The human need to outgrow God

Originally posted by @karoly-aczel
The often reffered to but mostly misunderstood one

What do you, personally, mean by “gospel”?

Originally posted by @ghost-of-a-duke

I'll happily concede that faith gives strength, comfort and hope to those who have it, but such a reliance on a divine force to 'lift us up' seriously impedes our shared human enterprise of 'rising up' of our own accord.

How much faster would we have progressed as a species without God holding us back?

Well to be fair, it's an attack on 'those humans' who have wasted energy on such a non-existent deity, energy they could have re-directed more productively to advanced the human race as a whole.

This is an interesting sort-of-counterfactual to wrestle with. A few stray and perhaps rather conflicted thoughts, then.

I spent decades as a Christian believer but I don't look upon it as a period of wasted energy and I am not sure how I could have re-directed myself more productively. I have little other than positive and happy memories of it.

Having said that, I do now have a sense ~ for myself at least ~ that religion, while an unsurprising outcome of human nature and the human condition, is a kind of squandering* of the kind of intellectual and spiritual** faculties and capacities that enable us to come up with things like religious notions***.

So there's certainly some paradox-generating, I'm-alright-Jack self-centredness built in to me thinking along those lines.

[* A harsh word, maybe - it's not mean condescendingly..]
[** My non-conventional use/definition of the word.]
[*** Which are highly elaborate and imaginative and can be intensely inspirational .]

For the vast majority of people who believe in a god figure, I am not coonvinced that all that much time and energy is actually wasted on that belief and the worship that goes with it. I'm not sure how 'held back' most people are. Meanwhile they have most likely benefited from the social order that theism has imbued their cultures with, warts and all.

If everybody had dedicated themselves to the time consuming pseudo-intellectual masturbation engaged in by so many members of the self-anointed high-priest-theologian "class", then humanity would have probably died out long ago in a pretentious death rattle of thinking-the-think and studiously not talking about doing-the-do.

Has humanity outgrown "God"? Maybe it has. But I am not convinced. I wonder if there is enough diversity in play in this community to sustain this conversation for long beyond the familiar and well-rehearsed philosophical iterations [like this one of mine]. I hope so. It would be interesting.

Originally posted by @ghost-of-a-duke...
How much faster would we have progressed as a species without God holding us back?

How much slower if we weren't bonded as a group? I see cave-people, huddled around a fire and looking over their shoulder. Kinda like church. Or a rave.

Originally posted by @ghost-of-a-duke
Yes.

Proceed with your point. (And OP relevance).

Then, by all means, enjoy the free will that some atheists claim you don't have.

Originally posted by @divegeester
As “God” doesn’t exist [sic] your question is mute, as it is only ourselves and our imaginations holding us back. Any attack on “God” is therefore an attack on ourselves.

Moot. The word is "moot".


To the point, God does exist and it is still "only ourselves and our imaginations holding us back". My life has only gotten better since I became a Christian. I see no way that single fact has held me back at all.

Originally posted by @suzianne
Then, by all means, enjoy the free will that some atheists claim you don't have.

Try as I might have, I never really understood what googlefudge meant when he was expounding on that.

Originally posted by @suzianne
Moot. The word is "moot".

Yes, I know.

Originally posted by @suzianne
To the point, God does exist and it is still "only ourselves and our imaginations holding us back". My life has only gotten better since I became a Christian. I see no way that single fact has held me back at all.

Did you understand my post?

Originally posted by @divegeester
Did you understand my post?

There was a double Whoosh.

The meaning of what you posted soaring over her always-het-up head..

And her de rigueur swing-and-a-miss.

Whoosh. Whoosh..

Originally posted by @divegeester
Yes, I know.

Sure you did lol

Originally posted by @romans1009
Sure you did lol

Well let’s suppose I didn’t; do you think I’m the type of poster to lie about it?

Originally posted by @divegeester
Well let’s suppose I didn’t; do you think I’m the type of poster to lie about it?

As FMF would say, Bingo!

Originally posted by @ghost-of-a-duke
I created a thread a while ago about how I felt God (or at least 'the idea' of God) was holding us back as a species.

I'll happily concede that faith gives strength, comfort and hope to those who have it, but such a reliance on a divine force to 'lift us up' seriously impedes our shared human enterprise of 'rising up' of our own accord.

How much faster would we have progressed as a species without God holding us back?

What exactly do you mean by “rising up” and how is it that God is “holding us back as a species?”

Originally posted by @ghost-of-a-duke
Well to be fair, it's an attack on 'those humans' who have wasted energy on such a non-existent deity, energy they could have re-directed more productively to advanced the human race as a whole.

Well it seems that the higher educated and more affluent types do not believe in God (at least in the traditional or mainstream sense) and instead favor pantheism (or some vague notion that the universe itself is God) and they pay little attention to the subject beyond that.

God and human pride do not co-exist.

So are the lower and less educated classes holding the human species back? What could/would they be doing if they weren’t in church or reading the Bible?

Originally posted by @ghost-of-a-duke
No.

Point is, if God doesn't exist (and I don't believe He does) then generation after generation of theists have wasted time poring over religious texts and the like, distracting them from more productive uses of their time.

How many theists “pore over” religious texts in your view? This thread topic reminds me of that crazy analogy you came up with that collapsed from its own illogical absurdity.