If Everyone Really Believed—

What life might be like if religion got everything they fight for…

  • “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”
  • Perhaps the most well known and recited scripture in all of Christendom. But what would it mean to our “Christian nation” and what would it be like when they have the total population baptized and True Blue?™️
  • The Pros
      • Conservative republican government with no opposition
      No crime
      Free homosexual and transgender de-programming (effectively making the world a “gay free” zone) in a generation.
      10% flat tax
      Guaranteed faith healings
      More hand holding
      Paleontologists would be held accountable—paying fines for the possession of fossils over 6000 years old
      Reduction in latex
      No-faith pharmacies
  • The Cons
      • Monochrome culture
      No mission trips to feed the ego-participants dopamine receptors
      No ophthalmologists
      Nobody left to hate
      Exhausting physical and emotional boredom
      Hypocrisy counseling centers dot the land
      Contradiction crisis lines
      Museums of reason
      Thought monitoring (only to help)
      Cumbersome arm-bands to signify your loyalty

    • Author: jimoeba

    Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

    40 thoughts on “If Everyone Really Believed—”

    1. YIKES!!!! 🥺 You describe a world WORSE than the dystopian state/nation Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale series!!! I mean, where does one draw the line for the most oppressive Police State and then one that is ruled and governed by a Constitutional democracy where freedom/liberty is just as balanced and enforced/nurtured as Fair Play or Laws/Regulations… exactly like any and all sports leagues MUST have!? 🤔😈

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      1. No hosannas? If everyone would just live like Jesus, we could all be homeless, unemployed at the mercy of strangers who also would be wandering around the streets hungry, preaching while nobody listened. Pure utopia Dwain.

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          1. That would be a whole nother post. The king has no clothes is still a favorite. Everybody knows what it’s referring to, but the herd is a powerful god.

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              3. Indeed. There are multitudes of other pleasures, experiences, and challenges in life and in this vast world of endless diversity that are SO MUCH MORE valuable/worthy than a fat bank account, endless adult “toys” and a public image (costume) that pleases total strangers and CEO’s who have no clue who you are. Right? 😉

                The meaning of the most fulfilling, impactful life is the one you share with your dearest inner circle and family. ❤

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        1. From ‘lead us not’, to ‘let us not fall’ into temptation.
          Apparently it’s effective immediately, but it’ll take a while to rewire those Catholics, and, of course, they haven’t told the Protestants so they get a monopoly in Heaven. 🙄

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              1. Thanks. Did I stop believing because of a neurological shift, or just quit paying lip service to something I didn’t believe, but professed because of my culture? I don’t even know if I could honestly answer that and know if It was correct. Great little neuro update though.

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    3. I’m inclined to believe the interfactionalism of the Christian faiths would soon rupture any utopian Christian nation. I blame Luther. And his tendency to affix (perceived) grievances to the doors of Teutonic structures of worship.

      But… then again, homogenous societies are often better at a lot of ‘stuff’ and from a utilitarianism philosophy perspective it would probably be better if we all believed the same thing.

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      1. I could see homogeneous societies being good at a few thing, but not a lot. Using my own country as an illustration, there are a ton of interesting ideas coming from all the varieties of life. ”Decades of research demonstrate that diversity is a key driving force for innovation, fostering creativity and creating an environment where “outside the box” ideas can be heard”—Intellectual Ventures.

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          1. Oh. That makes a little more sense, but I’m not sure why it makes sense—people generally dislike those that are most like themselves.

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          3. It think it’s important in what sense a society is diverse or homogenous. Japan is very homogenous in its basic culture and standards of behavior, which makes for a more peaceful and harmonious society than most. But it’s tremendously open to ideas and artistic creativity from the outside world, without which it could not be so technologically and artistically innovative. They have the best of both worlds.

            A Christian (or any religious) utopia would have to be homogenous in its thinking and world-view, closed off to new ideas from within or from outside, since it would already be “perfect” and any change would be heresy. It would be a fixed, dead, stagnant culture. It wouldn’t be innovative in thinking and probably not in anything else.

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            1. In my lifetime Japan has gone from a good chuckle, “made in Japan” to a powerhouse, but as far as ideation goes, they are great at copying ideas and then improving them (Anime and Pokémon don’t count) but certainly a place for that in the world as well.

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              1. When I was studying Japanese, one of the books I read mentioned a problem sometimes encountered with technical Japanese that doesn’t occur with any other language — encountering words for technological concepts that didn’t have any English equivalents because the concepts themselves had only recently originated in Japan and were not yet known anywhere else. At least during the nineties, there were concerns (I think there were actually Congressional hearings), about the US military and intelligence-gathering becoming dependent in some areas on Japanese technology which they had to use because it was the best available, but which no American really understood. I seem to remember there was even a secret internal report commissioned by the Japanese government (it leaked) on how Japan could exploit that dependence to pressure US foreign policy to be more supportive of Japanese interests. I know there’s a perception that the Japanese just copy ideas and improve them, but they have definitely been genuine innovators.

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      2. Luther? I vaguely remember some story about him nailing 95 feces to a church door and being forced to go on a Diet of Worms as punishment, but I’m hazy about the details. But Christian sectarianism long predates Luther. The Catholic / Orthodox split was pretty bloody too — the Crusaders attacked Constantinople at least once, for example.

        More seriously, if we all believed the same thing, how would we ever find out if that belief were erroneous?

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        1. I really relate to this—
          James Rachel on moral autonomy—
“To continuously evaluate whether a being is good requires moral judgment, which requires moral autonomy.

Therefore it is not possible to continuously evaluate if a being is good while also worshipping it (or submitting to it)

Therefore, worshipping necessarily requires abandoning one’s moral responsibility, which is immoral.

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    4. History would end if your idea were to happen, so, please, Jim, eff off! Turn the “force” off, that is. Allow everyone to do their own thing, as long as theybdon’t hurt anyone by so doing. Laughing my head off fiendishly, and rolling around on the floor maniacally.

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      1. Well fuck you too buddy. True, morality can work individually inside of a simple, yet general framework of laws based on autonomy.

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      1. Well, in all fairness a lot of those didn’t truly believe. “Many will say unto me, Lord, Lord—depart from me te that work iniquity”. There were pretenders. It this new world it’ll only be real believer. No pretending

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    6. What a christian kingdom of god would look like is going to depend on what version of christianity you look at. There are hundreds of different christian cults, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them adhere strictly to the teaching of Jesus. In fact, the actual teachings of Jesus would be antithetical to the beliefs and actions of just about every christian sect I know of.

      It was Paul and some of the other writers in the years after Jesus died who really formed what is christianity, and it is much, much different from what Jesus actually preached. Paul was actually more important to christianity than Jesus was. Jesus was little more than just another itinerant preacher, one of hundreds wandering around that area at the time. If it hadn’t been for Paul and a few others, Jesus’s entire life would have quickly slipped out of human memory.

      And even with Paul a lot of the things the christians claim to know about him are just plain wrong. While some of the letters in the bible are authentic, a lot of them aren’t. At least six are known to be fraudulent. And there are indications of the real letters being altered by others long after Paul’s death. The letter to Timothy which makes Paul look like a misogynistic bastard is fraudulent. He never wrote it. And there are indications that the other misogynistic statements made in the real letters were added at a later date by someone else. Probably got dumped by a girlfriend or found out his wife was having a fling with the mailman or something. Or maybe the first incel?

      Okay, how the hell did I get off on that tangent? What the heck was I talking about when I started this? Oh yeah, the kingdom of god and what it would look like.

      1 – we can’t really know what a kingdom of god would look like because all of the sources that define what christianity is supposed to be are either misinterpreted, altered, or outright frauds.

      2 – If it is based on any of the modern interpretations of christianity, it would probably be really, really nasty.

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      1. True. In Catholic utopia, Protestants wouldn’t exist. In Evangelical utopia, Catholics wouldn’t exist. During the actual Dark Ages, the different sects fought and persecuted each other with a fervor worthy of Dâ’ish going after the Shiites and Yezidis.

        It is striking that while the Christians claim to have the ultimate truth they want us all to believe in, in 2,000 years they’ve never been able to agree among themselves on exactly what that ultimate truth is.

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    8. There will always be room for hate in the human heart. Strike religion and we’ll find another reason. There is even a group called ‘True Catholics’ that seems to imply all the others are fake.

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      1. There’s a curious phenomenon in stridently ideological groups whereby much of the hatred is directed not against outsiders but against members of the group who are perceived as not hating outsiders quite enough. I read a couple of hard-line Catholic sites, for example, and they spend less time bashing groups like Protestants and gays than they do on bashing other Catholics who are too tolerant of Protestants and gays. There is even occasional talk of schism if the Pope and the rest of the leadership become too ecumenical. Religion is incredibly prone to splintering because its adherents believe the Word of God cannot be compromised, therefore even minor deviations from one’s own beliefs are heresy, abomination, etc.

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        1. You’re right, Infidel. There is a strong movement among some in the catholic church where it’s like they’re trying to out extremist one another in order to prove to themselves or others that they’re more devout or some such nonsense. There are increasingly vocal factions in the catholic church who calling for Francis to resign or even for him to be deposed somehow because he doesn’t hate gays as much as they think he should and things like that. It’s getting pretty nasty and pretty public.

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    10. Read Ammianus Marcellinus or Zosimus, two non-Christian historians of the late Roman period. They have interesting accounts(important because they have no Christian biases) of just how early “Christian society” was built up. Christians spent more time persecuting each other than anything else other than gathering money and property to their churches, to the detriment of every other issue facing the empire. Bishops from rival Christian sects bragged about torching the churches of rivals. There were street battles between gangs of different Christian sects, even in Rome. One of these battles was over who got to be Rome’s bishop. Monks(episcopal enforcers is what they really were) went about in eastern cities lynching Jews and pagans, vandalizing statues, and collecting books to burn.

      John Chrysostom actually bragged that Hellenic learning was almost extinguished, and riled up crowds to go attack non-Christians. You have heard of Alexandria’s library(Christians try to dodge responsibility for destroying it), but what about the explicit destruction of Antioch’s great library by Christians? Everything in that library was burned to appease the mob of Christians, by order of the emperor(a Christian himself). Antioch was the scene of a massacre carried out by the Christian bishop in the 4th century, including torturing people right out in the middle of the city market.

      A common Christian view of their “kingdom of god” is that the main activity of the believers there aside from constant praise of Jesus would be to view and enjoy the sufferings of the damned, all those non-Christians and heretics. Seems to me that they got their “kingdom” back then, because they got to view quite a bit of that.

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      1. That’s an interesting comment. I am not familiar with your references other than the apologetic lines I had studied twenty years ago as a believer. I’ll check em out. Thanks.

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