Even if theism is a failure, it's still superior to atheism

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

My biggest issue with pornography is the unrealistic expectations. 

So, your biggest issue isn't that it degrades women. Major LOL.

I'm out.

It appears you come from a culture without a sense of humour. And - just for the record - 

Quoting other members of the forum inaccurately is against the rules.

Boru

[Untethered]

Here, I hope I made the title as provocative as possible, I'll attempt to show that it's really more than a clickbait, it's true.

All religious people who work on defending their religion rationally are bound to face the difficult question : but why do you really believe ?

There are of course well-known reasons that motivate religious conviction : indoctrination, fear, sense of community, to name a few. But the thread won't be about those : there really are distinct reasons for preferring a theistic worldview over an atheistic one, even when all philosophical arguments fail. I'll cite just two for now, as I think the topics raised here are incendiary enough.

It's a horrible world out there:

Let's face it, the prospect of death wonderfully forces the mind to find pragmatic answers to all kinds of struggles. Firstly, it's important to see the difference between this fact and the simple emotion of fear : the awareness of the finitude of our lifetime is a stone cold fact that has nothing with our emotions. In other words, whether we fear death or not, we're still going to die. Secondly, it's common knowledge in philosophy that anything a man does is an attempt to "live in the moment" while they can do so, and that the full awareness of the finitude of our lives necessarily leads to a descent into absolute powerlessness, when the individual can longer find the inner momentum to move forward. Some psychologists speculated that all mental disorders are a form of weakness in one's character or mask of personality that makes them directly exposed to this awareness.

The late Ernest Becker in his award winning book The denial of death, brilliantly expressed this idea : "when the awareness dawns that has always been blotted out by frenetic, ready-made activity, we see the transmutation of repression redistilled, so to speak, and the fear of death emerges in pure essence. This is why people have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works".

But all people are also driven by the desire to stand out, to make a unique contribution to the world. An impossible dilemma : all your ready-made activity, everything you do, is the result of complex psychological mechanisms shielding you from the awareness of your own death, and at the same time, you want this same activity to be inherently valuable and cosmically important, you want it to transcend death.

Religion or theism offer a clear solution to the dilemma: there really is a Great being who guarantees that everything you do has cosmic justice, He created you so that you can accomplish it. All non-religious worldviews clearly fail or at best offer far less appealing alternatives to solve the problem.

The insoluble problem of sex and lust:

A woman constantly, and subconsciously, asks for assurance, that the man wants "me" and not "only my body", women are painfully conscious of the same dilemma above : they want to fully express their inner personality and, at the same time, are aware that all men ultimately only want the sexual act. And here it's important to note what I'll call a regress of symbolic lies to get sex : the evolving brain of the man managed to create a symbolic world of lies for the woman, he'll eventually convince her through an elaborate web of lies and sophisticated illusions that her beauty, or that the beauty of her personality, really transcends space and time, whereas his brain only aims the sexual act. What's commonly called love happens when this regress of lies becomes too sophisticated for the man, or the predator, himself : he starts to really believe that pursuing his loved one has some nobility and heroism in it, that his loved one is cosmically important, even with the full knowledge that, under naturalism, all her revered beauty is bound to decay and disappear irreversibly. The male predator eventually comes back to his senses and no longer feels the cosmic importance in his pursuit of lust, when the numbing feelings of arousal are gone.

This simple observation is enough to deal the blow to any prospect of feminism. Women can't be more than an object of lust and animal desire under naturalism. Religion, again, clearly has the upper hand here : the criterion for ultimate or other-worldly success has nothing to do with how dangerously seducing her body parts are, it's really her inner personality, the inner strength of her religious belief that ultimately determines her cosmic fate. Religion makes feminism possible as it inherently values women, whereas competing worldviews offer nothing in this regard.

[arewethereyet]

Hi new person. Did you mean to add something, or did you just think we needed an extra dose of Rookit crap?

[Untethered]

Theism is not superior to Atheism at all when it comes to open minded, free thinking logic.

In reference to God, or many Gods throughout History: "That which is not proven must be discarded until proof is established beyond doubt."

[Brian37]

My biggest issue with pornography is the unrealistic expectations. 

So, your biggest issue isn't that it degrades women. Major LOL.

I'm out.

Legal adult pornography with participants who are not being forced into it, is none of your business. It is unrealistic about real relationships, yes. But how much of any other on screen stuff is realistic RootKit? Do you think cops in real life solve every crime in an hour? Do you think romance reflects the movies you see in theatres? Do you think gun violence in tv and movies are how you should handle firearms?

Rootkit, women who partake in LEGAL adult porn that is regulated, and the women who like being in the industry, in safe conditions should not be stigmatized. Vulgar to me is how religion treats women.

[Angrboda]

I had to go back and look at where Rotkit started this whole thread. That he has devolved into telling us that Islam is superior because it tells their men they lack self-control is funny. Methinkst he protests too much.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve often been around attractive women in revealing clothes, and never felt a desire to rape any of them.

I’d make a lousy Muslim.

Boru

[Foxaèr]

This whole idea that women have to adhere to the rules men put forth is just another form of slavery.

[Angrboda]

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve often been around attractive women in revealing clothes, and never felt a desire to rape any of them.

I’d make a lousy Muslim.

Boru

Maybe if you'd rape a few nine-year-olds you could learn to be a better one.

[Jehanne]

Among certain historians, there has been a recent movement to rehabilitate the Mongols, which is the view that you are presenting (defending?); in my book, they were/are mass murderers, even if they lived in an era of mass murder.

But what you are doing is trying to paint them as worse than other conquerors of their time, a view only ever propagated by racist European and European descended propogandists.

Mongol Empire

Quoting Eric Margolis, Jones observes that in the 13th century the Mongol armies under Genghis Khan were genocidal killers[37] who were known to eradicate whole nations.[38] He ordered the extermination of the Tata Mongols, and all Kankalis males in Bukhara "taller than a wheel"[39] using a technique called measuring against the linchpin. In the end, half of the Mongol tribes were exterminated by Genghis Khan.[40] Rosanne Klass referred to the Mongols' rule of Afghanistan as "genocide".[41] It has been estimated that approximately 11% of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Turco-Mongol invasions (around 37.75 - 60 million people genocide in Eurasia, out of which at least 35 million deaths were in China).[42] If the calculations are accurate, the events would be the deadliest acts of mass killings in human history.
The second campaign against Western Xia, the final military action led by Genghis Khan, and during which he died, involved an intentional and systematic destruction of Western Xia cities and culture.[citation needed] According to John Man, because of this policy of total obliteration, Western Xia is little known to anyone other than experts in the field because so little record is left of that society. He states that "There is a case to be made that this was the first ever recorded example of attempted genocide. It was certainly very successful ethnocide."[43]

Tamerlane

Similarly, the Turko-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was known for his extreme brutality and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres.''_at_Wiki: -44][44] William Rubinstein wrote: "In Assyria (1393–4)—Tamerlane got around—he killed all the Christians he could find, including everyone in the, then, Christian city of Tikrit, thus virtually destroying Assyrian Church of the East. Impartially, however, Tamerlane also slaughtered Shi'ite Muslims, Jews and heathens."''_at_Wiki: -45][45] Christianity in Mesopotamia was thereafter largely confined to those Assyrian communities in the north who had survived the massacres.[46] Tamerlane also conducted large-scale massacres of Georgian and Armenian Christians, as well as of Arabs, Persians and Turks.[47]

Wikipedia -- Genocides in history (before World War I): Mongol Empire