And you know what, that might just very well be true if we’re talking about some supernatural force that is indifferent to its creations, not out of malice, but because it simply is truly neutral.
But as evidence for the religious capital ‘G’ God, the one who communicates and plans every little detail because he loves us so much? What is the point of these “subtle” proofs that took thousands of years to be studied and recorded when he has shown that he can just pop up anywhere or perform miracles and whatever the fuck.
It is no coincidence that the vast majority, possibly 99%, of devout religious people do not give a shit about using math to explain god because it’s all proven in their holy books. It is no coincidence that the “empirical” evidence is, in reality, just pointing at the existence of features and concepts of math and science rather than utilizing said features and concepts to prove the existence of god. And no, philosophical musings about morality using the language of mathematical proofs does not count as utilizing math and science (literally, all the axioms in these types of "proofs" are subjective shit like "bad" and "good" and not, say, the difference between 1 and 0).
And I didn’t even want to make a post dunking on religion, but I’m irritated because YouTube recommended some dumbass video by a channel called “Reformed Zoomer” and one of the arguments is “there is an infinite range of numbers between two numbers, and if we turn those numbers into letters, then every book possible has already been written. Checkmate atheoids”. https://youtu.be/z0hxb5UVaNE?si=RpjF6S0fHiF71iH-
there's a huge leap from these vapid deistic arguments that christian apologists make all the time and the god they claim we should believe in. i genuinely have more respect for the "molecular biology is in the koran" dorks
i genuinely have more respect for the "molecular biology is in the koran" dorks
Still less fun than the "UFO propulsion secrets are in Hindu and Jain sacred texts" ones
Studying the history of religion turned me into an atheist (or at least agnostic), and I honestly have trouble understanding why it doesn't do that to everyone. Organized religions change their doctrine according to the spiritual needs of the society they preach to, not according to what some ancient all powerful being dictated at some point, and it's completely obvious that that happens even if you just observe the way religious figures change behavior in real time and use your memory to spot the changes.
Like, why would God change their opinion on homosexuality? If they're omniscient then they should have been right all along, which either means that certain church leaders are softening on the issue as a cynical ploy to get more followers, or they don't actually have a clue what God believes and are just making it up on the spot - either way, whether or not a God exists is irrelevant, because the inescapable conclusion is that organized religions don't speak for them and are just making shit up.
The histories of Mormonism and Scientology are incredibly funny and probably mirrors the olden days
I came up with that quote one day and thought I was hot shit, then I learned Feuerbach said it first
Studying the history of religion turned me into an atheist (or at least agnostic), and I honestly have trouble understanding why it doesn't do that to everyone.
Same. I want every Christian to watch this. It's not a Reddit Atheist spiel, it's just an honest straightforward history of their own religion made by a buy who is himself religious.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I honestly have more respect for people who use their faith as their evidence for the existence of God because at least they respect themselves and others enough to not pretend to understand hard science to prove you wrong.
That's where I'm at. Used to be big into all the philosophical arguments, then quickly realized philosophy is much more complicated than I gave it credit for.
How do you feel about the people who just point to miracles as evidence? Even as a kid I always thought that it was a little weird that we'd chalk up someone's knee healing as an act of God. But there are some miracles/apparitions that, if they really happened as described, you'd think would get more attention. I still don't think they make good evidence, but it's weird that they don't get brought up as often as the weak philosophical arguments.
I don’t even know where I am at with my understanding of reality, so I can’t be anything but agnostic
Maybe that will change when we figure out consciousness
I like the one that goes, "if conditions had been just a bit different, we wouldn't exist".
Yeah cool well if we didn't exist we couldn't observe these conditions required for our existence dummies. And have you considered all possible configurations of sentient life under the other conditions? Maybe some really weird plasma aliens would exist and have the same thoughts
Imo if there is a 'God', they are a sadistic monster. Millions of deaths, starvation, diseases etc.
This was my view too. But nowadays for the sake of sanity, I lean toward a more primal theory. That is, maybe god creates and destroys the same a lion does - without any awareness or thought besides instinct
The blind idiot god azazthoh. To whom we are but part of their dreams. Should they wake we will be no more than any dream once the sleeper wakes. ia ia
That's the most annoying aspect of organized religion. They need to be ordered around by some ultimate authority telling them what to do. I follow an indigenous belief system and the differences between a spiritual belief system vs organized religion are night and day. Unfortunately, I've seen too many Western leftists act like the two are one and the same. Often mocking indigenous beliefs as "nature worship" or "ancestor worship."
The types who go out of their way to dismiss these beliefs from a group of people who don't actively seek converts remind me of Neoliberals dismissing Communism because their Econ books and professors have shown them why it's inherently flawed and wrong.
There is something about how, in the west, gods become dehumanized.
It went from Pan being horny and Loki playing pranks, capricious gods with human emotions, and transformed into a slave-master who lacks all human traits due to being intrinsically perfect who we must love or else.
I think western religion - and hey probably all other organized religion for all I know but I’m familiar only with western religion - lost its spiritual content because it was repurposed as a tool to enforce power hierarchies.
I am just ranting and I hope not mansplaining anything but I feel that the reason why Christianity seems so empty of real meaning is basically because the Christianity we’ve received is a construct of the Roman Empire and its power structures and later of European monarchies. What meaning can come from that? Of course it’s empty.
The mistake that Dawkins-atheists make is to extend this criticism to spirituality in general. But spirituality is clearly something we have as humans.
nope christianity is not uniquely bound by the political expedients that harnessed it as a tool. this is just mystification of other religions that you're not as informed about the repressive instruments of, either because they were marginalized by the europeans or liberated from them. it's mostly academic today how traditional chinese belief systems were used for violence and oppression (though it still rears its head toward reaction from time to time), but that's a modern political effort, not a verdict on its history. Buddhists also get off easy in western spiritualism and that's because the communists murked their most odious examples
The real proof that God exists is that sometimes things make penises hard when they shouldn't and the only reason that could happen is if it was a test from God because WHY ELSE WOULD PEEPEE GET HARD AHHHH
I suppose that's pretty uncharitable to some people, but also I fucking hate how often these assholes use religion to protect and rationalize child abuse
Anselm of Canterbury's proof of God, the foundation of most philosophical apologia, is that God is the greatest, and if you could imagine something was just as cool as him but actually existed he wouldn't be the coolest, so he must exist in order to be the coolest.
Anselm's Proof later got completely destroyed by a five year old asking him "but what if there was something as cool as god but he also had a gun?"
It actually got owned by a contemporary saying "Ok now imagine a super cool PLACE instead"
proving there's a god by using Discrete Math proofs which show there's no largest number
This proof relies on the existence of upper bound on coolness, so we now need to prove it.
this is so used soooo frequently in discussions about biology. the argument literally just boils down to "i think the biological mechanisms of life are too complex and so obviously some insanely intelligent thing made it". for some reason, it's easier for some to believe that a hyper intelligent god made biological mechanisms than that they occurred simply by chance and millions of years of trial and error that refined them. besides, they aren't even that efficient sometimes. mRNA synthesis begins with abortive initiation, where the RNA polymerase will try several times to begin synthesizing the chain but it will just fall off after a few nucleotides and the process has to start again, until it just, by chance, happens to make it past the first few. does that sound like the doing of a hyper intelligent entity? it doesn't, it sounds like something that has been hastily put together by nature and whatever works works. when you look at the whole thing, it can definitely look insanely complex, but when you start looking at the details it becomes obvious that its just nature trying to find something that works and then sticking with it with a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude.
What no dialectics does to a mfer, pretty much. I guess its more "interesting" to believe in an omnipotent creator than in the sum of small quantitative changes throughout time.
Religion does not exist because of evidence/proof for it, or evidence against it, or a lack of evidence either way. Anyone arguing for this is lost. The reason religions or spiritual beliefs exist is simple, and it has nothing to do with proving if God exists or not:
Nevertheless, another reading can be made of Marx. The often cited phrase--"religion is the opium of the people"--is truncated. What follows this remark lets it be understood that human beings need opium, because they are metaphysical animals who cannot avoid asking themselves questions about the meaning of life. They give what answers they can, either adopting those offered by religion or inventing new ones, or else they avoid worrying about them.
As for why the major monotheistic religions, mainly the Abrahamic ones, operate in the way they do, Marx helps explain it. Man created religion, religion did not create man. So what religion states is above in heaven is used to legitimise the current order of what is taking place on earth. Thus from there, critique of religion becomes critique of law, politics, social organisation and society itself, as Marx states. I will give an example below if how religion has been used to legitimise patriarchy, and how critique of that eventually becomes critique of religious fundamentalism.
Is monotheism really a wonderful advance in the history of thought, a qualitative progress? There are plenty of cunning minds (but when you say cunning, you could as well say ill-intentioned or malign, inspired by the Devil) who draw a parallel between this unique God (who is represented in the popular imagination, if not in the purified vision of the learned, as an old man with a white beard, a symbol of wisdom and authority) and the patriarch of the patriarchal system, the autocrat of the power systems. In this imagery, which adequately reflects what is actually experienced, it is obvious that the wise old male is closer to God than a woman or a youth. This is a projection into heaven that legitimizes the patriarchal order and autocracy which prevails on earth. In addition, the elimination of female deities, always important in non-monotheist religions, only accentuates patriarchal domination. Those cunning minds will add that this only and all powerful God deprives them, poor bastfards, of all power.
- All quotes are from Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy. A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism by Samir Amin.
Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion [...] Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. [...] It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.Thanks for posting the full quote in context. There is so much that can be extrapolated from there. I have already posted some neo Marxist analysis by Samir Amin on the monotheistic Abrahamic religions in the comments here.
You're welcome but I feel obligated to point out that I did leave some parts out, namely where the [...] are.
here's the full text
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
Also Marx has a lot of italics which frankly changes the tone of some of the text.
pi has infinite digits but universe is finite, so uh.... god.
And that's why you can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.
“there is an infinite range of numbers between two numbers, and if we turn those numbers into letters, then every book possible has already been written. Checkmate atheoids”.
I realized that about 20+ years ago and it was probably a a huge step towards me becoming a communist. They basically described The Commons and that Intellectual Property is theft.
God is just a joke that a small group created a website about in 1994 and people took it too seriously
