Eww, religion is gross.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Damn. This Jesus character sounds like a hoarder.
Cat boys have horns now???
> funny meme sub
> look inside
> debate on religious history
As the things should be
"Jesus saves horny catboys too!" or "Jesus saves, horny catboys too!"? The second is far more based, so I need to know.
Jokes aside, this is part of my "propaganda" posting when I'm shifting mainstream religious narratives from conservative to liberal. I cannot imagine the world without religion, as human beings tend to be spiritual, but i can imagine religion to be ethical and open-minded as in certain European countries nowadays
I cannot imagine the world without religion, as human beings tend to be spiritual
I'm curious about this. I was raised somewhat religiously, but at this point, I can't imagine myself with religion, or spirituality, or any of it. Why do you think it's so essential?
One individual can live with religion or spirituality in religious form, but not humanity as a whole. There were experiments in totalitarian countries to violently exterminate religion, they didn't end up well. Usually it's brainwashing and freedom of conscience denial
Oh I'm certainly not advocating for forcing anyone to get rid of their religion (I'm not advocating for anything at all). It just struck me as interesting that you can't imagine a world without it.
I think it depends on how you frame 'spirituality'. Love for example can never be meaningfully measured empirically, it's a spiritual truth. You just know it. It cannot be reliably be proven or disproven, especially across different people.
I don't think the line between 'I truly believe in love' and 'I truly believe in god' is as crisp as people would like to believe. That's not at all to say they're the same thing, but they're more similar than a lot of people want to accept.
I personally don't think something is spiritual just because it can't be measured.
Of course, but from my perspective you almost certainly do need spiritual nourishment of your own, given my broader concept of the spiritual. Purely a matter of perspective.
Which is all to say when someone like me says people can't live without spirituality, it doesn't necessarily imply that they feel everyone needs to believe in some kind of supernatural power.
Interesting, how do you define spirituality?
Spirituality itself, as with anything spiritual, is a know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing. But that's an unsatisfying answer.
I do think 'the opposite of empirical' is a decent shorthand. The less a truth can be objectively defined, and the less consistent the nature of a truth is across different people, the more spiritual it is.
Enjoyment of music and wonder in the face of nature / the cosmos are two more spiritual truths I think most people know.
I would class those as psychological experiences, not spiritual ones. Just because we currently lack the tools to very precisely and objectively correlate brain activity with specific thoughts, that doesn't mean we can never quantify that at some future date.
This feels like a "spirituality-of-the-gaps". By this definition lightning was a purely spiritual experience until we figured out that it's electricity. Our lack of understanding on a subject doesn't make it magic, it's just something we don't understand yet, and that's ok. The laws of physics existed long before humans existed to describe them, and they'll continue to function long after we're extinct.
Correlating brain activity to thoughts is not the same as being able to distill love or emotional experience down to objective understanding. The difference is spiritual experience.
Oxytocin is a part of how people experience love, but it will never be possible to objectively assess whether someone is experiencing love by measuring it or any other physical quantity.
We can measure the wavelength of light and track how it stimulates cone cells and the brain, but we will never be able to measure the spiritual experience of color.
It is science that will always be chasing the 'gaps' in measuring spiritual experience. No matter how closely we can measure ourselves physically, the actual spiritual experience will always transcend it.
Trying even to describe spirituality at all is difficult because it's an inherently nebulous thing. It can only be known, never proven.
I respectfully disagree. There's nothing inherently preventing a future technology that's able to objectively measure personal experiences, since we don't have any evidence to suggest that thoughts and experiences happen anywhere other than physically in the brain.
Thus-far unobserved spirits are an unnecessary addition to the neurochemical processes we know to occur in the brain and know to drive thinking. By Occam's Razor, an evidence-based worldview must reject these unnecessary assumptions.
Also, no, science is not "filling gaps in spirituality". The claim that there are spirits is the positive case, and bears the burden of proof.
You assume I mean spirits that physically exist separately from people. I do not. You have missed my point entirely.
Even the simple question of what the experience of color is like is totally beyond empiricism.
Not everything has a scientific answer, and that's ok.
Oh, ok. I still think we might be able to measure such things in the future, but that's a much more defensible position. I don't see how that pertains to spiritualism tho, maybe there's a term that fits that better. Belief in qualia?
I'm not really talking about belief so much as the fact that people need nourishment in unmeasurable ways: love, wonder, etc. I don't think it makes sense to exclude that from spirituality. I have found that 'spirituality = supernatural' is unnecessarily reductive.
But, at the end of the day it's just individual perspective as to what constitutes the spiritual.
That's fair, I personally wouldn't use the word spiritual for those things either, but I think it just comes down to a difference of opinion.
Humanity does need spiritual fulfillment, but it does not need Christianity. Christianity has long been influenced by powerful empires that used it for social control. As long as it is "Christianity," enterprising forces will use the tribe to drive people away from the actually decent values it may have had. Despite the tale of the "good Samaritan" literally warning about this, Christians as a whole have never learned. People will continue to think that worship is a substitute for being a good person.
Would disagree here. There is no such thing as "Christians as a whole". There are different denominations whose beliefs could be almost opposite. I heard that in the US, on one side, there's the conservative Catholic church, and various protestants who usually are even more conservative. Yet even there, one woman bishop stood up for trans kids before Trump. But in my city (I live in Finland) the mainstream Evangelical church is presented on pride parades. I'm not overly concerned about church as an institution—what worries me is that religious oppressed minorities feel additional pressure from the left-wing atheists. That's terrble imo. I'm not a religious myself and don't go to church, but my rule is simple: You're christian, or muslim, or buddhist, etc? Fine. You're bigot? Fuck you.
My problem with even the best denominations of Christianity is how they effectively replace a possible love for oneself with the "reciprocated" love of God. They receive love from God by giving love to God; it's part of what makes faith so powerful. It's hard to love oneself in all your faults, but it's easier to love another and to receive love in return. Of course, this makes you reliant on God for you mental health, making it very hard to escape the relationship if it is abusive.
This does not mean I dislike Christians who are good people for what they believe, or that I like atheists or agnostics for simply agreeing with me. What I care most about is being decent to other people, not what identity one may have.
I don't know how modern progressive religious communities address these very important mental health and lack of self-love issues, but i grew up in a conservative one, and even there i remember reading or hearing interpretation of a phrase "love your neighbor as yourself" as you should love yourself as well—and if you don't, you would not be able to love others. I'm sure that what you've said has a place to be, but community and people around play higher role than abstract beliefs imo
It's not necessarily a higher role, just a different one. It honestly pays a bigger role for less conservative Christians, as they need to wrestle something of value from the social control and authoritarianism of conservative understandings.
Yeah, true, wiith a remark that Christianity was not an institution in the very beginning. There were self-organized rebellious group of people without strict hierarchy. Then as it became more popular, tyrants turned it on their side to support existing world order. A classic story
I was sitting here wondering where he stores them and what occasion he's saving them for. But I'm willing to subscribe to a new religion if I can be saved by a catboy
Might i suggest my religion of Awesomism, in which the messiah is a horni non-binary catboy? They tell us the truth that sex is dope as fuck and hating other people for petty reasons is cringe.
They died for our kinks. And after 3 days and 3 nights, we celebrate with a massive orgy
horny catboys really do save!!! 😊