Religious Reasoning—Taking One More Step

How believers stop reason before it’s reason.

There is a serious problem with not thinking things through to the end. We don’t care to solve religious riddles, but always stop short of conclusion—in the feel good parts. Without stopping there, no religious doctrine can stand to scrutiny. None is without contradiction.

For instance

Wouldn’t it be amazing to live forever with god in heaven (the big family reunion congratulating our friends and family that made the cut) Endless hugs and bathing Jesus feet in our tears of joy with no evil allowed? Considering how easily we get bored now, imagine with all knowledge and understanding of the universe at our disposal and we celebrate—and keep celebrating, like the endless techno-chicken stuck in a loop, choir music and no chance for sleep. How long will this suffering be tolerable? After 60 trillion years of willing yourself to die, but you’re just getting started. Besides, I’ve been to family reunions…

The only thing that makes this life even remotely interesting is the fact we don’t remember before this is just a play, and cannot quite recollect what happens behind the curtain when the act is over.

Dying will be a great jolt of laughter upon realizing this game has gotten us on…again. And the surprise of dying to life will be an eruption of laughter to wake from this dream we call life.

This has been going on a long, long time. We have fossilized human (hominid?) footprints from 100million, 250million, and 500million years ago. Not remembering it is the only exciting venue left in the universe.

Meme courtesy of the superstitiousnakedape—John Zande

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

57 thoughts on “Religious Reasoning—Taking One More Step”

      2. If I were told tomorrow that my life has been extended indefinitely, I would take that as a great gift, knowing that all the things I’ve learned have not been for naught. Surely any intelligent person can reason the personal benefits of eternal life. I’m not speaking of such a life in the neutered heaven of the religious although even there the possibility of breaking free exists. Lucifer proved that it is possible to rebel against the almighty dictator, even if she (yes, Lucifer is female!) lost that round. Let me at ’em, Jim. Give me enough time to figure it out and a dictatorial divine ass-kissing heaven is toppled. As below so above, I’ve been taught to observe, hence as the powers that be on Earth become ever more corrupted, so do the Powers in “heaven.” The trick is to understand what the term “heaven” really means once the religious fuzz is blown off it; once the veil is pulled and the wizard is exposed. My opinion…

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        1. And a great opinion it is. It’s pretty obvious that the good guys lost and the winners wrote the annuls in the best light they could, which is horrible to a regular, unindoctrinated person. Count me in your ranks…

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      1. Certainly. And possibly not directly related to us. I do think this gig has been going on much longer than we know in its various forms.

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        2. 500 million years ago is about the time the first chordates appear, 400 million years ago is about the time of the early fish, 300 million years ago is about the time of the first reptiles, around 250 million years ago are the reptilian ancestors of the mammals, 100 million years ago we have dinosaurs and early mammals – still tens of millions of years before early hominins, let alone humans. The first footsteps idea is a nice metaphor, but the time scale does matter, important to get the scale of evolution right.

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  3. Yes, and I always found that this sortof problem came from making claims about things we couldn’t possibly know and treating those claims as fact. In Quakerism, we are concerned with this life and leave the rest to opinion. In my other experiences, the next life was all that counted and questioning it was not received well. It’s kind of like the Trinity or Substitution Atonement. No one can really know those kinds of cosmic “facts,” but the harder they’re peddled, the more holes start to appear for the more critical. Thanks for sharing!

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      1. Just like Comrade Trump’s bio; the more you listen, the more it falls apart! Like trying to hold on to liquid mercury; it just disappears. The so-called “unimpugnable” actually impugns itself! Comparatively the pagan “religions” – if they could be classified as such – were quite amorphous, so malleable as to weave them by region, or nation-state,or city. The subject deities had all the virtues and fallibilities of humans which ultimately made them so relatable. They could do great wonders one moment, unspeakable depravity the next making them just like humanity.

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  4. You should read “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” by Mark Twain. Although he wrote it perhaps as early as the 1860s, it was the last story Twain actually published, in 1907, and it stirred up considerable controversy in some circles. In the Visit story he points out how ridiculous the traditional version of heaven that he’d been taught really was. But the “staff” in heaven go along with it, passing out halos, wings, harps, etc to newcomers to keep them happy, and eventually people get bored out of their minds and find out heaven isn’t anything like what they were taught. Heaven is basically a lot like Earth, only without the pain and suffering. People can work, develop their talents, do jobs they enjoy and find fulfilling, form new relationships. While I think even that would get boring after a short time, it’s certainly a far more palatable vision of “heaven” than some.

    Twain had a sort of love-hate relationship with religion his entire life. In Innocents Abroad he goes after the hypocrisy of the “devout Christians” he went with on the trip to the Holy Land in Innocents Abroad. In other books he scathingly goes after the Catholic Church in Italy with their phony miracles to lure in the believers to make money, he pities the poor Millerites, an apocalyptic cult that eventually morphed into the seventh day adventists, how christian missionaries enabled and supported the enslavement of native peoples in the South Pacific, how missionaries destroyed local cultures, etc. He blistered Hinduism in one book. In some of his writings he portrays god as a deliberately sadistic creature, and religion as little more than a method the rich and powerful use to enrich themselves and wield control over others.

    I think he struggled with religion and belief most of his life. He was one of the most well traveled people in the world at the time. He saw cultures first hand that most people had never even heard of outside of travel books. And he was extremely intelligent and observant. And what he saw going on around him simply didn’t fit in with the concepts of religion that he had been taught. Nor did what he see really fit in with any religion he’d ever learned of. The religions he observed were obviously fraudulent, based on myth and silly stories and outright lies, and the people who claimed they believed in those religions didn’t even bother to observe the actual teachings of those religions except when it served their own interests.

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    1. Quote: “the people who claimed they believed in those religions didn’t even bother to observe the actual teachings of those religions except when it served their own interests.” Sums it up for me, and that’s why I’m no longer religious. Pure hypocrisy.

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    2. I love Twain’s later works.! “Ol # 44” or “The Mysterious Stranger” is a favorite. Of course, “Letters from Earth” is also a fav. Definitely no Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer here……

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  5. If we throw those objections up on the screen, we are then told we don’t know how, we just know it will be wonderful through faith. Thanks GF. Excellent comment. Twain was there, but we’d prefer to believe the believers

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  6. Not unlike the scene in the 1967 movie Bedazzled where Dudley Moore’s character, Stanley, is questioning George, aka the devil, about his falling out with God. His response was something to the effect that the tedium of the relationship was intolerable. To demonstrate his point he perches himself on a fire hydrant and has Stanley walk around endlessly praising him. After a number of circuits Stanley complains that he’s “getting board”and the Devil exclaims “now you’re getting it. Loved that movie.

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    1. What could possibly make it tolerable but brief vacations without knowing it’s a game? This is all I could imagine would give a jolt of pleasure. It the eternal scheme of things we’re here about twenty minutes (if a day is like a thousand years) I bet the line is long to get here

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  7. the nonsense of the bible “heaven” is always bemusing. one would have to be a fanatic to think this would be a good ideal of what you want to do for forever. And Christians themselves invent their own version of heaven just like they invent their version of god.

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  8. I have a question about the 72 virgins. Are they fake virgins? I mean, how the hell am I gunna know?
    And I heard some guys only get 48. They blow themselves up, randomly kill a bunch of their fellow believers, and then are shorted on the deal. Shameful.

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    1. In my perfect form I imagine after about 20 days they’d no longer be virgins. What to do with all of them then, if virginity is such a prize to be ruined?

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    2. If someone offered me 72 virgins, I wouldn’t bother checking their history. I’d just take them with open arms. 😉 48 ain’t bad either, but I guess after millions of years you’d probably still wind up choking the chicken to some other guy’s 72 virgins. Variety is the spice of life after all.

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  10. I am struck with how silly what people “believe” religiously. If you were to ask a small child about his fantasy land, kind of like C.S. Lewis’s “Boxen,” and they were to describe a world ruled by a god who sacrificed one of his own children to lift a curse the god had made and then the child was resurrected so that everyone could life forever after they died, you would think about taking the poor thing to a child psychologist. Something was very dark and very wrong in that child.

    The entire narrative reeks of wish fulfillment (…and then we live forever, sitting at God’s feet, and all of the people who were bad to us get punished, some go burn in a hot, hot oven forever and ever …). And the support for this narrative has so many holes in it that Swiss cheese is jealous.

    Remember “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Where’d that come from? Oh, I remember … 1st Corinthians.

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  12. There is a serious problem with not thinking things through to the end.

    HOLY SPIMOLLIE BATMAN!!! You had me right there Jim! Or how about NOT testing a potential solution?

    Or here’s a classic that still at work today! …

    Seriously!? Did no one bother to read the second sign!?

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      1. Ha! That’s probably it. Only a small fraction of my followers interact. I think some of them just read one post, and others look like promotional websites. They follow you as a means of getting attention.

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  14. If life is a dream like state, a reverie if you will, what is not to say that as the last synapse fires, from the hearth of our being, as the body begins its decent into that unknown curtain call we understand as death, and that matter that was once our being becomes image only in the hearts of those whom have loved us, that this image, this dream if you will that those who would mourn us, is not proof of the power that love has to transcend even death. Although I don’t necessarily agree with the premise, thank you for this beautiful reminder for those whom I have had the pleasure to love and are no longer with us.

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    1. Thank you for that. This is an idea that I’ve toyed with for a while but the reality is still unknown (but that does make the whole gig exciting)

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      1. A great resource that I found on the subject, that seems to merge aspects of dreams and the soul in grief, from an analytical psychology perspective are Robert Romanyshyn Technology as Symptom and Dream and The Soul in Grief. They are interesting explorations of the archetypes capacity to move our inner essence towards a form of realized growth potential.

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  15. Religion actually REQUIRES that you NOT think it through or it gets relegated to the dust bin of history, as it should have been in this case as well. Keep in mind that as soon as the Flat-Earther Christians gained control of the political system in the western world their very first step was the eradication of the corpus of philosophical works. Celsus, Aristotle, Democritus, Plato, et al, were replaced by Tertullian, St John Chrysostom, St Jerome, and Augustine. St Basil’s “handbook” explained exactly what to and what not to include in your reading for centuries afterward. People voluntarily burned their own private libraries in hopes of forgoing a visit from the Parabalani, the so-called religious zealots policing such things in Alexandria. We can never know the philosophical, dramatic, mathematical, or scientific works and authors we have lost forever, all at the hands of the most ignorant of our kind, the religious fanatics.

    Christianity – as with all religions – means “No Thinking Allowed Under Pain of Death” or some other such horrible penalty. And count on it, if they were to assume power today we would be in the same place all over again. Simply put, knowledge is the enemy of religion.

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    1. A authentic faith would be a mentoring then release, but we are goaded to hanging on, clinging to the ultimate idol—a god, where true faith is letting go.

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  16. would it still be a game, if we knew it was a game? who would ever follow the rules anymore, and fall in love, and feel the heart aches, and suffer loss? how would life occur, if no one took it seriously? and what is left to do, when you wake up and realize it has always been only you, your own dream. can you imagine anything more magnificent? isn’t That the work of a king?

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    1. There will always be enough doubt to have to take it seriously, even if it’s just to find a little comfort for now. Work of a king? Why yes, I resemble that comment!

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      1. haha! we are kings, so much so, that’s it’s freakin’ unbelievable.

        you know, the ones that go deep enough, that become consciousness more than matter, it is only by their own will that they stay within manifestation or not anymore. check out ‘rainbow body’ in the buddhist tradition, a fascinating practice. if you like a dramatic exit, haha! this is a nice article

        https://www.gaia.com/article/rainbow-body-101-everything-you-didnt-know

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            1. I was just thinking that same thing. The way the gig is set up, who has time to really do much more than survive…and believe what one has little time to contemplate at all.

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            2. yes! enlightenment is a great luxury. i feel grateful i was born in a family that allowed me to go out of the norm, and live in a country that takes care of my basic needs, without much effort. had i been born in Africa… 😬

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