Christianity is going to be easy.
I like other mythologies because they're interesting, they've got a lot of gods and a lot of other cultures.
Christianity only has Jesus, Moses, God and the Virgin Mary going for it. The mythology is kinda boring and very contradictory of itself. People prefer to cherry pick verses and everything to believe out of than it's intention.
The Crucifixion story and the end times prophecy are both pretty damn good stories, you have to admit.
I wish I shared your optimism but I fear it is not happenstance that it has survived for so long. I suspect that it contains enough textual material to be easily adapted over time to serve many purposes, fit many cultural mores, and exploit various aspects of human nature.
They also got Satan.
greek mythology is kinda amazing though
Yeah, I really love it because I love fantasy worlds.
And the culture around sex was like, "forget gender, just fuck whoever you want, nobody will judge you".
That really depended upon which Greeks you're talking about. For example, the Spartans said, "men fuck women for babies and little boys for pleasure."
Also "gods really like rape, except when their spouse does it, but then they only punish the mortal whom their spouse raped"
Kinda weird that out of all the various aspects of sex in greek mythology you plucked only that one aspect.
Bit inaccurate, isn't it..? No such thing as Greek gods and Roman gods... “Roman” gods are just your plain old Greek gods with fake beards, speaking Latin in a Greek accent, and wearing their togas in the Roman style... Should have used Greco -Roman gods for one door and something else (Egyptian, Babylonian, Norse... take your pick) for the other...
Sort of. Romans borrowed gods from all over the place and created their own gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_deities#Alphabetical_list
Not on that list are all the emperors who were worshipped as gods.
It is the syncretist of the pagan. You can still see it in many places of the world. They treat religion basically how Westerners treat tropes in entertainment. Oh you like that show? Check out this show that is almost the same! I have seen shrines that had crucifixes hanging next to a Buddha.
I wonder what the average lifespan for religions is
I imagine its probably all over the place, to the point an average is not very useful, because on the one hand, something like a small cult that doesnt survive the death of its founders might last just a few decades, but something like Hinduism might last thousands of years and have a very unclear date to when it starts. You'd also have the question of when a religion ends exactly, like, one that has no followers left is probably dead, but what if it changes over time until the original form is unrecognizable? Is the original dead, or does the modern form count, and if the former, when did it end? Does it count as dead if a major world religion loses that status and becomes largely irrelevant, but still has a few small communities of followers, such as with zoroastrianism? If a religion does lose all of its followers, but people later attempt to recreate and convert to it from its surviving texts or similar, does it still count, or does the revival count as a new religion?
Maybe Im missing some obvious example, but I cant really think of cases, beyond the tiny cultlike ones, where a religion dies out organically either, most examples I can think of are cases where a religion is deliberately killed off, usually by another one supplanting it and having some conquering power or converted authority forcing its members to convert to the new one.
Well some of them die when their god dies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
It is difficult. Ancestor worship is most likely the most common form of religion out there. Is a family shrine to a passed grandparent its own mini-religion?
Both the Egyptian pantheon and the Hellenic pantheon went through multiple iterations across the ages of their respective peoples. Neptune was the all father originally, then Zeus was made the patriarch of the Olympians (while Kronos created Phanes who begat the cosmos). Curiously Aphrodite was Astarte before, and Ishtar before that, and didn't just bring love and beauty, but also the Phoenician alphabet which would replace Linear-B.
And the way Christian and Jewish scripture is interpreted today is very different than how it was interpreted in the 16th century, or the 11th century, or the 6th century.
i have gone full circle and now i believe in millions of gods.
so many gods of and with all things.
gods with etsy stores.
the gods of my oil pan. the gods of my ancestors' oil pans'.
time is a god, and it will have to psychopomp itself according to the next panel of the comic.
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To be fair the Christian god is basically a Greek God with a Jewish accent.
Pretty sure that was Kratos actually
God of War 5: Kratos kills Time for taking his credit
I feel bad for religious people who have been deceived their entire lives' into a delusion. But at the same time, I almost feel no empathy when they go out of their way to do and say the most insane stuff with religion as a justification.
I feel so bad for the kids of these religious zealots. I used to live next to a family with a little girl (12/13ish) that just played/stood around in their yard alone for hours every day. She wasn't allowed to speak with anyone outside of their church ever or use the phone. She wasn't allowed to have toys or really celebrate anything ever. "Homeschooled" of course. Often she'd just sit out there crying because her mom constantly used her as a bargaining chip to guilt her dad to join their religion. She told her constantly that her dad didn't love them because he wouldn't join their faith and that he was going to hell blah blah blah. She riled her up and made her hysterically beg her dad not to leave them and go to hell on a regular basis. It was truly awful. Sometimes when her parents left she'd wonder over to the fence separating our homes and chat with us. I hope we were able to plant at least a seed of sanity with our talks. Poor girl.
Later I had a coworker stressing out about her kid having extreme night terrors and behavioral issues because she was SO scared of going to hell. I, knowing her kid was only 7, kinda laughed and said something like "did you tell her 7 year olds aren't ending up in hell?" To which she got angry, snapped at me, and said that she wouldn't lie to her daughter like that. She seemed genuinely offended that I expected her to have cared more about her young child having a mental breakdown at the age of 7 than appeasing her rancid asshole of a god.
Abhorrent parenting from stupid and small minded people all around. If that's what they deal with as kids no wonder they're so broken and incapable of rational thoughts as adults. It's SO important to keep this shit out of our schools.
Eh, “time”. I’d say so far only religion has killed other religions. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where atheism was as prevalent as it is now after the concept of religion was first formed.
If the metric used is the number of figures in the pantheon, it will be very interesting to do the math for hinduism, budism, dao and shinto.
Like it or not,
religiositybelief isn't going anywhere. Science can not provide meaning for life or the universe where we exist.What we can and should fight for is a society where belief is solely personal matter, with no room or weight on the broad public forum.
Rather than a question of adulthood vs childhood, the reality is that humans evolved certain traits and abilities that mean superstition and religion are in our nature, for better or worse, like it or no.
Humans had to become adept at determining the intent of other humans and of animals to the point where we tend to anthropomorphize animals, inanimate objects, even concepts like justice and luck and fate.
We evolved mechanisms to avoid harm by remembering past experiences and predicting future ones. Though flawed from the standpoint of rationality, these adaptations were enough to prevent extinction of humanity at large, while leaving us saddled with numerous cognitive biases that leave us more likely to believe unfounded claims of a spiritual nature.
The antidotes to irrational, superstitious thinking are knowledge and critical thinking skills. It takes time, effort, and dedication to gain the upper hand against our nature.
It may be impossible to completely overcome our nature. Still I do hope we are able to set aside the most harmful manifestations of our nature: dogmatic thinking and religious zealotry.
Logically and morally, this is an obvious conclusion, but most people are fucking idiots or apathetic towards what they perceive as 'lesser injustices.' Religious people are now existentially threatened because people are openly non-believers and since most of them lack self-reflection capabilities they get angry and aggravated and do what they can to fight for what is right in their eyes. One of the worst aspects of religion is that it makes people feel justified in doing things they otherwise never would have.
Really original that notion. I'm sure no one has ever considered it.
I also notice it was carefully considered and worded in order to avoid being considered as intolerant as the detractor to humanity it proposes to have dismantled.
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Not once gets deleted from reality during the Battle of Terra
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Uhhh don't you mean Yahweh
Eh less people would have gotten it if it said it like that
Ahura Mazda is still going strong, considering he's the deity of the oldest monotheistic religion.
Much like my old Mazda 6, nothing short of my ex girlfriend was able to kill that
More blood for the Blood God.
Glycon still has at least 7 followers. Checkmate atheism.
We should revive the cult of Dionysis.
I am also a fan of that song
Inaccurate. Neopagans and reconstructionists exist, and have growing communities. A thing doesn't have to be the most popular thing to be alive and well.
Jesus predicted this
I assume you are referencing a particular gruesome part of the book of revelations.
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Pssst, don't tell OP that the most dangerous religion now is not Christianity.
If you didn't killed the Ocean or Love then you didn't killed Poseidon/Neptune or Aphrodite/Venus. Good luck to kill the Creator(, and what S.H..e became after the Creation).
