>>38277Commies hated Christianity so much that they were burning priests alive. Then there was a pretty big civil war, you might have heard of it. Right wingers won and established an explicitly Catholic authoritarian state. But instead of shoring up the faith, it just made people associate religion with the right wing authoritarians, and the country went turbo-left on every social metric as soon as the right wing authoritarians lost power.
t; semi-knower of Spain things
>unless you accept Gnosticism
I looked into it during my early post-faith phase, and although I would be perfectly happy living in a Gnostic cosmos, it all just feels like fanciful philosophizing. Yes, it resolves the terrifying aspects of Abrahamic religion, but it doesn't give me any reason to believe that this is the actual order of the universe.
>As Russia was saying, it becomes more and more a thing in I think most religious traditions including also Islam and Buddhism or Hinduism that we get closer and closer to a terrible age where being good and righteous is actively punished and the evil seemingly rewarded. I'd say we are definitely almost there in America and Russia at least and that would probably be a major cause in the less faithful falling away from the faith, but you should still be stalwart against it.
"And then thousands of years later things will go to shit and nobody will really believe in our faith... but don't worry, that's supposed to happen!"
That always sounded a bit like a cop out to me. There's more than a few reasons to think that the whole human project teeters on the brink, but there have been many past ages in which the good and righteous were punished. Arguably, that's the default state of humanity, so I don't see today's degenerate society as categorically different than past ages of degeneracy. There's unique structural factors contributing to it that didn't exist in the past, but we've also overcome a lot of shit that our ancestors had to deal with.
Again, I prefer the Indian view over the Abrahamic one. Maybe our world is going to shit, maybe permanently. But there have been other worlds and ages, and there will be other ones. There's an eternal duty as humans to live righteously, and die righteously if necessary, but the world just is - and if this world
isn't at some point, there are probably other worlds and existences that will continue to be, regardless of our fate.
I'm curious as to what makes you believe in Abrahamic faiths specifically. What has always made me skeptical of personal religious experience as the justification for one specific faith over others, is the fact that people from all religious backgrounds have these experiences. I don't buy into hardcore perennialism, but again, I think there's the most truth in Sikhism. There can be great spiritual teachers and spiritual insight from any tradition. That doesn't make them all equally true, but it does mean that they're all getting at something. Sikhism, of course, being the actual perfect path to peace and understanding, but I actually believe them. Every argument I can bring against other religions, I can't against Sikhism. The only problem is that it's often treated more like a Punjabi ethnic cult instead of a universal faith.
Despite my skepticism, I'd be interested in knowing what makes you believe in an Abrahamic cosmos, as opposed to a more Eastern one.
>>38277Commies hated Christianity so much that they were burning priests alive. Then there was a pretty big civil war, you might have heard of it. Right wingers won and established an explicitly Catholic authoritarian state. But instead of shoring up the faith, it just made people associate religion with the right wing authoritarians, and the country went turbo-left on every social metric as soon as the right wing authoritarians lost power.
t; semi-knower of Spain things
>unless you accept Gnosticism
I looked into it during my early post-faith phase, and although I would be perfectly happy living in a Gnostic cosmos, it all just feels like fanciful philosophizing. Yes, it resolves the terrifying aspects of Abrahamic religion, but it doesn't give me any reason to believe that this is the actual order of the universe.
>As Russia was saying, it becomes more and more a thing in I think most religious traditions including also Islam and Buddhism or Hinduism that we get closer and closer to a terrible age where being good and righteous is actively punished and the evil seemingly rewarded. I'd say we are definitely almost there in America and Russia at least and that would probably be a major cause in the less faithful falling away from the faith, but you should still be stalwart against it.
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