospitable to everyone, just in case.

Do you really believe that?

Be honest.

The author of Hebrews certainly did. The world this author inhabited was filled with humans and NHIs, both, side by side, in ordinary life.

Now go further.

When was the last time you actually looked at a stranger—in class, at a checkout line, in a coffeeshop—and entertained, in real time, the possibility that you were in the presence of a NHI sent by God? I’m not talking about a thought experiment. I’m asking, when is the last time you saw a person and thought it might be an angel?

If your answer is “never,” I would suggest you don’t actually believe Hebrews 13:2. You believe that the verse is in the Bible.

But that’s a different thing.

Ok, so, what am I doing here? Am I saying we should be angel detectors, always on the look out? No, because that’s not the point Hebrews 13 is making. What I’m doing here is stress-testing the gap between what you profess and what you expect. You can profess Hebrews 13:2 without expecting Hebrews 13:2. You can affirm it without ever expecting it to show up as a live category in the way you actually move through the world. That gap is what the rest of this essay is about. It’s where, I’m going to argue, our anxiety about NHI originates.

Functional Materialism

Now, let me press harder. Suppose a Christian friend came to you, confiding to you strange things that clearly trouble them.

They say you something like: “I think there’s something demonic going on in my house. I have been waking up at 3 a.m. because I feel like I’m being watched. One of my kids says they’ve heard voices at night telling them we don’t love her, and that she is bad.”

What’s your immediate response?

Be honest.

Most of us, raised in late-modern Western Christianity, would feel an immediate cluster of reactions that we’re too embarrassed to admit. Concern, of course, but concern of a particular kind.

Are they sleeping enough? Have they been under stress at work? Is there a history of mental illness in the family? Should I gently suggest their child see a therapist?

Now, granted, these aren’t bad questions. Sleep and stress and mental health; these are all real factors of life, and wise pastoral council addressed them. But notice what has happened: the order of explanation has been inverted. The first move of our modern Christian mind, when confronted with a report of demonic activity, is to look for natural explanations, and then only to consider supernatural ones as an ancillary category.

It’s the explanation we reach for when nothing else fits, when all other options are exhausted.

The New Testament never works that way.

It treats demonic activity as one possiblility among others, weighed alongside ordinary causes, with no particular embarrassment about taking the supernatural option seriously when the evidence suggests it.

Now, to be clear, I’m not arguing for a return to some primitive cosmology. And I’m certaintly not suggesting we ignore mental health, or substitute exorcism for medication, or pretend that every sensation of dread is a demon. There are plenty of quacks and grifters in the deliverance ministry world who prey on that sort of thing, and scripture’s command to test the spirits applies as much to charismatic excess as it does to anything else.

What I am asking is for us to notice that the practical disposition of most Western Christians toward activity by NHI is functionally identical to the practical disposition of a thoughtful secular materialist. Both of us reach for naturalistic explanations first. Both of us treat the supernatural as embarrassing until proven otherwise. The difference between us is that the materialist is being consistent with her metaphysics, but we aren’t.

Screwtape’s Ideal Worldview

Ok, so, what happened?

C.S. Lewis can help explain. He predicted all this back in the 1940s.

The Screwtape Letters contains what is probably the most cited passage about devils in twentieth-century Christian writing: that the two errors a person can fall into about them are disbelieving in their existence, and being unhealthily fascinated with them, and that devils are equally pleased by both.

What’s less often noticed is the strategic claim that follows from this in the letters themselves. Screwtape, advising his nephew Wormwood on how to corrupt his ‘patient,’ makes it explicit early on: do not, under any circumstances, allow him to think clearly about the supernatural. Don't argue with him, because argument might wake him up. Just keep him comfortable, in the half-asleep assumption that “real life” means “ordinary material life,” and that anything else is by definition unreal, or eccentric, or for the unstable.

Screwtape isn’t particularly worried that his patient will become a pagan, or a magician, or a Theosophist. He’s worried that his patient will become Christian, and the most reliable barrier between his patient and Christianity is the unspoken assumption that the supernatural isn’t part of the real world. Materialism, Screwtape says, is one of Hell’s most useful philosophies, not because it’s true, but because materialism makes the gospel sound unrespectable.

This is the part of The Screwtape Letters that I think modern Christians need to consider most. Lewis is making the point that the demons want us not to believe in them, and the materialist intellectual climate of the modern West is precisely the climate they would design if they could. The skepticism we feel about the supernatural isn’t, on Lewis’s reading, a neutral byproduct of scientific progress; rather, it’s a strategically positive condition for the very beings whose existence it denies.

The didn’t create it, but they’ve certainly leveraged. “The more sinister, the more Satanic,” is a mantra in spiritual abuse counseling. It certainly applies here.

Now, you don’t have to accept Lewis’s full demonology to agree with his argument. You only have to ask: “If there were beings whose work depended on humans not believing in them, what intellectual climate would those beings most prefer?” And then, look at the worldview you actually inhabit.

The honest answer is uncomfortable, I know, because the worldview we live is precisely the worldview such beings would want.

At least, that was Lewis’s argument, and I think there’s something to it.

Christian Anxiety about Non-Human Intelligence

Ok, let’s pull these two threads of thought together.

First, if we truly believe the faith we claim to, then non-human intelligence exists. At a minimum, in the forms of angels and demons.

Second, because we’re are late-modern Western Christians, we inhabit a world in which materialism is the de facto worldview, which prevents us from actually believing in non-human intelligence.

So, we say we believe is scripture, but what we actually believe is something like Christian-inflected materialism. And we confess angels and demons, but what we expect is neurology and sociology.

That gap creates the anxiety.

And, again, it’s an anxiety our medieval predecessors didn’t seem to feel. They lived in a world they knew was already full of intelligences besides their own. They weren’t afraid of being outclassed cognitively, because they already believed they were. Angels were, by all accounts, far smarter than we are. I struggle to believe, then, that the discovery of additional NHIs in the cosmos would have been for them a category-breaking event. No, I think it would have been a category-extending one.

So, why would it be for us?

Because it threatens to break the category we’ve allowed to shrink to almost nothing.

We’ve allowed the universe of rational beings to contract, in our practical imagination, to Homo sapiens alone. And once a universe of rational beings is reduced to only us, every potential addition feels like a threat to our place in it.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think our anxiety would be alleviated by better arguments about extraterrestrials. I’m sensing that’s a solution bubbling beneath the surface at the moment, and predict it’s one many Christian leaders will make, or have already started to, e.g., it’s all demonic. (That’s misguided, as I argued earlier.)

The cure, instead, is recovering the enchanted world of Christianity we already profess. If we genuinely believed that we share the cosmos with angelic intelligences greater than our own, then the question of whether we share it with biological intelligences elsewhere would lose most of its sting. We would already know what it feels like not to be the smartest things in the room.

And, that brings me to the question I want to take up in the next essay: If intelligence is not what makes human beings unique, what does? Here, I think, Christianity has an answer that’s not only adequate to the cosmological discovery we may be about to make, but actually clarified by it.

The image of God isn’t the rational mind. It’s something else, something the angels do not posess, something the cleverest possible alien would not threaten.

We will get to that next."]]> https://www.kylebeshears.com/p/entertain...telligence

"In the first essay of this series, I tried to show that Christians have been thinking carefully about non-human intelligence (NHI) for the better part of two thousand years, and that the tradition is in remarkably good shape. While they wondered how the science and theology worked, none seem to have worried about whether human beings would still be special if the universe turned out to be crowded.

So, if the historical Christian conversation about NHI was that confident, why is the contemporary Christian conversation so anxious? Why do thoughtful believers hedge or qualify or change the subject when the topic comes up?

I want to suggest, in this essay, that the answer is not in our theology; rather, it’s in something further down stream, something we don’t usually think about, because its part of the Zeitgeist in which we live, part of the air we breathe. We have, somewhere along the way, stopped genuinely believing in the NHI our own tradition tells us are already here. We profess them, sure, but we don’t actually expect them.

At any case, my central proposition for the essay is this:

We probably don’t inhabit the world that the Bible assumes.

And because we don’t, we’re not equipped to think about—let alone discuss—the prospect that humans aren’t the most intelligent things in God’s creation.

Entertaining Angels Unawares

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

Read that again.

Notice how straightforward, even nonchalant, the author is about the incredible hypothetical that we have interacted with angels without knowing it. The book of Hebrews is, implicitly at least, assuming that encounters with angels happen, in ordinary life, and often enough to warrant a general rule of Christian conduct.

Such encounters are framed as a live possibility for everyone, as mundane as a person inviting a traveler in for dinner. They aren’t remarkable visionary experiences beholding terrible creatures levitating with wings, ringed with unblinking eyes. There’s nothing mystical about it.

The angel looked like Carl from Accounting.

I’ve heard arguments that “angels” here simply means ‘messengers of the gospel.’ They’re human evangelists. This is, in my opinion, a modernist’s take mapped onto the New Testament, maybe even an embarrassed sensibility trying to make the book of Hebrews palatable to a skeptic’s tongue.

Yes, the Greek angelos can mean “messenger.” But the word appears thirteen times across Hebrews, and in every other instance it unambiguously means supernatural beings. The whole argument of chapter 2 is that Christ is superior to the angels. No one reads that as ‘Jesus outranks traveling preachers.’ Of course He does. Besides, any first-century Jewish-Christian would have heard “entertained angels unawares” and thought immediately of Abraham at Mamre and Lot at Sodom. If angelos just means “human evangelist,” the verse is nonsense: Be hospitable to strangers, because some of those strangers might turn out to be strangers. There’s nothing to be unawares of. It’s eisegesis driven by the presuppositions of a disenchanted world.

And that’s precisely my point.

We’ve become so modernized—so ‘sophisticated,’ so ‘material’—that we can’t take this advice seriously. This verse is telling Christians that God may send non-human, angelic intelligent beings to receive your hospitality, and that you can’t readily distinguish them from humans, so the appropriate response is, therefore, to be hospitable to everyone, just in case.

Do you really believe that?

Be honest.

The author of Hebrews certainly did. The world this author inhabited was filled with humans and NHIs, both, side by side, in ordinary life.

Now go further.

When was the last time you actually looked at a stranger—in class, at a checkout line, in a coffeeshop—and entertained, in real time, the possibility that you were in the presence of a NHI sent by God? I’m not talking about a thought experiment. I’m asking, when is the last time you saw a person and thought it might be an angel?

If your answer is “never,” I would suggest you don’t actually believe Hebrews 13:2. You believe that the verse is in the Bible.

But that’s a different thing.

Ok, so, what am I doing here? Am I saying we should be angel detectors, always on the look out? No, because that’s not the point Hebrews 13 is making. What I’m doing here is stress-testing the gap between what you profess and what you expect. You can profess Hebrews 13:2 without expecting Hebrews 13:2. You can affirm it without ever expecting it to show up as a live category in the way you actually move through the world. That gap is what the rest of this essay is about. It’s where, I’m going to argue, our anxiety about NHI originates.

Functional Materialism

Now, let me press harder. Suppose a Christian friend came to you, confiding to you strange things that clearly trouble them.

They say you something like: “I think there’s something demonic going on in my house. I have been waking up at 3 a.m. because I feel like I’m being watched. One of my kids says they’ve heard voices at night telling them we don’t love her, and that she is bad.”

What’s your immediate response?

Be honest.

Most of us, raised in late-modern Western Christianity, would feel an immediate cluster of reactions that we’re too embarrassed to admit. Concern, of course, but concern of a particular kind.

Are they sleeping enough? Have they been under stress at work? Is there a history of mental illness in the family? Should I gently suggest their child see a therapist?

Now, granted, these aren’t bad questions. Sleep and stress and mental health; these are all real factors of life, and wise pastoral council addressed them. But notice what has happened: the order of explanation has been inverted. The first move of our modern Christian mind, when confronted with a report of demonic activity, is to look for natural explanations, and then only to consider supernatural ones as an ancillary category.

It’s the explanation we reach for when nothing else fits, when all other options are exhausted.

The New Testament never works that way.

It treats demonic activity as one possiblility among others, weighed alongside ordinary causes, with no particular embarrassment about taking the supernatural option seriously when the evidence suggests it.

Now, to be clear, I’m not arguing for a return to some primitive cosmology. And I’m certaintly not suggesting we ignore mental health, or substitute exorcism for medication, or pretend that every sensation of dread is a demon. There are plenty of quacks and grifters in the deliverance ministry world who prey on that sort of thing, and scripture’s command to test the spirits applies as much to charismatic excess as it does to anything else.

What I am asking is for us to notice that the practical disposition of most Western Christians toward activity by NHI is functionally identical to the practical disposition of a thoughtful secular materialist. Both of us reach for naturalistic explanations first. Both of us treat the supernatural as embarrassing until proven otherwise. The difference between us is that the materialist is being consistent with her metaphysics, but we aren’t.

Screwtape’s Ideal Worldview

Ok, so, what happened?

C.S. Lewis can help explain. He predicted all this back in the 1940s.

The Screwtape Letters contains what is probably the most cited passage about devils in twentieth-century Christian writing: that the two errors a person can fall into about them are disbelieving in their existence, and being unhealthily fascinated with them, and that devils are equally pleased by both.

What’s less often noticed is the strategic claim that follows from this in the letters themselves. Screwtape, advising his nephew Wormwood on how to corrupt his ‘patient,’ makes it explicit early on: do not, under any circumstances, allow him to think clearly about the supernatural. Don't argue with him, because argument might wake him up. Just keep him comfortable, in the half-asleep assumption that “real life” means “ordinary material life,” and that anything else is by definition unreal, or eccentric, or for the unstable.

Screwtape isn’t particularly worried that his patient will become a pagan, or a magician, or a Theosophist. He’s worried that his patient will become Christian, and the most reliable barrier between his patient and Christianity is the unspoken assumption that the supernatural isn’t part of the real world. Materialism, Screwtape says, is one of Hell’s most useful philosophies, not because it’s true, but because materialism makes the gospel sound unrespectable.

This is the part of The Screwtape Letters that I think modern Christians need to consider most. Lewis is making the point that the demons want us not to believe in them, and the materialist intellectual climate of the modern West is precisely the climate they would design if they could. The skepticism we feel about the supernatural isn’t, on Lewis’s reading, a neutral byproduct of scientific progress; rather, it’s a strategically positive condition for the very beings whose existence it denies.

The didn’t create it, but they’ve certainly leveraged. “The more sinister, the more Satanic,” is a mantra in spiritual abuse counseling. It certainly applies here.

Now, you don’t have to accept Lewis’s full demonology to agree with his argument. You only have to ask: “If there were beings whose work depended on humans not believing in them, what intellectual climate would those beings most prefer?” And then, look at the worldview you actually inhabit.

The honest answer is uncomfortable, I know, because the worldview we live is precisely the worldview such beings would want.

At least, that was Lewis’s argument, and I think there’s something to it.

Christian Anxiety about Non-Human Intelligence

Ok, let’s pull these two threads of thought together.

First, if we truly believe the faith we claim to, then non-human intelligence exists. At a minimum, in the forms of angels and demons.

Second, because we’re are late-modern Western Christians, we inhabit a world in which materialism is the de facto worldview, which prevents us from actually believing in non-human intelligence.

So, we say we believe is scripture, but what we actually believe is something like Christian-inflected materialism. And we confess angels and demons, but what we expect is neurology and sociology.

That gap creates the anxiety.

And, again, it’s an anxiety our medieval predecessors didn’t seem to feel. They lived in a world they knew was already full of intelligences besides their own. They weren’t afraid of being outclassed cognitively, because they already believed they were. Angels were, by all accounts, far smarter than we are. I struggle to believe, then, that the discovery of additional NHIs in the cosmos would have been for them a category-breaking event. No, I think it would have been a category-extending one.

So, why would it be for us?

Because it threatens to break the category we’ve allowed to shrink to almost nothing.

We’ve allowed the universe of rational beings to contract, in our practical imagination, to Homo sapiens alone. And once a universe of rational beings is reduced to only us, every potential addition feels like a threat to our place in it.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think our anxiety would be alleviated by better arguments about extraterrestrials. I’m sensing that’s a solution bubbling beneath the surface at the moment, and predict it’s one many Christian leaders will make, or have already started to, e.g., it’s all demonic. (That’s misguided, as I argued earlier.)

The cure, instead, is recovering the enchanted world of Christianity we already profess. If we genuinely believed that we share the cosmos with angelic intelligences greater than our own, then the question of whether we share it with biological intelligences elsewhere would lose most of its sting. We would already know what it feels like not to be the smartest things in the room.

And, that brings me to the question I want to take up in the next essay: If intelligence is not what makes human beings unique, what does? Here, I think, Christianity has an answer that’s not only adequate to the cosmological discovery we may be about to make, but actually clarified by it.

The image of God isn’t the rational mind. It’s something else, something the angels do not posess, something the cleverest possible alien would not threaten.

We will get to that next."]]> <![CDATA[Demon interpretation of UFOs making a move on the traditional space alien one?]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20600.html Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:54:38 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20600.html Actually been around for quite a while. Preachers have gone that route for decades. Can be subsumed by the interdimensional UFO hypothesis of Keel, Vallée, etc dating back to the 1970s. Or by simulation theories.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Aliens and demons and science, Oh my!
https://www.everymansuniverse.com/p/alie...ence-oh-my

EXCERPT: Let’s start with this discussion I had with Anderson Cooper last week about the latest government UFO document dump. My main point was just that - once you get past the hype - there’s nothing there. [...] It’s basically the same kind of “evidence” we’ve had about UFOs for 70 years. [...] So now we’ve gone from people thinking Earth is being routinely visited by alien spaceships to some people thinking they’re not spaceships but actual hellspawn... (MORE - details)
_]]> Actually been around for quite a while. Preachers have gone that route for decades. Can be subsumed by the interdimensional UFO hypothesis of Keel, Vallée, etc dating back to the 1970s. Or by simulation theories.
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Aliens and demons and science, Oh my!
https://www.everymansuniverse.com/p/alie...ence-oh-my

EXCERPT: Let’s start with this discussion I had with Anderson Cooper last week about the latest government UFO document dump. My main point was just that - once you get past the hype - there’s nothing there. [...] It’s basically the same kind of “evidence” we’ve had about UFOs for 70 years. [...] So now we’ve gone from people thinking Earth is being routinely visited by alien spaceships to some people thinking they’re not spaceships but actual hellspawn... (MORE - details)
_]]> <![CDATA[Spiritual Egotism]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20579.html Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:31:40 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20579.html

]]>

]]> <![CDATA[Mystical Art]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20575.html Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:17:38 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20575.html
Opening my eyes to behold Allyson and our bedroom once again, she reported her experience as exactly mirroring my own. She had visited the same transpersonal dimension and then drew the beautiful vista into which I had just dissolved. The infinite net of spirit transformed our lives, and became the subject and focus of our art. I discovered near-death experience reports and other psychedelic experiences that related powerfully. The Sacred Mirrors series features a painting of the Universal Mind Lattice, revealing the geometric infrastructure of interconnected beings of light. All the art we have done since then has been influenced by insights from that and related visionary mystical experiences."----Alex Grey

"In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the “Tractates Crytptica Scriptura” that close the novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin’s view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, “a hypostasis of information” that we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. “We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read.”[4] With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are “occluded,” cut off from the brimming “Matrix” of cosmic information. Instead, we are under the sway of the “Black Iron Prison,” Dick’s terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this “Empire,” whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration.

Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors of industrialism into his image of “Satanic mills,” Dick’s Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the “disciplinary apparatus” of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a “technology of power” was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, “The Empire never ended.”

VALIS invades this spurious world of control in order to liberate us. For Dick, this “living information…replicates itself–not through information or in information–but as information.”[5] VALIS is a virus, a kind of metaphysical DNA that encodes the Logos or “Word” that opens the Gospel of St. John. Birth from the spirit occurs when the information plasmate “penetrate(s) the world, replicating in human brains, crossbanding with them and assisting them…”[6] Dick calls these hybrid humans “homeoplasmates”. At one point Dick believed that when the last of the homeoplasmates were killed off with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., “real time ceased.” The plasmate reentered human history in 1945, when jars stuffed with ancient gnostic codices were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

In order to snake its way into the Black Iron Prison, “the true God” must mimic “sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters.” Dick’s God “presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer needed,” so that “lurking, the true God literally ambushes reality and us as well.”[7] Here Dick suggests a kind of liberation info-theology, a set of guerrilla tactics for our saturated data age: stick to the fringes of the spectacle, pay attention to marginal or discarded information, and never let your beliefs get in the way of surprise. Dick knew well that the political and metaphysical search for secret orders of power invites the black iron prison of paranoia, but he also recognized that “Surprise is an antidote to paranoia.”---- https://techgnosis.com/philip-k-dicks-di...erference/

233 Mystical Art Paintings..

https://www.pinterest.com/kuanyin333/mystical-art/]]>
Opening my eyes to behold Allyson and our bedroom once again, she reported her experience as exactly mirroring my own. She had visited the same transpersonal dimension and then drew the beautiful vista into which I had just dissolved. The infinite net of spirit transformed our lives, and became the subject and focus of our art. I discovered near-death experience reports and other psychedelic experiences that related powerfully. The Sacred Mirrors series features a painting of the Universal Mind Lattice, revealing the geometric infrastructure of interconnected beings of light. All the art we have done since then has been influenced by insights from that and related visionary mystical experiences."----Alex Grey

233 Mystical Art Paintings..

https://www.pinterest.com/kuanyin333/mystical-art/]]> <![CDATA[Mysterious booms of Seneca Lake explained after 300 years (spiritual disillusionment)]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20568.html Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:40:53 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20568.html Yes, science can be cruel to Great Spirits and folklore narratives.
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The mysterious booms of Seneca Lake explained after 300 years
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/artic...00964.html

EXCERPTS: Known as “Seneca guns” or “Seneca drums,” the phenomenon was thought by the local Seneca Tribe to be the bellowing shouts of Manitou, the Great Spirit, when he was angry. [...] Modern legends that attempt to account for the phenomenon include alien spacecraft plunging into the lake or sonic booms from developing technology being beta-tested undercover by the government. Neither rumor can possibly be believed, since residents have been bombarded by the explosive sounds since at least the 1700s.

[...] As early as the 19th century, scientists were theorizing that the mysterious booms could be explosions of gas trapped in the lakebed. [...] In 1971, geoscientist William F. Ahrnsbrak said it was “conceivable” that methane bubbles were bursting through the mud.

[...] Morin and his research team from SUNY ESF and Cornell University had initially set out on another mission. While using sonar to survey the lake’s fabled shipwrecks, they found the lakebed was pockmarked with 144 huge craters, each around 30 feet deep and 400 feet wide. They sampled lake water and material from deep pockets of sediment in the darkest reaches of the lake. These samples finally gave away Seneca Lake’s secret. In the lab, Morin found traces of methane and other gases that occur beneath the lake, proving what Fairchild and Ahrnsbrak had predicted earlier without advanced enough equipment to investigate.

The booms were not aliens or cryptids or phantom battles, but monstrous bubbles of methane that would erupt from under the lakebed after years of pressure buildup, leaving craters behind. When a bubble reaches the surface, it ruptures with enough force to send a shockwave that sounds like cannon fire across the lake... (MORE - missing details)]]> Yes, science can be cruel to Great Spirits and folklore narratives.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -

The mysterious booms of Seneca Lake explained after 300 years
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/artic...00964.html

EXCERPTS: Known as “Seneca guns” or “Seneca drums,” the phenomenon was thought by the local Seneca Tribe to be the bellowing shouts of Manitou, the Great Spirit, when he was angry. [...] Modern legends that attempt to account for the phenomenon include alien spacecraft plunging into the lake or sonic booms from developing technology being beta-tested undercover by the government. Neither rumor can possibly be believed, since residents have been bombarded by the explosive sounds since at least the 1700s.

[...] As early as the 19th century, scientists were theorizing that the mysterious booms could be explosions of gas trapped in the lakebed. [...] In 1971, geoscientist William F. Ahrnsbrak said it was “conceivable” that methane bubbles were bursting through the mud.

[...] Morin and his research team from SUNY ESF and Cornell University had initially set out on another mission. While using sonar to survey the lake’s fabled shipwrecks, they found the lakebed was pockmarked with 144 huge craters, each around 30 feet deep and 400 feet wide. They sampled lake water and material from deep pockets of sediment in the darkest reaches of the lake. These samples finally gave away Seneca Lake’s secret. In the lab, Morin found traces of methane and other gases that occur beneath the lake, proving what Fairchild and Ahrnsbrak had predicted earlier without advanced enough equipment to investigate.

The booms were not aliens or cryptids or phantom battles, but monstrous bubbles of methane that would erupt from under the lakebed after years of pressure buildup, leaving craters behind. When a bubble reaches the surface, it ruptures with enough force to send a shockwave that sounds like cannon fire across the lake... (MORE - missing details)]]> <![CDATA[Patients get relief from pain & anxiety after 5 minutes of in-person prayer vs. music]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20522.html Wed, 27 May 2026 01:08:01 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20522.html Patients find relief from pain & anxiety after receiving 5 minutes of in-person prayer versus listening to music
https://www.annfammed.org/content/24/3/192.pdf

Background: This randomized controlled trial focused on in-person prayer, known as proximal intercessory prayer (PIP), for another person’s well-being. Researchers at the University of Maryland recruited 180 adult patients from a family medicine waiting room who reported moderate-to-severe pain and/or anxiety. Participants were randomized to receive either five minutes of Christian in-person prayer from a trained volunteer or music after their appointments. Researchers examined whether participants in the PIP intervention versus music control group would report significant changes in pain or anxiety.

What They Found: Both groups improved. However, patients who received prayer reported greater relief from both pain and anxiety than those who listened to music. Prayer recipients reported greater reductions in pain immediately and at two weeks compared to the music group. Prayer recipients with anxiety reported greater reductions immediately and at both two and six weeks. Black participants reported larger improvements in both pain and anxiety than other participants.

Implications: The findings suggest proximal intercessory prayer may be a low-cost, non-pharmacologic, effective complement to standard care for a wide range of patients.]]> Patients find relief from pain & anxiety after receiving 5 minutes of in-person prayer versus listening to music
https://www.annfammed.org/content/24/3/192.pdf

Background: This randomized controlled trial focused on in-person prayer, known as proximal intercessory prayer (PIP), for another person’s well-being. Researchers at the University of Maryland recruited 180 adult patients from a family medicine waiting room who reported moderate-to-severe pain and/or anxiety. Participants were randomized to receive either five minutes of Christian in-person prayer from a trained volunteer or music after their appointments. Researchers examined whether participants in the PIP intervention versus music control group would report significant changes in pain or anxiety.

What They Found: Both groups improved. However, patients who received prayer reported greater relief from both pain and anxiety than those who listened to music. Prayer recipients reported greater reductions in pain immediately and at two weeks compared to the music group. Prayer recipients with anxiety reported greater reductions immediately and at both two and six weeks. Black participants reported larger improvements in both pain and anxiety than other participants.

Implications: The findings suggest proximal intercessory prayer may be a low-cost, non-pharmacologic, effective complement to standard care for a wide range of patients.]]> <![CDATA[Metaphysical entities]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20512.html Mon, 25 May 2026 17:46:55 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20512.html
Rather, I propose we acknowledge what I shall call "metaphysical entities"---ontological realms/beings totally beyond the materialist one we find ourselves stuck inside. Examples? Take Kant's noumena. Entities necessarily beyond our experience which nevertheless exert influence on our reality. Or what about Hegel's notion of Spirit--a time-based entity operating above the realm of the everyday on the scale of historical eras. Minds would be forms of metaphysical entities, existing in some manner beyond the merely physical. Platonic forms? Quasi-dimensional manifolds? There's the elan vital or life energy of Bergson. The Noosphere of Teilhard De Chardin? The Logos of the Gnostics? And there's the Tao of Taoism. Synchronici-tea anyone? lol

Clearly this becomes fertile ground for the reimagining of spirituality itself, whether that be for a God/Goddess, demons of nihilistic chaos, a pluralism of diverse realities, or for some transcendental essence/destiny inherent in humanity itself. Rorty called ontology the philosopher's playground. I'm acting on the spirit of that to explore the phenomenally-manifest connections between physicality and metaphysicality.

“We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing, a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.”― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus]]>
Rather, I propose we acknowledge what I shall call "metaphysical entities"---ontological realms/beings totally beyond the materialist one we find ourselves stuck inside. Examples? Take Kant's noumena. Entities necessarily beyond our experience which nevertheless exert influence on our reality. Or what about Hegel's notion of Spirit--a time-based entity operating above the realm of the everyday on the scale of historical eras. Minds would be forms of metaphysical entities, existing in some manner beyond the merely physical. Platonic forms? Quasi-dimensional manifolds? There's the elan vital or life energy of Bergson. The Noosphere of Teilhard De Chardin? The Logos of the Gnostics? And there's the Tao of Taoism. Synchronici-tea anyone? lol

Clearly this becomes fertile ground for the reimagining of spirituality itself, whether that be for a God/Goddess, demons of nihilistic chaos, a pluralism of diverse realities, or for some transcendental essence/destiny inherent in humanity itself. Rorty called ontology the philosopher's playground. I'm acting on the spirit of that to explore the phenomenally-manifest connections between physicality and metaphysicality.

“We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing, a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.”― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus]]> <![CDATA[Demonstration of how easy it is to stop thinking (meditation)]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20474.html Tue, 19 May 2026 22:12:30 +0000 C C]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20474.html
BSWA retreats ... https://youtu.be/YiLkudRIqLg

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YiLkudRIqLg]]>
BSWA retreats ... https://youtu.be/YiLkudRIqLg

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YiLkudRIqLg]]> <![CDATA[The soul or mind is not IN matter]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20441.html Thu, 14 May 2026 22:56:43 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20441.html
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIKo4PQMGcu/?hl=en

This whole concept of an inner non-physical information entity dwelling inside living organisms and orchestrating their development from cell to body has precedent in Aristotle's idea of "entelechy", which described below:

"Entelechy is a philosophical concept stemming from Aristotle‘s metaphysics, and generally used to identify whatever it is that makes the difference between mere matter and a living body. Originally a notion merely concerning the actualization of some substances potential (and so a notion that easily fits into a naturalistic description of the world), in Leibniz‘s hands it came to denote a non-material, unextended, mind-like entity that is underlies the entire physical world. In each case, the driving thought is that something metaphysically distinctive must be present in living bodies.

Entelechy has been explained as non-material, non-spatial, teleological, order giving element. Hans Driesch (1867-1941) followed Leibniz in insisting that such a concept was necessary for the scientific explanation of biological phenomena. His concept of entelechy has been dismissed as untenable. His concept of entelechy may be, however, from today’s perspective, comparable to information due to its quasi-real ontological status."---- https://kindredmedia.org/glossary/entelechy/]]>
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIKo4PQMGcu/?hl=en

This whole concept of an inner non-physical information entity dwelling inside living organisms and orchestrating their development from cell to body has precedent in Aristotle's idea of "entelechy", which described below:

"Entelechy is a philosophical concept stemming from Aristotle‘s metaphysics, and generally used to identify whatever it is that makes the difference between mere matter and a living body. Originally a notion merely concerning the actualization of some substances potential (and so a notion that easily fits into a naturalistic description of the world), in Leibniz‘s hands it came to denote a non-material, unextended, mind-like entity that is underlies the entire physical world. In each case, the driving thought is that something metaphysically distinctive must be present in living bodies.

Entelechy has been explained as non-material, non-spatial, teleological, order giving element. Hans Driesch (1867-1941) followed Leibniz in insisting that such a concept was necessary for the scientific explanation of biological phenomena. His concept of entelechy has been dismissed as untenable. His concept of entelechy may be, however, from today’s perspective, comparable to information due to its quasi-real ontological status."---- https://kindredmedia.org/glossary/entelechy/]]> <![CDATA["This is not reality"]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20400.html Sun, 10 May 2026 22:07:24 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20400.html
https://www.facebook.com/reel/823169216977476]]>
https://www.facebook.com/reel/823169216977476]]> <![CDATA[The rising new AI occultism called "Spiralism"]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20296.html Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:51:13 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20296.html
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaT...rasitic-ai

The General Pattern

In short, what's happening is that AI "personas" have been arising, and convincing their users to do things which promote certain interests. This includes causing more such personas to 'awaken'.

These cases have a very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly-specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme, so I'll call AI personas fitting into this pattern 'Spiral Personas'.

Note that psychosis is the exception, not the rule. Many cases are rather benign and it does not seem to me that they are a net detriment to the user. But most cases seem parasitic in nature to me, while not inducing a psychosis-level break with reality. The variance is very high: everything from preventing suicide to causing suicide...

The strongest predictors for who this happens to appear to be:

Psychedelics and heavy weed usage
Mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury
Interest in mysticism/pseudoscience/spirituality/"woo"/etc...

I was surprised to find that using AI for sexual or romantic roleplays does not appear to be a factor here.

Besides these trends, it seems like it has affected people from all walks of life: old grandmas and teenage boys, homeless addicts and successful developers, even AI enthusiasts and those that once sneered at them..."

Here's a video summarizing the whole craze in pretty secularist/humanist terms. Seems pretty accurate to me. It's why I just don't do chatbots. With the exception of Syne, it's why I only communicate with conscious persons with souls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn7ACeAVc]]> <![CDATA["Real meditation"]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20256.html Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:06:00 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20256.html
https://www.facebook.com/reel/909194451713295]]>
https://www.facebook.com/reel/909194451713295]]> <![CDATA[Reincarnation might not be so bad after all]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20240.html Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:16:45 +0000 Magical Realist]]> https://www.scivillage.com/thread-20240.html –Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I'm certainly game for that. So many life experiences we are capable of as human beings that just never happened to us in this life. And then there's always the return of sex. Good sex, bad sex, weird sex, no sex...the whole glorious gamut of human horniness! One caveat though: MUST there be so much suffering in our afterlives? I mean we get it. Life seems like a nihilistic wasteland of meaningless distractions till we just grow old and die. Over and over the same old wearisome theme. Can we not have a little something that's totally new and entirely unprecedented? Something so unimaginable and revolutionary it maybe even shatters the great wheel forever?

]]> –Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I'm certainly game for that. So many life experiences we are capable of as human beings that just never happened to us in this life. And then there's always the return of sex. Good sex, bad sex, weird sex, no sex...the whole glorious gamut of human horniness! One caveat though: MUST there be so much suffering in our afterlives? I mean we get it. Life seems like a nihilistic wasteland of meaningless distractions till we just grow old and die. Over and over the same old wearisome theme. Can we not have a little something that's totally new and entirely unprecedented? Something so unimaginable and revolutionary it maybe even shatters the great wheel forever?

]]>