this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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xkcd
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Religion is a whispering game between generations. The message is heavily distorted by bow.
I see what you did there.
Hey everyone, the message heavily distorted my bow!
Ha, that was unintentional. I'll leave it as a proof of concept.
Hey everything, the massage is highly defined by now.
Hay everywhere - the master is hugely disturbed, my god
Isaac Asimov's Bible guide convinced me that abrahamic religions are mostly made out from stuff either from Mesopotamia (Sabbath, Eden, the floods) or myths coming from later cults (e.g. Greece).
That. Book. Is. Fire.
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.
Which just goes to show that it's all made up nonsense.
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.
Afaik, christians don't see the devil as a god, but as one of god's minions tasked with temping the flock or having them prove their faith or some shit.
Sounds like a god. Even if they’d sniff at it.
So do angels.
The true part.
This presumes some type of "pure" original religion — which indeed some people believe — as opposed to an evolving understanding that is relevant in each generation.
Evolving evolution in a biblical context? My ass.
You seem to be confusing religion with a bible, which is probably a reflection of the dominant religion near you, but not every religion has a book, and not every religion with a book understands it in the same way.
Religion is intentionally designed that way. So it can be altered to better control the next generation...