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Post by StyxD on Feb 12, 2019 0:43:07 GMT
And also because I, an atheist who (the horror! The horror!) admitted he'd been to a Pride parade, kept correcting him when he fucked up quoting scripture at me. You were correcting his scripture quotes? That's cool. But wait, God will send everyone to hell, but in the meantime he won't let anything bad happen to his believers? How does that work? Also, hermit lifestyle is tried and true, but I feel like most people didn't choose it because it maximized misery.
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Post by Horsie on Feb 12, 2019 1:10:57 GMT
Dude got everything ass-backwards! The only thing I can really remember off the top of my head is when he told me that a wise man builds his house on sand, while a foolish man builds his house on rock, because a house built on sand will never collapse, and that's just how my faith should be.
Of course that one was really easy to pick up on, but that's the thing with this guy, when he fucked up, it was often in some glaringly obvious way.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Feb 12, 2019 3:47:49 GMT
His religion sounds like a strange combination of Christianity and satanism.
We're all going to hell, but God will stop bad things from happening to you... PROVIDED you suffer enough.
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Post by Horsie on Feb 12, 2019 4:41:19 GMT
Now assuming he's right about everything, I'd have to wonder if Satan would be better or worse than his version of God.
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Post by Canuovea on Feb 12, 2019 6:01:17 GMT
Gotta take the Marcus Aurelius stance on this. Just live your life attempting to be the best person you can be and God will understand. Or, if God doesn't understand, well, was He really worth worshiping in the first place? If not, then eh, you did your best.
I don't think being a good person to impress some ancient cosmic divinity is a good reason to be a good person. I'd rather be a good person on my own merits, thank you, and if perhaps that impetus to try to be good comes from society and religion's impact on me through some cultural channels then so be it.
And doesn't it seem a bit odd, really, to answer the question of "why be good?" with "it is what god wants"? Why should I care about what God wants? Fear of punishment? Hardly seems like a good motivation to me. Certainly, morality and law have very little to do with each other in my mind, and it is law that is enforced by fear of punishment. Furthermore, how can I even know what God wants? Seems to me that what God wants always kind of lines up with what someone else wants, suspiciously so. I see the human everywhere, so I think I shall stick with the human. Perhaps my brain is really just an empathy slot machine, and I just like being around people who are happy, but it seems that such would be the best measure of good behaviour. I'll take my personal connections and the people that come with them over the grand sweeping statements of religious commandments any day.
Edit: That is to say, I sometimes wonder if there is a God, perhaps God thinks along the same lines. Why should a deity reward someone who only tried to be good because they were afraid of punishment? Wouldn't a god prefer people who thought for themselves? Certainly in that situation the best you can hope for is neutrality. Eh, such thoughts are likely me projecting. It is so easy to see why some folks imagine meeting God and God somehow they understand each other perfectly.
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Post by Canuovea on Feb 13, 2019 21:31:23 GMT
Alternate Cult Checklist
The BITE model. Bit more complex.
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Post by wordweaver3 on Feb 13, 2019 22:00:14 GMT
Actually, a lot of political parties check a lot of those boxes too.
Do you have to check em all or just most of them to qualify as a cult?
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Post by Canuovea on Feb 13, 2019 22:17:18 GMT
This one guy marks them on the Fibonacci Sequence up to 34, being the highest possible. He said that if you hit over 100 in any category then it was a cult. But he said the Westboro Baptist Church counted as a cult and its highest score was 99. Jonestown's highest score was in Behaviour Control and about 150ish.
So basically 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.
All religions are likely to score at least a 1 in each category. But then again, almost anything that is organized is unlikely to score a 0.
An analysis.
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Post by StyxD on Feb 13, 2019 23:15:41 GMT
Gotta take the Marcus Aurelius stance on this. Just live your life attempting to be the best person you can be and God will understand. Or, if God doesn't understand, well, was He really worth worshiping in the first place? If not, then eh, you did your best. I feel like we, in the West, lost something of an understanding of ancient religions when we as a culture decided that divinely anointed monarchs weren't so cool and went for that democracy and humanism things. Now everyone can just say "I dunno, I'd just let everyone into heaven if they were a good person, no matter what deity they believed in" and be more merciful than the infinitely merciful God as written in the Bible. Maybe when tyrants were just a simple fact of life everywhere, it was easier to appreciate that God could punish you for anything he wanted whenever he wanted, but was merciful enough not to… most of the time. Now we want God to make exceptions and posit that if He's not actually that good then maybe He's not worthy of worship. Maybe back then people thought differently about such things. Well, one thing that I know, the answer to "Wouldn't a god prefer people who thought for themselves?" was for the longest time "Of course not, thinking for yourself makes you in danger of heresy, you need to believe exactly as told or you won't enter heaven."
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Post by wordweaver3 on Feb 13, 2019 23:47:32 GMT
Make Heaven great again!
Build the Wall!
Trump 2020!
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