Sorry, Cthulhu -- you'll always be my number 2
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Man, imagine being really devout, so devout you become a Saint, then instead of hanging out in Heaven you have to do paperwork for people praying to you.
"Saint" is just an old word for "Team Leader" is it not?
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I'm into decolonization of Christianity, and one thing that's really interesting is how saints were used by conquered peoples to preserve their gods and cultural practices i.e. syncretism. That's one of the reasons Catholicism has remained more prominent than Protestantism in Latin America.
Catholicism outside of the Vatican is peganism and animism and ancestor worship with the labels scratched off.
And I'm mature enough in my atheism (really, post-atheist) to think that's actually really cool.
My Filipino wife gave me a whole different view of their Catholicism. She has a rosary in the car and rubs it for protection, believes in Jesus and heaven, all that, but isn't familiar with even the most well-known Bible stories and I have no idea if she's even been to Mass. To her, the bible simply isn't important in any way, and neither are the practices of the church. All very strange to my American senses, having been raised in a white-bread Presbyterian church.
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I mean, there's even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he's canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.
Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there's a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren't important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
It's why there's so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
"El" being a word that was used for both "a god" and "this god" didn't help. "The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he's the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain".Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There's a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. "King sky god", "water god", "afterlife god" being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.
It was war, conflict and invasion that turned people to Yahweh to be the major god, since he was the god of war. Before then he was a minor figure. The odd part is why previous references weren't eventually changed or edited out to reflect this turn to monotheism.
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It's important to remember at all times that every single thing religious, was made up by very stupid people. Either stupid for living 1,000-5,000 years ago, and having zero education, or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit.
Confusion happens when things don't make sense. Religions don't make sense because they're hasty lies. You know people that constantly lie. They may even be religious. You're going to trust knowledge of an afterlife to a hallucination they had? lol. No.
That's why religions brainwash small children using fear.
Religion is baked into our very genes.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
And yes, the penultimate sentence is an experimentally verified fact.
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I mean, there's even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he's canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.
Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there's a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren't important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
It's why there's so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
"El" being a word that was used for both "a god" and "this god" didn't help. "The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he's the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain".Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There's a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. "King sky god", "water god", "afterlife god" being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.
I feel the need to add some context here.
The patriarchal push to erase the pantheon started just before the Babylonian Exile under the reign of King Josiah. He ruled from 640 to 609 BCE.
His son Ellakim (or Jehoiakim) refused to pay tribute to the Neo-Babylonians which resulted in 60 years of slavery for some 7000 Judeans.
It was only in 539 BCE when the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell that they were allowed to go home.
The Judeans come home, but their temple has been sacked and most of their sacred texts burnt, so they rebuild and recreate.
This is when Noah and Moses were invented, a long with anything before Solomon, and even much of his life as well.
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Fun fact: In the Old Testament, God first calls himself as El Shaddai, which many scholars translate as "God of the Shaddai people". So, even He doesn't see Himself as the universal gods, just one of many.
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The Torah has been preserved in Hebrew, but changed in writing over time. The Quran has been preserved in Arabic and the original text is preserved, which is also why the language is preserved.
Your argument is factually wrong and calling all Jews, Muslims and Christians "fucking idiots" is racist and antisemitic.
Racist and antisemitic are not the right terms here. Please let us know why you think it is factually wrong to call Muslims and Christians "fucking idiots".
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A common misconception, it actually means alphabetically as god's true name is A. Aardvark.
I'm gonna make my own god named A. Aaardvark.
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It was war, conflict and invasion that turned people to Yahweh to be the major god, since he was the god of war. Before then he was a minor figure. The odd part is why previous references weren't eventually changed or edited out to reflect this turn to monotheism.
Probably wasn't edited because it wasn't a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.
Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
Other religions over time haven't had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs. -
Probably wasn't edited because it wasn't a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.
Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
Other religions over time haven't had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.Wait wait wait, did Judaism invent the basic concept of a checksum?
That is... very interesting. I know numerology and the like are very popular parts of Jewish occultism.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, my knowledge of this history is iffy at best,
Iirc, Early Judaism wasn't monotheistic like it, Christianity, and Islam are now.
The people at the time had multiple gods, one of which was a minor god associated with storms. At some point this god was boosted into popularity and became the primary god of the old testament and eventually THE god of the 3 Religions.
The line being written like this could be a holdover from this extremely early culture which was initially Polytheistic.
OR it's just a funky translation and just ment to mean "Don't worship someone as a God like their any better than me.THE God."
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I'm into decolonization of Christianity, and one thing that's really interesting is how saints were used by conquered peoples to preserve their gods and cultural practices i.e. syncretism. That's one of the reasons Catholicism has remained more prominent than Protestantism in Latin America.
Catholicism outside of the Vatican is peganism and animism and ancestor worship with the labels scratched off.
And I'm mature enough in my atheism (really, post-atheist) to think that's actually really cool.
I'm not a practitioner, but I've done a lot of reading on Voodoo.
African, Haitian, and New Orleans.
Often, at least in Haiti and New Orleans, Catholic saints are matched with a particular Loa (spirit, god, whatever you wanna call it)
This was due to Voodoo practitioners being killed for not being Christians in Haiti. Thus, they could worship Saint whoever visually, while still interacting with their own faith. It just traveled to the new world as people did.
The process is called Syncretism, and Voodoo is hardly the first or last instance of it happening.
As you mentioned, the church has done this too.
Easter? Eostre was a fertility deity associated with spring and rabbits.
Christmas? Yule.
It goes on.
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The way it sounds in full is like "I saved you from a tyrant you were forced to serve and worship! Therefore you must serve and worship me!"
I'm not the only one reading it like that, right?
The old testament is full of kinda fucked up,
borderlineabusive demands.NVM he has you cut the tip of your dick off as an act of devotion it's full on abusive.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, my knowledge of this history is iffy at best,
Iirc, Early Judaism wasn't monotheistic like it, Christianity, and Islam are now.
The people at the time had multiple gods, one of which was a minor god associated with storms. At some point this god was boosted into popularity and became the primary god of the old testament and eventually THE god of the 3 Religions.
The line being written like this could be a holdover from this extremely early culture which was initially Polytheistic.
OR it's just a funky translation and just ment to mean "Don't worship someone as a God like their any better than me.THE God."
Yeah, there's a bit of a discussion about this further down the thread. Yahweh was originally some sort of god of war (and maybe storms? See the great flood), but as his worship became more prominent he assumed the attributes (and name, even) of the chief god of the pantheon, El.
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Now read in original language.
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Religion is baked into our very genes.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
And yes, the penultimate sentence is an experimentally verified fact.
Peter Watts, Echopraxia
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The Torah has been preserved in Hebrew, but changed in writing over time. The Quran has been preserved in Arabic and the original text is preserved, which is also why the language is preserved.
Your argument is factually wrong and calling all Jews, Muslims and Christians "fucking idiots" is racist and antisemitic.
lol, man didn not even mentions jewish ppl expicitly and you threw in antisemite lmaoo
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Wait wait wait, did Judaism invent the basic concept of a checksum?
That is... very interesting. I know numerology and the like are very popular parts of Jewish occultism.
Wouldn't go quite that far, but given you needed to be relatively educated to qualify for the task it wouldn't surprise me to learn there were some acceptable tricks for catching or preventing errors that we would recognize as parity checks.
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I'm into decolonization of Christianity, and one thing that's really interesting is how saints were used by conquered peoples to preserve their gods and cultural practices i.e. syncretism. That's one of the reasons Catholicism has remained more prominent than Protestantism in Latin America.
Catholicism outside of the Vatican is peganism and animism and ancestor worship with the labels scratched off.
And I'm mature enough in my atheism (really, post-atheist) to think that's actually really cool.
What is "post-atheism"?
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Yaweh was one of the sons of El in Caananite religion, which has the same Noah myth, and the religion/people is based on one of his son's decendants. El was accepted by Greeks as the same god as Zeus. Many other Caananite polytheistic gods had Greek equivalents.
When Moses wrote the tablets, he was basically doing a religious coup to claim the Hebrew/Israelite "subgod" was the primary god. Denouncing Idolatry, and "thou shalt not covet" was also a rebelion against the main/historical Phoenecian/Caananite religion to when Israelites war against Phoenecians "do not covet their idols, destroy them".