RE: Fear of hell, advice please
March 4, 2018 at 1:30 am
(This post was last modified: March 4, 2018 at 1:35 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(March 3, 2018 at 5:04 pm)haig Wrote:(March 2, 2018 at 5:03 am)Khemikal Wrote: Here's an opinion you won't get on af very often. I'm not sure what a lost belief in afterlives is supposed to do with atheism. Why, if a person stopped believing in them, they would suddenly stop believing in gods. It seems as if "god" is getting the short shrift in this exchange. Does there have to be an afterlife for there to be a god? Is the one somehow necessary to the other? I don't see why.
Correct me if I'm wrong but in all religions, the god creates the heaven and hell, so they are linked in their fairytale world.
Creator gods are a miniscule subset of all gods (usually the smallest set in any pantheon). That the most popular current religions (each a derivative of the same faith tradition) demand this attribute for their god is an artifact of the articles of their faith..but, just like the existence of an afterlife, the accuracy of the articles of their faith is not required for a god to exist either. As far as we can tell, the relationship went the other way round, in any case. People believed in afterlives long before they believed in anything we'd recogize as a god. They didn't consider one necessary for the other in either direction....even when they began to believe in both.
In essence, a person is considering whether or not to continue believing in gods if they happen to stop believing in one of a great many other things in the periphery of their religion. It's always possible that the one thing under consideration is untrue whilst the other is not. The colored stick theory of cattle breeding was wrong too..why should afterlives be the final straw?
Consider this. Every morning I take a shit, this causes the sun to rise. No need to thank me, yet another service I provide. Now, suppose in addition to believing that my morning shit causes he sun to rise I also believe that the sun will rise tommorrow (because I know I take a shit every morning). Well...I'm wrong about one thing, but being wrong about the one thing doesn't make me wrong about the other. My shits aren;t what make the sun rise, but it will rise. Perhaps there is no afterlife, but there is a god...or there is no god but there is an afterlife. This, ofc, humoring silly stories for the purposes of trying to get people who want to take them seriously to..you know, take them a little more seriously.
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