Spiritual Existence Disproved

Break it down now! detrop, I’m counting on you to give me hell. Don’t disappoint me. :slight_smile:

Karl Marx, 1844

The profane existence of error is discredited after its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis has been disproved. Man, who looked for a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflection of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance of himself, only an inhuman being, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.

Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked, is to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics…

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved forsaken, despicable being…

The following exposition – a contribution to that task – deals immediately not with the original, but with a copy, the German philosophy of state and of law, for no other reason than that it deals with Germany…

And now for the various and misplaced writings of a young Germanic descendent, moi:

-Man in distress is man struggling to be productive with one idea, one eye, one world where reality has failed him. Man deludes himself when he creates religion. Man creates his ideal man, he reflects his nature through religion and in essence attempts becoming one through an all seeing, all knowing, all connecting super-human entity which is immeasurably withstanding of its time.

These are the technical postulates of religion.

a. God is above man’s abilities.

b. God is steward of man’s actions within man’s realm.

c. God is substantially man’s heroic opposition to chance.

These are the technical realities man is faced with.

a. Thought and futuristic proposition is above man’s current or present state and is utilized in favor of man’s will.

b. Logic and reasoning is man’s control of man’s world.

c. Choices made by man are forces repudiated of contingent existence.

-Molecules clashing together to form organisms…

Oxygen and hearts are natural occurrences of the earth and are how humans and other species operate. That’s that. Just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it makes sense to an animal or an anonymous (won’t mention a god specifically) spirit or a tree or an idea which in essence is a god, an idea. Ideas are used to create by humans but ideas don’t necessarily need a certain personality to house them because, for example, animals create subconsciously, trees create subconsciously, the atoms and fragments of matter (as it’s been shown through “the big bang”) etc. We are apart of a cycle. We are at the top of the chain as far as nature goes. We are the furthest evolved. When we use ideas to create we are further evolving these ideas and making ourselves stronger which explains why the world is turning into a larger and larger database of formed knowledge through the human brain which is its tool yada yada but I won’t go into that right now.

-The same way they haven’t conducted experiments on people in mental hospitals who claim to hear voices in their heads and communication with shadowed figures.

If someone like Jesus Christ or Mohammad were still alive today he would be classified as ill, admitted to a psychological institute, given meds, and all would go well with the world. Back then, you’d be famous and have a religion carried on for thousands of years after in your name. Now we know the reason people make those type of claims. It’s because they’re mentally unstable and cannot think logically like an average and productive person would. If you’re making unstable claims in our present day you’re not going to get very far. That type of mentality is becoming obsolete and being kept hush hush in our society.

The Voice Of The Shadows United or something catchy like that. Yeeeah.

Now, I’m not calling you crazy but I am saying that that’s what we call people who behave in odd manners and say that they are communicating with unsensory beings outside of reality.

-Yes, old faiths. Other than faiths like Scientology but there are people who are put in mental hospitals for believing in aliens. It’s only a matter of time before the whole sect will be meeting in mental hospitals rather than churches if they already don’t. They’re like Star Wars fanatics gone theist.

Do you think Greek legends actually happened? Men like Heron of Alexandria were thought to have magical powers. He invented a simple vending machine that was developed as an alter so that people believed that the gods were answering their prayers when they inserted a coin and a bird chirped.

Do you believe in Heron of Alexandria who invented the machine? Do you believe it was the gods?

Do you believe there were prophets who wrote those books? Do you believe it was the gods?

  • The brain is a vast phenomenon that needs explored. Humans deduct ideas into reality. If they cannot be deducted into reality they are invalid and useless. Religion justifies its ideas by a limited reality. The only physical evidence it has is written record of events and laws of the ideas these men posessed. Ideas lead to nothing but ideas and show no significant sign of physical evidence which the ideas are “supposedly” based on. Merely men passing down of these records of events and laws. These records cannot be trusted unless proven in which case religion is unreliable. Gods cannot be proven. Gods could not be proven then and gods cannot be proven now.

Another simple way to put this:

Ideas come from our brains; brains do not come from our ideas.

Of course, I recognize historical facts. Spiritual influence? Not so much.

-There’s an easy solution to be held, gods can’t be scientifically proven. End of story.

So, of course, books like the Qu’ran and science are going to disagree one way or another because its basis is not solid. The Qu’ran was written by a man how many years back in the middle of a desert because he was called to by(oh, sorry, it can’t be scientifically proven)this “Allah”. Allah can’t be proven, Allah is a god, Allah is the basis for all of the Qu’ran’s facts, and thus forth, is not scientifically factual.

In order for something to be a scientific fact it must be proven which cannot be done by word alone, it must be physically shown to be, indeed, a true process. Yes, the man “claimed” it actually happened and that he’s this prophet of another realm and was told to write a book for people to live and die by, but that’s it.

I can tell you about the fairies swarming in my garden and the happy little gnomes bouncing in sync around the Daphodiles who told me to water the garden with pixie dust so that when I die I will live eternally by the wise Tulips of lala land, write a dialogue of how they ran up my phone bill and now I can’t call Reliagma on the planet of Nemase located near Arstidond Square because I’m in debt to Feleiche of Rumald’s oh so powerful company for the apes and unless I agree to its terms of usage I won’t be granted access back to my home planet Wubbly Wabba Woo, and be crowned queen of all things discarded, and in this manner ask for people of the masses to believe me because their life is in danger to Megrah the evil walrus of Aflirish who wants to destroy Reliagma’s reign of all the Stingos that grant their wishes of eternal life.

No, seirously, the book is soon to be published and I’m going to go down in history as a prophetic mastermind! Trillions of followers will be chomping at the bit to not fall for Megrah and help do what’s best for humanity by adapting their physical lives and watering their gardens with pixie dust to, thereby, act diligently unto Reliama’s commands in a sequential issue. That will be my factual basis of our religion’s claims and the reason for our existence and those who don’t follow it will eternally be kept in a dark box that smells like Spinach but feels like red by Adrewn the brother of Megrah.

What? You don’t believe me?

Well, you’re…you’re wrong I say! You’re all wrong! Face your dooooom, live your life against Reliagma’s will and you’ll be sorry.

It’d be much more liberal and sensible to accept that I’m a nut, not a prophet, and that there is no basis to my claims and that no one should follow such a whacky theory because it can’t be proven.

Tell me how the nonsense I just imagined is anymore senseless than your religion. They’re people who live on the planet earth, they could be sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, neighbors, citizens, and yet they’re debased and ranked as if they were more or less human than one another because they make individual choices and live under varying pretenses. As if they could determine characteristics of their judgement to judge characteristics of someone else’s.

It’s crazy. It really is. There is no science to it, just words and words represent ideas and ideas can be true or false and we judge them on the sensual confirmations of our bodies like hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, feeling and if they aren’t being confirmed by our senses that would clarify whether a tree made a sound when a branch fell, looks green and brown, tastes like bark and dirt, smells like sap, and feels rough, the assertion that it was a frog would be untrue because a frog represents its own sensual confirmations. So, if we live in a conscious realm that relies on only senses for the sole sake of be intertwined by ideas to judge its being we are being unconscious to the senses when we deny them and base our ideas on the pure assertion without confirmation.

Do I make myself clear?

-My fascist-“like” views.

Here’s my One-Point Plan: One world order.

Everything else would be irrelevant if people didn’t feel as though they had to have their own countries, language, religion, or government. We couldn’t have just one and all get along. Oh, and education would most definitely change.

Pssh, but what I’m saying is unheard of 'cause everyone is in their own place in the world and act like they don’t need eachother. It’s a battle field and it doesn’t have to be.

Children are not taught properly. People are only separated out of ignorance. They’re taught from birth how to be faithful to one nation, one religion, one truth. What they’re being taught is false because they aren’t the only ones. There are many others which exhibit similar qualities of contradiction to one another. In as much, they believe they’re the only ones as well and, hence, we have a massive worldwide misunderstanding which is chaotic and hateful.

I’m not fascist, though the phrase “one world order” is usually connected. I’m just someone like you who wants peace and a plan.

K, this is where I take my bow and walk out of the auditorium. Elect me for world leader everyone!

Ok, in a shorter version, what are you proposing we do? I feel I’ve just read a fairy tale, but maybe I just misunderstood.

No, you did. It’s called religion.

That is your belief. What i’m saying is the whole, One world, peace for all thing is just a fairy tale, it can’t exist. Man is too flawed to be at perfect peace, at what point do you call peace, peace? Secondly you have to pin point what peace is before you can ever reach it. As far as I know, my religion does quite alot for peace if you mean everyone loving everyone else, and showing them respect, so in that sense, it’s a way of life that’s not a fairy tale. When discussing God, it’s just your opinion and it’s irrevelant in a debate.

It’s only a fairy tale to those who don’t want it to happen and to those I do frown. :frowning:

You want peace and you’re looked at as a fascist commi, possibly pro anti-Christ. Most religions today focus on one god but what if people focused on one man? How could his existence be disproved? It couldn’t. He would be a real god.

Man is only flawed out of ignorance and man is reaching closer to a one world database. Knowledge is not spread out and people are aknowledging eachother. The world has been discovered and countries have been forming alliances like the U.N.

Now, think of what God means to you. He knows all, he is eternal, he is in charge of all, but it’s belief and can’t be proven further.

Think of what a world leader could mean to you. He knows all, he can be replaced, he is in charge of all, but it’s your future and you don’t see it.

That’s the point I call peace, peace. We can’t segregate and escape from hate. Once we become one mind we will be at peace.

I’m not sure I can “break it down,” but I can ask a few questions.

I’d say that one thing which can lead to a “distressing man” is what you propose, but there is another which would work as a better wedge, and really the foundation of the entire marxist polemic; man struggling against or from within a class. That’s the whole show right there. And it certainly is a legitimate objection.

Its a wedge, which can be a subtle and swift hyperbole. You, as the writer, catch us and force us to have that opinion “failure,” if only temporarily. With a little vericundium you could go a long way with it. As it stands, your examples of “failure” are too ambiguous, I think. Like, what do you mean “eye”? Is that like third eye blind or something. I think they suck, but then again I’m not sure if I’ve heard them. Well I’ve heard them, but I couldn’t call them out if I heard it again. That’s how important they are to me.

Where were we? Oh yes. Rhetorical strength and how to make a well crafted argument.

“Where reality has failed him.” What does that mean, actually? Can reality succeed for us or something.

Look, if these are third eye blind lyrics…I’m not interested.

Now that’s something there. There’s a lot of gobbledygook involved in the marxist vein so I’m gonna point you toward my favorites, one’s which I read when I’m readin on the marxist subject. I like Feuerbach a whole bunch. Engels was beside Marx the whole time. I think he even loaned Marx money often, the broke ass bastard. (just kidding)

I like Lenin in such as way that if I were to say how much I like Lenin, I might be assasinated by a sniper from a black helicopter while I’m walking to my truck in the driveway each morning.

Some say ditch Hegel, some say keep him. Me, well I think I understand him, and I want to keep him.

(I don’t know how to tell you this, SS, but there can be a method to good politics through telling white lies…lies about God, inventing an opiate for the people.)

The problem with the theory at this point is the fact that the ideal state of man would not involve classes, and its the class alienation, according to Feuerbach, that causes man to feel unease before social conventions because he is economically competing with another class that is seperated in an unnatural way; in this case the capitalist or the bourgeois, a term Marx coined to represent a person who has no function in the process of material production of commodities. Which is to say, if he wasn’t there, you wouldn’t notice a difference. There’s about six thousand other things which I haven’t explained and frankly, I can’t possibly do it all here. And that’s just the stuff I do know, not counting what I have yet to learn.

My point is that the ideal state would not create or need the result of religion. That the very conditions that caused “religion” were no more complicated than a guy lying to another one trying to hustle him over something. If that isn’t all there is to it…imagine the explaining we would have to do. Look at Hegel. That guy was so blasted he went to a lecture without both shoes on, students have reported.

So we stick with a historical materialism and leave the religion to the aesthetic, which inevitably is all that it is to the “sensuous human” as Feuerbach called it. We cannot have white lies in the ideal state but because they wouldn’t have happened in the ideal state. A bit circular but ain’t it the damn truth?

I say that religion is a projection of the family into a supra-psychologistic hermeunetic Lacanic Jungian Freudian archetypical memetic construct. “God” is like the Cosmic Dad, in a way, or so we like to think.

I like this in a way. I also believe that it is having the belief that man is viewed objectively by a “third eye,” a God, which therefore make man’s measure somehow safely concrete and spoken for. A lifeline, sorta, one you could call to help you find the answer, you know, like “is that your final answer?” Except this God doesn’t wear a silver suit.

Now these could be good. I’m gonna respond later to them. They’re like an outline of premises, or it should be, I hope. We shall soon see. The form of the writing is altogether something different than the content.

SIATD likes this kinda stuff. He’d give you a good critique.

(edit: [ahem] more like thirty-three rather than six thousand “as the stuff I do know”)

Don’t I wish.

Everbody, please…

Man did not create the universe, the universe created man.

Knowledge did not create the unknown, the unknown created knowledge.

If you don’t like religion, go to India.
See?
It’s not so bad. :smiley:

Mattercentricism isn’t very good for the spirit having its physical experiences.

Is that the heavens calling!? Oh, wait, it’s just detrop’s 1st post. Ha.

I lub that band, you do too, admit it.

Yeah, I mean “the third-eye”. The ancient symbolism of a god head.

What we’re not satisfied with at the temporal moment we dream about futuristically. What’s not real now which we wish to be real is where reality has failed us and only our wishes can compensate for.

And the lord is a good lord! :laughing:

…?what he said? Ahahaha. Sweet bajebus.

Amen. Well, I can’t object to anything you just said because we’re on the same page for the most part. I look forward to more comments.

God and religion are not mutually inclusive.

I recall reading in The Encylopedia of American Religions where in the late seventies (if I recall) all the “leaders” of “all” the world’s religions held a conference to decide the “definition” of religion. They concluded, unanimously, I might add, that for a philosophy to be a religion it had to satisfy both of the following tenets: 1) a belief in souls, where one’s soul is a part of one that is separat(able) from one’s body and that could have existed before and could continue existing after one’s present “material” life ends, and 2) a belief in before/after life. A belief in God was not required as a tenet to define a philosophy as being a religion.

My subsequent study corroborated their findings.

Maybe that’s why I can have a relationship with God without having a religious bone in my body … and without having to mentally mold a fantasy image of God in the image of “parents”.

As for spirituality, it remains existant, not in religion’s fantasy sense, but in the secondary definitions that imply a relationship between neuroclusters – “cities” in our brainy world – and how they can “light up” our life at “night”.

With regard to other secondary definitions now moving up the definition hierarchy ladder, those that present our soul as the part of us that feels are also now getting their realistic due.

Indeed, in us westerners, our mind is where we think, and our soul is where we feel. When feelings are “difficult”, the immature tend to focus on the world where such difficulties often arise, at the sacrifice of their body. Such resultant over-thinking can compromise the feeling mechanism via lack of “reporting” usage, thus causing the thereby dominant mind to experience the soul as a zephyr-like entity that is barely there, that there is more to us than meets the mind’s eye. This loss of full experience is then rationallized by the mind to be compensationally restored in the afterlife. Interestingly, such a description does have a tendency to conjur up the word “schizophrenia” as well as remind of the asymetrical western-'man differences between the left cerebral-limbic hemisphere and the right.

So what compels one to religion at the expense of … reality?

Probably because reality just seems, at the time, too tough to take.

Foundationally, the toughest to take is an exacerbated experience of the reality of one’s mortality when experienced at too young an age. If one is afraid of dying young, then afterlife is a great remedy … and, the only one most imagine to be available in the face of overwhemling odds.

So religion is likely to disappear only when both love rules the day and the foundational needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are met throughtout the world.

I believe that negative population growth may now be a prerequisite to that.

The trick is to do so without killing anyone, no matter how old they might be … or how young … or how “bad” … or, how good.

But, for the most part, we shouldn’t be too hard on religion.

After all, heaven is a great concept …

… And as Karen Carpenter so hopefully reminds us in her hauntingly beautiful “Look To Your Dreams”, "… once conceived, once believed, fantasy’s reality’s childhood, and like a seed visions need constant care like a child would … ".

The heaven-on-earth of love and met needs isn’t such a bad idea-turned-reality to give our children. I can’t think of anything that would function better to balancingly restore our souls to be accurately experienced as being more than just a passing fairy.

The challenge is to avoid succumbing to the mental “hells” of those who have, sadly, given up not only on the real meaning of the heavenly vision, but on themselves as well.

It could be argued that they are contextually if not etymologically related and interdependent.

Suppose for a moment that language didn’t “mean” anything that would remain without the language to explain the meaning, except the objects which are signified in speaking, the intent of the communication.

The only way left to examine history is through these “material” objects’ states, since when analysing words we are really only analysing specific vocabulary sets during certain period of object states. What you would get is a set of certain characteristics which are exclusive to the conditions which existed during the time the vocabulary developed, and not the particular language.

When religion and God “words” are coupled, they indicate their meaning only by the specific material conditions that engendered them. Explaining these conditions is not neccesary to accept their existence.

We could only say “When these words were spoken, X was happening,” but here we go chasing our own tail.

How interesting that this whole thread revolves around a God concept as omnipitent creator of the universe and the attendant “religions” that grind man into subjection. Myoptic. A one world order? A religion by another name is still religion. Ideology and the reality of humanity have never matched up.

A religion isn’t factually based. A religion can’t happen. A one world can happen. And, it will.

Stop sexying up my thread, detrop. :evilfun:

:laughing: :laughing:

“Religion isn’t factually based”.

150 years ago, science wasn’t “factually based” either.
Think about it.

I noes. In this day and age it just so happens to be. We have a better understanding and larger knowledge base. Over the years science has been accumulating. Religion, well. There are alot of dead people, huh?

Whatever is “based on facts” at whatever time is only the extent of what is called fact and what is not. This of course is a langauage game; everything is factually based and neither science nor religion exist…they are but facts that are dependent on a language.

That argument doesn’t hold, even if it were used to defend science and claimed the same for religion.

Maybe there isn’t anything outside of context!

:astonished:

I haven’t sensed a spirit. I can’t personally believe in one. I gave up when I started screaming at the sky like a maniac with nothing but the realization of me screaming at the sky like a maniac.

I’ve never sensed darkenergy. I can’t personally ever touch darkmatter.

There you go.
Physical senses failing to get at allot of what is “out there”.