How Can People in This Day and Age be Anything But Communist? Because we Can!

Creation vs. Evolution: Answering McLean v. Arkansas · New blog on the kid: How Can People in This Day and Age be Anything But Communist? Because we Can!

Perhaps "culturally Marxist" would be a more appriate description than "Communist" but the point stands.

Q

How can people actually, in this day and age, actually believe in gods, angels, spirits, or life after death?
https://www.quora.com/How-can-people-actually-in-this-day-and-age-actually-believe-in-gods-angels-spirits-or-life-after-death/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-1

Hans-Georg Lundahl

none/ apprx Masters in Latin (language) & Greek (language), Lund University

Quinquagesima, 19.II.2023

"How can people actually, in this day and age, actually believe"

Reality doesn't change because of day and age. The things you mention, if false, were never true, if true cannot have ceased to be so by now. It’s not like believing in a Confederation that lost in 1865.

The culture you, but not I, belong to is one, which, if you are right, has discovered evidence against the following, and if false, has forgotten or cut itself off from the memory previously accessible to many more, and still accessible to those who take the trouble, for following items:

• "in gods,”
• “angels,”
• “spirits,”
• “or life after death?”

Let’s take each in turn.

“in gods”

I am a Catholic, and to me the word God is reserved to the One Being - in Three Disitinct Persons - on which all other beings depend, more precisely as on Who has being, that is existence, in and of Himself and has given it to these other ones by the act of creating them.

The “gods” of other religions are sometimes misunderstandings about the true God, sometimes demons manifesting, sometimes men who have been raised to godhood in an exaggerated reputation, sometimes (but this is not the most usual case) false explanations, and sometimes angels working in nature (for instance, the angel who moves the Sun around the Zodiac each year (and is moved with it by God each day) is misunderstood as the god Helios who moves the Sun each day as a driver moves a chariot. They can also be personifications of psychic or social phenomena, which are only partly due to spiritual things, and when they are these are sometimes from God and sometimes from the devil, but they are in the most usual and common causality (which is not taken away by spiritual forces interacting with it) from human nature (intra-personal or inter-personal) itself, like Venus or like Concordia.

This means, I do not believe “all gods except my own are complete fictions” - the gods of pagans are instead only fictional as wholes, but actually true in parts, where they touch the Catholic truth.

“angels”

Are spirits created by God, who serve Him either in His providence over the universe (the one moving the Sun has been at work for 7222 years) or in His providence over single men (the one protecting me since before I was born has been at work for 55 years of his own 7222 years’ long existence).

We can deduce the ones from natural phenomena (seasons of the Sun, retrogrades of Mars or aberration and parallax over the year of alpha Centauri), the other ones from intereferences where they have protected some from harm more spectacularly than other times.

For instance, when a bar owner found it wearisome to crank in the cloth awning, when a baby fell from 10 meters up and bounced into it, and when he was caught into the arms of a rugby-player, which happened in Paris more than a decades ago, I find “pure coincidence” very bad as an explanation, and prefer to think it was three guardian angels who prompted people to the three acts which together saved the baby from falling at another time without the cloth awning and without the rugby-player. Obviously the parents took better care of blocking the window after that. Yes, the baby was screened by physicians in the hospital, and he or she was unhurt.

There are also evil angels, but they are more usually referred to as demons. They ceased to be good, about 7222 years ago, soon after they were created. Just as the good angels are already eternally confirmed in righteousness, the evil demons are already eternally damned.

“spirits”

That’s God, angelic beings (angels and demons), and also the spirits of men, who are composites of body and spirit.

Apart from spook stories, which involve the afterlife (when a man’s spirit and body are separated), shall we talk about consciousness first?

Computers don’t have consciousness. Some words of their operations are similar to the operations of beings with consciousness, but they don’t mean the same thing. Tom Scott considered that ChatGPT is “predicting the next word” … from data all over the internet. As he is a computer expert, he should know.

When we say a man predicts something, we mean something different. Either he actually had an imagination that he could “live in” and he made the conclusion that this was likely to come true, or, when it comes to words, when the phrase becomes unexpected, he can say “I thought you were going to say …” (something else than what he “thought” or “predicted”). This is a phenomenon which to date has not been replicated by any machines. It is something which we can conclude is not a matter of matter. At least for man, who is able to use consciousness about things other than immediately surrounding matter.

“or life after death?”

It so happens, if our consciousness is so different from matter, it is arguably not material. If it is not material, it is not composed from different parts. If it is not composed of different parts, it cannot be taken a-part. If it cannot be taken apart, it cannot cease to exist.

If it is no longer there in the man who has ceased to breathe and whose heart has ceased to beat, it still is somewhere. If not in that body, elsewhere.

Back to
“in this day and age”

People of your culture - which I once belonged to, or very nearly - have infested so much of media and of the education system (which is a mass medium, even more potent than private media concerns), that most people of your culture are monocultural. You are like Englishmen arriving in Ireland (certain parts) or France and unable to understand that, no, they weren’t raised speaking English, they weren’t pretending Gaelic or French was their language like some kind of Nevbosh, or like people conversing in Klingon, they actually were raised speaking Gaelic or French and it actually is a functional language including functional to teach children to speak. They have a very unfortunate tendency to motivate this monoculturalism by pretending that their culture gave us the good things we have in society.

The ball point pen was not invented by a scientist, and agriculture very definitely was not invented by people of your convictions. I use these every day, when I write something or when I eat anything with cereals in it.

It is not against my convictions to learn another language. It is however against my convictions to overadapt to your type of culture. I know it. I do not belong to it, and have a right to express that.

For more
of republished quora answers
see:
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/