>>34674648>that doesn't mean evil spirits are realWhen did I ever say they were? Abrahamic religions are built on ancient mythology, the earliest currently known mention of the flood dating to Mesopotamian tales of the Flood with Ut-Napishtim, also the Ebin of Gilgamesh, and earlier religions are most definitely based on animism, totemism, fetishism, etc, which turned to polytheism as people started ascribing humanoid traits to natural phenomena, and personifying them. Powerful men always used ignorance to manipulate the masses for their profit, no matter where, one of the curious examples being the supposed origin of "mumbo-jumbo"
https://youtu.be/1A3QGAHZ6cI (at around 3:15)
Controlling them with polytheism united people into controllable groups, but they were still divided, and the elites soon realized they had to monopolize that shit to really scratch that sweet, sweet tribalism spot, and it worked so well that we have apes bickering over it thousands of years later.
>that doesn't mean evil spirits are realAt the same time, what makes you think they aren't? Right now, our best tool is the empirical, scientific method. Yet it's sponsored and controlled by the elites, just like history, we only see what we're allowed to see. Anything that doesn't fit their narrative or propaganda is cut. Even if we were to remove censorship out of the equation for a moment, our developing technology limits us. Denouncing something without thinking is as ignorant as believing you have to mutilate your son's genitals just because you heard there's a big sky man that said so.
I didn't even mention "evil spirits", but since you used it as an example, let's try and define what that would be. A lifeform, possibly humanoid, transparent, mist-like, invincible, has abilities we don't understand, and thus, we're afraid of it. Sounds awfully familiar to the animist shit I was talking about earlier. The human mind is trained to see patterns and solve problems, combine that with ignorance, and we get the easiest solutions to any problem - lying, exaggeration. The other factors are imagination and mental illnesses. Evil spirits, specifically, were likely made up by the chiefs and shamans of smaller tribes to keep younger generations afraid and controllable, in check, and to excuse any bullshit an elite might do (possession), and create an artificial need for shamans and such, retaining their status in the hierarchy, while also giving warriors hope and morale by making them believe there's a life after death. It's also a coping mechanism for trauma after the passing of a loved one.
But let's break it down again. This time, it's not a fruit of simian fantasy and superstition, or a sandman used to manipulate.
A lifeform, possibly humanoid, transparent, mist-like, invincible, has abilities we don't understand, we're afraid of it. It doesn't fit into any of the animal kingdoms, as far as we know, there's nothing like it on Earth. But human beings tend to be anthropocentric, which is understandable, considering we killed or absorbed every intelligent humanoid on the planet, maybe with the exception of Australian aboriginals, but they're also mixed with humans. What makes you think, that in countless star systems like ours, there aren't any gaseous lifeforms that fit the description above? They could even be able to posses other creatures, why not. Something like being able to emit hallucinogenic gas and influence them to be aggressive. Maybe some of them decided to pay us a visit. With the amount of media you consume, is something as mundane as a smoke-like creature really that unbelievable to you? I'd say there are far more impressive and unbelievable things that that, like the planet we live on, the gravity that keeps us on it, the star that we orbit at incredibly speed WHILE spinning, and we don't even feel it, and the way the radiation from the said star nourishes most of the flora on fauna on this rock, or, speaking of rocks, this mass of plastic and rocks we're using to communicate with each other from different fucking continents, or a cruiser (have you even been on a cruiser? it's a fucking huge piece of metal floating on water, can you imagine, someone designed, tested, and built this), or a stick that gives one monkey power to kill a hundred, or a big mushroom that can destroy entire civilizations, it's the kind of power to eclipse any "god" and you're worried about some blurry guys.
