This is why they say one must get kids exposed to The Word as young as possible. Read a quote years ago about how a 30-yo man, having never heard of Christ, would be aghast if you tried to push Christian Bible stories on him. He would think you were bugfuck.
FAKE NEWS! Technically it never says apple so it could’ve been a Magic Durian Curse! (Which I think we can all agree is orders of magnitude more cursed than an apple.)
I had a friend who was never christened by her atheist parents and thus never had to be drilled to believe in any religion. Welp, it was rather refreshing to hear someone's perspective that all the proselytising just sounds nothing to a person who had never been indoctrinated since infancy. Someone from another religion might still consider the stories from other beliefs; but hearing religious story by someond who was never baptised into any religion? For that person they would just say "cool story bro". Even for myself who is no longer a believer, I still get some pangs in my consciousness brought by early exposure to Christianity. But I am lucky that I have never been extremely indoctrinated and therefore I don't feel any fear of an eternal damnation in hell for leaving Christianity. Some former Christians, though, essentially have PTSD by being made to feel guilty for leaving, and have existential angst of the possibility hell (the original Torah/Talmud never even mentioned hell so why should Christians believe in one?)
Foreskin blood magic, cannibalizing flesh and blood of gods, slaves obey your masters and instructions for keeping slaves and not beating them so badly they die within a couple days, faith healing and magic tricks described as miracles, plenty of fucked up stuff in the Christian bible. Childhood indoctrination is very effective for cults, armies, and religions.
It's like a Jesuit allegedly said, can't remember who or when, it might have been in a movie - "Give me a man for the first ten years of his life, you can have him for the rest, you'll never break him".
You forgot the part where you get tortured for all eternity if you don't believe all this stuff.
Or as all those batshit-crazy, tyrant-leaning, bible-thumping right wingers today might call it with a bloodthirsty smirk disguised as a smile - "tough love".
"...but He loves you!" - George Carlin
He wasn't a zombie. He was lich, maybe a wight. Also, he quit carpentry years before he died.
I like the part when there was voices in a dude's head and he almost murdered his son but didn't and told everyone God told him to. Must have been the first time anyone ever used that excuse.
What is scary to me is the degree to which information as understood by biblical scholars is withheld to the laity, such as how the writers of the books of the bible were often at odds, with conflicting interests. The OT and NT are not univocal, not inerrant, not divinely inspired. And there's a lot that we interpret today to mean something different than what it meant when it was written (a process that isn't always a bad thing).
When I've interacted with Hellenists, they still understand that their mythology is exactly that, fanfiction of stone-age and iron-age folk trying to explain natural phenomena or telling stories of their people.
But Christian ministries not only don't want to acknowledge the chthonic origins of their own scripture, but then want to reinterpret it preserving the power of the church, which is particularly odd since the Protestant traditions sola fide (by faith alone) and sola scriptura (by scripture alone) seat salvation and comprehension squarely in the hands of the solo parishioner. Then again, people who are comfortable with their own spirituality are less desperate to keep up on their tithes.
It's just another way to describe the hero's journey, which is about ego death (facing our "demons") and rebuilding ourselves into better versions of ourselves. Ancient people didn't have modern psychology, so they used metaphor, simile and allegory. A more modern version would be Steppenwolf, by Hesse.
A more modern version would be Steppenwolf, by Hesse
See also: Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Simple Life
It's more about appeasing the blood god.
At that time, it was their best understanding, sure. I'm saying there's a reason various archetypes have very human qualities. Also humans don't tend to work through their own stuff with regular rewards and everyday punishment of dealing with the backlash. But the rewards are divine, indeed.
And thus my new Dnd campaign is born
Holy shit, this one is brutal. I love it
Well... if you put it that way... it does sound like a pretty creative yarn they weaved.
Please clap.
