Is the DEVIL real?

i am aware of this social and tribal nature. "i see them five or ten years older not giving a shit anymore" is a really suck-ass argument point. why? because you're basically minimizing the tribulations people of all sorts of religions go through everyday because of their chosen belief system (or lack thereof).

did you hear about columbine, yes? do you know what those kids asked the kids they shot, before they shot them? they asked them, "do you believe in god?" if they said "yes", they blew them the fuck away. i don't think any of those kids got the opportunity of living five or ten years later to not give a fuck.

i'm all for discussion of beliefs and opinions. keyword discussion, not cutthroat.

i said nothing about the restriction of free speech, so don't make it out like i did, ok? i just said i think it's a good idea to refrain from discussing religion in social settings because it usually leads nowhere good, and somebody getting insulted. there is a difference between openly saying things of personal religious concern in a room full of people you don't know, compared to being in a room with 2 or 3 of your close friends.

solipsism is a form on self-deceit in which one thinks and assumes everybody will act as they do and think as they do. it's poisonous. this is the reason why religion is a dangerous conversation piece. it is nowhere in league with the discussion of music, video games, or food; your comparisons are horrible. the only thing analogous to religion in regards to social reactions is politics.

outspoken? yes. antsy? your word choice wreaks of judgement and negative connotations. perhaps you meant "impatient".

if you were a homosexual, especially a homosexual man, in america i think you'd feel a just a littledifferently. one of my best friends is a gay man and luckily we live in a city in the northeast that embraces and accepts gays/lesbians to an awesome extent.

this same friend traveled south with his boyfriend, and while on the road, they stopped to get some food at a diner just like anybody else. to their dismay, they found themselves the center of attention as they walked in and were seated; everybody looked them up and down and stared at them as if they were the anti-christ in their cuddly little bible-thumping town dripping with its southern accent and "good christian values". and i'm sure they were all white; and would of treated a black person the same way.

i'm not going to deny that religion is a great influence for most people and has indeed brought many people together. it has provided great strength for those that find truth in it. it instills a sense of community and gives one a purpose. that is wonderful, and i am all for that. i am not for high horses or solipsism. and frankly, many people involved in these religions that involve a higher power practice it (solipsism), also contradicting most of what their texts preach.

but religion is a tool of manipulation, not just on the level you speak of.

you bring up a good point about the wars, and i cannot refute the truth about the current war, but there are plenty of "good christians" and "__insert devout follower of said religion here__" that haven't read one damn page of the book they claim to follow. they just follow it because that's what they were told, and because most people believe it to be true. they fail to question.

this certainly is NOT all of them, but i find most people that are judgmental and preachy have neglected to read anything or have read everything. i have the utmost respect for those that are confident and secure in their faith, have read and furthered their understanding all they can, and still respect views other than their own.

what do you constitute as "blind, dumb atheism"? i'd love to know. and yes, i agree, in an ideal pipe dream that will never happen, everybody would be kind and helpful to one another. and you're right, a fair amount of people never will act that way. i used to act that way. keyword used to. i have my own reasons as to why i don't anymore.

sure, people have died in the name of non-religion. no shit! religion may not always be the matter at hand when it comes to war, but a belief in something is, whether it is a belief of disrespect, honor, or protection.

all men and woman are not equal. you would be a fool to think so.

justice is a concept, much like good and evil is, and religion too. justice, to me, is simply an eye for an eye or worse.

"oh well, i was on drugs when i molested this little girl" or "oh, i'm so sorry for what i have done". ok? well you shouldn't of been doing drugs in the first place, and you're just sorry you got caught. it's no excuse, even though some of these fucks get lessened penalties. electric chair please.

 

can you prove to me that they are real? how? i cant prove 100% to you that he isnt real, because he is kept alive in myth by tons of people who sin, who belive there is only one god.. that belive in "him". but there are so many other religions, that offer the same path...

Each religious group provides a distortion of faith, that they offer the only way to rightousness.

"each theistic religion provides a closed point of view, that new logic, faiths, and idea's are rejected in favor of traditionalized, outdated beliefs"

a cardinal doctrine or the christian faith, is the death and ressurection of christ, perhaps the most important notion in the bible
"And if christ be not risin, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain" -Corinthians 15:14

yet, there is no primary source of noting this supernatural event in secular history.. you would think, some guy rising from the dead, would be noted in more then just a book, called the bible.. however the ressurection and death of 'a person' has been in belief, since like what 10,000BC ?

and the fact that a large number of pre-christain savors with the same attributes, birth date, three kings.. same miricles.. instantly puts the any religion in mythological territory by association.

religions are just alagorical expressions derived from many years of what is thought to be.... hence its just a story
and if religion is the 'savoir', how come all religion shares the same threat, War. Christianity has more then 34,000 different battles over belief.

religions were created so many years ago, when we didnt know how things work.. they didnt know about atoms.. the fact that everything in this world is a whole,

but thats what happens when u questions someones faith.. peopleget mad, because they cant defend it..
im not here to question, i just cant belive in a world we know, the intelligence we have.. how our DNA, Atoms and everything else works as a whole, that religion is still keeping us from our full potential, there is no such thing as independance, everything in this world works and is created by a reaction.

do some reading, compare all the religions and gods before christ, there are about 40 'gods' with the same exact attributes.. dec 25th birthdate, started work at 30, was sold for.. worked miricles, ect ect ect.. krisnah, horus.. are some few..

open your mind, to what you truely are.. a chemical reaction that worked.

if u have some questions, watch the zeitgeist movies, otherwise, keep the narrow minded point of view, that there is only one way to self perfection, religion.

 

Very emotive, but I don't see how such incidents reflect religion as a whole. The vast majority of people will neither shoot someone not be shot in the name of religion. And I think it's pretty well-documented that the Columbine kids were social outcasts, rallying against the "jocks" and athletes at their school. I don't remember anyone implying that Columbine was religiously motivated. They were probably going to shoot the kids anyway, no matter what they answered.

I'd offer the counter argument made by, among others, Rowan Atkinson to the BBC, that the right to offend outweighs the right not to be offended. I know that you're only talking about "social censorship" - much the same way that talk about our own feces is largely "socially censored" - but to be honest, I haven't noticed many people discussing religion in social settings lately. Maybe America really is a backwoods shithole, I don't know.

Why are my comparisons "horrible"? Is it solely because they don't make religion look as bad as you want it to look, or do you have some evidence? You're talking about death tolls, but as far as I can see that's just an issue of scale of reaction. I don't see anything inherently different between two people disagreeing over which god is the best and which band is the best. How people react to the disagreement might vary, but I don't think that, for example, it is any more unreasonable to expect those who are discussing god to show restraint and a sense of decorum than it is those who discuss music.

People have killed one another over allegiance to music. A lot of the acrimony in the Columbine shootings is meant to have something to do with the killers' allegiance to music, to the culture that surrounded it, compared to those of the victims. I honestly don't know how you could think that religion had anything to do with that one. Maybe it was reported differently in the US.

Your word choice reeks of favouritism and bias . You say "impatient" though, and it's interesting. A lot of modern atheists talk as though religion is something that will pass, as if they're ahead of the curve and people who have religions just need to catch up with them. I find that rather arrogant, coming from them.

I might be wrong about this, I don't live in America so I don't know how hard it is to not be a religious person there. But it does seem like you're at least on the verge of "growing up" a bit with regard to religion. It's just a question of the atheists (particularly the "public" ones) being patient, making sure that they don't allow impatience to cause them to become frustrated and to misrepresent their views when the opportunity arises.

K. Don't really see your point though. Christianity is the dominant religion in America, so those invoking the spirit of the majority would probably go via Christianity. But really, those people just have an incredibly rigid idea of what is "normal", and you'll find that in every culture, every country, religious and non-religious. Few people in this country consider themselves Christians (certainly not practicing ones), but plenty still have a problem with homosexuals. They just hate them for being "unnatural" rather than ungodly. So I fail to see how the mere existence of intolerance can be directly link to religion.

This is my point; you're not proving that religion is the cause of these injustices, just that it is present.

Indeed, and people can get that sense of community from other sources, so in many ways, religion doesn't need to exist, just as fashion and other aspects of culture don't. This makes me think that they will exist, whether we need them or not - because we've never actually needed them before, and yet they do exist now.

Maybe I'm hanging around too many music nerds, but you'd be surprised how many fans of one band or another do basically the same thing. The "straight edge" subculture is a pretty good example: one guy writes a song saying that you shouldn't do certain things (specific examples being drinking and doing drugs) just because the mass says so, and within thirty years you've got a cult developing around it, with some adamantly against others drinking and smoking as well. Laudable acts, but with no vestige of the intent of the original song.

I am jut saying that a hell of a lot of other, totally acceptable things can be considered tools of manipulation. Marxists would argue that every aspect of culture is tailored to impart ideology. You've only got to look at the fairy stories you knew as a child to see how society is shaped by narratives. To me, there's no difference. I'm a Grimmsian and a Roald-Dahlist, laterally a Pratchettist rather than a Christian, and as a result I have certain values, instilled into me by those stories, that have made me believe that the world should ideally be a certain way. You see this kind of thing a lot more plainly in the Harry Potter books, actually - very strong messages of anti-authoritarianism, self-determination rather than blind obedience, and the unwillingness to let one's world be divided into black and white, good and bad - and I think that's what frightens the churchy types, far more than some mumbo-jumbo about witches and wizards.

Thing is, I don't think it can even be most of them. I'm putting aside people being a bit judgmental now and then here, because I do not believe that religion creates that type of person, and most of those people would be every bit as judgmental as Buddhists or atheists. But this ties into it. I don't think bad people are made bad by religion. They can be enabled in their badness by religion, but the mere fact that millions of people can read the same book, and only one of that million flips out on it is, to me, quite compelling evidence that religion isn't bad.

To give a non-religious equivalent, now and then, some kid will flip out and go around killing people. Society as a whole will insist that "this didn't happen in our day" (which is bollocks in itself), and start looking for something to blame. And they find that the kid has a few violent video games. And the little wheels of the mob mind get moving and they think "violence in games = violence in real life!" because it sounds sensible. But what they don't do is check. They don't check to see whether the sales figures for that video game correspond to the number of school shootings or violent sprees. If there was a simple causal relationship, you would expect every kid who bought the game to have at least attempted some kind of killing spree. But instead, it's easier to just blame the game, so that's what happens, and there's a lot of noise about it, it goes to a court, the court then takes the most sensible decision that will get the thing off their desk as quickly as possible, and nothing happens.

Long rambling tangent, but I see a parallel between video games and religion here. Both are blamed for the crimes of (in my view) a certain type of person who is at best suggestible (likely to commit a crime just because someone says it's a good idea) and at worst just attracted to violence and clearcut black and white morality because they are violent and crave authority. The fact that millions manage not to be so influenced is barely mentioned.

Of course, I'd imagine that it must be intensely frustrating to live in a country where religion appears to be beyond reproach, let alone accountability. Here, there's a lot less reverence, and a lot of people believe that religion makes people do bad things (e.g. Islam). But again, the percentage of Muslims who will actually kill someone is so negligible that the demonisation of the entire religion is absurd. And pretty much every religion I'm aware of does a lot more to stress the consequences of violence than the average video game!

As in, those who have not gone through a process of reasoning that God doesn't exist, but who are just mad at their daddies for making them go to church when they were kids. I guess it's anti-religion-ism rather than atheism. I can respect someone who simply does not believe in a god a lot more than I can someone who's just got a bee in their bonnet about Christianity and thinks atheism is their best alternative. There's no goal to atheism, after all, no Heaven or Hell or Internet coolpoints to tell you that you've done well. So it seems like it should be about the journey, the process of inquiry into the nature of the world, more than just a mad race to get some kind of answer before anyone else.

Quite. But then, you're getting into an awkward domain of either declaring all beliefs to be wrong, or deciding which beliefs are or aren't okay. Myself, I'd rather simply declare actions bad or good. A lot of the anti-religious argument just seems to be looking for something to blame, to explain how men could do such terrible things, because we fear our bestial nature and the fact that, actually, most of us are capable of truly awful things. Two-thirds of people are capable of inflicting (what they believed to be) lethal electric shocks to strangers. Admittedly that means that one third aren't, but still, surely we can agree that that fact is something that would make social animals such as ourselves rather uncomfortable, depending as we do on our ability to trust those around us.


LONG POST IS LONG.

 

You made the positive claim. The burden of proof is all yours. I'm simply pointing out that you don't practive what you preach. You are stating something that you cannot know for sure, and can never prove, yet you expect your polar opposites to do just that.

Also it was sort of interesting to see you automatically lump me in the christian category, even in the general philosophy forum. This tells me that you aren't really interested in hearing what other people say, but you already have all your "opponents" lumped into one broad group.

BTW, if you are getting your information from zeitgeist, then God help you. (insert comment on how you've done countless hours of research)

 

The entity famously known as Satan is merely a scapegoat for the fact that man cannot accept responsibility for his own evil actions.

 

Who is Stan? ...Oh you mean the kid from South Park? Stan's the devil????!!! Oh no! I should have known...!!!!!

(I hope you get South Park in England----or you'll never know what I'm talking about... ...Though I suspected that the younger priest on Father Ted (What's his name) was the Devil...)

 

I would say greed could be satanic in a way

 

The devil is a personification of the shadow---that part of the subconscious that we associate as a bad part of ourselves. Basically, any time that we are told "No!" by our parents, our teachers, friends, boss, priest, or whoever's ideal we are trying to conform to at that time, our ego takes that negative and represses it into the shadow. If it is important the ego tries to tell us that we are not that kind of a person.

But there are some tricks to that. First, The ego tries to deny that aspect as a part of who we are, but that is part of our total self. Maybe we learned not to do that thing, but in our innocence, we did do it. Often times by denying the problem, instead of dealing with it, we continue to act it out. A gossip may never know that he/she is gossiping, for example. Second, we often project our shadow elements onto the rest of the world. That same gossip may talk bad about others accusing them of always gossiping. That doesn't mean that someone who is very bitter about prostitutes secretly wants to be a prostitute but doesn't know it. It simply means that they have repressed something that the subconscious symbolically associates with prostitutes. Some homophobes are homosexuals and don't know it, but not all of them. Others just have something that was repressed that the subconscious associates symbolically with homosexuality. Third, the deeper something is repressed (and denied) the more evil and violently it can resurface. A lot of evil is committed in this world because people are acting out repressed shadow elements. Fourth, because our ego denies that such things are a part of you, anything that makes you very mad, is a part of your shadow. Take that same gossip and accuse him/her of gossiping, and she will explode.

When you can face your shadow element, understand it and accept it, you defuse it, and it is no longer a problem. A kleptomaniac, for example, if they were able to find the shadow element that causes them to do this, accept it and understand it, it would defuse the subconscious drive that causes them to steal.

But here is another aspect of this. The religious god (as opposed to the god experienced through spirituality) is the personification of the ego--particularly the ego-ideal (the egos concept of a perfect self. The purpose of the ego is to maintain a consistent self---so that you are the same person when you wake up, that you were when you went to bed. It does this by filtering our all the nonessential stuff to your subconscious. The ego is the filter of the conscious mind. But through this process it comes up wth a concept of who you are, and it tries to make you fit in---be the right or good kind of boy or girl to fit in with those who it identifies with as important to your personality. It also drives you to conform to your ego-ideal---something that is impossible.

Now here is the important part if god is the personification of the ego, and the devil is the personification of the shadow: The shadow is simply a repository----really just a name for all that stuff repressed b the ego. It is a part of who you are. There is no lies---just raw truth--you did this thing, perhaps naively, and you were told it was wrong. It is part of your make-up, or at least your history. It is the ego that is dishonest to you. It tells you that it is not you, or that you never did that, or you never do that everytime the ego is not watching... To deny it keeps that part of the self hung-up. To accept it and assimilate it allows the self to heal.

And before you start arguing with me about a new religion and all, let me point out that I was a consultant to the writers of The Bible. Well----not so much the Old Testament, that was more Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. In fact---anything that is about sex or alludes to sex, Woody Allen wrote that. So when it comes to The Bible... ...Oh wait, I'm not a Christian so I guess it doesn't matter...

 

In all seriousness--I agree. Just as there is a shadow to our individual psyche, there is also a shadow to the collective consciousness. Look at the Republican party, for example, (not to take sides but to make a point) they accuse the Democrats of Socialist policies, more because of the dictatorial connotations than political fact, while they temselves pursue policies, in the name of freedom, that are dictatorial in either a fascist or corporate fashion.

The old testament is filled with repression of sexuality, fertility, and the feminine. As the Hebraic tribes shifted to a sole male deity they socially repressed elements of the goddess as these same elements became individually repressed---i.e. turned evil. Yahweh himself, was originally a consort of the Goddess, Astoreth or Astarte.

The New Testament, heavily influenced by Greek Philosophy, has incorporated elements of a devil that reflects the shift from Dionysian ethics to Apollonian ethics. Western culture and civilization, ever since has been a conflict between the Dionysian and Apollonian forces. The political shift to the right in the US today, represents Apollonian forces taking control.

Nietzsche described these forces, and recognized how history reflects them. The Dionysian forces are those of nature, and explosive generation, growth, ecstasy, fecundity, and freedom, but they are also irrational and lead to excess. The Apollonian forces are those of control and management, suppression, repression, rationalism, and so forth. While it may bring in the voice of reason it retards growth, and is overly objectivistic.

c

 

The devil is in the details.

 

There's no devil, it's just God when he's drunk.

 

Don't you guys get it yet?

I'm the Devil----I thought it was so simple-----me, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, President Obama, Rush Limbaugh, and that guy, Frank, you used to know, oh and that one playboy making his way around Europe----we are all the Devil.

Geeeeesh! I thought it was so obvious!

 

not as a being of some sort. the human ego is real enough though. and its short sightedness is devil enough.

 

The idea of a devil is a typical example of Western dualism. If we have a 'good' god, we need an 'evil' devil to counterbalance it.

 

No.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ckuXx64abc"]Sympathy for the Devil - Rolling Stones - YouTube

 

fuck no the devil isn't real.

that's the silliest shit i ever heard.

 

Obviously a symbolic personification of the human invented abstract concept of evil.

 

That's also an interpretation indeed. Since I saw quite some posts of you I have to ask just to clarify: you don't really belief that interpretation to be the actual truth right?