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Do you think it's weird that ethnic groups separated by thousands of years of evolution came up with completely different gods and forms of worship? If there wa

by texuf 1y ago

Do you think it's weird that ethnic groups separated by thousands of years of evolution came up with completely different gods and forms of worship? If there was an omniscient being don't you think it would make itself known in a little more universal fashion? And isn't it strange that the institutions built around our current iteration of God are soft power structures that wield huge amounts of influence both financially and politically?

ivape 1y ago
I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time). Faith was a gift to help. In terms of Christ, let me put it this way. Imagine your high school, and one day the President of the US visits. You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. It’s a matter of faith, and it’s the little bit you need to help with the gift of free will. The very first story (well second story) in the main monotheistic books was the Eden Story. That story is all about how vulnerable we are with the choice of free will. Empirically, we have seen the failure of it over and over throughout human history (systemically you can easily see it). So, yes, I fully believe in the fallen nature of man, not because we are evil, but because what a gift and responsibility free will actually is.
- Tijdreiziger 1y ago
  > I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time). I think this hypothesis is flawed. I think most people in society strive to do right, and therefore most of us are able to live in relative peace and with relative trust in our fellow members of society. There are some people who do wrong, but we’ve set up our society to strive to detect this and punish those (albeit using imperfect systems and knowledge, leading to false positives and negatives). Therefore, I think religions are an encoding of human morality, not the other way around.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    I'd challenge your position with a simple thought experiment. You're given a device with a button. When you push that button a random person you don't know will be killed. In exchange you'll receive $1 million in completely clean money, and nobody will ever know you pushed the button or how many times you pushed it. So how many times would you push it? Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. And asking how many times you'd push it also gets rid of the marginal utility argument, and just to the dirty self centered core of humanity. People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards. There will undoubtedly be a guy who pushes it thousands of times, and then donates a fraction of it to charity, convincing himself that he's actually saved lives on net. That is humanity in a nutshell.
    - baobun 1y ago
      > Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. Is that a royal "Our"? I don't think you are speaking for anyone but yourself. People like Trump, MSB and Netanyahu aren't normal. They tend to abuse religion as a justification for their actions rather than spititual inspiration.
    - freedomben 1y ago
      What if you were a Christian, and you knew that the random person being killed was a rock solid Christian who would die painlessly and without even knowing it, and would go immediately into the bosom of Christ? In that scenario pushing the button seems like the right thing to do. If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault. What is the worth of a soul? My understanding is it's infinite. If not infinite, certainly it must be worth more than a measly cool million.
      - baobun 1y ago
        > If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault Have you read the Bible? Jesus would disagree with this take very hard. Or do you have any support for this moral argument from any of the apostles?
- em-bee 1y ago
  free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. free will includes the freedom to reject god. if god were to reveal himself openly then the freedom to reject him would not exist. we would not have a choice but to believe.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    What about Moses? Or Paul? Or the twelve apostles? Or all the Pharisees who witnessed miracles from Jesus himself?
    - em-bee 1y ago
      moses is a prophet or messenger of god just like jesus or mohammad. they are not subject to the same tests. some claim they aren't even human. according to my understanding paul also has been directly chosen by god for a specific mission. i haven't looked at the miracles jesus performed because, since them happening can't be verified and i can't witness them myself they are quite irrelevant for me. i also didn't get the impression that everyone witnessing a miracle was automatically convinced. also the existence of exceptions doesn't negate that the rest of us have that choice.
  - r2_pilot 1y ago
    >free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. Much like how religion posits a soul, you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we). You yourself suggest that the input of "revealed God" removes human free will to disbelieve. In other words, God can't(or didn't for whatever reason) create a human that can experience God without disbelief. Anyway long and short of it, just because you believe in free will doesn't mean it exists, either in your belief structure or in actuality, and Calvinists reject your hypothesis outright.
    - em-bee 1y ago
- teachrdan 1y ago
  > You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. My question would be: If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? Easy ones include a global flood that killed every animal on Earth. (Except for the two of each animal on Noah's ark, which would have overheated with so many animals in it, if it hadn't collapsed under its own weight first.) But there are also internal contradictions between the four gospels of the New Testament. Why would God make his own books inaccurate? To me, that indicates they are not the product of divine inspiration but the written accounts of oral histories. Your response may be that God introduced these errors into his holy books to test our faith. But at that point, isn't the answer to every contradiction and inaccuracy just, "To test our faith"? Is there literally anything that would change your mind, or is your faith just being tested even harder?
  - jayGlow 1y ago
    Christians don't belive the Bible was written by God they belive it's the word of God. the inconsistencies and contradictions are because its been written by many people over hundreds of years.
    - achierius 1y ago
      They don't even believe it's the word of God, strictly -- Jesus is the Word of God, the Bible merely contains (in parts) the word of God as reported by men. This is a key distinction between Christian and Islamic theology.
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        I've heard it described as "Jesus is the Word of God, the Bible is words about God", but there is definitely diversity of belief within Christianity about that; there are certainly groups that have views of the Bible that other Christians view as near-idolatrous.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? This would be a very good gotcha for a religion that believed the Bible was written by God (or at least dictated verbatim) and that it was intended to be a purely literal factual account, neither of which are majority positions within Christian theology (Fundamentalism, in which close approximations of both are important defining beliefs, being a relatively new movement within Protestantism and not the mainstream of Christianity.)
- baobun 1y ago
  So assumimg we have 1. Physical reality (e.g. how many years has earth existed) 2. Metaphysical reality (is there a creator? If so is your "soul" or life in any way relevant to them?) 3. Moral reality (Is killing other humans in cold blood justified by scripture? Are there such a thing as "Good" and "Evil"?) 4. Cultural reality (What do the people who raised you and otherwise influence you believe, local traditions and stories, scripture) 5. What feels intuitive for an individual to realize ("As above, so below", the unit of self, comparing Christ with POTUS, "the fall of man") Assuming your local space-time intepretation gets it all right (and everyone with different understanding got and gets it wrong) and that all of these by necessity align is some next-level hubris...
  - ivape 1y ago
    1) We can start with the fact that Historians believe Christ existed. 2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person. 3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that. 4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism. 5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin. 6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things. 7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans. 8) I’d let the whole true date of physical reality go. We literally reinvented time after he died. I won’t hold the Old Testament to the test of carbon dating, and reconsider that those books told us all the nature of how things began (from a big explosion). 9) And then we find the miraculous Dead Sea Scrolls proving that those books were not altered through the course of time. 10) The books say your soul is quite important. Christ was also one of the first to suggest your morality is from within (the thing atheist often suggest). 11) I’d finally suggest the following about science: Imagine I take a shit in a toilet. Imagine you are a brilliant scientist that sits around and figures out every measurement of how the shit moves around the toilet, down to the physics, down to the chemical composition of the shit. You would have figured out the physics of the universe of your toilet, but you will never ever know that I took the shit because I ate a lot of Taco Bell. 12) Hubris would be thinking our constant measuring (science) proves anything about our purpose. 13) Given the above hypothetical, it would be humble to accept the fear of god scripture puts into us, since we would have never even come close to figuring out our purpose via science (finding the true nature of God’s Taco Bell order) without these goofy books. 14) Last but not least: If the Big Bang was the moment of creation, you can believe one of two things: A) Something caused it B) Space was a vacuum and something came from nothing. If you believe A (You believe in God), our very existence is contingent on the sequence, A lead to B, then to C, and so on, so the entire chain of us talking here was deliberate (plus or minus all the free will decisions of humans, mostly a rounding error in the grand scheme). 15) And my personal favorite, everyone one of our births was a miracle given how sexual reproduction works (we all beat a million other possibilities). Faith is not hard when you truly see just how insane the odds are for so many things. Therefore, I’m quite open to the ridiculousness of the Galileans story. Another way to put it is, I am in awe of God.
ImJamal 1y ago
Have you ever played telephone? Messages get distorted in a couple minutes. Thousands of years is plenty of time to be easily believe that people would deviate on various gods.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  A god should be supernaturally good at telephone, right? Otherwise it brings would open up some pretty uncomfortable questions for folks who follow the teachings of modern translations of their books.
- freedomben 1y ago
  This strikes me as a pretty powerful argument against trusting the Bible (and other scripture older than a few hundred years), especially since we have a ton of evidence that distortion is exactly what happened. Even just reconciling the four gospels requires some pretty serious "interpretation."
kjkjadksj 1y ago
On the other hand, aren’t most creation myths actually strikingly similar in terms of overall themes? That doesn’t mean they are right, but I imagine there is an underlying proto religion shared by most if not all ancient faiths.
- robofanatic 1y ago
  > aren’t most creation myths actually strikingly similar in terms of overall themes Like any other product, someone invented it first, and others followed/copied. Over thousands of years, religions evolved separately, but you can still find traces of a shared origin running through them all.

by texuf 1y ago

ivape 1y ago

I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time). Faith was a gift to help. In terms of Christ, let me put it this way. Imagine your high school, and one day the President of the US visits. You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. It’s a matter of faith, and it’s the little bit you need to help with the gift of free will. The very first story (well second story) in the main monotheistic books was the Eden Story. That story is all about how vulnerable we are with the choice of free will. Empirically, we have seen the failure of it over and over throughout human history (systemically you can easily see it). So, yes, I fully believe in the fallen nature of man, not because we are evil, but because what a gift and responsibility free will actually is.

Tijdreiziger 1y ago
> I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time). I think this hypothesis is flawed. I think most people in society strive to do right, and therefore most of us are able to live in relative peace and with relative trust in our fellow members of society. There are some people who do wrong, but we’ve set up our society to strive to detect this and punish those (albeit using imperfect systems and knowledge, leading to false positives and negatives). Therefore, I think religions are an encoding of human morality, not the other way around.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  I'd challenge your position with a simple thought experiment. You're given a device with a button. When you push that button a random person you don't know will be killed. In exchange you'll receive $1 million in completely clean money, and nobody will ever know you pushed the button or how many times you pushed it. So how many times would you push it? Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. And asking how many times you'd push it also gets rid of the marginal utility argument, and just to the dirty self centered core of humanity. People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards. There will undoubtedly be a guy who pushes it thousands of times, and then donates a fraction of it to charity, convincing himself that he's actually saved lives on net. That is humanity in a nutshell.
  - baobun 1y ago
    > Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. Is that a royal "Our"? I don't think you are speaking for anyone but yourself. People like Trump, MSB and Netanyahu aren't normal. They tend to abuse religion as a justification for their actions rather than spititual inspiration.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    What if you were a Christian, and you knew that the random person being killed was a rock solid Christian who would die painlessly and without even knowing it, and would go immediately into the bosom of Christ? In that scenario pushing the button seems like the right thing to do. If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault. What is the worth of a soul? My understanding is it's infinite. If not infinite, certainly it must be worth more than a measly cool million.
    - baobun 1y ago
      > If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault Have you read the Bible? Jesus would disagree with this take very hard. Or do you have any support for this moral argument from any of the apostles?
em-bee 1y ago
free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. free will includes the freedom to reject god. if god were to reveal himself openly then the freedom to reject him would not exist. we would not have a choice but to believe.
- freedomben 1y ago
  What about Moses? Or Paul? Or the twelve apostles? Or all the Pharisees who witnessed miracles from Jesus himself?
  - em-bee 1y ago
    moses is a prophet or messenger of god just like jesus or mohammad. they are not subject to the same tests. some claim they aren't even human. according to my understanding paul also has been directly chosen by god for a specific mission. i haven't looked at the miracles jesus performed because, since them happening can't be verified and i can't witness them myself they are quite irrelevant for me. i also didn't get the impression that everyone witnessing a miracle was automatically convinced. also the existence of exceptions doesn't negate that the rest of us have that choice.
- r2_pilot 1y ago
  >free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. Much like how religion posits a soul, you are positing free will despise observing that rocks always fall in accordance with the laws of physics and we have yet to determine any normal way of altering the course of chemistry one jot or tiddle(in fact we build our edifices on these observations, so confident are we). You yourself suggest that the input of "revealed God" removes human free will to disbelieve. In other words, God can't(or didn't for whatever reason) create a human that can experience God without disbelief. Anyway long and short of it, just because you believe in free will doesn't mean it exists, either in your belief structure or in actuality, and Calvinists reject your hypothesis outright.
  - em-bee 1y ago
teachrdan 1y ago
> You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. My question would be: If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? Easy ones include a global flood that killed every animal on Earth. (Except for the two of each animal on Noah's ark, which would have overheated with so many animals in it, if it hadn't collapsed under its own weight first.) But there are also internal contradictions between the four gospels of the New Testament. Why would God make his own books inaccurate? To me, that indicates they are not the product of divine inspiration but the written accounts of oral histories. Your response may be that God introduced these errors into his holy books to test our faith. But at that point, isn't the answer to every contradiction and inaccuracy just, "To test our faith"? Is there literally anything that would change your mind, or is your faith just being tested even harder?
- jayGlow 1y ago
  Christians don't belive the Bible was written by God they belive it's the word of God. the inconsistencies and contradictions are because its been written by many people over hundreds of years.
  - achierius 1y ago
    They don't even believe it's the word of God, strictly -- Jesus is the Word of God, the Bible merely contains (in parts) the word of God as reported by men. This is a key distinction between Christian and Islamic theology.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      I've heard it described as "Jesus is the Word of God, the Bible is words about God", but there is definitely diversity of belief within Christianity about that; there are certainly groups that have views of the Bible that other Christians view as near-idolatrous.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? This would be a very good gotcha for a religion that believed the Bible was written by God (or at least dictated verbatim) and that it was intended to be a purely literal factual account, neither of which are majority positions within Christian theology (Fundamentalism, in which close approximations of both are important defining beliefs, being a relatively new movement within Protestantism and not the mainstream of Christianity.)
baobun 1y ago
So assumimg we have 1. Physical reality (e.g. how many years has earth existed) 2. Metaphysical reality (is there a creator? If so is your "soul" or life in any way relevant to them?) 3. Moral reality (Is killing other humans in cold blood justified by scripture? Are there such a thing as "Good" and "Evil"?) 4. Cultural reality (What do the people who raised you and otherwise influence you believe, local traditions and stories, scripture) 5. What feels intuitive for an individual to realize ("As above, so below", the unit of self, comparing Christ with POTUS, "the fall of man") Assuming your local space-time intepretation gets it all right (and everyone with different understanding got and gets it wrong) and that all of these by necessity align is some next-level hubris...
- ivape 1y ago
  1) We can start with the fact that Historians believe Christ existed. 2) I can grant you he might have just been a harmless mentally ill person. 3) You must now grant me that we crucified someone for that. 4) The above is evil. There is your proof. If you need more, you can check out Nazism. 5) This mentally ill person was pretty adamant about the nature of sin. 6) At the very least , it’s worth considering if he might have been right about a few things. 7) At the very least, one should be slightly freaked out that he actually existed and most likely died due the very reasons he suggested - that something is utterly wrong with humans. 8) I’d let the whole true date of physical reality go. We literally reinvented time after he died. I won’t hold the Old Testament to the test of carbon dating, and reconsider that those books told us all the nature of how things began (from a big explosion). 9) And then we find the miraculous Dead Sea Scrolls proving that those books were not altered through the course of time. 10) The books say your soul is quite important. Christ was also one of the first to suggest your morality is from within (the thing atheist often suggest). 11) I’d finally suggest the following about science: Imagine I take a shit in a toilet. Imagine you are a brilliant scientist that sits around and figures out every measurement of how the shit moves around the toilet, down to the physics, down to the chemical composition of the shit. You would have figured out the physics of the universe of your toilet, but you will never ever know that I took the shit because I ate a lot of Taco Bell. 12) Hubris would be thinking our constant measuring (science) proves anything about our purpose. 13) Given the above hypothetical, it would be humble to accept the fear of god scripture puts into us, since we would have never even come close to figuring out our purpose via science (finding the true nature of God’s Taco Bell order) without these goofy books. 14) Last but not least: If the Big Bang was the moment of creation, you can believe one of two things: A) Something caused it B) Space was a vacuum and something came from nothing. If you believe A (You believe in God), our very existence is contingent on the sequence, A lead to B, then to C, and so on, so the entire chain of us talking here was deliberate (plus or minus all the free will decisions of humans, mostly a rounding error in the grand scheme). 15) And my personal favorite, everyone one of our births was a miracle given how sexual reproduction works (we all beat a million other possibilities). Faith is not hard when you truly see just how insane the odds are for so many things. Therefore, I’m quite open to the ridiculousness of the Galileans story. Another way to put it is, I am in awe of God.

ImJamal 1y ago

Have you ever played telephone? Messages get distorted in a couple minutes. Thousands of years is plenty of time to be easily believe that people would deviate on various gods.

bee_rider 1y ago
A god should be supernaturally good at telephone, right? Otherwise it brings would open up some pretty uncomfortable questions for folks who follow the teachings of modern translations of their books.
freedomben 1y ago
This strikes me as a pretty powerful argument against trusting the Bible (and other scripture older than a few hundred years), especially since we have a ton of evidence that distortion is exactly what happened. Even just reconciling the four gospels requires some pretty serious "interpretation."

kjkjadksj 1y ago

On the other hand, aren’t most creation myths actually strikingly similar in terms of overall themes? That doesn’t mean they are right, but I imagine there is an underlying proto religion shared by most if not all ancient faiths.

robofanatic 1y ago
> aren’t most creation myths actually strikingly similar in terms of overall themes Like any other product, someone invented it first, and others followed/copied. Over thousands of years, religions evolved separately, but you can still find traces of a shared origin running through them all.