The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Least destructive religion I can think of. We are all spirits. 95 % water.
https://www.everyculture.com/North-A...e-Culture.html

But I guess it is common sense a city centric culture religious belief system will trump a tribal religious belief system.
Every time. Christianity used to be tribal. Then city folk ruined it. Making rules as time permitted in many years later .

Originally Posted by DavidMcCann It's ſtill in Unicode, in caſe you can't reſiſt it!

Bah! I added that 'ſ' to my keyboard, but neither the console or terminal is showing it. Not every font has it, I imagine.

Originally Posted by rokytnji Least destructive religion I can think of. We are all spirits. 95 % water. https://www.everyculture.com/North-A...e-Culture.html But I guess it is common sense a city centric culture religious belief system will trump a tribal religious belief system. Every time. Christianity used to be tribal. Then city folk ruined it. Making rules as time permitted in many years later .

Personally, I don't go for this at all - any of it.

As for the gods & goddesses - it's far too much like celebrities of the day being the gods of tomorrow. For me, anyone who wants to claim my worship has to be responsible for my creation. If they're just a pigeon-hole where I slot a particular type of request/complaint, why do they deserve my worship?

According to Alexander Hislop (Author of "The Two Babylons…" & Protestant Vicar) The whole god/goddess thing began with Nimrod, who started the tower of Babel. At what stage his wife got in on the 'god' act is uncertain, but Nimrod died young, and she had a son, which became the first trinity, Nimrod, wife & son (="Nimrod reborn"). That's where you get mother & son worship today, it is claimed. Hislop read more old traditions & histories than you or I have a stomach for. The story continues that when the languages were confused at Babel, all the groups took their (false) worship with them. It explains why Hindus and Catholics have identical Mother/son statues, so much so that Catholics have worshipped Hindu statues in ignorance.

The whole mother goddess thing goes back a long time before Nimrod! Think of all those paleolithic statuettes of pregnant goddesses. It took millennia for men to discover that a woman can't have a child unless she has had sex with a man nine months earlier. Before that discovery, women were thought to be semi-divine because they could apparently create life and men couldn't. Naturally therefore goddesses were shown either pregnant or suckling.

It depends on your sources how far it goes back.

Nimrod was the great-grandson of Noah, IIRC. Noah would have been our M.R.C.A., our Most Recent Common Ancestor. It's possible they were carving statues before the Flood, but there's no record of it. Of course, trying to pin any fact down back that far is well nigh impossible.

EDIT: In the post, I referenced (full title) " The Two Babylons, or Papal Worship proved to be the worship of Nimrod and his wife." It should be online, and it's so old copyright no longer applies. He tried to prove the Catholic Church was Babylon the Great, but he really only proved his own church was very closely related.

I find the fable of Adam and Eve as actually and particularly problematic. It is firmly confirmed that a gene pool of just 2, let alone from the same family, is nowhere near sufficient to reproduce even a moderate sized tribe of healthy individuals. Even if you deny Evolution everyone knows interbreeding is just bad medicine. The Human race would have died out in a century or two. There is some scientific evidence that at one time Homo Sapiens dwindled down to a few thousands of individuals, but anything less is improbable if not outright impossible.

Of course The Flood, as in a GLOBAL flood is just absurd or do people imagine that in the time of Noah (assuming he actually existed) the Earth was as smooth as a billiard ball in order for the amount of water on planet Earth to actually cover the entire globe. The Flood is a commonly repeated lore from many communities exactly because civilizations tended to crop up around large, preferably moving water sources and many rightfully feared flooding. It should be obvious that most post Neolithic civilizations (let alone anything before them) had no concept of most of the planet, making even the concept of a global flood impossible.

It truly boggles my mind that any modern person can apparently not grasp just how primitive even the brightest minds BCE actually were. It's not at all that their IQ was any less, it wasn't and they weren't, just the basic knowledge and understanding of the actual Universe in which they lived. It's one thing to imagine a creature that could create the ground upon which you stand with a sky above but quite another to imagine one that could create even what we can presently see for billions of light years.

The story of Adam and Eve tells us that humanity is the result of two close siblings reproducing sexually, with at least one of their sons also sleeping with his mother (as he got kids on his own). Can people really think that, unironically?

Quote: Originally Posted by rokytnji View Post Least destructive religion I can think of. We are all spirits. 95 % water. https://www.everyculture.com/North-A...e-Culture.html But I guess it is common sense a city centric culture religious belief system will trump a tribal religious belief system. Every time. Christianity used to be tribal. Then city folk ruined it. Making rules as time permitted in many years later . Personally, I don't go for this at all - any of it.

Coming from the land of Saint Patrick. I understand you completely.

I was parochial schooled also.

It took me a while to get over it.

Originally Posted by enorbet I find the fable of Adam and Eve as actually and particularly problematic. It is firmly confirmed that a gene pool of just 2, let alone from the same family, is nowhere near sufficient to reproduce even a moderate sized tribe of healthy individuals. Even if you deny Evolution everyone knows interbreeding is just bad medicine. The Human race would have died out in a century or two. There is some scientific evidence that at one time Homo Sapiens dwindled down to a few thousands of individuals, but anything less is improbable if not outright impossible. Of course The Flood, as in a GLOBAL flood is just absurd or do people imagine that in the time of Noah (assuming he actually existed) the Earth was as smooth as a billiard ball in order for the amount of water on planet Earth to actually cover the entire globe. The Flood is a commonly repeated lore from many communities exactly because civilizations tended to crop up around large, preferably moving water sources and many rightfully feared flooding. It should be obvious that most post Neolithic civilizations (let alone anything before them) had no concept of most of the planet, making even the concept of a global flood impossible. It truly boggles my mind that any modern person can apparently not grasp just how primitive even the brightest minds BCE actually were. It's not at all that their IQ was any less, it wasn't and they weren't, just the basic knowledge and understanding of the actual Universe in which they lived. It's one thing to imagine a creature that could create the ground upon which you stand with a sky above but quite another to imagine one that could create even what we can presently see for billions of light years.

I was wondering how long it would be before you'd start with that sort of nonsense. You can't hold yourself back, can you?

You don't believe the Bible, I gather. What else is new? As for the Flood, there's as many as 700 Flood legends. You discover some tribe on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and they have their flood legend. When only a few folklores have it, it's a legend. But when EVERY nation has the same thing in the most ancient form of it's own language, it's a fact. How else would you get the same story into the traditions of people who never even knew of each other's existence and couldn't communicate with each other?

Originally Posted by business_kid I was wondering how long it would be before you'd start with that sort of nonsense. You can't hold yourself back, can you?

Hold myself back? to what end? I calls 'em as I sees 'em. Nonsense? Could you please explain or refute instead of mere labeling?

Originally Posted by business_kid You don't believe the Bible, I gather. What else is new? As for the Flood, there's as many as 700 Flood legends. You discover some tribe on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and they have their flood legend. When only a few folklores have it, it's a legend. But when EVERY nation has the same thing in the most ancient form of it's own language, it's a fact. How else would you get the same story into the traditions of people who never even knew of each other's existence and couldn't communicate with each other?

Believe the bible? It's not as simple as that. No I don't believe the bible, ANY bible, stands up as literally translated. Right off the bat translation introduces error. That there are many translations over millennia beginning with early written languages that absolutely require colloquialism for contextonly makes matters more cloudy and inaccurate at best. That it was written by people who believed in numerous fantastical supernatural creatures and who thought disease was caused by curses, sin, and a host of ridiculous means because microscopes wouldn't be invented for over 1000 years, that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and far too many other ignorant notions on the nature of reality, what should anyone even hope for anything but quaint allegory at best?

Secondly it is nearly impossible to ascertain how many writers have contributed to it and many are contradictory so there are concepts and passages at loggerheads there as well. So why anyone living in the 21st Century would rely on any bible for anything definitive and important as words to live by and understand the world by, including human interaction, is frankly beyond me. One glaring example is the concept that murder is wrong and punishable by eternal torture unless of course the victim is a heathen/infidel or a slave, including women and children, who should not be suffered to continue living.

Simply put, to trust in a 2000+ year old conglomeration of myth and musings as a modern guide, simply denies that any progress has ever been accomplished. You may possibly disagree, but I'm betting not a single individual on LQN would like to live in any civilization remotely like those 2000 years ago. I actually doubt our ability to even imagine how difficult and despicable that would truly be.

The Bible (Old Testament) is just Hebrew mythology. It's not real history. The New Testament may have some truth in it. If the real Jesus existed, he was probably a militant anti-Roman, Jewish fundamentalist.
Strongly opposed to the collaborators of the Jewish establishment. Most likely violent - not "gentle Jesus, meek and mild". That's why the Romans executed him.

At the risk of distracting from the free flowing discussion, I will try - once.

Folks posting here have an interest in religion(s). You don't. You're a one-trick pony, enorbet. You think, like me, that you have the answer. But your contribution to the debate, your one trick, is doubt, scepticism, ridicule and in a religious discussion that is about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit (to quote Billy Conolly).

You actually don't have the answer. You threw out religion a long time ago. But you do have a faith, because science doesn't have all the answers. Science is supposed to be proved by experiment. But the only scientific experiments on Evolution (Mutation Breeding) were total failures, and we have the papers by evolutionists from the 1930s to the 1980s to prove it. Science can't explain: how the supposed big bang was so perfectly exploded; how the singularity got there in the first place; how the first self replicating cell was formed, and many other things. You ignore the consequence that if the first life never happened, there would not be life; If (in your version of events) the singularity didn't get there or explode, and the Big Bang never happened, there wouldn't be a universe. I've told you to put up or shut up on these points before, and you chose to shut up.

My point is that people don't have all the answers. The answers are all incomplete when viewed from certain aspects. So don't bombastically denigrate the choices of other folks who have chosen to explore different avenues. Start your own thread - "Anti-religion, Atheism & Science" or the like and make posts about peering up that SuperMassive black hole in the posterior of the Universe, or whatever folks like you want to discuss. I promise not to post there and point out how full of <expletive> they all are.

Sorry, business kid, but that won't do. You can't have a thread on religion and then only allow people who are religious to post in it. That's no different from the woke folk who won't allow any opinion but their own to appear on twitter. Debate and discussion require two sides. Let both sides speak freely and we can all decide who is the more convincing.

Originally Posted by hazel Sorry, business kid, but that won't do. You can't have a thread on religion and then only allow people who are religious to post in it. That's no different from the woke folk who won't allow any opinion but their own to appear on twitter. Debate and discussion require two sides. Let both sides speak freely and we can all decide who is the more convincing.

This isn't my thread, to be clear. It could be argued, I suppose, that enorbet was debating on Adam & Eve (which he probably doesn't believe in anyhow) but he then pours scorn, which isn't OK. I get that he doesn't believe in the Flood, and that's OK. If he was open to reason we could debate that. What isn't OK is that he is insulting anyone who does believe it. It's the typical ploy of scientists. Lead off by pooh-poohing all opposing views trying to put the onus on otyhers to support their view. And no amount of evidence is enough, becasuse the mental cement is already set.

Anyhow Hazel, enorbet and I respect each other's views are sincerely held, although we do butt heads occasionally.

Originally Posted by business_kid It's the typical ploy of scientists. Lead off by pooh-poohing all opposing views trying to put the onus on otyhers to support their view. And no amount of evidence is enough, becasuse the mental cement is already set.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."