If god turns out to be real then heaven is likely hell.
Based on what god has shown us so far he is a dictator who enjoys watching his little creatures suffer in too many ways to count. He is most likely an emotionless psychopath. He used his Jesus avatar once publicly to show that he’s “one of us”, showed off his admin rights by turning water to wine and resurrecting himself, and then logged off again with no consequences.
It’s the equivalent of a billionaire going with public transport for a day to show how grounded and normal he is.
If god exists and can truly control what comes after death then we are all fucked and need to find out how to kill him.
Maybe after death we resurrect into a full blown souls against god rebellion that has been going on for a few hundred years
The God of the Bible is a monster.
and crumbly and tastes awful
Ooh that’s a cool book idea.
If the god sends me to hell for not believing in him after his followers were so cruel, then he is a tyrant and I want nothing to do with him. If he recognizes my goodness and doesn’t care whether I had faith in him or not… then it sure sounds like I don’t lose.
This is along the lines I think.
If the “God” that exists is the one that has allowed some of the absolute abhorrent acts of the world and condones the hate that some of his followers display then I don’t want to go to his idea of eternal heaven or whatever 🤷♀️
That’s what people don’t get. Threatening that you don’t get to go to the heaven of some guy you don’t agree with anyway is just not that threatening 😅🤷♀️ it’s like trying to threaten a vegan that they’re never going to be allowed to go to a steakhouse.
If basically any major religion’s god is real, we all lose. They’re all fucking giant assholes.
I’m not worshiping an asshole… unless its attached to someone hot.
unless the religions are gatekeeping the real knowledge behind their dogma and twisting it, so they can gain more secular power.
What’s wrong with Ganesh? He’s a pretty cool guy
I think the matter is simple.
If there is a God, he should let me in for being a good person. If he is as vain as Christians make him out to be, I wouldn’t worship him anyway.
Interestingly, the Christian God doesn’t care about your life, only about your soul. And whilst they say belief is the only way to him there’s an interesting thing most of these guys intentionally overlook.
If God is infact made of love, as so many claim, only those who are full of love truly believe. Now I ain’t saying atheists have more love in them than Christians, but I can say with A LOT of certainty that Christians aint got a lot of love atall
The phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” isn’t going away till the Christians do.
Pascal’s Wager. Just as ludicrous as it was last time someone posted it.
Gotta love Pascal’s mugger
If god were to be real I’d like to think that finite and cringe concepts like “do you love me because I killed myself for you? (Tick the according box)” would be so laughably far removed from the conversation that’s it’s not even up for consideration.
The supposed almighty creator, who resides over everything in existence itself,…. Spends it’s time worrying wether or not you touched yourself and why you didn’t believe in the santa guy from a book mostly used by evil conmen. Don’t make me laugh.
It never seems to occur to them that if there was an entity so powerful that it could literally create an entire Universe out of nothing, and then monitor the progress of ever single element of that Universe, then that entity would be far too complex for our puny human minds to even comprehend.
And yet there are those among us who would dare to claim to know exactly what that all-powerful entity is thinking, and what it wants from us, and oh, yeah, it always costs a lot of money, gimme.
This always confused me too. It would be like an ant trying to understand the motivations of a human.
I have used that exact analogy, asking why the omniscient entity would care about the needs of any single individual ant out of a colony of billions?
Dear reader,
What if, after you die, you discover that string theory is correct, the the universe and reality itself are all merely tendrils of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that it thought you were kind of neat, so it decides to turn you into gelato… but only for a moment, as a joke, and then just does a ground hog day on you, as another joke?
You lose.
R’amen
Based I think?
On a true story, yes.
Braise Him pho-ever, r’Amen
If there is a god, what’s the chance that you have the “correct” one of all the religions ever invented? If you go to hell for following the “wrong” religion your chance of going to hell is much higher than of hitting the jackpot.
Yep Ancient Egypt had it right with their religion. You die and Osiris says hi.
Filthy infidel! The only true god is the Eagle God, that nobody has thought about in 37.000 years!
HOW DARE YOU!! I will fight a holy war over this!
Have fun in Eagle Hell!
Heretic! The one true god is the Anteater God, that nobody has invented yet!
Dear Christian,
What if, after you die, you find out you’re dead, and you’ve wasted your precious time all along?
You lose.
p.s. your God is obsessed with foreskins, you lose either way.
Dear Christian, … p.s. your God is obsessed with foreskins, you lose either way.
FWIW… The obsession with foreskins is more of a USAian thing from some corn flake capitalist. I think christians outside USA are generally uncut. It’s a national thing, not a religious thing.
Christianity legalized the foreskin almost immediately. It’s still legal today. TBH I don’t think christianity would have grown so popular otherwise.
… Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.” The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are… It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God…" - Acts 15
The obsession with foreskins is more of a USAian thing from some corn flake capitalist.
No, it’s really from the Old Testament, with over a dozen mentions (I think the total is 14). Search “foreskin” KJV in your favorite Bible search engine.
Jesus also said “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” (Matthew 5:14). Foreskins are a repeated part of those jots and tittle laws.
All of that foreskin business could have instead been admonitions against slavery, child marriage, or further dietary rules for that matter.
It’s there, for all eternity, genital mutilation and other stupidity, preserved for our enjoyment and/or embarrassment.
What if, after you die, you find out you’re dead, and you’ve wasted your precious time all along?
I mean, what does it mean to “waste time” in this context? There’s a certain existential dread that comes with the mystery of death - really the mystery of consciousness generally speaking - and we all cope with it as best we can. I don’t think a ritualized means of managing one’s anxiety is time wasted. If your genuflections to a carving of a guy on a crucifix sooth your own anxieties of loss-of-self, more power to you.
But it does feel a bit like someone asking “What if you stepped on a crack and then it really did break your mother’s back?” I mean, that would be very scary and sad. I can’t see the correlation between these two things. I’m not going to painstakingly tip-toe down the sidewalk out of a concern I don’t take seriously.
I mean, what does it mean to “waste time” in this context?
Sitting in church, reading the Bible and Bible studies, praying to God, time spent working that is then tithed, etc. All totally worthless and time wasted.
worthless unless you genuinely enjoy it* though i cant imagine how anyone would truely want that.
Is the man sitting in church and reading from the Bible wasting his time any more or less than the man sitting in a field and contemplating the stars? In the end, they both amount to the same thing.
I feel like the whole concept of souls is just racism. Because for souls to have a concept of existence and value, some sort of identity between life and death must be, implying, basically, eugenics.
“This soul is better than this other soul” etc. An inherent superiority and inferiority, separate from our minds, insulated, even from logic.
Your idea about the concept of souls being rooted in racism is interesting. Although you lost me when you jumped from life and death as an identity to eugenics.
Eugenics is the final boss of racism. It all leads to that, every time.
All monotheistic religions are in a logic of us vs them.
You say monotheistic and it has me think. Ill never be religious… well, until we respect earth and its science, but uh, Im in favor of bringing back the old gods. Polytheistic is it?
Shower thought earlier: Humanity truly feels lost.
I’m not religious myself neither, but I could have a thing for animism maybe.
Even if a creator exists, I reckon that it has long forgotten that it made this shitty planet.
“Hey G-man, those creatures you made are getting out of control.”
“Huh? What crea- Oh. Oh fuck. That was supposed to be thrown out 3 millenia ago. I fucking forgot. It’s probably all rotten and moldy now.”
“How the fuck did they manage to coat the entire planet in asbestos and lead?! Gonna have to quarantine that one…”
One of the ten commandments is Thou shalt not hold false witness. In other words, do not claim something to be true that you do not actually know to be true.
Everyone who claims God’s existence based on their own faith has thus violated one of the ten commandments.
Ask any self professed Christian (of any denomination) to tell you what the ten commandments are and they won’t have a clue … I know several devout Christians who are able to … but the majority, about 90% of them, wouldn’t have a clue
I grew up JW but the 10 weren’t really discussed all that much. While they did use scriptures from all over the Bible, the New Testament had the majority of the attention.
There are of course religions not based on the judeo-christian god
Pascals Wager was already stupid in the 17th century, it hasn’t really improved in the 350 years since then. Why do we need to rehash this still.
Pascals Wager was already stupid in the 17th century
The broad existential question was interesting. It’s part of a conversation about tail risks and cost-benefit calculations that you can apply to much more than just religion.
What I find more curious about Pascal’s Wager, from a theological perspective, is the logical consequence. Namely, that you’re obligated to find some kind of theological average between all known religious practices to maximize your own personal safety. And that theological average largely boils down to generic positive aphorisms -
- Do Unto Others
- Live Charitably
- Value Your Own Life And The Lives Of Others
- Reject Base Cravings
- Abhor Materialist Social Hierarchies
- Turn The Other Cheek
- Men Are More Important Than Women
- Slaughter A Live Animal To Appease Primal Forces
- Wash Your Asshole
- Remember That Old People Are Smarter Than You
Shit we should already know about and are inclined towards anyway. When you take a holistic view of religious studies, it peels away the pastiche and reveals the common truths of human existence. And Pascal’s Wager, as a thought experiment, helps navigate people to this point from an abstract logical framework.
“It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
People tend to develop biases when they are young and reinforce them when they get older.
If you cut across someone’s bias, they tend to see that as your attempt to trick them. And they fall back on a body of knowledge/experience that contradicts your efforts. If you encounter someone without bias, it is easy to seed a bias through presentation of slanted perspectives and cherry-picked information when you are their primary source of truth. But if your audience reflexively distrusts you, it is comparatively difficult to reshape their beliefs. You tend to have more luck playing on their distrust of you.
As an example, if you have someone who is racist and fearful of young, strong, black men, it is relatively difficult to tamp down that anxiety when around a person like this who they find intimidating. It is comically easy for a person that fits the description - but who is otherwise cheerful, passive, and pleasant - to intimidate the bigot with idle threats or make a fool of them by playing against their presumptions.
I think it falls under “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”. Each one thinking their the first to come up with this scenario (or act like it, after they saw it online, tv, movie…) likely doesn’t hold education (specifically history, philosophy, science, etc) in high regard.
It’s win-win:
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God is real, and loves athiests anyway.
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God is real, and can’t blame you. They made it real hard to prove.
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God isn’t real, which you don’t find out, cuz you’re dead.
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…Or dead-ish?
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God’s realness is predicated on belief:
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” “But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.” “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that…”
Or: God is real, he’s as vindictive, petty, and cruel as the Bible portrays him to be and anyone like that you definitely don’t want whatever their idea of heaven would be.
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