We live in a fairly civilized world today. Most of humanity at least gives lip service to the idea of human rights. We put a lot of stock in education. There was a time in history when things like geometry and algebra were considered black magic, but most kids are acquainted with those subjects, even if they have no idea what math is good for. And a lot arcane knowledge about the natural world is now pretty easy to find and read on the Internet, if you are interested, to include physics, chemistry, medicine and psychology.
This vast lore of knowledge makes it hard to imagine a world where such was considered secret and forbidden knowledge, and poorly understood even by those allowed access. Complicating the picture further is the way such primitive science was held by the same people who dabbled in what we now view as superstitious magic. It makes it very hard for people to give credence to the idea of angels and demons, for example. It makes it very hard to believe in God, much less the vast lore of revelation.
This is why we struggle with the idea of Creation as a living and sentient person. We are programmed to dismiss that even when Scripture flatly uses such terminology. Jesus rebuked the storm, but our minds insist it was just symbolic action, never mind whether He actually had the power to calm a storm. He ordered demons out of people, and we automatically call it psychological manipulation. All of that sort of thing gets pushed off into Spookyland, and with it goes a whole raft of miracles and teaching about the powers of Darkness. It causes a serious problem with intellectual tension, because we must believe, and yet we continue operating in our religious organizations as if none of it was true. We affirm it, and then organize in ways that deny it.
Frankly, it’s a divine miracle when people can get past all that resistance and start to see the hand of God in their world. Even then, it’s quite a struggle to wade through all that conditioning to begin understanding the wonderful things God gave people in the Bible. If you stay the course long enough, you see some of those wonderful blessings leaking into your own life. Eventually you are in a position to reclaim the lost lore of Creation and how some of the wholly inexplicable feats of the past were done. How do you suppose they drew the Nazca Lines in South America? How about the pyramids in Egypt? The temple at Göbekli Tepe? We should hardly raise an eyebrow at such things.
Daniel studied a lot of arcane stuff during his training period prior to appearing in the Babylonian imperial court. Moses was exposed to the same kind of thing growing up in Pharaoh’s court. So Daniel conversed with angelic beings about the future and Moses performed all those miracles that destroyed Egyptian power. Both of them were aware of the horrifying things mankind could do when listening to demons. Paul flatly stated that any worship of pagan deities was actually consorting with demons (1 Corinthians 10:20).
Would you be surprised to know that, just as advanced math was once the domain of pagan magicians, so is an awful lot of behavioral science? More than some kind of hypnosis, the ancients did know how to get people to do some incredible things by using various dark arts. Casting spells to drive people insane? It was more than just incantations, but it was real.
Today we have a secretive branch of psychology that involves the use of trauma to create internal disassociation and multiple personalities. It’s been studied and there is a broad library of clinical literature on it. There is also a wealth of whistle-blowing from victims of this kind of abuse, but their stories seem hard to swallow. All the more so when the stories involve the likes of the CIA inducing this kind of trauma precisely because it works so well to create agents with multiple personalities that can be called forth by handlers. And these alternate personalities can perform acts no normal person could or would do. It weaponizes people. And when the handlers are through with them, the people are discarded. No one’s going to believe their stories anyway, so there’s little risk.
But we believe. Maybe it’s hard to be sure about some parts of their stories, as these people tend to keep speaking from inside their trauma-induced psychoses, but we should hardly raise an eyebrow at their narratives. We should keep in mind that some of them were programmed to tell their stories in ways to discredit the whole field of investigation. This is all part of the globalist agenda, a resurrection of the Tower of Babel. None of this would have surprised Daniel or Moses.
Interesting points there.
I’m still struggling to understand many things. For example how and why and when “spiritual” things interact and influence “physical” things? Which events are “physical” and which “spiritual”? Everything is both? How should we think about these things? Or just say that “God is in control” and trust Jesus Christ to handle these things.
Thinking about these things is difficult and it easily goes into binary direction: either everything is spiritual and “God did it/influenced it” or mostly it’s normal physics with just some relatively rare “spiritual events” added into the mix of reality. You can start to worry about negative influences or that you don’t give enough/correct thanks.
The scientific worldview is probably the standard today and it’s not always easy to remember to add “spiritual influence” there.
Psychology and spiritual influence (demons/spirits) is another, probably very complex topic. Does anyone have much clue down here with our brains? Maybe some deliverance ministries but it’s still difficult to form a “model” or gain understanding.
In short, it’s hard to know how things happen and what impacts what. And probably we don’t need to know everything (most of us don’t have that much “spiritual sight” I believe), but can certainly pray. Is this something we should try to understand at all? Or just pray and do things physically with your hands?
We have all that science but we don’t seem have a good or even basic “technical understanding” of spiritual things that would fit into our scientific worldview – or vice versa. Complexities of modern world, this. But thankfully things can happen even if we don’t have perfect understanding.
Try to avoid over-thinking on this. You do a good job of describing the scientific worldview that holds our world in such a tight grip today, but the alternative approach is harder to put into words, isn’t it? I’m trying to find the words myself. I remain aware of the worldly view, but I’m striving to find ways to build and communicate a different approach. The physical is what our senses and logic can perceive, but the heart can discern the spiritual realm. The closest we come is the unseen world that still runs through our cultural legends and so much of our current fiction. It’s there, right upon us at all times, but it takes some significant effort to make the intellect recognize it as a necessary ingredient in our daily calculus of life.
I’m not sure it’s worth trying to pursue or even discuss and conceptualize anything else. We don’t have the cultural background to learn the ways people perceive and recognize angels, for example. There’s a whole area of discussion about angels and demons that is loaded with crap, and it’s hard to sort it out. We can only go forward with what we have and try to correct the lowest common denominator by calling folks to see beyond the bog standard viewpoint of our society. I write of learning to see the universe as a living thing made up of countless sentient living entities; it’s just the way I try to express it. I’m sure there are folks out there who can say it better, but this works for me.