Your experiences of spiritual attacks

MehGuy said:

Not sure if really a "spiritual attack". But when I was a kid this fat housewife told a story about how she was scuba diving in the ocean.. and she claimed she saw the gates of hell. My sister and I used to always bring the story up and laugh. Their whole family was kind of a meme between my sisters and my church friends.. lol.

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You can't have the gates to hell underwater...the place would flood every time you opened them. Do you know how hard it is to get the pilot light lit down there?

Jonathan Walkerin said:

That sounds like a load of rubbish without any evidence. I have yet to see an article where appeasing dark spirits did more to open something that diamond tipped drill could not.

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Not everything that happens out there is documented and not everything that happens out there is on the internet.

I took those information from 2 sources:
1. The FB post I shared, and I trust that FB page powerfully as they are one of the most influential and effective children rights advocates in Egypt. They managed to save a huge number of children and return lost children to their families. So I don't expect them to mislead. They simply shared what they knew of/saw/heard/encountered.

2. A friend of ours previously encountered a group of nomads that were doing spirit cooking/calling rituals for the very same purpose.

(Note that I saw the post after I knew what that friend encountered and they are totally different scenarios. People also started noticing that a subset of the child kidnappings are done for this purpose so it started getting noticed within the community. This is mostly shared within the community though and you won't see a title in the BBC about it.)

However, you can see it as rubbish, I lost my appetite for debates anyway so I won't try to prove my point. I'm just sharing what I'm seeing recently.

cloudyday2 said:

If true, that presents a problem for somebody like me who believes the Bible is mostly fiction. To be honest, when I believed in Christianity it seemed that prayers were very effective responses to spiritual attacks, but after reading the dastardly books of Bart Ehrman ... How do I pray now? Who do I pray to? What should I say? ... That is a problem.

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Reading the thread earlier did remind me of a video I saw on another subject, in psychology actually about "ferocity of intent". Their are parallels to this in the spiritual life. The best example is the book of James which mentions how Elijah when he prayed to end the drought in Israel "prayed passionately". That is a detail that is omitted in the original OT text, but was passed on in the Jewish tradition of the Ecclesiasticus that James affirms.

Anyway ferocity of intent would apply to the spiritual end of things. If you've dealt with children or miss behaving people (I lack child rearing experience but I worked as a living assistant to a developmentally disabled young man, a big guy who had lots of behavioral problems like a child) they really want to test your boundaries. They are looking to see if they can push you around and get you to do what they want you to do. Anyway, I believe there is this same kind of dynamic in when dealing with spiritual forces.

(language warning on video)

cloudyday2 said:

@Zoness , @jacknife , @awitch ,
Your responses lead to another question: why do some people claim to experience spiritual things several times in their lives and others never? If these things were random then I would expect some people to have 1-2 experience and others to have none, but it seems that some people have 5-10 experiences and others have have none. That indicates a difference in people to me, but maybe my perception of the statistics is incorrect. Maybe random chance alone can explain why some people have no experiences.

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People are acculturated in social and religious frameworks that guide their thinking. If this programming is particularly intense, people may subconsciously seek out signs that confirm what they believe (but filter out things that don't match their preconceived notions). Even for the less religious, people like to feel like they matter and the universe has a purpose for them so they tend to attribute meaning where there is none. Overarching narrative where they're a central character is a very powerful feeling.

cloudyday2 said:

- Maybe as @Zoness says experiences ARE "the mind playing tricks", but maybe this is how spirits interact with humans. A seismometer is unstable and can detect small earthquakes that are not noticeable to stable devices. So maybe a mentally unstable mind is like a seismometer that can detect spiritual signals that a more healthy mind cannot.

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Detection implies some sort of material causality, since we can detect material things. The brain's neurons would have to fire in a way that matches what someone would experience under those circumstances. If, for example, a mentally unstable person heard auditory hallucinations, we can detect the brain activity. If we can't detect the cause there's no reason to automatically assume its immaterial. We can reasonably infer its due to genetics, neurological problems, substance abuse, disease etc. We wouldn't resort to spiritual reasons because there's no framework for testing such a thing and probably there never will be.

Some might say that the spiritual has no way of interacting with the material to which I'd place it in a category akin to Deism. If it exists as an abstract maybe, then I don't see any use for it while my material life continues.

However, if we grant the premise; then I don't think it really supports the idea of one (or any?) particular religion being true. Especially since people have spiritual experiences as numerous and diverse as people themselves and all of them are mutually contradictory when taken in a large batch. It's sort of like NDEs; somehow a man who experiences a religious NDE in rural Nebraska isn't likely to see Ganesha reveal the ultimate truth of Atman and convert to Ganapatya Hinduism. He's more likely to see something he's well acculturated with, such as Protestant, white American Jesus.

cloudyday2 said:

Yes, it does seem to be in conflict with the commandments in the Bible. To be honest, I feel like a shaman or a witchdoctor when this happens, and that isn't my style. I don't like religion and spirituality. I don't try to make these things happen, but they seem to happen. I don't want to be superstitious, but so far it always signals weird things, and the weird things usually begin that same day. This has happened about 5 times maybe over 10 years, and it bothers me.

It isn't God's style from what I understand of the Bible. This is more like an innate animal sense that was semi-dormant and became a little more active the past 10 years after I had psychosis... LOL, I am ALWAYS knowing things that I shouldn't know. This happened just yesterday. Somebody complained about the ink in a printer, and I came in and asked if any of the printers needed ink. Maybe coincidence, but seems to happen a lot. I never know anything very useful. I don't know the winning lottery numbers. It is always something irrelevant. Like somebody had a flat tire, and I knew which of the four tires it had been. What use is that? LOL

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Irrelevant for you maybe, not so irrelevant for the printers
needing ink.

If by using your "talents" in the service of others,
you will not go far wrong.

Would reckon.

@cloudyday2
1 Corinthians 14 But the natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

If the metaphysic is not there, i.e Naturalism: then one can not comprehend the spiritual. Mind = Reality.

There is a mathematical proof that does not rule out, at least the possibility of demons. Newcomb's Paradox. www.megasociety.org/noesis/44/newcomb.html I had read through the "Art of Knowing"(a more layman approach to the problem) a collection of essays by Christopher Langan. Intuitively the proof makes sense to me. Basically ruling out other possibilities, the participant is possessed.

Also I found it interesting that a person(1st Earl Hardwicke) that contributed to the early modern legal system(Equity Law), was very pious, Lord High Chancellor(2nd in rank to the King, or a Steward) for 19 Years. Wrote in The Spectator, as a young man.

Spectator No 364(excerpt)
Thus he spends his time as Children do at Puppet-Shows, and with much the same Advantage, in staring and gaping at an amazing Variety of strange things: strange indeed to one who is not prepared to comprehend the Reasons and Meaning of them; whilst he should be laying the solid Foundations of Knowledge in his Mind, and furnishing it with just Rules to direct his future Progress in Life under some skilful Master of the Art of Instruction.

cloudyday2 said:

I have never had a foot cramp go away instantaneously. Moreover, that is the ONLY time that @CharismaticLady felt a demon was behind the cramp. She wasn't using the name of Jesus on her toe cramps each time until it finally showed a positive result and then forgetting all the negative results.

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What kind of demon causes toe cramps? That's even lamer than opening and slamming doors or flicking the lights on and off.

awitch said:

What kind of demon causes toe cramps? That's even lamer than opening and slamming doors or flicking the lights on and off.

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Reminds me of the hangover demon if I drink too much.

Nah,

Jonathan Walkerin said:

Reminds me of the hangover demon if I drink too much.

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Ok.. that demon is horrible.. lol.. although maybe he helps curve the rate of alcoholics? Lol..

Glad I am not so curious about these things,

reading Acts of the Apostles 19:13-19

Unless you know what you are doing it can be a very risky buisness.

That may be called an attack,

would reckon

cloudyday2 said:

Here is a reported exorcism from 1619 that I thought was amusing. (Of course I probably wouldn't have thought it was funny if I was present for that kind of creepy stuff. LOL)

Exorcism - Wikipedia

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IDK, but one thing is pretty clear I would think,

when things seem to become too much instead of making more mess, just get out of the way and let G-d take over.

What is there to choose from?

cloudyday2 said:

I think the problem is not in opening the hidden tombs and temples but in FINDING them so they can be opened. @Yennora can correct me if I am misunderstanding the purpose.

The spirits might have been eyewitnesses to the construction of these tombs and temples 3000 years ago, so they would remember their location. If a person believes these spirits exist, then the desire to make a deal with them is understandable.

According to Christianity, the job description for demons is to tempt humans to sin or lose faith, so these spirits might ask a treasure seeker to do something so awful that the person would feel permanently alienated from God. Sacrificing a child would be an example.

(Of course I don't know if the reports of sacrificing kidnapped children are credible or not, because I can't read Arabic and so forth.)

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The friend just called me after I sought confirmation and here is what he cleared up:

1. Yes, they can open the tombs normally using machinery but they will face 2 problems:

• A very high cost of operation especially in Egypt.
• Going through traps that were previously set up to prevent anyone from reaching the wanted places, so traps can lead to the death of workers without warning.
• Blood is only required for a subset of those discovered places. Some of them can be opened normally.
• Read this please, the friend told me about it: King Tut's trumpet resounds down the decades

2. I was also confirmed that they use the spirits in finding the places as you assumed, I didn't know this myself, I thought they were only used to open the tombs.

The friend should call me again, if I know something worth sharing I might share it.

Warning to curious readers: This is not a fun topic or something that you can try at home to prove its existence, people who go through these things suffer plagues and terrible implications if they decide to disobey/leave the bond with these spirits. + The loss of peace.