That was pretty obvious yeah
'Your momma so fat, when she died, she turned into a Red Bull factory'
I do not agree with your saying that the Abrahamic traditions in particular are full of nonsense btw. They make a lot more sense than the vast majority of other religions. But for some reason people take the first literally, while the other religions/mythologies are interpreted in a symbolic way.
I do not believe in the overwhelming role of the church. It's a manmade institution, supported by millions of people in past and present. It grew in an organic manner, through the ages, it's not a set-up of a few power hungry, mischievous men who want to keep people in place by threatening with hell and eternal torment.
Hell is a notion that goes way back, far further than the origins of the church. It's not a christian invention. You can say that it snowballed out of control as people became ever more pious (and maybe also wanted to shelter their own salvation from fellow christians who were not leading a very 'christian' life).
The church authorities have actually always repressed extreme religious views and chilliastic/apocalyptic movements. They have been given crap about eradicating 'heresies', but in all honesty, 99% of these sects and movements were complete WHÄCK.
Genetical engineering of the first humans I also don't believe in. If that were true humans would pop up out of absolutely nothing and nowhere. Instead they arrive in evolution REALLY late, and when they do, it's in the form of a multitude of forms that go from complete ape to slightly less ape to barely human, to somewhat smart human, to us.
Also, if we didn't evolve naturally, then why did every other species on earth? Or do you think life as a whole was genetically engineered? If that were so, how do you explain current evolution taking place, and why would it take millions of years to go from no-brain-bacteria's to single-brain-cell bacteria's? Surely that could have gone a LOT faster if it was indeed engineered.
edit: the picture below is my sig, it's not related to this post
I didn't say that the Abrahamic traditions are
more full of nonsense than anything else. I just used them as an example because they are by far the most common religions in areas that people reading this thread would recognize / be familiar with. That said, those religious texts are indeed full of nonsense that is so obviously untrue that people would have to be amazingly naïve to believe it. They are also more 'modern' than most other religions. The Abrahamic traditions are absolutely full of symbolism but the passages are taught as literal fact in most places of worship rather than allegories, which leads to a number of problems... and even if a church did teach these things as allegorical, would the onus then be on the religious leader to explain the mysteries in a no-bullshit way to everyone, or would they dole out a little bit of info at a time to people who they deem worthy and capable of understanding? It's really no different than the Egyptian mystery schools, or even high-level Freemasonry of today. (I myself am a Mason.)
And yes, notions of an 'underworld' do pre-date the modern Western idea of what Hell entails, but they are very different with the more modern notion of Hell being far worse. The idea of Hell is just yet another thing that was stolen from previous belief systems.
The Church was and is cancerous. It didn't grow in an organic matter at all. It grew like a tumor. Like a virus. It is strictly hierarchical and compartmentalized as well.
While I do believe in microevolution, I do not believe in macroevolution. We just simply don't have enough fossil evidence to prove the idea. Obviously a tray of bacteria is going to evolve if you subject the bacteria to various environmental factors. However, the bacteria are still going to remain bacteria even if they were in some sort of laboratory test setting for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. I can't know that for sure, but the idea of something becoming an entirely different species just seems crazy to me. They aren't going to change into a different kind of lifeform no matter what stimuli we provide. There quite simply isn't enough proof in terms of a "missing link" between modern humans and our supposed ancient ancestors. Archaeologists have been proven to be frauds and liars many times. The theories surrounding our so-called ancestors are just that - theories. I have read the studies and findings and I've yet to come across anything convincing. For a creature such as modern human beings to become so intelligent and aware in such a relatively short period of time (geologically speaking) just doesn't make sense to me. As far as every other species on earth goes, I have no idea. I don't think that life began on this planet (or anywhere else, for that matter) with a random event, of life springing forth from no life in the primordial soup. I believe that life and our universe's laws and mechanisms were created by a higher power because that is what makes the most sense to me. I believe that human beings were likely genetically engineered primary due to two factors:
1. Our advanced intellects compared to basically every other creature, giving us the ability to go from basically living in squalor knowledge level to going to space and global live streaming in the matter of a few thousand years, which is hardly any time at all from a geological or evolutionary time frame. To any person living even 1,000 years ago, the shit that we humans can do today would look
supernatural.
2. The ubiquitous nature of accounts / stories of ancient civilizations all over the world (totally unconnected) all talking about 'sky people' who bestowed upon them great knowledge and technology. The stories are so strikingly similar that I cannot help but believe that we got a jump start from a race of beings more advanced than us. I've read about all of these different accounts and I don't see how ancient peoples who lived without much (if any) knowledge of each other could invent such fanciful, far-out tales that are so similar.
The earliest recorded history of mankind goes back (depending on which sources you believe to be accurate) at most maybe 12,000 years, with many sources claiming that 6,000-7,000 years being more accurate, but personally I believe that stuff like the Yonaguni ruins and many other examples shows that humans have been around for quite some time. Anyway... Let's look at the mainstream figure of 6,000 years, which is the most commonly-cited figure in the West. Assuming that humans bred a new generation every 20 years, that's only 1,200 generations (approximately, of course) between us living today and those living back in the times of our most ancient recorded history. That's a pretty small number, even if many of us have little to no knowledge of our ancestors going back more than 4-5 generations. What I am getting at is that humans have developed far more rapidly than any other species on the planet that we know of, and I think that rapid growth has to do with outside stimuli.