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this exactly describes my childhood view of religion
I tried so hard to hear God. When I finally talked to my pastor about my doubts he said that reading the Bible would help. Reading the Bible made me doubt even more.
i always laughed at the “oh, you’re a nonbeliever? let me throw some bible verses at you” approach
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If I was writing a fanfic sequel to the old testament I would call it the new testament and say that Judas was paid 30 silver.
I could write whatever I want. Most people back then couldn’t read, and these stories had been passed down for generations by word of mouth.
All the animals of the earth can’t fit on a wooden boat. There isn’t enough water to flood the planet. Mankind isn’t descended from two people. You can discredit the bible from early on, unless you just “because magic” it.
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Mankind isn’t descended from two people.
Kinda.
The Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam are a thing. Admittedly, they probably lived about 100,000 years apart, but all mankind is descended from these two people.
That’s a big kinda.
But you know what I mean. Mankind didn’t start with one man and one woman. Mankind slowly came to be from another species that was similar to mankind, and somewhere in the history we called us humans and our ancestor something else.
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That’s not wrong at all, but there is a much more recent Adam and Eve - an actual anatomically modern human woman and man that all of us are descended from (although, again, they probably lived about 100,000 years apart - I.e. they weren’t a couple)
It should also be stressed that I’m not saying that at one point there was only one woman alive or one man alive.
Mitochondrial DNA isn’t like the usual inherited mix of DNA - instead it’s passed down directly from mothers to their children. If they have girls, then it’ll be passed down to their children too. If they only have boys, though, then that mitochondrial DNA has come to a dead end. Basically it’s matrilineal - it passes down the female line.
The same with the Y Chromosome. Fathers pass the Y chromosome to their sons. If they only have daughters, well it’s come to a dead end. It’s patrilineal - it passes down the male line.
DNA analysis shows that all of our mitochondrial DNA is shockingly similar - especially compared to many other animals. Rolling back the clock (by accounting for the tiny random mutations that occur over time) shows that everyone converges to a single person around 155,000 years ago. Before modern humans, as a species, had expanded out of Africa and spread across the world.
Interestingly, especially so if looking for biblical comparisons, the Y-chromosomal Adam can be traced to around 100,000 years earlier than Mitochondrial Eve - so he did appear first.
So, the next question might be, “if anatomically modern humans existed for at least 100,000 years before the Mitochondrial Eve, what happened to all the other mitochondria variants - why did we end up with only one?”
That is simply a numbers game. Compared to many other animals, humans only have relatively few children in their lifetime. This keeps small populations from exploding suddenly, but it also increases the likelihood of only having boys (and stopping that line of Mitochondrial DNA).
You can map it out on a piece of paper:
Get five different coloured pens and a black pen.
Across the top of the page, draw dot in each coloured pen, with a black one beside it. The coloured dots are female, the black ones male). These are the parents.
Now for the kids. Toss a coin twice - heads for a boy (draw a dot in black pen beneath the parents), tails for a girl (draw a dot the same colour as the mum). Do this for all.
Now pair up the offspring and carry on.
You’ll find very quickly, one colour will start to dominate the paper. This represents the Mitochondrial DNA.
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I would argue the easiest way to convince someone to become a Christian (or any religion, seriously) would be if some sort of celestial being would appear and claim to be a deity, or an angel or something.
Something that would prove “magic” or rather, “we are so advanced from you that you don’t really have a choice in the matter.”
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There isn’t enough water to flood the planet
I think that a being powerful enough to create the entire universe can handle a little water
Yeah, but that falls in the “because magic” category. That water would have to come from somewhere, or the crust of the whole world would have to flatten out so that the existing water would form a thin layer on top.
Either way, it would be “magic.”
Well yeah, being the God of all creation probably entails a great deal of magic. But as for explanations, there is reference to a firmament in the sky in Genesis. It’s generally believed by Christians that the firmament was dumped onto the earth during the great flood.
regarding the bible, an interesting presentation from a biblical scholar and former believer https://youtu.be/pfheSAcCsrE
Wasn’t raised Christian, but had a similar experience. But I definitely believed in God, heaven, etc, because they seemed like facts of life. I just thought there must be more to it.
Anyway, precisely because I took these metaphysics seriously and at face value, and because I wanted to know more, I kept digging. And as any seeker of truth knows: if you keep digging at a lie, you will reach the bottom in short order.
I only had to wait long enough for my youthful incredulousness to fall away. What a waste of time… I couldn’t been studying music theory or something…
I was agnostic until I’ve read the Bible. That made me an atheist. I was 12.
I clearly remember the moment when I realized that other people (other than weird fundies) were taking it seriously. I’m not sure what I had thought was going on, my best guess is that I thought praying and going to church was just a weird thing we were all supposed to do out of politeness, like not putting our elbows on the table.
I had the same thing when I was younger! In my head, it was like a thing people do just for tradition(or something?) that everyone knows isn’t real, but we play along for fun. Like when you knock on wood or wish on a star. Or when adults talk about what “Santa” brought them (and I don’t mean the people that genuinely believe in that shit). I dunno I had the concept well developed in my head like it was all some sort of metaphor and then my mind was blown when I learnt people actually think jesus was a real life wizard
I remember being confused about how I was supposed to distinguish between my own thoughts and god trying to tell me something 🙃
one of them is you. the other one is also you
Well, it’s interesting to me that the people who claim God spoke them always hear something that they wanted to do anyways.
Came here to write the exact same thing
Same.
Lemmites try not to bring up religion challenge
not exactly sure what you mean, but i’m doing the shit on religion all day every day challenge
why would someone be constantly trying not to bring up religion? what, are we supposed to all just agree to never talk about any religion ever again?
I thought imaginary friends were just something in the movies. Kids actually have them?
When we were kids, my sister (4 years old at the time) had a friend named Jennifer who “lived down the street” none of us had ever met. She went to play with Jennifer every day for hours on end. We moved to a new town and my sister again disappeared for several hours. When she came home she said she had been playing with Jennifer because Jennifer had moved too. Sister later confirms that Jennifer was an imaginary friend, but has no idea where she was going every day or what she was doing. Now my parents are so much more worried about where the grandkids are when they visit. My sisters and I tease them about where the concern was when we were growing up.
This convinces me further that imaginary friends are only supernatural if real at all
Seriously! Her son now talks about our uncle who passed, says he comes to visit sometimes. Big yikes from me.
I don’t remember having imaginary friends but my aunt and grandma have always told me the story of how I was sitting upset one and time and they asked me what happened and I told them there was an older lady scolding me. From what I described to them they were convinced it was my deceased great grandma that had been giving me shit for something or other. Apparently she was a bit of a grouch and had died in that house. House was also super haunted in other ways from what they say.
I imagine a lot of kids would use this excuse to just go play by themselves in the woods or whatever. Or, they could have been hanging out with other kids. So in this case it’s less an imaginary friend and more of a fake friend.
Where do you think religions came from
Mental illness and greed.
Also true
I blame the aphantasia, a lotta y’all’s weirdness made a lot more sense once I learned you can just make up pictures in your head
The fact that a lot of people can’t actually terrifies me.
Why?
Its kind of like considering blindness as someone who can see. It feels like removing a vital part of the human experience to someone who has come to rely on the ability.
Is it really this significant? I don’t think people usually describe it this way. I, for one, really don’t feel like I miss out on a lot.
What I’m attempting (and maybe failing) to say is that it’s a key part of how you perceive the world. To you it isn’t really a big deal, but people who do think this way just view their own thoughts in a fundamentally different fashion, and the idea of such a big difference in that regard is kind of scary or upsetting to think about for some people. I personally think I would be very sad if I suddenly developed aphantasia, even though I don’t think my imagination is as vivid as others.
interesting. i’d say it’s not really that important, but then again i’d probably have a very different opinion if i didn’t have aphantasia.
For me, I wouldn’t equate my ability to visualize things in my head to sight, but maybe hearing or smell. Could I interact with the world without it? Absolutely. But I do a ton with that ability. I hold lists, draw maps, plan routes, visualize models, check the contents of my fridge while at the grocery store. It also helps me make connections between disperate pieces of data. A lot of this I could do with a pencil and paper, but it’s so much faster to pull it up in my head.
Wait… the way you describe it now…
I was always told of photographic memory being some super power and thought “Hey, would be neat if I had THAT!”
Was that just the ability to daydream all the time? I imagined people with like literal cameras for brains that could take a picture of a book page and read it later like a text document.
This whole time, I might have had that mystical power all along and aphantasia people just overstated how accurate it was?
That’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve met anyone in person who claimed to have a photographic memory. I definitely don’t do the “recalling long strings of numbers” thing that TV shows imply. But I can pull up a fairly accurate picture of the inside of my fridge and take inventory.
Welcome to being autistic. Except it has nothing to do with imaginary friends and everything to do with culture.
I’d like to know more, please do tell!
I don’t understand what you are trying to tell, sorry.
What a weird thing to say.
As a French, it’s not in our culture these “imaginary friends”. Kids don’t have them (at least I don’t know anyone that used to have one), we don’t speak about it, we don’t have stories and fairy tales about them…
I think it’s an American thing. The new movie “IF” is uncanny for me - It’s like the girl is batshit insane and I was waiting for a twist with here being in a psychiatric hospital or something.Not French but francophone so maybe it is an English thing, because I heard so many anecdotes from Anglophone relations about their imaginary friends growing up, and mon doux jesus I tried to have an imaginary friend, but sadly found myself impotent in that regard.
It seems to be a swedish thing, but sweden is loving US/UK culture so maybe we hear about it but doesn’t have them.
For what it’s worth, I grew up there and never met/heard of anyone having an imaginary friend, but I do remember it from TV. Hmm, maybe a german film? What’s about you, germans?
No, I was a lonely nerd so I just had imaginary friends. I think I stopped having a specific imaginary friend when I was about 5 and moved on to playing out larger imaginary scenarios. In high school I got into tabletop RPGs, and today I still play them now and then, and I like to write stories and do other creative activities.
I feel like my imagination has enjoyed a long and varied career, and I look forward to several more decades of day dreaming.
No, but I intentionally mispronounced spaghetti because the kids who couldn’t say it correctly got more attention.
When I was 5, I went to a speech therapist for an S lisp. I remember first thing they told me was that I’m meant to keep my tongue behind my teeth. I had to say, “Sammy the silly snake slithers by” and nailed it. I forget all the other stuff, but never had a lisp after that very brief and distinct moment.
All I remember before that was adults saying to me, “No, like this.” and would just hiss at me. Who’d have thought a few seconds of explaining something would actually work.
Most of the time people don’t think about things thoroughly enough to describe them usefully. Or they don’t have the language to describe them.
Most people can’t articulate how things are done, it takes a professional. That’s why a lot of scientific and mathematical discoveries seem so obvious. Knowing how to do something, or how something works, is not the same as being able to define how it is done in a provable and repeatable fashion.
Edit: congratulations on overcoming your lisp!
I was in speech therapy all through elementary school. The only thing I remember was being told “smile when you pronounce your R’s.”
I honestly should’ve taken a class on how to hold a pencil. Instead of teaching me properly, they just let me type my assignments. It wasn’t until high school that I learned to actually write by staring at a classmate’s hand as she wrote and copying her form. My handwriting is still shit btw. I just don’t get cramps as easily.
Yes! Everyone was talking about theirs and I just made up one but felt like a fraud. I literally had to take a real animal toy of mine to base my “imaginary friend” on.
I did not have imaginary friends, but I imagined lots of DBZ like battles in my mind IRL scenery, does that counts?
My imaginary friend was dripped-out Goku as well
Did that with DBZ and MegaMan
Which MegaMan version?
I’m talking Nintendo 90s MegaMan using the circle shot.
None of my friends had that, so neither did I
Me too! Drop Dead Fred made me think it was a thing! Also Phoebe Cates is so convincing
After playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team Red for the first time and getting a Cubone from the test, I always imagined a Cubone going with me to school and keeping me company. Never told anyone about it, though
No
I thought I was adopted before I’ve heard or understood the concept of it.
Were you really?
Not really. It’s just my parents had a hard time when I was born (russian 90s + medical issues) and I lacked contact with them working long irregular shifts. When I was failing in something or just sad, it was easier to imagine I’m of alien origin and don’t belong there, than to talk this out with them. It’s probably not on them, and far from the worst stories other lemmings can tell, but it did hurt.
My siblings just did it as an insult, “ugh I must be adopted because you all are dumb!”.
There were some fun jokes at times, but my sister insisted even to others. Ironically, she has shown to be one of the less wise children with how she’s developed her life.
No, but I definitely had the thought that, “Wow, it’d be really cool if I could imagine something that strongly like everybody else. I want a pet blue eyes ultimate dragon”
