Religion

UrbanMysticDee
Chatty Kirin - A user who has reached a combined 1000 forum posts or comments.
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

Bae > Bay
There are a number of “academic” ideas about myths that don’t make any sense:
 
  1. Myths tell stories of real creatures, mostly aliens, because according to “ancient astronaut theory” everything is aliens.
     
  2. Myths are stupid gullible ancient people trying to explain natural phenomena.
     
  3. Myths are stupid gullible ancient people trying to explain fossils.
     
  4. Stupid gullible ancient people really believed the myths.
     
  5. Stupid gullible ancient people were diseased and misinterpreted thoughts from the right hemisphere of their brains as actual audible messages from gods (bicameralism).
     
    All the official “academic” theories seem painfully retarded. In 2020 I came up with a term for all this: “Peak Smugness”.
     
    The most likely explanation is that myths were fictional stories that people made up purposefully as fictional stories that everyone knew were fictional stories. Ancient people were no different from modern people. Ancient people were not schizophrenic, they were not ruled by aliens, they didn’t think fossils were living creatures - if they even ever found them - and they weren’t so stupid as to suppose that bird-headed men really created lightning by shooting it out of their eyes or whatever. We have evidence that Babylonian astrologers used calculus to model the orbits of planets. The Greeks accurately calculated the distance to all the visible planets and the diameter of the Earth. Ancient people were not any less rational or intelligent. In fact, since they lived in much closer proximity to nature and death than modern people they were probably MORE in tune with nature, not less.
     
    Myths were the ancient equivalent of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Ancient people went to conventions where they dressed up in silly costumes and acted out scenes from their favorite stories - which they totally knew were fake - and bought thousands of dollars of merchandise and put little sculptures of their favorite characters on shelves in their homes to look at.
     
    Imagine archaeologists from 1000 years from now looking at videos from Comic Con or something. Obviously it was some religious ritual. People from the year 2020 were irrational, rubbish beings who believed Darth Vader and the Terminator were real, and their high priests dressed up in ritual garb and performed sacred dances to propitiate the gods. Followers of these cults spent all their money on ritualistic totems of the gods and placed them in shrines in their homes to offer up incense and psychedelic substances.
     
    It’s bullshit. Everyone in ancient times knew myths were fake and they just enjoyed them for fun. People in ancient times liked making up stories just as much as people in modern times. Don’t be a smug asshole atheist who likes to denigrate ancient people to boost your own self esteem.
Anonymous #1D00
@Officer Hotpants  
This. You don’t build temples and perform burnt offerings if you don’t believe the gods are real.
 
Go read the Melian Dialogues.
 
Athens: surrender and be our slaves forever, or else we will level your city and exterminate you to the last infant
 
Melos: isn’t that kind of extreme? aren’t you afraid the Gods will punish you for such an evil deed?
 
Athens: lel
UrbanMysticDee
Chatty Kirin - A user who has reached a combined 1000 forum posts or comments.
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

Bae > Bay
@Anonymous #1D00  
How many people go to church and don’t believe it because it’s the thing to do? It’s the thing your parents raised you to do so you do it.
 
How many Jews are atheists who still support building temples and lobbying for Israel?
 
Most people in Japan go along with elaborate Shinto rituals and celebrations and they don’t really believe in Kami.
Anonymous #1D00
@UrbanMysticDee  
There are people who take this stuff seriously right now and really, truly believe in gods, really, truly believe they are real, right now. It seems a stretch to me to suggest that this is a new phenomenon and that thousands of years ago people who didn’t know how to smelt iron were going to the temple to prostrate themselves and make burnt offerings with an ironic, self-aware wink to the priests.
UrbanMysticDee
Chatty Kirin - A user who has reached a combined 1000 forum posts or comments.
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

Bae > Bay
Mahakala is the fiercest of the fierce deities in Tibet. Fierce in that 1. he frightens demons to protect people (and moreover protects reality itself: Mahakala is a Dharmapala, a deity who defends the Dharma, or universal law, from evil forces who would try to destroy the universe) and 2. he “scares straight” monks who have strayed from the path and need a serious intervention to get back on track with their meditation.
 
As a bit of a tangent this same quality is seen in the Sumerian figure of Pazuzu, who was unjustly maligned in the Exorcist movies. His frightening appearance is invoked to protect children from demons who would come in the night to kill them. Up until the 20th century really half of all children died before the age of 5. In fact, half of the 100 billion people who have died were children.
 
The great feminist icon Lilith (or Lilitu in Akkadian) has always been a demon who was responsible for murdering children. She didn’t magically become Adam’s first wife until the some Jewish fanfiction was written in the eighth century AD. But since abortion is the unholy sacrament of feminism it’s not surprising that they’ve adopted the murderer of children as their patron goddess.
 
Mahakala means “Great Time”, which is equivalent to death (also in the Kalachakra or “Wheel of Time” it is understood that time is a machine that produces enlightened beings). His skin is black since all colors mixed together make black just as all things are consumed by death and time (or sometimes dark blue, which is the color of the sky on a clear, moonless night, and I bet you didn’t know that). He wears a crown of skulls and carries a skull bowl and a flaying knife (which is typically associated with women). He along with his consort Mahakali (the goddess of the end of the world) absorb and destroy all the multiverse at the end of time and persist in the void until everything is created again in the next eon.
 
Mahakala’s animal form is the raven.
 
Here the revered Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism from 1988 to 1991 and teacher to the current Dalai Lama, is performing the Mahakala puja, a very important ritual within Tibetan Buddhism. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche wished to spend his entire life in permanent retreat but since his knowledge of the rituals of all the different Tibetan schools was unmatched by any other living person he was convinced to dedicate his life to passing on his knowledge to as many people as possible.
 
Here is a more modern talk.
 
In this video you can see an Indian dancer dressed as Mahakala. The moves to this dance are conspicuous as being those of the god Shiva (including the snake around the neck) since Mahakala is a manifestation of Shiva in Hinduism.
 
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UrbanMysticDee
Chatty Kirin - A user who has reached a combined 1000 forum posts or comments.
Liberty Belle - Sings the song of the unchained

Bae > Bay
I was watching something celebrating the Reformation, when Martin Luther - the most devil obsessed man who has ever lived - nailed 95 feces to the church door. The show was entirely the black legend, making the Catholic Church out to be the evilest thing that has ever existed and celebrating how the Protestants invented all sorts of nonsense that was discarded as superstition by the Church like burning witches and a flat 4000 year old Earth. A thousand years before Martin Luther the Catholic Church outlawed burning witches because witches don’t exist so a person cannot be convicted of a crime that is impossible to commit.
 
The talking heads REEEEE’d at the Jesuits. “They don’t take the Bible as the supreme authority! REEEEEE!!!!!” No, the Bible isn’t the supreme authority. Satan knows the Bible inside and out, front and back, better than you ever will. Jesus Christ is our supreme authority. We practice a religion called Christianity, after all, not Bibleanity. Jesus Christ is infallible, men translating and interpreting the Bible on their own are fallible. Of course we don’t want 57,000 interpretations of the Bible, because 56,999 will be wrong and that’s a whole lot of straw to sift through to find the one needle.
 
They also lied about indulgences. Indulgences were not sold, they were given as gifts for people who were particularly charitable. Charity is a virtue (except in Protestantism where hoarding money is a virtue because having lots of money is proof that God loves you. It’s not like Jesus himself said the exact opposite, that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter God’s kingdom, or that in this life you will have to suffer. Nope. Prosperity gospel! Booyah! Give money to the church.)
 
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Let us not forget what happened in the middle and end of that program, the narrator who REEEEE’d at indulgences said “If you make a tax-deductible contribution to this ministry we will give you this free gift book/DVD.” Do these people not see the massive hypocrisy of that? “We’re not “selling” this book, then we’d have to pay taxes on it. We’re giving it away “free” in exchange for a monetary contribution that exceeds the fair market value of the book. It’s totally different.”
 
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They said that both futurism and preterism are heresies invented by the Jesuits to confuse Protestants to the truth that the Pope is the Antichrist despite Protestants also believing the Pope to not be in the Bible, because they believe made up bullshit that contradicts the other made up bullshit they believe.
 
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They also REEEEEE’d at sacraments and transubstantiation.
 
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For people who claim to hold the Bible as the highest authority they sure like to twist the literal word of the Risen Lord into metaphor whenever it is inconvenient for them.
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