Religion of Holla Forums

dude lmao mysterious ways

Embrace the truth of the Mandaean faith. John the Baptist was the only REAL savior. Don't be deceived.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions

Damn you really didnt pay attention in school did you?
I am also including all the subsects of religions who claim that. For example, my loony christian neighbours told me, when I was 6, that I was going to hell because I wasn't in their church, despite still calling myself Christian at that point. The same goes for muslims, who constantly attack other groups of muslims, or jews. Or really, muslims, jews and christians are all the same religion, yet they want to kill each other.
Then theres the thousands of other smaller religions all with vastly different beliefs such as ancestor worship and whatnot, none of which have ever proven to even have a since gram of truth in them to me.

Jesus didn't preach it either

Hello, Satan

Majority of those religions are just offshoots of the main 5

I was only listing the main heads, the top 5, sorry

Christianity, or more accurately "Evangelical Lutheran Christianity". Besides the cultural reasons, which you said you didn't care about, I guess it has something to do with it being an opiate, as Marx wrote.

The Lutheran worldview is basically, atleast how it is presented in my state-church: "Just because you're a human, you have the right to be equal to all", which plays really well together with my political views. Some years ago a study concluded that part of the reason why the Welfare-model of my country is so popular has a lot to do with the religious tradition of my area.

As I wrote it is also an opiate for me. It guarantees me a "future" after death. And while this is very narcissistic, it is also comforting, when you lived most of your early life on the bottom of society(Thank God for the Welfare-system, it has helped many a worker(And while it isn't optimal, it is better than nothing))

I know other religions offer the same theological promises, but I find Lutheran Christianity very appealing, because it puts extra weight on the sectarian nature that is central in Christianity. While the Catholic and Anglican churches(As examples) tend to tie power on earth to power given from God, Luther was very clear about how important it is for state and church to stay separated, to ensure that neither became corrupted.

Christian atheist 2bh

*dabs*

biblehub.com/ephesians/6-5.htm
Have you read the bible?

You are no authority on what constitutes a religion and the fact that the members of those faiths themselves make these destinctions is enough to justify them.

:p

Do you actually have any knowledge of LaVeyan satanism? If so id be interested to hear your take on it.
I only have cursory knowledge myself, but it seems to be much closer to art school goth reads Ayn Rand and makes an pseudo-ironic Abrahamic religion.

Religion is fucking retarded and if you are religious you need to kill yourself.

None, don't find the arguments for god convincing

That's not a proper response.

How does this not make you wanting to change the system a bad Christian?

If Christians could think they wouldn't be Christians.

*tips*

Don't be mean to me

Ummmm, the Holy Bible sweetie?

Where does it say that we can't change the system? In Jesus's time, there were slaves.
And I never claimed to be a leftist (Even though I'm using the flag) I just tend to like leftism more due to my hatred of the right.

Stop being mean to me

Changing the system means disobeying worldly leaders.

Kill yourself you fucking retard

I've read the first half of the satanist bible when I was 16 and then got bored with it, so not really.

And while we are at it.
15. Deuteronomy 21:18-21

20. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (NLT)

Leviticus 20:13

1 Timothy 2:12
Isn't christianity just wonderful?

You're suppose to put Jesus first, not worldly leaders. You're suppose to hate this world and aim for the next.

Rude

But what about the verse I quoted earlier where Jesus tells slaves to obey their masters?

But it just said you have to sincerely obey your masters in the world, just as you obey Christ in your heart.

It's almost as based as Islam. But still Islam is better at putting whores and gays into their place.

Children should obey their parents
That's your problem
Deuteronomy 22:28-29King James Version (KJV)

28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;

29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
Being gay is bad
Nothing wrong with this. God has each sex different roles

What about it? Obey them sure, but don't put them above Christ(user was banned for having shit taste)

You've taken 4 pieces of the old testament. That is irrelevant to Christians, since those are what we call "the old laws". Jesus showed up and said: "Everything in the old testament isn't important anymore. Listen to me instead"

Being gay is bad? Jesus said that being gay was okay. Some were born gay, and that should be accepted:

“Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.” (Matthew 19:11-12)

Therefore being Gay isn't bad, it is natural. This becomes clear when we look at how Eunuch was used in contemporary litterature, to not only mean men without balls, or monks, but also homosexuals. The three categories of Eunuchs that Jesus mentions are then Gays, Castrated men, and people in celibacy.

Also: You are writing about the old testament as it was important. If you read the bible you would know that the old laws are irrelevant, since Jesus is the new pact with God.

sounds familiar.

pro tip. debating the bible with a avatar fag from tumbler will be a profound waste of your time.

Stop reading the Bible and embrace virtue, clericalist.

The reason that Islam seems more barbaric today in comparison to christianity is soley that Islam is popular in poor countries that have bad living conditions and christianity is popular in the rich west. Now don't get me wrong, there is still alot of christian terrorism (especially in central Africa and India), but who cares what happens to some niggers, right?
If christianity were the prominent religion in Iraq, Iran, Syria etc, we would have a problem of christian terrorism today. The living conditions matter more then the superstructure.

Are you illiterate or retarded? This is what Jesus said about the rules of the old testament:
Matthew 5:17

Also, the verse with the slaves from above is from the new testament.

That's not what the verse sais. Stop lying to yourself. It sais that who children don't obey their parents DESERVE TO DIE. So if your daddy is petit-bourg and votes for the conservatives and tells you to do the same, he has the right to kill you if you don't obey.

are you srs?

And god has fixed places in society for everyone too. So workers should not overthrow capitalism, as it is surely god given.

religion is for cunts

Islam of course. It is progressive and a religion of peace.

None, I wasn't raised to be religious.

Oh, I agree with you. Any religion can easily be misused for scary spooks.

Fuck off christfags

Wrex.

in the mind of a bootlicker

Yes. Jesus fulfilled the old pact, making it unimportant. He did away with the old, can instated a new. And while 5:18 says that not a letter should be taken from the law, it doesn't matter. Since the new pact is in place. Christianity is basically about ignoring whatever you want, that is why there are so many different interpretations.

And Paulus is not important, since I am neither Orthodox nor Catholic.

This. If you "accept christ" you automatically reveal yourself as a bootlicker, you don't want to search the truth yourself you need le jeebus

...

I have a friend who is both a leftist and a monarchist Christian.
No, I have not asked him to explain this to me, nor does it make any sense. I think he would prefer a benevolent divine god-king who can do no wrong, but he'll make do with seizing production in the meantime. I think.

The only religion

You can't be Christian and believe in god-kings. There is only one God.

Fucking christfags, get your religion straight already, none of your shit is ever consistent.

This doesn't make sense. If you don't accept Jesus Christ as the truth because it's inconvenient for you, or you'd rather look for another (incorrect) answer than you'd be in the wrong. It's like saying: if you believe in gravity, then you're a bootlicker to gavitational theory and we should keep looking for other reasons why objects don't just float into the aether.

I don't know what you're talking about. There is no person (other than Christ) who can be both human and God (or gods). It doesn't make sense.

Comparing beliefs based on old and largely manipulatad reportings of a man in the ancient world that "resurrected" with the law of gravity seems a very solid comparision

The difference is that the gavitational theory has shit to back it up. Accepting christ means start believing in a huge amount of shit that has nothing to back it up.

Then maybe he was just talking about the divine right to rule. I don't fucking know. Nothing you guys do makes any sense.

None really. I'm most sympathetic to Pantheism though

Pathetic

because the universe is the mind of a greater being

Putting aside the hostility, I would like to know how you combine christianity and communism. What is the common ground between the two, because I see none.

I think just you being personally unaware of any convincing reasons to believe in Christianity doesn't mean that there is no reason to believe in Christianity. And anyway, dismissing religion because you'd rather look for another answer that religion may or may not be trying to answer in the first place is wrongheaded.

Live in a communist society and, at the same time, believe Jesus is your saviour. You don't have to mix them.

Creationists are embarrassing and give Christians a bad name.

Read Genesis, honey

Who is this fuggo Chinawoman you keep posting?

Make me aware then.

But how would revolution even happen with that mindset. I mean you believe in Jesus being your savior, wich is the exact opposite of the marxist idea that only the worker can free himself. Furthermore, how could violence against the bourgeoisie be justified if most of them are christians the bible teaches a unity of believers?

My wife

I think you meant: "read Genesis literally". I will do no such thing.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=VHye8EABbEc

Her face is fat. She looks like a 2D representation of someone with downs.

...

I don't follow any organized religion, but I do believe that a zazen a day keeps the spook away. I'm unironically considering to join a Kwan Um school in my city out of sheer curiosity, though.

I would encourage you to look up Chris Hedges, a Christian and a revolutionary, who wrote a really good book: "wages of rebellion" where he lays out the historical circumstances that bring about rebellions and our ethical obligation to fight against destructive systems and oppression.

I know some people who look up to historical figures with more admiration and fervor than what your average Christian does so with Jesus. I think it's more of a cult though.

post second impact global communism when?

or some dead kike from the past who's ideology completely fails on all levels and ended up killing millions of minorities…

Again, Marx used scientific standarts to create his work and therefore can beck his shit up.

Implying you know any of the levels.

I don't follow a religion; a religion follows me.

...

please elaborate, how can you trust in a religious figure to save you while saving yourself?
If I believe that jesus will save me from being lumpen, why should I organize with other workers to do the same thing?

Jesus saves your soul. Communism saves your earthly life.

Jesus is saving you from your sin. Socialism is saving you from economic exploitation.

There is nothing spiritual about Laveyan Satanism. It's a satirical religion to mock Christians (more specifically Catholics) and to be used as a platform for a childish interpretation of a moral and life philosophy you can better find elsewhere.

I used to be an atheist but now I have embraced spiritual Juche.
There is a god, and Kim Il-Sung is his only son. The Kim family is of divine origin and only they can bring the revolution.

It's from an anime called Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil)

None.

The Earth, Life itself, finite as it may be. And the potential of us to do great good or great evil. Nothing else.

We do not need deities to be the best that we can be, in fact, us doing the best we can DESPITE any deity helping us is more to say for men than any deity ever could.

I kinda like Spinoza I suppose

You sound like an animist nature worshiper tbh

raised catholic and ill die catholic. fuck the prots. martin luther is not my brother he is a hun and probably a nazi ok. praise francis

You seriously overestimate men's place in the grand equation of things.

Earthquakes are more powerful than the Bible. So is the climate. So is the land we live under. And absolutely none of it is ordained by any entity. It is all permitted under the forces that can allow or not allow us to exist.

The universe is too vast for us to have any cosmological importance, in fact as we learn more of the cosmos, it proves life is not important. There are mechanisms within mechanisms within mechanisms in physics. Clouds of gas floating around and creating suns over thousands of thousands of millennia. Men aren't important.

We are not good or evil by nature of a single or multiple deities, we are good or evil based on the actions we do. We are our actions to help preserve us and live according to the nature that allows us to live here.

We were not made by an entity. If we were, he spent more time working on the universe than eh did us, what does that say about his priorities, or in fact, how much does it really contradict the narrative of The Bible?

I find primitive religions much more in line with actual fact than I do Monotheism.

Ummmm sure sweetie whatever you say

If a nearby supernova we didn't account for bathes the Earth in radiation, would that be God?

If a local gamma ray burst from a nearby star bathes our solar system and ourselves in radiation, will that be God?

If a star moves to close to our solar system, on slow trajectory that was on its way for millions and millions of years, throwing our gravitational equilibrium out of balance, will that too, be God?

With so many ways that life on Earth could simply end, why is there just one predicted end within Revelation? Life on Earth could end in countless ways, none predicted in the Bible. The Maya had a better handle on the power of nature to wipe out life than Christians. Why? Because one religion grew in a place where nature's impact could be felt, one was not.

What are you even saying anymore cutie?

...

Ummmmm the Holy Bible, that's why, sugar-pie

I'm Buddhist, but I'm more into the thought that religion is detrimental to modern society. Sure, believing in it is fine, but believing in it so much that it dictates other people's lives is weird.

Anyways, I just want to see the world burn to a crisp per the Buddha's sermons of the seven suns.

fuck off

Well, she's literally traced from a Japanese actress and that's how they look like outside of porn, fampai.

Wow that's rude

But what if life on Earth ends in a way that was unpredicted by the Bible. Say for example, an asteroid. Does that retroactively prove Revelation wrong, and if God can just change his ideas on a whim like that in terms of possibility of our own Armageddon; then how much of the Bible can be considered canon? If God can just rewrite the end? Or was the end predicted in Revelation only metaphorical?

I would kill for some giant beasts to rip out the ocean heralding the end of all things instead of something banal and cosmic, but I don't see it happening.

Ummmm that's real nice sweetie, reaaaal nice, smookums

can we ban this avatarfaggot?

There is an overall probability that humanity might be extinct due to cosmic means at just 19%. That's enough to gamble with. If you like gambling.

Um sweetie Allah is the one and only true god x

...

Nope, try again cutie-pie

...

Um sweetie x

kuso thread

Smoochie, there is no salvation in your own works okay honey? Accept Jesus now ok sweetie? Ok sweetie.

I'm about to make the hottest take of them all.

The Aztecs were right, and here's why

The world was supposed to have ended in 2012, as foretold by a Mayan prophecy that, in the end, only prophesied that the Mayans would need to buy a new calendar. As the prediction went, our solar system would align with the black hole at the center of the galaxy. The magnetic poles would sweep and switch and falter, leaving the atmosphere to be stripped away by a devastating solar wind; the enigmatic shadow planet Nibiru would collide into ours and turn solid ground into a spray of magma drifting through space.

It didn’t happen. But the prophecies will come back, before long. Isn’t every generation convinced it’ll be the last? People seem to enjoy imagining that they’ll live to see the curtains close on history, but it’s more than just enjoyment; a sense of finality seems to be built into our experience of the whole strange, senseless show that surrounds us. Either you die in the world, another speck to be mourned and then forgotten, or the world dies around you. Unknown planets or rising sea levels, whatever helps you imagine an ending.

Before the Mayan apocalypse, it was the year 2000 that was supposed to kill us all. Aside from the Y2K computer bug that failed to destroy all our soaring dial-up technology, mass-media preachers like Ed Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Left Behind authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins confidently expected the final judgement of God to arrive in time for the new year’s celebrations. In turn they were drawing on a legacy of bimillennial fascination that includes medieval Catholic theologians, Marian apparitions, invented Nostradamuses, the Kabbalistic calculations of Isaac Newton, and cultists scattered across the centuries.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have separately predicted that the world would end in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, 1994, and 1997. Various preachers in Britain and America spent most of the 19th century convincing their small bands of followers that the world was shortly to cease existence, extrapolating their figures from the dimensions of Noah’s Ark or the tent of the Tabernacle, watching the skies for comets, waiting for the ocean to boil, reading the newspapers to see when the Antichrist would reveal himself. And it never happened, not even once.

But aren’t the oceans boiling? As the air fills with carbon dioxide, the seas are turning to acid mire, a soup of plastic particles and dead coral, where the fish are all dying and only the tentacled things survive. Revelation, chapter eight: “A great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died.” Doesn’t Donald Trump, a leering Antichrist in bronzer and self-regard, glower from the front page of every paper? And as warships surround a North Korea bristling with missiles, could the sky not soon be full of dazzling, falling stars, and then empty forever? Isn’t the end of the world really, actually, genuinely nigh? Aren’t we watching it happen, broadcast from our TV screens, right now?

For its critics, this sense of a looming end is an expression of the same spirit that made all those bloated celebrity prophets predict the Second Coming around the year 2000. Panicked jeremiads about climate change are just another form of religious nonsense — so, for some, is Marxism, with its deterministic charts of universal history. The philosopher Tom Whyman, for instance, wrote earlier this year that “we’ve successfully secularized the End Times.” It’s all a kind of wishful thinking, he argues; everyone wants to think that the end of the world is imminent, because it means that all the messy contingencies of life will finally become settled, and this desire is given form and propulsion by a still-dominant Judeo-Christian-Islamic conception of linear time. Once we expected to hear trumpets and angels; now it’s just the wandering honk of a puffed-up president announcing to the world that he’s pushing the button. But it’s the same thing.

Isn’t the end of the world really, actually, genuinely nigh? Whyman considers the end of everything to be a kind of universal blankness, an abstract negation, a “Great Nothing” that blankets all existence without distinction. I disagree. When people imagine that the world is about to end, it’s their particular world that’s doomed, and the nature of that end will always in some way reflect what’s being destroyed. People who live in the desert would not live in fear of a global flood. And the End Times aren’t a unique product of Christianity; some kind of eschatology is present nearly everywhere. Nearly. The pre-Islamic Turkic peoples of Central Asia, for instance, don’t seem to have had any myths about the destruction of the world, and why would they? They lived on an open steppe far from the ocean, where everything is flat and endless. Why would it ever end? Societies that believe in the Apocalypse tend to be those in which the seeds of the apocalypse that’s really happening are already planted. Cultures that have big cities, forms of writing, a discourse of history, and centralized power. Cultures like the old eastern Mediterranean that gave us the Biblical prophets and the Book of Revelation. Or cultures like the Aztecs.

JohnCenaAreYouSureAboutThat.gif

The Aztec apocalypse is nothing like the Christian one. It comes out of an unimaginably different history and society to the world of Greece and Rome. But it’s a lot like ours. The collision with Nibiru or devastating magnetic pole shift might have a distinctly monotheistic tang, but it’s possible that the Aztecs might see in our worries over anthropogenic climate change, economic collapse, and senseless nuclear war something strangely familiar. Instead of considering apocalypses through their literary and conceptual lineages, we could think about them instead in terms of what kind of society gave birth to them. How much do modern Westerners really have in common with prophets of the Old and New Testaments like Ezekiel or John of Patmos? Might we be more like Itzcoatl or Huitzilihuitl, even if we’re less likely to know who they are?Our capitalist modernity isn’t a Mediterranean modernity, but a Mesoamerican one. The Aztecs, those strange and heartless people with their stepped pyramids and their vast urban civilization that never came out of the Stone Age or invented the wheel, are our contemporaries.

Original Aztec sources are patchy — most of their beautiful codices were destroyed during the Spanish conquests in the early 16th century — and tend to contradict each other, but what makes the Aztec apocalypse so different to that of any other mythology, and so similar to the one we face now, is that they believed it had already happened.

This world is not the first. There were four that came before it and were destroyed in turn, all in the usual fashion — usual, that is, for end-of-the-world stories. Each was made by and contested over by the two gods, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, as a series of staging-grounds for their constant battles, two cosmic children bickering over a toy. In the first, Tezcatlipoca turned himself into the sun, and a jealous Quetzalcoatl knocked him out of the sky with his club; in revenge, Tezcatlipoca set jaguars loose to wipe out all its people. Together the gods built a new race of humans, but they stopped worshipping their creators, so Tezcatlipoca turned them all into monkeys, and Quetzalcoatl, who had loved them for all their sins, destroyed them in a fit of spite with a hurricane. Tezcatlipoca connived the gods Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue into destroying the next two with fire and with floods. The fifth one, ours, will be destroyed by earthquakes. But in every other respect it’s entirely different from the ones that came before.

After the creation and destruction of four worlds, the universe had exhausted itself. We live in the shadow of those real words; their echo, their chalk outline. In each of the four previous worlds, humanity was newly created by the gods. Present-day humans were not: we are the living dead. After the destruction of the fourth world, it lay in darkness for fifty years, until Quetzalcoatl journeyed into Mictlan, the Aztec hell, and reanimated the bones of the dead. In the four previous worlds, the sun was a living god. In ours, it’s a dead one. To build a new sun for this worn-out earth required a blood sacrifice: The gods gathered in the eternal darkness and built a fire, and their weakest deity, Nanahuatzin, a crippled god covered in sores, leapt into the center of the flames, and the sun was born.

But it was a weak sun, and it wouldn’t move. All the other gods, one after another, immolated themselves in the fire to bring the dawn, but it’s still not enough. The sun needs more sacrifices; it needs ours. This is why the Aztec priests slaughtered people by the hundreds, cutting out their hearts and throwing their corpses down the temple steps. This blood and murder was the only thing that kept the sun rising each morning; if they stopped even for a day, it would go black and wither to nothing in the sky, and without its light the earth would harden and crack and fall apart. And some day, this will happen: it’s earthquakes that will destroy us all, and when it crumbles there will be nothing left.

The fourth world was the last; we’re living in something else. A half-world, a mockery, a reality sustained only through death and suffering. The first four worlds were created by the gods and destroyed according to their wills or because of their squabbles, just like the four Yugas of Hinduism, or the creation of the Abrahamic God, whose Judgement Day will come whenever He sees fit. Our world is being kept alive only through human activity; it’s a world into which we have been abandoned. The Aztecs were stone-age existentialists, trembling before their misbegotten freedom. This is a theology for the anthropocene — our present era, in which biological and geological processes are subordinated to human activity, in which the earth that preceded us for four billion years is finally, devastatingly in our hands, to choke with toxic emissions or sear with nuclear bombs. But modern society isn’t treading new ground here: the Aztecs came first, five hundred years ago. And their response was to kill.

Most everyone knows about the Aztec sun-sacrifices, the mass daily executions carried out by the priests, but ritual human slaughter was everywhere in their society. Sometimes children were drowned, sometimes women were killed as they danced, sometimes people were burned alive, or shot with arrows, or flayed, or eaten. Hundreds of thousands of people died every year. At the same time, these were the same people whose emperors were all poets, whose young people went out dancing every night, and whose cities were vast gardens filled with flowers, butterflies, and hummingbirds. This might be the reason Aztec human sacrifice is still so horrifying — we’re much more likely to forgive mass killings if we can say for certain why they happened. The Romans killed thousands in their circuses, and in the 21st century we still watch death — real or feigned — for entertainment; it’s extreme but not so different. When the Spanish came to Mexico, they were horrified by the skulls piled up by the temples — but then they killed everyone, and we understand wars of profit and extermination too. But like any mirror, the Aztecs seem to show us everything backwards.

Still, you can feel traces today. In the neoliberal economic doctrine that’s still dominant across most of the world, something strangely similar is happening. All the welfare institutions that ameliorate capitalism’s tendencies to extreme wealth and extreme poverty have to be destroyed, for the good of the economy. People die from this — in Britain, up to 30,000 people may have died in one year as a result of cuts to health and social care, and that’s in a prosperous Western country. In the United States, a faltering band-aid mechanism like Obamacare has to be wrenched off, with the excuse that it’s being replaced with market pricings, which are natural and proper and, in their own way, fair. But it’s all for nothing. The economics behind neoliberalism are nonsense, but the prophets — these days, drab old thinkers like Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman — have warned us that unless they’re followed, we’ll open up the road to serfdom. Ask a liberal economist why millions have to suffer, forced to live in drudgery under late capitalism’s dimming sun, and something horrifying will happen. A weak, indulgent, condescending smile will leak across their face, and they’ll say: that’s just how the market works. An echo of the Aztec priest, dagger held high, kindly telling his victim that his heart has to be pulled out from his chest, because that’s just how the sun works.

But neoliberalism really does work, it just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. It might not be any good for the population at large, but it has facilitated a massive upward redistribution of wealth; the poor are scrubbed clean of everything, and the rich drink it up. Class power creates both the excess of cruelty and the mythic ideology to justify it. Marxist writers like Eric Wolf have tried to find something similar operating among the Aztecs: Human sacrifice cemented the rule of the aristocratic elites — they were believed to literally gain their powers through eating the sacrificial victims — while keeping the underclasses in line and the conquered peoples in terror. But all contemporaneous societies were class-based and repressive; it doesn’t begin to explain the prescient nihilism of their theology. Something else might.

Why do you keep replying to this obvious bait? Have you just started wearing your fedora or something? What did I miss

The Aztecs built an extraordinarily sophisticated state. Their capital, Tenochtitlan, whose ruins still poke haphazardly through Mexico City, might have been the largest city outside China when Europeans first made contact; it was bigger than Paris and Naples combined, and five times bigger than London. Stretching across the Mexican highlands, their empire had, in 150 years, conquered or achieved political dominance over very nearly their entire known world, bounded by impassable mountains to the west and stifling jungle to the east. Without any major enemies left to fight, they found new ways of securing captives for sacrifice: the “flower wars” were a permanent, ritual war against neighboring city-states, in which the armies would meet at an agreed place and fight to capture as many enemy soldiers as possible.

The Roman Empire could never defeat their eternal enemy in Persia, and the dynastic Egyptians were periodically overwhelmed by Semitic tribes to the north, but until the day the Spanish arrived the Aztec monarchs were presumptive kings of absolutely everything under the sun. The only really comparable situation is the one we live under now — the unlimited empire of liberal capitalism, a scurrying hive of private interests held together under an American military power without horizon. We have our own flower wars. The United States and Russia are fighting each other in Syria — never directly, but through their proxies, so that only Syrians suffer, just as they did in Afghanistan, and Latin America, and Vietnam, and Korea. Wars, like Reagan’s attack on Granada or Trump’s on a Syrian airbase, are fought for public consumption. There is a pathology of the end of the world: dominance, ritualization, reification, and massacre.

The Aztecs were not capitalists, but their economy has some spooky correspondences with ours. While they had a centralized state, there was also an emerging free market in sacrifices, and a significant degree of social mobility: every Aztec subject was trained for war, and you could rise through society by bringing in captives for slaughter. The Oxford historian Alan Knight describes it as “a gigantic ‘potlatch state,’ a state predicated on the collection, redistribution and conspicuous consumption of a vast quantity of diverse goods. Sacrifice represented a hypertrophied form of potlatch, with humans playing the part elsewhere reserved for pigs.” The potlatch is a custom practiced by indigenous peoples further up in the Pacific Northwest, in which indigenous Americans ceremonially exchange and then spectacularly destroyed vast quantities of goods — blankets, canoes, skins, but most of all food — in a show of wealth and plenitude. In the sophisticated class society of the Aztecs, the grand triumphant waste was in human lives.

We are, after all, assembled from the bones of four dead universes. We were dead to begin with. Perched on the end of history, the Aztecs beheld a dead reality in which life becomes lifeless, to be circulated and exchanged. Four-and-a-half centuries later, Marx saw the same processes in capitalism. He describes it in Wage Labor and Capital: “The putting of labour-power into action — i.e., work — is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person […] He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life.” (Emphasis mine.) Workers are cut off from their own labour and from themselves by a production process in which they are not ends but means, part of a giant machinery that exists to satisfy the demands not of human life but of “dead labor,” capital. From his 1844 Manuscripts: “It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.” His labour-power becomes a commodity; something to be bought and sold in quantifiable amounts, something inert. The worker under capitalism, like the captive walking up the temple steps, is consecrated to death.

Who is this qt? She's perfect 💕

The Aztec world ended. When the Spanish came they found an empire of 25 million people; by the time they left only one million remained. Its people were killed with swords, guns, fire, famine, disease, and work. The beautiful garden-city of Tenochtitlan was torn down, a European fort built in its place. Sacrifices were no longer offered to the sun, and somehow it still kept rising every day. You can laugh at their credulity — they really thought the sun would stop rising, and look, everything’s still here! But the end of the Aztec world was dispersed throughout time, until it became isomorphic with the world itself.

Their disaster was not waiting for us in the future, a monumental bookend to history, like the Judgement Day of the people who destroyed them — they lived within it, in the ruins of a real world that died with the gods. This is the cosmology of the great German philosopher Walter Benjamin: to apprehend reality we should make “no reflections on the future of bourgeois society;” rather than a series of events leading towards an uncertain end, his Angel of History stands to face the past and sees only “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”

We exist in that rubble. The Aztec Empire conquered its world, strip-mined its future, and turned human populations into fungible objects. Contemporary society too has nowhere else to go: capital has saturated the earth, and outer space is a void. Our world, with the monstrous totality of its stability and order, is relentlessly producing its own destruction. In fantasies of black holes and the wrath of God; in the actuality of an atmosphere flooded with carbon dioxide and a biosphere denuded of all life. We missed the apocalypse while we were waiting for it to take place. Baudrillard writes: “Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred.” Capitalism built a corpse-world. Its sun keeps rising every morning, whatever we do, but it’s growing hotter in the sky; poisoning the seas, frizzling farmlands to desert, carrying out Tezcatlipoca’s last act of revenge.

my wife nico from love live

Good taste

thanks lad

This is now a nico from love live thread!

My beliefs are there is something like a god. I don't think this god is a creator at least not in the sense you see in most religions. This god is an evolved thing along with the universe. All matter or at least all life is a part of this god so we are a part of this super organism if you can call it that. I believe in an afterlife but not one ruled by gods but natural laws and self management. I also think there is ways of using natural but not well understood forces to ones advantage to obtain goals manipulating ones reality. Why is from comparative religion, philosophy and knowledge of more mind fucking scientific theories as well as analysing the world as it is. I think no individual could be totally right but society as a whole has a better intuition about the metaphysical setting aside all the corruptions of religions that were for tools of political power which taint the fountain of knowledge.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

Religion is hierarchical. God having authority means god is the enemy.

Stop posting ugly, unrealistic girls please

...

*siiiiiip*

Rotoscope is literally the ugliest thing their is you Jew-lover

showa shintoist

Please show my wife some respect

Only in shit-tier religions like Catholicism and Islam

unironically, what are the non-hierarchical religions except for buddhism?

I dont show respect to shitty styles of animation

Don't talk to me or my beautiful wife ever again

...

...

in theory you could interpret any sort of world-ending scenario (from the effortless explanation of the most probable asteroid impact, to the heavy mental gymnastics required for a hypothesized false-vacuum metastability event) in the context of the Apocalypse, but in practice it wouldn't matter because there would be no one to listen anyway.

Can the mods bumplock this attention whore autismfest?

...

Gnostic

...

demiurge did nothing wrong.

Is there anything worth saving in Hinduism?

siddhartha gautama already did that, famrade.

True, he is what went very wrong

...

I have zero theological reasons but tbh i like the tradition after one of my family died and priest was there to help us and escort her to grave.

Stalin literally did nothing wrong

wtf I love Gnosticism now

figured as much

tbh i wish prejudice against non-abrahamic religions was more common than prejudice among the abrahamic religions. i dont get how people fall into hating jews/muslims so easily when hindus can't even keep their holiest river clean and liberals want enlightened bald men as their leaders.

wow that really made me think.

Why would it be? An average European or American is affected exactly jack shit by non-abrahamic religions. For your statistical westerner, Hinduism is some exotic tradition waiting to help you with your self-discovery if you come there with your hard-earned money, and Buddhism is something the weirdo druggies do. Meanwhile, Islam is bombing stuff and Christianity is bitching about traditional values and protesting abortion clinics.

lmao, I used to read about gnosticism.

Are there more of these?

Absolutelydisgusting.jpg

The only good (extant) Gnostic cosmology is the far more simplistic and sensible Marcionitic one.

Some sects of Wicca an various neo-pagan religions. Many have a totally decentralized or solitary structure but some versions are very hierarchal.

I don't have anymore. it was from 4/pol/ that had a gnostic thread that was 70% christfagging and shitposting though

t.archon

Quality animu friendo

This thread is bait. The "arguments" are shit. Why have you not saged this thread, user?

What are you? 12?

Forgot shit posting flag, fuck. . .

Buddhism is somewhat compatible with communism, just ask the Dalai Lama. Everything else is cancer.

But to attain loftiness without constraining the will; to achieve moral training without benevolence and righteousness, good order without accomplishments and fame, leisure without rivers and seas, long life without Induction; to lose everything and yet possess everything, at ease in the illimitable, where all good things come to attend - this is the Way of Heaven and earth, the Virtue of the sage. So it is said, Limpidity, silence, emptiness, inaction - these are the level of Heaven and earth, the substance of the Way and its Virtue. So it is said, The sage rests; with rest comes peaceful ease, with peaceful ease comes limpidity, and where there is ease and limpidity, care and worry cannot get at him, noxious airs cannot assault him. Therefore his Virtue is complete and his spirit unimpaired.

Why am I not surprised that an anarkiddy is saying this?

Roman Catholic

I really like this thread.

I believe in metaphysical numbers and mathematical forms

mah n1qqu4

Hermeticism/Neoplatonism

To some extent. It's the closest to what my conception of religion and the world is, interests me very much.

It conflicts with my Socialist views admittedly. Since it and believing in basically any spirituality is as idealist as it gets.

Gnosticism with a bit of Discordianism thrown in. It's basically spiritual anarchism.

No gods! No masters!

None
The way I see it, if a god is capable of either just always existing or coming from nothing I see no reason the universe itself isn't capable of doing that on its own.

I guess nominally Catholic, but I haven't been an active participant in the Church (ironically) since I was Confirmed. At this point, I make no attempt to hide my contempt for the Church as an organization, but I suppose there is some lingering notion of God still left somewhere in my worldview (even if it has taken more and more of a deist perspective).

That being said, while I would really have no reason to actually adopt any of their beliefs or practices, I have found various forms of Gnosticism to be of great curiosity as of late. Aside from the often-made calls to ascetic lifestyle, I find there to be a faint subversive character (often between the cosmology, mythology, and the nature of deity-human relationship) that seems more compatible with other philosophical positions I hold.

I have just excommunicated you, nerd.

t. The Pope of Discordianism

Any other Muʿtazila on leftypol…
…Wanna have a discussion about Islamic negative theology and anti_ritualist mysticism thats it…

Maybe because anarkiddies are usually well informed.

I'm mainly agnostic but have a keen interest in Indo-European pantheons, particularly the Norse.

I find religion interesting but I can't believe in any of it. Nobody in my family is religious, nor is anyone my age.

Too bad because there are only cultural reasons to follow a religion (unless you are enlightened)

I left a particularly culty version of Christianity and found for a long time that I felt burned by religion in general and was a bit of a fedora-atheist type.

When I started getting into leftism I started to see how corporate the cult I had left was, they believed in a thinly veiled prosperity doctrine where the more "righteous" you were the richer you were and the more tithe you could pay. The more money you made or the richer your family was, the more likely you would be called to leadership positions.

The current "prophet" used to be the CEO of an insurance company owned by the cult and most of the "apostles" were corporate lawyers, bankers, etc.

When I really got into leftism and started learning about Tommy Douglas and what a lot of the Christian left is about I gained a fair bit of respect for them. Still not sure if I can make myself go back because of how badly I was burnt and given that Buddhism and Daoism appeal more to me, but I'm not a fedora anymore.

Staunchly Orthodox Christian, my adherence to it is actually what drove me to the left in the first place.

i believe in the cult of personality of stalin, thanks.

While I could understand some Catholics (via distributionism), Marcionites and Protestants being attracted to the left due to their faith.
I do fail to see how an Orthodox christian would be.

Monarchism (especially Byzantine/Greek and Russian) is honestly the only the only political current that I could see Orthodoxy pulling someone towards.

I don't have a name for what I am.

When I was 6, I was dragged out of my body and placed on a colossal pillar in a vast dark blue void, where I was forced to prostrate myself to massive statues of ancient beings.

Ever since then my life has been fucked, but I've come to accept it - revel in it, even, as if I'm the devil himself in a playground of humans.

As far as reconciling Apostolic Christianity and the Left, there are examples of it in the Church Fathers, like Basil of Caesarea:

Regarding why (specifically Oriental) Orthodoxy, it is because of the inherent political nature of the Council of Chalcedon between the Imperial pressures for it versus the opposition towards it from the local laity and clergy of the Holy Lands, of which echoes sentiment of class conflict within a religious context.

My wife used to be a Muslim and I grew up in an Atheist household.

somali?

No, Iraqi.

I married her because she worked with me and her parents kicked her out when she became an Atheist.

"Success".

Don't you just *love* multiculturalism and immigration?

Opportunism.

...

In all terms basically we are successful. The only reasons to hate it is government incompetence and if you're a right-wing outrage outlet.