This is an essay.
Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other people in a society (for instance, Western society) disagree about many things. But some things, they all (or seemingly all) agree on. There is a span of life between birth and "physical death" (the last breath in the bodies we currently have) which all of them acknowledge. In that span, there is the need for food, shelter, clothing, transportation and so on. Food, shelter, clothing, and transportation exist and we have to deal with them -- even enlightened people have to get on the bus if they want to ride it. In Western society, there are schools to go to and for most, jobs to work. There are bureaucracies to deal with. This is all real. This (and similar things) make up consensus reality.
(I thought about putting "science" in that list, but there are "science-deniers" who would not deny the existence of the above. Science is widely favored, but it's not quite literally consensus reality. Maybe we could say that it is near-consensus reality?)
The rest of reality is controversial. Is there such a thing as material substance (or something effectively like that) as atheists often believe? Idealists dispute that. Each of the Gods (or sets of Gods) of the theistic religions is different. Christianity insists on Jesus (God and human in one) as the only way to God, the Father, while Islam insists that you can't associate anyone with God -- perhaps this is a controversy. Hinduism says everything is one thing, while Buddhism sort of says it's all nothing -- perhaps another controversy. Many of us seem to like morality and think it should have binding force on us -- so it would be weird if we thought it didn't exist -- but Nietzscheans officially don't like morality, and moral anti-realists think that it doesn't exist. Academic philosophy has people arguing on different sides of different questions.
It is convenient for us to center our thinking on consensus reality. We can argue about all of those controversial things all day and not persuade each other (that's what it means for them to be controversial). So we think that the solid, real, good truth is consensus reality.
How likely is it that consensus reality exhausts all of what's real and what matters? At first glance, it sounds like that's not very likely. Why should it be the case that all of the things we agree on are real, and none of the things we don't agree on are real? It's probably a good sign if we all agree on something, but I wouldn't trust that completely. Maybe we could all agree on some moral value that was actually invalid, just because that's what made society run smoothly.
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism all posit the existence of spirits other than humans. Spirits might be able to affect the minds of people. (Have you ever seen a spirit come over someone, or experienced that yourself?) Spirits might not be all on the same side. Humans disagree and form blocs that want to defeat each other. It doesn't seem unlikely that spirits would do the same.
How would spirits fight? Partly by psychological warfare, trying to convince us of different random things. If they can win us over, we will do their bidding. Or our trust might be the prize in itself. The profusion of non-consensus reality beliefs is something that would make sense if there are different blocs of spirits trying to control our minds with the beliefs that they favor. The difficulty of us being certain about "spiritual" (ethical, metaphysical, religious, etc.) things being in part the result of the damage done by warring beings on the noetic equipment of our minds.
Sometimes I have told non-Christians that I believe in God because of meaning. I can remember two different people who heard that having a knee-jerk "that doesn't work" kind of reaction. They did not say "huh, that's interesting" -- a more philosophical response. They did not seem open to hearing my argument. The people (those two and four others) I can remember talking to about my theories of or interest in proving the existence of God did not react in a philosophical way, nor did they seem eager to explore to see if I was right. One of them even implied that proving the existence of God was impossible (but he would say things he didn't really believe in order to put ideas in my head, I later realized.)
This, in itself, is interesting. Why were they so reactive against the idea of the proof of the existence of God, or a particular way to prove it? Why weren't they interested in learning more? Why isn't this like any other topic where one might think about what is?
I can say that the effect of their reactions to me has got me really questioning my own beliefs sometimes. Sometimes I believe and move forward, other times I don't. After a few of these strange reactions, it breaks down my (sometimes fragile) natural sense of what's true. I can use my intellectual discipline to believe what I do, but my brain is always traumatized by the strange reactions -- I don't want to say they are literally "gaslighting" since I don't want to (always) impute manipulative intent, but what's going on is very much like gaslighting. That trauma makes me "not really believe", doubt my intellectual vision.
Why do the other people traumatize me? They have been through the same thing as me, perhaps, traumatized by other people. So they refuse to listen to me, not trusting me. They believe what they do in a fragile way, and now that they don't know what to believe, they rigidly shut out competitors to what they already believe.
It could also be that we want to believe things -- that beliefs about religion, God, and the lack of religious truth or the non-existence of God, are precious things. They are so foundational that we build our lives around them, and to change your foundations threatens self-destruction. We keep ourselves alive through our inner beliefs.
It may be as frightening to be offered a way to believe in something that you dearly wish to be true, as to be offered a disproof of it.
I probably made the mistake of talking to people who were as old or older than me. Older people lose the ability to really think and question, and instead operate as machines, stable and strong, which just do whatever they were programmed to do while growing up. People can resist this tendency, and it's not universal, but I can feel it in me now. To really question whether God exists requires research -- too much for most mature adults. Immature people have a chance at coming to know what is true. You have to have that immature spirit of adventure in you in order to keep your mind oriented toward knowing what is, rather than becoming aggressively or sadly dogmatic.
Perhaps I misunderstand maturity, and many mature people misunderstand it. It is virtuous to become more mature, not inevitable. It may (seemingly) be inevitable for the young to struggle against the many voices that try to control their minds, and their own inner instability, to try to reach a kind of promised land of being functional in society, stable and secure in mind, patient and emotionally self-regulating. But if this is the "inevitable maturity", the virtuous process of maturity requires that people who (more or less) attain "inevitable maturity" push on to the next stage, which requires them to recover the adventure needed to be in touch with reality.
Where do spirits come in? Spirits can engineer and disseminate new ideas. Time after time, intellectuals, artists, inventors, and so on receive brilliant ideas in "flashes of inspiration". They don't know where they come from. Well, if they don't know where it comes from, it's probably not from them. Where else can it come from? If we insist on materialism, it must come from the "unconscious self". But I don't see why we should insist on materialism -- at best it's one of multiple live options for how the world could work. In any of the others (I'm thinking of dualism and idealism), where spirits are possible, the most natural explanation is that spirits implant these brilliant ideas in these creative people.
I see spirits at play in some of the strange reactions I have to things. I feel like I'm, for better or worse, sick with the same mental sickness as "everyone else" (Western non-Christians). I hear God's voice and see his purpose in my life. But then, sometimes, I read someone saying "humans are really good at seeing patterns in things, humans make meaning". And then that's all I can see in my purported "hearing God's voice".
Why does this seem instantaneously and devastatingly true? Rationally speaking, it's no more weighty than pointing out that sometimes people (seemingly) falsify their own memories. The faculty of memory is not perfect. But I don't think "Oh no! None of my memories are valid!" So the faculty of "finding patterns" is imperfect. But sometimes it shows us things that really are there. Why am I so quick to distrust one faculty and not another? (Actually, now that I write that out, I don't see why I should distrust my instincts of pattern finding, bearing in mind that they are imperfect.)
People say "humans make meaning" in a certain way that implies something. And I fall for it. Why do I fall for it? Is it because I "know", deep down, that it's true? Or is it that I'm under the power of the same spirit as them? Why do they fall for it? I think neither they nor I are being rational. If we were we would see that pattern finding ("meaning making") is something that is basically reliable but with exceptions. Maybe pattern finding when we want something to be true or when the stakes are personal is less reliable? But it could be valid. If you really want someone to be romantically interested in you, it's possible to accurately perceive that they are. But when the implying and the subtext are ruling, I can't even consider that. So there's something fishy going on.
If people are being irrational, or in other words if they are making decisions based on subtext, psychological powers that live in the darkness of intuition, then that world of intuition is a black box. Spirits could take natural intuitions and feed them to produce "reasoning" that the spirits like. Or they could implant entirely new ones.
Does this sound paranoid or crazy? Why does belief in spirits or spirit conspiracies sound paranoid or crazy? Is it weird to think spirits might exist? Not under dualism or idealism. If they do exist, is it weird to think they would behave in concerted ways -- conspiracies? No, because that's how humans sometimes act. It's possible for thoughts of concerted intelligent action to mislead us or make us behave or feel badly. But reality exists regardless of whether we manage to safely believe the truths that correspond to it. Can we approach spiritual warfare in a philosophical way, rather than with heuristics that reject possibilities a priori due to a stigma (nor with spirits possessing us in the very contemplation of those spirits' conspiracies)?
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Whether through natural psychological mechanisms (traumatization and trying to maintain a coherent worldview) or direct spiritual manipulation, the psychological environment for coming to believe the truth about ultimate reality is not ideal. So we have to pay extra attention to what goes on, have more focus, keep our heads together, and have more courage, so that we can come to know the ultimate truth.
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