Ehhh

Seems reasonable enough to me. People thought all sorts of wacky shit before we found the appropriate empirical truths, so it kind of follows to consider all wacky shit to be a shoddy interpretation of something we've yet to analyse properly?

I don't think it makes me a nutter to believe that people think dumb things for a reason.

This instantly gave me a mental image of that clichéd scene where a chained-up maiden is offered to a slavering dragon; except now it's children and a giant old man.

"BRING US YOUR FIRSTBORN, THE MASTER DEMANDS MORE UNDERLINGS."

Seems like a half cocked "I need there to be more than this, but I don't know why" theory to me.

As long as they don't reject any compelling scientific explaination on the basis that they'd rather leave it a mystery, I'm cool with it.

I'm cool with it, too. I just think it's a little silly.

You're wrong. You're all wrong. When it comes to religion, everybody's wrong.

You're right. Whenever I hear that phrase, my thoughts are exactly the same

The term "greater force" does not satisfy the meaning of the word "force". It's like providing navigational assistance without mentioning any landmarks, place names, locations, distances, travel times, bearings, knowing where the person is going or even pointing in an actual direction. "Lost are you? Well just keep on heading towards your destination, provided you have one, until you arrive."

That's a faulty metaphor. Religious people know where they're going and how they're going to get there. The term "greater force" is simply an appeal to authority in order to validate the usefulness of the given directions. It's like saying that you can trust Apple Maps because Steve Jobs is a genius.

I'm not talking about the specific religious use, I'm talking about the wishy-washy use that refuses to go into more detail than than.

I'll tell you what pisses me off about spirituality. How half the time the people that practice wicca/ wodenism/ germanic-paganism and the sort, don't have a fucking clue what they're doing. I've had to just spend the last god knows how long telling someone that 'paganism' is not a single religion. Moreover that runes aren't magical and that Babylonian Zoroastrianism is not compatible with bloody Irish paganism.

I was in the car with mum earlier today, and the radio started talking about dream analysis. Typical Freudian nonsense, all narrative, no evidence-based research. I said aloud, "I'm extremely sceptical of this kind of psychology."

"You are such a sceptic," she replied, sounding actually disdainful of the word.

"Scepticism isn't cynicism!" I said, heading off a common error before I had to hear it.

"You won't accept anything on faith, will you?"

As you can imagine, this got my goat quite nicely. "The majority of the people of the world maintains beliefs based on faith, almost all variants of which are mutually incompatible with the beliefs of others. Even if one of them is true, which at most ONE can be, if any, all the rest must logically be FALSE. So as methods for discerning truth go, the failure rate of faith is extraordinary. What can it offer me?"

That ended that topic. She then started telling me that wars and the state of the world disprove god, which I had to disagree with, because it does not rule out, for example, evil gods who delight in our suffering.

It's weird right? Even views of hers that I agree with, I have to argue with. Bad reasons for true beliefs annoy me more than false beliefs.

Evil Gods are unlikely, as they're doing a half-ass job. A battle between Evil forces and Good Gods is equally stupid.

That's again assuming that our existence and experience is relevant to the Cosmic Stage. We could serve as an idle distraction. The divine equivalent of a videogame.

We can't be a casual game. Oh come oooooooon.

Wait. So the prayers are like chat messages in twich let's plays?

No cus then the game would be talking to you. Unless we're breaking the fourth wall.

We're more like the randomly-generated fluff from Dwarf Fortress.

This one is tall with a copper beard. It has four limbs and is made of carbon.

I dislike American Paganism almost to a fault, and I tend to be much harder on them in conversation than I am on Christians. There are very few second generation pagans in this country. It's usually people who don't fit in, want to strike back against their Christian society, and think that magic is hey pretty neat, so they decide to be become Wicca. I find that to be an amazingly stupid reason to join a religion. At least with Christians, they were born into it, and many of them don't really think about it. It's just always been part of their life, so to them it's just there. It's ingrained into our society, and that's the best, and only excuse I can think of to be religious in the face of modern science.

So yeah, if you're going to tell me that you believe in a half-man, half-goat prancing through the forests, I'm going to make you feel dumb.

I misread this title as "Spelunky".

Bring it

Yeah, I mean, did you know some pagans call magic, 'magick', because magic is just trickery where as 'magick' is the real deal summoning and shit. Urgh.

Please tell me you aren't really pagan.

Wasn't Shaman our resident self-aware pagan for the longest time?

square pagan a round hole

If it weren't for Christianity we'd still have old-school Pagans around in the UK. Still, Neopaganism clocked seventh largest religion over here.

I was totally willing to pretend for this scenario

Well I am Muslim, always been and hopefully I always will be, the more complex it get when I ask and read, the more I understand and the more tempting to dive deeper into my religion becomes, it seems right to me despite the fact that there are some close-minded followers of the same religion out there who either make us look bad or just attempt to manipulate religion for their own purposes, but enough about that.

As for the whole thingie about supernatural phenomena, I do believe that psychology plays a big part, but I believe there is always some bit of supernatural elements involved, as a muslim, it is a known belief in my religion that once someone dies, their soul is separated completely from the world of the living, only being informed by angels when someone prays for them and they have no way of contacting the world of the living in any way, shape or form, which I do believe, but I also believe devils/demons (Whichever you prefer to call them) can whisper to one, alter their perception, or blind their senses with extremely subtle forms of hallucinations, so my personal theory is that ghosts can be just demons trying to have a laugh at us by scaring the crap out of us by taking the form of dead people.

Yeah.... Your religion isn't real, either. If digging deeper makes you believe more, then you are simply looking for reasons to believe more. Because the more you objectively look at your religion, the more obvious it becomes that it is nonsense.

I never said it makes me Believe more, I said it makes it more tempting to dig into the deeper parts of it and analyze it on a deeper level than I am required to, or at least that's what I was trying to say, yes it does sometimes make me feel more "Right" about it, but that wasn't my point, besides, why would one look for reasons to believe something when they already believe it?

Anyways, for the sake of the argument and as well as not to allow this to be a shitload of consecutive posts discussing this which will probably get branched into even smaller topics that will probably go off-topic, or it'll get spun off into a thread, let's just avoid all that and say I'm "close-minded"/"Stupid"/both.

I don't think you're stupid. I think you're like the vast majority of the human race, and you want to believe that your life has a greater purpose, and that there is a loving god waiting to embrace you at the moment of your death. If that's all it was, I probably wouldn't say anything, but your religion is extremely harmful to society. All of the Abrahamic religions are harmful, but Islam and Christianity are definitely the two that top the bill. It isn't real, and no one should do the absurd things that these religions tell them to do.

Unless you're making the extremists the main people who you know "What Islam is about" from, I don't really see anything that "Absurd" that actually goes for Christianity as well, unless you're offended by how animals have to be slaughtered in certain ways or so, other than that I don't really see how these 2 religions are harming society that much, as long as you don't bother people who don't follow these religions.