General religious discussion thread

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

I again see this comfort as a person growing poppy bulbs among their hair, then enjoying the tea from them when they should instead be tearing up the old structures that perpetuate evil.

The family as a place of Dominion, where parents rule over their children as God rules over humanity, is harder to abolish for the expectancy of religion. I might have been hit with the Oedipus gun once even in a world without that institution, but I would have been able to find somewhere else to go if children were allowed to choose their own guardians freely.

The role of women in religion is just so easy to give out about I feel as if I need not try. I had a cisgender women tell me that men lead and women follow, and it was agony to try to figure out how to explain to her the utter wrongheadedness of that view. But Eve's leadership into the Fall is one of the essential stories of the biblical text.

Is the LDS movement encouraging people to be socialists or communists? To actually abhor the accumulation of wealth? Or does it encourage the rich to shape the world of the poor and call it charity? 

I like to say "I killed God for its lack of compassion". If all who hold compassion as dearly as I do, believer or not, could feel the pain of the world and unite to abolish and replace the structures that bring about that pain, we would live in a land so much more like paradise that Eden and Heaven would both need to be redefined to remain aspirational. Instead, we live in a world of traditionalists who might hear my story and say "Oh, shoot, that Oedipal stuff was supposed to be a metaphor for wanting to surpass your earthly father in some way".

I keep mentioning The Gospel of Christian Atheism because it seems, some 40 pages in, like a bridge you who cleave to a living Christ can walk to meet me. I cannot impart my revelation fully, because part of it was a moment of empathy that actually might have broken my ability to intuitively parse human emotions on normal scales. But that book at least seems to be trying to elucidate how a Christian might understand the world as I do.

In short: your comfort keeps you from doing the radical things necessary to make this world one worthy of Christ's sacrifice.

We should be done having money by now, if not for this self-soothing.

[Frustration]

31 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

Is the LDS movement encouraging people to be socialists or communists? To actually abhor the accumulation of wealth? Or does it encourage the rich to shape the world of the poor and call it charity?

You're making a lot of assumptions about economics in that statement, but this isn't an economics thread. Addressing your point:

The Church condemns communism, or any forced distribution of wealth.

The ideal society given to us by revelation in Doctrine and Covenants most closely resembles anarco-capitalist philosophy, with the church acting as the governing body.

[SpiritOfWrath he/him]

2 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

I again see this comfort as a person growing poppy bulbs among their hair, then enjoying the tea from them when they should instead be tearing up the old structures that perpetuate evil.

The family as a place of Dominion, where parents rule over their children as God rules over humanity, is harder to abolish for the expectancy of religion. I might have been hit with the Oedipus gun once even in a world without that institution, but I would have been able to find somewhere else to go if children were allowed to choose their own guardians freely.

The role of women in religion is just so easy to give out about I feel as if I need not try. I had a cisgender women tell me that men lead and women follow, and it was agony to try to figure out how to explain to her the utter wrongheadedness of that view. But Eve's leadership into the Fall is one of the essential stories of the biblical text.

Is the LDS movement encouraging people to be socialists or communists? To actually abhor the accumulation of wealth? Or does it encourage the rich to shape the world of the poor and call it charity? 

I like to say "I killed God for its lack of compassion". If all who hold compassion as dearly as I do, believer or not, could feel the pain of the world and unite to abolish and replace the structures that bring about that pain, we would live in a land so much more like paradise that Eden and Heaven would both need to be redefined to remain aspirational. Instead, we live in a world of traditionalists who might hear my story and say "Oh, shoot, that Oedipal stuff was supposed to be a metaphor for wanting to surpass your earthly father in some way".

I keep mentioning The Gospel of Christian Atheism because it seems, some 40 pages in, like a bridge you who cleave to a living Christ can walk to meet me. I cannot impart my revelation fully, because part of it was a moment of empathy that actually might have broken my ability to intuitively parse human emotions on normal scales. But that book at least seems to be trying to elucidate how a Christian might understand the world as I do.

In short: your comfort keeps you from doing the radical things necessary to make this world one worthy of Christ's sacrifice.

We should be done having money by now, if not for this self-soothing.

(What Frustration said)

You are equating personal religion and societal culture… it is important (for me, as one who is religious) to understand the difference between the two, but it is still possible.

My religion certainly does not look like that of one who perpetuates inequality.

 

But you make good points about meeting in the middle. I don’t mean to be disrespectful or contentious, yk.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

2 hours ago, Frustration said:

The ideal society given to us by revelation in Doctrine and Covenants most closely resembles anarco-capitalist philosophy, with the church acting as the governing body.

And this is why I like my little book where a Christian meets me half way on the nature of God:

Being radically against a governing The Church is simply necessary in my view.

Further, the abolishment of money is not the redistribution of anything real. It is the ending of a mode of speaking of values which reduces to an abstract sign. The spirit of the rainbow is that there cannot be but one good life, a singularity of good. And yet, money puts all other material goods, and many social ones, below that sign.

There is a vileness to money that is spiritual. There is a reason the 30 pieces of silver meant nothing to Judas once he knew the full horror of what he did. Assuming Jesus wasn't just a wig passed around by a group of dudes in the desert who needed to lose some heat and so two of them took a dive for the greater good.

This wrongness in money is partially why I would give food itself rather than money to the homeless when I can. I don't want their afflictions to be worsened by my grant of a small lease on life. This is a controlling thing, I admit this, but charity isn't a rational behavior.

[CoderDrag0n8 He/They]

I have a question for christians (or really any person who believes in a universalizing religion), and this is a genuine question that isn't intended to be an attack or anything, I am just genuinely curious, and if this is like, against shard rules or if you just don't want to answer, you don't have to.

And I have seen and heard a lot of different christians try and dodge this question, so I would respectfully like to ask for a straightforward answer.

Do you believe that I, an athiest unlikely to ever convert, am going to Hell (or related bad realm after death)? Assuming I am a good person in whatever other regards you have.

Again, sorry if sounds like some sort of attack, I just genuinely am curious or wish to know your answer/your reasoning.

[NameIess]

  

On 7/2/2026 at 7:32 PM, ParaTulip said:

My mother said that her stress would give her ulcers, and thus I had to wish sickness and potential death upon her if I was going to try to stop her abuse. This was simply the nature of things in her world. In your God's world, his sinless son and that son's sinless mother had to suffer immensely, and that was but God's own nature.

As preface, I'm not a Catholic or Orthodox or any other denomination that holds Mary as sinless. She was a good woman, but I don't think there's any basis for believing she was sinless. Her suffering, then, was that of a sinner living in a world broken by sin. But Jesus was sinless, and his sacrifice was necessary, his suffering undeserved.

I think an important point to bring up about Jesus' suffering is that Jesus is God. God the Father did not force Jesus to suffer. Jesus, God the Son, voluntarily underwent that suffering in order to save us. At any point Jesus could have called a legion of angels to save himself, thought every Roman soldier out of existence, or anything else you can imagine. He is God. He was not forced into it, but chose to follow the will of his Father in order that all humans could have salvation. That is not comparable. Your mother's justification of herself was selfish. She inflicted abuse on you for no good purpose, forced suffering upon you. God the Father sent Jesus to suffer for us that we might be saved from suffering ourselves. God the Son became flesh and dwelt among us, freely suffering and dying to save us.

On 7/2/2026 at 7:32 PM, ParaTulip said:

To be harsh, I am as one who faces down a machine that kills and kills and kills and tortures and kill with my eyes wide open even when I cannot help stop the machine except by screaming, and you are one who puts a teddy bear over your eyes to avoid seeing the death and mutters. To be cruel, you are like a drug addict who uses endorphins to cut yourself off from the pain of the world while I suffer it so I might try to reason about how to fix it. To be insulting, I think you are willfully ignorant of the true nature of the evil of this world and thus unable to fix it.

See my post in the Atheism thread for my effort to begin to at least try to fix the God problem. I have tried to solve homelessness by giving a home to two people on nearly free conditions, and it drove me insane. I begun to limit the suffering of the planet by trying to eat as little animal flesh as possible. I have only stopped soothing myself by going around and handing out food to the homeless on the streets because one of their number told me a parable about how I might be killed for being unreliable in that mission, and I know I am unreliable.

Thank you for your honesty.

First, I would say that your view of me can only be accurate if you are right about God and I am wrong. If God is real, then I see the world for what it is, and you are, to speak in metaphor, one who cannot see through the barbs and thorns of the world to the light and hope that is behind them.

Second, I would say that I am not blinded to the evil in the world. I am as capable of seeing suffering as you. I can see the horrors brought on by wars and droughts and corrupt politicians and greed and prejudice and just plain evil people. I do not deny that the way the world is right now is not right. But you do rightly say that I find comfort in knowing that it will not be this way forever. If you are right about God, then you are right that I do not understand the real way the world is.

Third, I would say that my view of the world does not prevent me from acting to prevent evil. In fact, I believe that I am commanded by God to help those in need. To quote Matthew 25:31-46:

Spoiler

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[f] you did it to me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

In this parable, the final judgement is pictured. Caring for those in need, preventing evil, is framed as doing the same for Jesus. Further, it is framed as the difference separating the dammed from the Saints. Although there is more to salvation than works, refusing to care for those in need is not a Christian attribute.

1 hour ago, CoderDrag0n8 said:

I have a question for christians (or really any person who believes in a universalizing religion), and this is a genuine question that isn't intended to be an attack or anything, I am just genuinely curious, and if this is like, against shard rules or if you just don't want to answer, you don't have to.

And I have seen and heard a lot of different christians try and dodge this question, so I would respectfully like to ask for a straightforward answer.

Do you believe that I, an athiest unlikely to ever convert, am going to Hell (or related bad realm after death)? Assuming I am a good person in whatever other regards you have.

Again, sorry if sounds like some sort of attack, I just genuinely am curious or wish to know your answer/your reasoning.

I can answer, and absolutely don't see this question as an attack.

First, there is no such thing as a 'good person' in regards to salvation. Every human is condemned by their works. If God were to judge me by my works, I would rightly be condemned to Hell.

That in mind, yes, I believe that if you were to die unrepentant and unbelieving, you would likely go to Hell. I won't say that you would certainly go to Hell, because I am not God, able to judge perfectly. But based on the scriptures God has given, Jesus is the only way to salvation. So through the scriptures, I can have no confidence in the salvation of anyone who does not follow Jesus.

Also keep in mind that Hell is not a place where sinners are tortured by demons, but a place where humans (and demons) are eternally separated from God, and thereby all the good things he gives us even in this current sinful world.

Edited 13 hours ago by NameIess

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

Oh good, I was worried I would not get a chance to reply to @SpiritOfWrath. I was tired writing last time, and really only addressed Frustration's points.

Matter of formatting: Page 2 is for SpiritOf Wrath. Page 3 is to answer Nameless. Page 4 is to answer CoderDragon. Page 5 is dedicated to the spirit of my sentiments in poetic form. I think my point build and climaxes through the full work, but I accept this is a lot of text for a forum post.

---

So, @SpiritOfWrath, I actually think a system of spirit which does not attain the status of being the firmament from which all other beliefs are based is unworthy of the concepts of faith and devotion. This is actually a problem a lot of atheists don't ever seem to square, it is why a certain Jungian whose voice is compared to Kermit the Frog can say that they "live Christianity".

My views on God are actually newly shifted by a recent experience of paranoid madness I had and my subsequent hospitalization. If there seems a break in my spiritual foundation from before then and now, it is because I revisited my memories of the end of my participation in Christianity and found something more worthy of the sacrifice upon the cross than God, which is the spirit that seeks to love all things in this and only this world. I thus call myself post-christian, for I might walk into a church and understand what is meant by it all, but I think "This is immature" as well.

I prefer to see God as a series of very potent metaphors than a question of reality. A metaphor can be made of real things. To explicate this point, I have a saying/joke:
Cars are like demons. I mean, not literally. It is not as if they have horns.
And then I wait a moment to say "Oh wait." And then I explain that I have
an astigmatism so they always are shining blazing crosses or rainbow lances in my eyes. 

---

To see God as a Lord, as a being of innate hierarchy, is to malform (and often male-form) God. This pollutes the metaphorical system before one even picks up the bible. I suppose we must instead imagine God as being a hurt and pathetic thing which must be either healed or remade in order to truly be worthy of the notion.

This is why I suppose that God, as a transcendent being, is a bad idea. I think all ought instead see all actualized thing as being equal members of God's being. We, as conscious beings who might possess the seemingly hallucinated and thus quasi-virtual existence of an inner world, are the lonely things which exist outside of this God, and yet are also as Mary to God: a mortal maker of God. To make God is to realize the potential to be beyond sin. Either in ourselves or in another who we help raise up as our child, it does not matter. @NameIess, dare you let me amend the Word before you? May I try to write a fix-it fic of your scripture, or would you cry "Demon" or "Blasphemer" for my attempt?

Perhaps another frame? Who is the superior follow of Jesus? The one who goes to give out bread and biscuits in the night hoping they will get to enter an eternal heaven as a living spirit, or the one who does that and says "Surely, this charity is buys either nothing or at most the slightest hesitation of my spirit being condemned to Hell"? Did not Christ have to spend three cycles of light and dark in Hell to free the souls there? Do you think we are beyond the cycles of light and dark yet? I think it is Saturday, and that certain Sunday might never come.

I see the gospels thus as like any history: They are trying to tell a certain story to bring about a certain conception of events that might not have even happened. I think it is high time we tell better stories, ones that accept disbelief and yet also belief, not disbelief or belief, as the contraction and expansion of the muscle. I think the worthy story of salvation is one where there is only salvation of this world because to postpone the balancing of scales to the afterlife is a dangerous delusion.

Yes, I am some kind of crazy person. I have bipolar and PTSD and more. Please, if me being possessed by madness disqualifies me then feel free to ignore this all. I respect your freedom more than anyone who speaks of a final judgement. But I have felt the world as one where every other God-maker, every person, was a serious threat conspiring against me, and my response was only that I might be delicate towards them all. 

---

@CoderDrag0n8, I can show you Hell. It has demons. It has torture. I have seen it and captured that vision upon a page. It is a baroque metaphor for the cycle of abuse and trauma, but it is as real as my part in that cycle. I am no saint, no prophet, but I see things with eyes far wider open than most. We already live in something much like Hell, you are going to be stuck here for the rest of your existence. Most of your existence will be as memory and as spare flesh for things to consume; We all are utterly passive things for so much of our being. So you should try to make the world better if you fear Hell. My ideal of universal compassion, the thing which I killed God to feel for but a fleeting moment before I had to fall from that state of grace like one goes blind from staring into the sun, is not Heaven but rather its foundation. If you can love all things, by which I mean will and act such that you would want all extant things (or at least people) to be given that which enables them to become their best own selves, then you too will Heaven into being. But if you exclude from your compassion even a single thing, you also will Hell into being.

---

Thank you to anyone who read all of this. The thoughts are as a newborn. I end on a rewriting of a  poem which I think describes the spirit I indulge to make these words, a poem I first wrote but some 5 hours ago:

Feed my body to the birds.

Cast me to the sea.

My two feathery wings

take them from me.

Azure Fallen Angel

Thank you to all those who make Heaven alongside me. 

[Qianweilian He/him]

8 hours ago, CoderDrag0n8 said:

Do you believe that I, an athiest unlikely to ever convert, am going to Hell (or related bad realm after death)? Assuming I am a good person in whatever other regards you have.

No. Well, it's a little more complicated. After death, your spirit either goes to spirit prison or spirit paradise until you are resurrected. Then you are judged, and either go to one of the three kingdoms of glory or this place called outer darkness. The kingdoms of glory are essentially equivalent to heaven. To go to outer darkness, you must, with a full knowledge of all of this and the gospel, choose to refuse resurrection.

[Frustration]

10 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

And this is why I like my little book where a Christian meets me half way on the nature of God:

Being radically against a governing The Church is simply necessary in my view.

Further, the abolishment of money is not the redistribution of anything real. It is the ending of a mode of speaking of values which reduces to an abstract sign. The spirit of the rainbow is that there cannot be but one good life, a singularity of good. And yet, money puts all other material goods, and many social ones, below that sign.

There is a vileness to money that is spiritual. There is a reason the 30 pieces of silver meant nothing to Judas once he knew the full horror of what he did. Assuming Jesus wasn't just a wig passed around by a group of dudes in the desert who needed to lose some heat and so two of them took a dive for the greater good.

This wrongness in money is partially why I would give food itself rather than money to the homeless when I can. I don't want their afflictions to be worsened by my grant of a small lease on life. This is a controlling thing, I admit this, but charity isn't a rational behavior.

This society would be one entirely devoid of compulsion, if someone didn't want to participate they are entirely free to leave, or to never join in the first place. Forcing someone to obey the commandments is entirely contrary to the Church's purpose.

For those who wish to participate, they agree in writing to how society will be organized and what they are expected to do. Violating that agreement, even severely, would at most be punished by excommunication(both from the church and the city), with a few exceptions such as murder. All of which would be detailed in writing at the time they entered society.

As for the abolition of money, I'm assuming what you are referring to is specifically fiat currency, as anything that isn't legally backed is just a resource.

In this society any particular city could organize themselves in such a way as to have a fiat currency or not. It would be all up to them.

As to the idea that money is inherently evil: you are correct that value is just an idea, but it is also an individual one. Thus it is no more evil than the ideas that a particular individual holds towards it. Money in and of itself is not evil, as it is just an attempt at quantifying value. How an individual decides to value things, that can be evil.

8 hours ago, CoderDrag0n8 said:

I have a question for christians (or really any person who believes in a universalizing religion), and this is a genuine question that isn't intended to be an attack or anything, I am just genuinely curious, and if this is like, against shard rules or if you just don't want to answer, you don't have to.

And I have seen and heard a lot of different christians try and dodge this question, so I would respectfully like to ask for a straightforward answer.

Do you believe that I, an athiest unlikely to ever convert, am going to Hell (or related bad realm after death)? Assuming I am a good person in whatever other regards you have.

Again, sorry if sounds like some sort of attack, I just genuinely am curious or wish to know your answer/your reasoning.

That's going to depend on who you ask, each church has their own views. Some would say yes. Universalists would say you'd receive a time in Hell as a punishment before eventually being allowed into Heaven.

For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we have a multi-layered afterlife. I'll explain a little more than @Qianweilian

After death everyone is separated into two places: Paradise and Prison. Everyone stays here until after the resurrection.

Paradise is specifically set aside for those who kept the commandments and were obedient unto God, and those who died under the age of eight. Prison is for everyone else, regardless of what they did.

Now prison sounds like a hard name, but there really isn't anything terrible happening here. I think if it as sitting in a prison courtyard all day.

Those in Paradise have the ability to leave and visit those in prison where they teach them about Jesus Christ and the Gospel.

See 1 Peter 3:18-20, and 1 Peter 4:6.

Now of course they still need to accept the ordinances such as Baptism in order to enter the Kingdom of God. For this reason the Church builds Temples, where we can vicariously preform those ordinances on their behalf.

See 1 Corinthians 15:29.

After the Resurrection everyone us assigned to one of three Kingdoms of Glory based on what they have in effect chosen.

The Telestial Kingdom which is set aside for Murderers, liars, and all those who rejected the prophets.

The Terrestrial Kingdom which is set aside for both the Honorable men of the earth as well as for those who believed but were not valiant in their testimony of Jesus.

And the Celestial Kingdom for all those who were obedient, and for "Just men made perfect through Jesus"

Each of these kingdoms have ascending levels of glory, such that even the Telestial Kingdom defies all description.

There is outer darkness as @Qianweilian said, but there are so few who will be condemned to that fate I won't bother going over it.

 

Now only Jesus can truly judge you, but given someone blank who met the description you provided, and assuming that no conversion took place in prison either: I'd say the Terrestrial Kingdom is likely, but by no means a final call.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

43 minutes ago, Qianweilian said:

To go to outer darkness, you must, with a full knowledge of all of this and the gospel, choose to refuse resurrection.

Well, assuming I can ever understand the gospel as anything other than a wild story about child abuse. I guess you can all see me going there. I have made my sentiment clear on this to others:

I hope my death is the end of my life.
I have to do so much before I die,
and that pressure keens my drives.

@Frustration, you have made many parallel points, and many of them are rooted in bad assumptions.

First, why would I want to build a city? There are already great cities. I would want to build a nomadism, since there has not been a great wandering society in so many many years. This great wandering would exist between and through cities. Those who are exiles of one group would be left by a city to beg entrance to the next, or to enter the city and live in its structures.

Second, even gold must go. There can be no sign of universal value in the material world without such a sign also signifying the subjugation of the material form of the human being. Wages are a mode of domination which I find abhorrent. A good society only asks of people what they can do and only gives to them what they can properly enjoy. Money in any form is an imposition on this. When society adopts a singular form of material value, that is evil.

Human beings are material things, or at least whatever I am is such.

Edited 6 hours ago by ParaTulip
Stupidly hit ctl-enter, now it is completed.

[SpiritOfWrath he/him]

8 hours ago, CoderDrag0n8 said:

I have a question for christians (or really any person who believes in a universalizing religion), and this is a genuine question that isn't intended to be an attack or anything, I am just genuinely curious, and if this is like, against shard rules or if you just don't want to answer, you don't have to.

And I have seen and heard a lot of different christians try and dodge this question, so I would respectfully like to ask for a straightforward answer.

Do you believe that I, an athiest unlikely to ever convert, am going to Hell (or related bad realm after death)? Assuming I am a good person in whatever other regards you have.

Again, sorry if sounds like some sort of attack, I just genuinely am curious or wish to know your answer/your reasoning.

(What Frustration said. It’s important to note, (just stressing smt in there), that time in the Prison/Paradise is a non-negligible opportunity for conversion, and we view it as very very vital for His plan.)

5 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

• Previous Page
• Next Page

• Previous Page
• Next Page

Oh good, I was worried I would not get a chance to reply to @SpiritOfWrath. I was tired writing last time, and really only addressed Frustration's points.

Matter of formatting: Page 2 is for SpiritOf Wrath. Page 3 is to answer Nameless. Page 4 is to answer CoderDragon. Page 5 is dedicated to the spirit of my sentiments in poetic form. I think my point build and climaxes through the full work, but I accept this is a lot of text for a forum post.

---

So, @SpiritOfWrath, I actually think a system of spirit which does not attain the status of being the firmament from which all other beliefs are based is unworthy of the concepts of faith and devotion. This is actually a problem a lot of atheists don't ever seem to square, it is why a certain Jungian whose voice is compared to Kermit the Frog can say that they "live Christianity".

My views on God are actually newly shifted by a recent experience of paranoid madness I had and my subsequent hospitalization. If there seems a break in my spiritual foundation from before then and now, it is because I revisited my memories of the end of my participation in Christianity and found something more worthy of the sacrifice upon the cross than God, which is the spirit that seeks to love all things in this and only this world. I thus call myself post-christian, for I might walk into a church and understand what is meant by it all, but I think "This is immature" as well.

I prefer to see God as a series of very potent metaphors than a question of reality. A metaphor can be made of real things. To explicate this point, I have a saying/joke:
Cars are like demons. I mean, not literally. It is not as if they have horns.
And then I wait a moment to say "Oh wait." And then I explain that I have
an astigmatism so they always are shining blazing crosses or rainbow lances in my eyes. 

---

To see God as a Lord, as a being of innate hierarchy, is to malform (and often male-form) God. This pollutes the metaphorical system before one even picks up the bible. I suppose we must instead imagine God as being a hurt and pathetic thing which must be either healed or remade in order to truly be worthy of the notion.

This is why I suppose that God, as a transcendent being, is a bad idea. I think all ought instead see all actualized thing as being equal members of God's being. We, as conscious beings who might possess the seemingly hallucinated and thus quasi-virtual existence of an inner world, are the lonely things which exist outside of this God, and yet are also as Mary to God: a mortal maker of God. To make God is to realize the potential to be beyond sin. Either in ourselves or in another who we help raise up as our child, it does not matter. @NameIess, dare you let me amend the Word before you? May I try to write a fix-it fic of your scripture, or would you cry "Demon" or "Blasphemer" for my attempt?

Perhaps another frame? Who is the superior follow of Jesus? The one who goes to give out bread and biscuits in the night hoping they will get to enter an eternal heaven as a living spirit, or the one who does that and says "Surely, this charity is buys either nothing or at most the slightest hesitation of my spirit being condemned to Hell"? Did not Christ have to spend three cycles of light and dark in Hell to free the souls there? Do you think we are beyond the cycles of light and dark yet? I think it is Saturday, and that certain Sunday might never come.

I see the gospels thus as like any history: They are trying to tell a certain story to bring about a certain conception of events that might not have even happened. I think it is high time we tell better stories, ones that accept disbelief and yet also belief, not disbelief or belief, as the contraction and expansion of the muscle. I think the worthy story of salvation is one where there is only salvation of this world because to postpone the balancing of scales to the afterlife is a dangerous delusion.

Yes, I am some kind of crazy person. I have bipolar and PTSD and more. Please, if me being possessed by madness disqualifies me then feel free to ignore this all. I respect your freedom more than anyone who speaks of a final judgement. But I have felt the world as one where every other God-maker, every person, was a serious threat conspiring against me, and my response was only that I might be delicate towards them all. 

---

@CoderDrag0n8, I can show you Hell. It has demons. It has torture. I have seen it and captured that vision upon a page. It is a baroque metaphor for the cycle of abuse and trauma, but it is as real as my part in that cycle. I am no saint, no prophet, but I see things with eyes far wider open than most. We already live in something much like Hell, you are going to be stuck here for the rest of your existence. Most of your existence will be as memory and as spare flesh for things to consume; We all are utterly passive things for so much of our being. So you should try to make the world better if you fear Hell. My ideal of universal compassion, the thing which I killed God to feel for but a fleeting moment before I had to fall from that state of grace like one goes blind from staring into the sun, is not Heaven but rather its foundation. If you can love all things, by which I mean will and act such that you would want all extant things (or at least people) to be given that which enables them to become their best own selves, then you too will Heaven into being. But if you exclude from your compassion even a single thing, you also will Hell into being.

---

Thank you to anyone who read all of this. The thoughts are as a newborn. I end on a rewriting of a  poem which I think describes the spirit I indulge to make these words, a poem I first wrote but some 5 hours ago:

Feed my body to the birds.

Cast me to the sea.

My two feathery wings

take them from me.

Azure Fallen Angel

Thank you to all those who make Heaven alongside me. 

• Previous Page
• Next Page 

• Previous Page
• Next Page

I get that argument—but I would also point out that there are many systems of belief with very very similar mythos at certain key points (case in point being the flood, which appears almost everywhere).

I would continue to say that monotheistic systems of worship (there are the ‘big three’, yk?) are mostly all rooted in early Judaism—The Hebrew Bible is (mostly) what Christians call the Old Testament. The teachings of Christ are added along to that—his sacrifice was necessary along with his new commandments, which became the foundation for Christianity.

(this question maaay apply only to LDS belief. Not quite sure, which is… frustrating)

Do you know what is believed about Gethsemane, directly before Christ was betrayed?

(Ggggrrrrrr the shard is being very very laggy…… *sadness*)

[Frustration]

1 hour ago, ParaTulip said:

Well, assuming I can ever understand the gospel as anything other than a wild story about child abuse. I guess you can all see me going there. I have made my sentiment clear on this to others:

I hope my death is the end of my life.
I have to do so much before I die,
and that pressure keens my drives.

@Frustration, you have made many parallel points, and many of them are rooted in bad assumptions

I'm not sure what assumptions my belief about the afterlife has, or how they are bad.

2 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

Well, assuming I can ever understand the gospel as anything other than a wild story about child abuse. I guess you can all see me going there.

Unless you've spoken to God face to face outer darkness isn't somewhere you could end up going.

2 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

First, why would I want to build a city? There are already great cities. I would want to build a nomadism, since there has not been a great wandering society in so many many years. This great wandering would exist between and through cities. Those who are exiles of one group would be left by a city to beg entrance to the next, or to enter the city and live in its structures.

Sure, you could do that.

2 hours ago, ParaTulip said:

Second, even gold must go. There can be no sign of universal value in the material world without such a sign also signifying the subjugation of the material form of the human being. Wages are a mode of domination which I find abhorrent. A good society only asks of people what they can do and only gives to them what they can properly enjoy. Money in any form is an imposition on this. When society adopts a singular form of material value, that is evil.

Without a law enforcing its use Gold is only valuable if people want it, just like anything else.

I don't think this is going anywhere, and this isn't a thread on economics so I probably won't continue with this particular discussion

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

@SpiritOfWrath And I come to overturn all the old ways by being something that has not been seen before. I am here as Oedipus turned a women. Oedipus who was a son to Medea and smote Jason by declaring that no-longer-he would die for the mother even without hearing the evidence of her crimes. Oedipus who was tortured for even the hypothetical crime of incest to the point of going blind to many human forms of expression save the written word. I am beyond your myths, and yet I live and yet I shall die. All your stories cannot contain what have been made to be. I will kill your God should I meet him. I will destroy his throne and I will raise blissful anarchy in heaven and/or hell if I am forced to live forever. Pray I do not.

@FrustrationI refuse to engage in comments formatted like your last one. Please synthesize a coherent refusal with a structure.

I just found out I have diabetes, and so I literally cannot sit at my computer, dealing with my annoyance at your schizo-style posting. 

[SpiritOfWrath he/him]

25 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

@SpiritOfWrath And I come to overturn all the old ways by being something that has not been seen before. I am here as Oedipus turned a women. Oedipus who was a son to Medea and smote Jason by declaring that no-longer-he would die for the mother even without hearing the evidence of her crimes. Oedipus who was tortured for even the hypothetical crime of incest to the point of going blind to many human forms of expression save the written word. I am beyond your myths, and yet I live and yet I shall die. All your stories cannot contain what have been made to be. I will kill your God should I meet him. I will destroy his throne and I will raise blissful anarchy in heaven and/or hell if I am forced to live forever. Pray I do not.

@FrustrationI refuse to engage in comments formatted like your last one. Please synthesize a coherent refusal with a structure.

I just found out I have diabetes, and so I literally cannot sit at my computer, dealing with my annoyance at your schizo-style posting. 

That’s… fun

 

——

*hug bc health*

*but also rude?*