Yeah I'm pretty sure the giant Buddha statue that the Taliban blew up in Afghanistan several years ago was Greek work.

There are also plenty of accounts from (I think) the Abassid empire where Greeks and Buddhists were both present in Baghdad at the same time. I forget why that ended, maybe because of the Seljuks or the Mongols, can't remember.

And of course, there's an account in the Buddhist canon of a philosophical debate between a buddhist monk (Nagasena) and a Greek king named Menander (Milinda in Pali), which took place in the first or second century BC.

But damn... thinking about a world where Greco-Buddhism became the religion of the West... what could've been, eh?

God that sounds like such a better world.

Austrian Agricultural Nostic?

Except the Bible was at one point the B movie release of more popular films.

God was indeed created in our own image and likeness.

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?

I mean yeah, if we’re being real it’s all just a load of shit to give people something to fear so they have some reason to not rape and steal and murder so much.

It’s insane when you say something so obvious (like that) to someone who has heard the same contradictory story over and over again for 50 years, and you can tell that they've never actually thought about the content of the story.

Maybe if we knock and brought a bottle?

Only if you're invited it seems.

Yea, you never been?…

Gold marquees with stupid band names. I don't wanna go to sunset strip.

I was told it was pineapple on pizza and tbh that seemed completely justified.

Last time Luci and I had a spat we sat wide eyed at a mountain of sins powerful men were excavating, looking for the true name of God. "Fuck," she noted. "Aye," I acknowledged.

The Woman, the Child, and the Dragon

12 Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. 2 Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.

3 And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. 4 His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born. 5 She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and His throne. 6 Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days.

Satan Thrown Out of Heaven

7 And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, 8 but they [a]did not prevail, nor was a place found for [b]them in heaven any longer. 9 So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

10 Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. 11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. 12 Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”

The Woman Persecuted

13 Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child. 14 But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. 15 So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. 16 But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17 And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Does it say that in Revelations 13 somewhere? Because it does not say that in Revelations 12 anywhere.

Love your response. I see people trying to dunk by just focusing on "knowledge" constantly.

Leaving out the extra words and details feels the same to me as a news outlet blowing up a stupid thing a politician says simply by ignoring a few words before and after the quote.

you can’t blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes

maybe you can't, dawg. godsdamned homalodisca vitripennis can suck my numerous buttholes.

I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.

That's not true. Before civilization, diseases were much rarer because people travelled together in small, consistent groups. Anthropological evidence suggests that the average person had better, more well rounded diets as well. Which isn't really surprising, pre-civilization is literally the thing we had millions of years to adapt to.

Civilization brought about much higher rates of disease, and also came along side the introduction of class and slavery, which reduced the quality of life of the average person.

Slavery was not viable in hunter-gatherer societies, because slaves could not be sent out to forage or they'd just leave, and they can't join hunts without being armed. With agriculture, you can sit on the porch with a bow and arrow and make other people do all the backbreaking labor, and with higher, more consistent yields, you can afford to hire an army of dedicated soldiers to go out and capture hunter-gatherer tribes to use as slaves, perpetuating the system.

It wasn't that humanity just collectively decided to do cities instead of tribes, and it wasn't like everyone in cities wanted to be there. But once cities were established, systemic forces caused them to expand and become dominant.

This is what the story of Eden is actually about. Once humanity became aware of agriculture and civilization, we no longer had the ability to remain in the state of nature that we were adapted to, where our brains were evolved to make us happy and satisfied, and faced with problems that our brains aren't designed to handle or cope with.

Nowadays, yes, we have things like medicine and vaccines and basic hygiene, but those things were only developed in the past few hundred years. From the first cities until then, cities were perfect vectors for the disease, tons of people clumped together, just dumping waste on the streets.

Paradise lost is largely pulled from Zoroastrianism influence on Christianity, not the bible. The Bible is largely devoid of depictions of satan or hell, traditionally describing evil as an absence of God. Zoroastrianism's influence on Christianity introduced a lot of the dualistic themes of evil vs good and heaven vs hell that is so prominent in evangelical Christianity that we know today.

How people interpret the Bible for their shitty actions for the past 2000 years makes it a really important book - whether you believe it or not. In that case alone knowing this book better is probably a good thing.

What a fucking psychopath.

Yeah but at the festivals I go, there are Christians handing out flyers saying it's the devil's music. So at least they have good music in hell. And it's nice and warm with loads of nice people.

In heaven are Karens, loads of unvaccinated babies and pedophile priests. I sure have a preference, and it isn't heaven.

No he's in there, pretty much all the way through.

Like all things with the Bible, the OP of this post and most of these comments are fairly inaccurate, as are descriptions painting Satan and/or the various antagonists who may be the same or different characters throughout the bible as beings of pure malevolence- as it depends on certain translations and interpretations of a mystical and obtuse text that has been changed and recontextualized by society over thousands of years.

For example - do you know whether harvest gleaning is morally good or bad without looking it up? What about whether someone who grows figs is considered higher in society or lower than someone who grows grapes? These would be second nature no Brainers to someone in the 1st century Levant.

Yup, in the Bible. But there are loads of contradicting stories. It also states homosexuality is a sin, but also says it's not. And it says you should be stoned to death if you eat pork. And God told a guy to murder his son. There's so much weird shit in there, you can just pick whatever you like and force it down other's throats while neglecting the rest you don't like, like so many terror Christian loonies do. But the Bible changed over the years as it used to be copied by hand by monks and there's the old and new testament. So it's all just sadistic bullshit to be used to scare people into submission.