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Author | Topic: Could Trump Instigate A New Civil War? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
What does it even mean to throw God away? What does it even mean to throw Jesus away? What does it even mean to throw Vishnu away? What does it even mean to throw Wotan away? Gods is gods. (borrowing from a catchphrase in a fast food commercial from the 80's)
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.3
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All Deities are not alike. There is only one. Oh, not even close! We have created countless deities, far too many to ever count. Even among those who claim as a collective to believe on "only one", every single believer within that collective has created his own personal deity, but since everyone within the collective all claim that it's the same as all other members believe in nobody ever realizes that their own personal deity is different from everybody else's. Even Christianity has multiple deities and I'm not talking any Trinitarian nonsense here. And we repeatedly see "true Christians" called "creationists" zealously "serving God" with lies and deception and other mean nasty stuff which actual Christian doctrine identify as instead serving another Christian deity, the Lord of Lies.
As an atheist/secular humanist, you likely think that we all collectively make up our God by trying to be good and noble to each other. Ha! Right! Since when did "true believers" ever try to be good and noble about anything, let alone to each other? Also, you're lost in the muck and the mire of your sectarianism and so cannot see the big picture that an outsider can easily see quite clearly. I remember an epiphany I had talking with someone from a narrow "fundamentalist" congregation. Only she bristled immediately at being called that, since that applied to those apostates! It turns out that while all those myriad sects (Should we call them "Legion" for they are many? Please don't tell me that Bible reference went right over your head.) that are virtually identical to each other in almost every single way as to be indistinguishable to external observers, whereas among themselves they are strongly divided on very finely split hairs of theological differences -- they can immediately identify unsurmountable differences between each other while they all just look exactly the same to us. Despite the following quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an awareness of perspective is still important: quote: In the story's narrative, Zaphod Beeblebrox had, unbeknownst to him, been transported into a bubble universe that had been created just for him. So when he was condemned to having his brain annihilated by the Total Perspective Vortex, all it ended up doing was to inflate his ego manifold (not that it wasn't already over-inflated) since that he was the most important thing in that universe.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.3
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Which reminds me of a story in which almost everybody in all of history (save for four) all ended up going to Hell just because for any individual there was somebody who believed that his kind was damned to Hell.
M*A*D. Mutually Assured Damnation.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
I'll offer a little something to munch on with your morning coffee: Pascal's Wager, which was offered to me in a proselytizing attempt as "after-life insurance" which I discuss on my page of the same name.
Most people, myself included, have not read the original in Pascal's Pensées, but the basic argument as most understand it you can arrive at four conclusions from two binary premises in which you either win or lose: "Either God exists or He doesn't" and "Either you believe in God or you don't." Refer to either or the two links above for a presentation of those conclusions, but in popular usage:
The Wager is plagued by all kinds of bad assumptions, some of which have leaked in over time, such as the assumption that believing costs you nothing (absolutely wrong!), that everyone benefits from religion (absolutely wrong!), etc. Read the discussion on my page. On my links page I link to a parody "news article" from no longer extant Religion Detox that I reconstructed from a printout, Pascal's Casinos Under Fire. In that article, Pascal's Casinos lured in customers with the promise of sure-win games when in reality those customers were losing their shirts (plus, once you play at Pascal's you are forbidden to play at any other casino). Basically, from my "after-life insurance" page:
quote: Two of the worst assumptions made by invokers of Pascal's Wager are: 1) the odds of God existing or not are even, 50/50, and 2) that there's only one possible definition for "God" and everybody who uses that word means the exact same thing by it. Here is my discussion of the Wager's problems:
quote: In case you missed it there, the "God" in Pascal's Wager was the Catholic god, which makes you as a heretic Protestant damned for Eternity. And not only is it extremely improbable to choose the right god, but agnostic and ignostic truths make even that impossible. We cannot know anything objective about the supernatural because it is outside our human abilities to detect it let alone study it. All we have to go by are subjective feelings and unfounded assumptions which form the quicksand foundations for massive and intricate theological structures ever fearful of being toppled by the slightest breeze. Now, of course, if one decides to use a god-based approach, then that is that person's own choice and he's free to do so. But he is not free to insist to others that his own personal choice must also be accepted by everybody else. And I would hope that in deciding on a god that that person would do so with his eyes open (and brain engaged) enough to realize that his choice of god is arbitrary regardless of how necessary that choice is to his god-based approach. I should also mention how you're pushing our buttons. Christians and other religious fanatics have a long and very bloody history of prosecuting others even to the point of annihilating them just for the purpose of imposing their gods on others. Whenever a Christian tries to force his god on us, we see that extremely ugly side of Christianity coming out and we do not like it one bit! Not unlike when Republicans start talking about "tax cuts" (Reagan's much touted "tax cuts" caused our taxes to nearly double despite our being lower middle class homeowners).
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