There are no demons or any other supernatural beings, there is no magic.

^^^ Any sufficiently advanced tech..

Under the definition I'm using, demons live in our mind, often operating through the subconscious mind. The Ancient Greek notion of a daemon described an entity which existed between the realm of gods and humans, connecting our deterministic material plane to the spiritual plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(classical_Greek_mythol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimonion_(Socrates)

Taken literally it means that gods don't just live on Mount Olympus, but are present in our psyche at all times, vying for our attention.

So for example, someone compelled to drink alcohol might have let their mind become ruled by Dionysus (or the Roman name Bacchus), or a daemon in service of that god or pretending to be that god. Same for gambling (Hermes/Mercury). Or politics (Zeus and Athena/Jupiter and Minerva).

Today's billionaires would be ruled by gluttany (Adephagia/Nemesis) although the Romans equivocated on this because concepts like master and slave had different meanings then, because the empire's existence depended on subjugation so it became "just how things are". Much like in the modern era "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understand it" (Upton Sinclair).

So Nemesis may have allowed a human to reach a high station, even emperor, unless that human committed hubris. For example by defying the gods by trying to become a god, like Croesus did by seeing what he wanted to see:

https://www.parikiaki.com/2021/12/croesus-of-lydia/

For billionaires, obsessive thoughts revolve around health, mortality and waiting for the other shoe to drop, since they experience Nemesis without knowing its name. Whereas for farmers, concerns are more about putting food on the table, since their thinking is ruled by Demeter/Ceres.

This relates to modern concepts in psychology like "symphony of mind", that the faculties in our brain lead to the emergence of agents which influence our spiritual vibration to dominate our thinking.

So when someone perceives the presence of a demon through sight/sound or feeling, it's more like their intuition is communicating with them through a sense which is not well-defined. For nonbelievers or people who haven't experienced trauma yet which stresses the mind into seeking non-objective explanations for the breakdown of their reality, angels and demons are just as mythical as say, hearing voices or having multiple personality disorder. But for people who have witnessed paranormal activity, the idea that there may be more to our reality than we typically experience is as true as say, the love of a child for its parent.

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I've seen one or two things that I can't explain, that would amount to ghost stories and close encounters. But I've also seen things that were later explained. For example, I was hiking in the desert at night one time with friends and a star lit up so that for a second or two, it was as bright as day, but it wasn't a shooting star. I later learned about Iridium satellite flares.

So I'm open to the idea that magic doesn't exist. But as long as science can't explain how consciousness works, then none of this can be ruled out. IMHO science will never be able to do that, because I believe that consciousness is the quantum uncertainty portion of nondeterminism. In other words, everything down to the subatomic level has a measure of consciousness, that we observe as an outcome or choice. Without consciousness (uncertainty), the universe would evolve in a purely deterministic fashion.

But when we introduce self-awareness by adding an observer, the act of observation influences the uncertainty to determine which timeline we walk. We control our destiny and may have even had a hand in our past before our consciousness reached a level of organization that would allow us to remember why we chose to come into being. Our awareness isn't a separate aspect of reality, they're two sides of the same coin, which is analogous to pantheism.

It's certainly entertaining and fulfilling to believe there is some great, deep truth and that you're finding it through the concept of magic, but your mental energy would better be spent understanding things like politics and technology for what they are, not draped in the context of the supernatural.

I would urge you to play devil's advocate and consider that the simplest explanation tends to be the right one by Occam's razor. Politics and technology give people an out so that they can rationalize groupthink and amoral behavior. A strong argument could be made that today's political landscape is comprised of tribes that engage in cult-like thinking, similarly to how multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs) attract evangelists due to how their incentives align.

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So all of this that makes no sense - like why we would want to elect public officials who are free of accountability - becomes transparently obvious when viewed through the lens of metaphysics. It's because the cognitive dissonance people experience living under systems of control like ours (that promote suffering when there is plenty for everyone were it not for wealth inequality) compels them to reach for solutions that allow them to defer their own accountability.

Because they don't want to begin the healing and growth work that would help them ascend past their self-imposed limitations, because they don't want to face their guilt and shame. So they project their frustrations outward as elitism, favoritism, discrimination, othering, division, dogma, prejudice, authoritarianism, etc. Which politicians turn into wedge issues so they can choreograph elections, sort of like gerrymandering but by framing debates instead of district boundaries.

When politicians orate and capture the hearts and minds of their base to gain power, it's no different than church leaders taking their lord's name in vain to further their own wordly goals, or magicians pulling the wool over their audience's eyes to create the illusion of a fantasy reality to make a buck. It's all magic, just like consciousness is magic.

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You're right that my post comes off as detached from reality, I get it. But I think there's a difference between studying a subject to master it and transcend its rules to add new ones, and practicing willfull ignorance of a subject to pretend that its implications don't exist.

Remember that Carl Sagan warned in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance"

But also wrote the character Palmer Joss in his book Contact to remind us to question our most deeply held assumptions, so that we don't inadvertently worship reason as a substitute for meaning.

Pascals wager suggest it is in your interest to believe in the supernatural

They blend into each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenish_fan -- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=german+dutch+isoglosses&iar=images

Very close, and I can confirm that as someone who knows "standard Dutch" it is fairly easy to read.

It wouldn't surprise me if it is even easier for someone from the german-dutch border region who is fluent in a local dialect.

Old too: But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

I don't think it's as simple as "wealth and power being bad". More that

- wealth and power are not reliable proxies for favor and righteousness (as many in Jesus's day thought)

- wealth and power come with unique temptations

Jesus also said "make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings" and there's a bunch of proverbs that talk about how the diligent prosper.

A lot of wealthy people are really generous.

Pretty much every society ever has the same things to say about how wealth/power enables people to behave poorly.

Ooh, I like that possibility.

Maybe she spent a near-eternity in agony with all that power and responsibility, and wished it all away. "Genie...er, Fish, make me an all-powerful fish!!!"

> It's just that the fish thought: to be like God means to be humble.

In which religion is the God humble? It wont be Christianity for sure.

But surely humility is only one attribute of God, and not the most relevant one. Omnipotence and omniscience are typically listed as more important aspects of the divine.

I was hoping for a "go home, she is as God", then he goes home and sees that she doesn't exist

Yes, I think...

> And they are sitting there even today.

... hints strongly that once that wish was granted, she stopped wanting something different.

Classic genie move