I am that I am

>I am that I am.
>F-fallacy, that's b-begging the question

>That which is not comprehended by the mind but by which the mind comprehends - know that...
>F-false, it's called a brain heh

Why do atheists have so much trouble with religious language?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism
youtube.com/watch?v=g9WvPi5S2BE
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Good thread.

I'm serious. There wouldn't be an atheism if this wasn't going on.

>The desecrator puts forth his strength against every fear of God, for fear of God would determine him in everything that he left standing as sacred. Whether it is the God or the Man that exercises the hallowing power in the God-man — whether, therefore, anything is held sacred for God’s sake or for Man’s (Humanity’s) — this does not change the fear of God, since Man is revered as “supreme essence,” as much as on the specifically religious standpoint God as “supreme essence” calls for our fear and reverence; both overawe us.
>The fear of God in the proper sense was shaken long ago, and a more or less conscious “atheism,” externally recognizable by a wide-spread “unchurchliness,” has involuntarily become the mode. But what was taken from God has been superadded to Man, and the power of humanity grew greater in just the degree that of piety lost weight: “Man” is the God of today, and fear of Man has taken the place of the old fear of God.
>But, because Man represents only another Supreme Being, nothing in fact has taken place but a metamorphosis in the Supreme Being, and the fear of Man is merely an altered form of the fear of God.
>Our atheists are pious people.

Bang on.

Why do religious people have such a hard time defending their beliefs without using strawmen and ad hom?

Why do atheists assume the most basic and shallow ideas of God, the soul, etc. are automatically representative of religion as a whole?

Learn what ad hom is you pleb

Can god (not just your God, any god) be proven to be real, and not just argued into existence using bullshit sophistry and/or taken on faith?

If not then I'm not even gonna bother. The risk of either being deceived by another human or falling to self-delusion is too high if you HAVE to take it on faith.

>God is an empirical phenomenon out there you have to find and then verify in a lab
>faith is just taking someone else's word for it

Exhibit A. What an immature, simplistic view of such a complex subject

Fine, fuck it, I'm leaving.

Some people's minds just don't grasp the whole concept of faith. I bet you think it's a disorder or mental illness, too.

Maybe you should provide your argument for god's existence instead of being a passive aggressive shithead.

>I don't grasp faith

lol

god is a metaphor. Is their literally a big man in the sky that watches you masturbate, no. Is religion a collection of human knowledge that helps you live a full life, yes. the guidelines they contain can be helpful in determining who you are, where you belong.

Many people use a very literal interpretation, and that can be find for guiding the sheep, for people who want to look at it in a more abstract way it can be very educational.

In the end, if you got what you needed from religion then the existence of a god is not important .

Existence is, therefore there is a ground for existence. The ground has been personified as a personal God. QED.

>god is a metaphor.
...but that's the same as God not existing. I seriously don't get this autism. as though calling something a metaphor is deep in some way. really it's just meaningless dribble that dodges the question. I can learn from religion without accepting it and I can enjoy it's stories without believing them.

>I am that I am.
>F-fallacy, that's b-begging the question
please give an example of any atheist saying this

...

>. I can learn from religion without accepting it and I can enjoy it's stories without believing them.

Exactly, that is the point. You don't need to believe in a father literally in the sky watching you. Unfortunately some people do because they don't understand the abstract. If the person needs their faith in god than who am I to deny it.

Removing that faith wont suddenly turn them into a better person, it would just shatter that worldview, its cruel. Should we prevent religious organizations from doing awful tings, yes, but religion in general is to necessary to just remove.

The symbolic is generally more evocative of the divine and transcendent than the literal, yes. Do you really think God was swimming around in an ocean when Genesis refers to the "waters of the Deep", or do you think it's referring to the fluid and unstable nature of primordial chaos? Bruh pls, it doesn't dodge the question, it renders the question moot, a product of inadequate understanding

Good reply.

I've never seen a criticism of the religious viewpoint that's a hair above school of life-tier.

Let me supply you one then, user. "religious" is a little bit of a broad category, and I'm not familiar enough with say Buddhism to truly give a refutation for it. so I'll stick with what I know: Christianity.

Here's a fairly simply proof I've come up with to say that Christianity is incorrect. First of, according to the gospels Jesus believed the Torah was written by Moses. Second of all, as part of the Godhead Jesus is nearly omniscient, with the exception being the day that the world will end, which only the Father knows. Third, according to what we know now it is impossible for Moses to have written the Torah. This is because Moses lived between 1400 and 1200BC. the 1400 approximate comes from if you accept the biblical dating and 1200 if you accept the theory that the Exodus occurred under Ramses II's reign. Until about 1000BC Hebrew wasn't a language. yes, it's predecessor did, but that is like calling Latin Italian. Even inscriptions from 1000BC are difficult to read because they don't follow the same rules as biblical hebrew. very little of the bible is in hebrew that is considered to date back to around 1000BC, these being the Song of the Sea from Exodus chapter 15 and the Song of Deborah from Judges chapter 5. the rest of the bible is from Monarchical times. Deuteronomy specifically, despite that it directly claims to be written by Moses, is dated to the reign of King Josiah in the 7th century in its earliest form. this means that Jesus was totally ignorant of the who wrote the Torah. Therefore he couldn't be God.

Perfectly good argument. However, the issue is not so much the author of the Torah but its content, whether or not it contains a wisdom befitting divine revelation, and except for the Jewish cultural obsession with divine law, I believe it does. Ecclesiastes is beautiful and almost Buddhist in its lamentation of the suffering life, and Job is I believe the most profound book in the Old Testament second to the opening of Genesis.

Historicity doesn't matter, whether Christ existed as he is depicted or not, the fact is a religion doesn't spring up around a cartoon character. Whether Christ was real or a fiction, his "author" was a man of a holy and remarkable. One doesn't overturn the pagan cosmic order by scribbling some shit on a napkin.

Euphoric

>However, the issue is not so much the author of the Torah but its content, whether or not it contains a wisdom befitting divine revelation, and except for the Jewish cultural obsession with divine law, I believe it does.
...You do realize that the Torah is this "divine law" which you attack? the Torah is the first 5 books of the bible. Not Ecclesiastes, not Job. Also I wouldn't consider the quality of a piece of literature to be a way to decide whether it was divinely inspired. there's plenty of deep, inspiring works of literature that have an non-religious perspective or don't talk about religion.

Also I can tell that you aren't a traditional christian by any means. You come off as the "spiritual" type who doesn't follow a specific religion, which this argument was not intended against.

I'm making a more general point that scholarly debates about what got written when are missing the forest for the trees.

This divide between religious/non-religious is a false dichotomy, I'd say all great works of art are religious insofar as they express the universal and acknowledge the spiritual yearning of man.

The "traditional" Christian is just as guilty of missing the forest for the trees. God is prior to doctrine. Attachment to the letter has produced a generation of lackadaisical Christians and rabid fedoras who believe they've refuted all of religion by dismantling the fallacies perpetrated by fundamentalists.

Here's how I see: you are a disgusting revisionist piece of shit. You are actually denying the genuineness everyone's spirituality other than your specifically unspecific special snowflake beliefs of a purposely vague transcendental One. You pick and choose texts from different religions based on whether you like them, and ignore or metaphorize the ones that are inconvenient for you. The "traditional christian", the "traditional jew", the "traditional pagan", oh yes, they all have completely misunderstood their religion because they are dumb! so are the "fedoras" and the scholars of religion! all of them miss the forest in the trees! all of that entire lot called humanity! all of mankind other than basement dwelling user

lol, yeah dude kierkegaard, eckhart, Augustine, Luther, St. John of the Cross, Tillich, Pascal, shit, even Rilke, have no idea what they're talking about because they don't settle for the lowest common denominator conception of God.

Stop embarrassing yourself you pleb

>I can provide names but no arguments
>I use the word pleb unironically
kys you pretentious shit. you are literally more cancerous in any discussion on religion here on Veeky Forums than fundie user

Lol you want an argument to convince you mainstream religions are just fronts for an inner and exclusive truth that most are not equipped to internalize? Do you really think the depth and profundity of Christian existentialism as well as its more mystic strains should play second fiddle to plebs like you because you can't engage with and intuitively process religious ideas into a holistic system?

I take "intuitively" in this context to mean that you simply decide this based on your personal feelings, without truly reasoning through it. You are a literal tard who is incapable of appreciating religion if it isn't part of some vague transcendental thing. You see pretty words on a page, take in another hit from your "herbal" vaporizer and say "I rinky dinky think this is a divinely inspired by the transcental One."

>religion isn't about the transcendent

You're slow aren't you?

>I can strawman
How desperate are you?

No, really, answer the question: why should religious holism be a fringe view compared to literalist and sterile academic interpretations you're peddling here? Is it because the idea of God being an inner reality is so much powerful than God as he is conceived by external religious authorities? Do you really believe all religions are fundamentally mutually exclusive and their differences not just reflections of innate cultural dispositions? Your arguments so far have been "nuh-uh". Start citing scripture or other religious texts, point out these supposedly unresolvable incompatibilities and maybe I'll stop laughing at you for a sec.

um, you are the one actually peddling a world view. I pointed out the flaws in your method for deciding your beliefs and you have no counter argument.
>Do you really believe all religions are fundamentally mutually exclusive and their differences not just reflections of innate cultural dispositions?
absolutely not. I think, along with most scholars, that religious ideas and motifs spread like memes. Religions change, there is nothing innate about it. exclusivity is primarily something that came from monotheistic religions. Oh the Phoenicians call Hercules Baal Melqart and perhaps have a different understanding of him. that's perfectly acceptable to pagans. But this isn't the case with monotheistic religions. please tell me how Christianity's claim that Jesus is God and that you must accept this to make it to heaven and Islam's claim that this is heresy, Jesus was just a man but was a great prophet, though not as great as Muhammad. these doctrines are actually mutually exclusive.

You're appealing to the authority of these nebulous "traditional" Christians who have got it right, no different than what I'm doing.

The issue is not a reconciliation of doctrines, which is obviously impossible, but a reconciliation of their spirit. The Arabs believed they had inherited the same legacy of revelation that was imparted to the Jews and then expressed through Jesus. Mohammed was one of their own, and more importantly, they believed the Quran was latest and most succinct encapsulation of universal religious truth. Does team blue rooting for their guy somehow mean Allah and God do not refer to the same reality? While one conceived as personal, the other as absolutely transcendent, each conception owing to the particular cultural and historical dynamics, but nonetheless both referring to the supreme source and identity of reality.

Once you get into Sufism the differences in doctrine are essentially terminological. Compare the Sufi Amma, the unmanifest God, with the Kabbalistic Ayn Soph, or the unfathomable Christian Godhead/Eckhart's abysmal God? And don't even get me started with the Eastern parallels.

>moot
literally who?

Why can't people accept that religion is a byproduct of evolution and development as a means of coping and that peoples' fear of death made things spiral out of control and now people are too invested in the ebin LARPing to give it up?

>The issue is not a reconciliation of doctrines, which is obviously impossible, but a reconciliation of their spirit.
congratulations. this is the dumbest thing I've heard on Veeky Forums to date. I'm done with you. all you've done here is beg the question. the rest of it taking some similarities as evidence that those similarities are true is no different than fundamentalists taking flood myths across cultures as evidence of a global flood.

religion is about more than death, most of what religion talks about is how to live a good life. It is the collected knowledge of countless people trying to explain what is necessary to live well by way of story and metaphor.

You are correct that it is a product of evolution but you are wrong to think it can just be discarded at will and without consequences

>what is the exoteric and esoteric

lmao you're a pathetic excuse of a religious """""scholar""""", go write an article about sexism in Buddhist sangha has or whatever faggot shit is the pet topic of the month at your cuck university

I never claimed to be a scholar faggot. You have absolutely no argument for your special snowflake beliefs. go take another hit of LSD to get close to the transcendental oneness, hopefully this time your brain will become damaged enough that you will finally be unable to post here.

Hm yes anything outside my domain of reference is just hippie woo-woo. Hm yes the similarity in religious cosmologies indicates nothing but something something evolution memes!!!

Embarrassing

Do you have one?

Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism, Christian mysticism, and Jewish mysticism all speak of an unconditioned Godhead from which all contingent phenomena emerge and inevitably return to, even in some cases the personal creator God. How do you account for this similarity? "Memes" isn't an argument retard, you don't adopt the religious views of another culture just because, and I'm gonna need some scholarly resources on supposed cross-pollination between Sufism and Taoism or whatever bullshit hypothetical scenario you're gonna run by me.

yes yes, and the Babylonians and Aboriginals both spoke of a global flood. give me an actual reason to accept these ideas, not just appealing to traditions that you think are pretty cool

>Thinks the flood myth is meant to be taken literal
wew kiddo.

>think it wasn't because lol I'm so deep I can read things as metaphors
Do you really think that this oral tradition from the Aboriginals isn't literal? go home, Origin, just because something seems silly to you doesn't merit interpreting it as non-literal

>all these isolated cultures independently arriving at the idea of an unconditioned reality
>this can't indicate something common to all consciousness that transcends superficial labels because something something the flood

retard

>some of these cultures*
>probably doesn't indicate something*

buddy, I'm still waiting for an argument other than that several people have come up with similar ideas. The global flood is the same damn thing. if similar ideas across cultures is your standard of proof, then there really was a global flood.

Who are you quoting?

Atheism is just a form of autism. Just look at /pol/. Most of those retards can't even tie their own shoelaces.

>Atheism is just a form of autism. Just look at /pol/. Most of those retards can't even tie their own shoelaces.

Are you implying /pol/ is an atheist board? They are very clearly christian or at least larp as christians and boy do they hate the jews. They are probably the most religious board on the site.

The Christian - God
The Islamic — Allah الله
The Heraclitian - Logos
The Pythagorean - Apeiron
The Hesiodic - Chaos
The Parmenidean or Neoplatonic - One
The Platonic - Form of the Good
The Chinese - Tian, Tao and other names
The Jewish - Ein Sof
The Vedic - Rta
The Indian - Brahman or Parabrahman
The Buddhist - Dharma
The Japanese[nb 1] - Amenominakanushi
The Korean - Haneullim
The Mesoamerican - Teotl or Hunab Ku
The North American - Great Spirit
The Sumerians - Anu or Dingir
The Egyptian[nb 2] - Amun
The Slavic - Rod
The early Indo-European - *Dyeus Phiter
The Roman - Deus Ignotus ("Unknowable God")
The Sufi - Al-Haqq
Spinozistic Nature
The Kantian - noumena (as opposed to phenomena)
The Schopenhauerian - Will
Aldous Huxley's "Ground of Being"
F.H. Bradley's "Absolute"
Heideggerian - Being, Thing
Lacanian - Thing

Just go there and ask them about God. You will have dozen fedoras and pagans jumping at you. True christians are welcomed there less than on reddit.

There is a weekly catholic thread up right now, I don't know if they are real or not but it appears real to me

>The Slavic - Rod
>That thing that we know little to nothing about is totaly slavic idea of the absolute, just trust me goy.

Lol still waiting for an argument why archetypal ideas repeating across space and time don't reflect a universal religious understanding.

I didn't say this proves the existence of the Absolute, I said it proves the nature of the Absolute as something innate to the religious consciousness, which you haven't even come close to refuting. You're legitimately autistic

Yeah. It's a contaiment thread. /pol/ is just a safe space for blood-worshipping fedoras.

Ironically Origen thought the flood was literal.

>I said it proves the nature of the Absolute as something innate to the religious consciousness
but it absolutely isn't. this goes against the vast majority of religious beliefs which feature petty spirits and personal intervening gods. they meet the same standard that you give for deciding that the transcendental One is real, in that they are common across cultures, even those that are isolated. I don't accept this, or your's. and I'm still waiting for that argument.

Various polls in the past have consistently shown that /pol/ is majority Christian. The fedora's are just the most vocal most of the time. You know, noisy minority and all.

what? Why would the ultimate reality be refuted by the very phenomena it is supposed to produce by definition? These are not mutually exclusive, you can have spirits and you can have the source of those spirits. There are levels to being: from matter/non-being at the bottom to the apex of manifestation, the personal God, to the unconditioned, transcendent Absolute. Are you kidding me with this shit? Your arguments are pedestrian.

interesting. it's the opposite here on Veeky Forums

>Your arguments are pedestrian.
as opposed to your total lack of arguments? and in your totally unsupported claim you've already assumed that there is only one personal god, which contradicts what I was talking about. certainly you can add the general ideas that you speak of to a system that has petty spirits, but they are two separate claims. Now give me a reason to accept either one of these claims.

>Various polls in the past have consistently shown that /pol/ is majority Christian.
That's funny. Every single one i saw so far was around 50% atheist. Even if you put together protestants with orthodox/catholic anons they aren't in majority.

>there have to be two personal God's because one is yahweh and the other is called Allah

Christ almighty you are autistic. I pretty handily prove that all religions and even a number of philosophies have an idea of an absolute and transcendent reality and that religious pluralist has to account for these similarities, and your counterargument is... all religions have concepts of spirits and gods, too. Were you born this way or did your daddy donkey punch you too hard?

It's not that hard to guess why all those cultures had a concept of some uber-god. There is always someone stronger, someone who is higher than you are. Same thing must be true also to deities. So if you don't want to add super-gods on top of each other into perpetuity you should probably create one that is all powerful. Same way kids always end up screaming that their father is infinitly more powerfull than your father.

>there have to be two personal God's because one is yahweh and the other is called Allah
my god, wtf is this strawman? you do realize that many religions have multiple gods? that many religions have a particular spirit in this tree that is totally unique from the spirit in that tree over there? seriously, are you this desperate? and all you can do is strawman me and call me autistic? Jesus Christ.

Do you really think argumentation plays no role in proof? Pleb scum - what do you think a Proof is? lol

This nigga thinks I'm talking about super-god and not that which is beyond being as such.

>he doesn't see the archetypes operating behind the individual cultural manifestation

Paternal Sky Gods: Zeus, Anu, Odin, Jade Emperor
Solar deities: Horus, Apollo, Jesus, Krishna, Ameratasu
Chronic and chaotic forces that threaten the divine order: Typhon, Apep, Nidhogg
Trickster deities that possess arcane knowledge: Thoth, Hermes

I'd have kept it civil if you didn't start tweaking at me, esp when it's obvious you don't know shit about shit

>You must be Christian to hate Jews
>You must be religious to hate Jews
you won the retarded sediment reward

Oh, yes you mean something so super special, beyond our grasp and powerful that it can't be even named. Unless said name is YAHWEH, then it's alright.

>that it can't be even named
And you accuse others of stawmanning. tsk tsk fedora.

How is Typhon chronic? He was one-time occurrence. He also was son of Gaia send by her to kill olympians for their crimes against her children, not to destroy any kind of order. He is closer to early depictions of Seth than Apep.

You aren't talking with one guy.

The Olympians are the principle of cosmic order in the Greek mind. Typhon is cthonic because first, he's literally the child of the earth, second because he hails from a darker, more primordial region of being, closer to Chaos than Cosmos. Nearly every Greek myth is about some heroic soul, always a solar personality, overcoming dark forces that threaten to return the world to the nullity of the primordial Chaos.

Compare, also, Seth being defeated by Horus, a solar figure, where the emptiness of the desert that Seth represents is the Egyptian equivalent of a blank and meaningless chaos

Very good post. The problem is atheist, agnostics

>Christian persecution complex
Simply eric.

>emptiness of the desert that Seth represents is the Egyptian equivalent of a blank and meaningless chaos
It's more likely about struggles between lower and upper egypt. But sure, let's butcher mythology until everything fits nice labels.

Very good post. The problem is anti-religious people wouldn't even know where to begin when it comes to metaphysics, mysticism, perennial tradition and the like. It takes time and a desire to learn.

People have a simplistic view of religion. They think it doesn't go beyond sunday school level discourse. Anything which really challenges their sensibilities is going to be dismissed. They fear what they don't understand which is why the mere idea is hostile.

>Christianity has always been persecuted science and free thinkers!
> "C-Christian persecution complex "
Unlike fedorians, Christians truly are persecuted in the world.

Kill yourself faggot. In most places in the world christians are STILL killed for their beliefs unlike your dumb ass.

>politicizing a myth that is obviously about spiritual themes with a bit more heft and universal significance than muh ebin secular ""religious"" """""scholarship""""""

Jesus Christ you are some of the most bloodless, unimaginative and dull-minded people around.

I'm fuckin saying nigga. I'd be stoked if someone would argue against these ideas on the level these ideas are on, but so far it's been shit flinging from the peanut gallery

Why is everything must be about universal spiritual themes for you guys?

Fedoras simply lack mental capacity for it. There is significant overlap between autism and atheism.

Start with this
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism

Autism is also associated with high IQ

This just confirms my suspicion that I'm to smart for religion

And this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism
Simple Wikipedia pages. The problem is you have no interest in it.

...

>Autism is also associated with high IQ
youtube.com/watch?v=g9WvPi5S2BE

Huh? I've studied Hermeticism. It's dope.

>myths are primarily about political conflict and not the foundational themes of a religious culture

What the fuck bizarro world you living in?

Who are you quoting?

Myths are primarily a means to find some understanding of the surrounding world, not a handy tool to be used millenia later to prove existence of christian god.

Name these 'most places.'

Lmao my dude you're literally impaired.

Not enough.

I've literally seen a complex, logical deductive argument for God on Veeky Forums before.

Hell, Emerson wrote about God and deduced him from nature.