Anyone have any ideas on how to kill God? I was thinking a out it and I think for a lot of people “God” is just this undefined “thing” out there that they can attribute other things to.

Like imagine a caveman kid talking to their caveman parent and asking questions like “Why is there a day and a night? Why is sky blue? Why is dog died?”

And the caveman parent just makes something up.

When people don’t know the cause of something, they can create a cause out of their imagination.

God will always be lurking in the imaginations of stupid people, and we will always have stupid people on this planet.

For a while this scared me because I’m a stupid person with an imagination, so I knew the idea of “God” will stay with me till I die (since I can’t think about anything when I die).

So I think the only way to kill God is if everyone dies. But even then it’s a gamble because there’s a whole “if a tree falls in a forest?” aspect.

Anyone else have any ideas?

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

    The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning.

    The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

    The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

    God was a dream of good government.

    You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.

    … prophetic words, one might say.

    Anyway… in the sense you are speaking of, the only way to totally kill God would be the erasure of massive amounts of human history, combined with either killing or ‘reducating’ billions of people, and then the institution of some kind of Orwellian totalitarianism, which must basically persist in perpetuity.

    Other than something like that… its not possible to totally exorcize the idea of God or Gods from humans… we are pattern seekers, we love simple explanations, and we love stories, narratives.

    • RadicalEagle@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      It’s cool how Mass Effect and Terminator could be seen as religious prophecies in some crazy future timeline.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I have literally met high schoolers who sincerely believed the Marvel movies were based on real life events, until I explained to them that no, they’re based on comic books, they are entirely fictional stories.

        We already live in the dumbest possible timeline.

        Remember how when Idiocracy came out, the general reception was ‘wow this is over the top, dude-bro moron version of the future, not worth serious discussion’, … and now a good chunk of people are looking back at it as ‘well actually, a lot of this seems scarily reasonable?’

        • RadicalEagle@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          That’s wild, but I almost can’t blame some kids for their misconceptions. Stories about Captain America fighting Nazis blur “reality” in a weird way because stories can be interpreted both literally and symbolically.

          Like, the idea of Captain America being a “real” bio-engineered person might not seem as crazy to a person after they learn about something like MKUltra lol

          The more we advance science and technology the more plausible our fantasy worlds become. You can still differentiate through experience, but I’ll cut high schoolers some slack since they just haven’t had that experience.

          From my perspective the world high schoolers are growing up in today seems even more fantastical and comicbook-like than the one I grew up in as a high schooler.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Most of the Gen A and younger Gen Z I’ve randomly struck up conversations with in the last year or so have had their brains thoroughly rotted by TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Rumble, etc.

            Avril Lavigne is actually a clone, or Biden is, or Kanye is,

            Astrology is completely real and my magic crystals will heal your chakras,

            Atlantis was totally real and actually we are all partially descended from different alien species and that’s what ethnicity and race actually are,

            ‘Insert movie here’ was basically actually real and making it into a movie is the way the powers that be laugh at us,

            Shadow Work isn’t just a very loose and differently defined psychological practice of attempting to understand yourself better and come to grips with trauma and negative urges its left you with, its actually that you literally have a shadow demon/spirit possessing you, and if you don’t exorcise it ‘properly’, it will magically spread to other people.

            … and I can tell this because I am a naturally born empath who is 100% accurate at determining what other people are thinking and feeling even if they directly tell me otherwise, which actually means that they are narcissists…

            and so on and so on.

            Of course this is my anecdotal experience, but this is what is normal for me to encounter… as I and the people around me are quite poor.

        • insufferableninja@lemdro.idEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          i like how Mike Judge found the stupidest looking shoes he could find, from a new niche shoe company. These will never take off, he thinks; they’re too hideous. So he puts everyone in crocs and chortles to himself. And then, 20 years later …