Why do people follow religions, when they are clearly made up...

Why do people follow religions, when they are clearly made up, also isn't it great how you are born into the "right" religion, what makes your god(s) better than the rest.

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deism.com/theageofreason.htm
people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=A0iDNLxmWVM
youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tyVdnIU9A
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Societal stucture. It used to be more important than it is, with the death of god.

You'd think that if all over the world in unconnected cultures and countries there was a consistent belief in something beyond ourselves it would attest to the validity of that belief.

It makes them happy thinking they "have it all figured out"

a true right-winger larps as a religious man while secretly being atheist

Belief is dumb, but you can't tell that to the masses. They're unable to act properly without the fear of hell.

>Belief is dumb
Without belief there is nihilism and nihilism is the path to communism.

that's why the masses have to believe. I don't believe in anything and yet I help others and try not to cause unnecessary harm.

Obviously the peons go degenerate without God. That's why we need to keep the religious facade

Because an external set of moral values and source of accountability is necessary to uphold society. The fall of every civilisation has been preceded by a period of decadence and godless degeneracy.

You're living through one of these periods now.

probably because most people crave a deity figure and fill the void with religion. look what happens when you remove religion, god is then replaced with fascist or communist dictators.

The notion of "religious versus atheist" is a false dichotomy too often propounded in these religious threads. I would recommend to the attention of anybody here who rejects atheism but is unsure as to the truth of religious dogma a far-too-often-overlooked philosophy called Deism, or the belief in God on the basis of reason and not of faith-based revelation. It came out of England and was the belief of Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Voltaire, and hundreds of other eminent men. A more recent convert to it was the formerly atheist philosopher Antony Flew. So too the ancient philosophers---Socrates, Plato, Cicero---believed in God, and that they did not need this thing called blind faith to do so, which is a mere invention of late antiquity and the Dark Ages; only the deductions of pure reason.

Religion (as people commonly conceive of the word) versus atheism versus paganism is a false trichotomy. There is a fourth way, and that is Deism.

Deism is also completely compatible with Christianity; some indeed would call it the true Christianity, and most of the Deists both considered themselves Christians, and had a great respect for the teachings of Jesus and the Bible. But they accepted only those teachings in it that they thought to be morally just, and subjected all things to reason and conscience.

A good place to start for those who want an introduction to Deism is the great Thomas Paine's work "The Age of Reason." The introduction runs as follows:

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."

deism.com/theageofreason.htm

You are alright Poland.

Theistic faiths are indeed trash. However it is a weakness to not be able to accept the mystic experience either, once one becomes an Atheist.

When the great Voltaire said "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" he was making exactly this point. He contended that society itself would collapse without God, and he was right.

but isnt this still believing in a god ( by god i mean a being who created the universe, then sat back and watched)

that's still believing in a high power, i personally don't think there is. why is there a constant necessity for the belief of something or someone who created all this and to feel safe in the knowledge of the man in the sky.

A starting point of the universe is undeniable. Or else you would have a chain of uncaused causes going back for all time.

no, i fully agree with that. There is obviously a starting point. Everything has a start point and an ending point.

But why does it have to be a deity ?
Why not just science as many believe, science controlled by nature itself not by a deity, so (i'm no scientist) why not a dark mass that imploded on itself

Christianity isn't made up but talmudism and the koran clearly are, Buddha existed, but ihis path misguided as hell. You want some knowledge dropped on your ass? Explain to me what every civ has a flood story altered in details over millenias at the origin point. You can't go take your ignorance somewhere else Sup Forums is Not a Faggot Tribly board.

have some faith user

>Christianity isn't made up
i personally think Jesus as a person was real, but the stories of his miracles are shit,trickery at best.

again Buddha real guy just doing his own shit.

muhammed was a real person no arguments at all, its just the shit he said and did was like Jesus either trickery or follows believed out of fear... Again tyrannical warlord

Do you not understand death of god? Religion will inevitably weaken past a certain point in society. Faith will not turn back time.

I think judging by the sheer complexity of the universe it doesn't seem too far to say that the origins of it had some form of conscious design behind it. I don't think it's too absurd to say that were a creator to make a universe, they would create a series of rules for it to be governed by that we interpret as science. To me, science is the study of God's universe rather than the study of God himself, the two are not exclusive. CS Lewis compared it to studying the works of Shakespeare, finding no character called Shakespeare and declaring from this that Shakespeare didn't exist. In science we are studying the prose of the universe. Lets not forget, the vast majority of scientists throughout history have been religious people.

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, virtually all the ancient philosophers believed in God long before religion (in the modern sense of the term) existed. They deduced it from reason, as (to take an example) from the argument that there must be a first cause, an unmoved mover, a primum movens.

What retards like you don't seem to comprehend is that your belief can be in nationalism instead of that faggot god shit

HURR DURR IT MUST BE A GOD

>ignoring infinite possibilities

The problem you face there is that you're relying and a malleable morality, rather than something (literally) set in stone.
Very mature while also ignoring all of my points.

you have to admit larping a a neo christian crusader to crush the shitskin hoards with thier inferior religions is fun
DEUS VULT
GOTT MIT UNS

Shush

Voltaire was an idiot a person of limited life experience whose own treatise were not one of objective analysis but frothing at the mouth absuridty. He didn't investigate anything just pretended he knew what he was talking about. Kind of like a modern day tribly.

people follow religion because it's a part of culture, unless you don't like being british.
also people who follow atheism can be equally insane, just look at fat kim

i do like your thinking and i don't by any means think what your saying is stupid.

i think personally we are all "agnostic"
as non of us truly know, and even not believing in a god is a belief in itself,

its like Charles Darwin said
"The impossibility of conceiving that this grand universe, with our conscience selves arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of god but whether this is an argument of real value. I Have never been able to decide.

I think its very hard to convince people of your belief especially when its not convincing a vulnerable person of the existence of god to make there life feel better, when its to people discussing religion to this point it'll be hard to convince.

>Thinking morality isn't ingrained in human nature

Why are you religious people so illogical?

The only explanation for the origin of the universe you can think of is god

yep we have plenty of catholics and up here in the north east especially lots of people of irish heritage here

triblys get rekt

Evolution of my religious/metaphysical beliefs
> Six-day creationist Christian fundamentalist
> Atheist materialist (learned about science)
> Agnostic apatheist (learned more about epistemology)
> Agnostic theist/deist
From a technical, highly abstracted perspective, I don't think you can 'prove' God, but I do think that the patterns of evidence form a persuasive argument that it is more likely that some form of higher power/intelligence exists than not.

Even mentioning them makes you a high ranked retard.
All ancient philosophers believed not only in something clever, but also something ridiculously stupid

Mere self-worship is absurd. Love of country and people alone is not a sufficient principle by which to live. The loss of moral principles in the West is exactly why you have mass immigration, radical feminism, the breakdown of the family, sexual degeneracy &c. in the first place. Blood does not determine the future of a nation, moral virtue does. See Sir John Glubb's "The Fate of Empires."

people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

>Patterns of evidence

>Persuasive argument

>God

Are you a nigger?

All animals have morality ingrained in them from birth you dense retard

Must be some paki, I refuse to believe a true Europeans is as retarded as you

>He thinks Orthodoxy broke away

You might as well try to tear down Pythagoras's theorem on the basis that all mathematicians in history have believed in something absurd. The point is that almost all great thinkers philosophers and writers in the European tradition going all the way back to the ancient Greeks have agreed upon this particular issue. It only starts really to fade away (not owing to any sort of new evidence, mind you) in the twentieth century of materialism and decadence and degeneracy, and, behold, you have the modern world as a result.

Yeah you're never going to get any solid answer when trying to look at the metaphysical view of existence. It is entirely based around trying to use logic. Many people find this unsatisfying because there is a lack of any hard evidence and so state that it's best to wait for scientists to prove what happened before the universe was created. They will likely be waiting a long time for this evidence.
A lot of people give religious people crap for 'thinking we've got it all figured out'. I disagree, I accepted that I don't know the hard facts behind the creation of the universe but I can certainly try and figure something out. Using the idea that there was an initial starting point which everyone can agree on, and that in my view it was conscious (which is really the topic that is to be debated in religious vs atheist circles) the question for me became, what evidence to I have here on earth that there is/isn't a God? Or in other words, what attracted me to Christianity? Now that's another topic all together.

Do you really perceive no difference between the moral characteristics of different nations and at different times? Between Victorian Britain (say) and the Britain of Druidism, barbarism and cannibalism?

Fuck right off back to Pakistan, you're clearly not smart enought to be a European

Nihilism is one of the symptoms of depression, I think it hasn't got anything to do with communism. It is true that a bit of existentialism is required, but you are the one who ought to instill a sense of purpose into yourself in a free society.

Nihilism is itself a product of degeneracy; when an authoritarian centralised governance sets your purpose you are released of the burden of having to choose what to do with your life. Propaganda should help in making a person feel happy about working for the Fatherland instead.

Selflessness is both beneficial for the society and for the self, as nihilism cannot happen in a selfless individual.

More or less. As a chicken owner I can notice that these birds are violent and vile, as cute as they may seem. If they were humans they would behave worse than niggers. You have the pecking order, the rapes, the vile assertion of dominance. Your argument doesn't make sense.

I am yet to see something stupid in Plato's writings.

Societies with conformist religions functioned better than ones without, so they dominated the global landscape. We didn't have the context of easily accessible knowledge that we have now to demonstrate that it's obviously a bunch of made up stuff. We live in a time of transition and experimentation, who knows what will happen.

Forgot to add: before starting my journey into metaphysics and the history of creation and humanity I was a very VERY militant atheist.

> Modal ontological argument
> Kalam cosmological argument
> Origin of Information argument
> Origin of Consciousness argument
Oh, nevermind, you're a fedora. *tips*

Proof for the resurrection of Jesus:
youtube.com/watch?v=A0iDNLxmWVM
youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tyVdnIU9A

You've proven your stupidity in not understanding the difference between natural morality and morality you're taught.

This
I don't belive too, but religion is important for country integrity

yeah, i agree with the route of thought you've taken, maybe not the answer you've come to, but people who out and out believe in a controlling god(like Christianity) he is in the words of Richard Dawkins

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

And Stephen fry said if he meets god he would have one question "cancer in children ? REALLY !"

I think anyone who can follow this god must be a fucking naive idiot

I find few phenomena more curious to behold than to see an individual who is evidently too foolish to engage in rational discourse, and whose only method of dealing with people who disagree with him coarse racial abuse impugn another man for his intelligence. But then men like you are ten a penny.

we can all agree that the altruism is what caused the decline of the west importing hoards of shit skins and allowing degenerates to run amok in our home lands has caused all this

If education alone were sufficient to provide a good person you could not account for monsters like Ted Bundy. Some of the best-natured people came from the most terrible backgrounds and the worst sort of parents, some of the worst- from some of the most prosperous and the best. Nero had Seneca for his teacher.

There is nothing rational about believing in a god.

If you didn't have the IQ of a nigger I would gladly debate you

Commonplace, I was as well. Atheists are oblivious to many facts, choosing only what fits their agenda.

Let me choose an example closer to your home, maybe you'll understand this. The earls from Norway used to fight all the time, there were tribes worshipping Wotan who lived in Norway and they were not too different from the African tribes nowadays - fighting against each other, not forming a united nation and instead hindering each other from progress. Even when they got unified in the 9th century, their "kingdom" was still based on looting and thriving in an illegal way on others' work.

Post-Christianisation Norwegian kingdom was still prosperous even though they would be more peaceful and humane.

This is how women perceive altruism. Male altruists support ideologies that aim for a greater good, such as fascism or traditionalism. My MBTI says that I am governed by emotions as well, but in a male it is different than in a female.

In a perfect society defects like you would have been killed already

I'm not watching 2:45 of bullshit, please just give me a timestamp of the section that has hard archaeological evidence of a resurrection having taken place.

where are the coptics?

can you explain what you think atheist agenda is ?

i myself don't believe in any god, deity or higher power. i don't class myself as an atheist same reason i don't have a name for not believing in flying pigs.

i can use the term atheist to describe myself as a non believer, but i think we are all "agnostic" as no one knows.

what a shitty scale

The disgusting way in which you think and talk is merely proving my point. You are the archetypal type and product of modern society. In any event we shall simply have to agree to disagree and I shall continue to stand with the reason and argumentation of all those "niggers" I mentioned before, from Plato and Aristotle to Carlyle and Voltaire.

Isn't deism considered heresy in Christianity though?

why ?

Name one (1) single civilization in all of human history that was built without religion.

The common man is frankly either too busy or too stupid to develop their own moral code, people have known this for thousands of years. You aren't any smarter than any peoples past for saying "yeh but y tho its clearly pointless lmao".

Obviously because they are too weak and too scared to think themselves. It is much much easier to follow some dipshit telling you what to do and what not to, than being your own master.

The circlejerk agenda of the atheists, only exposing the worse parts of Christianity. I can see it in your post too "i don't have a nem for not believing in flying pigs".

/r/atheism is a good example.

Scrambled thoughts here but I disagree. I think as people that live in a post modernist world we very much live in a culture of subjectivity. This has had an effect on our sense of morality. You'll find that many people today would define being moral as 'being nice'. Of course it's nice to say that your friend is good at singing when they're not, but is it morally right? In the moment our post modernist sense of morality makes us think it's better to say they're a good singer than to say they are bad and hurt their feelings. Now that is a scaled down example. When God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah we naturally think 'wow that's a mean thing to do'. When sinners are punished we think 'that's not very nice'. We have created our own system of morality and criticise God for not living up to it. I understand that from an Atheist point of view this may not mean much though.

fuck off to plebbit fucking communist fag

i don't by any means "expose the worse parts of Christianity"

Tbh i think Islam is the worst religion/ideology

but i find all religion stupid. i don't understand how you can believe in something that has no proof and is a made up story that we know was made up how ever many years ago.. see original picture.

Without just insulting a saying shit like circle jerk can you explain to me why you believe (if you do) and who you believe in.

where the fuck does the link come from ?

not believing in any good or deity > Communist ?

Modern Christianity was formulated during the Council of Nicaea in 325 A. D. Primitive Christianity, the pre-Nicaean Christianity was in my opinion closest to Deism; it was simply persecuted out of existence along with all other "heretical" beliefs. If you take the question of the Trinity alone, for example: many people were Unitarians from the very commencement of Christianity, but after that Council they were seemly hunted down and exterminated. And yet Locke, Milton, Newton and hundreds of other great intellectual luminaries in modern times were Unitarians also.

>some indeed would call it the true Christianity, and most of the Deists both considered themselves Christians
>the belief in God on the basis of reason and not of faith-based revelation
You do know that's literal heresy in Christiannity, right ?

>I think judging by the sheer complexity of the universe it doesn't seem too far to say that the origins of it had some form of conscious design behind it.
Wew lad, that's some scientific argument here

Atheism has no proof either, but one can work out that there is a God from how the world is organised. It's more of a philosophical way of thinking, no philosopher has ever denied the existence of a God, most of the thinkers have actually embraced it.

I believe in God because I know that human is a petty animal who could not evolve out of the blue and neither could he explain how the world was formed.

it might be philosophical for you, but there are people who believe a man in the sky is orchestrating all this. Most religious follows haven't even read the holy books/scriptures that relate to that specific religion.

I find it very funny that you are born into the "right" religion based upon the sheer luck of the geographical location of where you was born.

That's my whole point i don't believe in god because if there was a god we would all follow that god, instead there are thousands of gods that people believe in.

I just believe in one less god than you, so you disbelieve say around 2500 gods and i disbelieve 1 more. so your an atheist when it comes to say 2499 gods and i'm an "atheist" when it comes to 2500

like i said previous i think were all also technically agnostic because no one truly knows.

It's not about the Christian God or the Muslim God or another pantheon of Gods, it's about believing in a superior being which I wholeheartedly embrace. The fact that I embrace Orthodoxy is sheer geography indeed, but otherwise geography holds no sway over my choice of believing in a superior being.

that's kind of my point, i don't care what people believe if it makes them feel better as people and gives them some light in the dark as it were.

But when it comes to discussing religion. i find it nonsensical, because like i said geography does play a huge part of why people are that religion, your from Romania and you are orthodox. its kind of funny how over 85% of Romania is orthodox, id hazard a guess you was born into that religion, if not when you started to find religion that was the one that most accessible to you.

Saudi Arabia for example is technically a 100% Islamic state ( salafist to be precise), no one in Saudi ever gets to the age when they can speak and start saying that they are actually Hindu, they are told they are Muslim raised on it and have it drilled into them, they believe that there god is the only god.

and vice versa about India .. Who is right ?

This plus the fact that all religion has a start point say 2000 years ago yet the earth is billions of years old is the reason why i think its all just stories created at a time to control tribes and bind groups together to help them expand and keep them from doing stupid shit, basically like the early version of law.