I argued that exact same way with someone very close to me. Their answer was:
But those gods aren't real!
Nothing you can do if that last conclusion isn't there.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen Roberts
But those gods aren’t real!
Far be it for me to question your religious doctrine, but even the fucking Old Testament recognizes rival gods.
Shamash that like button
Shamash or pass?
Shamesh, Mary, Krill?
I’m always down for some shamashed potatoes
Unlike other religions, my religion of pondering the orb is the correct one.
Sun is orb
Checkmate
Checks notes
By Shamash they're right!
Based wizardposting.
Romans when you ask them if they know about your one true god:
Is there more to why the meme references mars in particular? I always thought they just expanded by more and more gods as they conquerered other civilizations, like a marvel cinematic universe.
Because I only had to cover the letter E and I thought it was funnier if it didn't change much
I bet "But who moves the sun around if there is no Shamash" seemed like a very solid reasoning at the time.
Because religion is all about indoctrination. When I came out as atheist my dad said that all my ancestors were Christians and I'm stopping that tradition. I don't care, if they belived that doesn't mean that I also have to belive and just because it's a tradition it doesn't mean it should continue. He also said that goal of atheism is to make people lose their identity (he and many others in my country think that identity is just religious and natinoal identity, they also think that those two things are same). After that I had to explain to him what is identity, how it's impossible to lose it and that there is no agenda behind atheism.
dad said that all my ancestors were Christians and I'm stopping that tradition
Well, your dad's wrong. Most of your ancestors worshiped some other god or not at all. Christianity is just 2000 years young.
I said that to him but he doesn't care because ancestors that lived closer to current time are more important to him.
"because tradition" or "because that's how i was brought up" or any other paraphrasing of "because everyone else is doing it" is the dumbest possible reason for anyone to do anything ever
"If everyone walked off a cliff..."
I agree with you, but peer pressure is real. I hated when grownups pretended it wasn't.
it absolutely is real. and i'd argue that part of growing up is learning to make decisions based on rational consideration. instead of "everyone else is doing it," like way too many grown ass adults still do
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people.
To be fair, the sun is pretty godly, what with being so big that our earth is an inconsequential part of it, that it shines life-giving energy down on us unconditionally, that we are smitten when we gaze upon it or stay too long directly in its rays.
It's important to keep in mind that religion explained a lot of stuff, especially regarding health and wellbeing (you're sick = evil spirits), before we managed to figure out the actual workings of some natural laws. I mean, hygiene was only "invented" in the late 1800s and the mere idea of washing your hands before coming in contact with a hospital patient was considered preposterous.
Nowadays, although we have amazing instruments that help us keep track of stellar bodies, we still can't quite correctly predict the weather past 1 week. Might as well say that's up to the gods.
More on topic, back on those times, each city had its patron god and it was common for conquered cities to lose their god, having the statue moved to the conqueror's temple.
Faith begins, where science ends.
God of the Gaps theory?
I recently realized why some things like salt and garlic are so prominent in folklore for dealing with evil spirits, demons, vampires, etc.
It's probably because at some point people noticed that salt preserves foods. And since they didn't understand why foods rotted, evil spirits were blamed and thus salt must have properties that wards off evil spirits. Garlic also has anti-microbial properties (though I can only guess as to why it's specifically associated with vampires, though hanging garlic is also considered a general "ward" against evil spirits iirc).
Holy water could have gotten its reputation because people believed priest blessings had meaning, but it could also be that the rituals involved in "blessing" water actually reduced the harmful microbes. I was only able to find modern guides for making it (though I didn't look very hard and skimmed over what I did find), but I saw things like using salt, finding a clean source of water, and filtering it in this guides.
It's fascinating to me, going from what looks like random associations to understanding how those associations might have come about in the first place. Sucks that we're still dealing with a lot of the fallout of all that, though.
But that's before the creation!
Well at least the sun actually exists and you can see and feel it and measure it with many different devices. It's nice when people appreciate an actual physical body and this one certainly has forces at work that far exceed ones imagination. Considering humans are "stardust" and we need sunlight, it even makes sense to call stars creators of life.
Some people worship cookies, others worship smartphones, animals or a person of the opposite sex, hell even nowadays many non-religious people worship singers, politicians, influencers or what have you. I wonder if any culture worships galaxies or black holes or some other objects in space that are not a big ball of hot plasma, a planet or a moon.
fun fact: although shamash is a sun and light deity, he is also considered an underworld god, and serves the queen of the dead, erishkigal, as a judge in her court.
Shemesh is also the hebrew word for sun.
and shamhurish is the name for a mythical jinn king from pre islamic arabian folklore, who was also a judge.
Economics is the control system which filled the void in society vacated by religion after the enlightenment.
An arbitrary set of rules, conjured by the ruling class, obfuscated and protected from scrutiny, and imposed on the weary masses.
Finance, an arbitrary subset of mathematics, serves as its mythology.
Banks and financial institutions serve as its churches and cathedrals.
Economists serve as its priests.
God replaced by GDP.
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