There’s a revival of an old and especially anti-Humanistic tradition that many got an eyeful of during the recent Oscars:

Honor Culture Is Back. We Eradicated It for a Reason.
Ryan Grim
https://theintercept.com/2022/03/29/oscars-will-smith-duel-honor/

One thing your Mother might not want to tell her friend is: “Oh, don’t worry!  Me and Ol’ Nick are just like this! *Crosses Fingers*” 🤞😁

I sometimes tell that to customers whose total comes up to $6.66 or something added to that.  The reactions can be funny. 😁

I believe that clinical depression is the source of the idea of hell for the human race.  It’s just a dark and horrifying corner of the human mind.

If it were I…then I would do that (I have super strict limits with people in general and religion is definitely one of them). My mother is French Canadian, they are INSANELY polite (as you may know). They have a pretty hard time confronting people with personal beliefs and emotionally difficult confrontation. But I would imagine at…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
It is sad to imagine someone so tormented like that. She’s probably a caring person, if she is so concerned for the welfare of your mother.

Around here churches and preachers push this fear of hell constantly and tell their flock to go save their friends, family, everyone from the punishment of their god. It’s an age-old r…[Read more]

In…[Read more]

Your Mother sounds pretty convinced and firm in her non-belief.  I doubt she could be “blackmailed” into belief,  but her friend is a mess.

Did she know your Mom was a non-believer, then just out of nowhere get concerned that your Mom was going to Hell?  That would make no sense if she was firmly convinced in her beliefs.

Davis wrote:
She isn’t mentally ill. Depressed, perhaps. I wouldn’t blame someone who honestly believes in hell for being terrified of a friend burning for eternity. Any caring person who honestly believed in this shit would be terribly upset about it. Hell is the most grotesque religious concept ever devised. It is what makes Christianity and…

[Read more]

I’ve said before that if a bloodthirsty Autism-spectrum child could write, The Qu’ran would probably be what it would look like.  And that’s no slam against the overwhelmingly friendly children on the spectrum, of course, just acknowledgement of how they often repeat themselves.

The Qu’ran cribbed a lot from…[Read more]

“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

He also said a line from The Baghavad Gita that comes off violent when one considers what the subsequent…[Read more]

For example, this passage in Revelation 22:18-19 has…[Read more]

• 

  HolyViolence

I think we just need to dig a bit deeper. Its not a dead issue, after all. If we just use our skulls a little more we can figure this out.
That’s the spirit. Maybe we have a ghost of a chance at resolving this yet.

Or we can just give up and bite the dust. Perhaps this discussion is on its last legs.

But most norms aren’t random

Uhhh. Yes. A lot of them are. I mean…come on Simon, in parts of the world they lob off pieces of little children’s genitals. Want a less extreme example? To be presentable in an office in western countries a man has to wear an uncomfortable pointless cloth noose around their neck and in Southern Europe a woman has t…[Read more]