Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum - Religions & Spirituality

Dawkins' neo-Darwinism is itself a religious theory?

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:29:55 +0000

https://iai.tv/articles/dawkins-neo-darw..._auid=2020

INTRO: We often see evolutionary theory as the enemy of religion. But in Darwin’s day, many scientists thought otherwise. Neo-Darwinism, today championed by atheists like Richard Dawkins, was founded by a devout Christian, who explicitly tied its mechanistic vision of life to a world ordered by God’s laws. In contrast, argues Stanford historian of science Jessica Riskin, the anti-mechanistic theory of Lamarck—which grants living beings genuine creativity—was attacked as dangerously atheistic. Riskin argues that today’s supporters of neo-Darwinism have forgotten its theological roots, and that Lamarck’s theory, with its radical, anti-theological motivations, should be taken more seriously... (MORE - details)

Anti-Semitic attacks at deadliest level in decades, global report warns

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:16:10 +0000

Anti-Semitic attacks at deadliest level in decades, global report warns
https://www.rfi.fr/en/international/2026...port-warns

EXCERPTS: The report identified hostility towards Zionism or Israel as a major motivating factor in incidents classified as anti-Semitic by its authors, accounting for 48 percent of recorded cases in the UK and 45 percent in the US. The task force warned that political arguments surrounding Israel and the Gaza war were increasingly being used to target Jewish individuals, institutions and communities, rather than remaining focused on the actions of governments.

It also highlighted the role of social media in spreading anti-Semitic rhetoric, accusing platforms of failing to apply their own rules consistently or act quickly enough against threatening and abusive material. Jewish organisations have reported that some people are avoiding displaying religious symbols or revealing their identity in public because of fears of harassment.

[...] The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism report released on Wednesday shows that 20 people were murdered in anti-Semitic attacks in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States in 2025.

Last year was the deadliest for such violence in the Jewish diaspora since the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. In France, 1,320 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded. While that represented a 16 percent fall from the 2024 figure of 1,570, it was still more than three times the 436 incidents reported in 2022.

Anti-Semitic incidents represented 53 percent of all anti-religious incidents recorded in the country in 2025.

The report examined anti-Semitic incidents in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Together, the seven countries are home to more than 90 percent of Jewish people living outside Israel. France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community... (MORE - missing details)

Pseudo spiritualities

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:16:31 +0000

When a belief system or ideology gives you a sense of specialness and importance you didn't already have, as if you are the totally fascinating object of some others' attention and plans, you can bet it isn't real. As if you were the center of the universe and worthy of constant coddling from some other higher being(s). This is a false spirituality, desperately clutched to allay your own insecurities and your nagging fear of being just a nobody. A constant narcissistic obsession with oneself and everything about oneself. Take it from G K Chesterton:

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
― G.K. Chesterton

An authentic spirituality constellates around the encounter of the being(s) themselves, humbling if not entirely devastating the experiencer's sense of self. It is the moment of metanoia/transformation and of experienced numinosity, opening us up to a whole new world-changing awareness.

The spiritual crisis of our time

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:18:00 +0000

"Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’

He has freed himself from ‘superstition’ (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation…”— Carl Jung

Jung viewed the time we are living in as one plagued by a hyperrational worldview and all-too-outward and culturally-extraverted lifestyle. Everywhere one looks one sees this predominantly left-brained orientation to our own experience. The explosion of new technologies and scientific theories about the universe. The transformation of daily life into a domain of hyperconnectivity and media-driven information and materialistic values. And the demise of religion as providing any relevant or adequate answer to the abyssmal emptiness and meaninglessness of human existence.

Most symptomatic of all we have the encroachment of the Internet and AI into our very ontological condition, disembodying us and sequestering us off inside divisive ideologies and semantic abstractions that only starve us for some more lasting and solid epistemic foundation. The rise of paranormality and anomalous phenomenon seems to parallel this over reliance of our species on discursive and egocentric thinking--a compensative balance back to our archetypal roots springing up from our own collective psyche. We crave a new and involving narrative and an absolute source of hopefulness by which we can regain the experience of the numinous and profound that our ancestors possessed. What form shall it take now that the gods of religion have calcified into stale dogmas and empty rituals? From whence shall we look for our salvation?

“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.”― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Spiritual family traditions are major barriers to adoption of plant-based diets

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:33:13 +0000

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1136959

INTRO: Nostalgia is a major barrier in preventing more people from adopting plant-based diets, according to a new University of Stirling study. Research led by Aga Kosla of the University’s Faculty of Natural Sciences found that links to childhood, cultural identity and a sense of home can make dietary changes feel like a loss of self or tradition for many people. 

Findings showed that people’s attachment was less often about meat itself – and more about links to personal experiences and cultural traditions. 

Lead author Ms Kosla said: “Our research shows that dietary change is not just a practical or nutritional issue. Food is tied to identity, belonging, and family life, so vegan advocacy, activism, and public health messaging needs to engage with those emotional and cultural attachments. 

“This study highlights that resistance to plant-based diets is not simply about taste or convenience, but about maintaining continuity with the past and preserving meaningful traditions. Interestingly, participants often realised that it was the shared experience, not the specific ingredient, that mattered most.” 

Efforts to encourage people to adopt either a plant-based diet or a vegan lifestyle often focus on health, ethics, animal rights or the environment – overlooking personal and social connections to food. Researchers believe that the findings could help producers, campaigners and public health organisations make plant-based options feel less like a loss, by recreating nostalgic or culturally significant dishes using vegan ingredients... (MORE - no ads)

What will death be like?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:45:54 +0000

Think death less as some spirit or soul journeying elsewhere thru some psychedelic space and more as an ontological jump. Like when you've just watched a very involving movie in a theater and it ends and they turn the lights on. In a matter of seconds we are thrown from one world to another. It's like how we sometimes wake up from a really vivid dream and we suddenly don't know where we are for a few seconds. That's what I think death is like. Think when Dorothy opened the door of her storm-tossed house. We instantly leap from one state of consciousness to another. And bam..you're just there. One reality is over and another begins. What do you think it will be like?

The Infinite

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:12:23 +0000

Here's a thread about the Infinite (in the deepest spiritual and metaphysical sense.) Starting off with a quote from Jung and then a marvelous little poetic reverie by Jason Silva.

“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.”― Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPQXLUpwNCA

No.. there are not 33 million gods in Hinduism

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:32:11 +0000

Far less in fact...

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8wm9i5obwl/?hl=en

[Image: Clguzxt.jpg]

... Love Letter... (spiritual)

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:51:02 +0000

...as a grateful beloved and not some moralistic scold or resentful neighbor. For I am acutely aware that the liberties I enjoy, and the clarity with which I know myself free, are gifts of your thought, your daring, and your existence. I am a... woman, yes, but in the profoundest sense that matters — one which appeals to nature... — I am your daughter.

...The radicalism of your proposition lies in its claim to be true by nature. In brief, you are and will be true in all times and places. You did something unprecedented: you took equality and liberty out of the realm of myth, custom, and historical accident, and you wrote them on the tablet of nature itself.... You said that what you claim depends not on particular English habits, Protestant temperament, or colonial grievances; it depends on the soul.

...You announce that the standard by which regimes are to be judged is man’s eternal nature and not tradition, blood, or geography. And if that is true, any regime — yours, mine, or any other — that repudiates that standard becomes an enemy... of humanity itself. This is why your existence is... a philosophical revolution.

...But your most profound audacity is your humility before nature. You dared to assert that the truths upon which you rest are not yours.... they are a human truth. You did not create the equality of men; you discovered it. You did not grant inalienable rights; you recognized them. That is why you are, and must be, a light...

The light you bear is not the sentimental glow of humanitarian feeling, which rises and falls with fashion. It is the light of nature—a light that flattens false hierarchies and exposes tyrannies as both false and unjust.... It whispers to the soul: You were not born to be a subject. You were not born to be a means. That whisper is your greatest weapon.

...You are chosen to live with the burden of having declared to the world that there is a standard above tribe, throne, party, and epoch. The burden is that you cannot retreat into the consolations of relativism without betraying your foundation. You cannot comfortably say, “Well, every culture has its own truths,” without also sawing off the branch on which you sit. If equality and liberty are not true by nature, then your founding is a magnificent illusion, and you are only one more tribe defending its prejudices. But if they are true by nature, then their reach is universal, their demand inescapable. You carry that demand. You carry it..., but more profoundly, you carry it in your self-understanding. You are condemned, by your own first principles, to care about the fate of liberty everywhere — out of philosophic consistency and not of imperial ambition....

From my vantage point,... — to the modest comfort of thinking we can live as if history has ended... — I see you for what you are: the keystone... Remove you, and the arch collapses.... The real keystone is that in you, the philosophy of natural rights did not remain an abstraction in a book or a lecture, but took the frightening step into reality. You wagered that men, understood as by nature free and equal,...

That is why your crises are never local matters. When you grow weary of yourself, when you tire of the old words and regard them as empty slogans, it is not only you who are endangered. A world already suspicious about reason looks on and concludes that even the noblest attempt to found... on nature is a failure. Your decadence is offered as proof that the longing for liberty must submit at last to some new form of gentle despotism, administrative and “scientific,” tidy and soulless. The world is always looking for an excuse to give up on the demand that regimes justify themselves by appealing to something higher than power. Your failure would be that excuse.

...You are tempted today by two opposite forms of forgetfulness. One is the temptation... to imagine that what makes you is a mere continuity of blood and custom, a... story dressed up as philosophy. The other is the temptation of pure proceduralism: to see yourself as nothing but an empty framework in which any “culture”, any “values,” any “identity” may be poured.

Both are evasions. The first reduces you to a tribe among tribes and abandons the universality at your essence. The second strips you of all substantive claims and abandons the truth by nature that gave you birth. Between these lies the hard road of self-knowledge: to remember that you are, in origin, argument and not blood — the argument that there are truths about man and justice that are true everywhere and always.

...I have been spared many of your struggles. But I have not been spared the consequences of your ideas. I live in a world fundamentally shaped by the fact that... a group of men... dared to write that... when any... becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty,... , it may be altered or abolished. Whether my own... remembers it or not, I know, because you taught me, that any regime which denies the equal natural freedom... is illegitimate.

That knowledge is a liberation and a wound. It liberates because it tells me that I am not crazy when I feel outraged by injustice; I am simply judging by the nature of things. It wounds because it leaves me no refuge in the cozy lie that “this is just the way we do things here.” Your universalism leaves me cosmopolitan in the deepest sense, unable to be satisfied with local excuses.
...
My love, the chosen... of natural right, you remain the one great... that staked everything on the claim that man is by nature free and equal...
- https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-gratefu...to-america

Happy 250th.

The present isn't real, therefore we live forever

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:36:52 +0000

It is apparent to me that we never really can be conscious of the present moment. What we think is the present is really just a fabrication or prop we make by projecting the fleeting memory of past happenedness as futural more happening. As if there is this infinitesimal sliver or gap between memory and anticipation which never changes and contains our very existence.

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

Human sacrifice in Inca Empire may have been driven by politics, not religion

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:12:06 +0000

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)

Entertaining NHIs unawares

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:24:53 +0000

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."

Demon interpretation of UFOs making a move on the traditional space alien one?

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:54:38 +0000

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)
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Spiritual Egotism

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:31:40 +0000

I am aware of this danger from studying Jung, who warns that when one identifies with a collectively unconscious archetype, one becomes megalomaniacal and grandiose--- as full of oneself as the lowly and selfish gollem. Red flags to look for? Pompous unsensitive bloviation. Subtle belittlement of and condescension to those who disagree. And a hedonistic obsession with feeling "cosmic" and emotionally blunted to everything all the time. Here's a little overview of this:

[Image: CK6pprQ.md.jpg]

Mystical Art

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:17:38 +0000

"On June 3rd, 1976, Allyson and I had a simultaneous vision, a mystical experience that changed our lives and our art. We sacramentally ingested LSD and lay in bed. Entering an altered state of consciousness, released from the dream of physical reality, I awakened as a glowing toroidal fountain of love energy, part of a vast Universal Mind Lattice, a matrix of interconnectedness with all beings. Duality of self and other was transcended in this infinite dimension beyond gender, beyond birth and death, a luminous cell in the body of God that felt more alive and more real than my physical body.

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

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"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/