I have on seldom occasion met a Christian who I agree with at any significant theological level. Any in depth conversation with these people nearly always ends with them calling me a Satanist.. in so many words. "I'm leading people from God, I'm making things too complicated, I'm ignorant, stupid, heretical."
Why?
Simply because I maintain that a Christian's foremost duty is to abstain as much as possible from sinful behavior. This throws these so called people of God into a fit. The Protestants are the worst of the sects. For a people who "don't interpret God's word," they sure do interpret circles around "if your right hand offend against thee, cut it off."
I now realize that what I am arguing against is not a logical theology. By a vast margin, people turn to God as a cope. They are unhappy with the state of the world, unhappy with their lives, frustrated with lack of success, seek healing and comfort. Perhaps I am guilty of this as well in some sense. It is an emotional adjournment as the result of some trauma. Yes, God will be your high tower. But what does Christ say to the rich man who asks *what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?*
The answer, *if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.* So yes, there are terms on eternal life; Jesus lists various conditions multiple times.
However the average Christian is far from a zealot. This is a person who seeks one thing from God and to disrupt the uninvolved ease at which he believes the end is obtained has confronted his desire of comfort. He wants to sin, and by simply feigning ignorance of scripture he believes that he receives both the world of the flesh and the spirit. But what does Jesus say?
I grew up attached to the land. There's times I can feel when somebody is staring right at the back of my head. It's like an electric sensation. I really can't describe it but when I was young the "6th sense" used to be a lot stronger. I truly believe in it. Yes anecdotal but there is *some* science to back it up.
>A process (evolution) spanning billions of years can result in that.
According to whom exactly? We can only observe only our own reality and make conclusions based on this. Maybe we have never witnessed God's great miracles in a direct and ostentatious way. Is it therefore logical to say that divine creation is impossible? We also have never witnessed life emerge from the dumb, or for dust to suddenly animate itself in a manner that is inconsistent from its nature.
The only fact involving life is that we have never witnessed life come to form, therefore we can not possibly know how it started. All else is religion or theory. When I was an atheist I played with the ideas of pseudo-life and "life as we don't know it." I figured if we ever did *find* alien life that had formed itself by chance on a distant planet that it would be life based in another element than carbon. But this is a fairy tale.
>What if we are just elaborate machines with the ability to move, regenerate and reproduce?
This is exactly what we are.
>What if every being with sufficient intelligence to think considers themselves special?
Yes, this is my point. Literally everything which can contemplate itself is the main character. You are a direct extension of your creator. He sees everything you do, feels everything, hears everything, listens to your thoughts, understands your ideas. It is not overwhelming to a being with infinite "computing power" which communicates via an unobservable connection.
And although this seems like a theory in the same category as secular creation and big bang, I do not think it is and I suggest that the evidence lies in man's own nature. As you said "Religions existed long before Christianity existed." Man has always been driven to worship *something*. Why would our nature have us invoke the imaginary? Why would all human beings who ever lived seek the metaphysical? There is nothing else in our nature that would be as unproductive as worshipping something that doesn't exist. Every process has a definitive and direct point, whether it was endowed in Adam at his creation, or otherwise formed via evolution. Sometimes we have to search for the point, but it is still there.
There is nothing unproductive or strange about any primal desire that we have. The want of sugar, meat, water, sex, warmth, comfort, shelter, community, love.. They all have an overt and obvious reason. We need sugar, we need meat, water, sex, etc. Even birdwatching has a purpose. The average human throughout the ages is drawn to worship, regardless of location, time or segregation, because worship of God is the same as the want of water and sugar. Sure, there is Mt. Dew which delights the senses to those accustomed to it.. but it is a poison, just as the various heathenisms that broke off from the primordial Aryan religion were.
>Imagine a simulation in which you just want to test what happens when you have a certain set of physical rules and have a super-huge amount of matter in one place.
The interesting thing about your model is it somewhat relates to Christianity. There are 2 Gods in Christianity, there is the Almighty, who created all and the Christ which governs (this is the entity that became Jesus). The almighty is the man at the monitor who made the rules and gathered the matter together.. but unlike man he has the capacity to notice all things. The Christ is the script which ensures that everything abides perfectly by the design. In practical terms he is the laws of physics and nature but able to be personified and judges creation.
God knew every possible outcome. We're talking about a vastly incomprehensible force that wrought the elements from absolutely nothing and must exist both inside and outside of spacetime. He knew life would come to exist, and assuming life was some accident, the worship of the ultimate creator is still in our nature so he surely has taken a shining to us.
>The Greeks and Romans also had religions with multiple deities
That's a discussion for another time lol.
No, but if we go by the things that are "possible", we have basically limitless things that can happen.
> We also have never witnessed life emerge from the dumb, or for dust to suddenly animate itself in a manner that is inconsistent from its nature.
Because it takes a time that spans a multiple of a human life. We aren't even sure how pyramids were created, and that's relatively recent! Or how are moons, planets and stars created? There are good theories, but you cannot "observe" something that takes millions of years or more. And it's not like there is a progression bar that says "43% complete." The ring around Saturn for example *could* be a planet or moon in the future, but as of right now it's just a ring of dust or tiny rocks. The same goes for evolution - at every point in time all life forms MUST be viable (or "complete"), and must be able to successfully compete with other life forms to continue to exist. And at the same time they must genetically adapt, meaning technically all life forms are also in an "intermediate" state too.
> that had formed itself by chance on a distant planet that it would be life based in another element than carbon. But this is a fairy tale.
It's very well possible that it's impossible, and the only way for life to exist is if it's similar to what exists on Earth. But we don't know, and possibly can never figure out.
> He sees everything you do, feels everything, hears everything, listens to your thoughts, understands your ideas.
Well, that's a romantic idea, but there is no evidence to suggest that. Also 99.9999%+ of it is utterly boring. And here's what makes it... unpleasant: Niggers, jews, pajeets, faggots, maggots, bacteria, rats - does the same also go for them? Are they observed too? Or is there a threshold? If yes, what about race-mixers? What's the threshold for race-mixing? Are Orientals ok?
> Why would our nature have us invoke the imaginary?
Because it's more about ideas, culture, transmittable thoughts. Christianity is not just the idea of God, good and evil, and afterlife. It contains a lot of philosophical guidelines that are objectively good. Plus cultural elements, traditions, reasons for get-togethers - something that united people. It's better to have more tangible ideas than to be vague. For example it's more efficient to say "sin is bad" rather than explaining why committing crimes and amoral actions is bad on an individual and collective level.
Atheists can easily fall into the trap of abandoning philosophy and ethics altogether, and devolve into selfish, careless degenerates, who have no issues to commit to malevolence.
As of older and other religions, this applies too. It just took different forms - like having a chorus of deities, each dealing with their own section of life. Subhuman religions are obviously... different.
ALSO: Ideas in general are "imaginary." They are abstractions, but they apply to reality. So it's not a big step from thinking "rain is good for my farm" to thanking a deity for rain.
> The Christ is the script which ensures that everything abides perfectly by the design.
Interesting. So Christ is like the avatar of God? To bring up a video game parallel: In my space combat/exploration game the only way to even perceive the universe and its content is to have an editor-spaceship that can move at extreme warp speeds and is invulnerable. There are many factors involved like loading ranges and procedural generation - so it requires the game to run in order for anything to exist.
>The same goes for evolution - at every point in time all life forms MUST be viable
>you cannot "observe" something that takes millions of years or more. And it's not like there is a progression bar that says "43% complete.
Yes.. The logical process for Saturn's rings should be that the dust will continue to accumulate in clumps and eventually form satellites then moons because of gravity. But there is nothing that we can look at (that I know of) and say "this lifeless form is on the road to animation." All we have is the already living and the utterly unliving. So that leaves us with the "common ancestor" theory, which means that literally every instance of life on Earth emerged from a single manifestation of life.. which *somehow* managed to reproduce and proliferate itself.
It is one thing to suggest that a microscopic dust particle somehow become animated, but how could it have possibly evolved to reproduce in the course of it's life and what did it reproduce with? Frankly from a strictly logical point of view, religion aside, I think it's just as ridiculous of an idea as saying an omnipotent entity formed man from dust.
>Also 99.9999%+ of it is utterly boring
Maybe that's why God "shakes things up" lol. Life in the past wasn't so boring though. Famine, war and struggle were constant. If you think about it our ancestor's prayers have been answered for the most part. They prayed that their children would not see the horror of conflict or starvation and here we are.
>Niggers, jews, pajeets, faggots, maggots, bacteria, rats - does the same also go for them? Are they observed too?
Even the trees are observed. The planets are observed. The physical and imaginary are observed. They all serve some sort of purpose.. Some purposes are bad/ generally annoying (like jeets) and others good. God observes these things because that is one of the purposes of God. You were made in the image of God, consider how you feel when looking over your videogame. You probably made the antagonists the epitome of what you hate the most, but do you hate your own creation? When you see the plague that you created do what it does, are you utterly revolted by it or do you feel a misplaced sense of accomplishment that *you* designed it correctly, and it's fulfilled it's duty? Of course you don't want it to win. If it were to win, you'd probably step in and rewrite scripts to overcome it because the victory of the antagonist is not what you wanted.
I spent 2 years making a video game. That's why I like using them as analogies lol. I really think the way we manage them is similar to how God manages the creation.
>Because it's more about ideas, culture, transmittable thoughts
Every species of human worships the imaginary. We know that blacks and whites are distinct, but the Africans worship their imaginary devils. They had been separated from humanity for an unknown amount of time but they worshipped in the same, albeit extremely primitive, manner as the heathen. Same with various Islanders worshipping spirits. The chings worshipping ancestors, etc.
>Atheists can easily fall into the trap of abandoning philosophy and ethics altogether, and devolve into selfish, careless degenerates, who have no issues to commit to malevolence
These people worship self. They have deluded themselves so heavily they believe that they are God.
>Ideas in general are "imaginary." They are abstractions, but they apply to reality. So it's not a big step from thinking "rain is good for my farm" to thanking a deity for rain
Well it sort of is. It would be more logical to thank the clouds for rain and worship them since they are visible, instead of inventing something else.
>So Christ is like the avatar of God?
Yes, essentially.
When will your video game be completed? Sounds interesting.
Remember, if you scoop up the ocean with a cup and find no fish, it doesn't mean there is no fish in the ocean. We are dealing with a size scale of microscopic spanning quantities of time which allows us only to speculate, because who could and would invest 1000+ generations to diligently observe something like that?
> I think it's just as ridiculous of an idea as saying an omnipotent entity formed man from dust.
Technically, it's not so far from what likely must have happened. It's just that there are intermediate steps spanning a long time. However the level of foresight it would require to create microscopic life, have it evolve over billions of years, given all sorts of conditions on Earth, including mass extinctions, and then at some point have one species evolve to have a similar shape as God is extreme. It would require omniscience. If you operate outside of physics as we know it, and have full information about the universe spanning its lifetime, it would be possible.
> you feel a misplaced sense of accomplishment that you designed it correctly
That's a good view overall.
> It would be more logical to thank the clouds for rain and worship them since they are visible, instead of inventing something else.
Yes, but to have it represented by an intelligent, anthropomorphized being that creates unpredictable(/hard to predict) outcomes is... well, more exciting. The unpredictable element would be something people would want to figure out, because hardships make life even harder than it already is. So some people come up with a solution - they tie it to virtue, meaning "there is no rain for the fields because you weren't virtuous enough." Or "we have to please god by killing the infidels." Or even weird things as human sacrifices. The jews are utterly crazy with what they came up btw - their religion doesn't contain much philosophy, it's all about making up idiotic rules and circumventing them via tricks.
So the good outcomes occur when that deity is pleased, which allegedly has demands which only a small group of people claim to know. And people go crazy over gambling, random outcomes, just as the concept of causality itself - so it's not like they have to prove much. Just be convincing. When the good outcome comes after people adhere to their will: "god is pleased", when the bad outcome comes: "god is disappointed in you, do better next time."
Same with Covid btw. Remember how people claim that the reason the coof wasn't as bad (the same as every flu) is because people abode by these idiotic edicts like wearing useless cloth masks and ~social distancing~? And that all of that has to be repeated because... it "would have been worse"?
This mentality is so deeply rooted in people, it's crazy.
> When will your video game be completed? Sounds interesting.
This year, I hope. A lot is already done, including the most difficult technical parts like multiplayer, procedural generation and loading/unloading in free flight FTL. Meaning you can see hundreds of distant stars at any point (more with higher loading range settings), and fly to one and visit it and its planets, moons and sites. It will span the size of the observable universe, but that's rather a side-note, because every galaxy will be huge anyway. The focus will be on combat, customization, progression and exploration actually. The setting will essentially be ethnically homogeneous Aryan Whites being the player faction, and all others being the hostile NPC factions. Niggers are extinct, because it would be too unrealistic otherwise.