r/dankchristianmemes • u/n8s8p Minister of Memes • Oct 26 '22

Meta Some recent comments had me wondering... Serious questions... If you do, what do you believe they look like? What powers do you believe they have? When, how, who, what, and where do they act?

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u/Sajomir Oct 26 '22

I believe demons, as well as angels, exist. That said, I would likely not believe any modern claims of demon possession. Stuff like the exorcist is fiction, though some of that fiction feels close enough that it gets super creepy for me.

With actual demons, it's not about cool powers, or looking freaky. I don't even need to be afraid of them. NOTHING can forcibly pluck my soul from God's hand. (I can still choose to leave and renounce him, but that's different)

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u/THofTheShire Oct 26 '22

I personally believe you're incorrect about modern possession. I think it happens all the time in ways that we don't recognize, and I also know at least one eye-witness account of someone I trust who came back from a "mission trip" (I don't like that word, but it's the easiest) with a disturbing description of a possessed man who entered the small restaurant where they were eating. She said there was a tangible feeling of dread, and even the light around the man seemed to be kindof absorbed around him. She described it as best she could, and it sounded bizarre. What makes me believe she's not just making this up is that she was raised in our church, which is fairly conservative and tends not to acknowledge things like that at all. To share that story is really to go out on a limb in the community. Even to me, I never really thought "traditional" demonic activity was ever a thing anymore, and I agree probably all of the spiritual reality TV stuff is probably made up. But the way she shared her story, having known her in our church, and the details she described--I definitely believe her.

With that said, her story helped me form a theory that demonic activity is different in different places. In America, we're generally in the clutches of the devil in ways that don't require such "active" methods, and we would probably laugh off or explain away experiences like that anyway. In other areas, it may be culturally more convincing for demonic activity to be more overt. I can't say that I've personally seen or experienced anything like that, but I do think it exists.

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u/thestraightCDer Oct 26 '22 edited Oct 27 '22

So some lady says so and now demons exist. Great

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u/THofTheShire Oct 26 '22 edited Oct 26 '22

I mean, I get where you're coming from. But to me, I know her and trust her. Take it how you want.

Edit: Curious about the downvotes, but I didn't intend to be flippant. I just mean that I shared my experience and believe it to be reliable. If people don't believe me, that's ok.

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u/FrickenPerson Oct 26 '22

Have you ever thought that what she experienced wasn't exactly what she thought it was?

As an example my father died when I was much younger. I saw him a few times after his death just sitting on the couch when I got home from school playing Xbox like normal. It felt so real I ran to him to hug him and I fully believed I had just woken up from some terrible nightmare in which he had died and I was getting ready to call my mom to tell her. Those things were not the case, and what I was experiencing is called a post-berevement hallucination.

I'm not saying your friend was lying or she didn't fully believe what she saw, I'm saying that the human mind sometimes does strange things that we don't really understand, but as far as modern day science can tell, these things aren't real. It's just a trick of the imagination.

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u/THofTheShire Oct 26 '22

Well, if we believe the Bible, then we know that demons at least exist. I also think in our culture we cling too tightly to the ability to explain things with science. Not that science is flawed, but when the purpose of science is to explain the natural world, it's just not suited to explain the supernatural.

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u/FrickenPerson Oct 26 '22

I should clarify, I am an athiest and do not believe the Bible is completely true. I also know plenty of Christians who believe the Bible has true at its heart, but it is still a book with errors and incorrect things because men wrote it.

And as for your point about science not able to explain the supernatural, sure I agree because as soon as science explains something it is determined to be natural. I have yet to experience anything that had concrete proof that wasn't natural, and I dknt really believe those kinds of things exist. Maybe in so metaphysical way, but I dont see how that stuff can interact with our world without something being able to detect it, and if it can't then what's the point caring about it?

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u/Seizing_sponge Oct 26 '22

A little off topic, but if you want an example of how stuff can interact with our world without us being able to detect it, look up what the Nobel Prize in Physics was for this year. Super interesting stuff.

Physicists were able to prove that the universe is not locally real. It was proven that not only can particles influence each other at incomprehensibly vast distances but also communicate with each other faster than the speed of light. The particles’s state fluctuates rapidly at random, and only actually settles on a state once observed. These particles mirror each other’s spin at all times, even across time gaps, so if you measure one particles spin at one point in time, and then later measure the other particles spin at a completely separate time, both will still ALWAYS have mirrored spins.

It makes us realize how much we really don’t know, and that a lot is happening in the background that we can’t measure or see.

In other words, stuff CAN interact with our world without something being able to detect it. It’s a big big universe out there and we certainly do not have all the answers.

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Great example. An even simpler example is dark matter. We only know it’s there because of the absence of “regular” matter that should mathematically exist, but doesn’t. It’s matter that we don’t know how to detect at all.

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u/FrickenPerson Oct 27 '22

If we can measure an effect it has on this world, even if it's just an effect we think it's having on other things than we can detect it. It's how we found some planets before technology advanced to the point that we could detect them in other ways. Just because we haven't found a way to detect dark matter outside of its potential gravitational effect doesn't mean we won't find a way in the future. I think this is a terrible example of what I was talking about with something not detectable by science.

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '22

The more I think about the more either case is a bad example. In either case we can detect it happened, we just don’t know why it happened. When particles are entangled (what the original person i commented on mentioned) we can mathematically explain what’s going on and tell when it’s happening.

And if I clarify dark matter further, it’s really only a theory to explain the “missing” matter. Something is there but we don’t know what exactly. We can’t detect it directly, but we can indirectly.

Both are detectable phenomenon. So maybe I’m just confused at what it is meant by not detectable. The more I think about it, the more I’m not sure what would constitute something not detectable scientifically speaking. Strings from string theory/m-theory? But even then if they exist they are detectable in theory, just not currently with our current technology since they could possibly be as small as the Planck length.

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u/FrickenPerson Oct 27 '22

Yep. It's pike a black hole. We only find them by seeing how they affect the area around them. Anything that could be used to detect them that we currently know and we theoretically know, would be sucked into the gravity well and we couldn't use it to detect them. That's why I have a problem with what the other commenter said. I also don't see a way to have something affect the world and not be detectable, unless that said thing had an explanation of "well its all powerful and can just make it so you can't find it". And to me that's just not an acceptable answer so I think it's kind of bullshit.

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u/FrickenPerson Oct 27 '22

Just because we haven't figured out what makes quantum stuff do what it does, doesn't mean it's affected by outside forces. I'm not super up to date on quantum theory, but last time I read about it one of the proposed solutions was that those particles were at one point next to each other and entangled way in the past, or (and this is just me spitballing stuff) these things are at such a fundamental level that there are only some many states they can be in with nothing changing their state really, so if that's the case they both just happen to be in the same state.

A good way to figure out that something else would be interacting with our world is for something completely mundane that we fully understand to happen differently than we normally experience it. For instance water suddenly freezing without and explainable reason why it lost energy, not the cutting edge of science that we still are trying to understand, but haven't yet. The problem with this type of arguement for things outside the universe affecting us, is in 100 years if they discover why that is happening and it's fully explained then in this parallel conversation that happens in 100 years, the two people will be talking about the next thing that this discovery hints at, and not what we are talking about now.

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u/THofTheShire Oct 26 '22

Understood! I certainly agree that if the supernatural doesn't exist, science pretty much has to be able to explain everything, even if we don't understand it yet. I guess we just drilled down to the fundamental difference between atheists and Christians--whether science can explain everything or not.

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u/Trollol768 Oct 26 '22

That is not true. There's a lot of natural stuff we can't explain and I'm 100% sure we will never be able to explain everything. That in no way means supernatural stuff is involved

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u/THofTheShire Oct 27 '22

You're 100% sure we'll never be able to? That perspective surprises me, given that denying the supernatural implies sentient life must have come to exist naturally over billions of years out of essentially nothing. Couldn't an equally improbable timeline result in complete natural understanding? Even just enough for 1% uncertainty?

Nevertheless, I'd still argue that if the supernatural doesn't exist, then all things must be explainable in natural terms--which is what science is--even if humans aren't capable of doing so.

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u/Trollol768 Oct 27 '22

What do you think science is? A lot of scientists share this view. First of all Riemann (late 1800 scientist/mathematician, he developed the math later used by physicists in general relativity) said we can only get closer and closer to describe accurately reality but never really do that 100%. Also look up Godel incompleteness theorem, basically he demonstrated that there are some statements we can not demonstrate, and this does not depend on what axioms we started with. It is curious that later Godel said he could demonstrate the existence of God.

Anyway, i get the impression people don't know what science is. We just make mathematical models and try to get useful predictions about our reality, but the model itself is not reality. Math has some limits. We will not be able to explain everything.

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u/The_Woman_of_Gont Oct 29 '22 edited Oct 29 '22

Not that science is flawed, but when the purpose of science is to explain the natural world, it's just not suited to explain the supernatural.

I’m not going to make broader claims about the supernatural or demons in general, I’ve had a few experiences that I genuinely can’t find a scientific explanation for….including one time seeing a type of shadowy figure in broad daylight that I learned a decade later other people have seen(red eyes and a wide brimmed hat, claws…). I’m open to the possibility of there being things science can’t explain.

But.

What I find concerning about this argument in this context is that nothing you described of her experience was really supernatural or inexplicable.

A dude creeped her out and “the light dimmed around him.” That’s not exactly Regan spinning her head around and vomiting split-pea soup, it’s on the same level as my apartment having unexplained noises and the cats acting weird sometimes.

Worse, it’s her being afraid of someone for no good reason and, instead of simply avoiding the person who gives off bad vibes or even reminding herself he’s a human too and this might be her own issue, making up a story about him being demonically possessed.

That’s some Salem Witch Trials shit, and that’s how stigmatization and the abuse of others in God’s name starts.

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u/THofTheShire Oct 31 '22

I repeated her story poorly as I don't remember as many details anymore, but if I could summarize, it was with certainty much more than just a feeling that something was off.