[texuf]

Do you think it's weird that ethnic groups separated by thousands of years of evolution came up with completely different gods and forms of worship? If there was an omniscient being don't you think it would make itself known in a little more universal fashion? And isn't it strange that the institutions built around our current iteration of God are soft power structures that wield huge amounts of influence both financially and politically?

[kjkjadksj]

On the other hand, aren’t most creation myths actually strikingly similar in terms of overall themes? That doesn’t mean they are right, but I imagine there is an underlying proto religion shared by most if not all ancient faiths.

[robofanatic]

> aren’t most creation myths actually strikingly similar in terms of overall themes

Like any other product, someone invented it first, and others followed/copied. Over thousands of years, religions evolved separately, but you can still find traces of a shared origin running through them all.

[ImJamal]

Have you ever played telephone? Messages get distorted in a couple minutes. Thousands of years is plenty of time to be easily believe that people would deviate on various gods.

[bee_rider]

A god should be supernaturally good at telephone, right? Otherwise it brings would open up some pretty uncomfortable questions for folks who follow the teachings of modern translations of their books.

[freedomben]

This strikes me as a pretty powerful argument against trusting the Bible (and other scripture older than a few hundred years), especially since we have a ton of evidence that distortion is exactly what happened. Even just reconciling the four gospels requires some pretty serious "interpretation."

[ivape]

I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time).

Faith was a gift to help.

In terms of Christ, let me put it this way. Imagine your high school, and one day the President of the US visits. You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes. It’s a matter of faith, and it’s the little bit you need to help with the gift of free will.

The very first story (well second story) in the main monotheistic books was the Eden Story. That story is all about how vulnerable we are with the choice of free will. Empirically, we have seen the failure of it over and over throughout human history (systemically you can easily see it). So, yes, I fully believe in the fallen nature of man, not because we are evil, but because what a gift and responsibility free will actually is.

[Tijdreiziger]

> I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time).

I think this hypothesis is flawed.

I think most people in society strive to do right, and therefore most of us are able to live in relative peace and with relative trust in our fellow members of society.

There are some people who do wrong, but we’ve set up our society to strive to detect this and punish those (albeit using imperfect systems and knowledge, leading to false positives and negatives).

Therefore, I think religions are an encoding of human morality, not the other way around.

[teachrdan]

> You may not directly see him, but the whole school would know about it, even if he was just there for 5 minutes.

My question would be: If the Bible was written by an omniscient and all-powerful God, then why does it have so many inaccuracies in it? Easy ones include a global flood that killed every animal on Earth. (Except for the two of each animal on Noah's ark, which would have overheated with so many animals in it, if it hadn't collapsed under its own weight first.)

But there are also internal contradictions between the four gospels of the New Testament. Why would God make his own books inaccurate? To me, that indicates they are not the product of divine inspiration but the written accounts of oral histories.

Your response may be that God introduced these errors into his holy books to test our faith. But at that point, isn't the answer to every contradiction and inaccuracy just, "To test our faith"? Is there literally anything that would change your mind, or is your faith just being tested even harder?

[em-bee]

free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. free will includes the freedom to reject god. if god were to reveal himself openly then the freedom to reject him would not exist. we would not have a choice but to believe.

[baobun]

So assumimg we have

1. Physical reality (e.g. how many years has earth existed)

2. Metaphysical reality (is there a creator? If so is your "soul" or life in any way relevant to them?)

3. Moral reality (Is killing other humans in cold blood justified by scripture? Are there such a thing as "Good" and "Evil"?)

4. Cultural reality (What do the people who raised you and otherwise influence you believe, local traditions and stories, scripture)

5. What feels intuitive for an individual to realize ("As above, so below", the unit of self, comparing Christ with POTUS, "the fall of man")

Assuming your local space-time intepretation gets it all right (and everyone with different understanding got and gets it wrong) and that all of these by necessity align is some next-level hubris...