My philosophy about Religion

[Belacqua]

First off, fuck evangelicals

Yuck, no thanks. They're not my type.

second, nobody knows how morality came about but that was just me trying to brainstorm, as for the lightning gods? Im not sure about how they came up with them, but I wouldn't be surprised if what I said has to do something with it. 

Yes, it's the sort of thing that sounds plausible as brainstorming. I think that nobody really knows, however, and if we want to be strict about the truth (unlike evangelicals) it's best if we don't overstate things. We don't really know.

Incapable of getting angry you say? I don't know but having billions of people burnt in fire sounds pretty aggressive/angry to me. Plus in the Old Testament God massacred people in the millions all because they wen't against HIS will. And you wanna know how many Satan killed? Just 10. Hmm, massacring millions of your own people for doing something you didn't like, this sounds quite familiar, I wonder what we call those type of people again? 

When you're arguing against the literalist sola scriptura Christians this will be relevant. You may be surprised, though, to find how many Christians in history have not believed in that type of God. Fetishizing a totally literal Bible is surprisingly recent. Any big-name theologian or philosopher (i.e. not a TV evangelist) does not believe in an emotional God.

It's important to separate the God of the literalists from the God of the theologians and philosophers. The former gets angry, but the literalists tend to be the least well educated. 

If Empathy is not enough for laws, then what is? Explain.

I think that when we feel sufficient empathy, we don't need morality. If we are operating on empathy, then we just do what feels right to us, and we treat people kindly.

The trouble is that we often don't feel empathy for people. It's completely normal to feel no empathy for someone who has harmed us or someone we love. Yet morality still tells us that we don't have the right to do to the criminal whatever we feel like. 

I would say that laws -- and the morality they are supposed to standardize -- come from cold hard reason. We judge what kind of society we would like to live in while we are feeling unemotional, and then we try to apply those judgments when we are in a more passionate state. Part of this means that we hold it right to treat people fairly even when we feel no empathy for them. 

If these theologians think God is of love, then clearly they didn't read their little book's texts more closely.

Again, you're thinking that theologians always read the Bible literally. They don't.

One common belief is that God is love, and that this is proved by reason, as begun in Plato. This means that this tenet must be a guide when interpreting the Bible. If something in the Bible seems unloving (massacring Moabites, or something) then that part must be read as allegory. The Moabites stand for our own unlovely passions, and we must conquer these passions and leave none standing. This reading was common by about the year 400 AD. 

It's also something that's common in other traditions. For example, some people hold that Plato's Republic isn't really about the government of a city; they say that the city is a symbol of a person, and the book is about self-control. It may in fact be about both. 

Religion was founded on fear mongering violence

I think you're back to brainstorming again. 

Maybe some religion was founded this way. Some was probably founded on persuading the powers of nature to give us an abundant rice harvest. But it's hard to say. And anyway, religion is a lot of different things, so it's hard to see how all of them could come from the same original impulse.

there was no way empathy itself would work

Yes; empathy is easily overcome.

Alot of these man-made gods are just imaginary representations of ourselves, power, need for control, etc.

The God of grammar will send you to hell for typing "alot." It's two words. 

But I think what you say here is quite likely to be true. We think of what we would be like if we could be, and we project this into something we imagine to be greater than ourselves. Nietzsche makes this case in The Birth of Tragedy. It helps us to see what people in different societies value. Early on, the Greek gods don't behave very morally -- they are just people turned up to 11. As time goes on they were reinterpreted to be ideals. You can see this happening in Plato's Symposium, where the different speakers offer wildly different genealogies of Eros. 

But I don't necessarily believe this is a bad thing. It's probably easier for us to think through symbols or characters, rather than abstractions. If you tell a 5-year-old to be kind to his friends, he may not even know what that means. But if you tell him to be like Anpan Man (a Japanese cartoon character made of bread, who shares with his friends to eat) this will make more sense. And for grownups, I think that the characters in great literature serve this function.

The whole thing about "What Would Jesus Do?" may sound trite. But if we hold, with John, that Jesus is actually the principles of goodness according to which the universe operates, then Jesus becomes a kind of example character. What would the Logos do in this situation? If we could imagine a person who invariably did the right thing, what would he do here?

It's a shame how the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, African, Norse, Pagan, Tengri gods, have all been disproved by today's civilizations

Are they disproved? Or have they just fallen out of favor? I don't think there's a test or experiment we can do to prove their existence or non-existence. 

But I see your point: most gods of previous cultures are seen as myth or just forgotten. 

they think the existing ones today are real

One thing to keep in mind is that the polytheistic gods are, as you say, just like supermen. 

This is not true of the God of the philosophers, which is not a superman with a body but something more metaphysical -- the Ground of Being, or existence itself, or the thing that must exist so that everything else exists. Science can't address this, because it's a metaphysical idea. It can only be argued with logical arguments, but people are too limited to be sure one way or another. 

So again, the literalist evangelicals are not persuasive, but we shouldn't assume that theirs is the only kind of theology that there is. 

the greatest trick Satan ever played was making people believe he existed.

Whispering: Satan isn't real.