(September 10, 2017 at 1:25 am)Rhondazvous Wrote: A christian can sew seeds to the flesh all week then go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure. I can't do that.
I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be honest about the person I'm looking at. I have to be able to sleep with myself at night.
To go back to church now and "rest in god's forgiveness" would be like tasting the red pill and trying to go back to the blue pill. Like tasting reality and trying to go back to the illusion.
Hold onto your illusion if that's what you need to do, but I'm unwilling to go through the effort it would take to psyche myself out that way.
I wouldn't limit flawed humans to one label or the excuses they make to justify being flawed. Having just finally found place to take my dog, having been wracked with guilt living in fear, and having lived in a dumpster for over a year, I am no fan of judging those with problems. I would only agree that it was me, not a cosmic hero saving me or a ground troll causing me to allow my life to get that bad. I was the one who finally got help and no magical being exists that got me that help.
But there are different motifs for every religion, even Hindus and Buddhists have their superstitions as to why humans do good or bad. Reincarnation and Karma are Asian superstitions that depict in different detail the same "accountability" and "punishment, reward" ideas.
Motifs of making mistakes or doing bad chalked up to magic and divine are not a patent owned by one religion, but exist in every religion because humans really simply don't want to accept that if we want to reduce suffering, or harming others, then we only have each other to look for ways to reduce those things.
Point being, even as atheists, nobody is perfect, we are human beings too, and we hurt others and we make mistakes too. I would say that all religions take our species behaviors and turn them into comic book explanations. There is nothing invisible out there helping humans, all we have are each other.
