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^ You missed the point entirely, which makes you look all the more foolish. It's not about the number of posts; it's about wasting our time and forum space with jokester childish posts. We all know that this thread isn't to be taken seriously.
Now, if you consider this forum like a comic book or standup comedy, well then, knock yourself out (literally).
P.S. Thanks for taking the time to do research and statistics with my postings. That's time well spent!
And perhaps you should also consider how this post makes you look.
What we post sometimes says more about us, than what our posts say about the other person.
Someone who has contributed 4,159 posts in a two year period is going to chastise a fellow poster who has contributed 4,060 posts in 7.5 years.............................. about "idleness and wastefulness".
I don't believe these gods exist...but I do think about them, and possibly empathize with them and care about them more than most human beings I know. That's how I think most religion should be...not about getting the goody-goodies in the afterlife, but about being inspiring or comforting somehow. Ideally, they wouldn't blind people to the truth of how reality actually works either. They'd coexist with it. Einstein's religion, if it could be called a religion, did all of that stuff, it seems. He wanted to understand the mind of God. I think he just personified the universe, and didn't particularly care if there was an intelligence behind it all or not.
For a lot of people, definitely for me, we care more about things when we personify them. I'm not sure if the personification makes us care about things more, or if we personify things we care about more...but I think there's often a correlation. Sailors used to personify their ships, for example. Their lives depended on them. They had to learn their movements, and little characteristics. They probably felt like they had personalities oftentimes.
Awhile back there was a guy with a religion he called "creating and absorbing the deity," which was here he'd just assume, or pretend, or lie to himself, or something, and just tell himself that certain gods existed that he wanted to believe in. He liked the Greek Gods. I think he might have thought his gods were more real than I think mine are...but I still have long been pretty fond of that sort of religious-ish type of mentality, where you just kind of pretend stuff exists.
So, these are my invisible friends.
The God of Light is a god of psychopaths, because he's the god of the forgotten and the isolated, the slaves, and the underdogs everywhere, and the rebels. He's a monster too - violent and destructive. When a young child experiences something so traumatic that their mind begins to pull away from the world around them, and they're all alone, the God of Light is still there with them. He tells them, "You still have you. I am you. You still have me," and these children may become violent monsters like the God of Light, but they remain alive. They endure.
The God of Light is a demon, to many, and appropriately looked at that way...like Kali, the Hindu Goddess and fierce destroyer of ego. The God of Light is the protector of ego. The God of Light respects Kali, more than anyone, for her fierceness and ferocity. He wants to fight her. He would take the form of an enormous, red dragon, spitting star plasma. She would slash and stab at him with her weapons in her many arms, and he would like them both to fight forever, becoming stronger in their anger, until everything becomes a scorched ruin. More likely though, Kali's husband Shiva would calm her, like he once when the Hindu gods were fighting demons, and Kali became swept up in her bloodlust, and kept stomping and destroying even after every demon was killed...until Shiva moved himself beneath her feet, and she found she was stomping on him...and that stopped her. The gods of the void would work with Shiva, who they'd respect, and distract the God of Light at just the right moment with some shiny new toy, and the universe would be saved...but the God of Light doesn't know any of those beings exist. He certainly doesn't.
The God of Light is the god of childishness creativity, recklessness, and curiosity, arrogance and pride, and whenever the world tries to crush that down, the God of Light will be there, pushing back and fighting.
The God of Light tells slaves they have worth. He teaches them pride.
The God of Light would have gladly fought Yahweh, if Yahweh had attempted to control the God of Light in any way whatsoever. It wouldn't have been much of a fight. Yahweh would, most likely, obliterated the God of Light with a thought, or less, but that prospect wouldn't have perturbed the God of Light at all. Satan rebelled, but was content to stop fighting once he lost, and focus instead on harming Yahweh's creations. The God of Light would never have stopped fighting, so long as Yahweh wanted to control him, and so might have been destroyed, but as long as he existed, he would have been free.
The God of Light shined brightly in Nat Turner as he led his slave rebellion, and taught Einstein to have the ambition to strive to understand the mind of God.
The gods of the void would respect the Buddha, and many Hindu deities, and Jesus the man, although not necessarily Jesus the God...depending on what type of Jesus we're talking about. They'd have disagreements, but they'd want to work with them. They'd help the Hindu Gods battle demons, not through fighting them, but through planning, and scheming and supporting. In return, they'd request the gods' help in containing the God of Light...not fighting him. That would only cause problems...but finding ways to contain his destructiveness.
Whether the gods of the void like Yahweh or not would depend heavily on the Yahweh. They'd like the Yahweh in some minds. Others though...they'd want the God of Light to conquer, but they'd know he'd fail, so they'd merely prepare for the consequences.
The gods of the void teach acceptance, and bending like a blade of grass in a storm that tears down trees.
But the gods of the void forget things. Their ancient minds ignore things. Little lives of little creatures are not quite, but close, to meaningless in their ancient eyes. They've seen the things before the universe, and they'll see the things that come after it's gone. They concern themselves with the greater good...their perspective of the greater good - their beloved eternal silence. They care about life...as alien beings, in their alien ways...but they don't know us. They don't care to know us, not like the God of Light.
The God of Light is a personal god, one that knows our minds, and cares what we do. It wants us to be glory-seekers, and to rage against the dying of the light. He's there for all the lost souls, reminding them that they still have one person, at minimum. They still have themselves.
The God of Light built the greed to form the individuality, to separate life from minerals and nonliving elements.
I like thinking about the universe that sort of way, because it just seems kind of neat.
Sure, anyone can invent a new religion. Finding followers is a bit more of a challenge, but not a daunting one. Generating enough in donations to improve your lifestyle will be trickier. Getting it to last 2,000 years and be embraced by billions of people, including the greatest minds in literally every field of human endeavor - well, that's going to be a problem.
What I would recommend is that you do what the other frauds and con artists do, here and elsewhere: No matter what other wacky doctrines you may espouse, be sure to work Jesus into your new religion and declare it a species of Christianity.
Don't make the mistake of working Muhammad into your new religion or declaring it a species of Islam, or your life expectancy will be rather short. Stick with pseudo-Jesus and pseudo-Christianity.
Actually...I'm kind of serious about this. I like the idea of it getting to be more popular for people just to make up their own fantasy religions. That's mostly what I'd like to encourage: people making up their own religions and building gods that motivate them, or comfort them, or that they think are just. I figure the more of these sorts of false gods get imagined and talked about, the more they can compete in Darwinian way, and we'll probably end up with a lot of healthy memes. So long as no one actually believes in them, they'll only spread if they make people feel good, or seem to teach lessons about reality, or are motivational...like stories.
I tried to make this religion teach healthy life lessons and depict reality as accurately as possible.
*Yeah...the universe isn't intelligent, but Darwinian evolution is a highly destructive, unthinking process that nonetheless has created a lot of beauty and complexity, just like the God of Light. The God of Light designed our instincts through evolution, which was his blind experimentation. What of our instincts and feelings aren't the result of his blind experimentation are the result of the foolish, dangerous, unthinking being that is the God of Light wanting to feel intriguing new experiences. I see such a foolish, unthinking psychopath whispering to us about how we should just blindly follow our passions as a pretty good analogy for someone just having the mentality of "let your heart be your guide" in all circumstances, so a major goal of the religion is to warn people away from doing that.
*None of the gods are better at knowing the best path than humans are, and that's another idea I wanted to illustrate. All the comforting and special aspects of reality, all our security, should come from humans, because there's not necessarily anything else out there that cares about us besides ourselves, and even if it does exist, it can get things wrong.
*I thought up the gods of the void after thinking about anti-natalism. Anti-natalism is the view that it is wrong to create more life. Anti-natalists sometimes argue that life cannot be better than non-life, because there's no one to miss out on the things that occur in life, but that we can experience and hear about times when life can be worse than non-life. Therefore, in such people's minds, non-life would have a constant value of 0 and life would have, at most a value of 0, and more likely a value in the negatives, with its value reducing, going further into the negatives, every time some suffering happens. Anti-natalists also argue about how people can experience an infinite amount of suffering, but only a finite amount of pleasure before the pleasure will become monotonous. Anti-natalists will also argue about human overpopulation, and I'll personally throw on the argument that while nonhumans have a way of solving their overpopulation problems by going extinct, every new nonhuman just takes more from other nonhumans, meaning that there is no real purpose to producing more nonhumans. Humans might be able to escape from that cycle someday and reach a point where we don't need to endlessly reproduce and keep taking from other life forms, through science, but right now most new human production probably causes more harm than good...so the goal of the gods of the void is the extinction of all life in as peaceful and permanent of a way as possible.
*Also, when thinking about the gods of the void I thought up my own philosophy, which isn't anti-natalism, but like anti-natalism it's rooted in achieving the greater good. With my philosophy, all life is nothing but sensory appendages of the super organism that all life forms, and the goal is maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for the super organism...so that's a secondary goal of the gods of the void. It's a very emotionally detached goal that would result in humanity, kind of operating like machines.
*Both the above philosophies, both mine and anti-natalism though, very much ignore the daily circumstances of individuals though, and so the gods of the void, while wiser than the God of Light, have alien thoguht processes that just often aren't applicable to ordinary beings.
*In my religion both the God of Light and the gods of the void are right in their own way. That's because, the way I see it, it is, in a sense, true that we're sensory appendages of the same organism. I age with time. Everything about me changes except for the fact that I can experience. That remains constant so long as I remain able to experience, and that's the same ability that remains constant in all life, and that ability to experience - to feel, is the only thing that can give any life value. Therefore, the logical path would seem to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for all life, treating humanity as a hind of factory dedicated to producing more happiness for itself and other organisms and reducing suffering.
*But at the same time as the above is true, we're all individuals too, and that's how the God of Light sees is. It sees the above philosophies and screams in rebellion "I am me! I'm not you at all!" and in a sense, it's correct...and without that sense of individuality our species would lose a lot of inspiration, and without blind passion we just often can't get things done quickly enough, and egotisticallness is oftentimes a last resort that protects the individual from unhealthy cultures. It lets someone ignore culture and depend on their own mind for guidance...so I wanted the God of Light depicted as often unwise, but for its lessons and powers to often be useful too.
*Also, modern society seems to perceive creation and accomplishment as very much of a good thing, and extinction as an inherently bad thing. Personifications of life are often depicted as angelic motherly figures. Personifications of death are often depicted as monstrous, frightening figures. I think culture is too much like that, so in this religion the more frightening, reckless personification is the God of Light, who represents life and creation, and the more gentle, careful, empathetic characters represent death - the gods of the void, who lack the beauty and romance that the God of Light's powers can offer, but they'd bring people to death, not as monsters dragging people into the darkness, but as gentle beings helping people to drift off into the nothingness from which they came, that the gods of the void long for themselves.
*I probably should have added more about the positive aspects of the God of Light. He likes dancing and music a lot, for one thing...and I wanted to emphasize that as a good thing. It's the purpose of living - achieving those positive emotions, for ourselves or others, and the God of Light, who is the personification of emotions, particularly passions, stands up for us, in the form of our egos, and pushes us to seek out the things that make us feel good - the achievement of our ideals - our personal joys - and those sorts of things are very difficult to quantify or determine the value of in a kind of "greater-good-for-the-universe" kind of strategy. Of what value is setting foot on Mars? The gods of the void would probably see it as silly, with their alien minds focused on a factory like production of happiness and reduction of suffering. The God of Light understands though. He understands the desire for glory, and adventure, and the achievement of ideals, and he understands ways in which life would be poorer with the loss of such things. He understands the ways in which it's difficult, or impossible to define life as an equation, or claim that living is worse than nonliving because of the equation, and he gives a sense of meaning to the people who are, according to my and anti-natalists' philosophies, little more than cogs in the machine, or, at worst, mistakes. The God of Light teaches people, "It doesn't matter that you'll be a negative or negligible influence on the world. You're you, and you matter to you."
And I'd like to find ways to better illustrate that. I don't want my false religion to be the only one out there. I'd prefer for there to be more others for it to compete with. I'd like more Otherkin - people pretending to have the spirits of dragons and things. I don't want more people to actually believe they do, just people pretending to. I want more people claiming to be Jedi who don't literally believe it, or bastardizing ancient religions and turning them into hobbies they adhere to the tenets of at their convenience...but more than just bastardizing existing religions (which again, I'd view as a good thing) I'd like it more if people would invent their own. I'd like my religion to have more competition so the less useful ones get filtered out.
The problem with pseudo-Christianity is you have to scrap just about everything except Jesus (mostly just if you view him as a man, rather than a god) for me to see it as particularly healthy. Jesus seemed like a great guy, especially for the time, if he was just a man. Everything else that might be a good influence - the afterlife that might our life seem less valuable - the paternal caregiver who might comfort people, but might also provide people with a false sense of security - the Ten commandments that either emphasize that are either common sense or probably not good things - the sense of being "forgiven" and "reborn" - it all seems like a double-edged sword, having potential benefits but also negatives that seem just as likely to cause problems, and that's if the completely bad lessons (like you should blindly follow authority figures) are completely ignored.
So, I'm open to pseudo-Christianity being a positive thing, so long as the followers just make up enough of it off the tops of their heads, but I'd probably prefer stealing Buddhism or Hinduism and just bastardizing that or something, and ignoring all the parts you don't like. Buddhism seems like it has fewer options for bad influences, and I like a lot of the Hindu teachings.
I really strongly dislike Christianity's, and every major monotheistic religion's, emphasis on obedience to a monotheistic god, so I tried to make my rulers of the universe very flawed and emphasize that humans are quite likely wiser than them. We're the result of the merging of both the God of light and the gods of the void. The God of Light created us, but the gods of the void tampered with us, so we could very plausibly be healthy middle ground...or maybe the gods of the void are just correct and everything should go extinct...but at minimum, the mechanical logic of the gods of the void won't take into account all the little aspects of life.
I'm not even particularly thrilled about the belief in a loving, wise god that just has pure, unconditional love for us...although I don't have any problem with that for other people. Fantasizing about existence of that sort of god just makes me uncomfortable though, because of the state of the universe. I prefer to fantasize about flawed, ignorant gods who humans might be more reasonable than, at least at times. That just feels better to me when I think about the universe in general...but I still like the idea of gods existing in some form though.
And, mostly, I just like talking about this stuff.
Actually...I'm kind of serious about this. I like the idea of it getting to be more popular for people just to make up their own fantasy religions. That's mostly what I'd like to encourage: people making up their own religions and building gods that motivate them, or comfort them, or that they think are just. I figure the more of these sorts of false gods get imagined and talked about, the more they can compete in Darwinian way, and we'll probably end up with a lot of healthy memes. So long as no one actually believes in them, they'll only spread if they make people feel good, or seem to teach lessons about reality, or are motivational...like stories. [TRUNCATED]
I like where you are going with this, and appreciate the thought you are putting into it. What I really like, thinking about long-term outcomes, is the prospect of a future where everyone who chooses could have their own "personalized religion" and (this is key)... FREELY AND OPENLY ADMIT IT IS ALL MADE UP.
One of many things that led me to my current state of atheist-leaning agnosticism was, ironically I suppose, the seriousness with which Mormons and Scientologists take their own versions of fantasy. These stand out for me as being created by charismatic cult leaders, who were obviously making things up to fit the task at hand, not unlike 1000s of religions before them... but recently enough so the man-made construct is visible to all and well documented. It's harder for them to hide behind the shrouded mists of time and false sense of credibility that comes with age. To be clear, I don't view LDS or Scientology as any less (or more) credible than other religions... just more transparent and obvious in their madeupiness.
Continuing on, one of the things that bothers me most about religion is the pretense of reality. I think that church pews (and not a few pulpits) are filled with people who, deep down, know that much... maybe all... of what they practice (and preach) is man-made fantasy. But they are bound by their upbringing, indoctrination, familial and social pressures, and sheer repetition, which prevents them from acknowledging that... to themselves and certainly to others. Your model would strip away that pretense. I think it would, indeed, be a healthier world if people could be open in admitting that they are engaging in fantasy... and then do it anyway, because it makes them feel good, teaches lessons, motivates them, and so on.
Good luck with that!
P.S., Out of curiosity, is it "Clint-one" (like the first in a series of Clints).... or "Clin-tone" (like a new color palette)? That has no relevance to anything... just like to know who I'm dealing with.
Actually...I'm kind of serious about this. I like the idea of it getting to be more popular for people just to make up their own fantasy religions.
Somewhere out there is ontological Truth, be it atheism or some species of belief. Most of us are on a quest to get as close to this Truth as we can in this lifetime. What you are suggesting is kindergarten-level nonsense and unworthy of discussion on this or any other forum. It's simply mental masturbation.
I figure the more of these sorts of false gods get imagined and talked about, the more they can compete in Darwinian way, and we'll probably end up with a lot of healthy memes.
What do you mean by Darwinian way?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clintone
*Yeah...the universe isn't intelligent, but Darwinian evolution is a highly destructive, unthinking process that nonetheless has created a lot of beauty and complexity, just like the God of Light.
Sure, anyone can invent a new religion. Finding followers is a bit more of a challenge, but not a daunting one. Generating enough in donations to improve your lifestyle will be trickier. Getting it to last 2,000 years and be embraced by billions of people, including the greatest minds in literally every field of human endeavor - well, that's going to be a problem.
I always wondered about the people, way back in the day, who helped start/create/invent the various major religions we have today (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.), if they ever realized how big they would eventually get?
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