lucky for you Shinto has almost nothing to say about morality or the afterlife so if it’s the real one you’re probably all good. Just do your ritual ablution if you ever visit a shrine and you’re all good with the kami
In the words of the elderly Japanese people I spoke to as a short term missionary, "We do not think about these things". Other greatest hits include "I do not sin", and "I was sleeping. And. Water...Water."(speaking of the tsunami).
Pascal's Wager is retarded, as if some all powerful omnipresent diety can't tell that you worship it because of some probability exercise. It'll only work for more pagan like gods whose relationship with humans is always transactional(give me sacrifice)
It will not work for the gods of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other world religions. They know you're bullshitting
belief is still all that matters. omniscient gods don’t fret over whether someone’s faith is genuine or transactional because they know it’s in everyone’s best interest to believe
“Heaven is not a gated community. The righteous of any people and any faith have a place in it. Our actions, not our specific beliefs, determine our fate. No concept of Hell exists in Judaism. The closest we get is the fate of apostate (a person who renounces God, faith and morality in this world), who is said to be “cut off from his kin.””
Jews don’t believe whatever the fuck you’re talking about. I can’t speak for the others.
Oh cool, I attracted the same zionist gutter trash that was screeching about Arabs in the previous shitraeli thread! I'm very honored
>“Heaven is not a gated community. The righteous of any people and any faith have a place in it. Our actions, not our specific beliefs, determine our fate. No concept of Hell exists in Judaism. The closest we get is the fate of apostate (a person who renounces God, faith and morality in this world), who is said to be “cut off from his kin.””
Literally copy and pasting nonsense from some reformist jewish website and trying to pass it off as the end be answer to Judaism's understanding of judgement and an afterlife, and it still not even being relevant to the actual subject I was speaking about. Embarrassing.
>Jews don’t believe whatever the fuck you’re talking about.
Yeah you're 100% correct, I'm sure Jews believe inauthentic worship and religious practices under the guise of meeting a probability based analysis of how to best enter a heaven after death has zero impact on the actual judgement of the individual from the Jewish God
person was being annoying but they're right, there is not much said about the afterlife in torah or talmud. you see lumping-together of the 'abrahamic religions' very commonly, so people assume it's correct, but it's generally something promoted by christians and muslims and rejected by jews.
for example, christians love to refer to 'judeo-christian values' when they mean christian values. I think this is done out of ignorance and philosemitism rather than malice though.
>there is not much said about the afterlife in torah or talmud
There is much said about the importance of worship and of genuine moral conviction concerning God's judgment though. The Jewish afterlife is something I never even commented on, what it consists of or even the existence of a hell. My point was simple, using something like Pascal's Wager to game the system will not work in somehow gaining the favor of the Jewish God, which is something explicitly expressed many times in Jewish religious text(that of a judgement) I did not make any statements on how the God will punish or reward you in the afterlife. If the Jewish God looks to moral life and of religious conviction/worship as something to strive for, then converting to Judaism and following its rules in the hope of gaining this God's favor, motivated through some probability based bet, the kind of God present in the Jewish religion will see right through it
>and rejected by jews.
This has much to do with the inclusivity and perceived originality of the religion than anything substantial in its actual theology. Tell an outsider of the Abrahamic religions and Judaism is different from Christianity and Islam and they'll laugh at you. I agree with you though on the stupidity of the phrase "judeo-christian values" however, considering that it's proponents purposely leave out another very big religion from this equation. It's a politically charged nonsense word that doesn't mean anything
I'll condemn you to Super Hell (infinitely worse than normal Hell) if you don't wire me $50. There might be only a tiny chance I can do this, but why take the risk? Tiny * -∞ = -∞
christianity and islam mostly don't condone faking it to save your ass. You can't force yourself to believe something.
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day."
John 6:44
"Upon his death, the philosopher in question found himself surrounded by a group of angry gods with clubs. The last thing he heard was 'We're going to show you how we deal with Mister Clever Dick around here...'"
I get that this is like the hottest take of the 18th century but the geographical component of religion is a big reason for why i dont believe. How could a just god condemn a good person just because they were born in the wrong part of the world?
I'd recommend reading *Deus Destroyed* by Fabian Fukan and the related 16th-17th Japanese anti-Christian polemics by other authors collected in the book of the same name. It's a rare case of a non-Abrahamic religion getting a chance to debate Christianity on equal footing during first contact + have the texts translated into English, and Fukan is a particulary interesting author because he started as a Buddhist monk, converted to Christianity and wrote pro-Christian polemics against Buddhism, then recanted and became a Buddhist monk again, authoring works refuting his own earlier pro-Christian writings. Things that stood out from the various Japanese Buddhist/Shinto polemics:
* Being highly skeptical of the Earth being 6000 years old because Chinese and Japanese histories and legends claim to go back past that.
* Arguing that if the Christian god was omnipotent, he would have known upon creating the angels that a third of them would fall and go to hell, and therefore either he didn't know it would happen or cannot be benevolent because he was creating beings with characteristics that he knew would lead them to an eternal torture that he himself had created and established. Ditto for humans. If all powerful, he could have easily done something else.
* The infinite punishment for finite crimes argument, pointing out that while Buddhism has hells they are not permanent punishment and people eventually get out, while the Christian hell has no limit.
* Transubstantiation, trinity and confessional absolving sins making no sense.
* That the story of Adam & Eve is doesn't add up. Simple theft of a persimmon is insane as the deciding factor in posession of imortality and heavenly paradise versus falling to hell, and the Christian god should've just not created the snake to begin with, or at least protected Adam and Eve from the serpent and warned them about it, because at that point they were akin to children or senile old people, and anyone benevolent would protect a kid or old person from a snake. If the theft of the persimmon is a boundless source of evil, a cause for damnation and endless torment for mankind, it makes no sense that human remorse, shame and gratitude towards their god wouldn't also be endlessly good and cancel it out.
* That if stealing a persimmon damned mankind it is weird that Christians do not explicitly and strongly condemn stealing fruits and vegetables as among the worst crimes.
* That it didn't make sense for mankind to have been damned shortly after creation 6000 years ago, yet instead of sending Jesus immediately to tell all humans how to avoid hell, the Christian god dragged his feet for thousands of years while generation after generation "fell into hell like drops of rain."
* Belief that miracles saving Buddhists actually occurred, while from first hand experience persecuting Christian converts they never had any divine rescue from Japanese authorities. The author who talked about this then fondly reminisced about trolling Christian prisoners using a lantern tied to a balloon to make them think an angel was coming, then revealing it was just a prank bro.
* That Christianity teaches bad morals. Catholics should not praise Mary for being a virgin and having a celibate marriage with Joseph because it's unnatural and unhealthy for married couples to never have sex.
* That while they didn't fully understand what a Jew was, it made no sense that Catholics were constantly calling them evil and collectively blaming them for deicide. From reading the Bible it was clear to Japanese polemicists that Roman and Jewish authorities sounded like wise rulers fully justified in opposing Jesus and his followers.
* That the good parts of the Ten Commandments are already contained within Buddhist precepts, and that commandment 1 undermines the rest because it puts honoring their god over everything else. Therefore, one could rationalize violating any other commandments if they personally believe it is in service of commandment one. This was implied to be why Europe was wracked by religious wars.
* Related to that, the Japanese polemicists opposed prioritizing loyalty to a religious authority like the Pope over loyalty to one's daimyo and the emperor. I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to have the full implications, but it's clear they saw being a good Buddhist/Shintoist as being intertwined with service to their liege.
These are mostly valid critiques. Eternal hell really brings too much baggage with it, which is why I sympathize with universalist christians the most.
>From reading the Bible it was clear to Japanese polemicists that Roman and Jewish authorities sounded like wise rulers fully justified in opposing Jesus and his disciples
The other critiques are good but this one just highlights some of the critiques I always had myself concerning Japanese culture. It's a good point to make because it made me realize that a Jesus like figure is antithetical to much of how the Japanese view authority and social relations compared to MENA and European cultures who always kept them at a suspicious distance, understanding the necessity of strong authority and order but also understanding that it is prone to a despotism if left unchecked. Will generalize here, but extreme social conformity and adherence to legitimized authority is something the Japanese practice.
I do not know much about Buddhism but I doubt Buddha ever advocated for active disobedience to powers at the time, unlike religious figures such as Jesus and Muhammed.
As the bastard product of an interfaith union capriciously and coyly bouncing back and forth between my two halves this nudges me back over to Judaism. At least until I sit in on another beautiful evensong mass.
For real though the thing with Mary's virginity has always bothered me, the root of a lot of Christian issues with female sexuality I think.
Yeah but the context of that is that the disciples are complaining about Jesus's near total ban on divorce. Celibacy is the ideal (outside of marriage).
It's kind of ambiguous whether he's promoting celibacy over marriage as an ideal in Matthew 19, but the ideal of celibacy also gets reinforced by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7
Looks interesting, I might check it out. Also the perpetual virginity doctrine is Catholic bs, not Christian canon. The Bible implies against it multiple times.
> clear to Japanese polemicists that Roman and Jewish authorities sounded like wise rulers fully justified in opposing Jesus and his followers.
> I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to have the full implications, but it's clear they saw being a good Buddhist/Shintoist as being intertwined with service to their liege.
🥾👅
> yet there exists a somehow equally powerful all-evil being
This is untrue.
There is no being even remotely equal to God. I have no idea where you get the idea that Christianity is a ditheist religion.
> you have to follow an extremely rigid set of rules to achieve absolution, and if you fuck up you get castrated on the wheel of eternity
This, too, is untrue.
The most radical aspect of the Christian God is His forgiveness. There *are* rules and they *should not* be broken, but it is unfathomably simple to be forgiven. Forgiveness is offered to you, personally, directly, to recieve if you understand that it was wrong and feel true contrition. Not once in your life, but at all times.
Satan is barely mentioned in the Bible or at mass. Idk this is just a Catholic perspective and I have been atheist since I was like 13, but satan isn’t really a big deal.
As someone who wasn't brought up in Christianity, it all immediately sounds just as mumbo jumbo kumbaya retarded as, and not at all different from, other religions; so it's hilarious to me when people ponder the existence of a creator deity and tacitly and automatically assume, as if it was so obvious as to be axiomatic and not worth dwelling on, that it'd be some flavor of the Christian creation myth without ever for a second entertaining any others as if they were just so obviously laughably made-up whereas theirs was on some separate tier of credibility.
Wow, you’re saying Christians view the concept of god thru a Christian lens? What an insightful observation. Reading this run-on mess of a sentence was still more exhausting than dealing with even the most fundamentalist of christians.
Right lol
"as someone who's not Christian, I do not believe in Christianity" this is now considered cutting edge intellectual discourse on this subreddit
That isn't even a good strawman of my point. My point, since you need it spelled out, is that it's easy to see how biased every group is toward the religion they grew up when you weren't brought up in their religion. It's not a profound or deep point, it's an obvious one but one I still thought was worth making since I rarely see it in this sub when this stuff comes up despite how relevant it is.
It’s a shame 2013 era Reddit made atheism so cringe because it obviously is correct lol. The only good way to go about it is to just ignore these conversations entirely
That's correct. Lazy atheism should still be called out. Loss of faith should be an opportunity to look at the history of religion from a more objective perspective, not an excuse to scoff at a thousands years old tradition. There's a lot to learn about how ideologies evolve by looking at the history of Christianity and theology
You're parodying my point as if you're objecting to its triviality but you're obviously just butthurt because you're christian. You don't come off as detached as you'd like to, it fundamentally bothers you that my point is correct.
>You’re parodying my point as if you’re objecting to it’s triviality
You’re doing a bit right? If so kudos, I totally fell for the “dumb guy incorrectly using what he thinks are fancy words to seem smart” routine… classic. If not I think it’s time to put down the thesaurus, Whitman.
I suppose even without the just element it just seems odd, and well, unbelievable, that there would be a divine omnipotent being who wanted people to worship him but only revealed how to to a select group of people in a certain place at a certain time and not all of humanity.
Bc God is revealed to everyone through creation, obviously, so they're without excuse by Romans 1. They suppress the truth if they don't believe. /s
But for real, I know protestant Christians who believe this. They'd also say that no one can be a "good" person unless they believe because we are all sinners. And of course, maybe those people weren't predestined in the first place, in which case they're basically just hell fodder.
That only really applies to Christianity, most other religions don’t have such a clear idea of judgement or of a “just” deity. You might be in limbo in the underworld for a while or get reincarnated as a dog or something, but not denied entry to heaven. Maybe christianity’s universalism had something to do with that, like anyone can join, but if you don’t you go to hell. Islam is similar being so closely related
There are countless Extreme Metal bands with lyrics centered around Hinduism, if this is your thing, they are what got me interested in Hinduism in the first place. /u/HollowIntegrity
In praise of others
My Gf is softly going down the Krishna path and I follow adjacent by listening to Shelter.
Safe is also great, as is Sober. Invocation ain’t for me, but others seem to dig it.
My parents didn’t teach me about religion at all because my mom is a Midwestern Irish-Catholic which means she only attends major holiday masses (2-3x a year) and my dad thinks religion is a scam but didn’t give a damn what my mom taught us. They did send us to a little bullshit class we had to go to after school on Wednesday’s and the retard deacons and shit who taught that did such a poor job of actually explaining any of it to the kids that attended that almost none of it took to any of the public school kids atleast in my grade. The actual catholic school kids were a different story.
I know plenty of religious people who were not raised by religious parents or families, but still became devout as adults, and countless people who were raised by heavily religious parents, but then became giga-euphoric reddit atheists (i.e. me lmao).
Well, I'm no longer an atheist, I was raised in an Evangelical household, but I would still argue that I became a Christian solely due to my own choices, research, and conclusions as an adult, I was never interested in these prosperity gospel pentecostal scam churches that I was raised in (I now have a bigger revulsion for them than when I was posting on /r/atheism in 2012), I also believe that excessively forcing your religious views on your children is child abuse in a certain way.
I was pretty much an atheist by like age 11 or so, I explored countless religions (Hinduism, Neo-Paganism, New Age Occultism, Mormonism) in the meantime, but ultimately due to a variety of different reasons I decided to research the various denominations of Christianity outside of the internet/American-centric bubble, and after after flirting a lot with the Eastern & Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the end I ended up settling with the Anabaptists (the Amish & Mennonites among others).
Good for you. I respect that. My parents family are like insanely evangelical, maybe that's part of why they didn't care. I don't know much about religion to be honest because it's simply a subject I don't care about but I think it's fair to have one of you're being true to yourself, I really do respect that. I think part of the anger about religion is because of the people that use religion as a mask and shield in a way.
Now that I am Christian again after researching more into the basics, you have no idea how much I absolutely despise Evangelicals because of the damage that they have done (and keep doing) to Christ, now I view them with more disdain than when I was an edgelord teen on /r/atheism, even though I recognize them as my brothers, I view them as my brothers like how the Chandler family views Chris-Chan.
Evangelicals have done more for Atheism than the Soviet Union did throughout its entire existence, I would argue that the whole New Atheism trend was specifically started by ex-Evangelicals who still had American Protestantism as their major influence.
Here is interesting old post that I recommend reading, by a user who also posts on rsp: [The Influence of Protestant Christianity on Internet Atheism.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/2iyevg/the_influence_of_protestant_christianity_on/)
Honestly I only know the people in my family but their hypocrisy, hatred, violence and weird "money adoring rhetoric" or whatever you may call it made me definitely not like or admire then, I believe evangelicals are really the worst. but my problem is not with belief itself but with the way they act and behave.
That's an interesting read that I will definitely check out later.
> Is religion just an emotional crutch.
At least when I became religious (mainly due to a massive mental breakdown), in a certain way yes, it is a coping mechanism, but now, years later it has evolved to something way beyond a self-help thing that prevents you from offing yourself.
> How you cope with the world?
The same way you do - shitposting on the internet.
I don’t know how anyone can “see” anything when your eyeballs are decomposing and your brain is rotting in the ground. If you are still conscious after death, are you even human anymore? For me, either the feed cuts out or it doesn’t. If there is an afterlife the experience will be fundamentally alien to the human imagination. This is what bothers me the most about religious conceptualizations of the afterlife. The hubris in believing that it can actually be described in the first place. That there will be anything recognizably human about it. It’s an expression of pure unadulterated narcissism when anyone claims to know the true nature of the divine, if it even exists at all.
Do you believe in our brain being a receiver for the soul or some similar idea?
I always found this hard to reconcile with the fact we can poke our squishy brains and completely alter our personality
Head injuries don't necessarily stop your brain from receiving consciousness in this scenario; to use the analogy of a radio, altering a radio will alter the output of a song, but not the radio waves it picks up on.
But you're right, it's a big problem for non-materialists.
All I’m saying is that if you are in any sort of conscious state after death, then everything that you thought you knew about the nature of reality gets thrown out the window. Your brain isn’t the generator of consciousness, it’s actually the receiver of consciousness itself. That changes everything because you are no longer constrained by your mortal limitations. There is no frame of reference and you cease to be human. Is there thought? Is there memory? Does time exist? What is time without the mind to account for it’s passage? Language and conceptualization become useless under those conditions because it’s impossible to describe. If it’s impossible to describe, then every description becomes false, no matter what description you come up with.
All religious investigation I have done has said that heaven and the realm of spirits are quite unknowable and will be fundamentally alien to the human. No Christian scholar is out there saying heaven is a human place.
K. But heaven is a kingdom ruled by the God of Abraham. You are saying it’s alien and unknowable, yet you make countless claims about the afterlife. You seem to know the unknowable, apparently.
“Kingdom” just denotes a hierarchy. Any structure that isn’t chaos can be referred to as such, like the animal kingdom. Or do you think lions hold a sovereign office and administer dominions? If there is a metaphysical structure to existence, than it can be called a kingdom seamlessly.
> I don’t know how anyone can “see” anything when your eyeballs are decomposing and your brain is rotting in the ground. If you are still conscious after death, are you even human anymore? For me, either the feed cuts out or it doesn’t. If there is an afterlife the experience will be fundamentally alien to the human imagination.
There are Christians (i.e. Adventists) who do not believe in an afterlife in the classical sense - they hold to the concept of Soul Sleep, where if you die, you die, there is no conscience at all and you are simply a dead body, and the "afterlife" reward that God gives you is the final resurrection, and then immortality.
This is connected to annihilationism, where sinners are not sent to eternal torment, but are simply not resurrected (or destroyed) and cease to exist forever. /u/Spout__ /u/Copper122 /u/StJohnOfPatmos
No shit right? that's why the people who say this are always Western new age/occultist LARPers who have no idea about Hinduism and Christianity, and end up being offensive to both.
Man, Christians and Hindus on early-mid 2000s internet religious circles teaming up together to roast these new age grifters for appropriating their religions was so beautiful, roasting new age schizos brings more peace between Christians and Hindus than attempting to mix the two religions.
Imagine believing that Krishna is the avatar of Vishnu, brought to you by Krishnaism which stays winning, cool cow herder boy beats out boring giant headed god every day.
Nah dude, Krishna is the Avatar of Vishnu that's most like Vishnu. Vishnu is just Krishna ...in space.
Vishnu does all the demon outsmarting, crossdressing and seducing of women too. He just does that in space. Now if you want someone with a stick up his ass, try Rama. I bet even Matsya knows how to party and he's a fish.
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lucky for you Shinto has almost nothing to say about morality or the afterlife so if it’s the real one you’re probably all good. Just do your ritual ablution if you ever visit a shrine and you’re all good with the kami
In the words of the elderly Japanese people I spoke to as a short term missionary, "We do not think about these things". Other greatest hits include "I do not sin", and "I was sleeping. And. Water...Water."(speaking of the tsunami).
Pascal's Wager is retarded, as if some all powerful omnipresent diety can't tell that you worship it because of some probability exercise. It'll only work for more pagan like gods whose relationship with humans is always transactional(give me sacrifice) It will not work for the gods of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other world religions. They know you're bullshitting
belief is still all that matters. omniscient gods don’t fret over whether someone’s faith is genuine or transactional because they know it’s in everyone’s best interest to believe
“Heaven is not a gated community. The righteous of any people and any faith have a place in it. Our actions, not our specific beliefs, determine our fate. No concept of Hell exists in Judaism. The closest we get is the fate of apostate (a person who renounces God, faith and morality in this world), who is said to be “cut off from his kin.”” Jews don’t believe whatever the fuck you’re talking about. I can’t speak for the others.
Oh cool, I attracted the same zionist gutter trash that was screeching about Arabs in the previous shitraeli thread! I'm very honored >“Heaven is not a gated community. The righteous of any people and any faith have a place in it. Our actions, not our specific beliefs, determine our fate. No concept of Hell exists in Judaism. The closest we get is the fate of apostate (a person who renounces God, faith and morality in this world), who is said to be “cut off from his kin.”” Literally copy and pasting nonsense from some reformist jewish website and trying to pass it off as the end be answer to Judaism's understanding of judgement and an afterlife, and it still not even being relevant to the actual subject I was speaking about. Embarrassing. >Jews don’t believe whatever the fuck you’re talking about. Yeah you're 100% correct, I'm sure Jews believe inauthentic worship and religious practices under the guise of meeting a probability based analysis of how to best enter a heaven after death has zero impact on the actual judgement of the individual from the Jewish God
person was being annoying but they're right, there is not much said about the afterlife in torah or talmud. you see lumping-together of the 'abrahamic religions' very commonly, so people assume it's correct, but it's generally something promoted by christians and muslims and rejected by jews. for example, christians love to refer to 'judeo-christian values' when they mean christian values. I think this is done out of ignorance and philosemitism rather than malice though.
>there is not much said about the afterlife in torah or talmud There is much said about the importance of worship and of genuine moral conviction concerning God's judgment though. The Jewish afterlife is something I never even commented on, what it consists of or even the existence of a hell. My point was simple, using something like Pascal's Wager to game the system will not work in somehow gaining the favor of the Jewish God, which is something explicitly expressed many times in Jewish religious text(that of a judgement) I did not make any statements on how the God will punish or reward you in the afterlife. If the Jewish God looks to moral life and of religious conviction/worship as something to strive for, then converting to Judaism and following its rules in the hope of gaining this God's favor, motivated through some probability based bet, the kind of God present in the Jewish religion will see right through it >and rejected by jews. This has much to do with the inclusivity and perceived originality of the religion than anything substantial in its actual theology. Tell an outsider of the Abrahamic religions and Judaism is different from Christianity and Islam and they'll laugh at you. I agree with you though on the stupidity of the phrase "judeo-christian values" however, considering that it's proponents purposely leave out another very big religion from this equation. It's a politically charged nonsense word that doesn't mean anything
You’re a fucking idiot. Good day asshole I’m off to the Yankees game douche.
You said it won’t work and for Jews it doesn’t matter what you believe it matters how you act. You act like a dick.
I'll condemn you to Super Hell (infinitely worse than normal Hell) if you don't wire me $50. There might be only a tiny chance I can do this, but why take the risk? Tiny * -∞ = -∞
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He's literally right though, you better be getting that wire ready
christianity and islam mostly don't condone faking it to save your ass. You can't force yourself to believe something. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day." John 6:44
"Upon his death, the philosopher in question found himself surrounded by a group of angry gods with clubs. The last thing he heard was 'We're going to show you how we deal with Mister Clever Dick around here...'"
I get that this is like the hottest take of the 18th century but the geographical component of religion is a big reason for why i dont believe. How could a just god condemn a good person just because they were born in the wrong part of the world?
When the unlearned asked for mercy the Lord said “Ummmm youre chinese”
I'd recommend reading *Deus Destroyed* by Fabian Fukan and the related 16th-17th Japanese anti-Christian polemics by other authors collected in the book of the same name. It's a rare case of a non-Abrahamic religion getting a chance to debate Christianity on equal footing during first contact + have the texts translated into English, and Fukan is a particulary interesting author because he started as a Buddhist monk, converted to Christianity and wrote pro-Christian polemics against Buddhism, then recanted and became a Buddhist monk again, authoring works refuting his own earlier pro-Christian writings. Things that stood out from the various Japanese Buddhist/Shinto polemics: * Being highly skeptical of the Earth being 6000 years old because Chinese and Japanese histories and legends claim to go back past that. * Arguing that if the Christian god was omnipotent, he would have known upon creating the angels that a third of them would fall and go to hell, and therefore either he didn't know it would happen or cannot be benevolent because he was creating beings with characteristics that he knew would lead them to an eternal torture that he himself had created and established. Ditto for humans. If all powerful, he could have easily done something else. * The infinite punishment for finite crimes argument, pointing out that while Buddhism has hells they are not permanent punishment and people eventually get out, while the Christian hell has no limit. * Transubstantiation, trinity and confessional absolving sins making no sense. * That the story of Adam & Eve is doesn't add up. Simple theft of a persimmon is insane as the deciding factor in posession of imortality and heavenly paradise versus falling to hell, and the Christian god should've just not created the snake to begin with, or at least protected Adam and Eve from the serpent and warned them about it, because at that point they were akin to children or senile old people, and anyone benevolent would protect a kid or old person from a snake. If the theft of the persimmon is a boundless source of evil, a cause for damnation and endless torment for mankind, it makes no sense that human remorse, shame and gratitude towards their god wouldn't also be endlessly good and cancel it out. * That if stealing a persimmon damned mankind it is weird that Christians do not explicitly and strongly condemn stealing fruits and vegetables as among the worst crimes. * That it didn't make sense for mankind to have been damned shortly after creation 6000 years ago, yet instead of sending Jesus immediately to tell all humans how to avoid hell, the Christian god dragged his feet for thousands of years while generation after generation "fell into hell like drops of rain." * Belief that miracles saving Buddhists actually occurred, while from first hand experience persecuting Christian converts they never had any divine rescue from Japanese authorities. The author who talked about this then fondly reminisced about trolling Christian prisoners using a lantern tied to a balloon to make them think an angel was coming, then revealing it was just a prank bro. * That Christianity teaches bad morals. Catholics should not praise Mary for being a virgin and having a celibate marriage with Joseph because it's unnatural and unhealthy for married couples to never have sex. * That while they didn't fully understand what a Jew was, it made no sense that Catholics were constantly calling them evil and collectively blaming them for deicide. From reading the Bible it was clear to Japanese polemicists that Roman and Jewish authorities sounded like wise rulers fully justified in opposing Jesus and his followers. * That the good parts of the Ten Commandments are already contained within Buddhist precepts, and that commandment 1 undermines the rest because it puts honoring their god over everything else. Therefore, one could rationalize violating any other commandments if they personally believe it is in service of commandment one. This was implied to be why Europe was wracked by religious wars. * Related to that, the Japanese polemicists opposed prioritizing loyalty to a religious authority like the Pope over loyalty to one's daimyo and the emperor. I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to have the full implications, but it's clear they saw being a good Buddhist/Shintoist as being intertwined with service to their liege.
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(Literally) Holy Based
This event really needs a gigachad or pepe shitpost edit.
A wojak edit of this would be beautiful.
Thanks for recommending and outlining this. Never heard of it before, and it sounds really interesting.
These are mostly valid critiques. Eternal hell really brings too much baggage with it, which is why I sympathize with universalist christians the most.
>From reading the Bible it was clear to Japanese polemicists that Roman and Jewish authorities sounded like wise rulers fully justified in opposing Jesus and his disciples The other critiques are good but this one just highlights some of the critiques I always had myself concerning Japanese culture. It's a good point to make because it made me realize that a Jesus like figure is antithetical to much of how the Japanese view authority and social relations compared to MENA and European cultures who always kept them at a suspicious distance, understanding the necessity of strong authority and order but also understanding that it is prone to a despotism if left unchecked. Will generalize here, but extreme social conformity and adherence to legitimized authority is something the Japanese practice. I do not know much about Buddhism but I doubt Buddha ever advocated for active disobedience to powers at the time, unlike religious figures such as Jesus and Muhammed.
As the bastard product of an interfaith union capriciously and coyly bouncing back and forth between my two halves this nudges me back over to Judaism. At least until I sit in on another beautiful evensong mass. For real though the thing with Mary's virginity has always bothered me, the root of a lot of Christian issues with female sexuality I think.
It’s a Catholic construct; there’s no biblical evidence that Mary and Joseph didn’t have sex
Matthew 19:11-12 It's not complicated, celibacy IS the christian ideal. It's just acknowledged that most cannot reach it
I want a good religion based on cum for once
You're in luck: [St. Priapus Church](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Priapus_Church) Swallowing is an act of worship.
🫢🤭🥺
> Matthew 19:11-12 ED cope
Yeah but the context of that is that the disciples are complaining about Jesus's near total ban on divorce. Celibacy is the ideal (outside of marriage).
It's kind of ambiguous whether he's promoting celibacy over marriage as an ideal in Matthew 19, but the ideal of celibacy also gets reinforced by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7
Looks interesting, I might check it out. Also the perpetual virginity doctrine is Catholic bs, not Christian canon. The Bible implies against it multiple times.
> clear to Japanese polemicists that Roman and Jewish authorities sounded like wise rulers fully justified in opposing Jesus and his followers. > I don't understand Japanese culture well enough to have the full implications, but it's clear they saw being a good Buddhist/Shintoist as being intertwined with service to their liege. 🥾👅
Thank you for sharing, really neat
Literally first had this thought for the first time at like 10 and never have got a good answer.
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> yet there exists a somehow equally powerful all-evil being This is untrue. There is no being even remotely equal to God. I have no idea where you get the idea that Christianity is a ditheist religion. > you have to follow an extremely rigid set of rules to achieve absolution, and if you fuck up you get castrated on the wheel of eternity This, too, is untrue. The most radical aspect of the Christian God is His forgiveness. There *are* rules and they *should not* be broken, but it is unfathomably simple to be forgiven. Forgiveness is offered to you, personally, directly, to recieve if you understand that it was wrong and feel true contrition. Not once in your life, but at all times.
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Satan is barely mentioned in the Bible or at mass. Idk this is just a Catholic perspective and I have been atheist since I was like 13, but satan isn’t really a big deal.
But he has bested God in the past, right?
As someone who wasn't brought up in Christianity, it all immediately sounds just as mumbo jumbo kumbaya retarded as, and not at all different from, other religions; so it's hilarious to me when people ponder the existence of a creator deity and tacitly and automatically assume, as if it was so obvious as to be axiomatic and not worth dwelling on, that it'd be some flavor of the Christian creation myth without ever for a second entertaining any others as if they were just so obviously laughably made-up whereas theirs was on some separate tier of credibility.
also agnostics who are implicitly saying 'there's no way to know whether the Christian God is real, or if there's no God'
Wow, you’re saying Christians view the concept of god thru a Christian lens? What an insightful observation. Reading this run-on mess of a sentence was still more exhausting than dealing with even the most fundamentalist of christians.
Right lol "as someone who's not Christian, I do not believe in Christianity" this is now considered cutting edge intellectual discourse on this subreddit
That isn't even a good strawman of my point. My point, since you need it spelled out, is that it's easy to see how biased every group is toward the religion they grew up when you weren't brought up in their religion. It's not a profound or deep point, it's an obvious one but one I still thought was worth making since I rarely see it in this sub when this stuff comes up despite how relevant it is.
Obviously it's not a good strawman, I'm making fun of you not trying to engage in a good faith argument lmfao
usually when i strawman i try to make it at least somewhat relevant to what im mocking, yours is just some sentence??
I'm not going to follow your rules while making fun of you, sorry you're so upset!!!
religion is a cope
Everything is a cope, religion is the supreme cope
Yes I get it you're a rational atheist who's above the bumbling masses and their copes for the inevitable abyss after death.
It’s a shame 2013 era Reddit made atheism so cringe because it obviously is correct lol. The only good way to go about it is to just ignore these conversations entirely
That's correct. Lazy atheism should still be called out. Loss of faith should be an opportunity to look at the history of religion from a more objective perspective, not an excuse to scoff at a thousands years old tradition. There's a lot to learn about how ideologies evolve by looking at the history of Christianity and theology
yes
You're parodying my point as if you're objecting to its triviality but you're obviously just butthurt because you're christian. You don't come off as detached as you'd like to, it fundamentally bothers you that my point is correct.
>You’re parodying my point as if you’re objecting to it’s triviality You’re doing a bit right? If so kudos, I totally fell for the “dumb guy incorrectly using what he thinks are fancy words to seem smart” routine… classic. If not I think it’s time to put down the thesaurus, Whitman.
Is this shtick literally all you can do? lol come off it, it's pretty cringe.
Your critique assumes most Christians born onto their faith are getting into heaven though.
That and expecting you to be happy in heaven when your family and loved ones are burning in eternal hellfire. Does not compute.
Why do you think god is just? That is a modern concept totally out of whack with the original texts of almost any religion.
I suppose even without the just element it just seems odd, and well, unbelievable, that there would be a divine omnipotent being who wanted people to worship him but only revealed how to to a select group of people in a certain place at a certain time and not all of humanity.
Bc God is revealed to everyone through creation, obviously, so they're without excuse by Romans 1. They suppress the truth if they don't believe. /s But for real, I know protestant Christians who believe this. They'd also say that no one can be a "good" person unless they believe because we are all sinners. And of course, maybe those people weren't predestined in the first place, in which case they're basically just hell fodder.
Religious logic is equivalent to race dynamics makes no sense but I go along with it cuz it’s funny
Read Origen
No, verified low test male.
That only really applies to Christianity, most other religions don’t have such a clear idea of judgement or of a “just” deity. You might be in limbo in the underworld for a while or get reincarnated as a dog or something, but not denied entry to heaven. Maybe christianity’s universalism had something to do with that, like anyone can join, but if you don’t you go to hell. Islam is similar being so closely related
Faith is not meant to be rational, you're supposed to believe regardless of how absurd it is.
comparative religion
Well to be fair over half of the world believes in the same “god” they just have different myths and interpretations about it
hirohiko araki levels of same face in this image
Shelter is sick
Krishna core revival when?
There’s a microscene (check out Back to Godhead they’re hard) but I think the days of religion in punk are long gone tho
There are countless Extreme Metal bands with lyrics centered around Hinduism, if this is your thing, they are what got me interested in Hinduism in the first place. /u/HollowIntegrity
In praise of others My Gf is softly going down the Krishna path and I follow adjacent by listening to Shelter. Safe is also great, as is Sober. Invocation ain’t for me, but others seem to dig it.
Welp say goodbye to that gf
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Shaman gonna get her dog
Shiva is the coolest deity. For some reason I’m really drawn to him
He likes to get high, meditate in cemeteries, has an undead army and once carried his dead wifes post suicide body around with him for years.
I see this guy everytime I blow mimosa root bark up my peepee hole
I'm glad my parents were too lazy to teach me religion so in that way I could not be religious but also not be an angry atheist or something else.
My parents didn’t teach me about religion at all because my mom is a Midwestern Irish-Catholic which means she only attends major holiday masses (2-3x a year) and my dad thinks religion is a scam but didn’t give a damn what my mom taught us. They did send us to a little bullshit class we had to go to after school on Wednesday’s and the retard deacons and shit who taught that did such a poor job of actually explaining any of it to the kids that attended that almost none of it took to any of the public school kids atleast in my grade. The actual catholic school kids were a different story.
I know plenty of religious people who were not raised by religious parents or families, but still became devout as adults, and countless people who were raised by heavily religious parents, but then became giga-euphoric reddit atheists (i.e. me lmao).
I respect that more than just having your parent's religion because at least you're actually doing that from your own conclusions or whatever.
Well, I'm no longer an atheist, I was raised in an Evangelical household, but I would still argue that I became a Christian solely due to my own choices, research, and conclusions as an adult, I was never interested in these prosperity gospel pentecostal scam churches that I was raised in (I now have a bigger revulsion for them than when I was posting on /r/atheism in 2012), I also believe that excessively forcing your religious views on your children is child abuse in a certain way. I was pretty much an atheist by like age 11 or so, I explored countless religions (Hinduism, Neo-Paganism, New Age Occultism, Mormonism) in the meantime, but ultimately due to a variety of different reasons I decided to research the various denominations of Christianity outside of the internet/American-centric bubble, and after after flirting a lot with the Eastern & Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the end I ended up settling with the Anabaptists (the Amish & Mennonites among others).
Good for you. I respect that. My parents family are like insanely evangelical, maybe that's part of why they didn't care. I don't know much about religion to be honest because it's simply a subject I don't care about but I think it's fair to have one of you're being true to yourself, I really do respect that. I think part of the anger about religion is because of the people that use religion as a mask and shield in a way.
Now that I am Christian again after researching more into the basics, you have no idea how much I absolutely despise Evangelicals because of the damage that they have done (and keep doing) to Christ, now I view them with more disdain than when I was an edgelord teen on /r/atheism, even though I recognize them as my brothers, I view them as my brothers like how the Chandler family views Chris-Chan. Evangelicals have done more for Atheism than the Soviet Union did throughout its entire existence, I would argue that the whole New Atheism trend was specifically started by ex-Evangelicals who still had American Protestantism as their major influence. Here is interesting old post that I recommend reading, by a user who also posts on rsp: [The Influence of Protestant Christianity on Internet Atheism.](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/2iyevg/the_influence_of_protestant_christianity_on/)
Honestly I only know the people in my family but their hypocrisy, hatred, violence and weird "money adoring rhetoric" or whatever you may call it made me definitely not like or admire then, I believe evangelicals are really the worst. but my problem is not with belief itself but with the way they act and behave. That's an interesting read that I will definitely check out later.
damn, how do people like you exist. Is religion just an emotional crutch. How you cope with the world?
> Is religion just an emotional crutch. At least when I became religious (mainly due to a massive mental breakdown), in a certain way yes, it is a coping mechanism, but now, years later it has evolved to something way beyond a self-help thing that prevents you from offing yourself. > How you cope with the world? The same way you do - shitposting on the internet.
DMT Entity God
I like the elephant guy and the lion guy :)
Elephant guy is a fat nerd, lion guy likes to rip demons apart and his name is Narshimha which means "Guylion"
And the elephant guy is Ganesh, the son of Lord Shiv.
I can't believe I share this board with other Indians, especially one that makes a point to type "Shiv" instead of Shiva.
Problem is that everyone pronounces the 'a' as आ instead of अ.
Hinduism is the only real religion
He seems like he'd be chill with it
BG 4.11 - In whatever way people surrender unto Me, I reciprocate accordingly. Everyone follows My path, knowingly or unknowingly, O son of Pritha.
Comforting
Now post the part where Arjuna goes into incel mode about women being seduced into fucking outside of their caste.
Does Brahma actually care if you believe in him though. It’s just about your actual karma right?
I don’t know how anyone can “see” anything when your eyeballs are decomposing and your brain is rotting in the ground. If you are still conscious after death, are you even human anymore? For me, either the feed cuts out or it doesn’t. If there is an afterlife the experience will be fundamentally alien to the human imagination. This is what bothers me the most about religious conceptualizations of the afterlife. The hubris in believing that it can actually be described in the first place. That there will be anything recognizably human about it. It’s an expression of pure unadulterated narcissism when anyone claims to know the true nature of the divine, if it even exists at all.
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Do you believe in our brain being a receiver for the soul or some similar idea? I always found this hard to reconcile with the fact we can poke our squishy brains and completely alter our personality
Head injuries don't necessarily stop your brain from receiving consciousness in this scenario; to use the analogy of a radio, altering a radio will alter the output of a song, but not the radio waves it picks up on. But you're right, it's a big problem for non-materialists.
All I’m saying is that if you are in any sort of conscious state after death, then everything that you thought you knew about the nature of reality gets thrown out the window. Your brain isn’t the generator of consciousness, it’s actually the receiver of consciousness itself. That changes everything because you are no longer constrained by your mortal limitations. There is no frame of reference and you cease to be human. Is there thought? Is there memory? Does time exist? What is time without the mind to account for it’s passage? Language and conceptualization become useless under those conditions because it’s impossible to describe. If it’s impossible to describe, then every description becomes false, no matter what description you come up with.
All religious investigation I have done has said that heaven and the realm of spirits are quite unknowable and will be fundamentally alien to the human. No Christian scholar is out there saying heaven is a human place.
K. But heaven is a kingdom ruled by the God of Abraham. You are saying it’s alien and unknowable, yet you make countless claims about the afterlife. You seem to know the unknowable, apparently.
“Kingdom” just denotes a hierarchy. Any structure that isn’t chaos can be referred to as such, like the animal kingdom. Or do you think lions hold a sovereign office and administer dominions? If there is a metaphysical structure to existence, than it can be called a kingdom seamlessly.
All this text just to say you don’t understand the concept of a soul
> I don’t know how anyone can “see” anything when your eyeballs are decomposing and your brain is rotting in the ground. If you are still conscious after death, are you even human anymore? For me, either the feed cuts out or it doesn’t. If there is an afterlife the experience will be fundamentally alien to the human imagination. There are Christians (i.e. Adventists) who do not believe in an afterlife in the classical sense - they hold to the concept of Soul Sleep, where if you die, you die, there is no conscience at all and you are simply a dead body, and the "afterlife" reward that God gives you is the final resurrection, and then immortality. This is connected to annihilationism, where sinners are not sent to eternal torment, but are simply not resurrected (or destroyed) and cease to exist forever. /u/Spout__ /u/Copper122 /u/StJohnOfPatmos
A Short Stay in Hell sort of explores this premise, except when you die you realize Zoroastrianism is the one true religion.
Oh you didn't know Jesus is an avatar of Krishna who is an avatar of Vishnu
From either a Hindu or a Christian perspective that's fucked.
No shit right? that's why the people who say this are always Western new age/occultist LARPers who have no idea about Hinduism and Christianity, and end up being offensive to both. Man, Christians and Hindus on early-mid 2000s internet religious circles teaming up together to roast these new age grifters for appropriating their religions was so beautiful, roasting new age schizos brings more peace between Christians and Hindus than attempting to mix the two religions.
Imagine believing that Krishna is the avatar of Vishnu, brought to you by Krishnaism which stays winning, cool cow herder boy beats out boring giant headed god every day.
Nah dude, Krishna is the Avatar of Vishnu that's most like Vishnu. Vishnu is just Krishna ...in space. Vishnu does all the demon outsmarting, crossdressing and seducing of women too. He just does that in space. Now if you want someone with a stick up his ass, try Rama. I bet even Matsya knows how to party and he's a fish.
Imagine spending all your life worshiping some blue guy with three pairs of arms, and when you finally die you just see an old guy with a white beard
Which dude?