Christianity is going to be easy.
I like other mythologies because they’re interesting, they’ve got a lot of gods and a lot of other cultures.
Christianity only has Jesus, Moses, God and the Virgin Mary going for it. The mythology is kinda boring and very contradictory of itself. People prefer to cherry pick verses and everything to believe out of than it’s intention.
Idk man, when you start looking into the old testament, especially non-official/apocryphal books like the Book of Enoch, it gets pretty interesting. Especially when you take early Judaism in context with the neighboring Canaanite religions
My favorite is the Book of Nod.
There are some kindred who consider that book quite heretical.
The first thing Christians do when they’ve formed a new group is to figure out who the heretics are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Nod
This… might clear things up just a bit. The Book of Nod is loosely Christian/Abrahamic religion adjacent mythology of the origin of vampires in the ttrpg Vampire the Masquerade. It’s the in universe origin myth of vampires.
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If you’ve got some time on your hands, this is an extremely interesting video on the origins of Yahweh and the Israelites https://youtu.be/mdKst8zeh-U?si=fk3vuzXxq58EHKu2
The Crucifixion story and the end times prophecy are both pretty damn good stories, you have to admit.
What? Why do you think they are good stories? They seem fairly boring to me. What am I missing?
The story, clearly.
🤔
I wish I shared your optimism but I fear it is not happenstance that it has survived for so long. I suspect that it contains enough textual material to be easily adapted over time to serve many purposes, fit many cultural mores, and exploit various aspects of human nature.
Bit inaccurate, isn’t it…? No such thing as Greek gods and Roman gods… “Roman” gods are just your plain old Greek gods with fake beards, speaking Latin in a Greek accent, and wearing their togas in the Roman style… Should have used Greco -Roman gods for one door and something else (Egyptian, Babylonian, Norse… take your pick) for the other…
Greek gods were just Egyptian gods. Egyptian gods were just Babylonian gods. Ba ylonian gods etc.
And Roman Catholic church “borrowed” multiple holidays from the Roman empire
[insert the meme with astronauts and guns]
Sure but they didn’t borrow their god
Wasn’t Zoroastrianism the first monotheistic religion?
Early christians in Rome were a lot more polytheistic. Many of the saints are borrowed from Roman gods and today they still provide a polytheistic feel to some christian churches.
No evidence of that claim.
Proto-Judaism, which took its belief from several religions, was polytheism until they had spent time with Zoroastrianists.
We were literally taught that in catholic school. Just like Jesus was almost certainly not born in 0 AD. It’s just not important to his teachings, but rather important during the spread of catholicism.
Plenty of good reasons to be critical of Catholic Church, but “They claimed saturnalia as their year end celebration because no one actually wrote down proper dates 2000 years ago and the Romans still wanted a festival in mid-December” is not a great one.
Technically there is no 0AD. It goes from 1 BC to 1 AD
Christian gods are just Judaic gods, and Judaic gods were just levantine gods.
Sort of. Romans borrowed gods from all over the place and created their own gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_deities#Alphabetical_list
Not on that list are all the emperors who were worshipped as gods.
I wonder what the average lifespan for religions is
I imagine its probably all over the place, to the point an average is not very useful, because on the one hand, something like a small cult that doesnt survive the death of its founders might last just a few decades, but something like Hinduism might last thousands of years and have a very unclear date to when it starts. You’d also have the question of when a religion ends exactly, like, one that has no followers left is probably dead, but what if it changes over time until the original form is unrecognizable? Is the original dead, or does the modern form count, and if the former, when did it end? Does it count as dead if a major world religion loses that status and becomes largely irrelevant, but still has a few small communities of followers, such as with zoroastrianism? If a religion does lose all of its followers, but people later attempt to recreate and convert to it from its surviving texts or similar, does it still count, or does the revival count as a new religion?
Maybe Im missing some obvious example, but I cant really think of cases, beyond the tiny cultlike ones, where a religion dies out organically either, most examples I can think of are cases where a religion is deliberately killed off, usually by another one supplanting it and having some conquering power or converted authority forcing its members to convert to the new one.
Well some of them die when their god dies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
I wish all cults were as innocent and wholesome as the Prince Philip Movement.
Both the Egyptian pantheon and the Hellenic pantheon went through multiple iterations across the ages of their respective peoples. Neptune was the all father originally, then Zeus was made the patriarch of the Olympians (while Kronos created Phanes who begat the cosmos). Curiously Aphrodite was Astarte before, and Ishtar before that, and didn’t just bring love and beauty, but also the Phoenician alphabet which would replace Linear-B.
And the way Christian and Jewish scripture is interpreted today is very different than how it was interpreted in the 16th century, or the 11th century, or the 6th century.
i have gone full circle and now i believe in millions of gods.
so many gods of and with all things.
gods with etsy stores.
the gods of my oil pan. the gods of my ancestors’ oil pans’.
time is a god, and it will have to psychopomp itself according to the next panel of the comic.
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Pretty sure that was Kratos actually
God of War 5: Kratos kills Time for taking his credit
Eh, “time”. I’d say so far only religion has killed other religions. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where atheism was as prevalent as it is now after the concept of religion was first formed.
If the metric used is the number of figures in the pantheon, it will be very interesting to do the math for hinduism, budism, dao and shinto.
Like it or not,
religiositybelief isn’t going anywhere. Science can not provide meaning for life or the universe where we exist.What we can and should fight for is a society where belief is solely personal matter, with no room or weight on the broad public forum.
Rather than a question of adulthood vs childhood, the reality is that humans evolved certain traits and abilities that mean superstition and religion are in our nature, for better or worse, like it or no.
Humans had to become adept at determining the intent of other humans and of animals to the point where we tend to anthropomorphize animals, inanimate objects, even concepts like justice and luck and fate.
We evolved mechanisms to avoid harm by remembering past experiences and predicting future ones. Though flawed from the standpoint of rationality, these adaptations were enough to prevent extinction of humanity at large, while leaving us saddled with numerous cognitive biases that leave us more likely to believe unfounded claims of a spiritual nature.
The antidotes to irrational, superstitious thinking are knowledge and critical thinking skills. It takes time, effort, and dedication to gain the upper hand against our nature.
It may be impossible to completely overcome our nature. Still I do hope we are able to set aside the most harmful manifestations of our nature: dogmatic thinking and religious zealotry.
Logically and morally, this is an obvious conclusion, but most people are fucking idiots or apathetic towards what they perceive as ‘lesser injustices.’ Religious people are now existentially threatened because people are openly non-believers and since most of them lack self-reflection capabilities they get angry and aggravated and do what they can to fight for what is right in their eyes. One of the worst aspects of religion is that it makes people feel justified in doing things they otherwise never would have.
People need comfort and hope
Marx’s vision as expressed in his opiate of the people quote is for a world in which the truth is comforting and hopeful, and the people of the community don’t have to turn to myths and legends for positivity.
Religion is a symptom that emerges from misery and trauma, and should be regarded by the state like an epidemic of an infectious pathogen.
I don’t think calling religion a symptom is fair. I think it is it’s own kind of virus that infects people who don’t have the tools to withstand it… And misery/trauma provides the blow that weakens people and makes them susceptible.
Staph doesn’t kill healthy people, but it sure as shit fucks up people who have other ailments.
Vulnerability is the symptom of trauma and pain. Religion exploits that.
Religious conviction and adherence to organized ministries is more prevalent in regions where the quality of life suffers, such as throughout the Americas. Here in the US, precarity (housing precarity, food precarity, job precarity, etc.) feeds into the kind of magical thinking that fuels adherence to faith and authoritarian ideology (that a charismatic figure will use their power to fix our personal woes).
So religion is not a personal symptom like a fever or cough, it’s a community problem, like elevated hate crime or recurring rampage killings.
Again though, religion isn’t necessarily the symptom of these things. Those things can exist without religion. Religion definitely thrives in these environments…
The same way staph/mrsa thrives in hospitals.
I hope that a world in which the truth is comforting and hopeful is eventually achieved however I kinda doubt that any kind of economic/political formation will ever change the fact that being alive kinda sucks, people will always experience hardship and sadness and insurmountable problems and faith in something intangible helps a lot of people get through that.
Throughout the history of post-agricultural humanity, we’ve had elites that yoked the work of an underclass and only recently (in the last few centuries) have we been able to recognize this is not a good thing and will ultimately lead to the downfall of human civilization on a short time frame (say, the next few centuries as an upper limit).
This may be the fate of the human ape, and while I’d rather we worked out how to organize well enough to go to space and colonize other worlds (what I think would require an egalitarian system), I acknowledge that we just may not be socially developed enough. It’s telling that billionaires don’t invest their gains into massive humanitarian projects that could put their statue in every state park worldwide. Many of them could become the god of Haiti if they wanted and yet none of them do. They invest in charities that are fit to market how much good they’re doing, rather than actually doing major good, and when they think of massive works, they automatically consider profit motives. That’s telling to me.
But not all hope is lost. We’ve psychological tricks to run against our less-than-social instincts before, and as we develop more collective self-awareness (such as our more general awareness of mental health language) we might be able to rise above our tribalist tendencies towards a collective system. Perhaps in the looming population correction we’ll be able to see that the capitalist, transactional society we made lead us to the climate crisis and a cascade failure of the state, and instead of choosing to cling to tradition we’ll decide to try something else.
It’s a far reach, but the only other option is to get comfortable with the risk of human extinction.
You can derive it from yourself and not a greater ‘supernatural’ purpose. For example, I have accepted I will die and that there is no meaning to life, I might even be an anti-natalist, but that doesn’t mean I just give up and live in despair. I’m alive and so with that life I act in my own self-interest to make the world better because it’s what makes my existence have a meaning.
“making the world better” is an intangible idea that you are choosing to believe in. If you get comfort from that faith then I’m happy for you
Really original that notion. I’m sure no one has ever considered it.
I also notice it was carefully considered and worded in order to avoid being considered as intolerant as the detractor to humanity it proposes to have dismantled.
I feel bad for religious people who have been deceived their entire lives’ into a delusion. But at the same time, I almost feel no empathy when they go out of their way to do and say the most insane stuff with religion as a justification.
I feel so bad for the kids of these religious zealots. I used to live next to a family with a little girl (12/13ish) that just played/stood around in their yard alone for hours every day. She wasn’t allowed to speak with anyone outside of their church ever or use the phone. She wasn’t allowed to have toys or really celebrate anything ever. “Homeschooled” of course. Often she’d just sit out there crying because her mom constantly used her as a bargaining chip to guilt her dad to join their religion. She told her constantly that her dad didn’t love them because he wouldn’t join their faith and that he was going to hell blah blah blah. She riled her up and made her hysterically beg her dad not to leave them and go to hell on a regular basis. It was truly awful. Sometimes when her parents left she’d wonder over to the fence separating our homes and chat with us. I hope we were able to plant at least a seed of sanity with our talks. Poor girl.
Later I had a coworker stressing out about her kid having extreme night terrors and behavioral issues because she was SO scared of going to hell. I, knowing her kid was only 7, kinda laughed and said something like “did you tell her 7 year olds aren’t ending up in hell?” To which she got angry, snapped at me, and said that she wouldn’t lie to her daughter like that. She seemed genuinely offended that I expected her to have cared more about her young child having a mental breakdown at the age of 7 than appeasing her rancid asshole of a god.
Abhorrent parenting from stupid and small minded people all around. If that’s what they deal with as kids no wonder they’re so broken and incapable of rational thoughts as adults. It’s SO important to keep this shit out of our schools.
You got me excited for the next God of War reboot at first glance! haha
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Not once gets deleted from reality during the Battle of Terra
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More blood for the Blood God.
Inaccurate. Neopagans and reconstructionists exist, and have growing communities. A thing doesn’t have to be the most popular thing to be alive and well.
Glycon still has at least 7 followers. Checkmate atheism.
We should revive the cult of Dionysis.
Uhhh don’t you mean Yahweh
Ahura Mazda is still going strong, considering he’s the deity of the oldest monotheistic religion.
Much like my old Mazda 6, nothing short of my ex girlfriend was able to kill that
Wow, and they only have the one God…
I argue it’s 2. One at endgame though.
It’s 3. But also 1.
I was referring to Satan, but yeah the Trinity makes it even more convoluted.
Yeah, Satan is an “evil god” no matter how much they try to deny it.
And then there are angels, which are demigods. The only way you can really describe them is as demigods.
