Satan is Bullshit
Satan is mostly borrowed from the Zoroastrian personality Angra Mainyu but not originally found in Hebrew religious texts as a supernatural entity. Rather, Satan was a word for a human accuser of a crime in early Jewish trials to determine guilt in a similar way that prosecutors exist in modern court rooms.
Demons are Bullshit
Religion is the bastard child of faith and politics
Iâd rephrase that to superstition and politics but yeah. Superstition is the product of manâs struggle to explain something which he does not have enough information to understand.
Examples:
Pork makes people sick sometimes.
Superstition: Pork is cursed by God!
Explanation: microscopic parasites.
Feces makes people sick
Superstition: Feces is evil
Explanation: Feces is filled with microscopic bacteria, viruses and parasites
Bottom feeding fish make people sick
Superstition: Bottom feeding fish are cursed by God
Explanation: Bacteria, viruses, parasites from feces, dead things, decaying plants/animals⊠you know the drill
People who have a lot of unprotected sex get sick and their junk hurts a lot!
Superstition: Having sex with too many different people is evil, punished by God.
Explanation: Sex is a normal biological function. STDâs are dangerous. right back to bacteria, viruses.
Gay communities sometimes get disease outbreaks.
Superstition: Gay is evil and cursed by God! Kill the GAY!
Explanation: Add one STD outbreak in a group of gay men and suddenly some ancient BS artist has a new curse from God.
Some diseases spread faster when people donât cover their face.
Superstition: GOD HATES WOMEN WITH UNCOVERED FACES! Face scarves for everyone!
Explanation: Men donât like wearing inconvenient face masks so they make women do it.
Pretty girls get more unwanted sexual attention.
Superstition: GOD HATES SEXUAL ATTENTION! BURKAS FOR EVERYONE!
Explanation: Men canât control themselves, blame women.
Jesusâs beard is bullshit. Also, ancient Romans were hilarious.
If I recall correctly, the imagery of Hell mostly came from Dante, who was just trying to write a silly story. See also Dead Sea Scrolls, which are not considered canon because the corpus has writings which do not jive with the judeo-christian teachings of the previous 2000+ years.
The Inferno was political satire/attack writing.
Get it straight, man.
Propaganda yo!
Inferno (no The) is just the first of three parts of The Divine Comedy (the latter being Purgatorio and Paradiso), all of which are Christian allegories.
blah blah blah. Google is your friend, right?
You wouldnât know a circle of hell if it bit you on your skinny ass.
You forget
CURRY NIGHT!
Religion did have a useful impact on society.
In the book âthe upright thinkersâ they describe early societies forming out of common held beliefs which was one of the first migration points away from hunter gatherer groups. Those early settlements gave rise to a need for farming and as societies grew written language, accounting, laws, etc. developed.
There were also benefits to having a common set of ethical values which were codified which gave people a common ground for forming social agreements.
There is a really interesting debate between jordan peterson and sam harris on whether or not religious ethics should be thrown away, and how society should create a modernized view on how ethics are viewed. (sam harris on the side of a new definition).
Sure. The religion gave one person or group enough power to control more and more people and through pacification, created larger and larger settlements.
Ghenghis Kahn did the same thing by killing 400 million people and installing himself as a living god emperor.
This is religious apologetics at itâs worst. Religion once again taking credit for progress that it has spent thousands of years trying to destroy.
Youâre off by an order of magnitude there bubba.
40 million, not 400.
Youâre welcome, again.
The kind of power control you are referring to didnât really exist back then. Early religious constructs were largely based in nature worship and religious principles and ideals gave rise to early ethical development. Society started forming around early religious beliefs.
This was one of the early structures they used in the book.
The value systems instilled through various religions form a big part of your own ethical structure whether you acknowledge it or not. There was a time when religion was science. Things only started to change much later with Thales
There is a lot of ethical value in looking at various religions. Iâm not saying bad things havenât happened in the name of religion.
It most certainly did exist. I was raised by a Southern Baptist preacher and I nearly went to seminary. Iâve forgotten more about the bible than most people ever knew. I donât have the degree but Iâm a store house of Christian trivia.
Deuteronomy 20:17
âŠYou shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you,
1 Samuel 15:3
Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.
Deutoronomy 20:16
Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.
Shall I go on? Ghenghis Kahn got a late start, so he had more to do.
lol, so your example is a good 10,000 years after what I was referencing above.
But i get it, you have issues with religion. I liked the character of Jesus in the Bible, I think there is some good stuff in the new testament. I liked how Bodhidharma took his view of Buddhism to shoalin and the impact that had on how they viewed life and trained. I like some of the ideas in Hinduism.
I feel like being angry at religion is very 90âs. There were social impacts that werenât solely negative as a result of religion especially when looking at ethics. There was also a time when the muslim world preserved and kept knowledge alive (science, maths, etc.). I feel like the above quotes are a very one dimensional view of something that is a much broader and complex topic. Yeah i get it, there are bad passages in the bible. Iâm surprised you didnât just go for Leviticus, thatâs the most common starting point. In fact there are so many better passages, you could have chosen something with incest like Lot sleeping with his daughters âŠ
Stop. Do not project your beliefs about my motivation on my motivation.
That is an assumption that you cannot reasonably make.
My issue with religion is that itâs a result of manâs failure to adequately explain his environment and in the modern era it has been rendered meaningless.
As for what happened 10000 years before⊠thatâs 6500 years before literacy that wasnât just a vague system of accounting. There is no way those oral tradition stories are remotely accurate.