I am sick of all these edgy hipsters constantly posting the same thread.
>but flood and war and God is evil and gealous
Maybe, but as far as I'm concerned, an omniscient being would use a different set of morals than mere mortals who's IQ is very limited. Also, the fact that you try to disprove a book you've never read by taking its metaphors ad literam just proves that you never came close to any kind of literature.
>but religion says that I'm weak and sinful
If you allow yourself to be plagued by greed and gealousy, instead of doing your best to be a decent human being, then you really are weak and sinful. Our actions influence those around us.
>b-but priests are evil and wicked and cucked
Yeah, but that's our fault for mixing faith with politics.
/pol/ is getting noticeably liberal, I can't wait for this election to end
>>74929499
But I'm automatically smarter than you because I'm an Atheist and that also makes me automatically right!!!
>>74929499
Nice dubs, here are some better questions to consider imo:
>How does a finite life of wickedness or righteousness really equate to infinite punishment (or at least the perception of it, to be concluded with absolution in the lake of fire) or everlasting life?
>Are you really a good person if you're just doing good things to gain a reward in the afterlife, and avoid eternal damnation? Shouldn't a truer measure of goodness be what you are willing to do when given the option to do good and evil, but with no clear reward offered and even punishment for doing the "right" thing?
>Doesn't it seem like religions generally tend to lay down laws more appealing to mortal people on Earth who seek to promote more harmonious societies than an omniscent being who could simply wish it all away? (Especially given the previous consideration)
>What makes the religions today, which all claim a monopoly on the truth (especially Islam which calls itself both the "first and final" religion) special?
>>74931276
Because life is not finite, this your current life is a test. Your'e sitting in a exam room with one question- Do you accept God, his message, and ask for forgiveness.
It's a million page exam with every page asking the same question. You pass if you answer yes. Most people write in elaborate no's.
Part of Christianity is reincarnation. The message is basically that you have always existed and life is about rediscovering yourself through God. But the Catholic church was uncomfortable with that message because it seemed too complicated to explain and was too similar to paganism, so they just left Jesus to be the token reincarnation and everyone else just kinda pops into being, without the mechanism being explained very well.
>are you really..
No. You need to accept God and ask his forgiveness. If you are unaware of God your entire life, you get a 2nd chance during Judgement.
>doesn't it seem like..
Look religion is probably aliens in prehistory fucking with primitive people. But it's kept people fighting for thousands of years and this is a good thing. Conflict is what sets in motion progress. Look at any animalistic or spiritual society, they are primitive nomadic idiots. Monotheism brings about schisms and great internal struggles, sectarianism and war. War means innovation, invention, destruction that cleanses the trash and refuse of humanity and gives new generations a chance to rebuild. Religion IS WAR, and without it the world stagnates. See China for the majority of it's history.
>what makes..
Nobody knows the truth friend. They just believe in it. Religion asks you to believe without evidence. This leap of faith inspires people to do great and horrible things. Motivation comes from emotion, not from logic or rational thinking.
>>74929499
>Yeah, but that's our fault for mixing faith with politics.
Based.
>>74932103
>Because life is not finite
How can it be a reasonable test for how you will be for eternity then?
>No. You need to accept God and ask his forgiveness
With the caveat that you actually are a good person though, of course you can run the whole "steal the bike, ask for forgiveness later" approach to life (for example: murder millions in cold blood and sincerely ask for forgiveness later) but no one has really demonstrated the efficacy of this approach, or the normal one for that matter.
>Religion IS WAR, and without it the world stagnates.
This is an unfalsifiable statement, we have no way to play back history without religion to see if it would progress or not. Those nomadic idiots also didn't benefit from taking over the works of the pagan Romans and Greeks (who did a fuckload with their polytheism), as Christianity and Islam definitely did.
All you've described is a force that "cleanses the trash and refuse of humanity" (with the alternative description being it's a cancerous scourge that has set mankind back centuries or even millennia), another line in the sand to divide us. Idk if that's really an argument for religion at all, especially if it really was the aliums/ayy lmaos.
>Motivation comes from emotion, not from logic or rational thinking.
Funny you say that in a discussion about religious belief.
so your angry about people that look for spirituality in a world where there is no god and find gnostism a sect that was genosided off the earth and have risen frome the dead to mock your religion...
>>74932581
>how
It isn't, you get tested again, they just retconned that part out of it.
>with
sure, people are complex, God knows if you mean it or not.
>polytheism
polytheism is an elaborate and primitive form of monotheism, there is always a progenitor all father god who spawned all the other ones and people were simpler back then so everyone got a god, just like there's a saint for everything now.
War leads to peace, most people need to see their friends guts fall out to get it. They cant intellectualize or internalize the concepts.
>motiv
My point is basically this. Atheists are largely more intellectual and less physical than your average person. They are not salt of the Earth, common men. They believe you can reason and explain everything. In reality, people, even the simplest people, are complicated. They don't believe in God any more than the atheist does, but they want to believe in something, they need their own thing. The atheist has his thing, his big dick totem, his reason, his long, his history, his culture, his great lineage of thinkers. The common man needs an equally big dick, he needs the external, the cosmos, the universe, the unknown, the magic of discovery, the joy of exploration, he gets that in justifying his actions, which often torture and confuse him, why did he do this, why did he do that, why can't he control himself, with an overall message of forgiveness. If he asks for forgiveness and is truly sorry, at least punishment wont be permanent, and he doesn't need to die with a sense of ultimate loss, he gets a do-over on the other side.
People need this for a complex series of reasons. The average person does the opposite of what they say. This is a combination of problems with language (it's terrible for communicating intent or forming decisions, the decisions often get retroactively justified or understood) and problems with human development. The same way we store fat for the lean winter, we hoard resources.
>>74929499
Oh please as if our religion is anything more than a complex set of superstitions, stop making it in something greater than it should be.
>>74933119
Empathy is great when everyone is well fed and doing okay. It tends to go out the window when you have to choose between feeding your child or someone else's, these are just biological drivers.
Modern Christianity is primarily about doing good and being a decent person to others.
Islam is primarily about becoming a perfect person through self-improvement, and telling the other religions to go eat a dick. It's militaristic stoicism. It needs serious reformation because it's completely transplanted out of a primitive age where empathy was in short supply and people looked out for their own.
Overall, you need to teach people empathy, acceptance, forgiveness. Because if you don't they kill themselves and never have any time to invent new shit. If you do teach it to them, they still kill themselves, but now they do it in a less random way. Organised mass murder requires thinking, planning, strategy, tactics, innovation. Eventually a weapon gets invented that can kill everyone at once and poison the Earth, this is basically in the Bible and why all the nutbags in America have been waiting for the Apocalypse for 60+ years. That weapon will make war unpalatable, so people need to be empathetic for their own survival. At which point something like world peace will be achieved, at least that was the hope.
All religions are predatory in nature and seek intelligent and manipulative people to ambitiously grasp power away from the powerful and control masses of people. Some religions lead to just wars and prosperity for the species, others lead to stagnation and hundreds of years of exploitation.
>>74933119
> they just retconned that part out of it.
So which version (specifically of Christianity) is the most "true" then? Doesn't that mean most "christians" have absolutely incorrect views of the way things "are"?
>God knows if you mean it or not
Sure, however the question remains over whether doing all these things (don't be a dick, ask for forgiveness, etc) are to get into heaven and avoid hell either way. Thus it leaves one wondering if all it's encouraging you to be good for a reward while avoiding punishment, and if you can really consider that """"good"""'
>polytheism is an elaborate and primitive form of monotheism
Isn't this opinion more a result of monotheistic religions being the norm now? There are no guarantees that all polytheistic religions converge to monotheism, and we have no way to test it. One could also argue that a unitary God, one which was all things to all people, is a somewhat "simpler" arrangement than a god for literally everything.
>War leads to peace, most people need to see their friends guts fall out to get it. They cant intellectualize or internalize the concepts.
War frequently leads to more war as well, and peace can beget more peace. Idk if most people really need to see it first hand to get how awful war can be, think how few people actually face off in conflicts now. Even WWI, where millions died for practically nothing, didn't stop the world from another global war barely 20 years later.
>My point is basically this
tl;dr: religion is a necessary evil.
I agree that religions offered fantastic perks to people who were rarely more than a poor growing season or two from mass starvation, however the dilemma is whether the pros really outweigh the many cons. I feel they increasingly do not (and many agree), religious belief will need greater reform if it's to survive in the west. (and globally, in the long term)
>>74933844
Religion is part of human nature, which is unchanging. You are not really rejecting religion, you are refusing to confront a very real part of who you are at your core. A primitive, angry, reactionary animal, who will kill indiscriminately to survive and if you kill enough, you start doing it for sport and pleasure.
Confronting uncomfortable truths is mostly what religion is about. We live in an insulated modern society that wants to shift the blame and responsibility into the past and pretend like the future wont be filled with torturous horrors, bloodshed and injustices.
There is a banal naivety here which underpins and undermines all attacks on religion. God has the biggest stick, so he keeps people in line. Where is your stick atheism? Secular humanism? Bad people don't exist? Africa is just a prank?
Take resources and comfort from people and they become monkeys. Religion keeps them in check because it convinces them that maybe they are more than monkeys, and maybe temporal pleasure is finite and infinite pleasure is a form of suffering.
What is the point of living? To be decent and get along, have nice things, learn new stuff. What if I want nicer things than you, what if I want to control or hide some knowledge so I can control you? What if I'm just a crazy asshole who wants to fuck you over?
Then you also need a stick to stop me. We eliminate God and his invisible stick, we took away the afterlife carrot, only the rope is left to hang on. So we need to introduce a new stick, a real stick, a stick so big that nobody comes along and fucks with our nice secular society of equality, peace and harmony.
Who controls that stick? The state? The military? Robots? Scientists? Artists? Doctors? Can we trust them not to abuse that power, after all they are the new God's, they enforce the rules and must self-enforce themselves. Is there a person alive good enough to do that job? CCCP v2.0 FEEL THE BERN LET'S GO BROS COMMITTEE BY THE PEOPLE!
