"Their cultists still decorate themselves with replicas of the murder weapon to This Day!!!"
The cult really needs to indoctrinate its members with the idea that a violent abusive authority figure that does nothing but demand tribute and obedience from you while protecting you from nothing is somehow "love." Honestly that's the most offensive thing to me about christians and their imaginary friend. Even if you look past the fact that there is literally more evidence of Spiderman's existence than there is of god's existence, the thing they glorify is literally a violent abusive patriarchy.
Klingons did it best.
I'm just here because I love seeing comments that read "deleted by creator" in all the threads about Jesus.
"I've read some more of this book. Apparently, if your neighbors show up at your house wanting to rape your guests, you should send out your daughters to be raped instead."
Japanese media is full of this, and it's great. All kinds of absurd cross-shaped guns and militant priests with nothing more than vague aesthetic similarities to practiced christianity. A delightful reciprocation to how western media treats japanese culture.
I maintain that the ending and plotline of Evangelion is actually closer to actual Christian canon than most people's understandings.
The original ending, End of Evangelion, or Rebuild?
This comment reminds me of the japanese cult that beliefs Jesus did not die on the cross but it was his japaneae brother instead and Jesus moved to Japan until he died of old age.
The biggest cult in the Philippines, which dabbles in prosperity gospel and owns an entire arena here, believed it was some Filipino man. I don't even remember if they view him as Jesus or some other incarnation. But where I live, they have the most followers. Oh and sometimes, they get people killed, like what happened to my uncle years ago.
Crucifixion didn’t lead to death by starvation but by suffocation.
elaborate? (I could Google it, but I prefer human response)
Basically, once your feet/legs get too tired to carry your weight you hang from your arms. This basically means to breathe you have to push up your entire body weight with your chest muscles. After a while you get too exhausted to breathe and suffocate.
Fun fact: the actual death from crucifiction was suffocation. Once the victim loses the strength to hold themselves up, the slouch puts some sort of stress on their lungs. There was an instance of the Romans not breaking someone's legs (which suggests that maybe that was part of the practice) so they would suffer longer. I don't remember where that info came from, but I've been reading lots of books about the first 200 years of christianity for about 20 months.
I'm an atheist, of course, just also a history nerd.
One other side note: around 1999, I wanted to make a "student" film (I was barely a student) about the life and times of christ. He'd fuck up and raise Lazarus as a zombie in one of the scenes. Never made it.
Your film idea makes me think you'd enjoy the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a book in the apocrypha starring Mary teaching baby Jesus not to kill his classmates for being dumb kids.
I just opened the wiki article to read next. That brief description sounds familiar. I might have read about that in Elaine Pagel's book, The Gnostic Gospels.
It's straight up like a sitcom in parts. Probably for the best that it never made it into the canon bible though.
Mad TV did one where the terminator went back to protect Jesus
I recently read The World Until Yesterday which compares the way of life between tribal cultures and western cultures. The section about religion has a clumsy preamble that was obviously trying to cushion the blow for religious people reading the book who thought their religion was any different to tribal religions.
The author then goes on to treat them all the same.
It was quite funny to read. I was imagining how it must feel to see your religion laid out side by side with a dozen other equally stupid myths and think "Yep this is the right one. I was super lucky to be born to parents who picked the correct religion!"
For me, a historical fiction that put norse and chriatianity on similar footing was the push that got me from "ugh this religious stuff is annoying" to "oh, it's probably bullshit, too". In hindsight, it's pretty telling that christianity puts the most emphasis on having faith no matter what evidence or lack thereof is presented, to the point where that alone determines whether one is punished, ignored, or rewarded in a way that is completely unverifiable to anyone living.
I've been saying for years this is literal training for anti-intellectualism and ultimately fascism and hate. As soon as you can convince yourself to believe something just because someone said to without any evidence or even contrary evidence, you're primed to start doing that in other areas of your life. Grifters and fascists will absolutely take advantage of people like that without a second thought, and they scream their propaganda all over Fox news. Religion is more than just some stupid bullshit people believe, it's a threat to democracy and freedom.
Absolutely.
Blind faith is an incredibly dangerous habit.
It's crazy that we accept it as a normal human variation.
a dozen other equally stupid myths
I think there is some missing context here that makes this an unfair comparison. In general, tribal cultures didn't treat their creation myths as literal fact. It was more of a poetic way to explain to the children of the tribe where their people had come from and give the tribe a sense of identity. Since they didn't have Science to actually explain how they got there, this seems as reasonable as anything honestly.
If someone from a different nation were to come visit and relate their account of creation, they wouldn't argue with the person and insist that their creation myth was the 'correct' one and that the visitor was wrong. They were a different people so it makes sense they were 'created' in a different way. Since neither was attempting to explain things in a literal way, the two different stories weren't incompatible with each other.
It's likely that the creation myths of the ancient Hebrew people were looked at in a similar way at first, they were a tribal people after all. At some point (likely to do with the Agricultural Revolution, but that's a whole different topic) they started conquering and subjugating the neighboring tribes and insisting those people adopt their spiritual practice, that's when the whole deal of insisting it was the literal truth came about.
In the bible Yahweh and the Hebrews spend a lot of time worrying about what 'gods' the other tribes worshiped. Much more so than would be rational if you considered Yahweh to be the one, true, only and actual God. The reason that so much time was spent on it was because Yahweh was just a story, just like all the other Gods and you had to go out of your way to get people to follow along with the narrative that that one story was 'true', otherwise who would believe it?
So while it's easy for us to look back on the beliefs of tribal cultures and dismiss them as stupid, we are misunderstanding the purpose and intent of these stories. It's only 'stupid' if you take it literally. In context it was a lot less dumb and probably somewhat necessary to a harmonious life.
We have the benefit of pretty much knowing exactly how humans and the world got here, so we were never in a situation of having one of our children come up to us and ask how we got here and only being able to answer with "I have no idea." That would have been the situation that tribal societies would have been in if you were expecting them to give a scientific answer to the question. So it's really not the case that their creation myths were "Stupid", but more it was the best system they could possibly have had at the time.
I see what you're getting at, and I personally think that's probably how a lot of the myths/religions start, but I don't think you can outright say that tribes only thought of them as children's stories.
In the book I was referencing, the author noted the "cost" of a religion, in that the tribes were usually required to spend a significant amount of their time worshiping, and/or discarded resources in the name of sacrifice. One of the tribes studied spent 1 out of every 3 days worshiping. A very large commitment for people who have a very real risk of starvation if their hunts go badly. He then goes on to argue that there must be an evolutionary benefit to religion or an atheist tribe would have out-competed all of these tribes (but that's another tangent). I bring this up because it implies that they do actually believe their "stories", otherwise why risk starvation?
That's a good point, I worded it poorly. I didn't mean to imply that the adults didn't 'believe' it and just told that to their children. I think that it was more the case that they believed in the spiritual truths behind the stories and not necessarily that they were literal, although I can't say for certain that was the case in all instances. Maybe some of them did believe it literally or didn't really make a distinction between spiritually true and literally true. It's not like they had the scientific knowledge to know what the alternative was.
I think it's natural to try and explain the world around you, and if you don't have the tools to know what is really going on- then yeah you will probably make some crazy guesses. And then if you tell it to your children as if it were fact, then they might not question it seeing as how you are a trusted elder.
I think my point though was that it really isn't what I would call 'stupid' to do something like create a silly myth and pass it on. For me where it becomes stupid is when you insist it's the literal truth and that other people believe it, or when you refuse to update your worldview in the case where better evidence comes along because you are a zealot about your mythology.
Yeah you're right, I didn't mean to imply that they're stupid. It's stupid to us, but that's only because we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
"We don't drink blood here. That's something Christians do." ~Satanist member
"I'm not in the business of murdering innocent children. That's God's jurisdiction."
- Lucifer, The Devil's Carnival
It's very important to note that Catholics believe that Jesus was both fully man and fully god, and in times past would straight up kill you for heresy for saying he was half man and half god.
True, but getting some details wrong seems to fit with the theme of the meme.
Normalizing a 2D vector is not part of the scripture, apparently.
(edit) I fucked up with my math. Normalizing either kind of Jesus would result in a being that is ~0.707 part divine and human. But if we assume that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, that would make his magnitude sqrt(2), which means that Christian beliefs are based on something that is completely irrational, which I've found to be true.
Well, in scripture a circle can be 10 cubits in diameter and 30 cubits in circumference, so...
I guess all that we can conclude is that through god, all things are possible.
It’s got to have been awful to be neurodivergent in the past. I want to dig into this right now and I grew up Catholic, so I know it doesn’t lead anywhere.
me too, i always wanted to actually understand how the stuff worked, but the best answer i ever got was something related to "god works in mysterious ways" or some other bs
Catholicism is all about meaningless distinctions with no basis in reality which drive them into murderous rage.
This 200% being, The fact that the bread and wine is 100% blood and flesh, don't ask.
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