Honestly worshipping the sun the river the mountain and the tree makes so much more sense than the abrahamic religions.
Like why shouldn’t the spirit of cats be happy when I feed some cats. Why should the god of the mountain not punish me for littering. It simply makes more sense for your spiritual thoughts or emotions to be grounded in specific phenomenon.
Nah, now you’re pouring unnecessary godhood onto inanimate objects. They have no agency of their own. You can still worship them for all the good things they bring you in life, but please leave the personifications at the door.
The way I see it, we’re all part of the same thing, which is the universe. And since we’re included, I see no issue in the personification of the universe.
The way I see it, we’re all part of the same thing, which is the universe. And since we’re included, I see no issue in the personification of the universe.
I actually agree, but nonetheless personifying, and relating emotionally in this way to specifics, is useful because doing the work of actually relating all the cause and effect happening in between everything and a specific thing is generally an impossible task, so a shortcut to emotionally understand some specific as it’s categories personification gets you a faster and maybe more detailed conclusion. It’s in many ways just a mental shortcut enshrined in culture.
Same with a lot of the abrahamic stories if you read them as you would read Aesop’s Fables there is actually a lot of good philosophical or otherwise human insight wrapped up in there.
In many ways it doesn’t matter if there is flooding because we angered the sea, or there’s flooding because there’s a tropical storm and high tide, as long as we realize early enough that there exists a flood and we should seek high ground, warn our peers…
In this same way it mostly doesn’t matter if everything is one and specifics are just phenomena of that one thing, like your universe, or what I’d probably just call nature, and others might call god, or if everything is a thing unto itself in constant relation to any other thing. If we draw the right conclusion.
So If you don’t litter because the sign at the entrance of the trail told you so, or you believe it to be disrespectful to the mountain, or it is your duty towards nature to not pollute it, nobody cares and/or should care, but crucially any of those ways to think give you a good reason to do the better and harder thing, which is the reason all these ways of thinking exist.
A shortcut or a model of thought devoid of context is neither good nor bad, but in context I see the personified one true god causing much more harm recently. Not that the personified mountain can’t be a harmful idea, it’s just that in recent history it mostly hasn’t been used that way.
If worshiping the Nekogami makes me happy and good to cats while not impeding me otherwise, why shouldn’t I.
Teng tools would like to sell you an umbrella
That’s probably how those “gods” came into being in folklore. In order for people to be kinder and more considerate, supposed religious scholars used the fear of God as a tool to be better.
Which is based, but down the line bad faith actors use this for personal gain.
We used to worship the sun in Europe too. But Christians decided they wanted to test that resolve, when they were helping pagans simulate the conditions of the sun by setting them on fire.
Technically you still do, Jesus basically just consumed Sol Invictus and his cult practices to be palatable to the Roman public.
Same Birthday, same halo iconography, same vision to Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. No seriously, that was originally Sol Invictus before Constantine fully embraced Christianity. The Chai Rho was a symbol of the general concept of righteousness at the time and was used by Constantine because it was a symbol all his multi-faith forces could accept as being a divine message without rubbing them the wrong way for being too partial to one religion or the other.
paganism works well with monotheism if you imagine that all could be a potential avatar of or personification of an overarching identity or deity which has multiple sub personalities due to omnipresence across multiple universes or timelines
So basically how Hinduism does it, they even have their own big trinity!
Also the bit where saint worship is basically just polytheism through a veil of monotheism friendly innuendo.
Yeah similar to Sikh. I have my own suspicions, mainly along the lines of gnosticism
This is the answer to the question I was always wondering about: “It’s obvious to me that Catholicism is a corruption of Christianity due to mixing with Roman religion; but what are the exact details, and how did that even come to be?”
Economics is not
Its real and true about some rules that in no way relate to the real world. Just like a video game has rules, yet it in no way describes reality.
It is real because we all believe it. The video game is a good example, we can shut it down and all your items are gone. Same with economy.
I mean a lot of concepts in economics are descriptive, they note phenomenon that just happen when humans engage in trade or resource allocation amongst each other.
It’s basically the three body problem but with sharing according to the maximum satisfaction of want and need instead of gravitational fields.
Are you talking about the science of economics or economy?
Kind of both. The science of economics is full of models with false assumptions and self fulfilling prophecies. Economy exists because we believe it does and because of said self fulfilling prophecies
Economy exists not because we believe it does, but because we agreed to follow particular rules, many of which are enforced by state. It is emergent phenomenon. But it does not make it any less real than any other emergent phenomenon, like air pressure.
So is Jesus.
The mainstream scholarly consensus is that a Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth did exist in Palestine in the 1st century CE. The contrary perspective, that Jesus was mythical, is regarded as a fringe theory.
Yeshua of Nazareth possibly existed.
Jesus is the comic version of that.
The academic consensus is that a guy probably existed who was a preacher whose teachings gave rise to the legend of this miraculous “Jesus”.
Everything that’s assumed to be real about Jesus is completely mundane. A preacher whose followers spread his teachings and fantastically embellished his achievements. Big deal! There are hundreds of guys like that. He’s L. Ron Hubbard without the trillion-year-old spaceships.
Except Jesus didn’t make millions of dollars from publishing his philosophy in book format, and L. Ron Hubbard didn’t willingly die in order to prove his belief in Xenu or whatever.
But he didn’t perform miracles. The gospels were written centuries later.
Sure buddy XD
So what if you could see “god”?
Maybe it takes a special technique. Maybe it’s difficult. Like “first you need to build a particle accelerator” to see antielectrons.
And what is “worship” anyway?
The idea that Native Americans were uncivilized is propaganda. They had civilizations as advances and connected as any European civilization. I would have loved to see how America operated as an integrated food system before western Contact.