Oddbean

You have a different bible than I do. The Yahweh guy put his people in the wilderness for 40 years with NO property and the Jesus and Paul guys said to give it all away to the poor. I don't have to kill god because he is imaginary. But go ahead and believe your delusions. I support everyone's rights to fantasize about heaven or hell. Problem is, is that most of y'all miss the life in front of you.

The lesson is that the divide between good & evil is in the pursuit of truth vs pursuit of status. Most people use stuff as a way to make themselves feel important, & because of that they lose sight of what is real & true. Heaven & hell are conditions we create right here on earth.

You imagine yourself to be a philosopher which is fine but your generalizations are painful. You are correct on the last point however. "“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us." -Joseph Campbell

I don't imagine myself to be anything, but I have spent a decent amount of time trying to sort out the mess that is Christianity & square it with my understanding of the world around me. Guy & I became a bitcoiners because we figured out that most of the economic ideas we were taught were upside down, we changed the way we eat because we figured out that the dietary recommendations were upside down, it wasn't too difficult to figure out that environmental science is completely upside down too. It looks to me like the only things that aren't completely backwards or upside down are physical engineering & blue collar sorts of education where everything is much "closer to the metal." If your engineering concepts are totally wrong then your structures fall down. Would it really be that big of a surprise to find out that everything most Christians believe & most churches teach is completely backwards? Religion is the subject farthest from the metal. All sorts of bad philosophy can persist for a long time without destroying productivity. But there must be some good bones in there somewhere, some living root back to reality for it to all have survived. I think it would be pretty ridiculous to assume we are just the smartest people to ever live & that no one who came before us had any philosophical contribution worth considering. There is generally some nugget of truth in every philsophy, on which the rest of it is built, even if it's mostly trash. I agree that the Bible is stupid if you read it like a 5 year old. But I also think reading an extremely complicated text full of idioms & methaphor that has been translated from multiple dead languages would be a stupid thing to do. Unpacking what's there is extremely difficult, but it's not impossible. Some things are easier than others, hopefully no one thinks Jesus literally recognized Nathanial by the shade of the tree he sat under, that would make no fucking sense, right? But you can recognize people who understand the world by the way they behave, the people around them, & the way they have set up their lives. In other words, the amount of shade their trees provide. Has a person built a nice life for themselves, or are they stupid, blindly doing what everyone else told them to do & struggling? I think God is reality. I don't think "all knowledge" can possibly exist outside the system that is the source of all the changing conditions, so the system itself is God. The map is not the territory, only the territory is the territory. Evolution is how God creates life. If we want to be successful & effective in the world around us we have to be married to reality first. If we want to get close to God we have to work to better understand all that is. If we forsake reality in pursuit of delusions the punishment will be harsh. Gravity or chemistry or the laws of economics are all very unforgiving. Whether or not there is some sort of super consciousness attached to reality is kind of irrelevant. If I am completely honest with myself I do sort of act like there is, but I am not sure there is any way to know that with certainty. So think whatever you want to think about praying. There is plenty of evidence to show that meditation & focusing the mind on certain things can help to direct our own subconscious in useful ways. So if I think God = reality why do I consider myself a Christian... A lot of Christians tell me I am not one of them, which is fine. If by their definitions I have to believe in some sort of magic to be a Christian, then I'm not. But the interesting thing to me is that if you remove all the magic from the story of Jesus, even if he was just someone who became a carpenter after being born into total poverty, to a woman who whored herself out behind her husband's back. He still grew to be someone who completely changed the world. Our calender is literally centered around him. Seems to me that view potentially makes the story more significant, not less. But if I call myself a Christian then it must be the MOST significant story, right? Well, if you zoom way out & discard the things we can't really know, it looks to me like a story about a man who was tortured by govt & religious authorities for helping others live better lives because his success was a direct threat to people in power who wanted to be the final authority on all things, but they clearly didn't know how to help people the way Jesus did. What always happens when people in power are embarrassed & shown up by a nobody? And of course, the masses in their tendency to blindly go along with authority celebrated the torture of Jesus. But as the story of what had happened to Jesus spread it became obvious that an innocent man was killed for doing good. So the lesson is not to blindly support authority, & not to pursue status & power at the expense of truth, because doing so will destroy all that is good. And if you look at history, look at the last few years, & look around us right now, I can't imagine any message that is more important than that. And I believe the message at the heart of the story is important enough that no matter how it gets twisted or misinterpreted it can always be resurrected when the need arises. The Bible actually makes it pretty clear that the majority will basically always misunderstand everything. I generally think the deification of Jesus is the result of kings not wanting their power threatened (yes but he was God, who are you?) And plebs also not wanting the responsibility of having to stand up to the king (yes but he was God, who am I?). And I think there is a natural sort of idealization that happens to stories over time, they become larger than life monuments of the things they represented. Also potentially relevant: it has been said that we die twice, once when life leaves the body, & again the last time anyone says our name. In that sense Jesus lives. It probably was as if he was at every dinner table in the 40 days after his death. If people realized a supposedly just republic had tortured & killed an innocent man & many people had cheered the torture, how might that story spread? And wouldn't the lesson be an important one to remember?

Lol, what assumptions weren't made? He doesn't seem to want to understand anything I am saying. And he is clearly mad at anything he associates with religion, which is understandable, but not particularly good for anyone.

Well this section is full of what sounds like previous baggage (with respect) “I don't have to kill god because he is imaginary. But go ahead and believe your delusions. I support everyone's rights to fantasize about heaven or hell. Problem is, is that most of y'all miss the life in front of you.” - seems to assume Jeff believes in some “dude in the clouds” idea of god. - instead of addressing a comment about morality and what leading the Bible may be teaching, which is a question of values, he instead assumes some apparently long list of “delusion” which aren’t relevant to anything in the OP. - “fantasize about heaven or hell,” also not brought up in the OP, but argued as if there was something said about these that demanded a counter argument, which didnt exist. -“most of y’all miss the life in front of you,” again nothing to suggest anything about “missing life” or even a single thing related to how Jeff goes about his day or whether it is limited by something the Bible says. - And then of course the key identifier of “most of y’all,” showing that he is arguing with an imaginary group in his head, rather than anything Jeff’s actually said. From what I read, it sounds like he has just brought in a bunch of religious baggage to continue an argument about religion he has had with people who believe an extensive list of things that have nothing to do with the OP. And then even extends this multiple steps forward as if Jeff’s life is somehow restricted by these believes that didn’t exist. It’s funny because I bet Jeff has many of the similar complaints and was *actually* trying to address them in his post. What I interpreted from the comment is his suggestion that Jeff adheres strictly to what the Bible says, believes in a dude in the sky, thinks people either go to heaven or hell according to their acceptance of it, that he even makes life decisions to align with arbitrary dictates of the Bible and that this results in his life to be empty and meaningless, and then that he and all those like him are delusional for it… Which is funny because I know Jeff doesn’t believe any of that. And his entire point was to address a lesson the stories of the Bible attempt to teach, that most Christians misunderstand because they are so certain the entire thing is as literal as a recipe of ingredients. TL;DR, the list of assumptions in his short post was actually quite extensive.

Well, with mutual respect for you, Guy, thank you for such a thoughtful play by play. I might offer a counterpoint earlier in the timeline though. Might you be making an assumption that he is refuting anything Jeff stated. I don’t see any attempt. It’s written in passive voice. I see a passing comment, that views Christians in a certain light and nothing was directed at Jeff. Even the “go ahead and believe your delusions” in context, was generalized at all believers. Dude seems to be making a passing comment about a topic, and generalizing about believers and the bible, not arguing or refuting. Your bro complains that people don’t “get him or make attempts to understand him”. I think thats the problem. Engage baiting, with religion is cause for misunderstandings, like putting “politics divide” in your bio and then posting political. I believe the first flawed assumption is that Jeff’s point was being refuted at all vs a passing comment and now we all get to see a tantrum. But hey, you know what they say about assume… anyway… that’s my take.

I agree that we don't know for certain whether there is any sort of ethereal consciousness we can pray to or communicate with. But I think certainty about the existence of God depends on how you define "God."