The belief that thousands of years ago people in power constructed a lie about the fundamental basis of reality and history in order to control the population. These lies were never officially challenged and were so strongly believed that idiots today still believe in them. This was achieved by the people in power brutalising and ridiculing anyone who spoke out against the narrative.
Oh, and theres no such thing as conspiracy theories because its too implausible that an entire society can be complicit in believing and reinforcing a lie. Someone would have reported on it eventually and we’d all know the truth.
Monkeys with a purpose vs retarded monkeys fucking each other. Do the math.
Elijah Garcia
if you are a atheist and you don't believe in conspiracy theories you fail to recognise that to an atheist religion is the motherload of conspiracy theories that was proven true
Hudson Reed
Atheistic Skepticism is a good label for a dumb ideology. Religious beliefs are an abstraction of extremely self evident facts regarding human experience. Our sense of justice, morality, duty, etc. Need to be explained, particularly to the young. How better to do that than with myth and fokelore? The collected works of a respective people's mythology become it's religion. It's no less true than any scientific doctrine, and it's no method of control. It's just an efficient way to organise what everyone believes in their hearts.
Grayson Bailey
What are you on about?
Juan Baker
It was a failed thread the first couple times, Propaganda Pavel. You should move on to boomers or blacks again or whatever is next on the Moscow Disinfo Agenda of the Day..
Julian Hill
This has nothing to do with atheism, it's just a way to rationalize religion. Atheism is merely a lack of belief in God/gods
Jaxson Anderson
how would an atheist rationalise that religion came about?
Millions of peoples collective experience of the truth of god? Then how can they deny him in their hearts?
Or the old religion was created by powerful people to control the masses which in turn makes it a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.
People who claim to have some kind of higher knowledge from religious people yet don't believe in conspiracy theories are a bit contradictory, don't you think?
To such an atheist, religion IS a conspiracy.
Henry Richardson
Atheists were always present. Look up Epicurus and his philosophy. That's ancient Greece, before Christ. Then you had Dante, nearly 1,5k years later, admonishing those who follow Epicureanism in Divine Comedy. There is nothing new under the sun, edgelords like you existed since the dawn of time.
Wyatt Rodriguez
So a few fringe people trying to get the masses to see the 'truth' yet the collective whole ignored them and continued about believing in the lie?
Nicholas Howard
>These lies were never officially challenged and were so strongly believed that idiots today still believe in them. This was achieved by the people in power brutalising and ridiculing anyone who spoke out against the narrative. >Oh, and theres no such thing as conspiracy theories because its too implausible that an entire society can be complicit in believing and reinforcing a lie. Someone would have reported on it eventually and we’d all know the truth.
I always wondered what the words to your national anthem was but couldnt be bothered to look them up thanks for posting them here, OP
Michael Gutierrez
it's not a shitpost,
i'm just pointing out the logical black hole that exists in the mind of atheistic sceptics.
you cannot simultaneously believe that a cabal of powerful people fooled the entire world for the entirety of human history for their own selfish gains but somehow believe that stopped because the particular flavour of the control has went out of fashion
Angel Collins
>It's just an efficient way to organise what everyone believes in their hearts. It must be nice to live in Poland and have real Christianity.
Also I would say that it can be applied to liberalism and modern philosophy in general rather than just religion.
Also tell me about the beans.
Isaac Clark
Attending Mass is good. Most places have a great turnout. Whole communities come together, rich, poor, young and old. It's really the only time when you see strangers smile at eachother. I think every people need something like that. We also have a lot of folk festivals where people eat traditional food and dance and dress up, and you get the same feel there as well (although it's more fun)
Adrian Martin
>and it's no method of control. It's like you have never learned any history at all.
Gabriel Moore
Do people actually believe in Christ there or is it just a sense of community? If the latter that worries me, if you guys run on hard times and its not “fun”, would they still go?
>Millions of peoples collective experience of the truth of god? No, most people feel a sense of spirituality. Instead of letting people experience their own spirituality as natural, liars and con men invent tales to sieze that spirituality into something unrecognizable.
>Or the old religion was created by powerful people to control the masses which in turn makes it a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true. The power of an ordinary man over his fellow man is tenuous at best. A lying leader who claims to be chosen by supernatural beings to lord over men can gain a following among the dim and feeble-minded, first, then the simple people, then the gullible class. At that point his leadership is not so easily challenged.
>higher knowledge >religious people You can only pick one
>religion IS a conspiracy It's far worse. Rational people understand the inherent immorality of most deity-based religions.
On the one hand, we are rational, moral beings who commit immoral acts. One of those acts was the enslavement of other human beings and the fabrication of the mental weapons used to do it - religion.
Religion forces you to love some entity who you fear, who can presumably smote you where you stand. We are forced to follow blindly his commands. Religion is a prep school crafted by the wealthy and powerful to graduate eternal slaves of formerly moral human beings
Religion tricks you into believing you can't be moral without religion. It cons you into imagining that some reward after death is superior to this one precious life you have on Earth.
On the other hand, the followers must such pieces of insanely degenerate shit that only the fear of being smote by the creator/destroyer of the universe is enough to get them to behave like civilized human beings for 5 minutes.
Oliver Bailey
Here it's just boomers and a Barney tier homily if you're lucky enough to get a white priest and not a non-white import with an incomprehensible accent.
Carson White
Religious governments historically kill anyone who is not a believer in the state's gods.
Colton Hughes
how the hell do you rationalise Islam and Mohamed under your Men are fallible and wouldn't be able to pull off such a swindle
Logan Rodriguez
so there was a collective conspiracy to even if you didn't believe the lie, you acted like you did.
You're not disproving my original point.
how many people out there know something is wrong with society but aren't will to pop their head out above the crowd and point it out?
Benjamin Stewart
Just because religious doctrine was twisted by powerful organisations and people, does not make power the purpose of the doctrine.
Adam Moore
Atheist governments typically kill everyone including religious people in the name of tolerance. And each other And lots of babies.
Austin Martin
>Religious beliefs are an abstraction of extremely self evident facts regarding human experience. Do you believe in flying carpets? Living inside a great fish for 3 days? Swimming axe heads?
Brody Nelson
>Just because religious doctrine was twisted by powerful organisations and people, does not make power the purpose of the doctrine. So to be clear the claim is that no religion was ever about power and control and in every case it was twisted from it's real meaning to be used to control people and have power?
Most really do. but it's such a strong presence here you don't really think about it. From my experiences in western Europe, Christians there have a real cult like mentality, and they're very defensive about their faith. Here you can be more chill about it because most people tend to believe. I think being on Jow Forums a lot has made me think differently about it, less religiously and more about the values that it represents, but that's unusual. I think also that the worse things get out west, the more people here will fight to preserve things. I saw an anti-abortion rally in Krakow the other day because it's pride month, we're not quite as based as Hungary but it's getting there.
Hudson Morales
This assumes the spiritual world does not exist
Ryder Barnes
I hope they keep it. Things are getting pretty insane out here. Atheism is a hell of a drug
Adam Adams
Telling people that they have to follow the rules of this religion or being tortured for all eternity is NOT a method of controlling the behavior of people. What the hell? Are you retarded? What about direct violence. Do you realize that the Christians killed a fuckton of herbal healers because they fucking mistranslated a term from greek meaning pharmacist and translated it as "sorcerer". Not to mention so called heathen and pagans...
Caleb Phillips
do atheists believe in the spirit world?
Asher Edwards
I think this may apply to some atheists, and specifically only in regards to those individual's attempts to undermine Christianity.
But to apply it broadly introduces a strawman. Many atheists believe that the idea of Gods evolved out of a need to explain observable things, rather than out of a conspiracy to control the world.
Hunter Gonzalez
motherfuckers telling people the only thing that can save them from being biomechanical slave units is the thing that's enslaving them
The idea of God doesn't explain organised religion.
Organised religion still meets all the criteria for being a massive conspiracy that the entire world played along.
Wyatt Murphy
I don't know about every religion, but I was talking about Christianity, and native European faiths for the most part. They all started as collections of myth and folklore. There's no power to be gained from those, besides your own ability to glean personal meaning and connect with others through them. They aren't naturally "top down" structures. To be sure, organisations have used their own interpretations to influence people, but again, that wasn't their purpose. Scientology and Islam are good examples of doctrine that started out that way, and you can tell from how much more efficient they are at it.
Nah man, the idea of gods, demons and spirits comes from shamanism, the mother of all religions. Mankind lived as hunter and gatherer for hundred thousand of years and all religions comes from real experiences in an altered state of consciousness, often induced by psychoactive plants and substances. Its not that somebody invented it, it comes from experiences. I did Ayahuasca in the jungle of Peru with indigenous shamans, and i was an atheist, after having the experience i realized where all this stuff is coming from and i no longer was an atheist.
Jordan Nguyen
how is the concept of one or some over all existence not inherently a top down structure?
Just because there is no record of what existed before doesn't mean it didn't exist.
See the Spanish inquisition of South America, they destroyed almost all previous religious text.
Adam Howard
>Atheist governments Like Hitler the Catholic who had to stop being Christian in order to be anti-Jewish? Like Stalin the Orthodox seminary student afraid the Church was planning to coronate another Tzar? Or Mao, the Taoist who attended Confucius college?
These guys are dripping with religion pretending to be atheist to eliminate the competition.
Aiden Baker
does a shaman and what he says have authority over what everyone else believes?
What is the need for a shaman to interpret things if everyone is equally able to experience the truth themselves?
Hudson Campbell
They might have started as myths and lore but they were selected in the competition of ideas until only those memes left were ones that provided material benefits to those that held them. Not designed to control but shaped by selection pressures to control. The myths and lore of Christianity has spent almost all of it's time as a means to control people and exert power over people. If something spends 99% of it's time doing something you don't get to cry about how it's the 1% that's the real form.
Angel Clark
In my view, hell is the abstraction of how a person is thought of by their community after death. You lose all control to change it (no escape) and are condemned to suffer if it's negative. We associate that with physical pain and torture. I don't think it's intended as a means to manipulate people to believe, because if it was, Atheism proves it's unsuccessful. If you don't believe in the doctrine anyway, you're not going to be convinced of hell to begin with. The important thing is to take the essence of the idea, and use it to make more informed decisions. Try to be viewed in a good light by those around you, and you'll be remembered as a good person.
Grayson Stewart
Depends on the culture. These natives that i worked with had some form of superstition about visions. They said they should not be shared since it is highly personal. The main function of the shaman is to heal, they are usually not very talkative. The other thing is that the shaman is participating in the ritual, that means if something is happening to you, he might see it himself and influence it for the better (or worse, but then he isn't a shaman) That's not how Christianity works. Careful, you might end up in hell.
Aaron Peterson
I don't think that they are. It takes time to contemplate the meaning of something. Alchemists in the 15th century studied rituals for years on end, until the meanings behind them were so ingrained that they could literally see things like universes being formed in a bottle. An apprentice was once recorded doing the same and failing to see the point, to which they said it was useless to perform any kind of ritual without a lifetime of study. The point is, you have to live your philosophy until the effects are self evident, and it's useful to seek guidance from those who have made it their lifes work.
Jack Jackson
That's rich coming from a German. Your people are fleeing here, escaping your shitty, valueless way of life. You have made hell manifest on your own soil, destroying your places of worship and allowing invaders to conquer you. No twisted church body could dream of the turmoil you have brought upon yourselves.
Alexander Torres
Calm down i was making a joke. Your view on Hell is interesting, but far from whats in the Bible.
Xavier Mitchell
Have you thought perhaps that it can exist in both forms simultaneously? There is a very strong organised religious presence here, and they advocate for this or that policy, but I don't feel it when I go to a church service. I feel more strongly the bonds between people. This is what makes the church, and it's what all organised religions require to survive. Some faraway group of people means nothing, aside from the occasions when they are able to stir up a conquest. That's not happening now, and it doesn't discredit the strength faith gives me and those around me.
Brody King
That is true for much of religion, however much of it, Christianity especially, has been modified to be used as a political tool to control the serfs and justify horrible behavior.
Also, regarding the aspects of religion that are as you say, self evident axioms on how to live based on thousands of years of human experience, the educated person in the modern world today needs more than "because the bible says so." Principles of patriarchical nationalism, which is basically what the Old Testament was, can be argued as to their validity using evolutionary psychology, history, biology, and economics. They should be argued thus, so that smart people who don't believe that God physically wrote the bible can still adopt it's principles.
Ian Young
Sorry then. I hope Germany is able to recover someday. I actually think that there isn't really a difference, but my language of choice is very much from an objective, analytical point of view. I think people who devote themselves to years of study, and view things like people's reflections on their passed loved ones with upmost significance really do envision a bad memory of someone in such a conceptual, abstract way. The idea of hell, and the notion of a physical space like hell, become one and the same.
Joseph Brown
Bullshit, religion was probably around before even cities were created, back when people were still hunter-gatherer nomads. It's a different way of viewing the world as explained, but from a spiritual and moral perspective rather than a logical one. It explains what humans cannot themselves comprehend--that is, the creation of the universe and the fundamentality of sentience/consciousness--and both it and atheism will be around as long as humans don't know where the universe came from. And don't give me that shit about it being started by muh elites. Religious leaders like Jesus, Buddha, Zoroaster, Muhammad (initially), Joan of Arc, etc., are some of the folkiest people from their respective areas and time periods. It's when it gets into the hands of the government that it becomes corruptible and usable as a tool of control. Truth is that we will probably never know why we're here or how the universe came about. But that doesn't mean we should reject religion and spirituality altogether. It's a pretty fundamental part of human nature.
the self evident truth about flying carpets is that they are rad as hell. living in a giant fish isn't fun. Swimming ax heads sound like a problem. Are fedora tippers just too autistic to read between the lines?
