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You may think that we believers are all that way, but we aren’t. As a Discordian, I believe that everyone else’s religious myths are true. Even the false bits a
by labster 6y ago
You may think that we believers are all that way, but we aren’t. As a Discordian, I believe that everyone else’s religious myths are true. Even the false bits are true in a dialectic sense. Such is life here in Plato’s Cave.
Stories are also deep magick for Discordians. They are perhaps the only tool we can use to get someone to change their mind about something important. It is only when, at long last, the fiction weaves its spell to transplant your sense of identity elsewhom that you feel true sympathy.
- ajkjk 6y agoAre you... serious? I am really not sure how to ask this question without it sounding offensive. I am not sure, and wikipedia suggests that Discordianism is a parody of a religion.
- esperent 6y agoI think you're over simplifying the wiki article: > According to self-proclaimed "crackpot historian" Adam Gorightly, Discordianism was founded as a parody religion. Many outside observers still regard Discordianism as a parody religion, although some of its adherents use it as a legitimate religion or as a metaphor for a governing philosophy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism Although I doubt many people consider it a religion, it's certainly an interesting philosophical view and makes as much (or as little) sense as many other schools of philosophy or theology.
- WJW 6y agoI have heard Discordianism described as "a religion for people who think ALL religions are parodies" and that seems largely accurate. The internal contradictions are an essential part of it.
- tootie 6y agoScientology was a work of fiction until it wasn't. Same way every parody subreddit devolves into deep sincerity with every new subscriber.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoI think the most likely situation is that everyone's religious myths are false. But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true, and the least likely is that one is true and the rest are false. I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.
- jrochkind1 6y ago> But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true... I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before. You have to expand your understanding of "truth" when it comes to religious myths to make that work, because of course some contradict on their face. But yeah, I have seen it advocated in several ways. From the sort of liberal platitude "all religions are just different paths to the same underlying diety", to a certain kind of neo-pagan constructivist "We make religions true by believing in them." I lean toward the latter.
- labster 6y agoCertainly, more people have advocated for the first position than I have. You’ve heard the allegory of blind men in a dark room trying to describe an elephant to each other, right? Each one holds a different part of the animal. The person holding a leg thinks it’s a tree, the one holding the tail thinks it’s furry, and so on. They can all be right while calling each other wrong.
- injidup 6y agoWhat definition of "right" are you using? Words have meaning. It sounds cool to say everything can be true but it's rubbish. The man who thinks the elephant leg is a tree is wrong. Is this so difficult to understand?
- labster 6y ago"Right" in this case means that the evidence each man has gathered is all correct, even if it appears to contradict the stories that others are telling. The conclusions are wrong, but their mode of interacting with the elephant is consistent. The whole idea of divinity is that it is beyond us. Many cultures say they have knowledge of the divine, but each culture interacts with it differently. And if the thing they are interacting is really some 11-dimensional being, why not both? So you can conclude that it's a bunch of shared delusions, because it appears to be uncorrelated. But what if it's not? Sometimes, it does seem correlated. Here is where the leap of faith is. (It's always hidden in there somewhere.) What if, instead, they're describing different aspects of the same font of divinity?
- injidup 6y agoHang on. Everything is true even contradictory things "in a dalectic sense" but then you embrace tools to get somebody to change their mind. So you get people to change their mind from one true thing to another true thing. This is just word mush. Let's just call everything a strawberry.
- whatshisface 6y agoThe thing about religion is that calling everything a strawberry could be one.