So I thought about this in the shower amd it makes sense to me, like praying and stuff never worked for most people I know, so a direkt link to god gotta be unlikely. That made me conclude that religion is probably fake, no matter if there’s a god or not. Also people speaking to the same god being given a different set of rules sounds stupid, so at least most religions must be fake.
Unless, hear me out, god is a golden retriever and needs to be reminded how much of a good boy He is
this golden retriever has committed many atrocities in the old testament
“Bad god!” hits god with a rolled up newspaper
It was a Chihuahua back then
Clearly he wasn’t trained properly as a pup
Sadly the doggo walked all over the holy keyboard and wrote the old testament
My go to phrase for Mormons is something like “I believe that, if there is a God, he wouldn’t be so vain as to require constant worship, and instead he would just want us to ‘live in his image’”.
It’s fun watching the cogs turn in their heads when you say something like that.
Pretty sure there are lines in the Bible that directly state it is enough to pray in your heart, without any outward symbols or churches or the like. So yeah, that’s not only a witty comeback, but also a good point from the consistency view
Yes there are, it’s one of Jesus’ teachings.
I remember a song from my childhood which was sung in the church regularly. And a part of it says something along the lines of “where two or three come together in my name, I’ll be among them”. Which seems to be a “quote” from Jesus. It’s not only written in their books but also in their songs but the whole “we need your money to build bigger churches otherwise God can’t hear us” scheme is still going…
Little know trivia in the Book of Mormon, you get a chance to convert after death if you haven’t already!
Book of Mormon
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Yeah, a couple family members converted a few decades ago and the Mormons sent us all a request to list all our ancestors so they could retroactively ‘save’ them. Most of my family being Lutheran, that didn’t go over well lol.
My grandpa, my uncle, and a few other family pranksters got together and gave them the most outrageous list they could come up with. I had a Mormon kid as a friend when I was young, and some days I wonder if they looked me up, and actually believed I was related to the King of Sweden.
I know LDS members in my family think they traced their lineage from present day all the way to Adam and Eve, so whatever you put, wasn’t nearly as outlandish as you think, lol.
“Give me your entire life and I’ll give you rewards beyond your wildest dreams… that you can only see after you die.”
One of the greatest grifts in all of history.
I can’t think of a better one overall
Lots of good discussion going on here, majority of folks have covered off on the pitfalls and deceitfulness that comes with religion so thought I’d give an alternative perspective.
I think in some ways religion is a very helpful tool. It provides people with guidelines to live a good life - ‘as long as you do these things everything is gonna be alright’. It takes away uncertainty. It gives people purpose. Pretty sure they attribute a lot of humanity’s early adoption of cleanliness and hygiene standards to religion. The whole ‘invisible man in the sky is watching you’ thing does wonders for keeping people accountable behind closed doors.
Whether or not it’s fake is up to the individual. Personally I define religion as a ‘way of living’ (a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion). Do I subscribe to organised religion? No. Do I think that it’s fake for those that do? Definitely not. Can different faiths be praying to the same god/s? Yes, I think it’s possible, we are all connected.
What I’m getting at here is that even if you think it’s fake, it’s important to continue questioning and exploring the spiritual or religious aspects of the human condition and develop your own understanding for yourself.
Religion has typically been used as a tool for controlling the masses but to dismiss it solely as a manipulation tactic is an injustice. There is more there to be uncovered if you are willing to look.
The world needs more faith.
Counterpoint: faith and religion have caused more wars, misery, and death than any other single source in human history. We’ve had literally thousands of years of being led by religious leaders, maybe it’s time to try something different. The world needs LESS faith.
I am in complete agreement with your statement, excepting the final line.
Organised religion leading society’s and their involvement in government is definitely detrimental.
What I aim to bring to light here is that religion, belief and faith in something greater than oneself is (in my belief) healthy for humanity when it is driven by personnel introspection.
I feel that all too often we have very intelligent people who completely ignore the entire prospect or field of spirituality due to the negative light it is cast in.
I’m also happy for people to ignore it but speaking from my own experience, I never thought to investigate this side of the human condition as I had wrapped all notions of spirituality up with the atrocities and lack of logic or reasoning of organised religion. Religion was bad and stupid and I wanted nothing to do with it. But I’ve since grown and adapted my world views & hope to share my experiences from an empathic viewpoint to maybe assist others who can relate.
When I say we need more faith, I don’t really mean faith in any particular god, entity, alien or higher power. I mean more so that faith in oneself, faith in the connected nature of all things and faith in the universe, this form of faith is a very empowering source of energy that we as a collective can draw upon.
It’s open to interpretation and appreciate your response.
It sounds like you are replacing the words faith with confidence or certainty. You can be confident in yourself but you can’t have faith in yourself because faith necessitates not having knowledge otherwise it would be knowledge.
I can’t really say much more about your idea of faith since most of what you said is the standard vague wishy washy stuff that doesn’t tell me anything exact
As an agnostic, faith isn’t confidence. It provides the wanderlust to go on along with a small ego boost for following morals.
It provides people with guidelines to live a good life - ‘as long as you do these things everything is gonna be alright’.
which is a fucking lie. the most decent people I’ve known have been plagued by disease and preyed upon by the strong and greedy. do these things and MAYBE, if you’re really fucking lucky, you won’t die an excruciatingly painful death and/or have your loved ones murdered and your life’s work stolen.
those seem like the odds everyone gets, regardless of faith.
The world needs more faith.
no, the world needs justice, balance. waiting for faith to solve things isn’t going to help anyone.
They are lies to some and to others they are promises.
I don’t disagree that organised religion can and is very manipulative.
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear - was less about whether or not the guidelines are real or have an impact (which is arguable either way) but more so that people want to be reassured that they are ‘doing the right thing’.
And my reason for highlighting this is to provide an understanding for the people that do follow religion - that it’s a very natural human response to look for certainty or predictability and for some people religion provides that by providing a structure for them to build their moral compass and world views around.
Again, whether or not that’s a good or bad thing is up to the individual.
You mention justice and balance and I agree that balance is definitely required. Justice is a more complex notion, one which generally involves consequences or punishment.
I’m unsure of justice being useful, as long as we are divided and pointing fingers we will never truly meet our potential as a species. We can do amazing things when we work together.
When I say faith I am not implying that someone or something is going to intervene and save the day. I’m definitely not advocating inaction. But as I mentioned in another reply, faith in oneself and the people around them to make the right decisions and hold themselves accountable is a good starting point. Faith that this existence is just a tiny part of a much greater existence and faith that what you do matters regardless of how inconsequential it may seem.
You mention justice and balance and I agree that balance is definitely required. Justice is a more complex notion, one which generally involves consequences or punishment.
RAPISTS NEED TO FACE JUSTICE. Instead faith orgs shuffle the rapists around and defend them.
If we simply started there, the world would be a much better place.
I think the imaginary friend(s) problem is going to destroy our species if we can’t outgrow it pretty fucking quickly.
also see: palestine
I think I understand your anger.
It would be a start, you’re right.
I think that division will destroy us much faster than anything else.
As long as we’re blaming, hating, raping, murdering, deceiving and competing with each other we will destroy ourselves.
And maybe that is what’s best for the universe.
A hateful species that can’t co-operate and recognise its diversities as its strengths should not be able to leave its planet.
It will become its own Great Filter.
You are right though, there does need to be consequences and inaction is just as bad as condoning.
Hating the people that believe in something is no better than the people that are hating each other for believing in different things.
Difference is nobody hates the people that are christians at least incredibly uncommon they hate religion for all the harm its done to families and everyone. Which is why i am antitheist.
It will become its own Great Filter.
yeah, I can’t see us passing the future hurdles and it makes me exceptionally depressed. we can’t get coal rollers and vroom vroom types to stop pouring hydrocarbon byproducts into the atmosphere, how are we going to get the entire world to pull back.
we have one biosphere. once chance. and it’s already so very very very fucked. AMOC collapse, Microplastics in EVERYTHING including all testicles measured - PFAS everywhere - ice sheets collapsing - ocean temps off the charts - mexico, us south, india, pakistan COOKING… it’s all gonna get worse and still the assholes are talking about drilling more and driving their shitmobiles.
The world needs more faith.
Upvoted just on this and you’re right. I have faith but fuck religion. Religion is man made and flawed AF. I have a deep relationship with “God” and talk to them regularly. People need to drop their inhibitions and expand their minds.
Issue is you can believe anything from faith and thats why atrocities happen because x god told them too. Or X priest says this thats how cults exist a group of people believe crazy things with no evidence whatsoever. Which is exactly what faith is belief without evidence.
There will always be that which we can’t explain. It doesn’t matter how advanced we get. We will never know what is upstream from the most recent discovery. Evidence will never exist for everything and I personally am at peace with that. The problem as I see it is you are attributing “god” to that gap when it’s far more nebulous than that.
Yeah their is always things that we won’t know so why make up answers rather then just admitting to not knowing something that is basic humility.
Also i didn’t attribute god to that directly i attributed faith to that which is its only purpose which is why i think its entirely bad. You can replace god with alien overlord and it works the same way. Or even a vision from the future.
The question back is what harm is it to you that I attribute the creation of the universe to a giant spaghetti Monster? What harm is it to you that I attribute the vast unknowns of the ocean to Cthulhu?
The flaws you mention come from organization which I am very clearly distancing from. Faith can exist without religion and organization. Religion cannot exist without faith.
The sooner we decouple these two things the quicker we can move forward as a species IMHO
Sure until you start attributing other things to it and basing your life voting and other things on it. Plus i think its inherently harmful to believe things without reason since i think their is inherent value in only believing what we have reason to believe is true. Plus this kinda thinking is what keeps us in the stone age if we assume we know the answer we don’t progress but then we discovered stuff like lightning wasn’t from roman gods and life improved from that knowledge.
I’m glad to hear that, keep that communication going! I feel the same and it makes me smile knowing that there are similar minded people out there. Thanks for the kind words stranger, lead by example.
I mean your wishy washy guide to life stuff sounds cool and all. But it is just flat out wrong no questions. People have used faith to justify genocide racism sexism slavery and more.
Faith can lead to any conclusion at all thats why faith is a problem I can believe in white supremacy based on faith and I can believe in loving everyone based on faith but because you can’t verify faith both these stances are completely equal.
Ironically jesus the most well known religious figure world wide told people specifically not to wash their hands in Matthew 15.
You can believe anything from faith which is why its used for atrocities and why the world doesn’t need more faith
Religion has always been nothing more than a way to control people.
“I talked to God and he said that if you don’t listen to the rules that I wrote in this book then he’s going to torture you forever”Abrahamic moment
Religion is a way to avoid accountability.
It is the ultimate giving up of your personal free will… and they make it a fucking SELLING POINT.
Like door to door lobotomy salesmen.
Praying works: “Thank God!111!”
Praying doesn’t work: “God works in mysterious ways… 🤷♀️”
Like sure if you need that as a way to cope with a depressing reality. But that is the main function of religion: to keep folks complacent, governable and prevent systemic change
(dw am not some kind of “religion bad!! no, I never interacted with organized spirituality, why do you ask?”-person. That’s just what growing up with
real /jOrthodox Christianity and two hours of liturgy on most Sundays does to a critically inclined mf lol)The more you think about it all, the less sense it makes. Congrats on discovering the tiny seed of free-will we all have inside us.
I find the argument for an afterlife humorous. Spend any time with a pet sleeping beside you and watch them dream. We are no different at the core. There is an abstract ‘conscious’ involved with dreaming. Do they have a god in their dreams. Is ours better than theirs, who is to say. I attribute such a thought to absurd human hubris.
Modern humans have existed in some form for only 100k years, while 99.9% of all life that has ever existed is extinct. What kind of omnipotent god is that shitty at dust, ribs, and apples that they failed at everything.
The real clincher for me was simply realizing the fundamental nature of stars and the processes that fuel them. That lead me to ask, if god really exists, why didn’t they note a single scientific anomaly that is undisputable. Absolutely everything found in any religious writing is fundamentally human. There are clever observations, but every single thing mentioned could be observed or fabricated. There is no higher evidence whatsoever, no ontological knowledge of the universe.
The only people that speak in riddles are con artists. Religion is the highest level of achievement in the skills of con artistry. The best criminals are those you’ve never heard of, but the pinnacle of achievement is those that do it in plain sight.
I think all religions were either started, or greatly fuelled, by psychedelics. For example: the description of the apocalypse in the Bible sounds like a bad trip, animals morphing into each other and all. Ah yes, a “vision of the end”- did it happen right after eating some funny mushrooms or perhaps some nice cactus eh?
also i think jesus had early onset shizoaffective disorder like his mum before himbut that’s by far my edgiest takeI don’t think Jesus ever existed. Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated. This is the premise we’re dealing with.
We were all stupid gullible little kids learning this stuff. Most people are only doing it for the social network, but don’t understand it as such. The bias of disregarding all the opposing evidence causes cognitive dissonance and most of the bad behaviors of present society.
Pragmatically, a group of nobodies managed to survive Rome destroying their civilization because of stupidity and rebellious nationalism. This diaspora was a refugee crisis everywhere else. No one wanted them and their religion was a joke. They had no where to go, owned nothing, and were not even citizens of the lands they inhabited. Most were likely slaves. After a few decades, some started rebuilding a life. It was the perfect opportunity to fabricate some new religious thing if you were a displaced nobody. That diaspora wanted meaningful purpose to make them feel nostalgic over their religious past. The gospels are the tales of some nobodies that didn’t have to work because they sold themselves as the product that filled the niche needs of the more successful among that diaspora. They got put up in people’s houses and fed well. They likely did so until they got caught by some Romans while trying to grow their religious support base, or because they were overstaying their welcome everywhere they went. Like Paul was probably put on a boat knowing that he wouldn’t be able to return, probably a boat likely to sink, and one sent into a storm on purpose.
It is easy to say all the things that “thousands witnessed” when all those thousands are dead or displaced and unable to dispute anything you’ve said. None of them wrote down any part of their accounts for several decades. What kinds of reliable stories can you tell after several decades. To top that off, there are elementary school level copying errors that are blatant in nature. They are exactly what I expect from a con. You don’t have a case where there are 12 unique accounts or 11 if you want to be pedantic. I can easily picture myself in this circumstance, and I can easily see myself performing this exact con if my alternative was starving to death. There is nothing remarkable about the story. At the time, there were very few people that supported or believed it. A couple hundred years later it picked up steam. That too is obvious. Polytheism is like an anarchic political party. Any fool can conjure a political movement that has potential to overthrow governments using an obscure god of convince and a plausible story that feeds what others want to hear… Look at Julius Caesar. He largely used his religious role as pontifex maximus to gain power as a populist. Monotheism is far easier to control. The true purpose of religion is quite simple. It is a self sustaining way to suppress the peasantry. This is the common thread throughout all of history. Religion functions as a morality police system with a corpus that is just long enough to occupy the minds of the average person. It is a source of tribal isolation. It is not a meritocracy, so it will not evolve much with time. Conservative sadism and ignorance are an effective way to oppresses or suppress progressive societal elements that might question the corruption and ineptitude of the upper class. Religion creates little gullible pockets of people that are easily manipulated by the upper class and authority.
So no, there is no evidence for anything more than opportunistic cons and pragmatic government if you really strip away all the layers and look at it objectively. It is a system of feelings over logic because feelings disregard facts and make up their own like imaginary friends no one has ever talked to, or a magical future if you just go about your insignificant life while telling you it will be better next time. Or shit, how about we really rub it in: in the next life “the meek will inherit the earth.” That’s right, act as low as you can little peasants, and be happy about it. It will be better next time. Your imaginary friend said so about this place no one has ever seen or been to. The majority of humans believe shit like this. If you know this stuff well, you know I did too.
You can’t fix stupid in anyone else; only within yourself. Fighting or arguing with anyone that places emotionally derived belief over fundamental logic is a pointless and destructive waste of time. Sharing reasonable logic with those on the edge can be helpful, but like, I came up with all of this on my own completely independent of external sources.
Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated
Literacy and writing were uncommon then, though.
If jesus could do that stuff he could just give people knowledge of writing instantaneously i mean their really is no excuse when someone is literally omnipotent
Or more likely, Jesus was an eminent rabbi of the era, that oral stories expanded for hundreds of years, until he became a literal avatar of a god.
Or maybe he was a fraudster like another magician of the time - Simon Magus, who is mentioned in the Bible. Simon was an escape artist, and had a levitation illusion. That’s not far from water to wine or walking on water.
You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.
The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.
The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.
You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.
Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.
The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.
But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.
It’s a lot easier to control and oppress people when they have the fear of god in them.
-like praying and stuff never worked for most people I know,-
Like they wished for a car or a pony and didn’t get it?
What about praying to not die of cancer or for jobs and/or places to live? Or praying for a child to live, or for no Genocide etc. Lots of nonselfish prayers out there.
Then planes would never crash, there would be no crime, and all guns would shoot jello. Who wants to live like that?
Lots of people. You enjoy people dying for no fault of their own? I don’t need planes crashing. I don’t have a personal need of guns, and if there were no unjust threats, why is a gun necessary? As for crime, crime is really a construct based on a created morality, so that’s up in the air.
My examples were about innocent people suffering, and it feels like your response is “Who would want to live in a world where innocent people don’t suffer?” I almost think you’re joking, because that’s a seriously messed up thing to admit about yourself, much less assume everyone else agrees.
My point was that this wouldn’t be a real life. It would be like a controlled fantasy Barbie dream house life and even she gets chewed up by the dog sometimes. There is no positive without negative. There is no advancement without adversity. If everyone wins the lottery, the lottery means nothing. Life is the struggle.
That’s just your myopic opinion. Plenty of people live fulfilling lives without random chance of an early death being their meaning of living. Perhaps you’re misunderstanding my original comment. I didn’t say immortality (though several religions do promise that as an afterlife), nor did I say unlimited wishes. I mostly said stuff like fatal diseases, daily needs, and unfair deaths like genocides, etc. You added in plane crashes, which also isn’t necessary for a fulfilling life.
It sounds a bit like you’re a zero sum person, like not everyone in the world can have basic needs. As a reminder, we’re discussing this under the assumption there is a loving omnipotent we can pray to. If the world is so messed up that people can’t even expect to not die horribly of stuff that just happens to them outside their own choices, or where not everyone had an equal opportunity to just live a simple life and have their needs met, then that suggests that an omnipotent God decided to make life that way, and such a being is not deserving of my worship, and hasn’t proved their existence.
Not dying of cancer is selfish. It mainly benefits yourself
If you think dying only affects yourself, then that’s already selfish, or sad. You have no family or friends who would mourn you? What if you’re the breadwinner, or you have young children? A person dying doesn’t affect only themselves.
mainly. Yes the biggest impact is to myself. Sure my kids will be impacted but not as much
Sure, for you. If a young single parent who is the only one who can support their child dies, at best they’re hoping for nontraumatic foster care, but in many places, including first world countries, it can mean far worse for them. Still, I’ll cede personal cancer for the sake of the overall point. That was hardly the worst issue in my comment.
no, I mean like they tried to talk to god
How did they know it didn’t work? I don’t really know how those things work, but I’m pretty sure that one is mostly internal.
Lol 💯
Have you ever played a game of telephone? Even if god did speak to people why would anyone ever trust a human messenger that is so prone to misunderstanding? Unless a god arranged the stars themselves in a way that communicates a presence there’s no reason to trust human prophets about their distorted views of the divine filtered through a meager tube of experience.
I always say this. Any “real god” that created everything and gave their word to humans to pass on will be distorted by the end of the day.
Humans are greedy and selfish and they will change the word to be proven right. That is what I have faith in. The human ability to fuck up shit for selfish reasons.
Just tell me: If there is a god, is he a war god and keeps mankind just for entertainment?
I’m just going to drop this here:
IMO, if God exists it’s nothing at all like what any religion says. If a god exists at all, there are only two possibilities I think it could be:
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Non-intelligent happenstance. The universe itself. The laws of physics. Whatever; it’s a concept and not a literal entity.
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An intelligence that created humans and/or other life here or there, but is not really “God” in anyway described by man. They’re just highly intelligent beings that bioengineered us long, long ago.
The existence of an afterlife though is more complicated. There’s two possibilities, at least IMO:
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There is nothing after death. No soul that lives on or moves on. There is just the meat in our skull hallucinating things based on external stimuli from reality to make sense of it all until the electrical signals stop and we cease to exist.
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There is something beyond current understanding where consciousness comes from and it can exist in some form after death. Whatever it experiences after death would be something of an afterlife; though it is probably nothing at all like what any religion describes. It may not even be possible to describe it at all because it’s just super weird.
I like to muse on the idea of an afterlife, being that I’m not religious. I’d like to think maybe every life is just an expression of the universe and that we are all the same; and that same either experiences things outside of our existence or understanding, or we simply resume experience but elsewhere, kinda like reincarnation. I’d also like to think we’re all from a higher dimension experiencing reality as if it’s an episode on Netflix, or like the game Roy from Rick and Morty, that would be fun.
Die and come back to reality where you’re a 10 year old kid in a sci-fi arcade on a family vacation during summer break.
As long as I’ve got the high score I’m thrilled
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