Religion is a whispering game between generations. The message is heavily distorted by bow.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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And the original message was dreamed up by dudes on shrooms.
I don't know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole 'god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up' is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert. The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.
The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.
You're ignoring 200,000 years of human history. The guys who wrote the Hebrew religious texts didn't start from nothing.
I was filing that under 'mystical fluff', but it certainly shapes the stories and how they were told.
All Religion has its origin in shamanism. That then led to polytheism which then led to monotheism. What all those have in common is that people made it up as they went along.
Does Christian monotheism exist? A majority (?!) of Americans believe there is a Devil.
Catholics also have patron saints for nearly everything from infants to ice skaters that they pray to but that are totally not gods because there is only one god. I mean, yeah, their second most important prayer is directed at the Virgin Mary, but that doesn't mean they worship her or anything.
I always took pascals wager as just being about some nebulous creator type of thing with no real specifics because the argument can't really handle specifics.
It was specifically about the Christian God because all others were "obviously" incorrect. It's terrible logic because it discounts:
- God somehow doesn't know you're believing in him "just in case" rather than because of actual faith.
- The wager implies that you should be an adherent of the religion that gets you the most stuff in the afterlife.
the religion that gets you the most stuff in the afterlife.
I think it would be rather the opposite, should be the one that promises the worst fate in the afterlife to non-believers