Religions are fairy tales for adults. Should we encourage th

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Religions are fairy tales for adults. Should we encourage them to grow up?

My mind set is close to Daniel Dennett as far as what religious people / theist should become after they grow up.

Personally, I like a lot of the social functions and appeasement of our need for fellowship, hivishness and tribalism offered by religious institutions.

youtube.com/watch?v=m5tGpMcFF7U

So I do not want to kill all religions but just encourage them to be more moral, tolerant and give equality to women and gays.

Having said the above, People and recent trends to read scriptures literally have cause many to forget that religions were invented as theatre and myth and were never meant to be read or taken literally. They were designed to seek God, not to find one.

pbs.org/moyers/journal/03132009/watch.html

Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, “The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it.”

Please listen as to what is said about literal reading.

"Origen, the great second or third century Greek commentator on the Bible said that it is absolutely impossible to take these texts literally. You simply cannot do so. And he said, “God has put these sort of conundrums and paradoxes in so that we are forced to seek a deeper meaning.”

As you can see from the following, religions and temples have always been about entertainment and fellowship.

youtube.com/watch?v=r7BHvN6rZZA

If Christianity and Islam could return to the old way of seeking God instead of idol worshiping false Gods, perhaps jihadists and other fundamental believers might chill and get along the way they have at some points in our past history.

Religions are fairy tales for adults. If this is a truth, we should encourage Christianity and Islam as well as all other religions to grow up and return to their better past of seeking God instead of idol worshiping Yahweh and Allah. Both of them are mythical and manmade Gods.

To just leave Christians and Muslim idol worshipers to continue as is means that we may never rid ourselves of their institutionalized homophobia and misogyny. The kind and moral thing to do is to try to correct our immoral religious friends to recognize their myths as fairy tales for adults. Do you agree?

Regards
DL

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Other fairy tales to add to the list:

Government
Morality
Human rationality
Social or existential progress for all
Equality
Egalitarianism
Cooperative societies
Human purpose
Virtuous politics
Benevolent or caring leadership
Selflessness
Mental illness
Love or romance
Just war
Justice
Economic equilibrium
The rule of law
Infinite growth
Nobility

These are just a few to mention.

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Mental illness?

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mental illness is not a fairy story…you are wrong as wrong can be

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None of these in your list claim to be anything more than conceptual and/or abstractions. As such they are not “tales” in any sense. I think what the OP refers to is such a thing as a false story designed to propagate a falsehood.
A “fairy tale” is a series of events that are supposed to have happened, but for which no other empirical support except the “scripture” from when they come is available.

The point here is that the story taken as true is not only evidence for the event, but the hand of god, and divine forces intervening. Not even the government claims that.
So your list is empty headed and totally irrelevant.

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Indeed.
And mental illness can the be result of fairy tales, or the reason they are believed.
A statistic a few years ago found that 40% of Americans believed that the story of Noah’s Ark was literally true.
I think you might want to consider the implications of that.
Let’s say that x% of people believed in Lord of the Rings as a literal truth, and that Sauron was once again stirring in the East.
Is this a situation that is desirable?

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Yes.

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God is just another abstraction.

I would argue that all of them on the list generate a falsehood.

By tales we could describe them as ongoing mythological social or existential metanarratives of human beings.

Let’s see if you can wiggle yourself out of that through mental gymnastics.

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It’s a game of hide and seek, right? And why not? Humans spend their entire lives playing games; naturally, they should want to worship a deity who also enjoys playing games.

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My favorite divine game is Sodom and Gammorah.

God really knows how to have fun to pass the time.

Who can forget that flood also.

God is the kid with a magnifying glass and we’re the ants on an ant mound.

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You forgot Tarot cards, palm reading and astrology and some of the other entertainment where people knowingly pay to be lied to.

Regards
DL

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They are presently trying to find out if religion causes mental problems or if a mental problem causes us to seek a God.

youtube.com/watch?v=olhCazkejPg

Regards
DL

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It has to be a game as priests and imams first tell us how mysterious, unknowable and unfathomable God is then start reaming off the books of all that they know of the unknowable and fathom of the unfathomable.

Idol worshiping believers and other fools just go along like they believe all the B.S.

Regards
DL

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I don’t need mental gymnastics. I’ve already explained why you are wrong, and you have failed to recognise it.

I’ll try once more.
God is taken as an existential reality. A Being that has volition and choice and may intervene at will in events on earth. This is qualitatively different than using abstractions such as “Equality” to explain aspirations and potential states of existence.
If you don’t know the difference, then there is no hope for you.
If I talk about “equality” it is an aspiration I would wish the legal system to operate by. When people talk about Noah, they think a real existent being intervened to flood the sin out of the world.

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Yet all of those things are taken to be existential realities also not just aspirations.

God is just a different kind of concept in comparison to all those others.

The mental gymnastics and denial is strong in this one.

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You can lead a frog with a gun to water, but you can’t knock any sense into a fool.

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Faux victory without any backing. Enjoy it.