LeisureChrist

That's how Eman did it. That's how America does it. And it's worked out pretty well so far.

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"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to be Environment Man and remove all doubt."---Benjamin Frank-N-Furter

mentor

So I'm like Eman now! We are part of an exclusive club

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Now the hard work begins...

Gaia

Fear of dying. And maybe 'cause there are no cool new myths.

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The present moment is a powerful goddess.
~ Goethe

Gaia

Yay!! Kind of a letdown tho', huh? Yeah...Oh well....

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The present moment is a powerful goddess.
~ Goethe

michelemichele

To some extent I can relate to that. When you really get a grasp on how vast Earth's age is, how minuscule we really are, it's a little hard to take at first: I never did 'have religion' (well, not for many many years, thank god), but I still sort of hung on to the little maybe.

It's fear of extinction - which comes down to what we already knew*: fear of death, fear of irrelevance.

*(or thought we already knew - turns out, I didn't know, not really)

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mentor

Or to look at the inverse, the myths give one an inflated sense of self importance and immortality. We all like to feel that there is ultimately someone who cares.

I guess what really bothers me about the myths is not so much that people want to cling to them. That's understandable. The problem is that they are almost universally manipulated by nefarious people for the purpose of exploitation.

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Now the hard work begins...

michelemichele

Yeah, very much soThe bit in the bible about "no one gets to my father except through me" was a wonderful bit of propaganda. Couldn't say what keeps muslims & the rest in line.

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mentor

Mainstream religions all tend to employ the same trick "you can't get there except through me". They just substitute Mohamed or Buddha or whoever for Jesus. In Buddhism, there is Big Raft and little raft. The former follows the traditional sheeple model, while the latter requires adherents to learn their religious truths, each one on their own. I think this kind of split exists in all religions, the second path always being populated by a very small minority because it is just to hard for most who simply want to be told what is true.

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Now the hard work begins...

michelemichele

Buddhism does the same thing?

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mentor

It would be a stretch to say it does it to the same extent as Christianity, but still, the parallels are interesting. Check out the two main schools of Buddhism here: The Main Schools of Buddhism especially the table marked:

II. The contrast of the two main schools may be tabulated as follows.

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Now the hard work begins...