• Michael McMahon
    508
    No matter how possessive a pantheist could be of others a pantheist still won’t parrot another person’s words and behaviour in a conversation!
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    Heterosexual genetics might be one way a religion works where women who are born with humble or outgoing personalities or assume them in later life could end up serving as a background that over centuries and many generations would reinforce virtues of a faith system like forgiveness! After all men would have to partially mimic the value system of women in order to attract them!

    Mikaela Lafuente in SLOW MOTION 4k | NY SWIM WEEK 2023
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    A problem with hell is that no matter how hard you prayer it might fail to outmatch the permanent focus of a solipsistic mind and the blankness of an unconscious mind such that it'd be difficult to pray for someone to be sent to hell.
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    “An average person from Laos is 155.89cm (5 feet 1.37 inches) tall.”

    I’d a dream last night in which I was walking around a DIY shop only to find a small male adult lecture me on angels not existing and that the west of Ireland is a victim of the queen. It’s possible that religion and science are capable of being reconciled through athleticism in a way that isn’t fully reductionistic. So smaller adults are capable of being far more reflective of the humility offered by a supernatural religion only if they were committed to the religion. For example the way certain Catholic Mediterranean countries tend to be slightly shorter in height than Ireland and how communist Laos is very short might relate to the cultures in those countries being more ethnically cohesive than Ireland. Yet height is a bit beyond conscious control and can be genetic.
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    An evolutionary argument for the existence of Christianity might fail when Ancient Rome would have appeared to have been the victim of evil by converting to Christianity in elevating the crucifixion of Jesus above all other Roman soldiers who died in battle!
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    If Jesus wasn’t a physical God then it could still have been ethical for Jesus to declare himself God because amoral people in Ancient Rome weren’t owed politeness. So from my viewpoint it’s still acceptable to view Jesus as a cultural God even if He didn’t create the world! A Christian version of science might be that Jesus was in fact God in ancient history but that he’s no longer God and is now more of a prophet of God.

    Young Jesus Heals Mentally Sick Man - The Young Messiah scene
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    One way Catholicism as a supernatural belief system verges on a materialistic system is through a negative that elderly Catholics aren’t evil. Perhaps Catholicism could make more sense if young adults weren’t actually needed seeing as the religion isn’t a military. A dilemma with viewing a religion militantly is that warfare mightn’t be very ethical to begin with. For example elderly people can be so serious that evil elderly people could outcompete younger people if the country converted to evil which would make it harder for the country to convert back to ethics.
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    If a supernatural afterlife was indirectly connected to a materialistic system then one inference would be that any lay person who promoted an afterlife would be inherently nicer than others who didn’t offer anyone else an afterlife. Yet the catch is that they couldn’t downplay how nice they are to offer an afterlife if God wasn’t directly connected to the material world. In other words the lay people would themselves be representatives of a tentative afterlife to atheists. So how nice people are can be subjective when religious people try to be humble but therein lies the mystery as to whether they’re downplaying how nice they are to offer an afterlife in the context of being grateful to everyone else in their belief system also an afterlife! This line of reasoning would be useful to counteract racists that some religious people had at least tried to offer an afterlife even if they were abandoned by others in their faith.
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    Pantheism might not ever be a large religion but by the limits of its own belief system of a shared unconscious might relate to the most extremely spiritual people almost as an exclusive group. Even if there’d be very few pantheists it’s possible that there might be very high-status people who are at least tolerant of pantheism given the self-sufficiency of the faith! So an ethical version of pantheism would have to limit how splendid an evil version of pantheism where all pantheists might struggle with humility.
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    Nirvana as a peaceful afterlife might be more convincing to scientists than a heaven of bliss because were a shared afterlife only dependent on other souls and not on God than any bliss would be from the charity of others rather than from an omnipotent God. So from a more impartial standpoint maybe a Christian heaven would have an altering amount of happiness rather than a steady amount of happiness. Perhaps a problem in Christianity is to reconcile themselves to a relaxing heaven rather than just a happy heaven! For example believing in a very happy afterlife might lead to a volatile mindset of giving up the afterlife altogether whereas believing in a happy afterlife might help avoid a crisis of faith.
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    An immoral version of forgiveness is that no amount of vengeance, torture or murder is sufficient were the aim to dehumanise the original perpetrators such that only forgiveness would suffice! So who knows if Ancient Rome’s conversion to Christianity also had a Machiavellian element!
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    Pantheism might sound megalomaniacal until you realise that no amount of spiritual pride or violent lucid dreams or sensory solipsism would match the physical strength of top black athletes nor the amount of charity among the poorest people!
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    A biocentric and deistic account for Abrahamic beliefs in genesis might be how the observer effect means that time elapsed so quickly for God before Earth’s creation along with how short-lasting animal life is that it might have felt like the universe took a few days to create were there a deistic God!
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    The problem of evil exists in all systems including an afterlife. So one way an afterlife belief could backfire is if people no longer cared about anyone being murdered because the victims were claimed to have received an afterlife as compensation. Yet an afterlife isn’t just competing against science and materialism but also the mathematics of probability. So even if people couldn’t disprove an afterlife such an afterlife could still be rendered absurd if the odds of achieving an afterlife were little more than a lottery. For example if Islam took seriously the claim of being rewarded with 72 virgins in an afterlife then they could assess that afterlife materialistically only to find that Arabia simply isn’t sufficiently overpopulated to satisfy that particular afterlife. After all certain evangelical Christian groups in America have polygamy only to find that if one man has dozens of wives then dozens of men will have no wife. So if religious people felt a short afterlife had a 2/3 chance of success while a medium length afterlife had a 51% chance of success than anything longer would have decreasing odds of success. As such if people stopped caring much about their religious faith system then a last resort might be to equate an afterlife with a collective near-death experience as if mental time froze just before their death and ultimate reincarnation. In that case a near-death experience might still partially comply with materialism if victims simply tried to remember their relatives until the memory reified as a projection before death.

    Strip poker where bluffing would be harder for less charitable people in an afterlife!
    Uniting Nations - Out of Touch
  • Michael McMahon
    508
    One way to interpret a belief in an eternal afterlife is that people might underestimate how hard it is to live to 70 or 80 when many people in the ancient world failed to live past 40 or 50. As such a belief in an eternal life might be a form of humility to live to an older age when Europeans or Americans might underestimate how fierce Japanese people might be to live until their 90. Some young people might be flawed in taking a huge lifespan for granted.
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