"If God did not exist, we would have to invent him"

"If God did not exist, we would have to invent him"

What did Voltaire mean by this?

Men need more to strive for than the shit that's around us, otherwise you degenerate.

gotta blame someone else

Man did fine for hundreds of thousands of years without religion (that we recognize).
Hell if you believe theories that man had advanced society not unlike the one we currently live in before and then shat themselves back into hunter gatherers, maybe they fell because of religion and we're on our way to repeating their mistakes.

And civilization as we know it was built by religious states, not barbarians.

If you can show me one city that was totally secular in its development, I'll show you a fairy tale.

>What did Voltaire mean by this?

people are scared of death.

And I'm arguing that's the point where man fucked up. Assuming our history is just an endless chain of becoming super advanced and then nuking ourselves back to the stone age to do it all over again, maybe that's the common thread

But religion was strictly used as a mean to unite people and control them via the religious head.Which don't get me wrong was actually really useful, and I still believe that to this day we need religion otherwise we'll degredate to degeneracy, which can already be seen in some majorly atheist states.(i.e Sweden).At this point, religion means tradition, and tradition leads to a conservative society, which is what we should strive for.

People are held back from going full degenerate by the looming threat of a final judgment.

Are you advocating primitivism, I actually agree. But shit man you can always go back, does it really matter if you can just go to baseline. Man must exist, due to this he does things, like think about his creation and what the ideal form of a human life is.

Its his only justification for social hierarchy since the pathetic cunt did not want to admit that Hobbes was right.

But morality doesn't stem from religion.Christian values are the product of greek philosophy, with god added into the mix.Hell, orthodox christians don't even believe today that Hell is a place of misery and eternal torment,rather a spiritual state,where God is absent from your life.

Can you name me an advanced civilization that began atheist?

t. Atheist

True enough, but man did that plenty without a monolithic single 'father' figure that christianity/judaism and anything based on those two feature. Instead there was a reverence for nature and the spirits that they saw represented in it, which means they devoted their respect to everything around them that sustained them out of nothing but pure thankfulness, rather than feeling compelled to respect laws and mandates associated with a central authority figure under pain of retribution.

One promotes good behavior and being decent out of willing respect for something all humans share in common, while the other demands you be a good boy under pain of eternal torment.

It's working miracles for Islam.

And how impotent would they be as unorganized shitskins in the desert, Islam is the threat Muslims are the vector.

He was talking about AI

That quote is taken out of context - read the rest of the paragraph. Voltaire believed in God - but he was a deist, not a Christian.

>read the rest of the paragraph
It's part of my uni's exams, but I really found the quote interesting
>but he was a deist, not a Christian.
The correct term would be Christian Deist if not mistaken.

Man created God

If God is real then, why am I always sad

natural law and natural rights require a god. his liberal philosophy stemmed from a belief in god. which is why liberal fedoras are retarded.

Societal control.