Do religions have PR departments? What are they supposed to do when people do damaging things and associate themselves with a religion when they do it?

And is it wrong to say that religion is not inherently theistic? I always tell self proclaimed "atheists" that a belief in a higher power has absolutely nothing to do with anything they're typically against and that all the bullshit they're mad about is the result of bad people, not any of the religions themselves.

Am I allowed to assume that anyone who says God isn't real because there's no proof of God is an idiot because they can't grasp the concept of a faith based system?

does the prophet muhammad browse 99chan's IRC

where do we go when we die

>Do religions have PR departments?

Abso-fucking-lutely they do. I mean, at least religious organizations do. Asking whether or not religion does is like asking whether or not politics has a PR department. The Catholics in particular talk about how to make their shit look better all the time, and all the different Cardinal fraternities disagree just as they do about everything. The problem is access, like usual. There are a shitload of Muslim leaders trying to drown out various extremist sects, but if you don't speak English and can't articulate in a way that westerners can relate to and understand, then it goes unheard.

>And is it wrong to say that religion is not inherently theistic?

"What is a religion" is the most fundamental question in when talking about religion. It's not a universal truth but I define religion as a shared set of beliefs and respect for something they consider sacred rather than a unified beliefs in gods specifically. So in other words, I could define it as unified reverence. This is a fairly common definition, and includes pretty much everything we consider religion, without also including things like politics. Some government-cults start to resemble religion simply because they take the policies/personalities so seriously it becomes sacred, and they are either voluntarily or forced to participate in it as a unified group. So no, not wrong. A broader question of whether atheists count as a religion is more complicated, but using the above definition, they would not qualify, because while they do hold a unified belief, they have no implied shared reverence. An atheist can still think science is bull honky and think Darwin was a twat.

>Am I allowed to assume that anyone who says God isn't real because there's no proof of God is an idiot because they can't grasp the concept of a faith based system?

Faith is sometimes defined as belief without proof or reason, but most people would not put faith in a complete stranger. Most people have faith in religious explanations of the world and stories because those stories are relatable, inspirational, or simply make sense in their minds. The problem with the Russel's Teapot and its derivatives is that it's random and lacks relatable context.

In my conversations with atheists I try this exercise in, well lying. You're late for work, you say that you're late because of traffic. Everyone rolls their eyes, even if it's 100% true. But then try adding little details: before I got to work I spilled coffee on my shirt and had to change it, then I got a call from my sister because she needs someone to take her kids to school, then someone parked in my spot so I had to go to the far end of the lot... it starts sound a bit more believable, if nothing else. Now start adding flowery details disconnecting from you trying to lie about work- say the person who stole your spot is a new, pretty employee, and right when you go to chew them out you stop and instead chat with them, and decide to go out on a date. You've taken it from an outright lie based on the truth (you were late for work one day) and turned it into the beginning of a potentially funny and heartwarming story.

I wouldn't accuse everyone who simply wants to derive meaning or purpose from the observable universe an idiot, but I think some of those people do underestimate or misunderstand what religion is, why people believe in it, and how it can be useful or even fun.

>>72014
It could be because god is either indifferent to the troubles of 99chan or it is because we have offended god in some way and thus he is making traffic on the board languish.

>>72015
The prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) ascended to heaven in the 7th century AD according to Muslims, and will not return to Earth until the last judgement at the end times. We are not currently in the end times, as we have not even reached the first stage when the Mahdi, the great redeemer of Islam, has revealed themselves. If they are not correct, then Muhammad (pbuh) has been dead all of this time and is not coming back. Therefore, there is a 0% chance that Muhammad (pbuh) is an active member of this website's IRC channel.

>>72016
Depends on what you mean by "we". If "we" is our bodies and thinking selves, then we are going in the ground, burnt up, cut up by scientists, buried at sea, etc. In any case, "we" cease to exist, and our souls (if they exist) transcend our current state.

Is the Judo-Christian God truly omnipotent, omnipresent, etc? Truly all knowing and all seeing? And if so why does he seem to have this fetish for testing us? Shouldn't he know if we're going to succumb to temptation or whatever?

Also is Satan a renegade archangel who wanted to overthrow God or simply the overseer of hell who does his job because he has to?

Why do left wingers denounce Christianity constantly for their treatment of gays and women, but handle Islam with kid gloves, when they treat gays and women way worse?

>>72019

Left winger here. The way many people that are Muslim treat gays and women is reprehensible, and we should strive to eliminate that oppression where possible. At the same time, I don't believe Islam is inherently the problem. Christianity has no shortage of violent passages in the Old Testament where the Tribes of Israel commit genocide and rape, but most Christians I've met aren't into that kind of thing. Likewise, the problems with Islam aren't problems with Islam - they're cultural problems with people that are impoverished and lack education, and they do not apply to all sects. Many Muslims are very progressive and are in full support of women's and LGBT rights. Many are not.

Saying "MUSLIMS ARE BAD" is ignorant and doesn't do anything to solve the problems that make certain modern day incarnations of Islam problematic. Likewise, I don't personally know any left wingers that say "All Christians are at fault" - it's generally specific sects or churches with specific beliefs we're looking at.

>>72018
The religious explanation is that God wants us to be fulfilled to and know our true meaning, and having no hardship or difficulty means that we don't ever truly understand that meaning. That our lives and how much we have is meaningless, the only thing that matters is our loyalty and devotion to God, and through that devotion we will find a place by his side in the kingdom of Heaven.

>>72019
It's more of a socio-political question, but I know the answer anyway, it's because Muslims in the west are a vulnerable minority. Now amount of atheists taking a dumb on Christianity and calling it a death cult is going to result in the wholesale marginalization and oppression of Christians. However, historically speaking, whenever a majority population starts saying a minority population is inherently violent, bad, disruptive, criminal, etc. it always ends badly, whether that was the intention or not.

But even then a lot of atheists regardless of political alignment will take dumps on Islam. I don't think it's unreasonable to say "we don't want innocent Muslims being rounded up in camps because of what IS is doing on the other side of the world."

I do think "left-wingers" as you might put them should still criticize human rights abuses and attacks on minorities in Muslim-dominated countries (and as someone who subscribes to Avaaz like a truth slacktivist, they're pretty big on highlighting that stuff), but the fear is that even if we just harp on what is happening in other countries too much, it could lead to unwarranted anti-Muslim violence here.

>>72017
Is Paradise Lost canon?
Even if it isn't why don't angels get to be free?

And how can you explain to people that religion has nothing against science or medicine? I'm getting tired of explaining why the church was the greatest thing ever in the "dark" ages and was the source of many major medical advancements.

Also where does one go to hook up with priests?

Do all furries go to hell?

>>72022
Paradise Lost itself is not canon but one could say that it is based on Jewish mythology detailing troubles regarding angels fraternizing with humans and generally rebelling against god. It seems apparent that angels have free will, but were made with some kind of inner insight into the nature of god and need to do nothing to get into the kingdom of Heaven, unlike humans. The book of Enoch (only recognized as canon by the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian church and some non-mainstream Jews) goes into this in detail, and might have been at least part of the inspiration, even if Paradise Lost is not really all that similar.

Trying to separate what is and isn't canonical can be confusing but not really hard, sometimes non-canonical ideas are used by religious people as ways to explain or justify things that aren't fully explained. The "problem of Hell" is one in particular that is hard without a broader explanation you see in Dante's work. Milton's work in particular is seen more as strictly allegorical fan fiction.

It is certainly true that the church, being the biggest and arguably most authoritative institution in medieval Europe, was also the biggest patron of science, along with art and other such things. Many scientists were indeed devout, not atheists who were just pretending. They felt like studying the natural world in full detail was the closest one could get to god, to realize his glory and majesty. They saw the church's teachings in their observations.

This was a phenomena that wasn't contained to Christianity either, for much of what Europeans call the "dark ages" (which really weren't that bad), the Islamic world was plowing forth in great strides in the world of science, mathematics, chemistry, etc. You look at how much work went into people trying to figure out which was to turn in order to be turning toward Mecca to pray.

This largely ignores the rest of the world, though. It's not like you NEED strong religious institutions to advance science, as we can see from China, India, and other non-Abrahamic regions.

This changed and became a religio-political issue entirely in the 20th century with the widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory and the origin of the Earth and universe. These are two sides of the coin that are difficult to consolidate without basically saying entire swaths of the early Bible is just allegorical.

So science and religion aren't natural enemies, and certainly don't have to be. Getting people to accept that the two did and still can work together is something that is up to them, though.

Where and how to hook up with priests is a question I get asked a lot, and assuming that you're talking about Catholic priests/nuns that are required to be abstinent, the best place to go is probably a church. I mean really, they don't leave church very often, that's sort of the point. Negging doesn't work so don't try it. You'll need some serious game to cross the finish line with one, unless you're young and nubile. Trying to find the vulnerable ones that show some obvious frustration with their lifestyle is probably the easiest route.

>>72027
What about just platonic stuff? Could they spoon you and whatnot?

I want to spank a nun, age doesn't matter, endless bonus points if she's somehow asian or speaks any foreign language.

I want to cook a nice dinner with a young priest and then fall asleep on the couch with him watching some movie.

>>72023
If they Jews/Muslims are right they almost certainly do, though it all comes down to how seriously they believe it. Some interpretations of Christianity allow everyone to get into heaven so long as they repent for their sins, so, you know. Probably though.

>>72028
It's not against the rules, at that point it's up to the individual to see how they feel about it.

>>72029
Your best bet is Koreans, they have the biggest east Asian Christian community, if I recall right. You could always bag yourself a Japanese Christian, they come with all the kinky shit pre-programmed.

>>72030
It takes a while to become a full-fledged priest so they spend most of their youngest years getting educated before getting ordained. Catholic priests tend to be pretty tight bros with each other though, so being one is best chance of being tight with one and getting inside one.

>>72031
How do you know so much about all this stuff?
Can priests use drugs?

>>72032
I had an irregular religious experience when growing up, with my father being Catholic, my mother being Methodist (Catholic lite), and because of my location I grew up around hardcore independent Christians, baptists, Amish/Mennonite, and even a Mormon at one time. One of my best friends in middle school was an Indonesian-American Muslim. I never really felt enamored by Christianity and basically learned a lot about most world religions in my attempt to find one that really "suited" me, besides just calling myself an atheist. I read the Bible along with studying some non-canon Jewish texts, the Koran, even Book of Mormon (that's a fun one). After studying and reading about the various Dharmic religions, I settled on Zen Buddhism, even found a local Tai Chi instructor who could offer some wisdom. I didn't go to school for it or anything, but it's not exactly hard to get hordes of information on religion and religious topics. When looking at religion in their specific historical contexts, it becomes a rather fun thing to study, and a lot of it becomes a lot clearer and easier to understand.

Generally priests and Christians in general are told not to get to addicted to mind-altering substances, to not foul up the body or the mind... however because Jesus himself drank wine this creates a conflict. Generally the Bible to doesn't expressly outlaw drugs, then again it's hard to say how much they knew about them or how much access they had to them. But I could certainly see some liberal Catholics who wouldn't have a problem with priests smoking the ganj.

>>72033
That's really cool of you.
I don't think I'll ever be able to be really close friends with a priest, but it's nice to think about.
and about that paradise lost thing, what I was really interested in was the lucifer part, I really like the idea of him just being an angel who wanted God to love him as much as he loved man but I don't want to come off as some edgy devil worshiper.

>>72034
Right, in the aforementioned Book of Enoch, there is a certain group of angels who did grow very jealous of humanity and god's attachment to humanity, and went down to have sex with humans in order to produce giants. God didn't take that very well.

Paradise Lost is a great story, and can examine the potentially destructive power of love and devotion, and/or what it truly means to be devoted. If you love someone and become so attached to them, but they don't reciprocate and marry someone else, it is not uncommon for people to become envious, and that envy can lead to problems. If you wish to see the religious stories as just fun, allegorical stories that help put our own troubles in different perspectives and examine them, then Paradise Lost can be as large a contribution to that as any story in the Bible.

>>72034
Does it have to be a Catholic priest? It is possible for Orthodox and Anglican clergy to be married and therefore they might be a little more relaxed and bro-tier about some of these things (with the caveat that Orthodox bishops and other high-ranking clergy are typically selected from the ranks of monastic clergy who are bound by most of the same rules as Catholic priests and monks).

>>72010
Can you explain to me the whole trinity thing? There's like a special philosophical term for the whole father-son-holy-ghost thing and what exactly they are all to one and another. I'm interested in what Jesus is too because that's related. It's the one philosophical thing in religion where I look at it and just don't even know what the fuck is going on.

Oh another question: What do you think of the current biblical canon? Are there some gospels you think should be in that aren't? Are there some you think shouldn't be in? I remember reading that Martin Luther wanted to take out a bunch of stuff from the New Testament. Also a lot of the other christian churches don't have the book of revelations included in the canon. Martin Luther wanted to take out the book of revelations too I think. Why do people hate the book of revelations?

Yesterday I got to encounter some Hare Krishnas spreading books about their religion. Admittedly, as far as aggressively proselytizing faiths go, I'm more used to seeing that from Christian sects like the Mormons, JWs, and Chick tract-flinging fundamentalists that tend to have, shall we say, idiosyncratic interpretations of some of their scriptures.

To what extent are Hare Krishnas like that in relation to the rest of "mainstream" Hinduism, if there even is such a thing?

>>72021
>>72018 here. So basically he made us so we could suffer through life and become his cheerleaders?

If we evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys and why is 99chan still 99chan and not evolved into a greater website like Twitter or what have you? Why does original sin prevent me from masturbating, mom? Lastly, who would win in a fight, Muhammad or Muhammad Ali?

>>72036
I wouldn't call Orthodox priests more bro-like than Catholics simply because I'm not entirely sure what they're like within their safe spaces the same way I've had experience with Catholic clergy. The rules on marriage and relationships are a lot more open in Orthodox, but they're still not allowed to get married after they are ordained. It's only when you get to the high ranks to people need to be celibate.

Really protestantism is the place to go if you want to have closer relationships with people, as there aren't many restrictions. With highly organized Christianity of any kind it's more of a matter of luck and finding the right people. They're mostly just friends with each other.

>>72037
Probably the thing that confuses people about the trinity the most is the holy spirit and exactly what the role of the whole thing is. Christianity is sometimes defined as an expansion of Judaism, but it actually redefines many core concepts. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is considered as a separate entity from the "Father", the creator of everything, etc. Jesus was added into the mix as the semi-mortal messiah of humanity. The trinity means that when people are praying to "God" or referring to him, they are not praying to just one entity but rather all three. Conversely, it also suggests that all three of them ARE the same entity in three incarnations and identities. If you wanted to, one could even claim that the hardcoreness of the Old Testament was because most of the interactions were with the Father, whereas the interactions in the New Testament were mostly with the Holy Spirit. It's also why Muslims sometimes claim Christianity is polytheistic while Christians maintain that they're monotheistic and they're both kinda right.

According to modern Christians, Jesus is both the son of God and the messiah, a man who was divine (whereas the rest of God is divine but not man). Whether or not Jesus was truly the "son" of God was a point of contention in early Christianity, but you could say that most things were points of contention in early Christianity.

>>72038
ballza question. People act like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other old books means we have to rethink Biblical canon. The fact is that the people who compiled the canon we used today likely knew about these books, even maybe had more intact copies of them.

The canon of the Old Testament had a few different reasons: not just to provide a philosophical and religious text, but also to provide a history of the Hebrews from the beginning to the rise and fall of the Israelite kingdom.

When deciding which books to include in Christianity, it's a bit more difficult, because it's meant to be strictly a religious and philosophical work. The only issue after that becomes historical verifiability. Much of the New Testament is Peter's writings and letters, in which he lays the foundation for the organized and "true" religion based on Jesus' teachings, so it is considered very important in relation to the gospels. It's easy to deride the religious scholars and just putting in the stuff that they wanted people to know, but in reality they were most concerned with the historical record. It was easier to tell which documents were authentic and which ones were fraudulent or simply didn't have a lot of copies made. It was a chaotic time when anyone could write something and claim it to be from the time of Jesus. Muslims have similar and bitter fights over Hadiths.

So the criteria for the New Testament was mostly 1) whether it contributes any greater understanding of Christianity not already contributed and 2) had a ballza bit of historical evidence to verify its authenticity. So in this sense, I would say instead of adding stuff that are very hard to truly verify, I would side with those that want to reduce the number of books in the NT in order to keep the message of the NT more streamlined and less confusing.

Revelation is a point of contention quite simply because it's really fucking weird and it's a big turn into left field from what was a Christian message of devotion and charity and compassion to Jesus literally sword fighting with demons while we all watch. The reason why it's considered important by the mainstream is because many early Christians did believe that Jesus would be coming back for Armageddon, and as such it is considered a mainstream belief and why it was included in the canon. From a historical perspective, St. John wrote it while in hiding on the Greek island of Patmos when he was close to 90 years old, leaving some to believe it was more the product of senility. A more modern perspective suggests that it is provocative anti-Roman propaganda cloaked in fantastical metaphor. The Beast of the Sea has seven heads, Rome is the city of seven hills, the Whore of Babylon wears purple, the Roman emperor wears purple, etc.

Many people including Martin Luther may not have liked it too much because it was the one book used most often as a cudgel during his time, and it's so uncharacteristic of the rest of the works it just doesn't feel like it belongs.

Would I keep it in? It's tricky, simply because taking it out means you're basically taking out Armageddon and the world ending from the Biblical canon. If you take it purely metaphorically, you could say that John's Apocalypse has already happened, with the Fall of Emperor Nero and the wider pagan Roman Empire, it's civil war between the faithful and the pagans, and the "new Jerusalem" being Constantinople. It's a bit of Texas Sharpshooter, though.

>>72039
Because of the decentralized nature of Hinduism and most Dharmic religions, it's pretty easy for someone to create offshoots. Hare Krishnas are hardly mainstream, but it's not really what they believe, it's how they believe it. Two people can believe the exact same thing but one can be a hermit and the other can be someone who shoves their beliefs into people's faces at the airport. In many ways, the Hare Krishna movement was influenced by western religion and Evangelism, even a way to try and package Hinduism in a way more easily understood by westerners, though in the process it starts to feel more like a fringe cult. But to answer the question directly, no, Hare Krishna is not really a major sect of Hinduism outside of the US, and you certainly don't have to act like one to follow Hinduism.

>>72040
If you think of the relationship between God and humans more literally like a traditional father-child relationship, it might make more sense. Particularly, the relationship a father might have with their 20 something child. The child has freedom, can make decisions, but the parents still want them to make the right choices. The whole point is not to suffer for God (though Job got the sharp end of that stick), it's to follow God's laws so you can have a fulfilled and less shitty life, and when shitty stuff happens you'll be able to handle it. Similar to how a father might want you to follow their advice. The story of Job runs into this conflict directly. Job had a lot of shit and God took it away to prove a point to Satan, and he basically said "well, the lord gave me this shit, so I shouldn't complain too much when it goes away." The whole idea is that we should be grateful for the gift of life, free will, and the various other gifts god gives us, and we shouldn't only be grateful when things are going ballza.

What do you think the pope's private life is like?

>>72045
Related question: Who is your favorite pope
Also, who is your favorite catholic saint?

>>72046
if OP doesn't say jesus malverde or gertrude de nivelle he's a big bundle of sticks

Answer my question, you godless fuck. >>72043

>>72043
People don't evolve from monkeys, monkeys and humans have common ancestors, some adapted into humans others into several other species of primate. 99chan likely hasn't evolved because it has no interest in evolving into a website with novel features and a broad audience. Original sin doesn't really prevent you from masturbating. The ancient Jews probably looked down on it because people could get fixated on self-gratification, just like they could get addicted to sex and other pleasures. In a fight with boxing rules it would certainly be Muhammad Ali, street rules still Muhammad Ali, but with no rules and no restrictions then the prophet Muhammad could just call down the wrath of God or something.

>>72045
The pope doesn't have a wealth of private time I imagine, but it's likely simple and not far off from what your average person does. Especially since the current pope is so chill. Reading, watching whatever Italian TV shows, stuff like that. The current one denied having a lavish apartment.

>>72046
My favorite pope is probably the current one. I wish I could do the histo-hipster thing and choose an awesome pope from history, but that's just the problem. We simply don't know a lot about many popes from olden times, and when meticulous history was being kept on them, it was mostly boring shit about ecumenical fights that didn't ultimately matter much. When a pope did to something that "made history", it usually wasn't something terribly positive. Compared to the current pope who has made great strides in significantly improving the optics of the church, addressing real problems that previous popes didn't have the balls to even acknowledge, and being an all-around cool guy that doesn't take himself super seriously, as far as popes go.

My favorite Saint would probably have to be Joan of Arc, again, not the most fringe or non-mainstream choice. I find her story to be particularly fascinating, and it only becomes more interesting when you learn some of the smaller details, like how she was able to essentially outsmart the court.

>>72050
>joan of arc
>not one of the saints with ridiculous stories like saint nick who brought a barrel of dead pickled children back to life

  why is all christian music so shitty apart from gregorian chants?

>>72051
That would be a cool story about St. Nick if it were a true, unfortunately like a lot of legendary figures people made up stories about him centuries after the fact. Whereas a peasant girl taking over France when she was like 17 is a matter of historical fact.

how aren't christians constantly grieving the fact that a huge portion of humanity (likely including some of their friends and loved ones) will go to hell? Shouldn't believing that give the average person panic attacks?

why do people believe in religion?

>>72053
Yeah Joan of Arc is one of those instances where God's intervention is actually more believable than the alternative. The alternative being that a teenage girl just woke up one day and decided to lead a huge army across France, and actually did it.

Your choice of pope is a bit dissapointing, mostly cause I wanted to learn about other cool popes. I'm sure there must have been some ballza popes. Was the pope actively involved in the counter reformation when that happened? Cause that was ballza, I mean it was more just stopping priests from being gluttonous bundle of stickss but it was a positive turn.

Next question: What's up with Christian mysticism? I've heard that orthodox churches tend to be much more mystical than other western churches, but like how does that work. Do they meditate and try to understand God or what?

>>72052
Probably for the same reason a lot of pop music sucks in general, because it has no edge. Most of rock music got popular because it crossed boundaries, and the emotions that come with it. Much of the popular bands in the Christian music genre just end up making simple songs with lyrics that appeal to young evangelicals. Thus, non-young-evangelicals will find it corny and stupid just as they might find songs about sex to be crass and offensive.

>>72054
The short answer is that they are. Have you ever tried to say that you're an atheist or simple non-Christian to a devout Christian you might know well? They tend to look sad and almost desperate to get you to become one. Knowing that much of the world will never see heaven is disconcerting to them.

Then there's those that simply think that everyone ballza will get into heaven regardless of their religion. This is a bit of a "pick and choose" Christian. Fundamentalists might rebut by saying that no one is truly "ballza" enough because we're all pre-made with original sin, and no matter how super duper we are during life, no one is perfect enough to get into heaven based on actions alone, only with Jesus' help and love and acceptance can we make it there.

There's also an interpretation that says that hell really isn't as bad as many people paint it as, a place where demons will rape you with barbs for eternity. God's not sadistic and enjoys seeing his children suffer. It's just a place defined as "not heaven" and some people might face eternal punishment for their sins, while others it might not be so bad. This aligns with what Jews tend to believe about hell, that it's not heaven. Jesus doesn't paint hell as a great place, however, which complicates things.

The "problem of hell" is a common issue and the subject of a lot of disillusionment and debate.

>>72057
I think the two main reasons (that relate to one another) come down to 1) Life is seemingly meaningless and that sucks and 2) People often don't know how to act and think and want guidance.

The second one is most important in relation to ancient times. Today we tend to see things like "don't murder, steal, assault, etc," as givens, like we're pre-programmed with those morals. But they're really just a set a rules cultivated over long periods of time meant to keep order in society. But then there's the smaller things, like what should I eat/drink in order to not get sick, is having sex all the time really a ballza idea, etc. The old Jewish laws sort of make a lot of sense in this context, they just took an absolutist approach with it. Having sex with one person would ensure that you don't get VD, eating pork can make you sick, so just don't fucking eat it. The the problem is this practical wisdom is hard for people to swallow from just some old guy, so various theologies have been constructed as a way to give it some more authority. Either it was from god himself or ancient wisdom of people who were a lot smarter than you.

People still look for guidance though, and that's where ancient religions can lose their luster and credibility, religious teachers of all kinds find themselves having to contort ancient teachings in order to fit into problems ancient peoples couldn't even conceive of.

>>72058
Yeah unfortunately studying papal history doesn't give one a terribly positive view of the position. Popes were ultimately politicians and puppets for much of history, and even the big reformers like Gregory VII excommunicated people for political reasons and is largely known for embroiling himself in politics as well as being embroiled.

It's not that papal history isn't interesting, it just means you have to compare and evaluate popes not based on their real contributions to the faith, but compare and evaluate them as one might kings of a country, and indeed, the Pope was the king of the Papal States for a long time. Only more in modern times do we have enough information about popes and can examine them fully.

The counter-reformation is often misunderstood solely as the Catholics cleaning up their act, and while that was part of it with elimination of corruption and blatant profiteering, in some ways it also made the Catholics even more fundamentalist in some ways. So as most things in history, there's the ballza and the bad, and it's also hard to pick out one pope in particular from that era, many of them had some role to play in the Council of Trent and various reforms. You could say Pius V was the biggest figure, he was a big fan of Thomas Aquinas but he also expelled many Jews from the Papal States and reaffirmed many hard line stances on heresy.

Some popes were likely gay, there might have even been a secret woman. There were debates and battles over nepotism, but no one pope eliminated corruption and it's hard to put one over the other. It's the same with patronage of the arts and science, some popes did others didn't.

Pope Innocent XI is cool to me because he didn't put the preservation of Catholicism over everything else, even siding more with William of Orange, because of how heavy-handed James II was with his attempt to restore Catholicism. A surprisingly principled stance for popes, but not that far-reaching or impactful.

Pope Pius X sheltered refugees in the Vatican from an flood when the Italian government wasn't doing anything, so that was pretty cool. Pius XI was a renowned mountain climber and didn't care much for racism, which makes him cool on two fronts. Pius XII, the pope of WWII, who is complicated because on one hand he kept the Vatican neutral during the war and while Jews were being subjugated (though most of the world was just standing by as well), but he also secretly helped the German resistance and tried to use the clergy in Germany to sow discord. Could have done more, but the same could be said for pretty much anyone. Nazis weren't shy about their hatred of the Vatican so it's not like them trying to incite Catholics in Germany would have done much more.

Christian mysticism is an interesting field to me simply because it does apply some common eastern tradition, consciously or unconsciously, to Christianity. Meditation in most circumstances is used to gain a higher understand of one's self, and Christian mystics use it to attain a higher understanding of God, and is generally considered to be intense and long prayer. It has the most tradition in Orthodox churches, but isn't without its detractors. It shouldn't be confused with speaking in tongues or various other non-traditional practices in Christianity, though I suppose they can be considered related in some ways.

Does a dog really have the Buddha nature?

>>72061
Buddha-nature has different meanings depending on the sect. In Zen Buddhism, Buddha-nature is simply the nature of impermanence, everything including rocks and sand and grass and universe have it because everything is impermanent. In other sects the answer is still usually yes, since all living things can be teachers in dharma, all living things have buddha-nature, and can attain enlightenment. Other, more fundamental sects generally consider buddha-nature to be something that humans possess before they are born, and attachment is how we lose it.

However, it is easy to forget all that when the little shithead pisses on the carpet.

Christian here.

One of the things that informs my faith and ultimately made me decide to look into Christianity again after I started to believe in God is the plethora of absolutely brilliant Christians, particularly philosophers. The kind of people that shook the world with their thought alone were also extremely religious and there's a wealth of evidence to support this. Kant, Descartes, St. Thomas, Hegel, Kierkegaard, the most profound and interesting philosophers would seem borderline psychotic if they were alive today (especially Kierkegaard). I could even go as far as to include Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, considering how deeply they influenced christian theology, as sort of proto-Christians; I rationalize this by their emphasis on faith in God, particularly Socrates.

However, when I look upon the great Muslim philosophers, there's not a damn thing interesting there. Even the ones that influenced important christian philosophers seem absolutely boring because there's no way for me not to compare them to their Christian counterparts. Similarly, Jewish philosophers don't provoke my interest much, but a couple recent philosophers I at least want to read more about are/were Jewish. Eastern philosophers are almost unilaterally nonsense.

How do you account for this? I have my own beliefs about this, but first I want to hear your (probably retarded) theory.

Hard mode: you can't invoke socioeconomic situations, accuse me of prejudice or try to argue Islamic philosophers are worthwhile.

Humanity is a single massive organism. Gods may be referred to as the collective self awareness of all humanity.

When miracles happen it is simply macro scale algorithms being mistaken for autonomous processes. Religion is akin to a data virus.

What is the best way of conversting someone to christianity? Do chick tracts work?

>>72065
Assuming that English is your native and sole language and that you're from the west, probably the most likely scenario is that there is a shortage of quality translations of Islamic philosophical writings. Even when western/Catholic Christian philosophers did not speak English, their stuff was studied by English scholars, translated and re-translated and different meanings were derived by a variety of linguists and their work has been discussed and studied and taught. Not only is the west decidedly not influenced much by Islamic or middle eastern culture and as such we don't have as many frames of reference for their philosophy, but Arabic/Persian along with other languages are quite foreign, harder to translate, both in meaning and in tone. The same problem afflicted many Chinese/east Asian philosophies, readable and enjoyable versions of writings like the Tao Te Ching are somewhat recent, many scholarly versions were literal translations useful only to scholars. This could very well be the case with Jewish/Orthodox/Muslim philosophy, with less of the people who truly know the material have a real command of the English language that is masterful enough to convey the same messages in an enjoyable and interesting way. Conversely, people who speak English natively and try to translate these things can often miss nuance and a real command of the language they're trying to translate, so it comes out drab and uninspired. Some would accuse the NKJVof that when you compare them to the original texts.

I'm not sure if that counts as a socioeconomic argument, but it might explain it adequately enough.

>>72065
>Eastern philosophers are almost unilaterally nonsense.
Confucius say: You big bundle of sticks.

Hermann Hesse is generally regarded as some German guy who wrote about Eastern ideas in a way that people coming from a Western background can understand. Read some of his things maybe.

  >>72052
fuck off

Why is it that some religions have faded into obscurity while others have spread across the world? Is there some quality in certain religions that makes them more popular than others?

>>72073
It helps if your religion is the official one of some big empire. A ballza religion is one that answers the big questions in some satsifying way, makes people feel ballza for believing in it, and isn't specific to one exact culture or race. That's one of the reasons you don't see a lot of racially-specific religions. Judaism could be considered one with a very orthodox reading, in some ways it was a religion that defined itself to a certain tribe of people which hampered its spread and allowed competitors. Christianity spread because there was a bit of a belief vacuum in Asia Minor. There was the Greek gods of course, which had been more or less stolen by the Romans, but they never appealed to many commoners. Mesopotamian religion was also similar. You have a zillion gods and they're all fighting for some reason and none of it relates to you much, but then there's this new one that relates to you more and even has a cool story filled with drama attached to it.

Islam spread partially for socioeconomic reasons, the entire region was run by a collection of corrupt local despots who cared nothing for the multitude of poor folk, and again with the polytheistic gods being unhelpful. Islam, probably more than any other religion, stresses charity as one of its main tenants. So naturally a bunch of poor people would gravitate to a religion that required rich people to give them money. The rather impressive spread of Islam can be attributed to common folk basically being fed up with a large selection of wishy-washy local mystic traditions that endorsed horribly corrupt governors. It spread into western Africa because of an important African king named Mansa Musa, who was enormously rich but during his pilgrimage to Mecca it was said that he crashed the economy with runaway inflation due to how much of his gold he gave away.

Buddhism spread throughout Asia mostly due to Emperor Ashoka, who, like Constantine is believed to have converted or at least embraced Buddhism after a particularly deadly war he waged, and after he embraced it he became known as a merciful and competent and compassionate administrator, which made him popular and in turn helped Buddhism spread. Because of the flexibility of Buddhism, it was able to appeal to both Taoists and Confucianists in ancient China, which helped it spread further.

Meanwhile, culturally specific traditions such as Chinese mythology, Shinto, southeast Asian traditions, etc could never spread beyond their cultures, and today aren't even really taken too seriously by most of their own populaces.

>>72065
>absolutely brilliant Christians, particularly philosophers

Back in the day, wouldn't European people who claimed not to have been Christians have been ostracized? Society itself was heaviliy Christian and if you weren't a part of the religion, you weren't part of society itself.

>>72068
>probably the most likely scenario is that there is a shortage of quality translations of Islamic philosophical writings.

Haha

No

The language barrier doesn't excuse their philosophy from being fucking stupid.

The correct answer is that Islamic theology teaches a fundamentalist approach to exegis and anyone that attempts to deviate from a face-value interpretation of the Koran is beheaded, unless they're trying to explain how the Koran contains schematics for Apache helicopters. Since Bible Study in Islam translates to memorization, muslims are uppity as fuck and consider disagreement tantamount to apostasy. This does not make for ballza dialectic, and intellectually their religion is just straight-up incompatible with modern thinking. Hence the massive wave of reactionary islamism--they can't cope with reform like Christians did, shit doesn't process, the only two options are to embrace secularism and lose their religion entirely like the Jordanians or the turks, or become batshit lunatics.

>>72069

What, that hack that wrote Siddartha? That's high school core. There's nothing difficult to understand about eastern philosophy, it's just bullshit. No grounding in logic whatsoever. Completely useless to anyone outside that cultural tradition, and once you break from the religious/enculturation aspect, it all falls apart. Like, legalism is just straight up "forrow raws, or u shame famiry"

What kind of bullshit is that? That's not profound, a man named Stirner might even call that downright spooky

>>72074

Also rong

Doesn't account for the spread of early Christianity before the conversion of Constantine. Sure, there was a need for a religion to replace greco-roman polytheism, but why an allegedly-heretical offshoot of an ethnotribal religious sect that the state persecuted time and time again? Furthermore, how in the fuck did 4 guys spread the word of Christ and manage to convert so many heathens when they were forsaken by their own tribe, by the state, and the most significant of whom never even met Christ but still wrote half the new testament?

There was indeed a religious vacuum in Rome. The early Christians had many, many religions to compete with to replace the state religion. Mithraism in particular was very popular and would've been far more palatable to the Roman sensibilities. As far as the downtrodden and the damned, Cult of Isis offered the same comfort and redemption to the oppressed. Even more significant was Paul's triumph over Gnostic Christianity. Some sects drew heavily from Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras (like the early church ended up doing) and taught that Christ was God, but only appeared human, which would've made more sense than the trinity to your outside observer, especially a pagan.

>A ballza religion is one that answers the big questions in some satsifying way, makes people feel ballza for believing in it, and isn't specific to one exact culture or race

This is more or less the opposite of what Christianity does. Christians have to pray and think and ruminate on the big questions, most Christians that think they have the answer are recent evangelical cult members who've been misled by corrupt pastors--and pastor is an outdated profession anyway, those chucklefucks do nothing but dumb down the wisdom of God. CS Lewis once said, "I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity"

Christianity is probably the scariest religion out there because it's the only one where you face a realistic chance of eternal damnation. There's a lot of people that don't take the Lord's word in its proper gravity. Muslims believe that, eventually, everybody will be purified in hell (aside from polytheists I think, which includes Christians) and end up in paradise after a while, and Jews believe you'll either face eternal slumber or be judged ballza and be arisen when the Messiah turns out. And furthermore, both religions are extremely orthopraxic and you can wind up in God's favor by basically being a ballza dude. Not as much as if you hadn't been such a fuckin Takfir, but nonetheless.

This is not the case in Christianity. The only way to the Father is through Him, and if you don't believe Christ is the Lord, Son of God, savior of Man, son of the virgin Mary and died on the cross for our sins, you're fucked. This is the wickedness of original sin, of free will, that if we make the wrong choice--or if we even just don't make the right choice in the right way--then we have nobody else to point fingers at, there was nobody preventing us from reading the Testaments and worshipping Christ.

As far as the spread of Islam, it's pretty funny that you mention the emphasis on alms instead of the fact that Mohammad was a fucking warlord who founded a massive empire through conquest. Quite frankly, I have no clue what you're even talking about--religious conversion was motivated principally by gibsmedats? That's absurd. Greed certainly was a factor, but it was more in the way of the need for a unified sociopolitical civilization that had a stable, common element spreading across multiple ethnic boundaries, a desire for social advancement in the caliphate, the balkanization and dissolution of local tribal religious modes and, natch, plagiarism of Christianity while spreading propaganda regarding its inception.

Yet it's Buddhism that you specifically point out as being perpetuated by an empire.
Wew lad Wew lad Wew lad Wew lad Wew lad Wew lad

>>72075

You could make that argument for some people.

Most philosophers though, their faith was way too deeply ingrained for that to make any sense whatsoever. Hegel was a priest all his life. Kant's entire philosophy is based on trying to explain God's ethics because he never seriously considered that they weren't right. Kierkegaard broke off from his fiance and died a virgin to commit himself to God.

Besides, there were plenty of people in those days that were outright atheists anyway but they called themselves deists to avoid getting hanged

Why hasn't anyone done anything about scientology?

>>72076
>The language barrier doesn't excuse their philosophy from being fucking stupid.

Unless that philosophy was mistranslated in the first place. Your understanding of anything from a foreign language is predicated on a quality translation. People believe that translation is 1:1 or something. Even the great ones still leave a lot of nuance out, hence why some will continue to assert that you can't truly understand some of the philosophers you pointed out without reading them in their original language.

At one time an expert from the Tao Te Ching looked like this:

Heaven and Earth are not humane
And regard the people as straw dogs
The sage is not humane
And regards all things as straw dogs

That translation is literally correct, but makes no fucking sense because the meaning (particularly of straw dog in this context) is not communicated. And as such, it's no secret why people thought it was dumb whereas works by Europeans that have been translated 50+ times over numerous centuries makes a bit more sense to them.

So... I disagree. I think you underestimate how much language can make a difference in this context.

I could just go with my original theory and say that you don't like them or understand them because you don't want to, but I still don't think it's that.

Islam is less flexible than Christianity though, no doubt. Christianity has this incompatibility with old Jewish laws while still claiming it is totes Judeo. Take the stoning of the whore, Jesus stopped them and said they were bad despite them literally following Jewish law. So is the Old Testament just... suggestions? Only there for historical reference? Still make up the backbone of Christianity? No matter what you believe, the Bible doesn't make it fucking clear. Jesus says all the old laws still apply, while he actively breaks them and claims they're all shit. Christianity is only less flexible because it is really vague.

So perhaps this is why philosophers are more interesting in Christianity, because Jesus and his disciples were so contradictory and unspecific that you can literally believe whatever the fuck you want, and so long as you put Jesus somewhere in it, you're a Christian. What you criticize about Islam is much of what gives it it's appeal to some people, you just can't start talking about transhumanism or whatever the fuck and people accept it as being related to religion when it's really not.

>Doesn't account for the spread of early Christianity before the conversion of Constantine.

I went through that with the spreading through Anatolia. Also, it wasn't just four guys, it's unsure exactly how many early Christians there were that actually followed Jesus but it probably wasn't just four. Most of those people had to GTFO of Dodge and lot of them went to Asia Minor, where Greek religion was relatively weak and there were many competitors. But it's not like Jesus performed miracles in front of their eyes, it still spread outside of Jewish areas by word of mouth and conversion, first with those whose beliefs were compatible with Christianity, some of which were not derived from Judaism. Then it spread farther in Greece over the next couple centuries, civil war, Constantine. If it weren't for Constantine, Christianity would still be a backwater religion like Zoroastrianism.

> Christians have to pray and think and ruminate on the big questions, most Christians that think they have the answer are recent evangelical cult members who've been misled by corrupt pastors--and pastor is an outdated profession anyway, those chucklefucks do nothing but dumb down the wisdom of God.

It's more about certainty than "having all the answers". Christianity is comforting because if your fucking kid gets gunned down by an aspie or police officer at least you can take some comfort that they're soul is going to fly off to heaven than simply going into the ground.

>This is not the case in Christianity. The only way to the Father is through Him, and if you don't believe Christ is the Lord, Son of God, savior of Man, son of the virgin Mary and died on the cross for our sins, you're fucked.

That's just the thing though, isn't it? Such a stark choice makes those who make the right choice feel gratified and enlightened and fulfilled, and they can safely look down on those who aren't.

Christianity is EASY, that's the point, and that's one of the reasons why it sticks so much. All you have to say is "lawdy lawdy I bin saved" and call it a fucking day, and you get a smug sense of satisfaction doing it. Whether or not it makes people feel ballza about being human is irrelevant.

Judaism and Islam are both hard. You actually have to act certain ways and follow laws and be a devoted servant, or fucking ELSE. We're not talking about some bullshit about after you die, you're gonna suffer in this life, bitch. Jesus didn't much like this, despite claiming to love it, for the same reason the rest of us don't today: it's brutal. Upholding god's laws here on Earth isn't a pretty business. Suggesting that God changed his mind on the whole thing suggests that God is and was never perfect, which is constantly asserting despite having a load of evidence to suggest that God made a shitload of mistakes.

>As far as the spread of Islam, it's pretty funny that you mention the emphasis on alms instead of the fact that Mohammad was a fucking warlord who founded a massive empire through conquest.

Why did Muhammad have followers in the first place, though? A general needs an army, and there's only so many cultists you can round up in your hometown before having to reach out to others. Enforcing your religion only goes so far. People were receptive to Islam and didn't mind being conquered by them in many cases because it was a whole lot better for them than the old tribal lords. The fact that the Caliphate became a prosperous and stable empire was only predicated on people buying into the religion to some extent. If that weren't the case, then there would be constant revolt and rebellion.

>Yet it's Buddhism that you specifically point out as being perpetuated by an empire.

Not sure if I'd say "perpetuated", certainly not single handedly. India still believes in many Dharmic traditions that are not Buddhism, after all. Buddhism's spread is long and complicated but there's no doubt that Ashoka's reign got the ball rolling in some ways.

Why were so many cults created in the 60's and 70's? It seems like there are a lot less of them today.

what is your opinion of satanic ritual abuse

>>72078
Because it was founded and flourished a in a country with freedom of religion. And they're ballza at keeping all the pedophilic shit on the DL.

>>72080
Liberal social movements gave way to people becoming rather disillusioned with traditional religion, so it became easier for people gravitate toward alternate concepts of god and religion. Cults just got a really bad reputation what with the mass suicides and murders and various other things. If it weren't for that stuff I still there would be more stuff like that today, and there is as far as Scientology and alternate forms of Christianity. Liberal Christianity really took off in the 60s/70s too, I have an old Bible called "The Way" which was a hippie writing of the Bible. It just illustrates the fundamental incompatibility of Abrahamic religions unless you really start redefining them into something completely different.

>>72081
It... doesn't exist in any significant capacity? LeVeyan Satanism is so corny and soft at most they do is nude altars. My understanding is that a lot of people got all sweaty about it at one time when D&D was accused of being satanist along with pretty much everything else that came out of the 70s.

What is your favorite religion?

Can you tell me the story of the protestant church from Martin Luther all the way to whatever the most common and contemporary denomination is?

Also what does ecumenical mean?

>>72089
That's an open question, I like some religions more because they are interesting and have interesting ideas and others because they are entertaining. Greek mythology can be entertaining simply because of the complicated relationships of the deities, and one can find some interest in the way the gods reflect the ballza and bad about humanity.

But I think the best mixture of the two is Mormonism, both in the actual belief system and the story/reception/social status of Mormonism today. Here you have a religion that probably has more in common with Islam than Christianity but yet is considered a sect of Christianity and accepted by most American Christians. Imagine if an entire state or even two states were dominated by Islam or any other world religion than Christianity.

Then you get into the actual beliefs, the fact that it's essentially polytheistic and that people are born dead and can keep having kids after they're dead and that stars are dead people. Shit that's so far out of the Abrahamic mainstream that it's truly strange how it was ever embraced or tolerated even in small capacities. I know Mormonism basically evolved to downplay and more or less ignore the less palatable parts of their religion, but goddamn. One of those motherhooligans was one secret video clip away from becoming President, and all those people losing their minds because they read that Obama might be Muslim were totally okay with it.

Then you take into account that the whole thing was transparently made up. I'm not sure if that makes it my favorite but like the South Park douchebags I sort of fell to allure.

>>72090
I'll answer the second question first, since it's easier to answer, because the first question is a doozy.

"Ecumenical" is a term that literally refers to the entirety of Christendom, however its use in history is a bit contradictory. Ecumenical councils were called to try and settle matters of church doctrine and practices, but they were almost never called with eastern Orthodox churches and such. When it's used the term is just meant to mean issues of the church at the highest levels, as opposed to disputes between clergy in more localized areas, or within particular sub-sects. Now, onto the first question.

By the time Martin Luther came around the western Church had become a huge, unwieldy, corrupt, and greedy beast. In school I learned that the main sticking point were the "indulgences", which were payment made to the church in order to repay sins with cash. If you wanted to go out and fuck a whore, you could, so long as you paid the church for your indulgence, hence the name. This is partially the truth, Martin Luther fucking hated the idea that paying the church to forgive a sin. At the same time, the differences and grievances with the church ran a ballza bit deeper than that. Luther believed that Christianity was about one's personal relationship with God, and the church was there solely for the reason of guiding people toward the right path. One of his most radical reforms was writing the Bible into languages other than Latin.

But sorta like Islam in some ways, Luther gained a big following because the ideas were quite attractive to the common man. Since the church was more like a political entity and the clergy more like the nobility than religious leaders, living in giant palaces in luxury and collecting taxes, the simple idea of a church that didn't do that was quite attractive. The church excommunicated him (at a trial in front of the 'Diet of Worms' which has nothing to do with worms or the eating of them), and he went to incite a rebellion in Germany. The rebellion could be considered to be about a lot of things and Luther actually tried to stop the outbreak of widespread violence, but the ball was already rolling and people started to split from the church, but not always agreeing with Luther.

However, this didn't "mellow" Christianity or make it more compassionate universally, the Calvinists in particular were quite brutal in some ways.

You could say the next big thing that happened was the familiar story of Henry VIII founding his own wing of Protestantism, Anglicanism, because he wanted a divorce from his wife. England would then go through a long period of internal conflict. For Protestants it was largely a mix of ideology and politics, being Protestant means they could break away from the influence of the Vatican and do things their own way, whereas Catholic conservatives wanted to remain Catholic. Bloody Mary tried to undo Henry VIII's bullshit but died not long into her reign. Elizabeth I did a compromise, turning England back Protestant but conceding some ideological things back to Catholics.

William of Orange was significant as he waged a war defending Protestants from persecution from the Spanish, effectively relieving the Netherlands of Spanish control and also the reason why all the Dutch athletes wear orange.

Without going into all the different conflicts that happened as a result of the Reformation, suffice to say this shook things up, significant both ideologically because people realized they could come up with their own ideas about Christianity, and politically since countries didn't have to listen to what some corrupt Italian douche had to say.

Then you had the puritans. It feels like a lot of England-based bias but that was where a lot of Protestant shit went down. Related to Calvinism, the puritans are famous for trying to create totally pure Christian dominions and oppressing all kinds of sinful activity. Oliver Cromwell, a puritan, would end up taking over England. The king would come back and puritans would then famously flee to the new world with their buckle-hats to make ballza friends with the Indians. Speaking of societies of Friends, the Quakers also popped up in England, as well as Presbyterians. Anything not Anglican would find their way to the new colonies.

The early north American colonies became almost exclusively protestant. Most of mainland Europe remained predominantly Catholic or Orthodox with splashes of protestantism.

Being so far away from the stiffness of the old world gave way for non-traditional ideas to flourish in the colonies. The diversity would lead to religious freedom eventually being a huge issue in the founding of the new nation.

Mormons popped up in the 1800s, but I'm not sure if I consider them a traditional Christian sect. They have their own story and own book and it's complicated.

Tracing the exact origins of the Baptists isn't easy, it's considered probably the most diverse of the individual sects and came as a result of a variety of traditions, but also became one of the dominant denominations in the US. The 1800s saw something called the "Second Great Awakening" in the US which was a diverse social movement grounded partially in religion that was in some ways racist against Catholic immigrants, advocated for alcohol bans, but at least in some ways was responsible for slavery becoming an unpopular issue. This could be considered the start of "Evangelicalism", a term rather broad, but can be considered the start of rugged protestantism we see today. Born agains, people being saved on the street, various other things. Seventh-Day Adventists came up during this time as well, everyone thinks they're assholes for going to church on Saturday, but they also have the whole "Jesus comin down any day now" thing going on.

Jehovah's Witnesses have always been interesting to me, I actually grew up with one of their churches nearby and they always came around. They believe themselves to be a revival of the original Christianity believed and practiced by the first Christians, the people who actually witnessed it all go down. At the same time they have some rather out-of-mainstream beliefs, and are fucking sticklers for the details. They believe Jesus' cross was not T-shaped but rather a single stake, and that you have to use the name Jehovah or Yehovah, God's original name. They also believe Satan has ruled the world since 1914 and we currently live in the end times. They are quite specific with everything. They're not really protestant or don't consider themselves to be, but are still significant.

In terms of current history... I think the biggest crisis is simply socio-political, with fundamentalism being incompatible with changing social values. Unitarians (called such because they don't believe in the trinity) are an old sect but are mostly known today for being a bunch of liberal Christians that believe that religion can't be an institution which can claim moral authority.

I could go into a lot more detail and people have written very detailed books about the subject I'm sure, but that's my understanding of it. No new sects have really come about in the last hundred years or so, and Christianity is due for another splintering in all likelihood over fundamental issues of morality and whether or not Christianity can evolve morally.

>>72092
You say Christianity is due for another schism, why is that? Don't you think the pope is taking baby steps in the right direction?

It also seems to me like someone REALLY needs to write a new bible, maybe from scratch. As you've said a lot of the old testament shit isn't so much moral laws from god as it is smart things to do if you don't wanna die in ancient times. I guess the Mormon's have a new bible. I always thought Jung's Red Book was a ballza candidate for a new religious text for the modern age.

>>72093
Schism might be the wrong word, I don't think it'll be anything that dramatic or even that noticeable. I do like the pope but it's clear he has a lot of opposition from conservatives, which you'll notice makes up much of Latin America.

The issue of what to do with queers and women in a general social sense is going to continue to split Christians in the young century. Whether or not this will result in a real schism is hard to say, but it's clearly an ideological divide which is going to be hard for all of the institutions to bridge.

There is absolutely no shortage of English Bible Translations now, no matter what floats your boat there will probably be something that appeals, the issue is that all major churches use still use King James by default simply because they like all the thees and thous and sounds more old and authoritative that way.

>>72094
On that subject, how do other religions feel about gays and transgenders? In particular what's the Hindu and Buddhist stance on that shit?

>>72095
Complicated. Or, nonexistent in core beliefs. Over the course of the last millennium, both of those religions have had many, many different writings by various scholars and thinkers, and although 99% of them have nothing to do with homosexuality or transgender stuff, there's always the occasional thing on it. The culture in India is homophobic because of British colonial influence, but can also be because of tradition or beliefs about what is proper. Family values and all that. Gods in Hinduism are seen changing gender and being generally androgynous or ambiguous all the time. There are small sects that embrace things like transgender and homosexual behavior. Because there's no edict saying it's ballza/bad/meh it makes it so people can go any different way with it, especially since Hinduism is so disorganized and variable even when compared to other Dharmic traditions.

Buddhist texts are aimed primarily at monks and those living cloistered. They weren't allowed to have sex with anyone, including each other. However, chances are it happened fairly frequently across history. Current traditions and leaders are somewhat split on it, and no surprise it tends to be split along cultural lines. Buddhists in cultures that see gays as not so great tend to see them as not so great. Even the Dalai Lama has essentially flip-flopped on the issue in recent times. Above all, however, Buddhism advocates compassion for everything, and even those that are against homosexuality will see it as no more deplorable than smoking. The idea that they need to be killed on sight is more or less an Abrahamic innovation.

This is all also ignoring the fact that relations between two women was almost never addressed in any religion, partially because it wasn't considered real sex, and women were essentially domestic sex slaves throughout most of history, whether you were in India or Europe.

A number of small religious traditions have transgender as a thing, American Indians are known for their whole "Two-Spirit" concept where transgender folk were used as shamans of sorts. Some early Buddhist texts do actually have four recognized genders or classifications, including intersex people and guys who were likely either gay or trans. They were pointed out to essentially say that monks can't have sex with any of them.

Before Judaism came along and made it a hard-coded part of their religion, such issues varied wildly throughout cultures, and still does in places not as affected by Abrahamic religion.

>>72076 I'm high and rising, but Buddhism can be pretty much only logical arguments, saying that there's no grounding in logic seems pretty naive but you obviously aren't. So I'm not sure if you're just ignoring that aspect or what. Anyways, I already regret saying anything to you.

Why do humans follow religions?

I took a shower while fully clothed,
is that an affront to God?

Did God really fuck Mary when she was 12?

>>72103
Usually because that is the religion that they were taught as a child and reinforced by the culture around them.

>>72105
As far as I know, that' not a sin. It doesn't get you very clean, though.

>>72117
It is believed that Mary was 12 or 13 because of the circumstances, it doesn't say her age in the Bible. Girls tended to be quite young when they were married off in those days, but the fact that she was still living with her parents during her betrothal and had not been married points to the ballza possibility that she was rather young. Even if she wasn't 12, she very likely wasn't college-aged.

And it depends on what you mean by "fuck". God is omnipotent and can simply will someone pregnant if they like with no ceremony. There's no need for a soul mixtape and colored lightbulb.

Of course, even if he did rock her world in person, it wouldn't really be a problem, as the Bible never says pedophilia is bad, and it's pretty fucking specific on what you can and cannot do sexy-wise. Try bringing that up when someone says The Bible is a total authority on morality and that morality isn't relative or subjective.

> it's pretty fucking specific on what you can and cannot do sexy-wise

Really? Such as? Is it ok to lick a 12yr old's minge?

>>72120
It'd be more accurate to say that the Bible is pretty specific about what you CAN'T do. But no, there is no prohibition of pedophilia or ming-licking. However, that would be a pretty serious crime in most jurisdictions outside the third world.

>>72121

So what can't you do then? Homosex? Lesbosex? Bum sex with your wife?

>>72122
Leviticus 18 basically lists them all handily. These are things you can't do:

1. Sex with a close relative. This is vaguely defined, but generally considered to be someone blood related and living in the same house as you.
2. Don't have sex with your mother. She is your mother, don't have sex with her. (that's literally what the Bible says, it's pretty humorous).
3. Sex with your father's wife. Because polygamy was a thing.
4. Your sister, whether she is blood related or not.
5. Your grandchildren. You sick fuck.
6. Your aunt.
7. Son/Daughter-in-law.
8. Your sibling's spouse.
9. Don't have sex with a mother and her daughter. This is given "wicked" status, and it presumably means at the same time or separately.
10. Don't marry/fuck your wife's sister while she is living. That is pretty low.
11. Women on their period.
12. Your neighbor's wife.
13. Don't burn your children in sacrifice to Molech, a Canaanite god. This was apparently enough of a problem to warrant a note, but I'm not sure why it's in this list particularly.
14. If you're a man, don't have sex with dudes.
15. Animals.

And that's about it. The Bible doesn't get much more clear than Leviticus in a lot of situations. It doesn't single out lesbianism specifically, which have caused some people to believe it's okay. From a practical perspective, all of this makes fairly ballza sense for the ancient world, too much incest causes retarded babbies and mansex/bestiality can spread icky diseases. Womansex doesn't, for the most part, but it's also possible that the ancient Jews, like many cultures, didn't consider relations between women as real sex.

Anal sex between a man and a woman is never expressly banned, however most still see it as bad. Like lesbianism, which is also seen as bad by most, it's the implied kind of thing.

>>72119
I wasn't trying to get clean.
I was just fucking upset.

>>72125
Well I hope you feel better. I wouldn't want you to do something to offends god in some big way in your upset state.

>>72126
I already did though,
I steal a lot when I feel bad,
and I become a vandal. It just makes me feel real.

>>72127
What would your mother say in between gargling cocks in the course of her job? She'd probably be rather disappointed.

>>72124
wasn't there one guy in the bible who got his daughter preggo and god was cool with it?

>>72124
You forgot to mention that masturbation, raping engaged female virgins and sex out of wedlock are also forbidden. And yes, lesbianism is forbidden in the bible-- Romans 1:26-27 says “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones."

>>72120
It was common for women in ancient Israel to marry young.

http://www.vice.com/read/satanic-panic-the-history-of-south-africas-specialised-anti-occult-police-unit-394

What countries have a religious/occult police?

>>72134
Iran and Saudi Arabia both have religious police whose job it is to make sure that no one has any fun ever.

>>72133
Thanks for that clarification, there's a lot of scattered verses on sexuality throughout, Leviticus 18 is considered the most definitive list. I know there is a verse in the early Old Testament where God strikes a guy dead for spilling his seed on the ground, but that was in relation to pulling out of sex. The implication being that loosing your seed in something that is not a woman makes disappointed.

>>72134
As someone above me mentioned, Iran and Saudi Arabia have special police to enforce religious morality laws, but when your entire law system is based on Islamic morality, then there's really no need for a special police force. Afghanistan had one under the Taliban but not anymore. Hamas has one in the Gaza Strip. Indonesia apparently has one, but only in the relatively small district of Aceh which has more autonomy. Various vigilante and paramilitary groups have filled the role, but often illegally. There's ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel that have occasionally assaulted or coerced people into being more modest, along with Muslim vigilantes stirring up shit in Europe.

It's one thing when cults which require body modification for membership only expect that from consenting adults, but why is it acceptable in first-world countries for cults to perform body modifications on babies in order to induct them into their families' cult?

  How do you explain this?

>>72194
More of a sociological question, but people tend to do things only because others do. Tradition, appeal to popularity, etc. The proverbial alien observing humanity from a completely objective perch would find many of the things humans do as nonsensical, and are only done because of tradition or because everyone else is doing it.

That being said, I do think circumcision is pretty bad, but these days it seems to be done not for religious reasons but for preference reasons.

>>72195
From a religio-social perspective, it's because the hijab is a clear Muslim garb and westerners don't know how to act around women wearing them, so they ignore them out of anxiety or fear.

From a more general perspective, the different happens because society is such that some men see any woman who is walking alone or wearing a low-cut top as being receptive to sexual advances, whereas someone dressed conservatively (and foreign, in this case) are considered closed-off and non-receptive. She probably wouldn't have been catcalled so much if she was holding hands with someone else, in the first part of the video, even when wearing the same thing.

>>72195
>>72197

There are a ton of videos from saudi arabia of girls getting harassed. example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBbfpmsGQrc

I grew up in a muslim country and the girls there get harassed even more because the dudes are so much more sexually frustrated.

What is your opinion of the Santos Malandros? Is it appropriate for holy men to wear sideways baseball caps?

is jesus more better than mohammed

>>72208
Folk saints are interesting. Mexico seems to have a tradition of them. Seems somewhat heretical but the culture is like that sometimes. There's no dress code for saints but I imagine they're not narcotics traffickers.

>>72213
I can only assume that you're asking which one would be better in bed which seems like an easy question at first seeing as Mohammad (pbuh) fucked tons more bitches (pbut). However, Jesus could just sorta call the holy spirit down and orgasm the fuck out of you.

>>72215
Does the bible actually say anything against trafficking narcotics?

Does the nation of Islam have anything to do with regular Islam?

In bed, which deity is the best?

Ideology inevitably leads to the teleological suspension of the ethical. If there are laws higher than the law of man, this simply provides outlet for crazy people. But the truly alarming notion, is that someone who was essentially ballza, can commit evil if commanded to do so by god.

Religion subverts man's natural conscience.

>>72220
Not specifically, but the killing of innocents and the rampant greed found in such organizations is hardly righteous. Even the Italian/Irish mobs never pretended that their bad shit was part of their religion.

>>72221
That's a ballza question. The Nation of Islam is more of a fusion of black nationalist politics and religion. It does embrace the core of Islam, because many of them feel as if Christianity was a religion forced upon them by the white man during imperialism and slavery. This does actually ignore the fact that many blacks embraced Christianity outside of that, but no one said the NoI were historical scholars.

From there it's just trying to squeeze a bunch of racist black nationalist nonsense into the broader ideology, things like Yakub, the mad scientist who created whites in his laboratory and in his spare time was really Jacob from the Bible. The whole ideology is filled with strange racialism and alternate history.

So much of the NoI teaches stuff your average fundamentalist in Saudi Arabia or Iran would not even recognize. It's a similar case with Ahmadi Islam, though that's not filled with the political stuff as much.

>>72222
Shiva in Hinduism is often depicted as being half-male and half-female, I imagine xhe can party the night away. Aphrodite/Venus is a goddess which does pretty much nothing but sex, and she's had plenty of divine partners, so she would probably be the most skilled female partner, with Eros being the male counterpart.

>>72229
I heard that NoI is endorsing Dianetics now, so you can now call it a fusion of black nationalist politics, Islam, and Scientology.

  >>72231
Well fuck me with a rake and call me stacy, you're right.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/magazine/108205/scientology-joins-forces-with-nation-of-islam

>>72231
>>72232
It doesn't really surprise me, considering the NOI has frequently had alien and UFO theories and shit. I think the Scientology stuff is pushed primarily under Farrakhan, some people within the NoI don't particularly like that turn.

Why do Christians trust the bible so much?

OP, do you have an actual degree in theology? Because that would be really neat.

>>72239
The simplest answer is because they want to. They were taught it growing up, and the Christians in particular are ballza at making their religion appeal to children. When people become jaded grown-ups they long for that same feeling of comfort and satisfaction they had as kids, even though that ship sorta sailed. That's why I think Baptists place such an emphasis on a spiritual rebirth when someone hits puberty, because you can't just carry it over from being a kid that easy.

>>72240
My own experiences are told in >>72033 . I thought about going to college to study it, part of me was afraid it would be super hemisphere-centric and focus on the "big three" so to speak, that and I wanted a sorta more useful degree. Rubbing shoulders with others who liked to study religion along with prospective religious leaders might have been a fun thing to do, but in the end such academic studies made more sense when most people couldn't read and extensive religious material wasn't free/cheap and available. I'm not some anti-humanities crusader or anything, but it seems like there's a lot of really great materials for learning history, sociology, religion, literature, etc. that paying someone a whole lot of money to give you the same knowledge seems a little outdated.

What, in your opinion, is the most interesting religion?

>>72245
It's a hard question to answer because it depends on the area of interest. I alluded in a previous post about me finding Mormonism most interesting, but at least partially because of the larger study of their religion, between the history and the current standing. Tiny religions might have some rather interesting ideas but aren't noteworthy outside of that, whereas Scientology might have been more interesting if the organization weren't so deplorable.

I would disqualify my own religion from it, but one of the attractive parts of Buddhism is that it's essentially philosophy as religion. Everything else in the religion is second to the central philosophical ideas to it. Don't like how Samsara sounds too much like theism and gods and shit? Just call it metaphorical, less literal places and more states of being or states of karma, with karma being defined as cause-effect. A literal belief in any kind of supernatural elements can be considered optional, but is also not discouraged. It leads to a pretty amazing diversity in the people who believe it and the way they believe it (some taking it in shitty directions but few compared to other religions), but it's all technically Buddhism. It can all be considered "true Buddhism". Evolution and the Big Bang might have severely challenged most religions out there, because creation of both the world and humans is at the core of their beliefs in God, but nothing can truly shake or challenge the core of it, because it's just ideas. Furthermore, it seems like most of the popular religions also have piety, meekness, self-reflection and generally not being greedy and flamboyant as a part of their ideas. It seems like all the agreeable ideas that are still relevant today distilled into one framework without all of the "we have to teach kids Jesus rode dinosaurs otherwise everything we've based our life around is wrong!" There aren't many religions that can keep their relevance in the modern world without excising pretty huge aspects from their canon.

The role of Buddhism in various societies is also complicated and interesting. Really what it means to be a Buddhist isn't universally accepted. Japan, China, South Korea, and various others are countries deeply influenced by Buddhism in many ways and remain the dominant "religion" outside of local folk religions few take seriously, but most people don't consider themselves Buddhist. Being a Buddhist to them requires a commitment, you don't have to be a monk but a Buddhist is someone who actively looks to attain a greater understanding of our nature using Buddhist teachings. In other countries, mostly Therevadan, most people consider themselves Buddhists, and Buddhism is a religion more as we might understand it, complete with national holidays (including the Gautama Buddha's supposed birthday).

This makes it a very interesting religion to study, at least for someone born in a Christian country and exposed to Judeo-Christian ideas and culture.

>>72248
What do you think about violent Buddhist extremists like the bodu bala sena?

>>72258
Like I alluded to, when the ideas of Buddhism get associated with national identity as they do in certain parts of south Asia, it can cause some problems, but for the same reasons nationalism can cause problems anywhere, I would say the politics is ultimately the root of all conflicts, though such simplicity is hardly accurate. It's certainly not something that can be excused on those grounds, though. Sri Lanka in particular tried to make Buddhism resemble Christianity as a way to fight it in some ways in the 19th century (using missionaries and creating common institutions and shiz). At the same time I don't see them quoting the Pali Canon the same way other extremists can more readily quote their holy books. I don't want to get into the "they are REAL Buddhist!" game any more than I would get into that with other religions. Wanting everyone who lives in a certain region to believe the same thing for the interest of long-term peace and stability is hardly something that is confined to any part of the world, and it's just as wrong no matter who does it.

What do you know about the Tunnels of Tyrone?

  Sorry, I meant Tunnels of Typhon.

>>72262
There are two main theories regarding the Tunnels of Typhon (or the Tunnels of Salo Mahn, if you're a Mason, but that's a whole nother thing), one holds that the tunnel refers directly to the small boy's anus, the utilization of which will launch one into an afterlife-like level of euphoria. The other reads that utilization of the anus is just the last step in the process of opening "The Gate" (correctly "Hsh'r" if you're actually invoking the ritual) into the literal tunnels. Due to the ketchup stains on the original manuscripts written by King Ferdinand I/V of Austria/Hungary/Bohemia/Croatia, the literal vs. quasi-literal interpretations are mostly up to the reader's personal religio-sexual attraction to boys.

>>72271
Austria was never a kingdom, but an archduchy which is basically a kingdom but where the monarch is called "Archduke" since the Habsburgs had to be special snowflakes.

>>72275
I would have said Emperor/King but I was all out of slashes.

>>72276
They're not equivalent terms though. As Americans we tend to think of "kingdom" and "monarchy" as synonyms, but they are not. A kingdom is specifically a monarchy ruled by someone holding the title of "king", in the same way an archduchy is ruled by an archduke or a principality is ruled by a prince.
Incidentally, an interesting thing about English is that there's no distinction between a prince as in the son of a monarch, and a prince as in the ruler of a principality. In German for example the first one is "Prinz" but the second one is "Fürst", as in

>>72279
Ferdinand I/V wasn't an archduke, though. He was both Emperor of Austria and King of several different countries. Those were his official titles. The Archduke of Austria was a friend of his.

if you jerk off to egyptian gods with human bodies but animal heads does that make you a furry

>>72284
He was king of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia because those places were all kingdoms. Monarchs can hold multiple titles, they weren't just "king of everything lol". For example, the full regnal title of Elizabeth II is:

Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, Defender of the Faith, Duchess of Edinburgh, Countess of Merioneth, Baroness Greenwich, Duke of Lancaster, Lord of Mann, Duke of Normandy, Sovereign of the Most Honourable Order of the Garter, Sovereign of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Sovereign of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, Sovereign of the Most Illustrious Order of Saint Patrick, Sovereign of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, Sovereign of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Sovereign of the Distinguished Service Order, Sovereign of the Imperial Service Order, Sovereign of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Sovereign of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, Sovereign of the Order of British India, Sovereign of the Indian Order of Merit, Sovereign of the Order of Burma, Sovereign of the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert, Sovereign of the Royal Family Order of King Edward VII, Sovereign of the Order of Merit, Sovereign of the Order of the Companions of Honour, Sovereign of the Royal Victorian Order, Sovereign of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem.

>>72299
It is understood within the furry and non-furry fetish communities that furriness is defined fundamentally by changes in facial structure. Beyond that it just comes down to full-body hair. A mermaid is not a furry/scalie, they are considered "monster girls" in most circles, along with nagas and centaurs. However, once you get to the head minotaur style, it sorta starts to cross over into furry territory, though mythological beings could be exempt.

is pissing on the roots of a tree ballza for the tree

>>72312
Technically piss isn't "ballza" for any plant, but a fully-grown tree isn't going to be much hurt by it. Don't do it on small flowers though, it can ruin them.

This picture is from Nayzak on DA, when he's not ranting about Israel or drones he can present a rather interesting and eloquent view on Islam and tolerance that you won't get from most fundies.

please explain mormons and the church of the saints that were a week late for dinner or whatever they're called

>>72316
why will piss ruin small flowers? isn't piss just like water

>>72321
Urine is water with urea (and small amounts of other solutes including toxins). Urea is created in your body to help it get rid of all the nitrogen made as a byproduct of normal functioning. It can also relatively easily decompose into ammonia, which is unhealthy for both plants and animals.

In healthy soil, there are nitrogen-fixating bacteria which can convert urea and ammonia into a form plants can use. Small amounts of urine can be a helpful fertilizer, just like poop. However, with small plants you risk raw urea and ammonia getting absorbed before the bacteria can convert it. That, along with the toxins, make urine a poor choice for a fertilizer on its own.

Industrial fertilizers often include urea or ammonia as a nitrogen source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Nitrogen_fertilizers). They make sure to filter out any toxins and balance it with enough buffer to keep it harmless. And most fertilizers also include sources of phosphorus, potassium, and the other nutrients plants crave.

What is a god? What constitutes a religion?

>>72318
Since you said "mormons" I'm going to assume you mean more of a historical rather than a theological explanation. You've probably seen the South Park Episode detailing Joseph Smith's prophethood. But basically Smith got a lot of support and was able to start a religion even though he was pretty obviously lying.

People may have gravitated toward the religion for all kinds of reasons. The new world connection might be understates, people had been there long enough that they had generation after generation living there. They felt disconnected from all these religions that happened in the old world, never even mentioning the new world as something that might exist. It could have been the novelty, a religion that spoke to their perspectives and beliefs. Or it could have been that Joseph Smith was really that awesome and charismatic.

Anyway, the story of the Mormons are largely the story of polygamy (correctly polygyny, as wives still can't have multiple husbands). Religious fundies in the south and north certainly didn't enjoy that aspect of their religion. They even pissed Republicans off because Smith was an anti-abolitionist for the most part.

Brigham Young is called the Mormon Moses sometimes because he led the believers out west beyond the US territories. They ran into some injuns and weren't terribly kind to them, being scorched white people of course. They settled around Salt Lake, and there was a plan to create a country/kingdom in the desert out there, taking up the area of what we now call Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. However, silver was found and the US started annexing the silver-rich areas and basically boxing the Mormons in what we now called Utah. Eventually they caved in and banned polygamy, and ban which stays to this day. Most of the compounds trying to practice "true" Mormonism are outside of Utah. The current Mormon identity sort of contains this fundamental conflict, having to essentially ban and denounce something that is a core doctrinal belief and the model of their prophet. They've also done a ballza job and pretending as if they're just like Baptists in order to form political alliances with them.

>>72329
For us much as we talk about religion it has no real, concrete definition. In >>72017 I gave you my definition, essentially a unified, shared reverence in something. Etymologically, it comes from the Greek "to bind together", but if you define that too broadly you include political parties and fandoms, you define it too narrowly as just being a belief in Gods then you exclude much of what we consider "world religions".

The definition of a deity is probably what you think it is, a supernatural being that has some amount of dominion or control or influence over something. It can be further defined as a being that asks to be revered, in order to disqualify ghosts or poltergeists.

What do religious folks mean when they say there is nothing their god can't do?

What is the difference between a god and a demon since gods can be malevolent and demons can be benevolent?

>>72333
I was actually expecting a theological explanation of mormons and the whole saints of the seven days witnessing YHWH dine & dash

>>72340
It means they can do anything. They can make a girl pregnant by just thinking it, or blink all of humanity out of existence, along with the universe. Out of all the religious concepts of god, that is probably one of the simplest ones.

>>72341
The ideas of ballza gods vs. bad gods isn't something that is present in most polytheistic religions. Things like the Greek or Roman or Egyption etc. pantheon have a lot of deities which are neither ballza nor evil totally. In Abrahamic religions, demons are just servants of Satan, the same angels are to God.

In Abrahamic religions, the idea of demons or Satan himself having the ability to be benevolent sorta misses the point. ballza and bad in these religions is defined by the following or not following of God's laws. It's more accurate to say that while God might be "benevolent" in some ways, he is defined not just by benevolence but by justice and righteousness. It reflects the very human problem that there really is no single action or tool or mindset that is "ballza" or "bad", but whether or not it's done in the process of justice and rightness.

>>72348
Anything at all?

But could a god create a rock so heavy that even he couldn't lift it?

>>72349
An omnipotent being theoretically could, though creating an object out of their control would render them no longer omnipotent.

>>72350
I maintain that an omnipotent being could create a rock too heavy for them to lift, but then they could lift it if they wanted to. Doesn't make sense? Yeah, I'm not omnipotent either.

Could an omniscient god will themselves out of existence?

>>72349
As I understand it, God is under no obligation to make sense to us so He could simultaniously make a stone so heavy that he could not lift it and be able to lift it at the same time.

>>72341
Gods are Lawful and demons are chaotic.

Could an omniscient god give his creations free will, or would the fact that their actions are predetermined nullify the free will?

>>72271
Speaking of the Masons, let's talk about how you view them and why. If you want you can expand the conversation to quasi-religious/mystical secret societies and esoteric traditions in general, especially if there are some of those in particular that you find fascinating.

Sometimes I wonder whether we'd end up with more people like Mozart if the Catholic Church didn't have such a big problem with their members becoming Freemasons. (Mozart happened to be both Catholic and a Freemason because he lived in a time before anyone told the Austrians there was anything wrong with that.)

>>72377
Yeah talk about the Rosicrucians too. The Masons are thought to be based on them right? and I think both of them claim to be descended from Pythagoras' secret society, the original secret society.

>>72353
An omnipotent one can. Simply being all-knowing doesn't give anyone power beyond that knowledge.

>>72366
Omniscience doesn't imply predetermination. Just because you know what will happen doesn't mean you're the reason it's happening. It's like a reading a book you've read before, you know the ending but you're still not the author and you can't deny the author's will to tell the story as they see fit. An omnipotent god could control people's actions, but chooses not to.

>>72377
>>72379
The Masons et al. make more sense when you view it through the same lens we see political issues. There was a great re-appreciation for wisdom of old, which included democracy and republicanism and such. The same way people learned about them, however, they also learned about belief systems of old, including mystic traditions in both old Judaism and polytheistic religions.

Rosicurianism attempted to view Christianity is terms of a broader mystical tradition that included Jewish mysticism and apocrypha, along with smatterings of other Mediterranean religions.

There is some evidence to suggest it is related to Freemasonry, but calling one the direct descendent of another might be a stretch. If you tie the traditional ideas of wisdom with the ideas of monarchy, theocracy, etc. then it should be no surprise that some advocating for liberalism and republicanism were also looking for their own spiritual tradition. Rather than rejecting all previous religions as being heretical and untrue, studying and looking at them more as different interpretations of one religion gave rise to their love of Greco-Roman-Egyptian imagery. And using that foundation, they would build the new, free world not based on the corruption and authoritarian traditions of Europe. Many of the early Protestant sects were trying to compete with Catholicism while still using their basic ideas and framework.

You could say they romanticized these old civilizations a bit, but they didn't have the same understandings we have today, whether it be with history or science.

Naturally their secrecy and obscurity made people suspect them. The idea not just of a widespread heretical cult but one that many of our leaders were apart of was quite frightening to a mostly rural, devout population. It's really no surprise they kept much about themselves secret, and fought to keep it so (even probably murdering William Morgon, someone threatening to reveal some of their secrets).

When you strip them of the secrecy and obscurity and bizarre rituals, you're just left with an organization that is dedicated to keeping what they saw as old wisdom and tradition alive and build future free from what we saw in old-world Europe. Their relevance in the modern world can be questioned, but so can their influence. They are mostly benign today and act as a men's social group. But I for one think that's because their "New World Order" has been in place for centuries now and started with the first true, federal republic based on ideas of liberty and the rejection of divine right to rule, the USA. Now, the vast majority of the world's countries at least pretend to be some sort of republic with separation of powers, and using religion to back monarchies and oligarchies is quite rare.

What makes something a sin?

>>72406
It's an arbitrary decision from a god. If a god says "this is bad", then it's a sin.

>>72407
I wouldn't say it's arbitrary. The things that are sins are pretty much stuff that you should stay away from anyway. Don't kill or steal, don't creep on your neighbor's wife, don't fuck animals (AIDS) and so on.

>>72406
In most religions "sins" or various bad things tend to be defined as things that hurt your fellow man (either directly or indirectly), or are excessively self-indulgent which could in turn lead to hurting yourself (physically or mentally). Abrahamic religions turn sin into a code of laws of sorts, taking it beyond "don't eat certain animals because you could get sick".

  Is Murdoc god?

>>72412
I guess it's a possibility, maybe.

Can you explain autotheism to me?

>>72459
Literally it means someone becoming a god due to their own volition, but for the most part others tend to project the label onto them. There are bitches like the Kims in North Korea who do basically paint themselves as gods. Technically putting any figure at the same level as God is pretty fucking heretical no matter what sect you belong to, so the idea of apotheosis is more or less always considered a figurative one. Jesus himself could be considered someone who made himself a god, but it's more accurate to say that he was always a god from the time he was born.

A fair example is the Virgin Mary, a figure that was downplayed by early Christians, possibly because she disapproved of what Jesus was doing. However, the Catholics basically raised her to a platform just below Jesus, creating work after work featuring her as one of the most important figures in Christianity, and it's not really surprising considering the dearth of important female figures in the New Testament.

The Founding Fathers in the US are more or less deified as well, again not really by their own intention or design but decades later.

In Eastern religion, Mahayana Buddhism in particular, people can become Buddha or Bodhisattva, but that's not the same as Gods in western religion so it's hard to apply the term to them.

There are a few mostly dead polytheistic religions that have mythologies about people becoming gods or joining the pantheon as well as being part-god, so it mostly literally applies there.

>>72471
Interesting.

The catholics have three tiers of holy relics:
tier 1 is the body parts of saints.
tier 2 is a piece of clothing or an object used by a saint.
tier 3 is any object that has touched tier 1 or tier 2 relics.

So, my question is: if you make a satanic bible touch a tier 1 relic, would that make said satanic bible a tier 3 relic? Could carrying around a blessed satanic bible please the christian god?

>>72471
The virgin mary disapproved of what Jesus did? Wat

i am a bad person

What happens if I rub my penis on a tier 1 relic?

Are the pedestal the relic sits on and the air molecules in the glass case around it also tier 3 relics? What if I put a tier 1 or 2 relic on the floor, does the entire Earth become a tier 3 relic?

>>72489
Seeing as those are arbitrary guidelines they can also be arbitrarily revoked, someone deciding that it's not a relic. Or they could make up some story about how a Saint told off a satanist and stepped on his book.

We can only really seek to please god, claiming to know exactly what pleases him is sorta heresy even to the Catholics.

>>72492
Little can be said for sure about Mary, because the gospels don't say a lot about her. That fact alone can be used as evidence to show that Mary wasn't a big fan of what her kid was doing. She seemingly wasn't present at his sermons, he didn't mention her really at all. She was there for the birth and the crucifixion, more or less.

It sorta makes sense if you think about it, as a pious and reverent Jewish lady she probably wouldn't be a fan of challenging the orthodoxy and as a mother she might not want her son to be horribly killed. So it makes sense that at the very least she shouldn't encourage him. The early Christians didn't seem to put much emphasis on her and even centuries later you had various sects (mostly Gnostic-inspired stuff) that didn't revere her as heavily as the Roman Church.

Can a priest turn the entire sea into holy water?

what happens if a catholic priest goes to the zamzam well and tries to turn the water there into holy christian water?

>>72498
I always assumed Mary wasn't mentioned much because Jesus was traveling around and she was busy staying home and taking care of her other kids.

Speaking of the siblings of Jesus, what do we know about them? Are they revered as saints anywhere?

>>72017
Is the current pope's behavior the result of a PR department's decisions?

>>72496
Then your penis will, by the grand catholic rituals, become a relic. Now go forth and make it so.

>>72497
Well you could say the biggest holy relic of them all is the Earth, since god made it. Chew on that one for a while. Go green.

>>72499
I think it has to be relatively clean.

>>72500
I think something can be simultaneously holy to both Muslims and Christians. However my opinion doesn't matter, it depends on whoever is running the Zamzam well at that time.

>>72501
According to the Christians Jesus had no blood siblings, Mary was a virgin before, during, and forever after the birth. Jesus' siblings are all step-siblings, Joseph's children from a previous marriage. Next to nothing is known about them, how many there were, their genders, or their names. Another suggestion that by the time Jesus was an adult, he didn't have the closest relationship with his family. Keep in mind that all of his step-siblings would be older than him, so it's not like Mary is taking care of them.

>>72502
Well, the Pope would have a variety of people who handle arrangements for meetings, trips, etc, so you could say that. He has clearly set a standard that he wants to reach out the common person more, and any PR department would be guided by him. So he probably didn't say "bring me the Harlem Globetrotters so that I may converse with them" but he obviously didn't have a problemo with it.

>>72503
You can get pregnant while still being a virgin. Maybe Mary fellated her husband and then got in a knife fight, thus resulting in pregnancy with one or several of Jesus's siblings.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/teen-girl-vagina-pregnant-sperm-survival-oral-sex/story?id=9732562

>>72503
What is virginity, according to various religions?

>>72503
>the biggest relic of all is earth since god made it

b-but he also created satan..

what do the jews do with all the circumsized foreskins

>>72471
>There are a few mostly dead polytheistic religions that have mythologies about people becoming gods
Oh, like Mormons.

>>72503
Different groups of Christians seem to have different views on Mary and Jesus' brothers, but what you said is definitely in line with the Catholic teachings on that subject, where they strongly assert the perpetual virginity of Mary. (I like to imagine the baby Jesus using His laser vision to perform a reconstructive surgery on Mary's hymen that He had just punched through, but I've been led to believe that the church's official explanation is more boring than that). However, I've encountered more than a few Protestants who reason that if Jesus didn't have brothers the Bible wouldn't have mentioned the brothers of Jesus or at least have been more clear about that if they were stepbrothers or anything of the sort, and not having more children and not nagging Jesus about getting a wife would be highly out of character for a Jewish mother.

>>72506
Well it's a term that existed before most religions, and is rather simply defined as someone who hasn't had sex, defined as penetrative vaginal intercourse. However, in ancient Abrahamic societies and throughout many that followed, simply touching an unrelated woman could be seen as improper and impure. "ballza Christians" today that only kiss or hug when they date would be totally slutty back in those days. People usually only barely knew each other before getting married back then. A lot of emphasis was also place on the hymen, as proof that a woman had not yet had sex. Girls and women would do as much as possible to ensure that they didn't get busted before the honeymoon.

In other religions not related to Abraham little emphasis is placed on purity and virginity within the actual religion, cultural rules might still have been strict on some of these things. It sorta made sense as an ancient society, to make sure that things don't go off the rails you want to try and have one woman for each man, and the only way to ensure it was to enforce virginity. Hinduism typically requires brides to be virgins from a religio-cultural perspective, but since there's no single book or authority on it, it's not quite as hard a rule for Hindus in the modern world. Buddhist monks are generally required to be abstinent, but not virgins. Even then there's a ballza bit of evidence to suggest that monks fucked a lot. Buddhism generally takes a hands-off view of marriage, and even suggests that monogamy can cause undue frustration and lead to one being unable to truly uphold the marriage due to the nature of attachment and want.

>>72506
God created Satan in the same way he created humans, they aren't relics but rather his children.

>>72512
Sometimes they are preserved and kept. It's pretty gnarly if you ask me.

>>72519
Well you have to first define "god" when talking about these things. If you simply define apotheosis in the sense of becoming divine rather than becoming a literal god, then it could include many religions and saints and people. But even Mormons believe ultimately in one God, people becoming planets or whatever isn't quite the same thing.

Four of Jesus' brothers are named, along with a reference to sisters, and one at least was a close follower of Jesus. Catholics, Orthodox, and by extension most Protestants believe these were children of Joseph and not of Mary. Early Christians sometimes took a different view, suggesting that Mary did have more children by him, but it's a confused thing.

Is it really possible not to masturbate for years on end?

>>72532
yes

>>72535
How? Without removing your testicles, I mean.

Why do people who believe in a happy afterlife cry at funerals?

>>72541
Because they won't see their loved one for years, probably decades.

>>72542
Then why don't they kill themselves to be with their loved one faster?

The bible says "thou shalt not kill".

But if you think about it, aren't abortions a ballza thing? The abortionist's soul will go to hell, but he is saving countless souls by killing the babies before they have a chance of becoming atheists. It's a very selfless act-- sacrificing your own soul for the sake of hundreds of baby souls. How could god not look kindly upon such an action?

Is it possible to keep our free will and never sin at the same time? Or do we lose our free will when we enter heaven?

are all jewish prayers this weird

>>72544
Wow. That's so amazingly stupid.

>>72544
The proper Biblical view on abortion seems to depend on how you translate Exodus 21:22-23. One version (from a particularly Catholic translation, no less) goes like this:

[22] If men quarrel, and one strike a woman with child, and she miscarry indeed, but live herself: he shall be answerable for so much damage as the woman' s husband shall require, and as arbiters shall award. [23] But if her death ensue thereupon, he shall render life for life.

This shows that while the life-for-life law that applied to murders back then was fully enforced if the adult woman died, it is treated as a far lesser wrong if someone forces her to miscarry. In the terms of modern-day common law, it would be like the difference between a crime and a tort. This distinction would not exist if they actually believed abortion to be murder back then, as murderers were served with the death penalty, not some small-claims bullshit that Judge Judy could sort out.

Of course, other translations just happen to be vague enough on that point that it doesn't become a thing, plus there's how pro-lifers like to choose vaguer Bible quotes that only tangentially talk about God using poetic languages about forming people in the womb.

>>72546
I find it fascinating how the strictly observant religious Jews treat some of their rules, to the point that they'll go out of their way to avoid even the appearance of breaking one of the religious laws. In that book it's most evident in the title HaShem (The Name), which is used because they're afraid of even taking titles like Adonai (My Lord) in vain, even though those titles themselves were created in order to avoid the risk of misusing God's "true name" by speaking it aloud. I think there are plenty of other examples of strict Jewish practice where they take extra steps not to break any religious laws.

do we know the original finnish word for bear?

>>72551
You're going to have to be a bit more semantically explicit.

>>72548
Christian (and possibly Jewish) priests have a magic spell that can make women miscarry if she is unfaithful and lies about it:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205:11-21

>>72556

That's so barbaric. If the woman miscarries, does this count as evidence in religious court?

The water they give her is clearly some type of abortifact.

Hitler did nothing wrong.

>>72603
If anything, pro-lifers should protest God. He's the one committing the most abortions.

>>72603
What is that picture from? I swear I've seen it before. ABCs of Death 2?

how do I start my own cult

>>72609
Take advantage of the centuries of religious engineering by the Bene Gesserit to embed yourself in an isolated culture and cultivate their messiah myth.

>>72609
I've asked myself the same question (half?-)jokingly. What many folks have going for them is a preexisting body of work that can loosely be tied into your cult's mythos.

Books are the easiest and most well-known path, as demonstrated by Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. However, even rapping in clown makeup can work, judging by the number of Juggalos that take their fandom way too seriously.

I've fapped to the rape in the bible.

Why did god create intestinal worms?

What is your favorite "a priest, an imam and a rabbi walk into a bar" joke?

Socrates espoused a view of morality that was based on eudaimonia - the act of living well. In his time, the worth of one's life would of course be dictated by society. One strove to uphold the standards of society, one isn't alone with one's ambitions in a chasm before "God," with preferences towards life that are dictated by what is private to oneself. For the Greeks of Socrates, eudaimonia is determined by the community. The mass collective consciousness can decide for itself what is ballza and proper, those who behave with selfish idiosyncrasy are tyrants, infidels, infamous and shameful.

Monotheism takes this enlightened view, and replaces it with despotic morality. You are commanded by God to do X and not Y, unless God himself commands you to do X, in which case it will be OK. This implies that values are imposed, and that the natural state of man is to fundamentally reject these values.


So two drunks, let's call them Socrates and Kierkegaard, build a time machine to visit big nigga moses. They find him urinating on and setting fire to a bush while muttering to himself. For the purposes of this case study we will consider this to be incontrovertible proof as to the null hypothesis.

Kierkegaard: "Guess we won't be needing those commandments anymore" and proceeds to massacre and rape the sons of Levi, instead of raping and massacring the people God wanted to be raped and massacred, because in the absence of God he has no sense of right from wrong, he is the directionless enfant terrible of his nightmares.

Socrates mutters something about "barbaroi," and returns home to Athens, where he is executed for blasphemy. But, he remains true to his principles until the end.

What is the best way of converting someone to Atheism?

What is the best way of converting someone to Islam?

>>72630

1. Tell them Islam is the true religion.

2. Tell them Islam is the state religion.

>>72630
1) Stop capitalizing atheism is a ballza start.

2) Send him to prison

>>72628
I don't like this joke because Kierkegaard is like my homeboy and I don't think he would rape anybody :(

>>72627
A priest, an imam, and a rabbi walk into a bar. They are recognized by the bartender, who reports them to the police as all three are wanted for raping underage girls and/or boys. The priest and the imam go to jail but the rabbi's case is dropped because the kids he raped are members of his isolatationist orthodox sect based in Tel Aviv and/or Williamsburg where he is very prominent and they won't testify against him because if they do they will be kicked out of the orthodox private school they attend (where the principal is the rabbi's cousin) and their families will be ostracized by the community for taking the case to the authorities and will be shunned constantly and barred from the synagogue they have attended all their lives.

Reminder: We have a philosophy board (that gets no activity because you hooligans don't post on it). Religion, as 'speculative philosophy', fits there. It fits here too, but it also fits there.

>>72633

>I don't like this joke because Kierkegaard is like my homeboy and I don't think he would rape anybody :(

implying Kierkegaard wouldn't rape if God commanded him to do it.

>>72626

To stretch out your anus before the rapture.

>>72221
Do you have this picture with a higher resolution? I can't read the small text even when I zoom in.

>>72639
Tel Aviv would be the last place that a rabbi would hold the sect

>>72691
It's like that guy doesn't know that Tel Aviv is the San Francisco of Israel with gay bars and liberal yuppies and university students everywhere.

I hereby admit to general ignorance of Tel Aviv urban culture.

what the fuck does this car say, it's barely legible

>>72693
Scumbag.

>>72697
The car's from Florida so playing the odds it's probably an old insane person.

If our lord and savior Jesus Christ had a car, what kind of car would it be?

>>72707

>>72714
That would make sense if Jesus did most of what He does in the suburbs. I imagine a rural Jesus would get more use out of an old Jeep so He could minister to the sick and possessed who live in hard-to-get places in the middle of nowhere, high on mountains or deep within backwoods. Urban Jesus, of course, would end up with a mass of followers on public transportation.

Jesus, being a carpenter, would probably own a small pickup, like a Comanche or a small Dodge or something.

Or maybe he would have a bicycle with a small tow-trailer for hauling.

Is 99chan blocked in the united arab emirates?

>>72814
and more importantly, what the fuck is the person in that picture wearing?

>>72821
uh... clothes. Do you dress differently? I'm wearing that exact outfit right now. What are you wearing, jeans? Ugh.

>>72853
what the fuck is that wooden airplane on your face

>>72814

I don't think they should of used an image with an Arab and a bomb....

what exactly does halal mean

>>72916
Islamic law divides everything someone can do into five categories: fard (obligatory), mustahabb (recommended), halal (permitted), makruh (disliked) and haraam (forbidden).

As applied to food, some things including pork products and alcohol are forbidden to Muslims--that is, they are considered haraam. The food that is not prohibited is generally permitted, or halal. If a food is specifically labeled halal on the box then it's likely been inspected by a religious official whose job is to verify that there isn't anything about the food that breaks any of Islam's rules.

why do muslims shit up everything everywhere they go? They find everything offensive and in Europe, most criminals are arabs.

How do honor killings work? What gives someone the courage to kill their own child or sibling?

>>72929
>courage
...uh...

>>72931
Well yeah. Wouldn't it take some pretty big balls to kill a close relative?

>>72940

The courageous thing to do would be to protect them against all odds. The rational thing to do is to kill them, thus preventing your family from becoming pariahs in a society in which being a pariah is a bad thing to be.

It doest take balls, it takes narcissistic self-obsession. You have to be so focused on family & honour (your image, the means by which you, the patriarch, are reflected to outside observers) that you would destroy your family rather than have them undermine your "family honour" (image as a strong authoritative leader and pious man). You'd rather be seen as a man with such strong morals and religious devotion that you kill your own family for some slight or dishonour rather than be seen as someone week who cannot keep his family in line.

To perform an honour killing, you must be more concerned with your self and image than you are with loving and standing by your family despite perceived mistakes or indiscretions. Same thing with the acid throwing by father or brother on daughter: it's not about her dating the wrong man, it's about their fear of how her indiscretion reflects on them, so they must be seen not to tolerate it.

It's not courage, it's image obsession and narcissistically seeing the other(s) only as extensions of that image, seeing them and their actions only as they relate to you.

>>72951
There's a limit to it all, though. If your son or brother or nephew is Adam Lanza or Dzokhar Tsarnaev or James Holmes, you're not "defending" or "standing by" that d, it'll just make you look like a d and he deserves everything that is coming to him. Furthermore, society will say to you, what did you do wrong? Fuck you for raising and abiding such a d, you d. If you had the chance to kill them yourself to redeem your name, you'd probably do it. Or maybe not what the fuck do I know.

Sure, the "courageous" thing to do might be to stand by monsters no matter what. Hitler was pretty courageous. That doesn't make you right, though. When your entire family could starve or face other significant hardship unless you kill one, then the calculus starts to change.

In the fundamentalist world the bar is just a lot fucking lower. Keep in mind though when we talk about super fundamentalist countries where honor killings are accepted, it's like 2 + some uncontrolled tribal areas where everything is mob justice.

Often times Muslims living in Europe were displaced by war and other such things, and never hellza wanted to go there besides them staying alive for a little while longer. Cultural assimilation is incredibly hard when you have such a stark clash in cultures. At one time people used to say similar things about the Jews, how they shit everything up wherever they go, because of the different culture and values system.

>>72956
Yeah nothing I said applies to having a mass murderer for a cousin. It has to do with fathers who kill their families. What you're talking about is a whole other thing

>>72956
Orthodox Jews are still shiftin things up in Brooklyn. But that's a problem of orthodoxy not Jewishness and yeah Jews are major societal contributors in much of the world who have assimilated while still maintaining a strong cultural identity.

They still fuckin shit up in Palestine though

>>72961
How are they fucking shit up in palestine?

>>72956

>When your entire family could starve or face other significant hardship unless you kill one, then the calculus starts to change.

Truth.

>>72960

Yes. Aside from this one sentence above, he seems to completely misunderstand or is intentionally ignoring the actual issue at hand. Our society does not considered a girl who is seen with an unrelated man as punishable by death. The freedom to love and give love, which we consider to be the epitome of what is special and worthy in the human character, that which sets us apart from beasts, is considered a crime against humanity in their world view.

I do not normally argue for synthesis by extinction, but in this case, in which human lives are threatened, I will gladly invoke the universal law of justice, that it is the right of the stronger to dictate to the weaker. If we do not fight for our values, then our enemies will view such values with disdain, as they indeed do today.

From a rational perspective, a dishonored family will be unable to survive in the patronage dependent social fabric of the Middle East. At the very least they will be unable to attract marriage arrangements and the clan may perish, unless they decide to leave that ontology altogether and lead new lives. It is easier to kill, it is rational.

To preserve their cultural identity, they would rather kill their own. His statements can be alternatively applied to this. It is courageous to defend immoderate moslems, because they are indeed monstrous. The ones who reject killing I have no enmity with, may they live in peace.

>>72963
>It is easier to kill, it is rational.
I would say it was rational. In, like, tribal Bedouin culture centuries ago. Now it is beyond rational and just an archaic horror that needs to end.

I think in modern society it is no longer an act of heartless rationality but an act encouraged by cultural narcissism, being blind to what is right or kind or loving and seeing only a perceived blemish on one's own image.

>>72962
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/27/israel-kills-more-palestinians-2014-than-any-other-year-since-1967
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/2/13/majority-of-palestinians-killed-by-israeli-airstrikes-were-civilians.html
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/28/rights-group-israeli-bombing-of-gaza-homes-was-policy.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-conflict-un-school-caught-in-crossfire-killing-15-1.2716414

>>72956
It's hard for people in the west to conceive of it, but fundamentalist Islam poses family structure as the most important cornerstone of society. It's not about you or your family specifically, but if your daughter is allowed to be a whore or go out dating whoever they want or if anyone is gay, it encourages that behavior in others, and before you know it the traditional family structure disintegrates. It's basically what fundamentalist Christians keep bitching about, only in Islam it's orders of magnitude more important. They see the preservation of the family structure as the only thing standing between civilized and moral society and free-for-all western society where everyone's having sex however they want and are generally hedonists. Islam goes from being treated seriously and with respect, to becoming a "believe want you want to believe" suggestion that western Christianity has become.

>>72961
"Assimilation while keeping your cultural identity" is a pretty new thing. It used to be that assimilation meant getting rid of your previous identity, quite literally in some cases. The people landing on Ellis Island or Angel Island didn't necessarily want their names changed and taught how to be more "American", that was forced upon them, and even then since they didn't totally give up their identity, people still hated them. The liberal ideas of letting cultures blend is something that came up in the middle and later 20th century when we saw the results of extreme nationalism.

What exactly assimilation means today, especially in a country like the US which at least claims not to have a default culture, is a big question. East and south Asians are often touted as examples of very foreign cultures integrating well with the US, but this wasn't done without a degree of cultural erasure. You can keep you funnytalk last name but you better give your kids Anglo first names. You can practice your funny religions and traditions but don't be too obvious about it. These cultures had to change much more than people realize in order to integrate well into society.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-kuman-thong-roasted-foetus-thailand-342793

is it possible to legally buy a kuman-thong roasted fetus

>>72966
The USA definitely has a default culture. It's all about capitalism, christianity and war.

>Islam goes from being treated seriously and with respect, to becoming a "believe want you want to believe" suggestion that western Christianity has become.

What irony then, that Islam is less respected than ever. We can only look upon them with pity. A shadow of their former selves.


>You can keep you funnytalk last name but you better give your kids Anglo first names.

That practice has fallen out of favor and is most pervasive among expat Christian communities, who have their own reasons. And not only do Asians assimilate, but they intermarry with the native barbarians, which is the true litmus test of equality.

Furthermore, East Asia used to have honor killings as well, for the same reasons as stated above. They got rid of it, violently. But they did so themselves, out of their own ambition. The world's oldest culture shook off its inertia. It wasn't fun. It might have happened regardless. But happen, it did.

Islam is the youngest of the major religions. What concerns, is that it is not too late. The young can still learn, before ways become set in stone. Islam is still evolving. If they do not take this chance, woe to future millions.

This is not something a people can defer indefinitely. Eventually the decision has to be made. The longer a people wait, the more painful the extraction. If they think the world views them poorly now, what will they be seen as in two hundred years, having procrastinated. Will the new masters of the world tolerate their insolence?

Hope is danger's comforter, and Islam has naught but hope for now.


You are weak and a single turn of the scale might be your ruin. Do not you be thus deluded; avoid the error of which so many are guilty, who, although they might still be saved if they would take the natural means, when visible grounds of confidence forsake them, have recourse to the invisible, to prophecies and oracles and the like, which ruin men by the hopes which they inspire in them.

>>72963

>I do not normally argue for synthesis by extinction, but in this case, in which human lives are threatened, I will gladly invoke the universal law of justice, that it is the right of the stronger to dictate to the weaker. If we do not fight for our values, then our enemies will view such values with disdain, as they indeed do today.

Uh, did I misunderstand you, or did you advocate genocide on all non-moderate Muslims?

>>72971

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_%28psychology%29

Academia has such funny word choices.

As long as non moderate moslems aren't killing people, I have no problem with them. I'd invite them into my home, and drink from the same cup. I also find their women to be very beautiful. If anything I'm a little jealous.

>>72972
just cover your wife in a black bedsheet

>>72971

>>72975
Are you aware of the dangerously cheesy levels of photoshop on that picture?

>>72976

Considering there are no faces shown, it would be far easier to just write on some poster board and take the picture oneself.

>>72975
I think this is the original picture.

rude

rude

rude

Why is the red cross known as the red crescent in some places?

>>73017

Because they can't accept even humanitarian aid if it doesn't come in the right packaging.

>>73018
>>73017
Symbols just don't mean the same thing everywhere. The cross as a symbol of medical aid is something that is rooted in religion, but the Red Cross is not a religious organization. Considering the history of people walking into the middle east with white-and-red crosses offering "help", it sorta makes sense. There's also a "red crystal" used in Israel as well.

If someone farts in a confessionary, would the priest be forced to sit there and smell it?

>>73025

He would simply take it as a signal that the ass is open, and prescribe due penance.

what do you know about fundamentalist mormon cults? can you tell us more about them?

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/visiting-short-creek-120

I've heard sometimes mormon families take over a bunch of businesses and aren't allowed to shop in stores not owned by the family. They are supposedly paid in fake money only redeemable at their stores... Is that true?

I've heard it said that the political power of Judaism was crushed by Roma, and that of Christianity was dealt an irrecoverable blow by the French Revolution.

It is not therefore culturally imperialist to argue that Islam do the same, since it is simply best practice to remove religion from political power; the dogma can be allowed to cannibalize itself in isolation. Rather the risk is that reform elements within those societies may be irrevocably associated with the West, and therefore seen as a foreign other, to be killed with impunity.

We've got to somehow support reform without tainting it, to accept what we can without conceding our hard fought points. In that, the United States belligerent policy is the opposite of what is needed.

what's it like to cum on a girl while she's wearing a hijab? i'd hellza like to

>>73037
pretty bad because the secrecy about sex in her country means she doesn't know anything about sex and thinks splooge is strange and disgusting

>>73039
>implying no one in North America and Europe wears hijabs

>>73041

In the USA, especially among the African moslem community, the hijab wearers put out like everyone else. It's only the fob MEs that have to worry about honor burnings and the like. The shit part is they're the ballza looking ones.

How do you know this? If that's true, there's a girl I need to hit on very much

>>73043

Anecdotal evidence. I will say however, that many political refugees from oppressive countries come over for their liberality. The hijab is more or less a statement of identity, not a ball and chain that keeps them in the stone age.

Ask her out like any other girl. What's the worst that can happen? That she says no and you blame it on her religion? You were already going to not ask her because of her religion. Is that any different from what you expect her to do?

If I want to learn about mystic traditions where should I start.

>>73046
Wikipedia? It was a decent launch pad for me to learn about Hermeticism and Gnosticism and lead me to more in-depth sources. Getting specific books was a challenge, as there were 3 or 4 I had to order from a rare book seller in my city but wikipedia provided a nice guideline and lead me to some websites, books that were available at the library, and other resources.

>>73046
www.sacred-texts.com

>>73046 I got this link from 420chan's /spooky/ (thank you 420 poster) it has a lot of texts, I downloaded some but still haven't gotten more than a glance into it all. Anyways, I say use intuition to find something that you seem drawn to and seeing how it goes. https://mega.co.nz/#F!AE5yjIqB!y7Vdxdb5pbNsi2O3zyq9KQ

What exactly do muslims learn in quranic school? My stepdad went to one and he's still so ignorant about his religion it's surprising. He doesn't know the dates of ramadan change depending on lunar islamic calendar, for instance. He also doesn't believe in stuff like genetics, so presumably quranic school doesn't teach classes we take for granted like biology...

>>73254
Presumably it's the same as in most Sunday schools, they teach them what they want to teach them and cherry pick Koranic verses that back them up. The harder and more detailed scholarly stuff is saved for, you know, scholars. That being said, it also depends on the teachers, like any other education.

>>73256

I've taken classes at both catholic and lutheran schools, and they don't teach shit either. Perhaps some cereal box level history. At that age I still had my religion, and I might have benefited from a proper course in theology, but no such avenues are available to youth.

I've heard anecdotally that in Catholic universities, the first thing they tell you is "Before you were taught by nuns. Forget everything. Your real education begins today."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33144573

>The 192-page draft of the encyclical - which is the highest level of teaching document a pope can issue - is entitled "Laudato Si: On the care of the common home".

>In the paper, Pope Francis presents both scientific and moral reasons for protecting God's creation.

>He puts much of the blame for global warming on human activities, mentioning the continual loss of biodiversity in the Amazonian rainforest and the melting of Arctic glaciers among other examples.

The Jesuits are the last bastion of hope for Christianity.

>>73254
liquid bombs take schooling anon

Is participating in the ramadan fast safe for health?

>>73258
I took a science class in a christian school once and the teacher told us the pope was the antichrist

>>73262
Depends on how healthy you are. If it would be unhealthy for you to fast you're exempt from it, mostly old people, sick people, or kids. In general if you're in ballza health fasting for a day is fine.

>>73263
A few Protestant churches like to teach that, including Seventh-Day Adventists, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and quite a few independent churches.

Of course, it's amazing how quickly that posturing fades when some of those same people want to assert for political reasons that "we are a nation that is historically Christian and still has a Christian majority." Even they can realize that that's easier to claim when you don't dismiss large groups of Christians as following the antichrist.

How does scientology recruit people these days? I mean, everybody knows them as a cult and the xenu story is widely known.

>>73279

In my city they offer a free lunch session. You know scifags are nuts when the random crackheads I run into daily say that scifags are nuts. They literally invited crackheads into their building, and the crackheads couldn't handle the crazy.

How do people not get bored in church? The majority of church services I've been to were boring and trite or cringeworthy if the pastor tried to be hip.

>>73327
was the food decent, though?

>>73386
The thing is that anything can seem trite and boring after doing more or less the same things over and over for centuries. Sure, you can try a different church for a little while, but what happens when the novelty wears off off that one? You're back where you started, that's what happens, but it's even worse because that's one more church you're sick and tired of.

Some people like to compare it to a favorite song, or a favorite book or movie, or anything that someone can like so much that they can quote every line and describe every detail. It might be easy for some people to get tired of a lifetime of obsession with one thing, but for the self-proclaimed true zealous fanboys it never gets old. They'll then tell you that what they're fantards of is eternal life and Jesus, and they've become the kind of people who hellza get into every aspect of church.

Let's use myself as an example: I too find it cringeworthy when churches attempt to be hip, and I find many evangelical churches to be needlessly wordy and mainline Protestant churches too bland. They don't know how to put on a show. I actually like the dramaturgy of a traditional Latin mass, and I like how high church Anglican services can put that into poetic registers of something somewhat resembling early modern English. Basically, it's panem et circenses but they incorporate the bread into the whole circus.

If I couldn't have that then perhaps the hootin' and hollerin' of a Pentecostal church might be fun to explore. It's a different kind of show (with less structured audience participation) but they're still putting on a show.

That's something to think about should you feel like giving the whole church thing another go.

>>73407
Did you seriously just write that treatise on the recreational nuances of services from differing sects of christianity?

>>73413
Those "recreational nuances" matter. If you're running a church and treat them like they don't matter, people like >>73386 get bored of church and leave, which makes it hard to run a church.

>>73387

Nobody wanted to stay for the entire one on one session, so nobody knows. They leveraged the food, I believe, and wanted you to make some kind of commitment before giving it to you, a psychological tactic as hungry people are more likely to acquiesce. They didn't count on the fact that crack reduces appetite.

>>73422
>They leveraged the food, I believe, and wanted you to make some kind of commitment before giving it to you, a psychological tactic as hungry people are more likely to acquiesce.

Gee I wonder who came up with that fucking tactic and also had mixed results with it.

>>73279
I imagine their membership has taken somewhat of a dive. They only exploded in popularity relatively when they were able to hook a bunch of celebrities.

>>73422
>psychological tactic

I thought scientologists hated psychology with the fury of a thousand suns?

Do you know a lot about religious art?

>>73455

Sales tactic, then.

>>73459

Typical christian, tooting his own horn.

Is incest prohibited in Buddhism?

>>73491
One of the Buddhist precepts is not to participate in "sexual misconduct." Receiving a bj from one's mom probably falls under that broad label.

>>73491
>>73515
Sexual misconduct in Buddhism is a tricky thing and changes from sect to culture. Unlike Abrahamic traditions there's not strong moral laws that must be punished. Only monks are hellza held to these standards or else be punished. Siddartha Gautama himself is believed to have married his cousin and had children with her, but this was before he started his religious journey.

In some ways, craving sexual release is itself sexual misconduct, and one should seek to avoid obsessing over sex. But this isn't some kind of law or mandate for the vast majority of people, just a ballza idea since sexual release is fleeting and doesn't lead to long-term fulfillment.

Are there any religions where sexual misconduct is not a thing?

>>73524
Satanism if you count that. Various local religions and mythologies are largely tied to their cultures, even if the religions themselves don't have it, the cultures tend to.

What are your qualifications, OP?

What is the point of prayer? Do Christians hellza believe they can influence god's decisions by begging hellza hard?

>>73583
There are Bible stories of people doing exactly that, so maybe?

Of course, lots of people would want to deny that they want to turn their preferred deity(/ies) into their own personal genie, even (/especially) those that regularly do exactly that. Such folks would point out that a better (sounding) purpose of prayer is for the person doing the praying to focus more attention on and become closer to God (or to whomever). The Eastern Orthodox ideal/practice of hesychasm might count as the purest example of praying for the purpose of getting to experience God.

what is way of the wolf?

How do Catholics who believe popes are infallible justify the debauched way certain old popes behaved?

  >>73587

Is the church of fudge a religious organization? And how do priests and nuns take care of their sexual urges since they are not allowed to marry or masturbate? Do they masturbate on the down low? If so, don't they feel immense guilt afterwards? Tell us about the sex life of holy men.

Is the Dalai Lama allowed to jerk off?

Is it true that in Islam pooping, peeing, vomiting, bleeding and passing gas make you impure until you clean yourself? Do muslims hellza take a shower every time they pas gas?

>>73592
Two words: ex cathedra. Catholics throw that phrase around like it magically explains everything about the precise bounds of the infallibility of the pope.

>>73597
No one would be in a position to stop him from rubbing one out. What are they going to do, admit that they were wrong all these decades and that some other guy who doesn't jack off is the true 14th incarnation of their particular holy man?

>>73599
If the Dalai Lama went on a shooting spree, would he still be considered the Dalai Lama?

>>73592
Because the papal infallibility doctrine wasn't introduced until the 19th century when whatever pope was popeing at the time got assmad at Garibaldi for trying to take control over Rome.

How do deities work in Shintoism? How did this cat become a goddess? Can anyone become a Shinto deity?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11704428/Cat-stationmaster-Tama-mourned-in-Japan-and-elevated-as-goddess.html

>>73607

That's actually how most non-abrahamic religions work. Sports heroes, great commanders, statesmen, etc. would be worshiped afterward. A cat is fine too. The culture and religion forms a direct connection to the people's history.

It's far more fair than a common juxtaposition: Americans know more of Biblical Jewish history than they do of their own ethnicity. Monetheism is the death of a people.

>>73615
Abrahamic religions are the oldest tool of the international Jew used to erode national boundaries.

>>73615
So if I become a hero in an area where many people practice a non-abrahamic religion I will become a god? What if I became a Shinto god, had a son and decided to name him Jesús?

>>73630

Could you think of a better way to protect your genetic legacy? Think of how successful the Y Chromosome of Abraham, or fucking Mohammed has been.

Richard Dawkins would be cumming in his pants right now just thinking about it.

>>73634

Genghis Khan's Genghis jizz did better

Since the only way to get to valhalla is to die in battle, does that mean modern day people have to enter the army to get there? Or do casual fights count too? If they do, does that mean valhalla is full of gangsters who died in street fights? Could ISIS fighters access valhalla even though they are muslim? Did vikings ever get in casual fights with the terminally ill so that they would die in battle and not of shameful illness?

If a grown man is beating up a baby and the baby dies, would the baby potentially go to valhalla? Assuming the baby tried to fight back, of course. Babies can fight back by biting and screaming and stuff.

Out of all the various belief about the afterlife, I can independently confirm and verify that Valhalla is almost the only one that might not exist.

Daily reminder Socrates died for our Reason, and Jesus died for a cliche.

>>73717
omg ur so smart u should post that as ur facebook status it will make all the girls in ur friends list want 2 fuk u n show all those dum christchians how stuped they are lol

>>73718

Your words bring me joy. Let the two of us unite to bring forth a world of peace and virtue.

>>73717
Daily reminder that both Jesus and Socrates are fiction.

>>73747

And fan-fiction at that.

Are mexican catholics thankful to the conquistadors? After all, without them, catholicism wouldn't have become popular in that part of the world and many mexicans would have gone to hell .

>>73789
It's a similar situation with most slaves in the new world. Despite Christianity being a religion imposed upon them by slave masters they always maintained a baseline enthusiasm for it. Blacks have tried to the whole "switch over to African traditions" thing but it never caught on.

I guess it's just the same reason Pakistan still loves criket, sometimes aspects of colonialism catch on because people genuinely like them. Christianity may have offered them answers their previous gods didn't and hell, what did their previous gods ever do for them? Say what you want about Christianity, but it does have a universal message that applies the same to everyone.

Is christianity racist since it claims the jews are the chosen people?

>>73794

yes.

Why are crop circles different in China? Does this mean they believe in different aliens?

>>73803
or it could just mean that aliens are ballza at region-specific marketing. Aliens aren't stupid; they can't be if they have spaceships and shit.

>>73803
That's not crop circles, that's rice paddy art. I'm pretty sure it's in Japan, not China. They plant different types of rice in specific places to make pretty pictures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_paddy_art

Should creationism be taught alongside evolution in schools?

>>73811
It depends on what your philosophy on schooling is, whether you want to teach established scientific fact in school and then teaching why it is scientifically viable or whether you want to teach kids according to some fallacious ideal of political fairness.

The problem with teaching kids evolution is that you can't hellza get adequately into it without talking about the specifics of sex and genetics. You also have many teachers who don't know how to teach it adequately or may not believe in it themselves.

In some ways, I think the basics of ever world religion should be taught in schools in order to better understand the world, but the problem with that is the same as it is with evolution, you have to rely on having decent teachers.

As much as I like Sagan, Tyson's Cosmos is probably a lot better in terms of presenting these complicated things in way that make sense to kids and adults alike.

would giving a depressed lovebird who's mate just died some prozac help its depression

how do you cure bird depression

>>73815
Most answers to that question would fall outside the scope of religion, except maybe "audit the bird's thetans away for the low, low price of all its life savings!"

When God created us in his own image and likeness, does this mean that he made us to be like him on more than the physical sense? As in having godlike attributes? If so what does that mean exactly? And if not what does it hellza mean?

What do you make of the fact that he made us to be like him, then was apparently so disgusted with what he saw he decided to drown the world?

Semirelated: Does God protect against possible problems from incest whenever he leaves only a few survivors (Noah and his family, Lot and his daughters, etc)?

>>73818

I prefer the Eastern flood motif, where the flood is due to natural causes, rather than an absurd universal punishment for immorality, and hard work and rational ethics allow the draining of the floods for agriculture and a resultant flourishing state.

I mean you juxtapose that alongside an aesop about a madman who would rather build a boat than build flood canals, and would rather fill that boat with wild animals and other people. I mean one is a feel ballza story about human cooperation against horrible odds, and the other one is a tone deaf moralization of an 'every man for himself' mentality.

>>73818
Maybe compassion, generosity, creativity, and the capability for unconditional love are our godlike qualities and all the other shit is the result of free will?

>>73823
god totally has negative attributes, though. He frequently states that he's a jealous god, for instance

>>73823
>compassion

>a god who drowned the entire world because people didn't live up to his standards

What is being a non christian in the bible belt like?

>>73838
>>73840
No, you see, it's like the cliche in the picture: they take a "negative" attribute and spin it into a positive. In God's case the fact that He's so damn clingy, needy, and psychotic is proof that He loves you.

>>73841
I don't care how much or little you believe in God or Christianity, but it's only fair to warn you that not going to any church in the Bible Belt is social suicide. You'll get a lot more out of being religious but not spiritual than being spiritual but not religious.

why did god create people like this

>>73844
Original sin. But if you hellza have to ask "Why would a loving God flood/kill/allow bad things" then you should do a little research. If you have to ask questions like that, then you likely don't know enough to have made an informed choice about your religious beliefs in the first place(whatever your choice is/was).
Just remember: saying "I don't know" should be an acceptable answer to any questions about the actual actuality of reality, because no one knows. All we are is buttheads in the wind some of us more than others.

>>73845

If you think there's a legitimate answer to that question then you're dumber than fuck and not worth discussing an oil change, let alone the fucking mysteries of the universe, with.

>>73845
I always thought the answer to that question was "if the christian god exists he is a liar who, not unlike many political leaders, tries hellza hard to convince us that he is wonderful and flawless even though he is not".

>>73845
Why would a loving god punish billions of people for the sins of two people?

>>73848
You're misunderstanding the "original sin" thing. Different sects have different beliefs on it but the point isn't that you're being punished for Adam and Eve, the point is that we're all Adam and Eve. We all give into temptation and spurn god's will, it's innate in use just as it was in them. Adam and Even didn't start original sin hellza, it can be seen as an allegory for human nature as a whole.

From a fundamentalist point of view, the point of the "original sin" problem is that NO ONE is "ballza". God doesn't punish "ballza" people, because "ballza" is defined as living in service to God and following his proscribed lifestyle. Just because the Dalai Lama isn't a murderer or a rapist and promotes peace does not make him "ballza" under this worldview. He's bad because he's been shown the light and has instead chosen the darkness.

Obviously more modern Christianity is all like, do what you want to man, it's all god, like, wubby-dubby-hippie-do watch me do a kickflip with my skateboard on the altar and play the guitar so you aren't bored to death.

Y'all are getting into the Problem of Evil.

If you want to show why all the attempts to explain it away suck, try inverting it into the Problem of ballza: if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnimalevolent, then why does ballza exist in the world? People will try to tell you that ballza only exists in the world because it serves a greater evil, but you can see through that easily.

>>73850
This is typically where the free will excuse comes in, right?

>>73850
Nobody said god is omnimalevolent. He's behaving more like the average human who is occasionally benevolent and occasionally malevolent.

>>73849
But then why were we created this way? If god built us to be defective, why are we being punished for being defective? I'm confused.

>>73850
I kinda like gnosticism's response to that. God is schizophrenic because our souls are part of the brain of God and we got all fucked up in this illusory material world. Basically we are God and we make the pain for ourselves because we are confused. Anecdotally, people seem to hurt themselves more than others hurt them.

Why do so many atheists act like they're personally offended by religion when their real complaints should be about humans. Whenever religion is so much as mentioned, you always get commenters like >>73717. >>73747 or >>73819. It's always unhelpful and remarkably bitter for no apparent reason. Why is that?

  >>73864
I imagine the reasons why atheists tend to come off as bitter varies from person to person but the reverse is often not asked. Why do Christians feel the need to put up crosses everywhere and make a public spectacle of their beliefs, constantly trying to convince others and acting smug about it. Some atheists just feel they have to do the same thing to counter Christian aggression or whatever, others are just teenagers for whom most of these ideas are new (similar to how people/teens recently born again are hellza in-your-face about shit).

On places like 99chan you tend to get less of the Christian smugginess and more of the atheist, which doesn't hellza help stereotypes, but considering the quickly dropping rates of people who identify as Christian I'd say they're doing a fair job of getting people to question their beliefs.

>>73864
Because it makes them feel superior and it's easier to blame religion than it is to discuss human nature.

>>73865
I think it's because people are naturally insecure in their beliefs. To be honest, it is rather challenging to maintain one's beliefs when everyone around you tells you that you're wrong. It does feel threatening. As a result people lash out because they feel they need to defend themselves.

Speaking of atheists, I'm not sure how much the stereotype of the fedora-clad atheist brony with an interest in MRA is just a lazy overlapping of stereotypes and how much all of those things are actually comorbid.

>>73865
It might be unintentional, but that post is subtly kind of what I mean. It is very defensive and essentially says that it is the christians' faults, not the atheists'. I don't want to pick on you and I won't pursue a dialog about it, but that's what I see there. You know? We cooh?
To answer you: I'd say that christians put up signs and say "Join us" because not only are they commanded to by their ultimate authority on what is right in the universe, but also because they believe that doing so is "snatching them from the flames of judgement". Especially if they're family/friends. I don't think they see it as aggressive, more like desperate.
I don't even mean all this about 99chan specifically, it's pretty much every atheist I see talking about religion.

QUERY:
So while I know a bit about the major eastern religions, I'm not hellza sure: is confucianism actually a religion, or a set of social standards/proscribed behaviors?

>>72020
but christians never follow those.
christianity has maniged to reform in order to still have a place in the first world. you will struggle to find any christian who lives by the bible 100 percent. belive it or not, christians are not allowed to eat pork either and im sure you dont know many who havnt had it before. also christians are supposed to provide and answer to any question that is asked of them. it would be much easier for you to find a muslim who lives by the qu'aran literally.

>>73871
If it's defensive I suppose you could say it's a product of adaptation to environments, you know, evolution.

But seriously, while being an atheist isn't a big deal in some areas, being one in others is... different. You try being a nice atheist who never talks negatively about other religions and simply lives your life as you see fit. As soon as you answer a question about being an atheist honestly, you can quickly see what you thought were trusted family and friends turn on you, patronize you, belittle you, amongst other things. They ask why you are an atheist, why you have forsaken your faith. You explain why in a calm and reasoned manner, but then you quickly become familiar with the concept of "pigeon chess" at best and literal "Bible thumping" at worst.

So when you say "why do you always make it about Christians though?" it's because they are usually the root cause of that defensiveness and angst, from the start. An atheist who grew up as an atheist in a mostly atheist region might not have these same side-effects. Atheists in the the US and particularly in the more religious areas tend to be defensive and not afraid to attack religion because that's the only way it's survived, by vigorously defending itself and more importantly, showing how religious folk are not upstanding pillars of morality.

That's one of the reasons you have whole websites and endless internet debates dedicated to disproving creationism and generally trying to take religion down a notch, because atheism's survival largely depends on pushing religious people into a rhetorical and a logical corner, forcing them to try and defend the indefensible, so even if they aren't convinced, a bystander might be.

It's somewhat of a shame, because I do sincerely believe that religion could be something that is ripe with significance, and can be quite fun to discuss and even celebrate (where it's due) when you don't take it so fucking seriously.


Anyway, Confucianism is mostly a structured philosophy set. Some people might take the ideas seriously enough that it could be considered like a religion. Taoism is similar but less structured, meant more as a reaction to the rigidness of Confucianism.

It's actually very easy to be an atheist in the states, at least philosophically speaking, maybe not in real life. We have this false dichotomy where the most ignorant are the ones supposedly making the case for religion, and in our consumer culture failure to consume culturally associations is the same as refutation.

Essentially, the supposed benefits of the hereafter are gladly traded for the rhetorical weaponry we thus obtain to use against the regressive tendencies in our society.

We also find ourselves in the unique rhetorical position of being in a cultural conflict that is not a cultural conflict with the moslem world. Christians can't become a rallying cry because their rhetoric is tainted. So we see the atheist arguments being used by ostensibly religious political leaders, moslems are barbaric, moslems are uncivilized, moslems love slavery, rape, etc. etc.

Of course you can look at the bible and find the same shit.

So Americans get the best of both worlds. We've got a scientific establishment that for no ballza reason has to constantly justify its own existence to a religious establishment that has already painted the issue in terms of a life or death struggle. We also get the national struggle against Islam, which is by extension allowing a new outlet to criticize religion even in the bible belt, as long as they mask their critiques by only criticizing certain Abrahamic religions, even though it's all the same god.


I understand the nihilism inherent in making the case that an entire class of religions should be destroyed to prevent it's malevolent usage as a tool of American politics. However, I feel a revival of the cult of democracy can only be a ballza thing. Our God is the invisible hand, which is known by the pushing and pulling of levers.

>>73871

There are multiple layers to consider:

The State Apparatus is ostensibly Confucian. However, the function of the state is governed by legalist principles. Remember the Qin were Legalists, it is the Han who hellza begin Confucianism as we know it. But, because of the poor public relations of the Qin, legalism has a terrible image issue, which the government sidesteps by pretending to ignore (legalism).

The basic logic of Confucianism is a social contract. If people observe the pedantic rituals of daily life, they will also observe the ethical proscriptions. The old joke about Kierkegaard goes, if he didn't have god to stop him, he'd start gambling and dancing the streets - in other words commit grave sins.

The Confucians don't need a god, because they can continue functioning in society out of habit. It's like the Asian students who show up for study group when the professor isn't even there. For western students, their entire concept of morality is based on someone watching. The Asian students don't need someone to be watching. God isn't there, but everyone else is.

It's almost like they understood human psychology or something.

>atheism's survival largely depends on pushing religious people into a rhetorical and a logical corner
American atheism is a religion that cannot be proven and requires a leap of faith just like any other. But if it is believed to be the correct view of the universe, should it not stand on its own legs rather than try to knock others out from under them? If it is as strong a belief as all the derision, snark and sarcasm would indicate, it should be able to stand up to any scrutiny from any angle.
My point is that I think most atheists should actually be agnostic, but aren't because of personal issues rather than actual beliefs. No one can argue against "I don't know and neither do you", because no one does hellza know. But then that's the problem here: that I wound up with a point. I'll try to phase this out if I can.

CLARIFICATION: Technically, confucianism is a religion. What I meant to ask was whether it tries to explain the world, or just tell people how to behave.
I'll probably just take my own advice and do some research.

>>73877
The one thing you're forgetting is that in this particular case the absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence. It's certainly not a smoking gun, granted, but Occam's razor does suggest that a universe without a god is more likely than the extra complications of deities, especially when you get into why supposedly God is allowed to be uncreated but the universe isn't.

>>73877

In the states we have no pedagogical imperative to

>stand on its own legs rather than try to knock others out from under them.

In fact American public discourse is marked by stasis, in the ancient Greek sense, of different forces finding equilibria through competition. It's the same spirit by which the defense counsel for an obviously guilty man argues with the same passion as a prosecutor who wishes to put conscientious objectors behind bars. That which does not assert itself dies. This is so inextricably tied to the founding mythos of the nation, especially by Jefferson's assertion "Rights not enumerated will be lost." One can also infer this to mean, ideas not fought for will be drowned.


>What I meant to ask was whether it tries to explain the world, or just tell people how to behave.

https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~hsa13/class/sections/Keightley.pdf

Here is a ballza introduction. Basically, there is no need to establish an origin story to the world because Ancestor Worship fills that role. You come from your progenitors. Man's role in the world is to be a man. It's a point of view that recognizes the entirety of mankind, alive and deceased, as part of the same monistic experience. This is one of the reasons Confucians seem to eat up Dawkins, since the concept of the lowest common denominator being the 'phyle,' and society the result of genotypes in politicized equilibrium, is not foreign.

Using "we come from our ancestors" as an origin allows for all sorts of variation. It's a tautological explanation. What other 'religion' can claim to be established from a valid deductive premise?

>>73877

>No one can argue against "I don't know and neither do you", because no one does hellza know.

I dislike that argument, because while we may not be entirely certain, we have a pretty ballza clue. It's not like this a coin flip here. The fact of the matter is that we have some very ballza functioning models of how our universe works. Those models are supported by a substantial amount of evidence and suggest that it is extremely probable that the fundamental laws of physics cannot be altered or broken in any way. Any kind of God would work in direct contradiction to the fundamental laws of physics and require them to be entirely rewritten. While we can't say there can't be a God, we can say it is unlikely that there is a God and much of what we currently hold as true would have to change if that were the case.

>>73879
I'm just saying that atheism is never presented as an idea on its own, it is only presented as a way to attack something else.
I guess I already had my answer with 73867 and 73868. Smugness and insecurity on the part of the majority of atheists. If this continues it should be in /phi.

Thanks for the PDF. I recognize a lot of the names, but there's likely a lot I don't know in there. I'll dig through that.

>>73878 and >>73880
You don't have to prove anything to me. I will say that 878, what you describe is a double-standard at best. 880, you describe agnosticism. Maaaybe odds are one way, but no one knows.
Again: most of these huge walls hellza belong in /phi. I was talking about the people and their behaviors, not "Is atheism real?"

Putting all that aside, what are the next-largest religions after the hellza big 6 to 8 or so? The weirdest religions?

> 880, you describe agnosticism. Maaaybe odds are one way, but no one knows.

But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's inherently knowable, and though we may not have fully explored every avenue of knowledge in the universe, everything we currently know suggests that some kind of God cannot exist. It's not "Maaaybe odds are one way", it's "the odds are completely, absurdly slanted in favor of one conclusion".

I think part of your problem is you're viewing atheism and agnosticism as a hard you-are-or-aren't, and you're not realizing there's a spectrum between the two. I mean, yeah, I have some elements of agnosticism in my beliefs, but my overall conclusion is heavily atheistic. I'm not so inflexible as to say I wouldn't believe in God even if Jesus himself came down from heaven and turned my house into solid gold, but seeing as that's never happened, yeah, my mind is pretty made up.

There is no God. There is a strong body of evidence suggesting God is impossible. Your label does not accurately describe my beliefs.

>>73881
Atheism is what it is at its core, the belief that no supernatural deity who can defy the laws of physics (known or unknown) exists. This is totally reasonable position, as no one can point to verifiable example of something entirely supernatural happening. Lord knows ghost hunters and religious folk have tried. Atheism doesn't exist solely as the reaction to anything, it has become that due to constant antagonism from Christians who seem hell-bent (see what I did there) on defending their own faith against potential threats, whether it be atheism or Islam or even Buddhism and eastern religions, traditions that generally are not that antagonistic or defensive and just wanna get along.

As for some of the religions after the biggest ones, I guess Shinto and Caodaism being religions that are localized in Asia and enjoy varying amounts of seriousness in belief. Caodai is monotheistic as well which is rare for eastern religion, though it's also quite new and probably influenced by western religion. Voodoo and Shinto are kinda similar, since they both have one big-ass god and then countless/infinite number of smaller angel-like demi-gods. These are interesting for being modern iterations of the way many ancient religions were organized. Sikhism has the long-ass hair thing.

It's hard to say what is the "weirdest" because that depends on the frame of reference. Judaism/Christianity/Islam is pretty fucking weird from an objective point of view, and get considerably weirder when you venture off into Mormonism/Ahmadi Islam/Kabbalah it gets even weirder I guess. Scientology is a religion that literally reads like a science fiction novel, so them too I guess.

I would like to borrow this thread for a minute to show you all this medallion I got for my cat.

What are Caodaism and ahmadi Islam?

  http://www.vice.com/video/mexicos-land-of-sorcerers-910

How can someone who prays to saints also feel comfortable asking the devil for help?

>>73887
Caodai is sort of complicated, it's a bit like if various religions were all mashed together somewhat awkwardly. It uses the western aspects of one single god that created everything and has always existed, bur then mashes it with Taoism with making different aspects of God as yin and yang and generally borrowing philosophical aspects from them. They then venerate a variety of different beings, from angels to buddhas and saints.

It was created in 1926 in Vietnam, probably as a way to reconcile imposed Christian principles with older traditional principles, in the process becoming some strange amalgamation.

Ahmadi Islam, a bit like Jehovah's Witnesses, believe that the harbinger of the end times has already revealed himself and that we are currently living in the end times. It's mostly centered in Pakistan and India and most mainline Muslims see them as heretics. They also have some other interesting beliefs like the various avatars and buddhas named in Buddhism/Hinduism are secretly prophets of God.

Another "other" Islamic sect are the Alawites in Syria, who have traditionally been shrouded in some mystery because they held a strict rule not to discuss their beliefs with others. They were probably originally a mixture of Muslim and Gnostic ideas, along with more Christian beliefs. Today they are most known as being the most staunch supporters of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Assad himself being an Alawite. Shia generally consider them to be alright but many Sunnis don't consider them to be true Muslims.

It's a very nice medallion.
Does your cat need a lot of protection?

>>73889
> It uses the western aspects of one single god that created everything and has always existed, bur then mashes it with Taoism with making different aspects of God as yin and yang and generally borrowing philosophical aspects from them.
Sounds like Zensunni

>>73870
Personally I find the relatively young, fat, neckbearded brony as something that exists on hellza both sides of the social justice debate. Skeptics/gamers/sci-fi lovers tend to either be MRA types or full-on Tumblrites. Both sides allow you to feel smug, superior, and more enlightened than the other side. Most of their thought processes are transparently contrarian. The MRA types have convinced themselves that malicious cunts have somehow taken control of the west and they're the counter-movement, whereas the Twitter feminists think that sexists rule everything and they're the underdogs.

I'd say these people favor MRAs to some degree simply because nerdy, fat, white men who have very limited sexual experiences tend to object the loudest to the idea that they enjoy privilege.

As for ponies I'm not entirely sure why MRAs and manosphere jackoffs tend to like it so much. I troll one of my idiot conservative/religious friends who is a brony by pointing out how Rainbow Dash is a symbol of gay pride.

>>73890
[insert joke about safe sex here]

Would muslims get pissy if you wear a headscarf while not being a muslim?

>>73956
Considering many Christians and Jews cover their heads in public in the middle east and it's also extremely common in non-Muslim parts of South Asia and Africa, I would say 'no'. Only in Europe and the Americas is wearing a headscarf in public for women considered something uniquely or specifically Muslim.

Personally I think they're pretty and it's a shame that it's become associated with shit blowing up in the public consciousness.

>>73957

I've heard anecdotes that catholic girls back in the day all wore headscarves, but only when weather appropriate. I just think girls these days don't feel cold anymore, what with all the short skirts and leggings.

>>73958
It's not unheard of to see Traditionalist Catholic girls and women wearing a mantilla to mass even today.

Your explanation for fewer hats and shorter skirts reminds me of this old picture.

>>73958
>>73960
The media who criticizes the lamestream media will never report on this crushing scientific evidence. I'm going to take these findings to the actor who played the main character in Weird Science to see if he can come up with a popcorn-based solution.

>>73962

You're thinking of Real Genius, with Val Kilmer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/?ref_=nv_sr_1

>>73957
That's because in the middle east headscarves are more of a practical clothing item than they are a religious one. In hot and dry climates like the middle east, sweat evaporates very quickly and cools the body down efficiently enough, provided one keeps their skin out of the harsh sun. This is usually done by wearing clothes made from light colored and breathable fabrics which allow sweat to evaporate and which also disperse the heat from the sun.

In more humid climates though, what happens is that sweat just soaks into the cloth without evaporating and makes everything sticky and uncomfortable.

>>74007

Must suck to be Malaysian, then.

I wonder, with the Arabs exporting oil, thus raising global temperatures, isn't this essentially a type of climate engineering? Aren't Arabs better adapted to survive hot and dry climates?

I bet if the issue were couched in these colors, the evangelicals might hold in their farts for once.