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
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
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!
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.
Book of Mormon
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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.
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 him but that’s by far my edgiest take
I 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.
wonderfully written! yes I absolutely agree with that perspective. Additionally having a mascot in the form of a guy who wholeheartedly believes he’s the son of the God (and is also god in a way because we can’t get polytheists about it of course) is a great marketing move. People always have a hard time trusting and identifying with some ethereal entity up in the sky, there’s a reason why all gods have human (or animal) faces, if Jesus was fully made up or inspired by a mentally ill guy who was completely delusional but still kind that’s another thing lol
I 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.
I’d agree with the statement “the twelve apostles didn’t exist,” especially seeing how in Luke they go from the ten to the twelve and the various gospels can’t even agree on the list of them.
But show me the invented religious figure where the earliest surviving records are disputes over who they were and what they were talking about. Pretty much every cult around a real person ends up that way after the person dies or is imprisoned. But not the made up figures so much.
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.
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.
