Did sin enter the world through Adam, Satan or Yahweh?

Really? Must I point out the dualisms involved in your analysis above? But yeah I never meant to imply that the myth occurred in a social vacuum. It grew out of the mythology of the civilizations of the fertile crescent and was elaborated and redacted by multiple authors and editors over centuries. You imagine that your reductive analysis brings something new to the room when in fact all you have done is move the furniture around.

you can, but you gotta be veeeeery careful how you use that word ‘dualism’, cuz i’m poised to strike at that word cuz i hate it. it’s one of the mortal enemies of meaningful philosophy.

anyway behind every anthropomorphic religion there’s a hidden anthropological explanation for how and why that particular religion has the features that it does. so the religion tells us nothing about the cosmological, ontological, or epistemological nature of the universe/reality/existence, only about the nuanced nature of the psyche of the people who invented said religion. in fact you can almost rank a people’s spiritual stamina and constitution according to their religions. here’s a list in the order of sickest to healthiest of the major religions:

christianity; absolutely depraved masochistic nonsense
judaism; absolutely depraved masochistic nonsense with a silly chip on its shoulder
islam; nonsense with great big balls
buddhism; chilled out, easy going nonsense
hinduism; a magnificent party of socially stratifying nonsense
paganism; whitey’s version of that same party
taoism; pretty fuckin realistic as far as religions can go, but still nonsense
spinozism; the end-game. the first and the last. the alpha and the omega. a cold, eternal wind bloweth through it.

Spinoza is cool. Your argument is fun but thin as fresh blown snot.

When did you transcend your own psyche so that you can stand outside it and tell us how things really are? Or do you admit that these are merely your opinions based on limited knowledge and experience?

Let’s see; Xianity is at the top of you dualistic list of offending religions. Could it be that Xianity was your cradle religion?

Damn straight spinz wuz cool. Hey yo you know them niggas almost kilt his ass? Goddamn Jews stabbed em, bro. Real shit. He even kept the cloak (spinz rocked a cloak) with the knife tear in it as a souvenir.

jewishreviewofbooks.com/article … l-spinoza/

I have a deep feeling that the jew bible is evil.
The problem is that the stolen texts still have value.

The bible is evil if you read it literally.

If not, it retains it value as a myth and is quite good for thought, since that is what it was created for.

Without Midrash, the Christian way, the bible is garbage as it has Christians adoring a genocidal prick of a god.

Regards
DL

Isn’t a bit overkill to call it ‘evil’ though? There would be any number of reasons why the story tellers and the writers that worked with them would invent a religion that portrays man in such a forlorn and lost state of misery. Most likely such a theme only reflected their collective anxiety and inner turmoil… something they finally came to believe was intended by god. Or maybe it was more conspicuous… like the dudes were already trying to make all the other guys feel miserable so they could be more easily managed, as well as feel a dependency for/on the higher ranking members of the clique. Probably a little of both; a group of depressed people trying to manipulate each other for rights and privileges out there in the desert villages. But ‘evil’? I think that’s giving them too much credit, but you see more than I… Daniel you’re a star.

in the above case i use a principle from my own school of analytical nihilism known as ‘promethean75’s razor’. and what this principle allows me to do is disclose the distinction between sensible metaphysical statements about empirical objects and processes, and nonsensical metaphysical statements about concepts about empirical objects and processes. what i have discovered is that there are far less sensible metaphysical statements that can be made, then philosophers and theologians like to believe. my duty is to identify that very thin line between such kinds of statements and serve the philosopher/theologian who makes them, a bologna sandwich.

that beind said, there is absolutely nothing that can be derived directly from experience that could sensibly lead a philosopher/theologian to taking any of the available religious doctrines seriously for even a moment. now because there is almost certainly no ‘god’, and, all things must have causes, there must be something other than the existence of the thing believed to exist through the kinds of metaphysical reasoning that leads philosophers/theologians to think it does, that is responsible for making them believe the things they do. in other words, it isn’t because ‘god’ exists that people think ‘god’ exists. something else is responsible for this hermeneutic intellectual process, and the bad news is that it’s almost without exception drawn from and out of a deeply entrenched psychological anxiety… and the even worser news is that this anxiety is itself rooted in the general constitutional weakness and fragility of the human psyche.

the only thing of interest to me regarding the history of religions is an anthropological and sociological examination of the kind of environment in which the religion evolved. the kinds of influences responsible for leading a particular type of people to believing a particular version of this kind of nonsensical metaphysical thinking. this general investigation falls under the rubric of historical materialism, first, and then from that basis particular facts of analysis can be ascertained. for instance, why christians believed in ‘this’ kind of god while hindus believed in ‘these’ kinds of gods, etc. or why this religion permits polygamy while this one doesn’t. or why this religion holds strongly to the notion of ‘sin’ while that other one does not. so on and so forth.

as you can see once i’ve established that both a logical/empirical proof for the existence of ‘god’ is impossible, and have as well dismissed the possibility of revelatory knowledge of ‘god’ (there are mental hospitals and opium dens for folks like that), i’m still at liberty, as an analytical nihilist, to seek the actual causes for why and how people believe in ‘god(s)’ and offer them, at the least, a bologna sandwich.

I’m just now seeing this post for the first time. Yeah yeah, your conclusion re: theology is similar to Prismatic567 i.e. God is impossible. Now in this instance we’re talking about sin. It isn’t obvious that sin is directly related to God, though, if you’re like me, you learned about sin in Christian circles where they were studying Bible texts in which the figure of God appears. Which do you suppose came first the image of sin or the image of God?

sin is just a religious extension of the feeling of shame when being in violation of a social more. that’s all it is, man. first there was embarassment, shame, remorse and regret before our family, peers and social group in general. then that feeling gets expanded to include the same kind of feelings ‘before god’, who is thought to be the arbiter of the morality that is in violation.

so what ended up being called ‘sin’ existed long before any image of god, as human beings were capable of experiencing that embarrassment and shame and stuff long before they developed the cognitive capacity for the abstract reasoning involved in metaphysical thinking. hell, even before they had a phonetic language they were experiencing these feelings. a dude comes running at you with a club right after you take his rabbit off the spit and you’re like ‘shit i musta done something wrong’… but you don’t think in these words. instead it’s a feeling of fear and unrest that’s associated with the act of taking the rabbit. you learn not to do that, because you don’t wanna piss him off. you need this guy on your side. so this is an example of how the pre-linguistic experience of ‘sin’ develops. it’s mediated between people in groups and has its first appearance in the feeling of fear. and this part is important; notice i didn’t say it originates in ‘fight response’, but the fear response. the origin of morality belongs to those who experience shame when they are overpowered by a force that doesn’t permit them to act as they have. this is morality’s crudest and most primitive appearance. the guy with the club certainly didn’t feel any shame, right? i mean he wasn’t like ‘yo you ain’t supposed to do that, bro’ because they didn’t have language yet. only much, much later was that instinctive social dynamic ever developed into an abstract ‘civil’ contract that everyone agreed with.

the feeling of sin isn’t ‘damn i shouldn’t have done that’, originally, but rather ‘shit i didn’t get away with that like i thought i would… and damn if that nigga didn’t call me on it.’

that changes everything, don’t it. and here you were thinking ‘man’ was a nice guy. hell no he ain’t. he’s an inherently despicable creature who acts of his own self interests. the original homo’s erectus was stirnerite through and through. just a carrier of selfish genes. and that’s why you gotta know this shit before you can begin an honest investigation into the problem of ‘man’. and believing in ‘god’ ain’t gonna do nothin but muddle up this investigation.

So where did the idea of gods come from in the first place?

aah you know, little uh this, little uh that. first you get the developmental stage in the human brain which gives the human the ability of apperception (lacan calls it the mirror stage in infants). now the human experiences a phenomenological split with his body, and crude concepts of ‘self’, ‘will’, and ‘freewill’ enter into experience. this feeling of separation makes bodily movement a very strange thing; a fellow first decides he wants to move, and then he orders his body to do so. next thing you know he’s like ‘wait a minute am i in this body? wtf is going on here. this is some weird shit.’ so this experience of ‘will’ being something different from the body was the first part.

next comes the notion of design in nature. a fellow notices that complex objects require his work and effort to come into existence when he makes em. he then makes the analogy that everything in nature, having some degree of physical and material complexity, must also be the result of some effort… and when he couples this idea with his new feeling of ‘will’, he starts thinking that there’s some kind of ‘will’ that made the things in nature.

so it all started when some significant physiological changes occured in the brain which led to ‘cognitive confusions’, for a lack of a better phrase, that caused him to anthropomorphically project an external ‘freewill’ onto the world around him.

and all the stages of belief in spirit followed from that. animism, totemism, polytheism, henotheism, monotheism, and flying spaghetti monsterism. although the last stage didn’t evolve until man had invented pasta, for obvious reasons.

An intelligent man said when the first con man met the first sucker.

All religions of the supernatural type are cons designed to fool the gullible and help them part with their cash.

The rise of monotheism, not the stupid Christian type of a 3 in 1 godhead, is natural I think.

We are a hierarchical species who all look to our best and brightest for guidance. On earth leads to as in heaven. We made as above as below when we invented our gods.

Regards
DL

I don’t think humans invented religion, which is why humans won’t be able to stop religion. To me, religion appears to be a product of the collective unconscious as Jung proposed. The ancients didn’t invent the gods. The gods were imaginal realities to them. Yahweh and Satan and Adam and sin were archetypal manifestations of the unconscious human psyche.

Meh, the interesting question isn’t really where gods and religions came from, or why, or even if it’s all bullshit or not. It’s “Okay, if it is complete bullshit, why have they stuck around so long…?”

All religions are are tribal units and yes, we are tribal by nature.

All gods are figments of our imagination. All were invented by men. Immoral men at that.

We, as you can see from the stats, will eventually rid ourselves of the religious tribes and be loyal to our secular gods and countries.

If you check the World Peace Index, you will see that the less religion a country has, the more peaceful and law abiding it is.

Proof for that is the war mongering U.S. that touts itself as a Christian nation while having the highest jail stats in the free world.

Regards
DL

The Noble Lie of their usefulness to the people, while they only serve themselves.

Further,
The fact that the mainstream religions grew from inquisitions and jihads because they did not have decent moral arguments tell the whole story.

Regards
DL

Ok, if they’re wholly self-serving, that would make religions soley a burden on a society/group, with no offsetting benefits. Rendering those religiously inclined groups/societies less competitive throughout history.

Why then is there no seeming evidence, nor surviving modern example of, an irreligious society…?

There are, and statistics show that the less religion a country has, the more peaceful and law abiding they are.

youtube.com/watch?v=VdtwTeBPYQA

There are off-setting benefits, for the in group.

There is no benefit to the out group as demonstrated by the use of inquisitions and jihads by those who have no decent moral arguments to convert and must resort to murder.

Regards
DL

No, I mean if religions are so destabilizing to a society as your research suggests, why do all surviving societies in the world have one…?

Why wasn’t the entire world domimated by irreligious groups throughout history…?