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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Many (most?) complex civilizations “believed in” personifications of bad behavioral inclinations and social forces, and they called them evil spirits or demons. IMO the utility of personifying invisible forces is that humans are excellent at memorizing characters with personalities, but not lists of assertions or principles. It’s easier to persuade oneself not to eat too much cake when it’s a question of obeying an ugly demon who tempts you with thoughts and who has tempted you before, versus some hazy self-negotiation involving delayed gratification and self-reward. Demons also center a person’s moral identity: your true identity always wants the longterm good, and the demons are what tempt you (not “another part of me wants…” which is sort of depersonalizing). If the intel community is religious and interested in civilization-crafting then maybe they want to bring back angels and demons? Linking UFOs to unknown forces takes the public’s interests away from futuristic cia crafts and onto spiritual concerns. Plausibly, the same org that is so high-tech that it can make UFOs is also so smart that they see no merit in a population overly concerned with mind-boggling military technology.

This is somewhat similar as a hypothesis to what’s been floated in terms of all these things being engineered to increase the religiosity of the nation in order to save as many souls as possible in the long-term (and also to defend against the ‘ultimate deception’ of the antichrist). Nick Redfern’s Final Events has a similar perspective to this in terms of being in contact with a group within the intelligence community that actually believes that this is the right thing to do, and what ought to happen, due to their belief that there actually does exist a real unexplainable phenomenon deemed to be “extraterrestrial” by the larger populace that is actually demonic in nature. Incidentally, the late Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser believed he had encountered the same group of intelligence officers going to various theologians and airing their conflicting feelings about what they had done in such an affair. Whatever’s happening, it’s probably at minimum as weird as Michael Flynn going on camera with his family saying the QAnon oath and never elaborating. (Based?)