The meaning of life is to subjugate your will to imagination.
As a religious spectator—life has its own meaning, or get bogged down with the rule book—or the experts. We all remember that one guy who would always quote the rule book, but only when it was to his benefit?
The coach—Preaching is a most unworthy profession. If you can’t do, teach! Pseudo-wisdom and just enough fear smattering through the sermons to keep you coming back, burying themselves in the doctrine to hide their lack of faith by pretending. Caught up in the game itself, but lacking any accomplishment in life, they plow through the book and find a million different ways to say the same thing. Like a motivational speaker that entangles each talk with a threat. Teaching others not to trust their own judgement—how empowering.
The player coach—Youth pastors are training to be real pastors. Enamored with the “men of words” and someday having his own congregation (he’s such a good boy) his enthusiastic sickness has never read the Bible through, but what he has read was carefully explained.
The referee—Governing bodies that look the other way and move priests from parish to parish to protect the name of the church. Payoffs and gag orders, protect the good name of the lord, even at the cost of a child. Skilled in sleight of hand, priestly gerrymandering makes these guys a top pick for ruthless prick.
The team—Everybody is running their own plays. Everyone else is doing it wrong (in this I agree) My favorite however, is the cheater who gives glory to god for every goal, and supplements his business ventures with car sales.
The Spectator—the one that watches it all unfold in a game that should have never been invented
Studying rule books is a way of life for most of the world. Hell, we’ve all done it (which is why we are here) but now we watch the plays unfold from the cheap seats,
It’s amazing what one can see from this vantage point! The game of unfun—religion…stuck in your craw like a hometown referee.
TheCommonAtheist 
I prefer the sports combo play by play and color commentator analogy. Theists setting in their pews by the millions banking on the act of showing up and taking in the show of shows will a saved Christian make. As books go the Bible is a tedious, difficult and uninteresting book to digest. Why not covet thy neighbors pretties and earn pious points at the same time. For those who take the charade seriously, that’s what bible study is for. Making shit up and calling it the word of a god so it all doesn’t sound so unbelievably insane.
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Hello Nationofnope. OT. I am subscribed to your blog but for a while now I am not getting any emails of new posts. I just tried to find your blog by google and I failed. Can you shoot me a link so I can fix this and get emails again. Hugs
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Life, it has a way to mess up a routine. Family, health, friends and travel have put a back seat to my blogging. Thanks for following my posts and quips.
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https://nationofnope.wordpress.com/
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Hello Nation. I hope all is well for you. I understand not being able to get to do the blogging one wants to. I get very behind myself. I depend on emails to get to the blogs I follow. Thanks for the link. I had to load the page three times ( wordpress and I have been having a bit of a disfunction lately ) before I got the following button to come up. I will unfollow and refollow and hope that fixes any hiccups. Be well. Hugs
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Thanks bunches!
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Quote: “Preaching is a most unworthy profession. If you can’t do, teach!” And if you can’t teach, preach. Preachers aren’t teachers, they’re demagogues, even if they don’t manage to stir up much of any fuss. If they did they’d immediately get fired and after collecting their hefty separation package, have to go in search of another pulpit or set up their own televangelist station. It’s a lucrative, safe, position if you can’t be, or don’t want the hassle, of becoming a politician.
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You left one off: The apostate who said it’s not true, the priest touched me in an impure manner, who actually did read the damn book, who said the bishop is lying, who stood up one day and said “this shit is a bunch of crap.”
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It’s so cool those pre-historians played polo, too!
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Watching religion is sort of like me watching people playing cricket. It looks interesting at first, they wear funny clothes, and they have nice snacks, the rules are often rather silly and the whole thing makes no sense at all.
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Now watch it in Latin! Haha. Makes even less perfect sense.
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I suppose a lot of people going to catholic services would have had trouble really understanding what was going on. I actually liked the Latin, to be honest. I started serving for mass in – gosh, would have been 1962 I think, before the switch to the vernacular took place, and our priest wasn’t in any rush to make the change anyway, so I had almost daily lessons in liturgical latin for something like five years. My generation was the last that had to deal with that. Vatican II had just ended and everything changed after that. And a lot of people are still mad about it.
I still think some of that was a mistake for the roman church. People love spectacle and and pomp and ritual, really, and something like the traditional Latin high mass certainly had that when it was done right with the ornate robes, candles everywhere, incense, the Latin, the choreography and all that. It was flashy, ornate, showy. And then they went in, ripped out all of the decorations, the statues, the high altars, the censors, just about everything, turning churches into little more than boxes with a table and cross at one end. Even worse, they dumbed it down. Literally dumbed it down. The English translations were ridiculously simplistic, childish, really. Still are. And dull? The last couple of times I got dragged along to a catholic service – oh my word, it was dull! So dull and boring and dreary. I think half the people in the church were dozing off before they were 15 minutes into it. No wonder attendance has fallen off so badly. If you want to put butts in the seats you at least have to put on an interesting show and they can’t even do that any more
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that’s pretty much any sport for me. Oh look, sportball is being played. Oh look, one bunch of people finds that they are the “winners” because of some inane activity.
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One thought: I heard a friend share this with another. He listened to a man walking by a homeless person in the street. For some reason, at this pinnacle of time, he heard the man ask the homeless person if he believed in God. The homeless person said something I’ll always remember. He replied, well, who do you think made you? That was all he needed. Each person is aware of themselves, that they are not their thoughts, but also don’t know where the thoughts are coming from. But you are also aware of you. And you know you didn’t put yourself on this Earth. That was the talk I heard shared. Makes one think. And then there’s understanding.
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So the homeless person remembers what he was taught in Sunday school. Without to much thought, that is the bias of early indoctrinations.
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I understand there are those who can’t believe their are those who “see” things for themselves without indoctrination. There are things I came to understand without others. Interestingly, some things I realized in my youth, different from all of my friends, I found much later that others were saying the same thing, from what they came to know. **It’s a contradiction in terms to believe their isn’t truth, reality that is for everyone. Because in order to say that, one has to admit they can have no opinion. But the very fact one believes in something says there is something to believe. The very opinion of discounting other’s believing is a belief. It’s like saying nothing means nothing. Can’t say it.
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Well, first of all deciding to believe holds no actual substance. Merely a thought conviction that has left humanity mass deprecated for centuries. It is treated like the pinnacle of honor, but merely trading one insecurity for a bigger one with stubborn pride in mere belief.
There is truth, but very little of it so we imagine. Belief and faith are nothing more than using your imagination (hence the story grows) and just because someone thinks of anything at all, doesn’t make it true in the least. Children especially are born immensely gullible and will believe anything, taken advantage of since day one proves there is a god? Haha. If this is your lead into a deity, frankly it’s rubbish. Presenting a story with testimony (conviction of hope) hoping I can imagine what you imagine just proves nothing but the desire for validation.
If I had never been told about religion and gods, it would have never crossed my mind. It is not self evident in the least. The concept has to be taught. Since the idea came around it has been used to explain a myriad of things that have been disproven by science and technology. God is getting smaller and smaller in scope, and it won’t be long before everything can be explained without a god.
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My writing here is not to convince you of anything. It’s simply what became evident to me, not through others, although, when I listened to others, what became clear through the conversations. I know I didn’t create myself: that’s a contradiction in terms. I know I don’t know everything: very little in the grand view. There are things I “see”, but can’t explain how I know. I just do. But I understand something else. The intellect can “see” things anyway the person chooses, but it’s thought stuff. There’s a difference between thought stuff and understanding. A vast difference. How do I know He exists? I just know. Not from books or whatever else others have said. I just know.
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Hello dolphinwrite. Of course you did not create your self. Biology did. The fact is that humans, like all animals species, want to propagate themself. I am sure you understand how “A mommy human and a daddy human who love each…produce little baby humans”. It really only takes evolution, our biology, and the nature time has created. No deities needed nor wanted. Hugs
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Like I said in the thesis “The meaning of life is to subjugate your will to imagination”. Imagine there is more to it and voilet! there is. My mother in law “just knows” homosexuality leads to arson. She just “knows what she knows” according to her. Belief in god holds just as much weight.
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Quote: ” How do I know He exists? I just know. Not from books or whatever else others have said. I just know.”
Well of course, anybody can “know” something they believe in or faith would be an even more ridiculous concept than it already is. I would certainly question your claim that you know “He” exists from a mind condition of tabula rasa. Assuming you mean God, how could anyone today claim that they have never heard of God from books or whatever else others have said? Well, maybe a tardigrade might never have heard about God but you don’t sound like a tardigrade.
So you heard about God and from that, through emotive “reasoning” felt the need to believe in this “He.” That’s simple enough. If you, on your own, had invented or imagined a “He” totally divorced from anything ever written or said about “He” then your “He” would in no way resemble any other template in existence. It would be one of a kind. As soon as it matches existing information, it’s no longer personal, is it. That is from personal experience by the way.
I “know” some entities myself that no one else can see, or interact with. They have been my Teachers for approximately 20 years. Long ago I believed in the institutional ‘god’ of Judeo-Christo-Islamic variety, the one and only patriarchal, misogynist, proud, violent, instigator of bloody sacrifice, hater of mankind, etc, etc, chimera. You know who I mean. That “god” never once answered a single one of my prayers, however sincere. I was praying to a tombstone over an empty grave.
If you “know” the “He” you are talking about and your knowledge is strictly personal, not from ANY external source, then why not keep it at that? Why push it out there? Why use it as an argument for the existence of a public imaginary god? It’s as if you want to push your “knowing” into the public sphere and I must wonder, what is your agenda? Do you wish to defend the overt anti-human criminality of organized religion by validating the “existence” of their claimed god?
Why would any rational, reasonably sane individual want to defend that death-dealing chimera called interchangeably, “I Am that I Am” or YHWH or Yahweh or Jehovah or Allah or for those who aren’t quite sure, the unknown god or simply God or “He?” Is it because you aren’t sure, that you must attach your personal “He” to the other idols?
If it’s so important to advertise your discovery to the world, say not a word but go out and demonstrate through an impeccably compassionate lifestyle how “He” has changed you, then let others draw their own conclusions from their observations, even if some claim it is the power of White Buffalo Calf Woman or the *Flying Spaghetti Monster that is guiding you. So be it.
*Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of the church by the same name, also known as Pastafarianism.
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Why push it out there? INDEED!!
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I get it, Jim. We can’t be in others’ heads. That’s why I don’t try to convince others, just share what I know. I know. But that’s for me. For you, that’s your journey. All the best.
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Likewise. Enjoy the day!
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