"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
― Marcus Aurelius
Wow that’s way older than I realized!
I know right? Can’t believe it’s been 26 years since the Gladiator movie came out!!
26 years since the Gladiator movie came out
The way I figure it, if God exists he gave me a reasoning mind and provided absolutely no reasonable evidence of his existence. If he has a problem with me drawing the inevitable conclusion from that then fuck 'im.
If you look at it from God’s perspective, assuming he exists, you have all of these groups of people who claim to worship him, and the biggest ones all have different holy books, and all of those holy books are flawed. They’re even self-contradictory. I think God would be offended if people thought he was responsible for those piles of trash.
On the other hand, if God created our cosmos, surely he’d at least approve of people trying to understand it compared to boring people who ignore the world and just chant the same things over and over.
If god is real im going to try and kill him for creating a world with such evil happening to innocent people.
Any god who creates a place where babies are raped and murdered deserves to die.
the flying spaghetti monster, would like to hastily clarify, that he didn’t mean to, doesn’t know how to fix it, and is honestly freaking out
uhh, if you have any tips, give them to me, r’amen
This is why I refer to myself as agnostic instead of atheist. I do not see an evidence of God as stated in the Bible, Torah, Koran or such religions. However I cannot prove that a different type of God does not exist. Something - called God - could be responsible for the beginning of everything. I don’t see that God as being too concerned about humans and what they do or don’t do. God and religion are not the same thing. Religions are entirely man made as a societal control mechanisms and abused by leadership greed.
Then it’s a question of semantics, and how you define “God”. Would you consider big bang as “God”?
If god is real, he has a lot to answer for.
Also:
“If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.”
- Unknown victim of the Holocaust, carved into the wall of a Mauthausen cell[
The platypus. Seriously, wtf?
Australia was his animal testing ground. It was never meant to make it into production.
If god is real, he very likely doesn’t give a shit about humans. If you interviewed him, he’d say that all of that stuff you attribute to him was obviously made up by humans.
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.
Yeah, well…
MY religion says if you don’t give me $20,000 you’ll spend forever swimming through a pool of glass shards and lemon juice. Better be on the safe side - what if I’m right?
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.
That comeback flipped the whole argument on itself. “You lose” has never backfired faster. 😂
If the christian god exists and the reward for serving him is eternal life in his presence, I will gladly accept the alternative.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
It would be really amusing to learn that what we call a deity, is actually just a higher dimensional being, a child one at that, and we were just a science fair project that didn’t even get a participation trophy.
Would you believe that that is basically an actual plot point / lore detail in Animorphs, if you read all the non mainline series books as well?
Ok I want to know more
https://animorphs.fandom.com/wiki/Ellimist
Before achieving through abnormal circumstance a godlike omnipotence and omnipresence, the Ellimist was originally a Ketran named Toomin. He lived on the Equatorial High Crystal with his friends Inidar, Aguella and Wormer. Toomin could be best described as a “gamer”; he frequently played a life simulation game called Alien Civilizations, very popular among his people, which gave each player an alien species and tasked them with slightly modifying their environmental or evolutionary aspects, so as to cause change over time. The aim of the game was to keep the species alive for as long as possible; if the species became extinct, the player lost.
So, far before the main storyline of Animorphs, the ancient backstory is roughly ‘once there was a race hyperintelligent elf-dwarfish creatures, of whom some played very advanced life simulator / god games, and, following a series of extraordinary events, the last remaining one of their kind basically became an actual god / a dimensionally transcendent being.’
… and, the particular one of these that ended up essentially becoming god, well, he was originally … pretty much a hikkikomori NEET nerd ‘failure to launch’ ‘professional gamer’ kid/adolescent, going by the cultural standards of his species, before it was genocided.
So… its like an ancient alien dork who was really into life simulator / god games just ended up gaining so much knowledge and power that he became able to treat reality itself as one of his games.
Kind of. Sort of. Its more complicated and strange than that.
That’s a lot more than I expected. Thanks! I’ll read more
Animorphs is just actually a really good book series.
Yep, the covers are ludicrous.
But to me, Animorphs is basically on the same level as Redwall, very, very good series of books to give to a kid to entertain them, make em more literate, and also expose them to some pretty serious and ‘big’ ideas and concepts.
A million times better than an iPad.
Also, I guess at this point, they also serve as a pretty good time capsule into 90s/00s culture/lifestyle.
The concept of absolute forgiveness is terrifying to me. Rape, murder, and make people suffer with greed and corruption all you want … then say “Im sowwy about all that, forgive me” before you die and into Christian heaven you go. Fuck that. I want no part of that “heaven” … that is where pure evil will reign, it will be hell.
If I were evil and wanted to corrupt a bunch of religious idiots I would tell them that they didn’t have to be decent people, that they could just do what they wanted because a zombie god died for their sins. That would lead them to worship the wealthy and not care about their fellow humans, the suffering would be everywhere. Do you think that could work?
If I were evil and wanted to corrupt a bunch of religious idiots I would tell them that they didn’t have to be decent people, that they could just do what they wanted because a zombie god died for their sins. That would lead them to worship the wealthy and not care about their fellow humans, the suffering would be everywhere. Do you think that could work?
That’s pretty much the way it works now, so, yeah, start your own religion.
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
“You lose” is such a weird thing to say. It’s implying this is an issue to win or lose on. Instead of you know living a virtuous life. Nope. It’s sides that win or lose.
Right? My religion tortures you for not being on our side I rather choose nothing than worship that kind of evil.
God: >hides<
Also God: how dare you not believe in me with zero proof in the natural world! >tantrum<
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “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,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
