Christianity Is Immoral

[Ananya 0]

Spiritualization may make one feel/reach to a state of mind where one experiences something of awe and splendour of universe but I am not sure about it.As I haven't followed the route to spiritualization yet and what you are telling is the final stage after attaining it.But it will definitely come as outcome.There is no denying it.Spiritualization in precise is the way to achieve self perfection.

Now when that gets achieved fully,seeing truth isn't a distant thing to them any more.This is something like breaking free from every chains of illusions. When you say that why should someone leave his/her family and loved ones to do this.Then first I would like to ask you do you really believe in rebirth.If you believe in animism then you do believe in souls as something existing apart from our materialistic bodies. The soul doesn't die even if our materialistic body die.It passes on and on. Well If you tell me to bring evidence regarding that then it isn't possible for me.

In Gita it is said that everything in this universe is yours or rather nothing is exactly yours. Because if you broaden up your outlook everything will appear to be yours but since nothing here on this earth is for permanent. So it is said that nothing is yours. The first one holds true for all creatures and second holds true for all materialistic comforts. Those who take on this path of spiritualization

I believe is somewhat based on that concept.The spritual practitioners don't take on the family they born in as something as their own rather they take on everything as their own.

 

Definitely its spriritual enlightenment that makes Buddha say:

The greatest battle is not the one that you win over others but rather its the one that you win over your own.

Every action in this world is basically void in nature.

Edited May 18, 2012 by Ananya (see edit history)

[Bikerman 2]

No, obviously I do not believe in animism - this is obvious from my general stance as a materialist/humanist/atheist. Since, as you say, you cannot provide any evidence to support the notion, it seems to be simply faith - belief despite evidence*

 

* Yes, I know that it is almost impossible to prove the negative - you can't prove that the Invisible Pink Unicorn (bless her Holy Hooves) doesn't exist, but that does not provide any reason to believe she does (even though she actually does exist, of course). The fact is that there is simply no good reason to believe that anything that is 'me' could possibly survive my death. It is generally accepted that my consciousness, personality, self-awareness - in other words everything that makes 'me' - is a product of the physical brain which dies when you die. Any claim which disputes this must provide some pretty damn good evidence, yet they provide not a jot.

[Ananya 0]

Its hard to present anything in favor of animism as something that surpasses death is difficult to prove.I can't do that.Everything in this world can't be tried and tested. Anything that is created is destined to get destroyed one or the other day.But like when a substance is burnt some of it gets transformed as ash and the other part gets transformed as smoke.So death to every being doesn't perish that creature totally.It goes through transformation from one birth to other and the static thing that doesn't suffer any change/transformation is the soul embodied within us.Here comes the need to purify the soul.Because soul gets carried on.

[Bikerman 2]

Everything in this world can't be tried and tested.

Well, you see, I think it CAN be measured.Anything that has an 'effect' can be measured by that effect. Everything has an effect, so everything can be measured. Saying that something has no effect means it does not interact with our observable universe - which is the same as saying it does not exist in our universe.
The notion of a 'soul' being the essence of a person is simply unsupportable. We KNOW what makes me ME - it is the porridge-like matter in my skull.
We can pretty much prove it - change someone's brain - by accident, for example, and their entire personality can change, they essentially can become a different person.
If there really was a soul then it must, by definition, contain information. Information needs to encoded. Encoding information can be done many ways but they are ALL measurable.
Guess what? Scientists have tried many times to measure a soul - by electrical effect, by mass, by energy discharge - you name it. Nobody ever found a trace.
It also flies in the face of everyday experience. I am a 50yr old man. I am, in many important ways, a different person to the 18yr old me. If I did have a soul and it developed with me to reflect the current me, then that would be horrible. Most people die sick and old. I don't want an old copy of me - Ii'll have the younger one please. But if that were possible then what happens to the older me?

I find the whole notion of a soul frankly ridiculous.

[Ananya 0]

The soul within you at 50 and the soul within you at 18 are the same.Because transformations happen only to our physical body. But yes a different kind of transformation do happen to our soul.If you are what your thoughts are. Then if your thoughts have undergone changes then you within yourself is undergoing a change. Your way of looking/perceiving things will also change with that.That change is getting percolated deep within you.This deep change within you can't in any way be explained by your physical transformations.Do you agree with this perception of mine.

[Bikerman 2]

Nope. My thought certainly change - moment by moment. It isn't 'percolated' within me....it results in different synaptic connections in the brain (physical) which I perceive as different knowledge, thoughts, habits etc (mental). The physical change absolutely describes the mental change, we just don't understand enough yet to be able to 'read' those changes.Therefore the soul becomes an entirely dodgy and unwanted notion because it either records a decrepit 'me' or it records a 'me' that is out of date. Both are horrible ideas to me.Now, this point about not creating or destroying matter. OK - there is a basic truth there, but think about what YOU are. Your mind is electrical signals moving around the brain. When you die, the electricity is switched-off. Without that there is no mind. The matter still persists - although it will decompose into simpler chemicals over time - but the 'motive force' - the electrical currents - they die when you die.When you sleep, are you conscious of yourself (assuming no dreams)? The answer for most people is no. Now, stretch that sleep period to a year, a decade....still no consciousness. Stretch it as long as possible - eternity - still no consciousness, no soul, no afterlife, just literally nothing - no perception, no memory, no sensations, nothing at all.People find this idea scary - I don't really understand why. I was 'not alive' for many billions of years and I don't particularly have a problem with that - so why should the same thing be a problem now? Answer - it isn't. When you really face the issue squarely and head-on, fear vanishes. Sure, I don't want to die, but I'm not scared of dying or being dead. I do not want a painful death - I'm much more scared of that, but the act of dying and of being dead - why should that scare me?As a wise man said:- Why should death worry me? Where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not. Why fear that which one will never meet?Moreover there is wonder and beauty in this. Every atom in my body has been though a star - many of them have been through 2 or 3 stars. They will, in the future, go through more stars and be blasted into space to maybe end-up as part of a planet - maybe even part of another being or creature.I am, in a very literal sense, stardust - as are you. We come from stars and we will, in turn, return to stars, our matter being recycled over and over to make new wonders.I find that a marvellous and deeply moving thought - now that is what I CALL spirituality. Compared to this real truth other versions of afterlife - heaven, nirvana, elysium - these are childish, parochial, so unimaginative, so downright boring. You can keep the nonsense of eternal life and 'happiness forever' - because it would be a horrible punishment for anyone to endure..As for me? I'll be a star please! What a wonderfully better vision the real future holds than some bronze-age silliness......I'm filling-up just thinking about it.....magnificent.

Edited May 23, 2012 by Bikerman (see edit history)

[Ananya 0]

By giving instance of sleeping what are you intending to say.Are you wanting to say that when you sleep the soul within you ceases to exist or you as person ceases to exist.If you talk about consciousness then if someone shakes you while sleeping.Don't you wake up. Only thing is your body remains in rest.The consciousness doesn't die truly.Having dreams while sleeping is also a form of subconscious thoughts getting expressed in the form of dreams.While sleeping, you as person isn't changing and is remaining the same.

I am, in a very literal sense, stardust - as are you. We come from stars and we will, in turn, return to stars, our matter being recycled over and over to make new wonders.

Please explain the above line.What you want to say about recycling matter?Are you regarding soul as something recording data like it gets stored in a RAM? Well that is something done by our brain.Soul undergoes transformation in terms of the person as a whole I am.

[Bikerman 2]

COnsciousness drops but doesn't entrely go away. There is no soul so it doesn't go anywhere. I was simply saying that in dreamless sleep we come as near as we can imagine to death - lack of self-awareness etc.

new wonders. Please explain the above line.What you want to say about recycling matter?Are you regarding soul as something recording data like it gets stored in a RAM? Well that is something done by our brain.Soul undergoes transformation in terms of the person as a whole I am.

Nononono...I thought I'd been clear that I don't believe in the concept and see plenty of reason to be fairly sure it is an invention....

[Ananya 0]

But how can you compare a dreamless sleep equivalent to that of death.Even if you do so then also how can the soul cease to exist just because one is having a dreamless sleep.Sleep doesn't mean your soul is leaving your body.Consciousness of mind doesn't drop.But soul remains where it is.It leves only when a person dies.

[Bikerman 2]

You are not reading. I don't believe there IS a soul and so of course I see no problem. You are inventing a problem that I don't believe exists.

[Ananya 0]

My belief in soul within us came from a very personal experience. My granny died in 2005. Once after appearing for My 2009 GATE entrance exam while I was awaiting for the results to come, I saw my granny.Then that very night my granny came in my dream also to console me that you won't be able to clear this exam.And miraculously when the results came really I couldn't clear it.From that I somehow reached to a conclusion that there must be something within us that never gets perished even after death.May be its not a proof for existence of a soul.I wouldn't be able to present you a proof for existence of soul.The belief that the creator created us impartially by putting in different containers which look so different from outside without actually making the content within that container different.

[Bikerman 2]

Hmmm...a familiar tale from believers.Basically there is another way to explain those facts:You were waiting for the results of an exam, but you strongly suspected you had done badly. The dream is fairly standard - subconsciously you were trying to find reasons for failure and granny enters to grant the forgiveness that your self cannot grant itself....You still show some emotion regarding this exam - for example you talk about 'clearing' rather than passing or failing which is an unusual choice of words.....And you base your belief in a supernatural and the inevitable and inexplicable system of spirits and miracles that this entails on.......on that?Aside from the obvious - even if true it would tell you precisely nothing about the afterlife other than it existed, but consider, which is more likely?An explanation such as the one I came up with in seconds or an entire realm of reality which means a lot of what we know must be wrong. And before you say that science has been wrong before, let me explain that scientific theory has certainly changed over time. Basic measurements and laws, however, have NOT. An apple took about a second to fall one metre in the time of Newton. Last time I checked, it still does.For your belief to be truth requires that thermodynamic law, causality itself, as well as everything we know about neuroscience, information and basic human biology. We also have to add an infinitely complex entity (and anyone who says, at this point, that God could be simple, not complex, you are WRONG as I can demonstrate if required) to our model of reality, and Ockham's razor demands that it better bring something pretty impressive to the party, otherwise we ditch it. What does it bring ? Nothing at all.It doesn't tell you what happens after death - or it does, but it keeps changing - is Purgatory still in? Is Hell being denied the presence of God, rather than a real hell and brimstone existence? Do un-baptised babies go to hell?Ask a variety of religious people and see what you get back - and these are the EASY questions. It doesn't tell you ANYTHING about the hard questions, like 'What do I think about genetic manipulation of humans?' or 'What do I think about the current Government-Media relationship in their respective rolls of establishment and watchdog?God couldn't even get it together to tell us not to keep slaves - in fact he rather said the opposite - so God is not going to be a great source for properly tricky moral questions is he? even if we knew what he thought about them - an issue on which he seems strangely silent...

[Ananya 0]

That time I really gave the exam well and definitely I wasn't expecting anything wrong to get depicted in my results to come.How can I know beforehand that I am going to fail/pass. Its just after that dream that I started realising that may be something is going to happen wrong.But whatsoever had happened that time one can't definitely take for granted as a proof of soul to be present within us. A thing that disappears soon after the death of a person can't be tracked the way it can be with a living person.The very concept of soul comes from the fact that there is something within us that isn't ephemeral and is going to be there within the premises of the material world in a different form whatsoever. Now the question arises to believe in that something imperishable within us to exist or not to exist.The reason why I gave you the instances of my personal experience is that I intended to give a point in favour of existence of such a thing called soul.If we can't establish a real proof doesn't leave us with a conclusion that such a thing don't exist.I think its best to leave many things on the basis of personal view.Its futile to quarrel over issues on which we really can't establish something for sure.

Edited June 13, 2012 by Ananya (see edit history)

[Bikerman 2]

Religion is not about truth. Faith is a terrible way to find truth - you wouldn't use faith in your daily life if you were searching for truth. Faith is the excuse people use when they have no evidence.Buddha certainly existed - we have evidence in contemporary writings. Jesus probably didn't, in my opinion. Neither of them were 'Gods'.The idea that all religions have the same 'core' of teaching is just nonsense. Some religions are polytheist, some are animist, some are monotheist and some are so weird that we don't have a word for them. If the Christian god exists then the Jewish and Muslim god cannot exist - they are mutually exclusive. If the Christian god exists then polytheistic religions must be wrong - and vice-versa.There isn't even a common thread or message. Jesus tells people to abandon their responsibilities and follow him, and he will then give them eternal life in some 'paradise'. Yaweh tells people that they better do what he says or they are toast (he has nothing to say about heaven or hell). Buddha says that these notions of a God are silly and the thing to do is reduce dependence on material possessions and search for 'non existence' - freedom from the cycle of birth->death->rebirth.These are not even close to being the same message.I think that you are so desperate to find some way that these religions can be true that you have deluded yourself into thinking that they are somehow all pointing towards some greater truth. They are NOT. They are superstitions, with zero evidence for their supernatural claims, dating from a time when people generally believed in spirits and unseen powers.We don't need Gods to be righteous - in fact there is a very strong NEGATIVE correlation between religiosity and bad social indicators (divorce, abortions and teen prenancy rates, violent crime, prison populations - you name it - the more religious a country is, the worse these problems generally are). This is hardly surprising when you actually READ the bible - it is a horror story, full of rape, killing and genocide, utterly immoral behaviour by God and commanded by him of his 'people'. Hell, the 3 Abrahamic religions share a common foundational story - Abraham being told to kill his son. And the insane thing is that we are supposed to think that he was a GOOD MAN for being willing to do so, rather than obviously being a dangerous nutcase hearing voices.Religion has NO redeeming features. Maybe once it had a use. When everyone is blind then a man with a little amount of sight is useful. When the lights go on, however, he is not.The only 'positive' thing that can be said about any religion in today's world is that it apparently gives comfort to some people. To me that is illusionary comfort and I don't consider it worth a candle - and I also consider it immoral to offer such comfort.I've said this before, but it bears repeating. If a friend asks you if he is dying, and you know he is, do you lie (maybe he will live longer if you lie) or do you tell him/her the truth? Religion offers the lie. I would tell the truth because that's what REAL friends do.