Do you believe in God?

[Famine]

Satanists are Christians. Without the Bible no Satan.

Aside from the fact that "Christian" means "someone who follows the teachings of Christ" (so Satanists can't be Christians), Satan appears in the bits of the Bible that predate Christ too, so as a being he isn't exclusive to the Christian world-view.

Judaism isn't hot on a supernatural evil being, but Islam is fine with it as far as I understand. And of course, like JK Rowling, all the books of the Bible/Torah/Qu'ran lift their lore from previous civilisations anyway.

 

[Dennisch]

someone who follows the teachings of Christ

It may mean that but religion is in most cases just taking the bits you like from which ever fancy tale they picked them from. Same goes with Satan worshipping. Picked from a Bible, and they ignored the rest. But as it's all the same silly nonsense, we could call them Jewish or Islamic too.

 

[TexRex]

Your @Lizard turned into a @Liquid.

I'm not cleaning it up.

 

[UKMikey]

I'm not cleaning it up.

Me neither.

 

[Tappajakoala]

Satanists are Christians. Without the Bible no Satan.

Er...lot of religions spooks common conformists about evil, not only christians.

Actually satanists are more close to atheist than christians.

However, atheism is not a religion, it is normal situation to live without supersitious characters.

 

[UKMikey]

Er...lot of religions spooks common conformists about evil, not only christians.

Actually satanists are more close to atheist than christians.

However, atheism is not a religion, it is normal situation to live without supersitious characters.

Satanists are closer to atheists but Christians are by definition believers in Satan.

[EDIT] I made a mistake... a lot of Christians don't buy into the Satan thing. As the quote goes, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was covincing the world he didn't exist.

https://www.barna.com/research/most...-believe-that-satan-or-the-holy-spirit-exist/

 

[Dennisch]

a lot of Christians don't buy into the Satan thing

But but, the prospect of eternal damnation is the only way for them to behave like a righteous person!

 

[TexRex]

As the quote goes, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was covincing the world he didn't exist.

And like that...poof...he's gone.

 

[baldgye]

Satanists are closer to atheists but Christians are by definition believers in Satan.

[EDIT] I made a mistake... a lot of Christians don't buy into the Satan thing. As the quote goes, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was covincing the world he didn't exist.

https://www.barna.com/research/most...-believe-that-satan-or-the-holy-spirit-exist/

To be fair a good chunk of ‘Christians’ also don’t seem to be buying into the whole God thing either, going off that link...

 

[UKMikey]

To be fair a good chunk of ‘Christians’ also don’t seem to be buying into the whole God thing either, going off that link...

Spoiler: Mild language warning

 

[Dotini]

A short while back we had these questions about what happens to our consciousness when we die.

May I ask a question that is closely related to the topic? There is no other place I could ask the question without derailing the topic hard.

First of all, I consider myself an agnostic, and the question is aimed at those who do believe in the classic Christian or Islamic ''heaven''. It is not my intention to make the question sound sarcastic or disrespectful.

So, if you led a pious and righteous life you go to heaven when you die, right? That's basically a beautiful place of peace and no wrongdoings where you meet your ancestors and god himself, right? Not your physical self but your soul, your mind, your personality as it is right now, right?

My question is, how long does this last? For how long?

I ask because the question of time is important for me, how long do I stay at that place? 100.000 years, a million years or even forever?

My point is, the human mind is not meant for this kind of longevity. Imagine the timespan of a whole healthy life, that is around 90 years.
Now imagine, if you even remotely can, imagine a 100.000 years of existing. That's way back in the stone age, when mammoths and saber-tooth tigers were around. What do you do with this time? How can you exist for that long without going utterly insane? If you do things over and over and over again, or imagine over and over again, even the biggest pleasures turn into absolute horror, and it does not take long to do or imagine everything you ever wanted before it is rinse and repeat. And this does not take even a quarter of an eternity.

When people say they wanted to exist forever (In whatever form) they have never truly thought about the time that is actually involved with that, it would quickly turn into a never ending nightmare of despair with absolutely no way out. That's the idea of hell, isn't it?

Isn't the scientific version of death much more merciful? Just ceasing to exist altogether means no chance of eternal suffering.

The only way out would be reincarnation with a memory swipe, a clean slate beginning in intervals.

I've never considered this. This is actually horrific to think about.

Do people in heaven supposedly know what's going on down on Earth? I mean I guess it'd be cool to see the Earth evolve over a Geological Eon before its inevitably destroyed by our sun. But if we're on a human time scale, then I'm probably gonna to go mental after like a year of doing nothing lol.

It just makes much more sense to me that when you die, you die. Your timeline ends.

Recently I ran across a different answer to this question in a declassified CIA document.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700210016-5

27. Consciousness in Perspective. Having ascertained that human consciousness is able to separate from physical reality and interact with other intelligences in other dimensions within the universe, and that it is both eternal and designed for ultimate return to the Absolute, we are faced with the question: “So what happens then?” Since memory is a function of consciousness and therefore enjoys the same eternal character as the consciousness which accounts for its existence, it must be admitted that when consciousness returns to the Absolute, it brings with it all the memories it has accumulated through experience in reality. The return of consciousness to the Absolute does not imply and extinction of the separate entity which the consciousness organized and sustained in reality. Rather, it suggests a differentiated consciousness which merges with and participates in the universal consciousness and infinity of the Absolute without losing the separate identity and accumulated self-knowledge which its memories confer upon it. What it does lose is the capability for generation of independent thought holograms, since that can be done only by energy in motion. In other words, it retains the power to perceive but loses the power of will or choice. In exchange, however, this consciousness participates in the all-knowing infinite continuum of consciousness which is a characteristic of energy in the ever present. Consequently, it is accurate to observe that when a person experiences the out-of-body state, they are, in fact, projecting that eternal spark of consciousness and memory which constitutes the ultimate source of their identity to let it play in and learn from dimensions both inside and outside the time-space world in which their physical component currently enjoys a short period of reality.

 

[TenEightyOne]

A short while back we had these questions about what happens to our consciousness when we die.

Recently I ran across a different answer to this question in a declassified CIA document.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001700210016-5

27. Consciousness in Perspective. Having ascertained that human consciousness is able to separate from physical reality and interact with other intelligences in other dimensions within the universe, and that it is both eternal and designed for ultimate return to the Absolute, we are faced with the question: “So what happens then?” Since memory is a function of consciousness and therefore enjoys the same eternal character as the consciousness which accounts for its existence, it must be admitted that when consciousness returns to the Absolute, it brings with it all the memories it has accumulated through experience in reality. The return of consciousness to the Absolute does not imply and extinction of the separate entity which the consciousness organized and sustained in reality. Rather, it suggests a differentiated consciousness which merges with and participates in the universal consciousness and infinity of the Absolute without losing the separate identity and accumulated self-knowledge which its memories confer upon it. What it does lose is the capability for generation of independent thought holograms, since that can be done only by energy in motion. In other words, it retains the power to perceive but loses the power of will or choice. In exchange, however, this consciousness participates in the all-knowing infinite continuum of consciousness which is a characteristic of energy in the ever present. Consequently, it is accurate to observe that when a person experiences the out-of-body state, they are, in fact, projecting that eternal spark of consciousness and memory which constitutes the ultimate source of their identity to let it play in and learn from dimensions both inside and outside the time-space world in which their physical component currently enjoys a short period of reality.

The context of that is an explanation of how hypnosis-induced out of body experiences might work, a technique which was evidently being considered as part of a therapy programme. It wasn't presented as an empirical answer to "what happens to our consciousness when we die".

I just thought I'd clear that up in case anyone found the CIA, declassified and answer parts of your post misleading.

 

[UKMikey]

 

[Dotini]

Sectarian violence resulting in murder, arson and mayhem has broken out in Delhi. Both sides believe in God, but seemingly not the same God. How is this resolved?


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51612461

 

[TenEightyOne]

Sectarian violence resulting in murder, arson and mayhem has broken out in Delhi. Both sides believe in God, but seemingly not the same God. How is this resolved?


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51612461

Build a wall down the middle of the streets, that's what we do in the UK.

 

[Daz555]

Build a wall down the middle of the streets, that's what we do in the UK.

View attachment 894439

And that's for people who believe in the SAME god.

And in Glasgow, Scotland your flavour of christianity determines which football team you support.

 

[TenEightyOne]

And that's for people who believe in the SAME god.

And in Glasgow, Scotland your flavour of christianity determines which football team you support.

It's a strange almost-schizophrenic feature of some port/dock cities, the same division used to be true of Manchester's City and United, and Liverpool's FC and Everton. Over the last few decades that's ceased to be the case as much (if at all) but the characteristic remains strong in Glasgow.

An ex-colleague (sadly departed) remembered that in the 70s and 80s that a collection would be held at Celtic matches that was understood by everybody to be a collection for the IRA. Non-donation was unthought of. I don't know how true that was but he swore to it

 

[Danoff]

When the universe was created in the Big Bang, there should have been an equal amount of matter and antimatter created. The problem is that matter and antimatter destroy each other immediately on contact, resulting in a burst of energy. We should have a universe of all energy and no matter. But we infer from our knowledge of the Big Bang that for every 30,000,000 particles of antimatter, there must have been 30,000,001 particles of matter. Why is this? No one knows.

I posted this video elsewhere, but I can't help but post it here also in response to this question. The "fine-tuned universe" problem.



What this is saying is that everything behaves in a quantum sense. We all exist in a probability of states, just as an electron does, but that those quantum distributions are more "entangled" at the macro level, which is why they appear to behave as though they are not quantum. This same concept applies all the way to the universe level (and they extrapolate it that far in the video). The universe itself exists as a giant quantum state. But I would submit that it would itself be part of a quantum distribution as well. Just as an electron exists in all possible states at the same time based on probabilities and statistical entanglements, so would the entire universe including all matter, energy, and laws of physics.

In other words, all of the possibilities exist... for an electron, and the universe. Our observations of that universe are deeply entangled with it, and so they do not observe the distribution of states across a probability, unlike our observation of the electron, which is not deeply entangled with our state, and so it behaves as though it exists in all possible states.

When you really think about it, and I have posted this notion here before, this kind of answer makes much more sense than "nothing". A "zero" answer is more arbitrary than every possible equivalent.

 

[Skynyrd1977]

Wow. Glad to see that this discussion has continued for so long!

 

[Denur]

Wow. Glad to see that this discussion has continued for so long!

Why?

 

[Dotini]

Here's a question that is usually easy to answer "No!".

https://www.indiapost.com/corona-virus-is-god-unhappy-with-mankind/

 

[Danoff]

Here's a question that is usually easy to answer "No!".

https://www.indiapost.com/corona-virus-is-god-unhappy-with-mankind/

It's a loaded question. Like "when did you stop beating your wife". The answer is "there is no god".

 

[FoRiZon]

 

[Danoff]

They're not hurting anyone by believing in god... just leave them to their comforting beliefs...

 

[Dotini]

There was a time when religious heretics burned alive at the stake. False beliefs are dangerous, now as then. Or not.

Burning of Thomas Hawkes, 1555

 

[Danoff]

There was a time when religious heretics burned alive at the stake. False beliefs are dangerous, now as then. Or not.

Burning of Thomas Hawkes, 1555

There's no reason to think that false beliefs are equally dangerous over time. There is a notion that false beliefs (especially among christians) are now benign.

 

[Dotini]

There's no reason to think that false beliefs are equally dangerous over time. There is a notion that false beliefs (especially among christians) are now benign.

I thought you were mocking the poor little girl for the false and dangerous belief that the deity would protect you from the virus. I'm all for a positive mental attitude and for the belief that we personally are responsible for our fate. But also that we should follow rational rules in matters like dealing with plague, fires and other major problems. Civilization should bring enlightenment to the game.

 

[Danoff]

I thought you were mocking the poor little girl for the false and dangerous belief that the deity would protect you from the virus.

Not mocking. Merely pointing out that the notion that false beliefs are somehow benign in the modern world is flawed.

I'm all for a positive mental attitude and for the belief that we personally are responsible for our fate.

You're not personally responsible for your fate. Only the part you can control.

But also that we should follow rational rules in matters like dealing with plague, fires and other major problems.

Perhaps "rational thought" instead of "rules".

 

[evldave333]

Most folks who have beliefs are happy even if its a delusion, were I draw the line is were you have to pay for your beliefs with your life or financially. Beliefs are fine if they're reached by your own experiences if they're prescribed it gets dangerous. Most belief systems are co-opted by smart folks taking advantage of the followers for their own ends in elaborate pyramid schemes with tax exemptions and even law exemptions look at the vatican!

 

[Dotini]

Not mocking. Merely pointing out that the notion that false beliefs are somehow benign in the modern world is flawed.

False belief can be dangerous, especially in the modern, interdependent and packed-together world. China has a workable system for removing false beliefs from society. It seems rather brutal, but they are an old, smart and successful civilization. Is it too bold to suggest that censorship, hidden persuasion, and denial of educational and employment opportunity for people with false beliefs are practices already promulgated, tolerated or sought for here?