on discussing god and religion

[iambiguous]

@Ichthus77

pardon the interruption (moo) but …

self=other
us=them

same same

Imperfect humans screw it up… That you can see it means there is a God that can fill your hole.

That’s what She said.

k bye

Like I said, she must spend hours and hours days and days agonizing over each word in these “miraculous” posts. [-o<

Note to Meno:

Are you coaching her?

[iambiguous]

Religion and Morality
Ryan McKay email the author, Harvey Whitehouse
at APA PsychNet

To illustrate why such sanitizing is problematic scientifically, we note that the most prominent contemporary hypothesis in the literature on religion and morality is the “religious prosociality” hypothesis. Although many papers on “religious prosociality” appear to equate the notions of morality and “prosociality”, some imply that morality is a subcategory of prosociality, whereas others indicate that prosociality is a subcategory of morality.

‘Prosocial behavior, or intent to benefit others, is a social behavior that “benefit[s] other people or society as a whole”, “such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering”. Obeying the rules and conforming to socially accepted behaviors are also regarded as prosocial behaviors.’ Wikipedia

“What is religious Prosociality?
‘…a religious principle associated with the protection of the religious group, and a supernatural principle associated with the belief in God, or other supernatural agents.’” psycnet.apa.org

Again, as always, we need actual social contexts to make these distinctions clearer. Also, prosocial behavior would seem to be just as applicable in Humanist communities as religious ones.

And while many would argue that scientifically one is not able to differentiate moral from immoral behavior socially, politically and economically, how about philosophically? What would constitute the philosophical equivalent of the “scientific method” in establishing something like this?

The problem is that behavior that benefits certain others (and so is “prosocial” in this standard sense) may be detrimental to the wider social group. And conversely, behavior that benefits the group may be harmful to at least some of its members. For example, torture is a powerful mechanism for enforcing and stabilizing social norms, yet torture is often unambiguously detrimental to the recipient. The irony is that behaviors that are literally “prosocial” insofar as they further the interests of a particular social group may be “antisocial” in the standard social psychological usage (e.g., by harming the norm violator).

Though again with God in the Script there is a transcending font supposedly able to provide the flocks with the spiritual equivalent of “the final answer”. Though even as it pertains to the same God, there can be conflicting interpretations of what constitutes being either “prosocial” or “antisocial”. And even within the Christian tradition alone there are many denominations – uua.org/re/tapestry/youth/b … 7545.shtml – such that what might constitute being “prosocial” and “antisocial” might be different among them.

Then any possible squabbles among them as to how connect the dots between “religious prosociality” and morality. With respect to “the protection of the religious group, and a supernatural principle associated with the belief in God, or other supernatural agents”.

Where do Roman Catholics and Evangelicals and Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses etc., overlap and where are they at odds…given particular sets of circumstances.

[iambiguous]

Religion does not determine your morality
From The Conversation website

Most religious people think their morality comes from their religion. And deeply religious people often wonder how atheists can have any morality at all.

It’s all about God. In fact, I’ve never been able to really understand how No God religious paths are able to connect the dots between “I” on this side of the grave and “I” on the other side. If there is no God to judge your behaviors here and now what exactly is it that determines your fate there and then?

No, seriously…how does that work?

And God because most Gods are said to be omniscient and omnipotent. There is no getting away with behaving immorally because God sees all. And there is no question of not being punished for choosing to live off the righteous path.

And while Humanism can concoct secular renditions of objective morality there is no transcending font to turn to when these renditions themselves come into conflict. And whatever justice follows you to the grave, you are still only on your way back to star stuff for all the rest of eternity. “I” is at one only with oblivion without God. Or with how No God religious paths bring about immortality.

And salvation?

[iambiguous]

Religion does not determine your morality
From The Conversation website

I’m going to use Christianity as my example, not because it’s representative of religion in general, but because there’s a lot of research on Christians, and because many readers will likely be familiar with it.

Christians will often tell you that their morality comes from their religion (or from their parents’ version of it). And if you ask them about what their religion tells them about what’s right and wrong, it will likely line up with their own ideas of right and wrong.

But the causal link is not as clear as it first appears.

It can’t be entirely clear because among ourselves here there are a wide range of Christians…some are very conservative and interpret God’s Scripture as condemning homosexuality and abortion and pretty much in line with the policies of, say, Donald Trump. Other, progressive Christians, using the same Scripture, come to opposite conclusions.

Then there are those who put emphasis on the meek inheriting the Earth while others insist that God wants you to be rolling in the dough.

Some say that without God all things can be rationalized. But, apparently, with God, most things can be too.

And some put emphasis on Judgment Day…on Heaven or Hell…while others insist that their own “private and personal” Christian God forgives all.

Thus…

The Bible is complex, with many beliefs, pieces of advice and moral implications. Nobody can believe in all of it. Different branches of Christianity, and indeed every different person, take some things from it and leave others.

The part I root in dasein. Christianity is much like any other set of value judgments. You are indoctrinated as a child to believe or not to believe in it. You have experiences as an adult that bring you toward it or away from it.

So, in acknowledging this, how then are you able to determine beyond a leap of faith or a “wager”, if the Christian God is the optimal [or the only] path to objective morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side?

Well, you tell me.

Many things in the Bible are unacceptable to modern Christians. Why? Because they do not sit right with contemporary moral sensibilities.

The part where morality [even religious morality] evolves over time historically and culturally. For example, with Christianity in the Feudal era, the Catholic emphasis on the afterlife and then, with the advent of capitalism, the birth of Protestantism in which the emphasis [for many] shifts to life on this side of the grave. It’s still important to tend to the poor but it’s also important to “live long and prosper”.

[iambiguous]

Religion does not determine your morality
From The Conversation website

Let’s take magic as an example. Many Christians don’t believe in magic, but even the ones who do, don’t think they should kill those who use it, even though one could interpret passages in the Bible to be suggesting exactly that.

What’s going on?

In a word: dasein.

Each Christian connected to the God of Abraham is no less connected through their own childhood indoctrination and their own uniquely personal experiences connected to Him subjectively, existentially, problematically.

In the case of the magic above, there is a moral behaviour advocated by the Bible that gets rejected by most people. Why? Because they think it’s morally wrong.

They ignore that part of the moral teachings of the Bible. Instead, they tend to accept those moral teachings of the Bible that feel right to them. This happens all the time, and a good thing too.

Indeed, just imagine if the truly preposterous stuff from the Old Testament were taken literally: lifelessons.co/spirituality/bible/

Or the things God endorsed: salon.com/2014/05/31/11_kin … e_partner/

Or the mass killings: bethinking.org/bible/old-te … s-killings

Clergy interprets scripture, and cultural practices and beliefs are passed down, many of which have little or nothing to do with the Bible, like the Catholic idea of having fish instead of meat on Friday a cultural tradition never mentioned in the Bible at all.

Basically, people take or leave religious morality according to some internal moral compass they already have. They might even choose which church to go to, according to how well the teachings of that church match up with what they feel is right or wrong.

And where does this internal moral compass come from if not from the manner in which I construe the self here as the embodiment of dasein? Especially in our “postmodern world” where interpretation is all the rage. For many, religion is just another cafeteria line from which to pick and choose the God least likely to impose actual onerous obligations on you. Religion-light as it were.

On the other hand, the fanatics…

[iambiguous]

From the Philosophy Now forum…

@iambiguous

One thing we can conclude is that your own Christian God has yet to provide mere mortals with a Script that leaves no doubt whatsoever as to what constitutes evil behavior. And, given Judgment Day, you would think that might be important to Him.

@Immanuel Can

What? Because they continue to disagree with the “Script” he HAS given them? Why would the obduracy of man count as evidence against there being such a Script."

That doesn’t seem to follow at all.

Are you telling me that the omniscient God of Abraham could not come up with a Scripture such that the terrible inquisitions, crusades, and wars fought down through the ages between Christians, Muslims and Jews over what God’s words meant couldn’t instead have been entirely avoided?!

And what of those born before the alleged birth of Christ? Those who never even heard of Christianity? What of those who go to the grave worshipping an entirely different God precisely because no one ever brought your God to their attention?

What of their fate on Judgment Day?

Also, it seems reasonable to conclude that since down through the ages historically, and across the globe culturally, and given all of the uniquely personal experiences any one individual might accumulate in his or her life, moral relativism would be all but inevitable.

@Immanuel Can

It doesn’t at all seem obvious. An objective reality is always objective, regardless of the opinions or “personal experiences” people have. One’s opinion about the laws of surface tension will not decide whether or not one can walk on water, and one’s “personal experiences” do not invalidate the law of gravity.

Again, unbelievable. Gravity is applicable to all men and women down through the ages and across the globe. No exceptions.

But people born hundreds or thousands of years ago, and in countless cultural contexts producing any number of conflicting moral and political agendas…objective is objective here too?

@Immanuel Can

So if morality is objective, opinions are irrelevant to the moral facts. The only question is, “Is morality reflective of an objective moral truth, or is it merely a product of human imagination?” But if it’s the latter (a product of human imagination) then it’s not merely “relative,” but rather “delusional,” since it fails (in all its forms) to correspond to any objective facts at all.

Again, the only reason you are able to assert that here is because you merely assume that this objective morality is derived from a Christian God that you basically refuse to take here…

1] to a demonstrable proof of the existence your God or religious/spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and religious/spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed…but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual’s belief in Gods and religious/spiritual faiths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God or religious/spiritual path

…given a particular set of circumstances.

@Immanuel Can

You’ve said, “People accuse each other.” Fine. How do we know what the value of those “accusations” is?

You ask them.

@Immanuel Can

No, that won’t do.

Asking them if they personallly believe their own “accusations” is different from being able to show what the value of the accusations actually is. If I accuse you of murder, and believe you did it, that does not mean my allegation is in any way justified – unless you actually did it, and I have good reasons to know you did.

Again, my point does not revolve around accusing someone of murder, but in establishing that the accusation itself is warranted because it can be established in turn that murder itself is immoral. And [of course] what you do here in order to “establish” that is to insist that such things ever and always go back to the subjective, rooted existentially in dasein assumptions you make about the Christian God! Around and around you go!!

Just as those who worship and adore an entirely different God will.

Meanwhile…

Where is this God? Are you able to produce Him? demonstrate to us why we should accept your own “private and personal” set of assumptions?

No, of course not. Instead, yours is just another leap of faith, another wager.

Instead, it’s my point that in a No God world, Evil is merely that which someone believes exists “in their head”.

@Immanuel Can

Right. In other words, it’s a delusion. Nothing more.

But what isn’t a delusion are the conflicting behaviors themselves.

@Immanuel Can

That behaviours “conflict” does not show them to be evil. The most it can show is that they are incommensurable. But they could both be good, or both evil, or both indifferent.

Again, let’s bring this down to Earth.

Here are the scheduled executions coming up Texas.

tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr … tions.html

Now, given your own understanding of the existential relationship between this behavior, objective morality and the Christian God, how are we to understand “incommensurable” here?

Now, from my frame of mind in a No God world, there does not appear to be a way for philosophers to establish if capital punishment is in fact either Good or Evil behavior. Instead, different individuals having led [at times] very, very different lives will be predisposed existentially to embrace conflicting political prejudices.

What say you?

Instead, you bring it “down to Earth” given a different context…

@Immanuel Can

Example: my desire to buy ice cream for a party and your insistence we should use the money for cake could be incommensurable: but they are in no way evil. They’re just incommensurable if there isn’t enough money for both.

Well, at least there is no mention of pixies and unicorns.

@Immanuel Can

In fact, an Atheist can’t even coherently say that conflict among people itself is “evil.” He could as easily think it’s just the evolutionary process doing its usual work of eliminating some and allowing others to thrive at their expense.

More to the point [mine] atheists who subscribe to moral nihilism as I understand it do come to conclude that human conflict in a No God world that is essentially meaningless and purposeless, ending for each of us one by one in oblivion, is neither good nor evil.

Sans God, how could it possibly be either one?

On the other hand, this can be no less but somewhere in between an educated and a wild ass guess given “the gap” and "Rummy’s Rule.

I mean, given just how utterly insignificant “I” am in the context of “all there is”, what could I possible really know about any of this.

It’s just that I suggest in turn that this is applicable to you too. Indeed, that’s why I suspect further it is so important for those like you to believe in things like Christian Gods. Something, anything to anchor I in.

Try this…

Go here: sciencechannel.com/show/how … ks-science

Watch a few episodes in order to grasp just how profoundly mysterious “all there is” is. See if you can connect them to your Christian God.

[iambiguous]

Religion does not determine your morality
From The Conversation website

Right and wrong

Experimental evidence suggests that people’s opinion of what God thinks is right and wrong tracks what they believe is right and wrong, not the other way around.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues surveyed religious believers about their moral beliefs and the moral beliefs of God. Not surprisingly, what people thought was right and wrong matched up pretty well with what they felt God’s morality was like.

Now ask yourself this: where do their opinions come from? How about this: through one or another complex intertwining of their religious indoctrination and their own distinctive, idiosyncratic experiences all jumbled up in their relationships with others and the particular sequence of information they happened to bump into through newspapers, books, magazines, movies and the like. Thus, as with fingerprints, no two minds here are ever really going to be alike.

On the other hand, that doesn’t stop most from insisting that their own take on God has nothing to do with any of that. No, they have convinced themselves they really are able to capture God so as to capture precisely what God has commanded of us in our quest to choose a righteous path.

Then Epley and his fellow researchers attempted to manipulate their participants’ moral beliefs with persuasive essays. If convinced, their moral opinion should then be different from God’s, right?

Wrong. When respondents were asked again what God thought, people reported that God agreed with their new opinion!

Why might this be the case? My own conjecture here revolves around what I call the “psychology of objectivism”. Once you come to invest the meaning and the integrity of I in a particular moral narrative, that becomes the source of your “comfort and consolation”. And not even God and “persuasive essays” are going to come between you and that. You see what you already know. And with luck for your “peace of mind” all the way to the grave.

[iambiguous]

Religion does not determine your morality
From The Conversation website

So where do our morals come from, then, if not from religion? That’s a complicated question: There seem to be genetic as well as cultural components. These cultural components are influenced by religion, to be sure.

Yes, but which religion? Revolving around which alleged God over the length and breadth of thousands of years in communities that worshipped and adored every imaginable rendition of Him that, well, could be imagined. And then all of the No God facsimiles with their own [to me] wholly unintelligible No God immortality and salvation.

Then we pile on all of the No God Period secular fonts derived from the simple fact that when human beings interact there is no getting around the absolute necessity for “rules of behavior”. Prescriptions and proscriptions which reward this and punish that.

And then when, re Marx, surplus labor derived from our more recent political economies allowed for the existence of philosophers, those able to concoct all manner of “philosophical” narratives, it still doesn’t change that basic reality.

From or not from religion, nature more or less than nurture, morality comes from the very existence of the human condition itself.

Thus…

This equation happens even for atheists, who often take up the mores of their culture, which happens to have been influenced heavily by religions they don’t even ascribe to. So it’s not that religion does not effect morality, it’s just that morality also impacts religion.

Atheists don’t score differently than religious people when given moral dilemmas. Clearly, we all have morality.

Whether you’re religious or not, morality comes from the same place.

Of course, all I do is to explore that “place” given my own set of assumptions here. Though, unlike most, the “place” I’ve come to has resulted in my own moral philosophy having been deconstructed into a “for all practical purposes” fractured and fragmented sense of futility. I don’t see the glass either half full or half empty…but having fallen to Earth and been shattered in a thousand pieces.

And all derived from the assumption that a God, the God does not exist.

Though, by all means, if you can convince me that He does, give it your best shot.

[iambiguous]

Why are people calling Bitcoin a religion?
The Conversation website
by Joseph P. Laycock
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Texas State University

Read enough about Bitcoin, and you’ll inevitably come across people who refer to the cryptocurrency as a religion.

[b]Religion:

1] “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”
2] “a particular system of faith and worship.”
3] "a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.[/b]

Given religion in its broadest sense there are any number of human behaviors that can be described as religious. Certainly some construe capitalism as a religion. Those like Ayn Rand worshipped and adored the almighty dollar by eschewing all “supernatural” components and insisting that philosophically a rational mind could defend capitalism as the most logical and epistemologically sound economy. And then all that follows from this in regard to social and political interactions.

Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.”

Okay, Bitcoin is, what, a new currency? You use it as a means to purchase those things that then revolve around whatever you think yourself into believing the ends in your life should be. You might use it to sustain your religious beliefs or your political prejudices or your preferred “causes”. Just as the accouterments of any particular religion are used to deepen your faith there.

But how then, as with traditional religion, is it more than a means to an end? How does it make sense to worship and adore Bitcoin as one would worship and adore a God or an ideology or a school of philosophy?

In Austin, Texas, there are billboards with slogans like “Crypto Is Real” that weirdly mirror the ubiquitous billboards about Jesus found on Texas highways. Like many religions, Bitcoin even has dietary restrictions associated with it.

On the other hand, where do the Bitcoin zealots come down on immortality and salvation? Bitcoin only on the other side?

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

So… it’s the same idol it’s always been. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

all the volcanoes blow up

[MagsJ (..a chic geek)]

_
If nobody loves you, at least (your) God does.

[iambiguous]

Why are people calling Bitcoin a religion?
The Conversation website
by Joseph P. Laycock
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Texas State University

Religion’s dirty secret

So does Bitcoin’s having prophets, evangelists and dietary laws make it a religion or not?

As a scholar of religion, I think this is the wrong question to ask.

The dirty secret of religious studies is that there is no universal definition of what religion is. Traditions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism certainly exist and have similarities, but the idea that these are all examples of religion is relatively new.

Now, why might that be?

Perhaps because, as I suggest over and again, things like religion are in fact rooted existentially in different historical, cultural and uniquely personal contexts. Going all the way back to the caves. And what makes the modern rendition what it is revolves largely around the fact that in the modern world science has yanked “the gods” out from under most and made it all more and more about a God, the God.

The word “religion” as it’s used today – a vague category that includes certain cultural ideas and practices related to God, the afterlife or morality – arose in Europe around the 16th century. Before this, many Europeans understood that there were only three types of people in the world: Christians, Jews and heathens.

Indeed, the vaguer the better when it actually comes down to demonstrating that your religion is the only one that counts in regard to morality and immortality. Of course that’s the beauty of faith though. You can believe something even when having no demonstrable reasons to.

So, for those who worship and adore Bitcoin, only those among them who also worship and adore one or another traditional God and religion have all bases covered.

Just out of curiosity, does that include anyone here?

I’m trying to imagine Ayn Rand’s reaction to Bitcoin. She worshipped and adored the almighty dollar. But she was also rather adamant that you can’t take those dollars with you to the other side. Not if the other side doesn’t exist.

[iambiguous]

Why are people calling Bitcoin a religion?
The Conversation website
by Joseph P. Laycock
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Texas State University

This model – when "many Europeans understood that there were only three types of people in the world: Christians, Jews and heathens – shifted after the Protestant Reformation when a long series of wars began between Catholics and Protestants. These became known as “wars of religion,” and religion became a way of talking about differences between Christians. At the same time, Europeans were encountering other cultures through exploration and colonialism. Some of the traditions they encountered shared certain similarities to Christianity and were also deemed religions.

More to the point [mine] how is the rift between Catholics and Protestants – same God, different narratives – related to the historical existence of the capitalist political economy. And what does this tell us about what mere mortals came to believe back then and how that was connected historically to such profound changes as the death of feudalism [in Europe] and the birth of the industrial revolution? God and religion construed in a whole different light precisely because the way people interacted economically shifted the focus from “the next life” to “this life”, from “we” to “I”, from monarchy to republic, from the ecclesiastics to the captains of industry and their cronies in the government

After all, would the term Bitcoin even be around had there been no capitalist political economy to give birth to it.

As religion scholar Russell McCutcheon argues, “The interesting thing to study, then, is not what religion is or is not, but ‘the making of it’ process itself – whether that manufacturing activity takes place in a courtroom or is a claim made by a group about their own behaviors and institutions.”

The making of it. And concomitantly how this or that denominational Scripture comes to reconfigure The Word in order to accommodate a God, the God, my God to the changes that unfold out in the world historically and culturally. How re those like Marx you can’t more fully understand the social and political superstructure without first grasping the fundamental components of the economic base.

[MagsJ (..a chic geek)]

_
Everything is a religion, to those that don’t actually know what religion really is.

I am Rishi, don’t expect too much from me, ergo… a minimal mind, devoid of clutter and others’ circumstance.

[iambiguous]

Why are people calling Bitcoin a religion?
The Conversation website
by Joseph P. Laycock
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Texas State University

Critics highlight irrationality

With this in mind, why would anyone claim that Bitcoin is a religion?

Some commentators seem to be making this claim to steer investors away from Bitcoin. Emerging market fund manager Mark Mobius, in an attempt to tamp down enthusiasm about cryptocurrency, said that “crypto is a religion, not an investment.”

And, sure, that’ll work with/for some. Those who connote religion with mumbo-jumbo supernatural gibberish for the weak-minded. On the other hand, to the extent that it does become a part of global economy there will be those who don’t worship and adore it but are more than willing to pursue it if it means sustaining their true religion: the bottom line.

And then those who go here…

His statement, however, is an example of a false dichotomy fallacy, or the assumption that if something is one thing, it cannot be another. There is no reason that a religion cannot also be an investment, a political system or nearly anything else.

Religion can be practically anything under the sun if you choose to call something a religion. And for whatever personal reason you need to think of it as a religion. Religion by its very nature – connecting the dots between “I” and “all there is” – is going to be a profoundly subjective rendering of reality. How can mine possibly be the same as yours or his or hers? Overlapping perhaps but understood in precisely the same way?

Mobius’ point, though, is that “religion,” like cryptocurrency, is irrational. This criticism of religion has been around since the Enlightenment, when Voltaire wrote, “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.”

In this case, labeling Bitcoin a “religion” suggests that bitcoin investors are fanatics and not making rational choices.

Here, regarding this “religion” “I” – rooted almost entirely in dasein – am at a loss. I know practically nothing about either Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. So I can only leave it to others who do to squabble over that. As for religion, fanaticism and rationality, it depends [for me] on the extent to which someone insists that their own religion is the One True Path to morality on this side of the grave and/or immortality and salvation on the other. Insistence without actual demonstrable proof.

That’s everywhere here. And, when confronted with it, I’m more inclined towards the “psychology of objectivism”. A belief in God and/or religion because it comforts and consoles you to believe it…and because it provides one with an anchor for the One True Self. Or the Soul.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

meme is life

[iambiguous]

Why are people calling Bitcoin a religion?
The Conversation website
by Joseph P. Laycock
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Texas State University

Bitcoin as good and wholesome

On the other hand, some Bitcoin proponents have leaned into the religion label. McCook’s articles use the language of religion to highlight certain aspects of Bitcoin culture and to normalize them.

For example, “stacking sats” – the practice of regularly buying small fractions of bitcoins – sounds weird. But McCook refers to this practice as a religious ritual, and more specifically as “tithing.” Many churches practice tithing, in which members make regular donations to support their church. So this comparison makes sat stacking seem more familiar.

You tell me.

My own main concern with religion revolves around connecting the dots between morality on this side of the grave and immortality on the other side. To the extent that some here might construe Bitcoin as a religion they are really talking about what I would call objectivism. And here it could be Bitcoin, it could be anything.

Objectivists are those who think that they are in touch with the “real me” – the soul? – and that this real me is in sync with the only rational manner in which to think about something. And in thinking about it that way you are driven to behave so as to sustain this belief. Zealously at times.

What does one use Bitcoin for? To become wealthy. Why does one want to become wealthy? To be able purchase anything and everything you and your loved ones desire. Consumption [mindless or otherwise] then becoming the true religion. Bitcoin is just the means to that end.

While for some people religion may be associated with the irrational, it is also associated with what religion scholar Doug Cowan calls “the good, moral and decent fallacy.” That is, some people often assume if something is really a religion, it must represent something good. People who “stack sats” might sound weird. But people who “tithe” could sound principled and wholesome.

Okay, you stack sats. That may or may not over time earn you money. But how likely is it to bring you immortality? And as a moral issue doesn’t it basically revolve around sustaining your own selfish interests. So, how might any particular individual might construe all of this in terms of how they have come to understand religion?

You tell me.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

1. I don’t tithe. Also: The church is not a building/business. God owns this. When I make money I don’t have to pay back, it will go to where God tells me to spend it (including church). And probably places like Taco Bell, tbh. And spoiling my grandkid(s).

2. It is not possible to buy a stairway to heaven.

3. Store up your treasures in heaven. This world is a sandcastle for the tides.

[iambiguous]

“God is dead”: What Nietzsche really meant
The death of God didn’t strike Nietzsche as an entirely good thing. Without a God, the basic belief system of Western Europe was in jeopardy.

Scotty Hendricks at Big Think website

It has been more than 130 years since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “God is Dead” (or Gott ist tot, in German), giving philosophy students a collective headache that’s lasted from the 19th century until today. It is, perhaps, one of the best known statements in all of philosophy, well known even to those who have never picked up a copy of The Gay Science, the book from which it originates. But do we know exactly what he meant — or, perhaps more importantly, what it means for us?

Is this a headache for you? Or are you convinced that not only do you know what Nietzsche meant by this but how close he came to grasping the most rational manner in which to encompass the death of God?

Your own understanding of it of course.

My understanding of it starts with the assumption that by “God” we must go all the way back to an understanding of existence itself. After all, aren’t Gods invented as a way in which to zero in on the ultimate answers to the ultimate questions:

1] why does something exists and not nothing?
2] why this something and not something else?

Then the part beyond the ontological itself…coming up with an actual teleological purpose for something instead of nothing.

Finally, it all coming down to your own individual purpose on this side of the grave. A purpose that can only be relevant given the assumption that “I” continues on the other side of the grave as well.

Nietzsche was an atheist for his adult life and so he didn’t mean that there was a God who had actually died, but rather that our idea of one had.

Though of course that is no trivial pursuit. After all, your idea of God or No God [God dead or alive] can go a long way toward motivating your behaviors with and around others. And that’s the part where actual consequences emerge.

After the Enlightenment, the idea of a universe that was governed by physical laws and not by divine providence had become mainstream. Philosophy had shown that governments no longer needed to be organized around the idea of divine right to be legitimate, but rather by the consent or rationality of the governed — that large and consistent moral theories could exist without reference to God.

And what brought this on? Two things in particular:

1] the explosion of scientific discovery able to explain so much that was once attributed to God
2] the advent of capitalism and the shift from an “other worldly” religious orientation to one that focused more on how you fared on this side of the grave. Morality and the market?

This was a tremendous event. Europe no longer needed God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the universe; philosophy and science were capable of doing that for us. This increasing secularization of thought in the West led the philosopher to realize that not only was God dead but also that human beings had killed him with their scientific revolution, their desire to better understand the world.

Yes, if approached from the perspective of a general understanding of historical events. But each of us as individuals is still going to have “personal experiences” that can result in many far more truly unique trajectories.

The part I attribute to dasein.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

That we still transculturally hunger for true meaning means we haven’t killed God, but merely repressed him. That’s the reactance symptom.

Science & Faith

First, faith is just trust. It isn’t blind, but there are varying levels of evidence, as with everyone else you trust. Our reasons may be crap, but nobody trusts out of the blue. Even a child trusts bare minimum because their trust has been won by consistent parents/environment, and it has never yet been broken. They should not be shamed for such trust. It is that kind of trust that is lacking in anyone who rejects God after knowing he exists (the real God—not a poor representation). If you don’t know—if you haven’t made up your mind—if it hasn’t even occurred to you to examine the evidence without bias—you haven’t had the opportunity to trust or not. Yet.

How dark were the dark ages?

fb.watch/cyzQKt5JaH/

Correcting “Cosmos” (Neil deGrasse Tyson) on Giordano Bruno, etc.

drive.google.com/file/d/1B7Ff-p … p=drivesdk

Theistic evolution, since you probably don’t interpret cross-cultural creation narratives literally:
biologos.org/questions (when their website is working)

List of Christians in science & technology

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … technology