(April 17, 2012 at 1:46 am)Creed of Heresy Wrote: Kratos, I'm going to drop the contempt I generally feel for you for a brief moment to explain that the reason why warfare is so common is the drive for survival and power, though power is only a means to ensure survival; when you are stronger, you have less risk of being subjugated by outside influences, increasing your odds of survival. The religions of the world have been one of the most common driving influences for war. Not the ONLY reasons...but that's only in modern history. Even still, churches have never hesitated to bless one army or both, calling their reasons for war "divine" and "holy" and "just." War is a plague of humanity but religion has done nothing to suppress it; it has only aggravated it. I will stop short of saying that war is solely caused by religion, because that is simply not true. But religion claims itself to be the righteous guide of humanity and yet there is nothing righteous in almost every single war humanity has waged upon itself. There are a few notable exceptions; drives for independence and freedom, like in the US's war for independence from Great Britain, but those are few and far in between. Drich, you mentioned Manifest Destiny, talking about how it was what resulted in the slaughter of the native Americans. Are you aware WHAT Manifest Destiny even fucking entails? It is basically the "will of Providence;" that the American expansion was THE WILL OF GOD. You shoot yourself in the foot! IT WAS BASICALLY STATING GOD CONDONED THE MURDER OF NATIVE AMERICANS for the goal of expanding American influence! AND YOU TWO STILL CLAIM THAT THE IDEA OF GOD IS A RIGHTEOUS INFLUENCE, ARE YOU FUCKING BENT?! Your argument is that moral standards change; no, not all of them! Clearly the moral standard of belief in god is that you can excuse away murder and genocide by simply saying "god told me to do it," and the only times it changes are only when modern society forces it to change kicking and screaming. So by your "logic" if I show up at your house and club you until you're a vegetable and I state that god told me to do it, you'd be COMPLETELY OK with that, right? I mean, you have no way of knowing whether or not I'm telling the truth [which is basically what faith itself is; believing something even if you don't really know whether or not it's true], so you'll have to take me at my word and have faith that god wanted me to beat you into a state of living death.
The pathetic thing is you probably WOULD. ...Well, except, no, you wouldn't, because you'd be a vegetable, so you wouldn't be thinking anything at all, so you wouldn't even be able to accept it. BUT, if you DID, then you might as well completely do absolutely nothing at all in your life whatsoever. After all if god has a plan for you, it'll happen regardless of what you want or don't want, right? If you really think this way, fine, whatever, good on you, and good luck with that, lemme know how it turns out, but stop trying to pretend that mindset makes any rational sense, because it doesn't and it's insulting in a way no slanderous words I could ever dream up could manage to be to people who value the pursuit of rational thought.
God's supposed righteousness should be universal to everyone if he were real, and it should be universal throughout time. But modern society has evolved past the false righteousness of having human beings owning other human beings like livestock and stoning people to death for minor offenses, in direct contradiction to what is supposedly universal righteousness. That advanced societies considers slavery and murder and genocide and cannibalism as abhorrent while primitive, ass-backwards ones consider those things just par for the course is extremely telling about the stance of what is supposedly god's "righteousness." God's "righteousness" is primitive. And for an all-powerful, omnipotent, omniscient deity to be primitive and backwards and crude and immoral to a society thousands of years after he supposedly spoke his last words is the MOST telling.
God is a fictional work by barbarians used to exercise power and give legitimacy to weak rulers and unimaginative men. Nothing more. If he were not, then his righteousness would have been far advanced in comparison to the men who worshiped him. But he is not. He revealed no moral or just laws beyond what was acceptable at the time with only the smallest deviations from the current society...and those deviations were, again, only things meant to control individuals, not guide them along a path of love and knowledge but rather bigotry, hatred, and ignorance.
Game. Set. Fucking match. I tire of arguing this same fucking point to every last theist who gets on this forum. This should be blatantly obvious to everyone with a functioning brain and an iota of inquisitive thought and yet every time you ridiculous, blinded fools come onto this site I am exposed to the sickening thought that there are tons of people who apparently lack a functioning brain and/or even an iota of inquisitive thought, who believe whatever tripe if it guarantees them even the smallest inkling of some comfort that there will be life after death.
You trade your curiosity and potential for false comforts. I feel genuinely sorry for you. Both of you. You need lies to feel safe and secure. For someone who realized the lies to be precisely what the are, and who finds comfort in just the joy of experience and life itself, who can live without delusion...you guys are perhaps the most pathetic kinds of individuals. And it makes me unbelievably sad to think that you guys are the majority.
I hope you really learn to question your faiths some day. But if not...then I pity you for your wasted potential.
Very long interesting post ,but my belief in God/s are not the ones made up by people. I know that the names of Gods correlate to the sophistication of a civilization. Like the ancient God "A" pronounced arrrhhh from mesopotamia comes from a very primitive people that may have spoken in simple short words, to long complex named Gods in more advanced times. People have used Gods to represent everything but you tend to focus on the evil side. But I think there is something out there I just use God/s because I don't know what it is. How do you explain the ability to see the future? And other psychic powers. I cannot work it out scientifically where does the knowledge come from?
