Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

You’d think he would have laid out some rules before punishing people for breaking them. How did Cain know it was wrong to kill his brother if there no rules? And WTF was god’s problem with Cain’s offering? God caused to problem and never accepted responsibility.

In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlingsof his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. (Gen 4:3-5)

 

God clearly is not a vegetarian.

 

Nothing. Nothingness.

 

Exactly. A community is more likely to survive if the people in it work together rather than killing one another. It works better if they don't steal from one another, whether it be people or property. It works better if children respect their parents so they can learn from them. It really isn't that hard to see how some moral values might evolve naturally. Then, once you have a community, leaders emerge. They start making laws designed either to protect the community or to preserve their own self interest. Even if it is the latter, it is still to their benefit to keep people together.

Alma may be incapable of finding decency and community without a book telling him what to think, but I don't think we all have those limitations.

 

Most communities also have/create a God. Agreed?

 

How many atheists are we dealing with here itt? That would be helpful to know.

 

Many communities create them. To say otherwise would be to deny the existence of religion. Even if one of the religions is right, the others are creating theirs.

By the way, I'm not an atheist. I am quite militant of keeping all versions of G-d out of schools and government, but that doesn't mean I don't have my own beliefs.

 

I didn’t say you were. I asked how many. It helps to know.

 

I wove my answer to your general question into my response.

 

Blew my mind to read a book on World Religions and reading about the "Caveman dieties" and totems created. There was faith before Islam, Christianity and Judaism - whether the Western world wants to acknowledge it or not.

And figure there were countless localised versions in small communities of peoples, based on the stars, moon etc.

So anyone pitiching their faith as the "one true faith" can get lost.

 

Some communities create many (lowercase) gods.

As Dan Oregon points out, there's a pretty rich human history of gods big and little.