Can we just have tiny villages where we tell ghost stories and just all contribute to each other’s well being?
Any idea why communism is spelt with a zero here?
Problem is real world communism always ends up as authoritarian dictatorships.
Lol, heaven is also an authoritarian dictatorship
it’s almost like American imperialism has made sure that any attempt has failed by economic and military disruption and injecting dictators with the goal of dissuading others from trying.
the second there’s a success story western capitalism becomes unnecessary and a better system comes into view.
Socialist capitalist democracy works pretty well though
Source: Scandinavian
Also, heaven is an absolute monarchy. The fact so many commies don’t even see the difference between communism and a monarchy should tell you all you need to know.
Also, heaven is an absolute autocracy. The fact so many fundies don’t even see the difference between US and facism should tell you all you need to know.
That’s a pretty boilerplate criticism. While true to a great degree, it’s also true of a lot of western capitalist nations.
It’s pretty hard to find information about real communist societies because media companies have it in their best interest to bury any good that has possibly been done by a communist society, meanwhile demonizing them and making them the enemy. You really have to dig to find honest information about communist societies.
Moreover, a lot of otherwise successful communist regimes have been sabotaged and poisoned by capitalist interests. Either by literally arming fascists, or just by demonizing them with foreign policy and media coverage.
Also communist economy is impossible to implement since there is no all knowing god to fuck all the people siphoning the money out via corruption. Communism is great if you can remove humans from the equation. Mofo humans fuck every system up, we are the problem.
Me listening to tankies describe communism as a moneyless, stateless, classless world, then criticise anarchism
people still use the word tankie ? my guy most communists these days are anarcho communists.
tankie was never funny anyways
We can only make the world stateless by having one all-encompassing state. Anarchism would result in a mosaic of states.
Nice satire
sadly I actually do believe this. help me 😭
What if we have zero states?
I’d rather 0 than 51
What’s a tankie? I know what it means but for others that don’t go ahead and drop an egg of knowledge on them.
A supporter of the Soviet Union and its habit of using tanks to suppress uprisings.
I choose to imagine it’s actually because they all wear tanktops
The people have all the power, except when they disagree with their rulers… then its perfectly acceptable to kill and maim them
What if heaven is just whatever you need heaven to be? Like, what if it’s just a temporary state of affairs? You enter Heaven, and it is exactly what you need to be at peace with your death and your life before that. Then, when you’re ready, after however much time you need, you can decide to move on and stop existing, or send your soul to be reincarnated.
Watch The Good Place.
This is similar to what Rick Riordan (author of Percy Jackson) suggests in one of his other works - that the afterlife is simply whatever you believe it to be. It’s pretty comforting imo.
Personally I wouldn’t like it to be what you believe it to be, rather what you need it to be. Some people don’t know what they need until they have it. You can believe that Heaven is endless sitting in a circle and piling devotion upon God, but if that isn’t actually going to help you be at peace, then what good is it gonna do you? How is a baby going to form a belief of what their afterlife is?
No, I reckon Heaven ought to be what you need, not what you want. I want my afterlife to be me being a series of Isekai protagonists in my favourite fictional universes because I secretly want to feel clever and powerful and knowledgeable about things to come, but indulging me probably isn’t the best way to put me at peace.
The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight.
Seems to be the approach of MCU as well 🤔
Religion is like a shoe. Yours won’t fit me and mine won’t fit you. So let’s just let each other walk.our own ways without trying to push us along our paths
Replace “Religion” with “Truth” and you’ll see why this doesn’t work.
With our concept making apparatus called “mind” we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled “reality” and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see “reality” differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle. Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
Religion is a tool to manipulate people according own will based on stories that happened similar in real world. Similar, meaning, the religion master picked stories that helped them explain why people have to behave like he says and maybe added som flavour here and there.
Please, people, can we just stop falling for it?
And what do you think the Buddha’s big master plan was, what with telling people to seek enlightenment?
And you think the BBS accurately represents the teachings of the Buddha, and the whole of Buddhism? I asked about the Buddha’s master plan, you’re trying to answer my question with this BBS article?
Well, one can use religion manipulation for things that are not evil as well.
Doesn’t makes it any better in my eyes, as think it is disrespectful, telling people fictional enhanced stories to manipulate. I prefer the scientific way of thinking and explaining. People understand way more than you think, if you just try to explain it in logical steps that they can follow.So you think Aesop’s Fables are bad?
Heaven is described as being populated by perfected people, not by their own doing… The world we live in is populated by selfish people primarily. Hell even toddlers are selfish. It’s a redefinition of human nature. Whether or not it’s a fantasy, it would actually make it work flawlessly.
Cooperation and sharing are just as much “human nature” as selfishness. We contain lots of “natural” impulses, but people will prioritize and grow into those impulses which society most rewards.
Yea, and pure capitalism rewards assholes the most…
I know that’s not your point, I just want to point out that toddlers aren’t selfish as much as they just haven’t developed empathy yet, as a sense of empathy usually only develops after the 4th birthday. The golden rule just doesn’t work for toddlers, they can’t put themselves in someone else’s shoes and imagine how they feel. There’s a riddle/test with a doll and a closet that illustrates this well.
This actually makes sense, once you understand what their problem is with communism.
You see, they have no problem with all the benefits that communism offers… What bothers them is the idea that those benefits would be given to people who haven’t earned it.
Heaven, to them, is a reward. Only the pure, the righteous, the faithful get to enjoy its benefits. Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
A heaven for everyone, with no walls, no gates, no pitiful outcasts scrabbling to get in… That’s no heaven at all.
No, the issue most people have with it is that it requires a king (god) to make it work. People don’t mind a higher being (god) ruling them as an absolute monarch. They do mind handing such power to a human, since we have seen again and again how such power corrupts people.
Right wing politics can be summed up as: Exclusive & Sadism
You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
When I grew up religious, the conversion was that communism was a bastardization of god’s plan, so it’s inherently evil. Basically, it cannot be as pure and perfect with men in charge so it will fail every time.
You’d think they’d want to try and be more like their god and his plan for their heaven but they just reject it.
You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
It’s also heretic AF. As in: It directly contradicts Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran, doctrine, all for different reasons.
Remove the heretics from Christianity, and you will have not a religion of billions of oppressors, but a cult of a few dozen communist hippies.
They believe that only God can be the one to create paradise on earth. A primary pillar of their faith requires earth to be in a constant state of suffering until then.
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Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
See, this is the part I can’t get behind. An eternity of that disparity with even the smallest scrap of empathy would eventually be unending torment. Every day is just more “oh yeah, hell is a thing and I can’t do anything about it…”
Fr, I knew for fact that there was something deeply fucked up about “The Good Place” in the TV show bearing the same name when Janet played Eleanor a short clip of sound from the Bad Place.
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If working all your life for a regime does not earn you the benefits of that regime, I don’t know what will in their minds
They should know better:
Interesting read. Thank you.
Just so everyone knows, the word you should be using is socialism. Communism is what you call it when socialist pick up guns and other weapons and take over by force using violence. Socialism = good, communism = bad.
Can we all agree that no matter how bad this gets, we shouldn’t stoop to their level?
Nope, that’s not what communists mean, when communists talk about communism. What you describe is the dictatorship of the proletariat, not communism aka the time when all means of production are owned communally, everyone enjoys working according to their ability and lovingly shares all goods according to their needs.
Of course, if you use the term “communism” to refer to the political movement that tries to achieve communism through revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, you’re 100 % right.
No.
Communism was tried, and it failed.
It’s also not stateless. Quite the opposite in fact.
Then it wasn’t tried
Marxist communism hasn’t been tried. Leninism is also called communism, and it’s been tried. It’s supposed to be a two part system where you establish dictatorship to create the classless, stateless, moneyless system… They just never seem to reach the second part once they setup the dictator. 🤷🏻♂️
I think at this point we need to accept that the only communism we’ve seen in practice, is communism.
Capitalism failed and continues to fail every day. When do we get to try something else?
Actually, I’d say the issue isn’t so much communism or capitalism as the problem is humans in general. They are greedy and selfish. That’s why both fail. Same with socialism, etc.
It has been 2025 years since the death of Christ, and we still do not have a functional economic system!
No matter what angle you look at it from, it’s insanity.
I asked one “so when do I actually die?” and they couldn’t comprehend that I didn’t want to exist forever
I suppose that whatever heaven does to you, you would want to exist forever…for whatever reason.
If there is heaven and there are people there, it’s already a problem for me. No need to add other things.
Sound like you need a Medium Place all by yourself.
When I was fairly young my mom described Christian heaven. I remember struggling with the idea of not struggling and being happy all the time. Then she hit me with if someone you love doesn’t make it to heaven you forget them. That’s when the fracture began for me.
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Its not that you forget the person. You gain a perfect understanding of the situation. Like when your child has to go to jail for some crimes they committed. You may be sad they went to jail, then understand why they went to jail, then agree it was right that they were put in jail.
Not a perfect analogy, but something like that.
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be religious if I have a conscience
What’s the point of religion if you’re already capable of deciding what’s right and wrong?
So we join with the God-mind in order to understand why the person we previously loved isn’t worthy of love after all…
Not what I said.
But at the end of my lifetime, it’s someone I loved, but that God doesn’t love (not enough to bring them to heaven, anyway…), and so my feelings about them get updated with God’s perspective?
So I learn why I was wrong to love them?
Edit: I’m just saying that Hell as a concept, alongside an all-loving God, doesn’t compute, to me.
Whereas Hell as a concept, introduced by human church leaders, to keep tithes up, makes perfect sense, to me.
So it feels like an Occam’s Razor situation, to me.
This isn’t preaching, I’m just going to explain it so maybe you can understand it better.
As far as God only bringing people to heaven if He loves them, there’s more to it. If God created everything (humans, animals, earth, stars, etc.) then He has authority over it. He has laws we are to follow, and if we break any of them then we are guilty of sin. Just like in human society, when someone breaks a law, they get punished either by paying a fine, going to jail, etc. Hell is jail; everyone has committed a sin against God, and deserves to go there. The bible without much detail, tells us there are varying degrees of punishment in hell.
In response to your edit, think of God as a judge. If a human judge has a child trafficker in his court, and the judge just lets him go free, would he be considered a good, just judge? No, we’d say he is a corrupt judge. Apply that concept to God, crimes must have a punishment. If God just brought people to heaven, then God wouldn’t be just. So you’re saying a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell. Well, God is loving, and had His son Jesus who never sinned crucified (willingly), paying for the punishment of the sins of anyone who puts their faith in Him as Lord. So, because God is loving, it’s very easy to avoid going to Hell. Which is why it’s also very easy to go to hell, we already deserve to go, so if we reject His offer of forgiveness, that’s on us.
Purgatory, I would say was an invention of church leaders since it’s not in the bible. They used the threat of purgatory to get people to pay for indulgences.
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Severance
Basically heaven is a mindfuck.
It really is. It’s not even a pleasant thought experiment.
It’s only “communism” if the equality goes to individuals outside of your group. If your group gets the benefits, well, that’s because you’re awesome and you deserve it; but fuck those other guys.
I was going to upvote but you were right at 666 so I couldn’t bring myself to
