Is the need of salvation an evil lie from religions?

Is the need of salvation an evil lie from religions?

Some religions like Christianity and Islam teach that people are condemned by God and that we have to work to gain salvation. God created us ill, and orders us to be well, on pain of tremendous eternal torture and eventual death. This teaching follows the one where we are told that God is unknowable, unfathomable and works in mysterious ways. This makes the notions of condemnation and the need for salvation obvious lies.

Gnostic Christianity does not use this type of carrot and stick motivation in its theology. We are Universalists and only see a heaven, no hell. We think God too good a creator to ever have to condemn anyone. Our God is a winner, not the loser God that Christianity has invented. All the Gods are myths created to help us reach our highest human potential and are only tools to open our inner eye. Our single eye as Jesus calls it.

How we can forgive ourselves is that as Universalists, we have tied righteousness to equality. The logic trail from there says that if God is to punish anyone, he would have to punish everyone as everyone contributes to what we all are.

For instance. If God were to punish Hitler, he would have to revue what made Hitler what he ended up being. God would follow his time line and see perhaps that his parents spanked him and God would know what we know today, that spanking creates resentment and a delinquent attitude. That beginning would see Hitler’s parents setting his mindset which eventually flowered into his tyrannical nature. So to be just, God would automatically have to punish Hitler’s parents. That same logic would apply to everyone who contributed or facilitated Hitler’s rise to infamy.

So for you and me to blame just ourselves for what we are would be quite unjust. This is not to say that we hold no responsibility for our actions, just not all of them.

Do you agree that the need of Salvation promoted by religions is an evil lie?

Regards
DL

Its a lie from society, and then religion follows from those changes in society, what people want and expect etc. e.g. people chose jesus and not any number of others similar ~ because that’s what they were seeking.

we want salvation from the ills of the world, but that cannot be achieved. Ultimately there needs to be a reason beyond death, for any salient features and reasons for making the world better, otherwise its all pointless and redundant.

That and the wealthy, kings and what have you, also need to justify their positions and greed.

We are born good, but have forgotten it. Salvation is remembering how we were born. The only sin is forgetting our birthright.

That may have been the motivation in the distant past, but that would not explain why, if the notion did come from society, society today in our world or ever improving conditions, would still hold on to the notion.

I think it more likely that it is a religious lie designed to get the sheeple to more readily open their purses and pay for their salvation.

Religions are all about the money and always have been.

Regards
DL

I agree with your first. Not so much with the rest.

I do not think it is so much what we have forgotten as much as us believing the lies we have been fed for so long by religions.

Psalm 51:5 “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”

Add original sin to the mix and you see Christianity indoctrinating the sheeple with a false guilt so as to gain more cash.

Regards
DL

Is it really any different than civil laws? You can’t go up to a judge and say I apologize or hey I did not know it was illegal and get forgiven and not punished.

I see your point but perhaps people are still confronted with the same old philosophical issues ~ death disease injury disability. At most we can relieve some of that, but we are left with the ultimate issue; death and with that purpose.

Sheeple? Is that human beings you are referring to! I agree though that naturally the church wants people’s money to survive, indeed some people [in non-national denominations] give a proportion of their wages. But that is the reason now and not the original reason ~ naturally you don’t give your money to a religion which is not predominant at the time, like with early Christianity. The same kinds of people giving money now were probably the same type who were giving then.

Basically religion is a scream for help.

In civil law, we do not stand before a judge known to demand sacrifices and bribes the way Yahweh did.

In heaven, there is no one that needs protecting. On earth there is so trying to make one system fit both is impossible IMO.

Regards
DL

I do not see it that way. I see it as people just appeasing their groupish or tribal instincts.

youtube.com/watch?v=T64_El2s7FU

As to your view that — “you don’t give your money to a religion which is not predominant at the time,” — I do not agree as in the distant past, temples were more for entertainment than religion except for the debates in seeking God which was also entertaining before the less enlightened religions, like Christianity, became idol worshiping cults.

youtube.com/watch?v=r7BHvN6rZZA

I think people supported whatever temple or religion that did the most entertaining.

It was all for show and pleasure as attested to by the Temple prostitutes.

Regards
DL

Fair enough, though I don’t see Christianity as more enlightened.

The philosophical reasons for religion are not money, but death and gloom etc. where they have become that [money] more recently, is a faculty of support and not of their basis. They wouldn’t get support if the philosophical issues didn’t remain.

The desire for salvation comes before religions [is the point I was making], and so is not an evil lie. That they use it to gain support is dubious.

I do not see Christianity as more enlightened either. I thought that that was what I was saying but perhaps said it badly with my ----- less enlightened religions, like Christianity,.

I agree that religious focus on death and appeasing our after death fears is what religions focus on instead of the moral aspects of philosophy or even theology. Those are supposed to be what religions are for but as you say, the money took over and now that is all they care about.

They do not use Temple Prostitutes anymore but they are still in the feel good business instead of the think good business and they sure don’t mind lying to people towards that end.

Regards
DL

Was the sacrifices demanded in the original texts or was it a human perversion in order to control through fear? What religion became after words were written cannot be put upon the God. It must be put upon human manipulation based upon the predator instinct.
Oh and yea, there are bribes and sacrifices in the system. If you do this then you get that or outright bribes and sacrificing.

I agree. and with the rest of your post.

I don’t think you question can be answered.
We do not have any original text as far as I know and the original would have just been something handed down through oral stories or even if it calls itself an original, it could be a plagiarized copy.

If there was a God it certainly could be put on him. One would think that if he wanted his true message passed down, he would and could insure that it was. If such an entity could not, then he would not be much of a God. To then judge us for following a law that he allowed to be distorted or changed would be quite unjust. Right?

[/quote]
That is not quite the same as a judge, who usually does the right thing of punishing the guilty and not the innocent, demanding and accepting a sacrifice or bribe to alter that good moral habit to an immoral one of punishing the innocent instead of the guilty.

Regards
DL

Nice. Thank.

Regards
DL

Forgive, to dissent, but the above processes do not take away from a benign argument, because the time of revelation did not yet connect with salvation. In fact the language and practices had to conform the understanding prevalent at the time, to confirm the validity of the evolving message. Jesus parables were a much more advanced example of this idea.

One of the Jesus’ in the scriptures had advanced ideas for sure but another of the Jesus’ sure had the opposite.

I like this one.

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

Luke 17:21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

This link speaks to that Jesus.

youtube.com/watch?v=alRNbes … r_embedded

You likely only know the Roman ass kissing wimp Jesus that Rome created.

What did the scribes put in the mouth of that Jesus that you like, if that is the one you see?

Regards
DL

No, though the compelling Jesus You present is convincing. No, the Jesus I see is the archetype of redemption, the same redemption which Parcifal negated Nietzche with.

This in Wagner contra Nietzhe is a philosophical triumph of art over traditional religion, of forgiveness.

Who forgives whom? If not God, then Man, forgiving himself, for his sense of guilt, in the generic sense of overcoming the stigma of animalism. It is what Jesus meant by us being his sheep, for sheep are gentle, and comforting. They furnish the wool to keep warm.

It was pointed to in another forum, that the psychological and the philosophical are mutually exclusive in a forum about religion, but I dissent on basis, that the orthogenesis of thought , general were once not differentiated.

Nowedays, it is fashionable to present the view that philosophy as a rationalization may be a defensive move to regress into that anomalous state. But that’s, as often being the case, it can conceivably likewise be argued that psychology is an unwarranted, groundless assumption, that archetypes have no staying power, in an ever shifting realm of hypothesis, in a psychological-philosophical world , where the philosophy of mind does have tenured root.

Therefore, according to this flow of ideas, salvation is grounded more in the psychology of philosophy, then of religion. Therefore it is of necessity it flows, the necessity of the archetypical psychological roots of philosophy, or vica versa, rather, the philosophical roots of psychology.

Seems like you like to make up stuff.
Let’s see if we have this straight: you know the motivations of religious leaders, mystics and participants. Their motivation is money.
You know what is going on in all these other minds. Is this a psychic claim?

So your Jesus is the one who first condemns you then turns around to die to save you from his own wrath.

Rather a strange situation to me.

Why do you like a God who loves so much that he will punish the innocent instead of the guilty to forgive instead of just forgiving outright?

The laws of heaven are supposed to eventually come to earth and we are to emulate God.

Would you set a bribe or sacrifice price of the death of your child or if you thought that a death was required, would you step mup yourself or send your child?

IOW, who should bury who? Should you bury your child or should your child bury you?

FMPOV, if God does not have the balls to do the right thing and step up himself then he is the vile demiurge that we Gnostic Christians have named him.

You might like what this Bishop has to say about punishing the innocent.

youtube.com/watch?v=jKNup9g … gest-vrecs

Regards
DL