Today's reading

[guno]

Jesus Christ died, then rose again from the dead three days later.

George Carlin died, and stayed dead.

 

[guno]

 

[Avatar4321]

A few of my fave Carlinisms:

"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money."

"Religion is like a pair of shoes...Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes."

"I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it."

"I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate."

My favourite thing about George Carlin is that he is dirt napping.

Yeah - who needs people who invite you to question and explore.

funny, I've been encouraging you and your atheist buddies to do that for years and you've given me nothing but excuses on why you won't.

You make the common mistake of assuming that people have not investigated your particular religious sect and subsequently decided to reject the ideology as false.

In that sense, I would suggest that you might want to explore religions other than the one you currently subscribe to.

It really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that overwhelmingly, religious belief is not a choice for most people. It's overwhelmingly nothing more than simply accepting the majority religion with little thought to investigating the core precepts of the ideology. Religion for a great many people amounts to little more than making token nods to their beliefs and the gawds / idols that are the objects of worship and it really has very little impact on their lives.

Quite clearly, bibles, korans, Books of the Dead, etc., like all books – came from the corruptible hand of man. It’s an inarguable fact that all books are written by man. That you and others attach mystical / magical properties to these books doesn't suddenly make any of the gawds extant or even true.

It would be nice if the god paradigm were true. That would make things easier (though also depressingly unexplainable) – human knowledge would be hopeless in a god-model because that ultimate answer is forever beyond us). I’d like to live in paradise too, and see my dead loved ones, and so on. It’s just like the deep desire makes me careful about accepting models and paradigms without adequate support. That’s how we discern truth from falsehood – not what we feel about something, but what are the realities of it.

you haven't you've made every excuse not to.

and I've studied many religions. All truth is part of my faith wherever I find it. Maybe you should stop making assumptions before assuming others are

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Responding to think it's Hollie's 'god model universe' remark above, I think instead of knowledge forever being unattainable in a universe where God exists, it'd instead set a goal for us to try and reach. Whether we ever reached it or not isn't as important perhaps as trying to reach it. If God is real, something about the universe/multiverse made God possible, thus, that same thing made us possible and thus trying to evolve into or otherwise become gods is what less-evolved lifeforms might opt to do.

 

[Hollie]

A few of my fave Carlinisms:

"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money."

"Religion is like a pair of shoes...Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes."

"I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it."

"I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate."

My favourite thing about George Carlin is that he is dirt napping.

Yeah - who needs people who invite you to question and explore.

funny, I've been encouraging you and your atheist buddies to do that for years and you've given me nothing but excuses on why you won't.

You make the common mistake of assuming that people have not investigated your particular religious sect and subsequently decided to reject the ideology as false.

In that sense, I would suggest that you might want to explore religions other than the one you currently subscribe to.

It really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that overwhelmingly, religious belief is not a choice for most people. It's overwhelmingly nothing more than simply accepting the majority religion with little thought to investigating the core precepts of the ideology. Religion for a great many people amounts to little more than making token nods to their beliefs and the gawds / idols that are the objects of worship and it really has very little impact on their lives.

Quite clearly, bibles, korans, Books of the Dead, etc., like all books – came from the corruptible hand of man. It’s an inarguable fact that all books are written by man. That you and others attach mystical / magical properties to these books doesn't suddenly make any of the gawds extant or even true.

It would be nice if the god paradigm were true. That would make things easier (though also depressingly unexplainable) – human knowledge would be hopeless in a god-model because that ultimate answer is forever beyond us). I’d like to live in paradise too, and see my dead loved ones, and so on. It’s just like the deep desire makes me careful about accepting models and paradigms without adequate support. That’s how we discern truth from falsehood – not what we feel about something, but what are the realities of it.

you haven't you've made every excuse not to.

and I've studied many religions. All truth is part of my faith wherever I find it. Maybe you should stop making assumptions before assuming others are

You confusion here lies in the fact that you have uncritically accepted the idea that certain sectarian writings such as (in this case) the claims of a man to have received golden plates with inscribed "sacred writings" are reliable guides to the end zone of a “creator”. This is all well and good, but it provides no compelling reason for anyone else to accept that same belief.

Your particular sectarian version of gawds is essentially the form of many other gawds that have come and gone before who rule with supreme (even if arbitrary) authority and power. You understand "belief" to mean choosing to follow “his” (often arbitrary, capricious and cruel) rules of behavior for the purpose of either receiving a supernatural reward or avoiding a supernatural paddling on the behind.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Just as Islam was the arab world's reaction to the wildfire spread of Christianity, Mormonism was the west's reaction to a religion that sanctioned polygany and underaged brides.