George Carlin agrees.
I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to 'God' are all answered at about the same 50% rate.
Sometimes I wonder if there was a George Carlin based religion where he was the profit of secularism or something if he would hate it or would get a kick out of it. I know it's the former but he was also pretty twisted in his last days.
I feel like prayers being answered at a 50/50 rate could be exploited.
Honestly worshipping the sun the river the mountain and the tree makes so much more sense than the abrahamic religions.
Like why shouldn't the spirit of cats be happy when I feed some cats. Why should the god of the mountain not punish me for littering. It simply makes more sense for your spiritual thoughts or emotions to be grounded in specific phenomenon.
Nah, now you're pouring unnecessary godhood onto inanimate objects. They have no agency of their own. You can still worship them for all the good things they bring you in life, but please leave the personifications at the door.
The way I see it, we're all part of the same thing, which is the universe. And since we're included, I see no issue in the personification of the universe.
The way I see it, we’re all part of the same thing, which is the universe. And since we’re included, I see no issue in the personification of the universe.
I actually agree, but nonetheless personifying, and relating emotionally in this way to specifics, is useful because doing the work of actually relating all the cause and effect happening in between everything and a specific thing is generally an impossible task, so a shortcut to emotionally understand some specific as it's categories personification gets you a faster and maybe more detailed conclusion. It's in many ways just a mental shortcut enshrined in culture.
Same with a lot of the abrahamic stories if you read them as you would read Aesop's Fables there is actually a lot of good philosophical or otherwise human insight wrapped up in there.
In many ways it doesn't matter if there is flooding because we angered the sea, or there's flooding because there's a tropical storm and high tide, as long as we realize early enough that there exists a flood and we should seek high ground, warn our peers....
In this same way it mostly doesn't matter if everything is one and specifics are just phenomena of that one thing, like your universe, or what I'd probably just call nature, and others might call god, or if everything is a thing unto itself in constant relation to any other thing. If we draw the right conclusion.
So If you don't litter because the sign at the entrance of the trail told you so, or you believe it to be disrespectful to the mountain, or it is your duty towards nature to not pollute it, nobody cares and/or should care, but crucially any of those ways to think give you a good reason to do the better and harder thing, which is the reason all these ways of thinking exist.
A shortcut or a model of thought devoid of context is neither good nor bad, but in context I see the personified one true god causing much more harm recently. Not that the personified mountain can't be a harmful idea, it's just that in recent history it mostly hasn't been used that way.
If worshiping the Nekogami makes me happy and good to cats while not impeding me otherwise, why shouldn't I.
Teng tools would like to sell you an umbrella
That's probably how those "gods" came into being in folklore. In order for people to be kinder and more considerate, supposed religious scholars used the fear of God as a tool to be better.
Which is based, but down the line bad faith actors use this for personal gain.
Like why shouldn’t the spirit of cats be happy when I feed some cats.
I think this is literally true, if you assume that the spirit of cats is inside the cats, rather than some mystical universal phenomenon.
We used to worship the sun in Europe too. But Christians decided they wanted to test that resolve, when they were helping pagans simulate the conditions of the sun by setting them on fire.
Technically you still do, Jesus basically just consumed Sol Invictus and his cult practices to be palatable to the Roman public.
Same Birthday, same halo iconography, same vision to Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. No seriously, that was originally Sol Invictus before Constantine fully embraced Christianity. The Chai Rho was a symbol of the general concept of righteousness at the time and was used by Constantine because it was a symbol all his multi-faith forces could accept as being a divine message without rubbing them the wrong way for being too partial to one religion or the other.
This is the answer to the question I was always wondering about: "It's obvious to me that Catholicism is a corruption of Christianity due to mixing with Roman religion; but what are the exact details, and how did that even come to be?"
Economics is not
Pfft I bet he believes the moon is real too /s
Permanently Deleted
So is Jesus.
The mainstream scholarly consensus is that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
The only thing scholars agree on is that he was baptized and he was killed. Nothing in between is supported, it is all fairy tale. All the miracles, bullshit.
Who cares if some mentally ill man 2,000 years ago created some fucked up cult based on the lie that his mother didn't cheat on his father and get pregnant. If I could go back in time I would murder Jesus to save us from the Christofascism we are facing today
A better way to put it is that the consensus is that a historical figure named Jesus, upon whom the biblical figure is based, did in fact exist. The actual details of his life are almost entirely unknown apart from, as you say, a few key events for which we have multiple credible sources. We have a better read on his teachings, but even that's not entirely clear since a lot of the gospels contradict one another and can be interpreted in many different ways.
There’s really not much evidence that he existed at all. Likely just stories borrowed from another religion.
Don’t cut yourself on that edge bud
The academic consensus is that a guy probably existed who was a preacher whose teachings gave rise to the legend of this miraculous “Jesus”.
Everything that’s assumed to be real about Jesus is completely mundane. A preacher whose followers spread his teachings and fantastically embellished his achievements. Big deal! There are hundreds of guys like that. He’s L. Ron Hubbard without the trillion-year-old spaceships.
Except Jesus didn't make millions of dollars from publishing his philosophy in book format, and L. Ron Hubbard didn't willingly die in order to prove his belief in Xenu or whatever.
But he didn't perform miracles. The gospels were written centuries later.
Just so everyone knows, this "loving Christian" just excused Christians in Uganda putting LGBT+ people in prison for life.
Sure buddy XD
No, it's true. It is the consensus among historians. This appears to upset a lot of atheists, not sure why. It has no effect whatsoever on my own atheism since whether or not the biblical figure has a historical basis doesn't play into my lack of belief in god.
