I argued that exact same way with someone very close to me. Their answer was:
But those gods aren't real!
Nothing you can do if that last conclusion isn't there.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts
You disbelieve in those other Gods because your God explicitly tells you to?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_have_no_other_gods_before_me
Or do you treat Science as a religion and see adherence to atheism as an article of faith? If so, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” leads to a strong conviction that there are no “Gods”. Like any other good religion, this is often paired with intolerance of and hostility towards other beliefs.
If you see the Scientific Method as less of a religious creed and more simply as a best practice for evaluating explanations in the context of evidence, you may be more of an agnostic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism
Agnosticism suggests that we do not know if there are Gods or not. At a deeper level, it is about having a balanced view about drawing conclusions from evidence.
Thomas Huxley had this to say: “Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle ... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”
The scientific method strives to propose explanations that can be tested by the acquisition of new evidence. That is, it promotes the practice of forming explanations that have predictive power. Acceptance of an idea is based on the validated success of those predictions. That is, scientific ideas can be demonstrated.
Based on science alone, if the only choice is between believing in Gods or not believing in Gods, the atheism seems an easier choice as absence of evidence at least justifies Occams Razor. Agnosticism, reminds us however that these are not the only two choices.
Having a “conviction” in atheism or a belief ( let’s be honest and call that faith ) that atheists “conclusions are certain” despite not being “demonstrated or demonstrable” is not a “scientific” position. It does not result from the Scientific Method. At least not in my view.
I am a bit of an atheist but I recognize that saying this is an admission of faith, not evidence of my intellect or knowledge. It is a belief—not a proven fact. I should be cautious about my level of conviction.
Agnosticism and the Scientific Method are two very complimentary methods of evaluating evidence. Regardless of my beliefs ( because like all humans, I have them ), when it comes to making statements on the existence of Gods, I think it is a much better demonstration of my intellect to admit “I don’t know”.
Again, this is all just like, my opinion man.
Dope.
But those gods aren’t real!
Far be it for me to question your religious doctrine, but even the fucking Old Testament recognizes rival gods.
Romans when you ask them if they know about your one true god:
I bet "But who moves the sun around if there is no Shamash" seemed like a very solid reasoning at the time.
Because religion is all about indoctrination. When I came out as atheist my dad said that all my ancestors were Christians and I'm stopping that tradition. I don't care, if they belived that doesn't mean that I also have to belive and just because it's a tradition it doesn't mean it should continue. He also said that goal of atheism is to make people lose their identity (he and many others in my country think that identity is just religious and natinoal identity, they also think that those two things are same). After that I had to explain to him what is identity, how it's impossible to lose it and that there is no agenda behind atheism.
dad said that all my ancestors were Christians and I'm stopping that tradition
Well, your dad's wrong. Most of your ancestors worshiped some other god or not at all. Christianity is just 2000 years young.
Not much of a tradition. The Christianity you might hear from your local minister is very different from the Christianity of the same church, fifty years earlier.
Religious doctrine is molded with the culture of the time, and recently has been influenced by propaganda efforts.
"because tradition" or "because that's how i was brought up" or any other paraphrasing of "because everyone else is doing it" is the dumbest possible reason for anyone to do anything ever
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people.
Ugh I’m so disgusted by people who automatically value tradition. Haven’t they noticed that people were filthy, uneducated, murderous slavers in the past and only recently have we even thought about evolving out of that? Why in the hell would you assume that the way things have been done in the past must be good. I assume the opposite until I see evidence otherwise. My view is that we need to be investing a better future as far as possible. LOL @ holding on to the mystical grunts of our ape like grandfathers. WTF is the point of that?
It's important to keep in mind that religion explained a lot of stuff, especially regarding health and wellbeing (you're sick = evil spirits), before we managed to figure out the actual workings of some natural laws. I mean, hygiene was only "invented" in the late 1800s and the mere idea of washing your hands before coming in contact with a hospital patient was considered preposterous.
Nowadays, although we have amazing instruments that help us keep track of stellar bodies, we still can't quite correctly predict the weather past 1 week. Might as well say that's up to the gods.
More on topic, back on those times, each city had its patron god and it was common for conquered cities to lose their god, having the statue moved to the conqueror's temple.
Faith begins, where science ends.
God of the Gaps theory?
I recently realized why some things like salt and garlic are so prominent in folklore for dealing with evil spirits, demons, vampires, etc.
It's probably because at some point people noticed that salt preserves foods. And since they didn't understand why foods rotted, evil spirits were blamed and thus salt must have properties that wards off evil spirits. Garlic also has anti-microbial properties (though I can only guess as to why it's specifically associated with vampires, though hanging garlic is also considered a general "ward" against evil spirits iirc).
Holy water could have gotten its reputation because people believed priest blessings had meaning, but it could also be that the rituals involved in "blessing" water actually reduced the harmful microbes. I was only able to find modern guides for making it (though I didn't look very hard and skimmed over what I did find), but I saw things like using salt, finding a clean source of water, and filtering it in this guides.
It's fascinating to me, going from what looks like random associations to understanding how those associations might have come about in the first place. Sucks that we're still dealing with a lot of the fallout of all that, though.
Yaweh and Allah are the same thing, FYI.
The Koran quite literally says that it’s from the same god you’ve been hearing about from the Jews and Christians. It’s full of passages like “We told you once, and you didn’t listen. We told you twice and you didn’t listen. This time is FOR REAL OR YOU’RE BURNING IN HELL.” I think it’s pretty key to the success of Islam that it doesn’t purport to create a whole new deity. It’s just supposed to be the latest update from the existing one. Just like Christianity doesn’t claim to be a different god than Judaism. I wonder if Jews look at Christians and Muslims the way Christians look at Mormons: these weird fuckers who made up their own bizarre amendments and are now following them.
“Yaweh and Allah are the same thing, FYI”
I think some people are missing what is being said here.
Yaweh is thought to be the name of the Jewish God. The God of Judaism.
Christianity builds on the Jewish tradition ( sort of ). The Old Testament is a collections the Torah and other Jewish writings. So, if the God in the old and new testaments is the same, “the Lord” in the bible is the same God as Yaweh. However, it is important to recognize that Jesus established a “new” covenant with Christians that essentially overrides the Old Testament. The Catholic Church goes even further by making their “catechism” dominant over the entire bible.
Islamic tradition says that Allah revealed his gospel to Jesus, his prophet. So, according to Islam, the God that Jesus believed in was Allah. This makes the Christian God and Allah the same God and therefore Allah and Yahweh are the same.
This last bit requires a bit more explanation though.
Islam believes that Jesus was real and that the gospel was revealed to him. However, Jesus was not himself God. He was just a man ( a prophet ). He was not the most important prophet ( that was Mohammad ).
Islam does not accept the Bible as the word of God. The New Testament is not “the gospel” that was revealed to Jesus. No writings from Jesus himself have survived. About that, I think Christians and Muslims agree.
I believe Islam rejects Jewish writings, including the Old Testament, as just being plain wrong. They are not the teachings of Allah.
So, while “God” is the same being in all three religions, both “the word” and “the tradition” are quite different. So “God” is not really “the same thing” in these religions in most ways.
So is Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
But it all depends on who you ask.
If you ask me, all gods are the exact same.
No, Roman Catholics are a special form of stupid and would not arguably be a legit Abrahamic religion since they incorporated various European polytheistic religious cultures and holidays into a fucking Middle-Eastern cult (Judaism) and called it something new.
If that dude that Jesus is based on was alive today, he would shit on all modern day Catholics for drastically changing Judaism to conform to a European culture.
All hail Shamash! Death to the infidels!
Ba'al can kick his ass.
can they withstand the samash-smash?
As in Bocce?
I'm on team Enlil
But that's before the creation!
Well at least the sun actually exists and you can see and feel it and measure it with many different devices. It's nice when people appreciate an actual physical body and this one certainly has forces at work that far exceed ones imagination. Considering humans are "stardust" and we need sunlight, it even makes sense to call stars creators of life.
Some people worship cookies, others worship smartphones, animals or a person of the opposite sex, hell even nowadays many non-religious people worship singers, politicians, influencers or what have you. I wonder if any culture worships galaxies or black holes or some other objects in space that are not a big ball of hot plasma, a planet or a moon.
Economics is the control system which filled the void in society vacated by religion after the enlightenment.
An arbitrary set of rules, conjured by the ruling class, obfuscated and protected from scrutiny, and imposed on the weary masses.
Finance, an arbitrary subset of mathematics, serves as its mythology.
Banks and financial institutions serve as its churches and cathedrals.
Economists serve as its priests.
God replaced by GDP.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
There's a really great art installation by Mark Boulos that I saw years ago on this. All That is Solid Melts into Air
I can't find the full thing but it juxtaposes the Chicago stock exchange with a group of rebels in Nigeria fighting the oil companies there.
It's weird to me that some atheists here are seeing this as evidence that religious people are dumb. What makes anyone think that they wouldn't also be worshipping whatever god their parents and culture taught them to worship if they grew up in Babylonia 6000 years ago? This meme points out that we are the product of our upbringing. Calling religious folks stupid in this thread lacks the very self awareness that it criticises, and isn't going to win any arguments anyway.
Many of us here know what it's like to be religious. To grow up not knowing better. We know how short-sighted, guillible and hypocritical religion makes people.
Deist arguments do not validate your brand of theism.
It’s moments like this when religious people get all mystical and say that all religions are ultimately orbiting the same thing. They will say this as if they are the first person to ever think of it, and as if it makes them a next level innovative thinker and an elevated spirit.
In fact it’s just a way to cop out of the issue. If all religions are the same then prove it and worship fucking Marduk or whatever. But no. Today religions are all the same. Tomorrow, we’ll be back to following the Bible literally because it’s objectively the direct word of god.
What if on top of that, I add that wherever the story of Adam and Eve comes from God tells humans “not to be religious”. The cause fall of man is knowledge of Good and Evil. Knowledge of Good and evil is religion.
It is not right from wrong. Adam and Eve had knowledge of right and wrong. As it was wrong to “eat from the tree” therefore right to not do so.
Knowledge of good and evil is religion.
I’m not sure I see how this is true. You’d have to say more about it. But whatever the case, what’s up with god not wanting us to know about good and evil? I cannot fathom in any way how that is a good plan at all, let alone something that should constitute an overall “fall” for our species.
No, this may seem true, but no, if you read Lucian, adepts of many of those polytheistic religions would treat their deities like some piece of magic or even like a good aesthetic.
There were cults which required "defending the faith", but, well, not all of them.
many of those polytheistic religions would treat their deities like some piece of magic or even like a good aesthetic
Just like today's believers in Allah, Vishnu, Jesus, or Yahweh. Your observation doesn't really contradict the meme. At its simplest, a reader of the meme could expect to have the same degree of faith they have today just directed towards Shamash. This would include the "good aestheticians" you mention as well as today's true believers.
No, I don't mean that. I mean - like Krishnaites, or Star Wars fans, or Star Trek fans, or superstitious people with plenty of amulets, or hippies, or UFO believers.
It was a more competitive and free religious ecosystem, so to say.
For real, read Lucian, you won't regret it.
Religion is a control mechanism. It helps people feel better about things they can't control, mysterious ways and all that, but it is always about control and power. Ea is gonna get you, be scared
time traveler story where a mormon travels to 2000 BC on mission and ends up accidentally creating mithraism
I prefer to joke modern ideologies. Oh no... i'm a bigot now. Modern americans have the stangest godless religion now. Can i seriously joke about mlk or rosa parks or trans activists or i am a bigot?
