Do you believe in God?

Well, first thing is to not conflate different religions. They often have enough divergences in moral code that I think it's unhelpful to talk about the religious as a whole.

Thankfully, Christianity has your point baked into it; we're all, in some way, broken. We do evil, often when we don't even want to do evil. It's some great flaw in our deepest being. That's the exact problem that Christianity is attempting to address.

How do you reconcile this idea with martyrs?

Survival impulses are not only manifest in personal survival outcomes.

People fight in wars and sacrifice themselves to protect the survival of their tribe or their family. That's innate in some people.

We do right and we do wrong, we do good and we do bad, we do moral and we do immoral. There is no supernatural realm magically automatically invoked to "correct" this natural condition. In fact, it is in humanity in which the greatest expressions of morality are manifest, and in which express moral codes are EVER followed. In this sense human beings are evolving further out of an amoral state. So it wouldn't make much sense for them to have it perfect, now would it? And stories about gardens and apples are just-so stories along the lines of mythology.

So we see someone do something wrong, and we think: "Wow. We need a supernatural savior for that!" No,we just do some right and some wrong. The supernatural thing is borne of a magic believing time. The fact that we do both does NOT create a supernatural thing where everything is perfect, any more than when we do some math problems right and some wrong, there is automatically a supernatural math being that is perfect and will save us from it.

Jung ~: "As best as we can discern, the role of man is of kindling a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." Humanity is the apex of devising its own meaning and morality within the natural world. And because it is far from perfect, that hardly conjures a realm of supernatural perfection hiding from us. Unless such magic reigns in one's culture or thinking.

Simple reminder that everything Jesus claimed is true.

Your thoughts, which you don’t even know from where they emerge, and which you blindly believe, are not more true than the thoughts of the Son of Man.

Unremarkable people think they can directly advise against the claims of the spirit of truth. Amusing.

Yes, keep quoting Jung against the Son of Man himself you fool. Even Jung would tell you he is inferior to Jesus.

1. Christ as the perfect man
“Christ is the perfect man who is the goal of the whole process of individuation.”
— C.G. Jung, Aion (CW 9ii), § 79

2. Christ as the most complete historical symbol of the Self

“Christ exemplifies the archetype of the Self. He represents the most complete realization of the Self in history.”
— C.G. Jung, Aion (CW 9ii), § 71–72 (paraphrased in many places, but the core statement is clear throughout the entire book)

3. No one else has achieved this degree of integration

“In the history of symbols, Christ is the most complete and perfect embodiment of the Self that we know.”
— C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12), § 23

Did Jung attain the fullness of self actualization or did Jesus? Which one?

Yeah, he's inferior to the archetype of the perfect man/Jesus. Key word: archetype. Key point: symbolic.

Is some great lumberjack inferior to Paul Bunyan? I mean Bunyan created the Grand Canyon (says the legend).

Just-so legends are not quite perfection in reality; they are stories about what perfection might look like.

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Imagine corrupting your soul to the point where your mission in life is to be anti Christ.

Imagine this is your life.

Smh

Imagine the love you are exhibiting in your Christ-like state. Pure clueless hypocrisy.

I know he does. All the pre-medieval official doctrine ideas of perfection are bullshyt. For instance: murdering people for forgiveness is not perfect.

Will you please just tell us how god gives you all this knowledge? Because it surely isn't just that, "Well, I presume that my thoughts are god's thoughts. How could it not be true?"

No I don't claim to know where thoughts or anything else originates. You are the one lying and saying you do, and not only that but are certain of it. Must be that special pipeline to god almighty you have that you don't seem to be able to explain, describe, account for, verify, justify ... have any explanation for at all. And it is that reality that makes you a card carrying member of the "true believer syndrome." And it doesn't matter what the belief system is when one is operating this way: it's just obviously "true" to them.

As an atheist I won’t blame God for humanity’s shortcomings. However, if a God actually existed why is it too much to ask that He alleviate the suffering of innocent victims of those shortcomings? Presumably it wouldn’t have been too tough for an omnipotent God to give Jeffrey Epstein a massive fatal heart attack BEFORE he started doing the things he did on his island. It shouldn’t have been too tough to just allow a certain corporal in the Austrian army during WWI to die of the injuries he suffered rather than survive to kill over six million people as leader of Germany a few decades later. Why did innocent underage girls and innocent Jews (to give just two examples) have to suffer due to human shortcomings? If there is no God the answer is obvious, but if there is one, isn’t there some explaining to do?

I get where you're coming from. But there's a lot of explaining that can be done.

If God personally intervened to prevent all the evil in the world:
1. It would make it impossible for humans to freely choose morally correct/virtuous actions; by extension, it would make it impossible for humans to be morally virtuous.
2. It would strip humans of the free will He wants us to have - in God's eyes, our free will should be inviolable. We would become very unhappy if we were unable to choose freely.

So I can freely choose to beat the **** out of a godbothering child rapist? Not your best post, Chuck! Just kidding, all your posts suck ass.

Or you just take the god out of it -- along with a lot of other 1st Century magic notions -- and say: "Man does right and man does wrong, man does good and man does bad ... and we don't need any demons, ghosts, or supernatural beings to account for that."

I get the argument, but where it loses me is in the extremes. If God had allowed (or caused) Hitler to die from the wounds he suffered during WW I, it would have escaped the notice of literally everyone in the world other than perhaps his family. He would have just been one more out of hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers from that war. Why is Hitler’s free will that much more valuable than that of any of those hundreds of thousands of other soldiers who did in fact die in the war? Did they not lose their free will when they got killed? If free will is that highly valued, why did God let them die and save Hitler?

Even if God doesn’t intervene to stop ALL evil, why can’t He at least do something about the most egregious evildoers? Why should six million innocent people have to die and many more suffer torture and starvation in concentration camps all to protect the free will of ONE human, and a particularly evil one at that?

So much of this seems stuck in the personal god for the human race idea. If there is a god, whatever it is, it has created trillions of galaxies. Human ideas, and primitive ones at that, making "him" in the image of their caretaker just prove that humans are making it up.

2 mass shootings in a day in 2 countries.

God: "Oh well, what a tragedy, wonder what an ominpotent being could have done about this......"

But I guess it's about freedom of choice or some other bs.

God is sovereign and therefore must face Justice for this. Do you agree?

Or is it…

Atheist: “I’m going to punish God by not believing in him.”

God: “Lol. You think that was your idea?”

Religion can include a fine system of teaching. It often contains much that is wise, beautiful, poetic, helpful, good. Leave it there -- instead of buying superstitious/supernatural myths whole cloth -- and it can be a valuable part of a culture. Give unto religion what is religion's, and unto metaphysics what is metaphysics.

No.
I'm Catholic.

A Religious Story

Charles Sennett was a man of god, a pastor, you know one of those with the holy calling. After a lifetime of fraud he hired hit men to kill his wife. They bludgeoned and stabbed her brutally, which she briefly survived, much to the chagrin of the good pastor. He feinted upon hearing this news, then later killed himself.

Two of the hit men were condemned, and another died in prison some 30 years later. Don't worry, the condemned ones found Jesus in prison before their execution. And they lived happily ever after in heaven, along with the good pastor presuming, of course, he was savvy enough to ask for forgiveness for his misdeeds. Amen.