But Jesus existed…
Did some carpenter dude called Jesus exist? Sure, I once had a dude called Jesus install some cabinets at my home. Did the religious character described in (among other works of fiction) the Bible exist? No he did not, or at least he existed as much as other historical fiction characters.
It’s very hard if not impossible to figure out if stuff written down thousands of years ago was fact or fiction. Even persons that seem to be reliable sources from that time have had works of fiction or embellishments mixed in. Almost all we know about thousands of years ago is because people wrote shit down and the amount that actually survived is very little.
The sources you claim are from well past the time Jesus was alive, so it’s questionable how reliable sources they are. I also would not trust anything written down by cult followers about the cult leader, this is basic common sense.
And if you’re going to link Wikipedia, you can at least read the article instead of just the blerb.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus#Criticism
And Buddha also existed.
And Sun still exists. Can’t say that about all the others.
That’s my point. Jesus was just a man. Most likely a con-man, a rebellious instigator, or just crazy
I mean you’re not wrong. Jesus existed in some form, as the leader of a doomsday cult. His insane followers went around and preached in other places because no one took them seriously in their homeland. Jesus was just your average doomsday preacher. Christianity is basically Mormonism if the Church of LDS was started a couple of thousand years ago.
However, Jesus is/was also considered God and the son of God. Obviously, Jesus was never a god.
If you weren’t raised to eat meat and saw hundreds of millions or billions of people suffering and dying of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and cancer, you’d know instantly.
They’re not insane. They’re just desperate for answers to life’s great questions. They’re afraid of death and can’t cope with life. They’re affraid to face reality that this is just what it is and death is just death. This is their way of dealing with all that, hiding reality behind a fairy tale to give it some artificial mean, because “life cannot be just an accident. We…I am too important for that”
It’s not simply insanity, they don’t have an affliction, it’s a very conscious, well thought out decision to run and hide. It’s, at best, a fault of emotion, not a fault of mental capabilities.
I would say cowardice is an affliction. Also that the percentage of religious people who have thought this out and made a conscious decision to choose fantasy over reality is tiny; the majority (at least from my experience of Christianity in America) don’t even have the brain function to consider fantasy vs reality due to lifelong indoctrination.
Exactly this. Some people are afraid of the idea that the universe is indifferent, void of meaning besides that which we create, and that when you die your neurological processes stop and your identity and consciousness wink away, leaving the you who lived your life as nothing but memories of those still living. I basically explained this to a girl once who asked about my beliefs and she said, that’s scary I don’t like it
No, most religion is people who don’t have the capacity to understand the universe looking for answers to the great questions.
It is also people defending that they were indoctrinated into when they were kids. Looking this if you remove the people who end up non-religious there is a 86% chance that you will match the religion of your parents; if they are both of the same faith. There is a good reason that we indoctrinate kids; it works…really well.
I indoctrinate (instill into) my kids into; thinking education is important, reading is fun and questioning and critical thinking is right and proper. We all push our beliefs onto our kids, it is nice when we see it reflected back to us.
The difference between a religion and a cult is scale, that’s all.
There’s a famous quote in sociolinguistics: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” I think the same thing applies here. A religion is just a cult with an army and a navy, because then they can enforce it onto others.
Yes, I think scale is typically what determines strength of control upon individuals. Cults are smaller and thus any charismatic cult leader can exert greater control on his small flock. The larger your religion gets though, the less likely the leader himself can micromanage and exert control, thus leading to the delegation of responsibilities and power.
When the DSM lists religious belief as a mental illness, I’ll grudgingly begin to respect psychology.
