My philosophy about Religion

[Mister Agenda]

First off, fuck evangelicals, 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. 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? 

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

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

Religion was founded on fear mongering violence, and where did that violence come from? Humans. Humans are violent by nature, there was no way empathy itself would work, they had to resort to violence to send their message, obey the gods or die. You were basically given a choice, life or death. Choose wisely or we'll burn you at the stake. Alot of these man-made gods are just imaginary representations of ourselves, power, need for control, etc.

It's a shame how the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, African, Norse, Pagan, Tengri gods, have all been disproved by today's civilizations, but yet they think the existing ones today are real, that's how much power religion holds on the world, the greatest trick Satan ever played was making people believe he existed.

Welcome, SuicideCommando01. Have you made an intro thread yet? If not it would be nice to hear more about you.

You haven't run into one of our resident evangelicals yet. The community runs skeptical and tends to examine claims to see if they can withstand scrutiny. Disagreeing with you isn't a sign of evangelicism, or even theism.

A lot of what you're going over is very familiar territory for many of us. The God of Abraham is depicted as a nasty oriental potentate with too much power, good news, he's one of the easiest creator gods to debunk because he's supposed to have done some specific things (created the universe including the earth and all life in six days, flooded the earth, stopped the sun in the sky) which never happened, so the God that did those things doesn't exist.

The moral sentiments of empathy, fairness, and justice provide the motive for morality; but history, laws, social norms and reason provide the practice.

Here's an alternative origin for religion: Once upon a time we noticed we seemed to live different lives in a strange world when we closed our eyes at night. In that world we seemed to travel, meet people both dead and alive, talk to animals, and have many other weird experiences. Other people could tell we never moved from the spot. Perhaps there was another part of us besides our bodies and that was the part that went somewhere when we were asleep. We called the self that went out of our bodies a spirit, and the place we went to, the spirit world. We paid attention to our spirit world experiences in case the spirits were trying to tell us something important. In our imaginations some of the spirits were much more powerful than the others and we began to think of them as gods to be placated and worshiped to protect from disease and ensure good hunting. Over time, these beliefs moved from stories to rules, and yes, gradually became a tool of social control, but they were never just that.

The old gods haven't been disproven, they're just not popular anymore. Frankly, many of them are more believable than Yahweh, though he started out much the same as the others; only gradually evolving into a god of (arguably in the case of Christianity) monotheism. It's actually harder to disprove a lesser god than one that is supposed to be omni-everything. Even Satan has the grace never to have done anything disprovable, one of the benefits of not having making and destroying world feats attributed to you.