Is being religious better than being non-religious? - Mormons or atheist wet Dreams?

[Quiet Guy]

Would Android Raptor be a good answer to that question?

 

[PonderosaPete]

You should at least be open to the idea that there are powers at work vaster than your own comprehension.

 

[Male Idiot]

It is better for your mental health if you believe in stupid things.

Religions, and other superstitions are distractions from the depressingly sad state of reality.

Bigfoot, aliens, sky daddies, ghost hunting, horoscopes, CWCville are all copiums that help you from going insane from the depressing majesty of the universe and your own insignificance.

Look at Pajeet. You would ack yourself at the thought of living your life in a mud hut collecting cancerous garbage. Yet he happily rolls around in his own needful, perfectly content despite the highest point of his life being when he fucked a cow and found a free rupie coin on the street.

It is the opium of the masses, but they do need that opium.

 

[California Newt]

It is better for your mental health if you believe in stupid things.

Religions, and other superstitions are distractions from the depressingly sad state of reality.

Bigfoot, aliens, sky daddies, ghost hunting, horoscopes, CWCville are all copiums that help you from going insane from the depressing majesty of the universe and your own insignificance.

Look at Pajeet. You would ack yourself at the thought of living your life in a mud hut collecting cancerous garbage. Yet he happily rolls around in his own needful, perfectly content despite the highest point of his life being when he fucked a cow and found a free rupie coin on the street.

It is the opium of the masses, but they do need that opium.

Pretty sure Opium is the Opium of the masses.

I used to have a similar opinion of religion until I learned that not all of it is just emotions based, purely arbitrary Evangelicalism. Americans can fall into that mistake, and Europeans are a conquered continent since WW2 so you can't really blame them. My own family treated their nominal Christianity as copium and are clearly agnostic/atheist in their actual outlook anytime they're not thinking about death, so I grew up agnostic until I learned about the ontology of universals and things spiralled from there.

The truth is that you just assume that reality is this horrible depressing thing because of the philosophical presuppositions of the age that you live in, when in fact materialism/scientism (not science itself, but the idea that science can explain everything) fell apart in the middle of the 20th century. That's why pomo overtook logical positivism. This isn't just something you hear about in philosophy books: this is something you read about in books about the history of various scientific disciplines (such as, for example, the history of psychology during the 20th century).

Materialism is a top-down imposed slave religion. Epstein funded/was connected to many of the new atheists, including guys like Dennett and Dawkins. Odd how these things work out. Why was the founder of the theistic satanist Temple of Set one of the guys in the charge of the American Psychological Warfare program during the Gulf War? The people at the top aren't materialists.

There are serious epistemological problems with atheism that make theism a logical necessity.

 

[AstaSilva]

@CaliforniaNewt, I think your last link was a discord attachment? I don't think its visible anymore and was curious to see it.

 

[Lowlife Adventures]

@CaliforniaNewt, I think your last link was a discord attachment? I don't think its visible anymore and was curious to see it.

I attached it here.
Edit: skimmed through it and it did not make me more convinced that theism is a logical necessity. Seems like the core of the argument is: if we scrutinize the different epistemological approaches, we find out that they all have flaws and that we can't actually find out truth and knowledge. but it's crazy and absurd if we just acted like truth and knowledge isn't real, so given that the other approaches have flaws it means that the only approach left, which is that it comes from God. Since truth and knowledge must be real, and the only remaining epistemological explanation is that it comes from God, then it means God is real.

I don't agree with that analysis. The fact that the other explanations are flawed doesn't lead me to think that truth and knowledge aren't real, rather, that we lack the capability to be 100% certain about truth and knowledge. Actual truth and knowledge can still exist, and though we may never have them, we can still make useful approximates. The existence of a god is also not necessary for truth and knowledge to exist outside of our perception.

Since I skimmed it I may have fucked up the interpretation. Feel free to correct me.

 

[Male Idiot]

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Yeah, I don't think that the soys are actual Lovecraft religion-free thinkers who marvel at the insane weight of the cosmos on them.

They are anti-theist, eternally mad at dad, even the beardy sky dad. They worship Feminism, and The Soyence. It is just satanism but without a loosee goat daddy, who has been replaced by a fat black tranny of the month. Its priests are Lizzo, Vaush and Soros and their vile ilk.

Wokeism is a religion in all but name, and the worst one to grace this planet. I'll take a christian, muslim or hindu over them. It is at least as bad as its progenitor, judaism.

I would love if ancient pagans were validated. I would even take the new age energy bullshit. I just see no evidence for it.

 

[California Newt]

The fact that the other explanations are flawed doesn't lead me to think that truth and knowledge aren't real, rather, that we lack the capability to be 100% certain about truth and knowledge. Actual truth and knowledge can still exist, and though we may never have them, we can still make useful approximates.

First of all, thank you for linking the document.

There are a few problems with your reading of it:

• It's not just that it's "crazy and absurd" that we can't have knowledge: It's a logical contradiction to make the propositional claim that knowledge is impossible. You would be saying "I know that I cannot know". It is self-refuting. That may be what you meant, but I should make it perfectly clear.
• You cannot make "useful approximates" if you have nothing at all to ground your epistemology. I heavily recommend that you re-read the document, and do not skim. The foundation for an epistemological system is not a matter of "degrees of certainty"; it's a binary. You either have a justified foundation or you do not. If you do not, then you have nothing else to build upon. You can't build an epistemology off of arbitrary conjectures, and there's no room for "relative certainty" because it isn't relative to anything. It's a tether hanging in an empty void.
  This is incredibly important to understand, because a lot of atheists really struggle to grasp the fact that there's no room for any kind of uncertainty whatsoever in the epistemological foundation. It's not like an empirical observation, where you check to see if you're within a certain number of standard deviations from the mean and call it a day—it is a question of black-and-white propositional logic. If you cannot say that the foundation of your epistemology is capital-"T" true, then you do not have an epistemology. You are floating tetherless in a void.
• God is necessarily the foundation of knowledge, because anything other than God (and a certain kind of God, which I—not the paper—would argue is the Orthodox Christian God) fails to solve the problem and instead moves the problem back a step until you're in an infinite regress:

Revelation from someone or something that's in a position to know the absolute truth is necessary in order to have any truth to build upon. It's the only thing that can give you something solid to attach your tether to. This revealer would logically need a few qualities:

• It would have to have a mind, as knowledge is had by minds. If it were an impersonal machine or something, we'd need something with a mind to verify the information (moving the problem back a step).
• It would have to be honest, as otherwise you couldn't trust it to reveal the truth (defeating the point).
• It would have to be ontologically different from us in a real way (or else we're back at square one, stuck ultimately in our own heads). This is where the essence-energies distinction comes in from the Ortho world.
• It would have to be our creator, as goal-prioritization is necessary for attention filtering, perception, and even basic cognition; this means that we need to have some sense of our purpose (fundamental goal-orientation) in order to have thought at all, let alone correct knowledge (which is dependent on the filtering and management of cognitive bias). The only entity in a position to know something's purpose is He who created that thing (or someone this was revealed to, but this moves the problem back a step and eventually you'd need to get to the creator). In order for purpose to be a baked-in property of everything in the universe, then there needs to be a creator of everything in that universe.'

Those last two bullet points are from me (and other Orthos with the essence-energies thing), and not the paper. The last point especially is also an argument for a single true religion revealed in history, as the role of revelation at the root-level of cognition implies that it's impossible to come to the truths of theology at all without the help and co-operation of God; there'd be no opportunity for a person to come up with duplicate theologies with the names changed like a game of mad-libs.

This source of revelation logically must exist, as the opposite would necessarily mean that knowledge is impossible (a claim that cannot logically be made).

I would love if ancient pagans were validated. I would even take the new age energy bullshit. I just see no evidence for it.

The greatest pagan tradition is converting to Christianity. That being said if you're looking for the reality of psychic phenomena, the U.S. Military is pretty open about it. That Satanist Temple of Set guy talked about it in his Psychological Warfare document, as do renowned statisticians who were brought in by the government to validate the results of their remote viewing work:

 

[Lowlife Adventures]

There are a few problems with your reading of it: (snip)

Hey, thanks for the detailed response. I'll check it again some time but at the moment it's a hard sell for me so we'll have to agree to disagree. FWIW I have a lot of respect for Christians despite not being a believer.

 

[California Newt]

Hey, thanks for the detailed response. I'll check it again some time but at the moment it's a hard sell for me so we'll have to agree to disagree. FWIW I have a lot of respect for Christians despite not being a believer.

No problem, I get it. I was in the same boat. This stuff feels like trying to force a bowling ball into your skull if you're from a typical agnostic background.

Whatever the case, I'm sure God favors an honest man. An honest man is someone who loves the Truth as God, even if they don't think it

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Being religious is probably better than being non-religious, but I can't choose to believe in something solely for its instrumental value. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how belief works.

You could offer me a billion dollars for believing the sky is green and the most I could do is lie and tell you I believe it. I wouldn't actually be able to believe it.

 

[Male Idiot]

I don't have the CIA's access to psychadelics nor skitzo brains to analyze. Nor do I trust them, if I maybe frank.

Same with the totally reverse engineered UFOs. What is more likely, the MIC fudging the numbers and lying for their own sake or to cover up something like a bioweapon lab, or them having ufos and farseers? Because if I were funding CIA Epsteinstein Island and you asked where the money went, I would want an excuse and point at Chris chan too.

I would need something like grandma's ghost showing up and telling me which Wermact/Hungarian royal army base she worked at which than I could dig the historical archives for so I know I am not just having a hallucinogenic episode, or the pope pointing his blingy stick at a building and it turning to gold.

 

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

I've been non-religious for most of my youth until I became religious. It is absolutely worth it and is not something you can understand until you take the leap. And it's a big leap, but worth taking, though you can't bail out of it afterwards.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

I've been non-religious for most of my youth until I became religious.

I'm exactly the opposite. I grew up going to church, my family is religious, I played guitar for services and was involved in various Christian things for my entire youth. I don't have bad experiences with religious people or hold resentment toward them like some formerly religious people and I was never molested by a clergyman or anything.

The SOLE problem was that the core supernatural axioms underlying the whole thing were self-evidently not true.

 

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

The SOLE problem was that the core supernatural axioms underlying the whole thing were self-evidently not true.

So maybe you should have studied the Bible or something in between guitar sessions.

 

[macrodegenerate]

It depends upon how you apply religion in your life.

If you treat religion as just the memorization of scripture and rules to follow, it's difficult to find it useful and worth it. It's rigid and unchanging and uncompromising which makes it difficult to adapt to the modern age.

I contend that blind acceptance to moral relativism, which primarily exists under western economic and social systems, is more oppressive and exploitive to the individual than religious dogma. It preys upon man's base desires(pornography, onlyfans, dopamine hits,greed) to enslave them into pointless lives which they only realize they have lived far too late.

The heros of history who are the most beloved and respected earned it through acting in devotion and service to something greater than themselves. It may be to a god of justice or a principle of freedom, but that guided unyielding devotion is what made their lives and the lives of their children worth living.

If you allow religion to guide you on that path to one of conviction, in the end you will have served something which you loved and cared for. You go out on your own terms. By contrast a life spent without meaning and conviction is no different then enslavement to an irrational and uncaring master. Pointless toil and suffering without reason or aim only to be thrown away and disposed of as garbage.