Yes yes yes. This is in essence why I cannot believe. I miss the beautiful comforting certainty of religion, but there is always a psychological price to pay. These mental contortions render belief impossible.
I’m generally respectful of people’s religious beliefs and kind of think religion can be cool in certain contexts.
But if we’re going to talk honestly about why I don’t personally believe the gloves are going to have to come off.
Nietzsche called religion a ‘‘slow suicide.’’ That was exactly my experience. It kills everything authentic about you and yet you’re urged to praise God for the sublimation of self, to conform to His Will. And when you strive for that within the model of an authoritarian family system that squashes any sense of self-worth you might have left over, there is very real hell to pay. Obey thy father and mother my ass. It’s masochistic patriarchal bullshit. If there is a God, and my years of abuse and psychological torture were God’s Divine Will, then fuck God. Fuck what He did to Job and what He did to all of us. Fuck Him for SIDS and cancer and the Holocaust and natural disasters and this insidious disgusting suggestion that we’re supposed to just bend over and ask for more.
I don’t think they meant you were supposed to arbitrarily reject everything that people tell you is true and deliberately make things up no other rational person (besides yourself) believes.
Then as far as I’m concerned, you don’t exist. Nobody else does - only my imaged impressions of them.
This is, functionally, solipsism. Even if multiple people exist, if they are each in their own separate subjective world, then each person individually is a solipsist.
The thing about solipsism, though, is that the people you imagine you’re interacting with in your subjective world are for the most part in agreement about the way your virtual world works - so these imagined people form a sort of mini-objectivity amongst themselves and you, inside your little bubble. So as far as you’re concerned, what you see and they’re talking about is all one consistent objective reality.
Er, that is, if things work the same in your solipsistic bubble as they do in mine. Perhaps you perceive everyone around you as talking lemurs that randomly turn into typewriters, I dunno.
Scriptures point to a form of subjective reality, or at least not a objectivity reality, possibly 4 interacting realities, the 4 kingdoms that Daniel spoke of, and the 4 gospels, one from each reality.
I’ll take it. And I think it fits in line quite nicely with multi-universe theory, multi dimensional physics, string theory and m-theory. Not that I need that as confirmation, but it is good to see that science is on the right track on somethings.
The way I see it is that when something bad happens, it is not necessarily because something good will come of it, but possibly that something bad a person did is being acted on and that person is being punished. God doesn’t necessarily have to only work through works of kindness or charity. For instance take a look at the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, beliefs in karma, and beliefs in yin and yang. Punishing gods go throughout all religions in the world, even Christianity, and by saying that good comes out of everything bad that happens to people is just ignorant.
One wonders why god doesn’t just go ahead and punish the sinners directly then, instead of using things like earthquakes, tsunamis and diseases which are just obscenely wasteful and impractical, not to mention the collateral damage.
“Certainly”? You asserting something doesn’t make it certainly so; the fact that no-one else holds a comparable opinion makes it even more uncertain than your unsupported word.