[ur-whale]

This approach, "religion as an operator's manual to living one's life" is one of the very rare arguments in defense of religion I can vaguely resonate with.

Unfortunately this argument entirely fails to support all the rest of the luggage, especially the metaphysical hokum: you can perfectly chose to live your life according to a set of rules that will help you (and others) without having to justify it via the existence of some bearded dude sitting on a cloud.

[hudon]

> bearded dude sitting on a cloud

That's a strange straw man. No God-fearing person I know believes in such a thing. God is not a being, but rather is _being itself_. In fact, when Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am". If you prefer an Aristotelian frame, he is the "unmoved mover" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover

[krapp]

God, as portrayed in the OT, is clearly a being. God has specific thoughts, agency and expresses emotions. God gets tired after making the universe and takes the weekend off. God despairs of humanity and decides to kill everyone in a flood. God calls himself a jealous God. God even argues with Jonah about a houseplant (Jonah 4) and haggles with Ezekiel over what kind of excrement to bake his bread over (Ezekiel 4).

[rcoveson]

The people you know are most like you (the same is true of the people anybody knows), and are a bad proxy for humanity. The number of people who believe their God is "being itself" is vanishingly small compared to the number who believe their God is a real, specific being who has spoken specific words and done specific things.

I agree that "bearded dude sitting on a cloud" is a strawman, but "entity who spoke directly to Adam and Moses" is pretty accurate, in most Christian's eyes.

[deergomoo]

If you search Google Images for “god” there’s an awful lot of bearded men sitting on clouds, so it must be at least a somewhat popular belief

[petre]

Most likely caricatures than popular belief, or caricatures that shape popular belief. Maybe this is why muslims get angry when others make depictions of their prophet?

[today20201014]

God is a being in Genesis. He walks through the Garden.

[joshuacc]

And when someone is in love we say they "walk on clouds." That doesn't mean we're literally ascribing the power of levitation to them.

[today20201014]

> That doesn't mean we're literally ascribing the power of levitation to them.

Exactly, it's figurative language. My point is that when we read in scripture that

> Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am".

the notion of Moses asking God may also be figurative.

[Smoosh]

I always assumed that the "God/Heaven in the clouds" meme came from the same source as Greek gods dwelling atop Mt Olympus being obscured by clouds.

[rbp]

Some Christian commentaries interpret this as God in the person of Jesus Christ: https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/guzik_david/StudyGuide2...

[ur-whale]

> God-fearing

I rest my case.

[hudon]

Ah, you're probably interpreting that as believers walking in fear all day, which again is not the case (side note: studies show that believers are significantly less anxious on a day to day basis. I would link to one study but there are too many that show this so I'll let you Google it).

"God-fearing" is a very ancient phrasing used by the Israelites to refer to anyone that believes in the God as I've described him, "the unmoved mover", "the God of gods", "the Lord of hosts", etc. The term "fear" is our best English translation of the Hebrew text, but the implication here is that we believe that God is just, not arbitrary, and therefore we can respect and submit to his rule and expect fair treatment. Fear only concretely shows up in our hearts when we choose to disobey him. Those who don't believe in his existence or his justice naturally don't have fear when they disobey him, hence the term.

I hope this helps!

[ur-whale]

> Ah, you're probably interpreting that as believers walking in fear all day

No, I was referring to the fact that religious people basically have a slave-like mentality [1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPD1YGghtDk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eefS0gayKFc

[hudon]

If you think you're not a slave to anything, try just sitting still, not eating or drinking, and seeing if you can truly be free, even free from your own tyrannical desires. Try as you must, you will quickly discover that you are a slave to Thirst. You'll want to spend every waking hour obeying it fully, using every ounce of energy in your body to find water to please Thirst. And if you disobey and don't drink, you will then discover that you are a slave to Fear of Death. You'll be free from Thirst but then completely subjected to Fear of Death, so you'll reorient your whole being to serving Fear and making sure you survive. But let's say you steadfastly desire freedom even from Fear, and if you still don't drink, and then you die, so as to prove a point that you were not even a slave to Fear of Death... we'll know you were a slave to Pride.

And this just strengthens David Foster Wallace's argument: if you're going to be a slave anyway, why not be a slave to the greatest possible thing, Creation itself?

[jwalgenbach]

That is a definition of God that is so amorphous that it is completely useless. God is whatever you want it to be in that particular moment. So much so, that there is nothing concrete there.

You are simply living from moment to moment, with no grounding connecting your beliefs aside from your personal desires for them.

[cjameskeller]

A tall mountain, or the ocean, are also "fearsome". The cause of fear here is the power differential, which is not itself a bad thing.

[eszed]

You're right, but there is value in the community of accountability that churches provide. Fasting, tithing, charity work, and self-examination are objectively worthwhile, but not things I'm likely to muster up the will-power to do on my own, at least not regularly. It's like physical exercise: easier to get yourself off your ass when you go to the gym with a friend, or join a regular class.

Also, even though I don't really believe there's any "metaphysical hokum" going on behind it, I'm still moved (aesthetically, and -- dare I say? -- spiritually) by liturgy and church architecture. I'm sitting in the same place, while seeing and smelling and saying the same things that people have for hundreds or thousands of years. That's pretty cool, and I always feel better afterwards. So, even if I'm rationally convinced that it's a psychological (rather than metaphysical) effect, it's still worth doing.

[ur-whale]

> easier to get yourself off your ass when you go to the gym

Yeah, I hear you, but this is where we part ways: to me it's not a matter of willpower, but rather one of - a sin, I know - pride: I can't bear the idea that I'm walking the path of my life using the equivalent of moral crutches.

As to your second argument: no argument there, not everything about religion is bad, even if, in the case of beautiful churches, you could argue that the way they were erected wasn't necessarily "ethical".

[joshuacc]

> some bearded dude sitting on a cloud

You do realize that this idea is explicitly condemned by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?

[ur-whale]

You do realize that, when talking about a bearded man on a cloud, I was making a point about the fact that most of what the three monotheistic religions you mention (BTW 3 out of many, many equivalently deluded things) are essentially fairy tales designed to control the minds of men?

If at one time the bearded man on a cloud was the useful tool of the day to manipulate crowds and was later "condemned" because better ways were devised to keep the flock believing, in what way does that affect my argument that 90% of religion is utter, unprovable, fairy-tale BS?

[EDIT]: and yeah if you insist on plowing the dirt of literal interpretation, I'll point you to this argument made by another poster : please take a look at the first image that pops when querying google for "god" and come back and tell us that the argument has no basis.

https://images.google.com/search?q=god

[exporectomy]

That's a naive view that assumes people are rational but we're not, not even you. Our minds seem to need some amount of hokum (imaginary beings) to remain sane. Children who grow up with a supportive parent who reliably takes care of them carry the feeling of being cared for and the confidence that comes from it for the rest of their lives even after the parent is dead. A dead person is no more real than God, yet they're very influential in helping people cope with life. I think they serve similar purposes. Just think how much people who are not present with you still influence your feelings every day. Until we meet them again, these people effectively don't exist either. It's all in our heads, just like God.

There's even a psychological technique to build confidence by imagining a supportive person helping you. That's even closer to God or Jesus than a real but absent person.

[rcoveson]

> A dead person is no more real than God...

I'm unconvinced that remembering dead parents amounts to believing in imaginary beings.

Reality is less relative than you're making it out to be. Dead people are "real" because I can reliably predict observable effects their past actions would have had on the world and then confirm them with observation. For example, if I wanted to track down some college essays written by my grandparents, I might actually be able to find some, even though I don't have them in my memories. Or, more practically, I can ask a mutual friend, "remember when {dead person} said X?" And they will say, "yeah, and then they said Y", and I will say, "yeah".

The fact that dead people are dead doesn't make them "hokum" in the way that Zeus or Thor or Moroni are hokum. It's fine to doubt your own mind's relationship with reality, but don't doubt it so much that you become totally disconnected and consider all the people in your memories who you can't immediately re-confirm the existence of to be as immaterial as God.

[ur-whale]

So, in summary: we're not rational beings, therefore improvement through self-delusion?

I'm sorry, but I have two problems with that approach:

    1. Knowing I'm willingly drinking snake oil believing it'll somehow improve me makes it very hard for me to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. On a good day, I'd call myself an idiot, and on a bad one a pathological liar.

    2. Once you open the door to being told fairy tales in hope of improving yourself, you also open the door to letting yourself being manipulated into believing *any* kind BS by other, manipulative people. This is precisely the kind of mental attitude that has given us all the "interesting" byproducts of religion: religious wars, religious persecution, faith-based terrorism, death cults, debasement of arbitrary category of people (eg women, gays) etc ... (the list is long and extremely gruesome).

Nope, none of that for me, thank you.

[cjameskeller]

Sure, but some folks like me also believe the ontological claims are true. For example, here's a sort of summary argument based mainly on the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BfItu3Hm94okBn0dCJfRTjX6...