The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

Heck. If you full Jesus. There many NT quotes that implies that Religious Faith as we know it currently isn't necessary.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25:31-46

http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-21.htm

http://biblehub.com/1_timothy/4-10.htm

http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/6-9.htm

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+John+2%3A2-5&version=NIV

http://biblehub.com/matthew/19-17.htm

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+2:24&version=ESV

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13:2

http://biblehub.com/philippians/2-12.htm

http://biblehub.com/luke/23-34.htm

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+2:14-26

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+9%3A40-41&version=NIV

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+2:6-14

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2017:10

http://biblehub.com/matthew/16-27.htm

http://biblehub.com/psalms/11-6.htm

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians%205:10

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Peter%201:17

http://biblehub.com/revelation/20-12.htm

http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/7-19.htm

http://biblehub.com/james/2-20.htm

http://biblehub.com/luke/1-6.htm

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Also, I'm not the only one that is weirded that Satanism is imagined as Left Wing because is not christian? Like, many of it's founders would be Objetivists today, with Le Vey calling Satanism being Objetivism with Magic (Which makes guys as Ted Cruz being hilarious).

Remember, they are the religion that explicitly decided that The Modern West was too egalitarian...in the 90.

Even villanous Satanists rarely resemble the religion being generic Religion of Evil rather than the Objetivist Elitist club that they are. I find it weird, if you are going to use a religion as villains, at least try to get them right.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 5th 2018 at 10:58:05 AM

Mind you, even the idea of the Bible being THAT important is a reactionary new idea.

Catholicism begins with the idea, "The Bible literally is new book contradicting the old book."

So it's not held up as particularly special like in, say Orthodox Judaism or Biblical literalism.

And that is why, when you think about it. All of us are a bunch of heretics.

Also, I just read this quote and I really want to share it...

Social Justice Knight Templar when?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 5th 2018 at 11:01:24 AM

It's an usonian thing I believe since Christianity tends to be seen as strictly right-wing and anything against it would be considered left-wing.

Remember that here in Latin American the Church could have leaders that were right-wing or left-wing due to the dynamics it had with the Spanish Empire and the Republics that followed, with the left becoming more prominent after Vatican II and specially with Pope Francis I.

Edit:

The thing with the Bible being held at face value was already debunked as early as Late Antiquity. Saint Augustine of Hipona for instance was open to the idea of evolution (as in we came from a metaphorical dirt) and him and other Fathers of the Church already were discussing that some things in the Bible should not be taken literally.

Edited by raziel365 on Nov 5th 2018 at 8:03:45 AM

Usonian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usonia

USA. Many Latin Americans dislike refering to USA as "America" given that it kinda ignores the rest of the continent.

Yes, Biblical importance was a direct attempt to undermine the power of the Catholic Church in the Renaissance. It was due to certain level of demystifying its claimed spiritual power. If everyone could read the Bible in their native language then priests had no special standing or authority versus the common man. The problem with this was the Catholic Church had done a thousand years of work interpreting, reforming (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst), and so on.

So, you got shit like believing in witches and going back to Old Testament Law even when the New Testament was all about "some of this stuff is messed up."

(12 years of Catholic schooling has warped mah mind)

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 5th 2018 at 8:09:13 AM

I'll always find it somewhat ironic that the infamous Spanish Inquisition phased out the accusations of Witchcraft in the XVIIth Century for being "unscientific".

Edited by raziel365 on Nov 5th 2018 at 8:12:58 AM

Yep.

Mind you, the Spanish Inquisition probably created racism as we know it. Simply because previously they believed you when you converted.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 5th 2018 at 8:20:19 AM

Funny, I also read somewhere that they where the first to use "Innocence until proof of Guilt".

I'm not sure on the racism thing, that was more associated with the attempts of the Spanish to try to make some sort of racial hierarchy on the Viceroyalties, which at times failed because people kept intermixing with one another and because there were some situations where you had Amerindian nobles holding slaves despite being in the supposed bottom of the pyramid.

I always noted it was interesting how even France gave itself fits trying to deal with the fact its nobility very often had black children they doted on, even though it had every bit the brutal chattel slavery as other American colonies.

The Inquisition wasn't exactly a high point in Church history, God knows, but a lot of its popular attributes are holdovers from the Black Legend (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend) beloved of Protestant historical polemics. I've got a lot of problems with the office's conduct and methods ... but would certainly rather have been tried by them than by a civil Spanish court of the same period. In fact, it was partly started to get accused defendants out of the clutches of the consistently unfair & merciless local courts.

In the Americas, there was a lot of three-way tension among the natives, the Spanish governors, and the Church. In some parts of Latin America, the clergy did quite a bit to repress the natives and perpetuate racial hierarchies. In others, they ticked off the civil authorities by defending the natives' interests & rights, and fought to preserve their languages. And one bishop's successor might reverse his predecessor's policies ... which were a reversal of his predecessor's.

Edited by Jhimmibhob on Nov 6th 2018 at 1:06:57 PM

Peruvian here. Can confirm that Catholicism got a bizarre historial here.

And if we speak of the Church in America, we also have to speak of the Saints, people like Saint Rose of Lima, Saint Martin of Porras or Saint Juan Diego were contradictory to the racist social classes that the Spanish attempted to impose by their very existence; or images such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Lord of the Miracles, whose following went beyond social classes and are still held as important today.

Speaking of the Viceroys, the government of the American Kingdoms was filled with legal contradictions since, as early as the reign of the Catholic Kings and Emperor Charles I, the natives were meant to be given the same rights any spaniard would have back home but there was also the racism towards the amerindians and the black slaves held up by the system of “razas”.

How old does a child tend to be on average (in the Western world, at least) when they usually start understanding the concept of "God"/"gods" and "religious worship" on at least a rudimentary level?

Mine started around age 5-6 or so.

It depends on the kid. You can start teaching them almost from day one, but, yeah... Most will only really start conceptualizing what they've heard at around 5-7 years old.

You might get the odd early or late bloomer (and those who never get it at all or who drop out after picking up new ideas), but... <shrugs> That's like with everything.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Nov 21st 2018 at 4:13:51 PM

So... Would it be believable if a Child Prodigy achieved such a conceptualization by age 3? It's an intellectual maturity thing, right?

It's possible. Also, an outlier.

More likely is not fully understanding what they're juggling with, while still getting some of it.

Another few months of noodling probably still needed.

I'm asking because I'm crafting a scenario where a 3-year-old Child Prodigy has their mother go insane from a science experiment, her father soon shows his true colors by starting an affair with his wife's own doctor and even having sex with her in the room next to said wife's hospital room, then her mother eventually commits murder-suicide with a doll that she believed to be her child (all while believing said child to be a total stranger), and all of that causes the child to lose all the faith in God that they had gained from the upbringing they received from their mother, now believing that either God doesn't exist or He's undeserving of worship due to being evil/jerkass/heavily fallible, because a benevolent God wouldn't have caused/let all that happen when they did nothing wrong, let alone something deserving of such cruelty.

Well, a combination of child prodigy and upbringing. A child may be very intelligent with a natural ability that leads them in a certain direction, but it wont amount to anything unless that child is exposed to educational material that supports the ability. So this child likely had a religious upbringing, and did well working with the chuch elders, when this incident happened. In other words it implies a break with their religious community (and the individual relationships they had within that community) as much as a break with God.

What do you mean by "working with the church elders"?

If a three year old child shows some talent in the direction of theological curiosity, where would that child demonstrate that talent except at a church? Perhaps I shouldn't say "elders" so much as "adults." A Sunday school teacher, more than likely.

Ah, that makes sense.

... On an atheism-related note, are there any replacements for such phrases as "Oh my God!" that real-life atheists may use if they're personally offended by using the name of a deity that they don't believe in or refuse to worship?

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 21st 2018 at 8:41:43 PM

Unless you're pretty hardcore, I don't think there is. It's just words.