Demonic Possession, is it real or group hysteria?

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Is Demonic Possession real or group hysteria?

  • Absolutely real

    Votes: 10 18.9%
  • Probably real

    Votes: 2 3.8%
  • It's real, but you have to invite evil influences into your life

    Votes: 8 15.1%
  • No, not real; anyone claiming this is a mental case.

    Votes: 28 52.8%
  • There is a good force and a bad force in our universe-a person has to decide which force they choose

    Votes: 2 3.8%
  • diamondbruno#9, do you have your own church and gospel?

    Votes: 3 5.7%
  • diamond you always make the best threads; cutting edge, pushing the intellectual and religious envel

    Votes: 6 11.3%

  • Total voters
    53
  • Poll closed .
nathan1977 said:



Demons, unfortunately, are rarely as polite.

Exactly, for the most part.

They can also run the gamet to as far as personalities are concerned as well.

Some are deceptive.
Some are repulsive.
Some are clever.

All demons can be manipulative to secure a person into thinking all is well, that life is great.

With the gift of the Holy Spirit, one is able to ascertain a good spirit from a bad one.

dbs
 
nathan1977 said:


Rev. 3:23 -- Jesus says, "Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens the door, I will go in to eat with him, and he with me."

Demons, unfortunately, are rarely as polite.



see, i just don't understand this.

how do you know? honestly. how do you know if demons are polite or not? most people don't think they exist, there's absolutely no proof whatsoever of the existence of a demon, how can you not only assume that they exist but have actual marked characteristics.

i feel like this goes a step beyond faith and well into superstition.

i mean this as an honest question.
 
Irvine511 said:




see, i just don't understand this.


i feel like this goes a step beyond faith and well into superstition.

i mean this as an honest question.

The Holy Spirit testifies of truth.

How many times have you listened to someone and been able to ascertain that they weren't forthright, that they we're being deceptive or withholding something?

You don't have proof of these feelings Irvine, but people don't think you're mad or insane now do they ?

It's an inherent gift we as humans have from God who created us in His own image.

Another interesting thing is have you ever wondered why lie dectors can for the most part be accurate?

The answer for that is our human bodies act differently when we tell an untruth or or deceptive. Truth is eternal principle and comes from God.

Yes you can train your body to beat a polygragh;sociopaths are great at this- but it isn't natural. Truth is natural because it comes from God, and because we come from God our bodies react to truth in a favorable way.

Sorry for the tangent.

dbs
 
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diamond said:


The Holy Spirit testifies of truth.

How many times have you listened to someone and been able to ascertain that they weren't forthright, that they we're being deceptive or withholding something?

You don't have proof of these feelings Irvine, but people don't think you're mad or insane now do they ?

It's an inherent gift we as humans have from God who created us in His own image.

Another interesting thing is have you ever wondered why lie dectors can for the most part be accurate?

The answer for that is our human bodies act differently when we tell an untruth or or deceptive. Truth is eternal principle and comes from God.

Yes you can train your body to beat a polygragh;sociopaths are great at this- but it isn't natural. Truth is natural because it comes from God, and because we come from God our bodies react to truth in a favorable way.

Sorry for the tangent.

dbs




this is all an expression of faith,

not a statement of fact.
 
If we only lived on facts, we couldn't develop Faith.
God placed you here to develop Faith, not to live on fact alone.

dbs
 
diamond said:
If we only lived on facts, we couldn't develop Faith.
God placed you here to develop Faith, not to live on fact alone.

dbs




continuously proving my point.

these are not statements of facts.
 
diamond said:
You'll find out one day.

:)



and so might you,

when you think you're having an NDE, and the lights are bright and beautiful and you're moving towards it,

and then your brain dies and the lights go out

and that's it.



not that i think that's absolutely the scenario,

but what if it were? what if it is all a myth we tell ourselves? can't you consider that possibility?
 
Irvine511 said:




and so might you,

when you think you're having an NDE, and the lights are bright and beautiful and you're moving towards it,

and then your brain dies and the lights go out

and that's it.



not that i think that's absolutely the scenario,

but what if it were? what if it is all a myth we tell ourselves? can't you consider that possibility?

OK fine Mr Irvine, let's make a little deal right here and now in this sphere.
If and when we do progress to a paradisical sphere in the next life, I say we look each other up-and you and I chat about all of your silly posts and how we used to get all worked up over nothing on Earth, ok? Do we have a littlle deal?

Are you game?

:)

dbs
 
diamond said:


Are you game?




you know me. i'm up for anything.

:sexywink:

though honestly makes me preface all this by saying that i'm an *agnostic* -- i know that i can't know, so i live with ambiguity and uncertainty. it's harder, of course, but it just feels more honest.
 
Irvine511 said:




you know me. i'm up for anything.

:sexywink:

though honestly makes me preface all this by saying that i'm an *agnostic* -- i know that i can't know, so i live with ambiguity and uncertainty. it's harder, of course, but it just feels more honest.

ha,

I will have all eternity to rib you, you know, but I won't.
:)

dbs
 
A_Wanderer said:
That an artificial intelligence would be a calculator without the capacity for some form of morality is an assumption.
Empirically we can measure the speed of light as 186,000 miles/sec but we can only assume it to be a constant. But it's a pretty safe assumption, so is, to me, the assumption that artificial intelligence can exist but can never be aware of it's existence.
That is important, as the universe doesn't care about you or morality in general.
That's so bleak in it's implications, I'd think even a demon possessed soul would be preferable to no soul at all. A sliver of light being better than total darkness.

But moral behaviour is advantageous for a social animal.
Moral reasoning isn't required anywhere else in the animal kingdom, why should Homo sapiens be any different? How is introspection about our actions better than survival of the fittest and instincts?
We are wired for it,
Well, we can agree here although you'd say wired through genes while I'd say wired through a conscience attune to a divine Moral Law.
 
INDY500 said:
Empirically we can measure the speed of light as 186,000 miles/sec but we can only assume it to be a constant. But it's a pretty safe assumption, so is, to me, the assumption that artificial intelligence can exist but can never be aware of it's existence.
It is used as a constant in most models, not all, there are cosmologists who argue for a variable speed of light to account for cosmic inflation. Intrinsic conditions of the universe are different than the potential to develop a computer that is self-aware, there is nothing prohibiting a self-aware computer in the same way that you can't accelerate beyond the speed of light in a relativistic universe. It is not a safe assumption and the development of intelligence through the mechanical sorting of natural selection on organic computers (brains) attests to this.
That's so bleak in it's implications, I'd think even a demon possessed soul would be preferable to no soul at all. A sliver of light being better than total darkness.
How is it bleak? The facts are always preferable to a lie no matter how dearly people want to cling to them. Recognising that there is no immaterial soul doesn't make the universe bleak and dark, we are just as sentient and just as capable of good and evil as we were before.
Moral reasoning isn't required anywhere else in the animal kingdom, why should Homo sapiens be any different? How is introspection about our actions better than survival of the fittest and instincts?
Because they are advantageous traits within a society. It isn't nature red in tooth and claw when in a tribe, for a tribe to succeed there must be what we would call moral behaviour. That we call these instincts moral and dress them up in falsities does not detract from the very practical function - they keep society running which keeps a breeding population ticking. Natural selection ensures the survival of the genetic material and for human beings altruism works to that end (as do the less moral features of humanity such as the capacity to make outsiders less than human - evil is a big problem for a special creator).
Well, we can agree here although you'd say wired through genes while I'd say wired through a conscience attune to a divine Moral Law
Divine moral law is a bad model for human behaviour, it has no mechanism and there are far too many exceptions that always get swept under the rug (why would god create psychopaths?).
 
A_Wanderer said:

Divine moral law is a bad model for human behaviour, it has no mechanism and there are far too many exceptions that always get swept under the rug (why would god create psychopaths?).


There is a Divine moral law along with natural laws, however human free will trumps both.


Even Jeffery Dahmer admitted he had a choice, saying in court that even if his genetic code ingrained in him caused him to do the evil acts he did, he also made conscious choices and felt bad for the choices he made.

dbs
 
I can fully appreciate why many atheists, agnostics and non believers have a problem with Orthodox Christianity. I promise you my friends, the following piece is a piece in which Satan wants people believe that this is what God's plan for man is, when sadly it is not. Regardless, it's an entertaining read-enjoy:


Christianity in a Nutshell

Christianity teaches that God is an immensely vast alien spirit. The Christian cult alleges this immense, cosmic, Lovecraftian demiurge is beyond comprehension, to even look on its terrible and incomprehensible form would consume your existence.
In the alien’s present god-state, it rules our world invisibly, has a unimaginably vast body which humans are not permitted to gaze upon. Its terrible true form is a mystery to all mankind, as it hides somewhere in the vastness of space, silently, darkly brooding over the unknowable machinations of its enigmatic alien intellect.

Christianity teaches that this titanic alien intellect sat brooding for untold billions of years before deciding to create humans on a whim as playthings. The megalomaniac alien God’s cruel game, created for his amusement, was ultimately to determine which of his creations would worship him and which would not.

Christianity alleges this immense alien entity called God created the earth and humanity itself out of the nothingness of chaos and, after six days of creating the earth, placed two of his experimental protohumans in a special laboratory. He allowed the humans to breed for five-thousand years, as the mysterious alien intelligence hid, brooding, biding its time.

Then, according to the Christian Cult, the invisible alien demiurge abducted a human woman and, using some unspeakable fertilization process, impregnated her with its foul putrescence.

The half-human, half-alien offspring of that ghastly human/alien union looked human, but possessed the terrifying intellect of its bizarre parent. The half man, half alien thankfully lived only a short time before the humans in the area cornered and killed it, but not before it unleashed untold devastation.

It preached a frightening dogma of punishment, suffering, pain and worthlessness. It told humans they were worthless worms, beneath the dirt, beneath contempt. From a position of supreme arrogance, it told the ignorant humans they were vile, sinful, corrupted and destined for horrid torture and punishment – unless they accepted him as their god and demanded they swear total subordination to him.

Those who threw themselves at the feet of the half-alien tyrant could expect to become his humble servants after they die, singing mindless praises to his divinity forever. Those that did not swear obedience could expect the most gruesome, most appalling, most inhuman torture possible forever after they die. Worst of all, the maniacal alien-man hybrid didn’t even give most humans a chance to surrender to him. The alien/man’s schizophrenic application of justice condemned most humans to his cosmic torture chamber without even the chance to submit to his tyrannical dogma.

Thankfully the Christian God’s alien/human hybrid was caught, killed, and sealed away in a crypt. But the thing lived on. Like a reanimated zombie, the alien/humans wounds regenerated. The punctured hands and feet scarred over. The dripping open viscera began to pulse with macabre unlife. Unbelievably, the thing stood, shattered the prison doors, and escaped. Before the local humans could kill it again, it flew into the sky, and returned to the terrifying, invisible Alien-God that spawned it– swearing vengeance, demanding obedience, and promising that it would return someday even more powerful, even more terrible, preparing to finish what it started, and destroy every human that dare defy earth’s new overlord.

The Christian cult still worships this bizarre alien/man abomination to this day. In unspeakable secret rights, forbidden to outsiders, they re-enact the alien’s gruesome death. Behind the closed doors of their churches they drink wine, pretending its the creature’s blood. They eat bread, pretending it’s the alien’s dead corpse. The cultists whip themselves into a hideous blood frenzy, chanting, swaying, some falling to the floor convulsing. The weep, scream, leap in the air, and bellow praises to their ghastly alien god, praying for the day it returns. Praying for the time it crawls forth from the blackness of space to burn their enemies in cataclysmic fire. Praying for the end of the world. The insane doomsday cult calls these terrifying apocalyptic events Armageddon.

They warn the rest of us they are right. That our judgment is near. That we are doomed to the alien god’s torture chamber if we do not swear allegiance to its half human-half alien abomination offspring. That we should be afraid, very afraid…




My views are the polar oppossite of the content of the above article, and I promise you that article is -not the way God wants you to think, or serve Him. Many people have been befuddled into thinking otherwise, thereby estranging themselves from their Creator by no fault of their own, which is sad.
 
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diamond said:



There is a Divine moral law along with natural laws, however human free will trumps both.


Even Jeffery Dahmer admitted he had a choice, saying in court that even if his genetic code ingrained in him caused him to do the evil acts he did, he also made conscious choices and felt bad for the choices he made.

dbs
But these types of people cannot empathise, of course people have a choice in behaviour but lacking a concience, lacking empathy, that blame either rests on a defective brain or God.
 
A_Wanderer said:
But these types of people cannot empathise, of course people have a choice in behaviour but lacking a concience, lacking empathy, that blame either rests on a defective brain or God.

There was a time in their lives when they could. Given environmental and emotional conditions their situation became toxic, and they reacted the wrong way although they still had their free will.

If Jeffery Dahmer were raised by loving nurturing attentive parents he would of had a better chance, and chances are he would have never became a serial killer. However, his free will still trumps the environment he was raised in.

Have you ever read the books:

"Man's Search for Meaning"
By Victor Frankl ?

or

"A Child Called It"
By David Pelzer ?


Both of these books deal with overcoming your unchosen environment and the importance of free will and choices.

dbs
 
A psychopath raised in a well off family may well not become a murderer; politicians, police and executives also attract the amoral. You act as though free will is an independent characteristic of humanity; I am saying that what we consider to be free will is the capacity to make choices and that is dependent on the way that our minds work which is a product of biology and how that is shaped by the environment.

Your theology seems to demand that bad people are just the product of bad choices by their free will. We do have the power of choice; but the way that choice is rooted in our biology. You can't teach a mind empathy if it lacks the correct wiring. You can't claim that somebody that cannot feel any emotion for other people is making the same types of decisions as you or I. It does not abbrogate responsibility of murderers, it does show the problem of having God be involved in designing everybody and that our free will is always conditional.
 
A_Wanderer said:
.

You act as though free will is an independent characteristic of humanity; .

That's exactly right, it's an inherent right that we wanted and granted by God before we came to earth. Satan didn't want us to have free will. God granted us free will and sent Jesus and Prophets to help guide us, for us not to live in total darkness and instilled each of us with a conscience to help guide us and develop faith. Satan on the other hand who wanted glory and power has tried to supplant that idea ever since our creation and for this he was booted out of Heaven, along with 1/3 of it's hosts (his followers) and wasn't allowed to come to earth and learn free will. Satan doesn't know the mind of God and didn't know that God was going to send Christ into the world, as a safety net and for us to exercise our own free will to choose right over wrong, good over evil, love over lust etc. Satan was used in God's plan as a 2nd teir actor and he is is pissed and miserable.
Satan tries to entice mankind with power, fame, addictions and other earth bound schemes and tendencies that derail us from the spiritual to the carnal. Eventually he will lose and be cast off forever when God's plan is complete.



We do have the power of choice; but the way that choice is rooted in our biology

Biology plays a role but free will still trumps gentic make up.

dbs
 
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Irvine511 said:


how do you know? honestly. how do you know if demons are polite or not? most people don't think they exist, there's absolutely no proof whatsoever of the existence of a demon, how can you not only assume that they exist but have actual marked characteristics.

i feel like this goes a step beyond faith and well into superstition.

i mean this as an honest question.

From my own experience with demons and the demon-possessed, I can quite honestly say that there are paranoid schizophrenics, there are people who are insane, there are people with multiple personality disorders -- and then there is something else much, much darker.

The forcible taking over of another human being is hardly polite, and the fact that so many stories in scripture of encounters between Jesus and demonized people include the demons inside the person howling about how they won't let the person go, is a sign of the fact that God exists in freedom/free will (ie., we are free to choose him or not, reject him or not), while the devil wants to remove such freedom altogether.
 
so it does come down to a belief from scripture. that's where the explanation for such behavior comes from? it fits certain criteria already laid out in the Bible, thus, we have demon possession?

do people who don't believe in demons get possessed by demons?
 
diamond said:


very rarely.

dbs



which is to say ... never?

doesn't that say something?

and i have to pause every time i post in here, since i feel like we're debating something that's on equal ground as Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, and poltergeists.
 
Irvine511 said:




which is to say ... never?

doesn't that say something?

and i have to pause every time i post in here, since i feel like we're debating something that's on equal ground as Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, and poltergeists.

No...rarely.

It depends where a person would fall into the matrix of things, what their actions have been, what choices they've made, what God's plan was for them.

Consider the man Saul who later became the Apostle Paul.

In our era former Satan worshippers after turning from Satan towards God are reaaaally harrassed, because Satan hates losing a team member; my speculation based on research.

As far as BigFoot, Saswquatch, Loch Ness-I have my own theories and those have to do with more products of group hysteria.

Poltergeists episodes would come from the dark side-my opinion from researching it.

UFOs-I feel they probably exisit but they have nothing to do with mankind's salvation.

Did I make myself clear?

dbs
 
Irvine511 said:
so it does come down to a belief from scripture. that's where the explanation for such behavior comes from? it fits certain criteria already laid out in the Bible, thus, we have demon possession?

It makes sense that when you are confronted with unexplained phenomena, some kind of explanation for the phenomena should be sought out.

I'm not one to look for demons under every rock, and I do think there are scientific explanations for specific issues (such as multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, dementia, etc). But I do think there are certain instances where scientific or medical explanations come up short.

The Vatican has come up with a few very specific situations where demon-possession is addressed, and I think they do a credible job of assessing any such situation before stepping in and deciding that it is so. (Not sure if this holds true in cases of demon-possession, but I know that in other cases of spiritual phenomena they'll dispatch an atheist, a Jewish rabbi, a priest, and a lay person to assess the situation.)
 
Irvine511 said:




which is to say ... never?

doesn't that say something?

and i have to pause every time i post in here, since i feel like we're debating something that's on equal ground as Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, and poltergeists.

from page 1

of 18 pages :huh:

deep said:
Demons are as real as

ghosts

angels

spirits

E T aliens

dreams - having meanings

visions

revelations


and the one thing that every victim of a con has in common with all others?


they have to buy into to the con

hence,
non-believers do not get possessed by demons
 
nathan1977 said:


It makes sense that when you are confronted with unexplained phenomena, some kind of explanation for the phenomena should be sought out.

I'm not one to look for demons under every rock, and I do think there are scientific explanations for specific issues (such as multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, dementia, etc). But I do think there are certain instances where scientific or medical explanations come up short.




i can agree with you right up to this point.
 
deep said:

and the one thing that every victim of a con has in common with all others?


they have to buy into to the con

hence,
non-believers do not get possessed by demons

Bingo! :yes:

Rimbaud said it well in his "Night in Hell":

I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am. This is the catechism at work. I am the slave of my baptism. You, my parents, have ruined my life, and your own. Poor child! - Hell is powerless against pagans.

Works for demons too.
 
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