What if all major religions were in fact worshiping eldritch horrors?

Compared to other large organizations, the exaggerated and overblown accounts of pedophilia that the media and comedians love to bring up are minuscule in comparison to places like secular public and private schools, scout organizations, even hospitals and non-Catholic churches.

While there were some terrible decisions made in regards to some of the Catholic cases, these were always done at no higher than the bishop level and condemned when exposed to the higher tiers of the organization.

Excuse the term, but pretending that a few case of pedophilia make such an enormous organization (which openly condemns the practice and works to safeguard, educate and even feed millions of children all around the world on a daily basis) evil is essentially cherry picking.

It's a fact that the Catholic church condoned, both directly and indirectly, pedophilia and acted to prevent justice in cases of pedophila. No comparison matters. That isn't okay and it can never be rationalized as okay.

If it was a failure of leadership at low level, that was also a failure of higher leadership. If you think repeated, widespread incidences of pedophilia (however small they may be as a percentage of churchgoers worldwide) which are condoned and concealed by the mother church is cherry-picking, then you are in no position to judge the evil of the Catholic church. Because your point in that instance is not to look at it with a moral lens, but to defend it from accusations of being evil.

Like I said, the position of an evil Catholic is:
>It is interesting to think about how many raped little children are tolerable matched against the vast donations given and raised by the Catholic church
And the actual moral position ought to be: >The answer is none. This isn't a fucking barter system.

The catholic church has done a lot of good. At the same time though, it has also caused mass poeverty, the crusades, repression of foreign cultures under the guise of missionary work, and more.
Even today, we are still a few years after a MASSIVE wave of pedophilia cases by priests from many different countries that the Church has deliberately and systematically covered up rather than punishing thoose responisble, with many more suspected but protected by the status of the church in many countries (try to make a case against them in Poland for example, see how you fare), and many people are still getting infected with and dying from HIV and other STD's because the Catholic church (as well as the protestants) denies the effect of contraceptives in the hope that the fear might keep people from having sex outside their marriage (ha!).

Also, if you say the church does charity, i ask "with whose money?". They do not produce anything by themselves, after all.

>this thread
I j-just wanted fun brainstorming eldritch horror cults

Welcome to Veeky Forums.

Cant stop the idiots.

We are thinking on the basest of planes.
What we need, are more eyes.

>It's a fact that the Catholic church condoned,

But it didn't. The Church condemned it, and, once again, I remind you that in comparison to other organizations its record is practically immaculate.

You are trying to say that because the Church isn't perfect, it's evil. No organization composed of people is perfect, and when you actually look at how big the larger pedophilia problem is in other organizations, the Church really does begin to appear divine.

I'm sorry, but your claim is essentially "all organizations are evil because of the sins of a few of its members, no matter how few those members are or how much good the rest of the organization does."

We're literally talking about the biggest charity in the world. The group that has done more good for more people than any other organization ever has or ever will. This doesn't excuse any of the sins it or its members may have committed, but if all you're going to do is focus on overblown media attacks and hope to condemn an entire organization on the mismanagement of any incredibly (and I mean, incredibly, with a zero and a period and a lot of zeros following it) small percentage of its lowest members, then I think I have the right to say your stance is built up on prior bias.

At least the fuckboys where allowed to live.

theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/04/claim-of-800-childrens-bodies-buried-at-irish-home-for-unwed-mothers

Then there's general abuse of the mothers there, hindering anti-AIDS efforts, massive money laundering, the German Bling Bishop who managed to blow over $40 million before they found him to embarrassing to keep, etc.

theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/04/pope-francis-church-law-paedophile-priests-catholic-bishops

Facts are things that are true.

It's hardly flawless, but compared to other organizations of its size and history (and even compared to most that are only a fraction of its size and only have a few decades under their belt), it's got a fantastic record.

And, the Church's positive contributions to humanity are on a level unmatched. Literally unmatched in just about every measure you can imagine, from its contributions to science to its tireless dedication to fighting against hunger, poverty, and injustice around the world.

You'd have to be a coddled first-world child to not be able to recognize all the good the Church does.

I do think the Catholic church as an organisation trends more evil than not, yeah. I'm fairly against the organisation of religion on this scale in general - I don't think the Catholic church is any more evil than any other large, religious organisation that has existed for more than 1000 years for example.

You are talking to someone who is, or was, a Catholic here. But I don't think that church is in any position to manage or regulate the divine anymore, and I trend much more towards the more anarchic worship that early Christians themselves practiced (as rife with sects and competing trends as that was). The Catholic church aims for a monopoly on faith, and has treated itself like a business for a great deal of its existence. It's not a trustworthy organisation.

What if all major religions were being manipulated by Eldritch horrors?

>You'd have to be a coddled first-world child to not be able to recognize all the good the Church does.
Or you know, not interested in yet-another-version-of-colonialism.

Have you read the Bible? It always amazes me when people say things like this. THE LORD is pretty much the OG cosmic horror in every sense of the word. Angels are fucking terrifying.

I don't mean that THE LORD is evil or some edgy shit like that, just, man, if you want inspiration for cosmic horrors, look no further than the Books of the Prophets. Daniel 7:9, man.

But he loves us so its OK.

>Fedora tippers
>Having read the bible
user pls

Which I personally find more novel than "all religions are evil."

What if all religions are *true*? Then you have the LORD - the friendly cosmic horror - up against all the other bizarre deities, like the old horrible things of Babylon and the humanocentric douchebags of the Greeks and Nords.

I guess then you just get Black & White, but I liked Black & White.

They're always after me lucky charms.

You're going to have to accept the fact that we are now a global society. colonialism does not exist any longer.

there's a book including this exact subject/topic/discussion.

Neo-Colonialism does

...

I think the jewish bibles dont actually claim that other gods or entitites are not real... just not to worship them. As if worship somehow confers some strategic advantage or something.

What is it about pantheisms that fall to the wayside to monotheisms?

Is the Buddha merely the world's first person to realize we're just play things for the cosmic horrors and wants us to release attachements to the material world to make our deaths the least tasteful thing they could eat?

Or is he himself an avatar or some insidious being?

>i ask "with whose money?"
That's not really a criticism though is it? Because it's true of every other charity in the world.

Well since someone already thought of the chatolic church which is a corrupt institution then let's get on the nerves of islamplophiles.

Ehem here i go:
Some 5 million years ago the fey fled from their world which was being invaded , overrun and eaten away by an allconsuming race of eldritch horrors.
They oppened a portal to not!Earth in an attempt to survive.
As they descended into the world they lacked true bodies which could house their souls.
Thus they used magic to change a suitable speciess into a fitting shape to fuse with (this is how humans were made).
They built vast civilisations with their magics untill 10k B.C. when a group of the allconsuming monsters numbering 5 in totall descended uppon this world: KaBaal the blackness, Leviathan the mountain of serpents, Dorunas the thunder demon, Gaia the mother of monsters and Eliohim the storm.
Allthough weakened through their journey they were still powerfull enough to cause the downfall of the last fey civilisation but not before the fey cast a seal that dispersed the magic of this world thus rendering them weaker with each passing year.
Finally they each made their own choicess:
Leviathan sought to adapt and in the same manner as the fey and started altering a suitable creature to survive as untill the seal is broken.
Eliohim and Gaia chose to mate and give birth to a race of slaves (titans) which they fed on to survive.
Once they started feeding of the brood of Leviathan they caused a conflict which freed the titans and caused their own deaths by Dorunas hand.
He consumed them to leave this world.
Leviathan was injured and hid with her draconic brood living as a creature of this world from now on.
KaBaal chose undeath and hid in the lush forrests of the south , feeding on the surrounding life force.
Ages passed and the now human race started to build their own civilisation.
Some fell under the rule of titans which they viewed as either gods or giants.

Cont.

You mean like Shinto?

You aren't wrong, God doesn't understand human concepts like love, Jehovah operates on logic; Yahweh's love is unconditional (signed). John 3:16.

Buddhism recognizes they're non-enlightened (elevated) deities worthy of reverence.

Gautama Buddha wasn't a person, nor the first Buddha; there were Buddhas before Gautama.

>the Crusades
>bad
So how would you score them against over 1000 years of aggressive Islamic expansion?

What if you were in fact straight?

My bad,

The first Buddha that we are 'aware' of, to be recorded.

Would then breaking the cycle of Karma to slip past human bounds and become mythos creatures ourselves?

>You are talking to someone who is, or was, a Catholic here.

You mean you're just a fedora tipper without a shred of credibility, but who thinks he knows so much just because he went to church a few times? Well, la-dee-da, and here you are trying to talk about other people being untrustworthy.

I like this.

I like this a lot.

So the process of becoming a Buddha is in fact the process of shucking one's understanding of the world and becoming like the things that founded religion.

I can see a pretty sweet game based around this kind of transhumanism.

Does this also mean that eating the flesh of God in transubstantiation is meant for a similar purpose?

Do other rituals have other forms of similar transhumanism, with Buddhism simply being a method to achieve such power without a patron?

Others served the dragons who were worshipped as forces of nature or fearsome demonic beasts.

The brood of both these lines slowly shrunk as their blood thinned after interbreeding with humans.

Meanwhile 5 millenia ago the seal cast by the fey started to weaken and magic slowly returned to the world.

KaBaal in hopes of fleeing used this chance to devour all the life of the lush forrests he hid in, turning the area into a grand sandy dessert.
He failed and slumbered again untill being dug up by humans 2k years ago.
He beguiled them into believing him to be a God, gifted them with magic knowledge and set them on a path to conquer the world in his name.
All of his worshippers are required to make a pilgrimage to his phylantrecy where he slowly saps their life force and taints their soul.
Once they were spread into every corner of that world they were changed into a savage race of mindless slaves called orcs who destroyed and devoured in the name of their "God".
Humanity fought back and slowly rediscoverred magic again as well as their ancestry.
Inspired by the power to change oneself they experimented to enhance them selves and so created dwarves with enhanced strenght and elves with enhanced sensess.
Driven by their efforts KaBaal's forces were driven back into his wastelands and here we are now in a world of wide range of different technology and magics, rulled by sorcerrer clans compeeting for dominance.

>Mormons worshipping Mother Kos
I can dig it

None of what that idiot wrote has a shred of thought behind it.

The Jews and the Christians have a pact with their Eldritch Horrors, other faiths generally have rites to contain them and some, like the Muslims, just hope that their god doesn't feel like turning them and their familiy into human centipeds tomorrow as well.

Are we just going to ignore the Dark Age brought about the the Catholic Church and it's systemic oppression of everyone not a priest back then? How it prevented scientific, economic and cultural growth for a few centuries and went out of its way to silence all who argued with it, including brilliant thinkers that could have helped improve human knowledge and the way of life?
Also, nice quads.

This.

Islam dindu nuffin.

>raped little children
Are you talking about your uncle or your stepdad?

What if eldritch horrors where in fact cool dudes who just want the salvation of mankind?

>Dark Age

Congrats. You've proved you're not old enough to post on this site.

You mean the one organization that actually still maintained libraries, education, medical services, and scientific research?

Also
>Dark Ages
Next time don't take history lessons from Hollywood and r/atheism

>Dark Age
>prevented scientific, economic and cultural growth for a few centuries
Somewhere in the afterlife, Roger Bacon, Thomas Bradwardine, Pope Sylvester II & plenty more just had a collective facepalm.

I don't know what I'm talking about: The Post

>Dark Ages
What is this bullshit?

"Church brought about the fall of Rome"
Said noone ever thus your argument doesn't stand.
It was the sole reason why the west maintained lieracy untill the fall of Byzanth when their schollars fled and founded academies across Europe including Jadera(Zadar), Geneva, Prague, Bologna etc.

What prohibited cultural and scientific growth were nobles who didn't like having literate peasantry (mostly nordics, balkans south and east from Bosnia as well as Ireland).

You realize that during the "Dark Ages" almost all scientific thought and indeed academics as a whole was preserved and ADVANCED by the Catholic church. Galileo didn't even happen in the middle ages, and it wasn't even because people disagreed with him, the pope actually had agreed with him in arguments against another cardinal when he was but a cardinal himself, but rather Galileo fucked up greatly by indirectly calling the pope an idiot.

OH SHIT

...

Or that of any religion.

>prevented
>not preserved and promoted

shit, I get the butthurt about Galileo, but that was about politics, not science.

YOU ARE GUILTY

>Spiderposting
It really is Summer now

Well, if we step back and look at a bit of a remove, Delta Green has real organizations or ones resembling them doing some good or seemingly positive things too, as a front for nasty stuff, or alongside really mean things.

So you could have a member of "yet another Nyarlathotep" cult who's job was to promote hatred or something nasty, while they were also doing some good, too.

Like, they might be truly charitable to WHITE charity cases, but also promote racial divisiveness and preach against miscegenation.

That's kind of funny because Father Squid at least, from Wildcards (which is a usable setting for this kind of thing too because one batch of alien invaders, sort of are abominations.) looks a lot like that, or could be depicted as such. That, or a plain old Cassock. and aside from the fact that he killed a fair amount of people in Nam' and has some things he's not proud of, is a great person. Who has a head pretty well like that, smells faintly damp, and also has super strength. (Not the biggest in the setting, but you know, enough to kick ass in gladiatorial combat with street level Jokers, some of whom are pretty tough. And the Turtle is still ridiculously stronger than any mere "guy who is physically strong" because of banana levels of TK. He can lift battleships with his mind.)

>Like, they might be truly charitable to WHITE charity cases, but also promote racial divisiveness and preach against miscegenation.
If we're going to do Lovecraftian cults properly, it'd need to be black charity cases. Just saying.

>Crusades
>1000 years
kek

Also reminder that the crusaders took it out on local christian minorities when they couldn't get to the muslims.

>muh fedora
What about you find an echo chamber elsewhere, like /pol/

He wasn't talking about the crusades there, mate.

>advanced
Actually medieval scholastics didn't really advanced a damn thing beyond elevating poorly understood classical philosophy to the point of religious writ.

Reminder that until autopsies became a thing in the early modern period, church approved medicine believed the human womb as the exact same as that of a rabbit.

>mass poeverty
Explain
>repression of foreign cultures through missionary work
Here have some food and by the way have you ever heard about Jesus? = Here have this free hat by the way have you ever heard about life insurance?
Explain to me how MetLife is repressing my culture.
>Crusades
Happened almost 1000 years ago and was in terms of casualties and destruction insignificant to past and future religious wars.
>contraception
catholic.com/tracts/birth-control
Educate Yourself
>Pedophilia
Unless I am mistaken the Church dismissed those who were found to be guilty or complicit after an internal investigation and simply transferred those whose accusations were unsubstantiated.
>"with whose money?"
With that of their members of course. Where else would they get it, from trees? Contrary to popular belief the Catholic Church is more than just some buildings and people wearing robes and funny looking hats.

>Actually medieval scholastics didn't really advanced a damn thing beyond elevating poorly understood classical philosophy to the point of religious writ.
I'd make the argument that was actually more of the thing in the Renaissance than the medieval period.

Leave idiots alone.

Dumbest poster of the day. There was no "Dark Ages".

you deserve more (you)s, also I want to post this

If people fuck all the time and die of AIDS, it's not the fault of a third party who didn't spend money to gift them condoms, its their own stupid fault

This isn't your normal Dark Age misinformation

This is ADVANCED Dark Age misinformation.

One of the reasons that Rome persecuted early christians so terribly is because their religion seemed so alien and ass backwards.

They worshipped a single omniscient and omnipotent but physically unidentifiable "God", which was supposedly both the supreme master of creation and an entirely different kind of entity than all other gods (compared to classical greek and roman mythology which did not deny the existence of other comperable pantheons of gods or god like beings in other parts of the world). This being cast its own infinitely divine child into the flesh of a regular human (major taboo for Roman theology, in which the division between man and god is one of the most important themes), which then presented itself both as the true king of mankind and its servant, garnering a huge following of people in less than a lifetime, died and just fucking came back to life on his own, and ultimately convincing his followers that they could be granted eternal life via a blood ritual.

Naturally, at least in origin, the Christian god is the Jewish god. But the fervor in which this new group believed, in spite of a complete lack of tradition or history to fall back on, suffering the most horrible of fates imaginable and yet still keeping their mouths closed... the romans were confused, and terrified. Both the novelty of the religion and misunderstanding of some of its details led to an image of some sort of unfathomable death cult born from the most radical of the jewish community which worshiped a cosmic being that seemed to orchestrate all of creation just to make a point.

...

Dude, what if SATAN was really the good guy?

>muh crusades

It was a response to centuries of Islamic conquest into Christian territory.

History is written by the victors.

>They worshipped a single omniscient and omnipotent but physically unidentifiable "God", which was supposedly both the supreme master of creation and an entirely different kind of entity than all other gods (compared to classical greek and roman mythology which did not deny the existence of other comperable pantheons of gods or god like beings in other parts of the world).

as we all know, that was considered ass backwards, as noone read Plato and him and the Stoics didn't have huge follwoings in classical Rome, including their monotheistic ideas.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EldritchAbomination/MythologyAndReligion

No one posted this yet.

>tvtropes
And I thought this thread couldn't get any worse.

Plato's writings were explicitly polytheistic, though he did express a lack of faith in the literal truth of roman mythology. And while both Plato and the Stoics to certain extents treated the idea of god and the divine as a single force, they did not preach of a single IDENTITY that was God, and certainly not a both omnipotent and active one, nor that of Jews.

That'd be gnosticism.

History is written by the literate, which is why the Vikings have a reputation so different from all the other raiders and warlords of the era.

But you do know that the ratio of rapes in the catholic or protestant church are not different from what happens in the rest of the population or in other religious organisations.

Maybe he's unaware of the time that they invaded Spain and then immediately tried to follow up by invading France.

Or relentless Turkic aggression in the Mediterranean and Balkans.

Or that the First Crusade was requested by the Byzantines to defend Anatolia.

Gnosticism.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=PQj8xOknzKc

Hey don't lump us in with the papist scum

youtube.com/watch?v=wjWOy6ioVHI

I think this video will be right up your alley, user. Enjoy.

Instead of "Flesh of God", it is the "Old Blood".

>I think the jewish bibles dont actually claim that other gods or entitites are not real... just not to worship them

In fact, if anything, the book of Exodus seems to explicitly say that there are other real gods, just that they're shittier than the Jewish god. Specifically, the priests of Egypt being able to transmute their staffs into snakes. Or I suppose this may only confirm the existence of non-divine magic.

>Gnosticism
>That'd be gnosticism.
No.

I don't even know how you came to this conclusion, even just reading the simple Wikipedia page would've corrected you.

I see that not even Veeky Forums is safe from the christfags.
I understand your pain.
Hope it gets better after summer.

Love,
/x/

No one on Veeky Forums is Christian. The fedora-tier ideas and arguments are just tiring if you're not in middle school.

But I'm a methodist

Wow, look at these fedora tippers try.

You know, I am unbeliever myself, but at least me and the Christians had a deal. I won't burn their churches they won't burn my house and/or me. It was working for both of us pretty well.

And then the Arabs show up...

Pretty sure the whole 'prevention of scientific growth' wasn't actual prevention but rather everyone trying to figure out how all the stuff around them worked. Much like the Mechanicus in the 40k-verse has no idea how half their gizmos work, the X-gothic kingdoms that took over old Roman lands were probably not aware of how most of the stuff the Romans left behind. So rather than being repressed I think they were just trying to relearn everything.