Christianity is going to be easy.
I like other mythologies because they’re interesting, they’ve got a lot of gods and a lot of other cultures.
Christianity only has Jesus, Moses, God and the Virgin Mary going for it. The mythology is kinda boring and very contradictory of itself. People prefer to cherry pick verses and everything to believe out of than it’s intention.
Idk man, when you start looking into the old testament, especially non-official/apocryphal books like the Book of Enoch, it gets pretty interesting. Especially when you take early Judaism in context with the neighboring Canaanite religions
My favorite is the Book of Nod.
There are some kindred who consider that book quite heretical.
The first thing Christians do when they’ve formed a new group is to figure out who the heretics are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Nod
This… might clear things up just a bit. The Book of Nod is loosely Christian/Abrahamic religion adjacent mythology of the origin of vampires in the ttrpg Vampire the Masquerade. It’s the in universe origin myth of vampires.
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If you’ve got some time on your hands, this is an extremely interesting video on the origins of Yahweh and the Israelites https://youtu.be/mdKst8zeh-U?si=fk3vuzXxq58EHKu2
The Crucifixion story and the end times prophecy are both pretty damn good stories, you have to admit.
What? Why do you think they are good stories? They seem fairly boring to me. What am I missing?
The story, clearly.
🤔
I think it’s like a weird food you instantly like it or you never do.
My personal favorite is the Sermon on the Mount. He lays out everything he believes with multiple catchy phrases and in short order. Which is how you definitely know it didn’t happen.
I wish I shared your optimism but I fear it is not happenstance that it has survived for so long. I suspect that it contains enough textual material to be easily adapted over time to serve many purposes, fit many cultural mores, and exploit various aspects of human nature.
They also got Satan.
greek mythology is kinda amazing though
Yeah, I really love it because I love fantasy worlds.
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That really depended upon which Greeks you’re talking about. For example, the Spartans said, “men fuck women for babies and little boys for pleasure.”
Also “gods really like rape, except when their spouse does it, but then they only punish the mortal whom their spouse raped”
Kinda weird that out of all the various aspects of sex in greek mythology you plucked only that one aspect.
Bit inaccurate, isn’t it…? No such thing as Greek gods and Roman gods… “Roman” gods are just your plain old Greek gods with fake beards, speaking Latin in a Greek accent, and wearing their togas in the Roman style… Should have used Greco -Roman gods for one door and something else (Egyptian, Babylonian, Norse… take your pick) for the other…
Greek gods were just Egyptian gods. Egyptian gods were just Babylonian gods. Ba ylonian gods etc.
And Roman Catholic church “borrowed” multiple holidays from the Roman empire
[insert the meme with astronauts and guns]
Sure but they didn’t borrow their god
Wasn’t Zoroastrianism the first monotheistic religion?
Early christians in Rome were a lot more polytheistic. Many of the saints are borrowed from Roman gods and today they still provide a polytheistic feel to some christian churches.
No evidence of that claim.
Proto-Judaism, which took its belief from several religions, was polytheism until they had spent time with Zoroastrianists.
I like the term monogamoustheist. There are a lot of gods but they only prayed to one.
Polylatrism or Polylatry is the term you’re looking for.
We were literally taught that in catholic school. Just like Jesus was almost certainly not born in 0 AD. It’s just not important to his teachings, but rather important during the spread of catholicism.
Plenty of good reasons to be critical of Catholic Church, but “They claimed saturnalia as their year end celebration because no one actually wrote down proper dates 2000 years ago and the Romans still wanted a festival in mid-December” is not a great one.
Technically there is no 0AD. It goes from 1 BC to 1 AD
Christian gods are just Judaic gods, and Judaic gods were just levantine gods.
Sort of. Romans borrowed gods from all over the place and created their own gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_deities#Alphabetical_list
Not on that list are all the emperors who were worshipped as gods.
It is the syncretist of the pagan. You can still see it in many places of the world. They treat religion basically how Westerners treat tropes in entertainment. Oh you like that show? Check out this show that is almost the same! I have seen shrines that had crucifixes hanging next to a Buddha.
I wonder what the average lifespan for religions is
I imagine its probably all over the place, to the point an average is not very useful, because on the one hand, something like a small cult that doesnt survive the death of its founders might last just a few decades, but something like Hinduism might last thousands of years and have a very unclear date to when it starts. You’d also have the question of when a religion ends exactly, like, one that has no followers left is probably dead, but what if it changes over time until the original form is unrecognizable? Is the original dead, or does the modern form count, and if the former, when did it end? Does it count as dead if a major world religion loses that status and becomes largely irrelevant, but still has a few small communities of followers, such as with zoroastrianism? If a religion does lose all of its followers, but people later attempt to recreate and convert to it from its surviving texts or similar, does it still count, or does the revival count as a new religion?
Maybe Im missing some obvious example, but I cant really think of cases, beyond the tiny cultlike ones, where a religion dies out organically either, most examples I can think of are cases where a religion is deliberately killed off, usually by another one supplanting it and having some conquering power or converted authority forcing its members to convert to the new one.
Well some of them die when their god dies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
I wish all cults were as innocent and wholesome as the Prince Philip Movement.
It is difficult. Ancestor worship is most likely the most common form of religion out there. Is a family shrine to a passed grandparent its own mini-religion?
Both the Egyptian pantheon and the Hellenic pantheon went through multiple iterations across the ages of their respective peoples. Neptune was the all father originally, then Zeus was made the patriarch of the Olympians (while Kronos created Phanes who begat the cosmos). Curiously Aphrodite was Astarte before, and Ishtar before that, and didn’t just bring love and beauty, but also the Phoenician alphabet which would replace Linear-B.
And the way Christian and Jewish scripture is interpreted today is very different than how it was interpreted in the 16th century, or the 11th century, or the 6th century.
i have gone full circle and now i believe in millions of gods.
so many gods of and with all things.
gods with etsy stores.
the gods of my oil pan. the gods of my ancestors’ oil pans’.
time is a god, and it will have to psychopomp itself according to the next panel of the comic.
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Pretty sure that was Kratos actually
God of War 5: Kratos kills Time for taking his credit
To be fair the Christian god is basically a Greek God with a Jewish accent.
Eh, “time”. I’d say so far only religion has killed other religions. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where atheism was as prevalent as it is now after the concept of religion was first formed.
I feel bad for religious people who have been deceived their entire lives’ into a delusion. But at the same time, I almost feel no empathy when they go out of their way to do and say the most insane stuff with religion as a justification.
I feel so bad for the kids of these religious zealots. I used to live next to a family with a little girl (12/13ish) that just played/stood around in their yard alone for hours every day. She wasn’t allowed to speak with anyone outside of their church ever or use the phone. She wasn’t allowed to have toys or really celebrate anything ever. “Homeschooled” of course. Often she’d just sit out there crying because her mom constantly used her as a bargaining chip to guilt her dad to join their religion. She told her constantly that her dad didn’t love them because he wouldn’t join their faith and that he was going to hell blah blah blah. She riled her up and made her hysterically beg her dad not to leave them and go to hell on a regular basis. It was truly awful. Sometimes when her parents left she’d wonder over to the fence separating our homes and chat with us. I hope we were able to plant at least a seed of sanity with our talks. Poor girl.
Later I had a coworker stressing out about her kid having extreme night terrors and behavioral issues because she was SO scared of going to hell. I, knowing her kid was only 7, kinda laughed and said something like “did you tell her 7 year olds aren’t ending up in hell?” To which she got angry, snapped at me, and said that she wouldn’t lie to her daughter like that. She seemed genuinely offended that I expected her to have cared more about her young child having a mental breakdown at the age of 7 than appeasing her rancid asshole of a god.
Abhorrent parenting from stupid and small minded people all around. If that’s what they deal with as kids no wonder they’re so broken and incapable of rational thoughts as adults. It’s SO important to keep this shit out of our schools.
If the metric used is the number of figures in the pantheon, it will be very interesting to do the math for hinduism, budism, dao and shinto.
Like it or not,
religiositybelief isn’t going anywhere. Science can not provide meaning for life or the universe where we exist.What we can and should fight for is a society where belief is solely personal matter, with no room or weight on the broad public forum.
Rather than a question of adulthood vs childhood, the reality is that humans evolved certain traits and abilities that mean superstition and religion are in our nature, for better or worse, like it or no.
Humans had to become adept at determining the intent of other humans and of animals to the point where we tend to anthropomorphize animals, inanimate objects, even concepts like justice and luck and fate.
We evolved mechanisms to avoid harm by remembering past experiences and predicting future ones. Though flawed from the standpoint of rationality, these adaptations were enough to prevent extinction of humanity at large, while leaving us saddled with numerous cognitive biases that leave us more likely to believe unfounded claims of a spiritual nature.
The antidotes to irrational, superstitious thinking are knowledge and critical thinking skills. It takes time, effort, and dedication to gain the upper hand against our nature.
It may be impossible to completely overcome our nature. Still I do hope we are able to set aside the most harmful manifestations of our nature: dogmatic thinking and religious zealotry.
Logically and morally, this is an obvious conclusion, but most people are fucking idiots or apathetic towards what they perceive as ‘lesser injustices.’ Religious people are now existentially threatened because people are openly non-believers and since most of them lack self-reflection capabilities they get angry and aggravated and do what they can to fight for what is right in their eyes. One of the worst aspects of religion is that it makes people feel justified in doing things they otherwise never would have.
Really original that notion. I’m sure no one has ever considered it.
I also notice it was carefully considered and worded in order to avoid being considered as intolerant as the detractor to humanity it proposes to have dismantled.
People need comfort and hope
Marx’s vision as expressed in his opiate of the people quote is for a world in which the truth is comforting and hopeful, and the people of the community don’t have to turn to myths and legends for positivity.
Religion is a symptom that emerges from misery and trauma, and should be regarded by the state like an epidemic of an infectious pathogen.
I don’t think calling religion a symptom is fair. I think it is it’s own kind of virus that infects people who don’t have the tools to withstand it… And misery/trauma provides the blow that weakens people and makes them susceptible.
Staph doesn’t kill healthy people, but it sure as shit fucks up people who have other ailments.
Vulnerability is the symptom of trauma and pain. Religion exploits that.
Religious conviction and adherence to organized ministries is more prevalent in regions where the quality of life suffers, such as throughout the Americas. Here in the US, precarity (housing precarity, food precarity, job precarity, etc.) feeds into the kind of magical thinking that fuels adherence to faith and authoritarian ideology (that a charismatic figure will use their power to fix our personal woes).
So religion is not a personal symptom like a fever or cough, it’s a community problem, like elevated hate crime or recurring rampage killings.
Again though, religion isn’t necessarily the symptom of these things. Those things can exist without religion. Religion definitely thrives in these environments…
The same way staph/mrsa thrives in hospitals.
I hope that a world in which the truth is comforting and hopeful is eventually achieved however I kinda doubt that any kind of economic/political formation will ever change the fact that being alive kinda sucks, people will always experience hardship and sadness and insurmountable problems and faith in something intangible helps a lot of people get through that.
faith in something intangible helps a lot of people get through that.
It also causes those people to become the hardship and sadness and insurmountable problems other people have to experience.
Throughout the history of post-agricultural humanity, we’ve had elites that yoked the work of an underclass and only recently (in the last few centuries) have we been able to recognize this is not a good thing and will ultimately lead to the downfall of human civilization on a short time frame (say, the next few centuries as an upper limit).
This may be the fate of the human ape, and while I’d rather we worked out how to organize well enough to go to space and colonize other worlds (what I think would require an egalitarian system), I acknowledge that we just may not be socially developed enough. It’s telling that billionaires don’t invest their gains into massive humanitarian projects that could put their statue in every state park worldwide. Many of them could become the god of Haiti if they wanted and yet none of them do. They invest in charities that are fit to market how much good they’re doing, rather than actually doing major good, and when they think of massive works, they automatically consider profit motives. That’s telling to me.
But not all hope is lost. We’ve psychological tricks to run against our less-than-social instincts before, and as we develop more collective self-awareness (such as our more general awareness of mental health language) we might be able to rise above our tribalist tendencies towards a collective system. Perhaps in the looming population correction we’ll be able to see that the capitalist, transactional society we made lead us to the climate crisis and a cascade failure of the state, and instead of choosing to cling to tradition we’ll decide to try something else.
It’s a far reach, but the only other option is to get comfortable with the risk of human extinction.
You can derive it from yourself and not a greater ‘supernatural’ purpose. For example, I have accepted I will die and that there is no meaning to life, I might even be an anti-natalist, but that doesn’t mean I just give up and live in despair. I’m alive and so with that life I act in my own self-interest to make the world better because it’s what makes my existence have a meaning.
“making the world better” is an intangible idea that you are choosing to believe in. If you get comfort from that faith then I’m happy for you
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That makes me feel so great about life. Why would I ever turn to faith.
In our society, one that teems with parasitic behavior between its individual members, yes, it raises a question why we might want to live without higher meaning. Sartre didn’t address it until late in life, but Camus recognize that most people at least commit philosophical suicide (that is, take a leap of faith) if the choice is between that or committing literal suicide. It’s why he offers embracing the absurd, imagining Sisyphus happy, and finding a way to get there, yourself.
To be fair, I’m not even there yet, finding that my society has willfully betrayed me from my childhood (as it does for all kids in the US) trying to create an obedient and disposable laborer / soldier to build vanity projects for billionaires, rather than prepare us to shape society the way we want it as we grow into it. Ours is now a gerontocracy as well as a plutocracy, while the kids have their own ideas and are looking to defy the natural social order.
So my story and yours is in how we break free from the fetters and find our own way. Or not, as the case may be.
Fuck Camus.
Yes. We all start here and it sucks.
Strangely, it’s why I’m ruthlessly sympathetic of everyone no matter how crabby they are.
I don’t really know anyone who lives life for some higher meaning. The people I see are just trying to get through the week.
You won’t ever be able to overcome the ills of society alone, by yourself you’ll never be able to “break free from the fetters and find your own way” Making a better society requires coordinated collective effort. Religion bonds people together in a very rare way. You can’t get people to work together in a coordinated way without some ideal in their minds, they have to believe that their effort might not help themselves directly but might help make future civilization a better place. That takes faith of one kind or another.
That takes faith of one kind or another.
Bullshit. You can choose any number of career or volunteer paths that demonstrably help people or society without needing any “faith”.
Here’s the context of that sentence that you are quoting: “You can’t get people to work together in a coordinated way without some ideal in their minds, they have to believe that their effort might not help themselves directly but might help make future civilization a better place. That takes faith of one kind or another.”
I was talking about getting people to work together for a better world, not an individual choice"
Loads of people work together for the betterment of mankind without any sort of faith.
You’re right that changing society requires a movement, but I was talking about the individual process.
And yes, few of us find a real opportunity to find a way to create for ourselves some wiggle-room such as Winston and his nook-journal hidden away outside the surveillance of Big Brother. (Our world teems with infant perishing from famine or infectious disease, so just by getting literate and on the internet, you’ve gotten far.)
I think of the chaos of complexity that allowed cloned dinosaurs to breed, to migrate off Isla Nublar and to survive despite a lysine dependency. Our oppressive system is rife with such opportunities even if it’s to pirate movies for diabled folk who couldn’t otherwise afford to otherwise see them. Or for that matter, our own kids.
Steps to escape the cages might be tiny in the moment, but they can sometimes add up.
Religion bonds people together in a very rare way
It’s called brainwashing.
Weak minded lol
Life is what it is. Grow a spine and face reality.
I agree. Life is what it is. Reality sucks. That’s why faith is so alluring. People aren’t robots, emotions are core to the human experience.
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Determination and grit are emotions
Good ones, too
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Not once gets deleted from reality during the Battle of Terra
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More blood for the Blood God.
Uhhh don’t you mean Yahweh
Eh less people would have gotten it if it said it like that
Ahura Mazda is still going strong, considering he’s the deity of the oldest monotheistic religion.
Much like my old Mazda 6, nothing short of my ex girlfriend was able to kill that
Inaccurate. Neopagans and reconstructionists exist, and have growing communities. A thing doesn’t have to be the most popular thing to be alive and well.
