My philosophy about Religion

[SuicideCommando01]

There is overwhelming evidence that religion is man-made; 

Well, sure. That seems pretty obvious. But what you claimed was that "Religion was created as a tool for social control." And that's a big claim. I'm just curious as to how you demonstrate that it's so.

I don't wanna go look around for evidence right now because it would be a little mentally exhausting for me to look for hours on end

It seems to me that if you want to discuss your views here, instead of just having everyone blindly accept them, then giving reasons and listening to other people's reasons would be part of the discussion. If you're not interested in supporting your claims then I don't see how discussion is possible. 

But if it's too tiring I understand.

but If I were to point you in the right direction I recommended looking at YouTube channels like Theramintrees and Underlings, and other channels like these if you can find some.

I'd rather discuss it with you, rather than look at a bunch of videos. Again, if you're here to present your philosophy then I'll discuss it with you.

If religion was created to feel connected to nature, then why force it upon other members of the tribe?  Obviously they probably won't listen to you if you say to them "Don't do this because you will feel bad!" So telling them of a higher power not physically there who will retaliate against them for their choices they make after death will keep them in line. 

Yes, good questions. 

There is no doubt that religious justifications have been used to enforce social norms. People who are convinced they know what is best will almost always try to enforce their views on society, religious or not.

My question was: why do you think religion was created for this purpose? Is it religion's only purpose? For religions everywhere? 

What I'm saying is, if Judaism came first, and they claim to have the true and only version of God, then why not stick with them?  if anything these religions are like a competition, a competition of who has the right and just version. 

The history of how Christianity split from Judaism is an interesting story. The Christians disagreed with the Jews, and made arguments. 

One version is that Judaism relies too heavily on the 613 commandments, which enable them to conform to the letter of the law but not the spirit. Christians say that Jesus wanted us to change this into one big law ("love everybody as yourself") which is written not in scripture but in the heart. This was a more difficult demand, because it requires everyone to think for himself about what is best in a given situation. Obviously Jews see it differently. 

But if you really want to know why the different religions disagree with each other, there is a great deal you can read on the subject.

3. Because God (and Jesus) says one thing, then says something else. "You only need faith to come to Heaven" then "You need faith and good works to come to Heaven" and then in another text "You will lose your salvation if you sin" and one last example "All sins are forgivable" then "Blasphemy can never be forgiven". Its just contradiction after contradiction and it's like the Bible can't make up its mind, which is probably why Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) have little "sub-religions" aka sects/denominations (Catholicism, Orthodox, Lutheran, Mormonism etc.) God want's his followers to agree with his viewpoints, and if a follower say converts to another religion like Buddhism or say Paganism or disagree with him entirely and dis-believes in him and creates his own morals,views etc, God will think what he/she is doing is "sinful"or "blasphemous". Clearly this god does not wish for humanity to think for themselves unless they wan't a one-way ticket to Hell! 

Many Christians say that exactly the opposite is true: that different parts of the Bible that are hard to reconcile precisely because one written text cannot cover every possible case. By providing a variety of different parables and directions, each believer is challenged to decide for himself what is best in a given case. 

So what you say is "clearly" is not so clear to many people. 

4. Thats just an example of the possibilities religion was created

An imaginary possibility, but not one that can be supported with evidence. 

5. Even if ancient cavemen were intelligent, they wen't intelligent enough to actually use their brains and scare their fellow man into submission with stories of super beings, now you could say religion could be considered free thinking, but religion isn't a rational and logical answer to their existence since they really didn't have any evidence their gods/spirits existed.

As you say, people didn't know as much science back then. To people at the time, these answers seemed reasonable and logical. 

I mean you wanna know how Zeus came to be? Because early Greeks were scared by the lightning and thought there must be a force of some sort behind it, so they thought up of some old guy in the sky who throws lightning strikes down to Earth. Same can be said for other early religions that involved lightning/thunder gods. But back then we didn't know better, we weren't really advanced in terms of scientific advancements and knowledge.

This may be so for some gods. How do you prove it? Are there historical sources? Or is this a just-so story that seems right to you? I mean, it wouldn't do to invent imaginary origin myths that seem reasonable and logical if we don't really know. Especially when you're criticizing earlier people for doing exactly that.

Also I don't agree with you that our more advanced science can solve questions traditionally addressed by religion. Science can tell us how to pursue our goals more efficiently, but not what goals are good to pursue.

6. Empathy and sympathy=philosophical thinking=morality. It's that simple.   

It's not that simple. It may seem simple to you, but you haven't provided any evidence or argument as for why anyone else should believe it. 

Again, are you just wanting us to agree with your unsupported assertions? Because if you just want to repeat them I won't bother you.

7. The thing is, if you begin to doubt your religion and start to stray away from it, according to whatever scriptures it uses, it's god/gods/spirits etc will be angry if you think differently then the established guidelines and codes of conduct. Pslam 141 "The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good." 

Boy, you're just like a TV  evangelist, cherry-picking scripture to prove a point! There is a huge body of religious literature about doubt, and many cases in history of religious people who thought for themselves and departed from their religion's orthodoxy. Sometimes they spoke out, and sometimes they didn't. 

Laws do not need religion for their justification of enforcement, knowing that you wouldn't wan't to murder someone because you know how it would feel for them is good enough!

It's true that laws don't require religion.

But empathy is certainly not sufficient. There are many more arguments for morality than just empathy.

But if you have an argument as to why in fact laws come from empathy (rather than just an assertion) I'm curious to read it.

11. God is also bipolar, he feels fine one moment (love) then he gets pissed for no reason (threats of hell, eternal damnation). Plus Christians say we must be FEARFUL of God, as can destroy "both body and soul" etc. How is that love? 

This is true according to Bible literalists, and naive popular religion. 

Any theologian you can name, from Anselm to Buber, does not agree. For them, God is impassible, is incapable of getting angry, etc. 

If you want to limit your criticism to the naive literalists you'll have more success. But what you say is not true of more educated Christians or Jews. 

Fear comes from violence, violence leads to religion, which leads to both violence and fear. Religion was made to spread fear and keep order, when order could just simply be obtained through peaceful means, empathy. There is no need to tell tales of beings who will either reward or punish them for whatever route they take, just tell the "wrong-doer" to ask him to think about what he's doing and think hard.

Again, this sounds like a creation myth. No doubt it seems reasonable to you, but I think you're oversimplifying. And I think your dislike of religion may be causing you to cherry-pick reasons, when lots of others are possible. 

Again, if you have some arguments beyond assertions I'd be interested in reading them.

 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.

[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. 

[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.

[SuicideCommando01]

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

Whispering: Satan isn't real. 

That's what I was saying.........

[Mr Greene]

The bulk of polytheistic beliefs weren't 'disproved by today's civilization', they were persecuted to extinction by xtians and muslims.
Hinduism just clung on into our period because the Mughals were still in process of conquering India when Da Gama turned up.

[Abaddon_ire]

Whispering: Satan isn't real. 

That's what I was saying.........

You know that, I know that, everyone else knows that with a single exception.

To understand Bel's fundamentalist nature, one only has to see which authorities he cites. Over and over and over and over...

Just watch his posts and make a list of the "authorities" he always returns to every single time. It is a short list. It is always the same list.

But I think you know that already.

[MooN]

I think religion is the greatest concept man has ever created.

---

Primitive man worshiped the giant ball of fire that we now call the sun.

We know a lot more than our ancestors,.

[Agnostico]

Religion allowed primitive man to develop civilizations by creating laws based on the moral guidelines of their teachings

Their morals are based on family structure with the goal of sustaining a society over a prolonged period. Without it we would still be living like chimps

Today's religions have stood the test of time and have brought us to where we are today. Without religion we still have the government that makes the laws

A government who is corrupt to the core, taking money from lobby groups to create policies that benefit them, not us

The president becomes god without religion, as we've seen in every atheist society in the past

Today we see the effects of atheism on the family unit. Over 50% divorce rate means that kids are growing up in dysfunctional families and grow to be unsuccessful

The rate of child birth in the west has dropped to a decreasing level. Meanwhile the Muslims have 4 or 5 kids per family and are migrating to the west

At this rate Islam will overpopulate the west and take over by installing and selecting its own leader

[SuicideCommando01]

I think religion is the greatest concept man has ever created.

---

Primitive man worshiped the giant ball of fire that we now call the sun.

We know a lot more than our ancestors,.

Anybody who supports the poison known as "religion" is a supporter of suppression of free will!