Image description: Two images. The top image is of a sign for a "Back to the Bible Holiness Church*" that reads "God created man & woman Satan made gays and transgender gen 5:2". The bottoms image is of a women sitting on a porch wearing sunglasses, dark clothes, and smoking. The caption reads "Praise Satan."
I know this is going to be controversial here, but I'm not a fan of religion.
Then to whom do you pray??? HOW DO YOU NOT SIN WITHOUT ANGRY SKY-MAN???
That's not controversial at this point. What's controversial is I'm not exactly Christian but Trump is/was a perfect fit for the description of the Anti-Christ, and I've personally had a semi-lucid dream that apologized for being unable to stop painful life events that would only happen five years later. Anecdotal, sure. You don't have to believe me. Just saying I have to believe my own experiences.
Guys, I mean this in the most scientifically-plausible way I can imagine... I think maybe our own unconscious minds might be railroading our conscious souls according to one great big mythological Batman Gambit. There are way too many coincidences or predictions that came true in too small a timespan for a conscious human to produce, and too much of the content of dreams is symbolic and detailed for it to be just neuron misfiring noises.
I mean, obviously real life isn't a story, but the "Dream Land" trope is as old as Aboriginal settlement of Australia and as recent as that new Lego theme/cartoon (Dreamzzz), as lighthearted as Kirby and as dark as the Backrooms (wait, is their lore really that different?) or Changeling: The Lost, as famous as Nightmare on Elm Street or Inception and as obscure as the Tabletop RPG Dreamscape from a 24-hour creator jam back in 2004. Songs about dreams range for the vaporwave-inspired "Dreamland" by Glass Animals, to "Into the Ocean" by Blue October. In short, I can absolutely see there being some truth to the stories behind Complete Me, and the hub page for the Oneiroi Collective had a point; we hadn't even realised it but dreams got into everything, not that shitty Minecraft streamers and a song about a breakup by Juice WRLD really count.
As for how dreams predict the future... You know how supercomputers predict the weather? Do you think a computer is aware it's simulating a planet's weather? If you uploaded a human mind to a hypothetical brain emulation program on some sort of hyper computer, and also ran a weather simulation program on the same super-advanced computer, would the uploaded mind necessarily be aware of the weather simulation? Yeah, something like that, except replace the weather simulation with a mental Siri/ChatGPT.
I was with you until the second paragraph and onwards
Sorry, I might have "come on too strong"; I came to the conclusions in the third and onward paragraph but I'm not trying to get anyone else to. It does sound a bit crazy when you haven't noticed that dreams seem to play a far more important role even in pop-culture and mythology than we give them credit for. I just think it's likely that as images, ideas and feelings created by our unconscious rather than conscious mind and experienced only by our subconscious, dreams are being drastically underestimated.
Religions are fine, it's large organized religions with a focus on showing off that tend to be used to commit atrocities.
Afaik not much violence has been done in the name of buddha or ganesha, and the satanic temple is an officially recognized religion in the USA at least and they're just objectively good.
Check out the Sri Lankan Civil War before you're so quick to dismiss the idea of Hindu & Buddhist religious violence. The founder of LTTE ("Tamil Tigers") was very explicit that he was inspired by the Bhagavad-Gita to run an organization heavily featuring suicide bombings and violent extortion of Tamil communities in other countries.
Look at Ayodhya, Amritsar, sectarian violence in Gujurat, or all of the Hindutva rhetoric from Modi. Not to mention the entire history of violent enforcement of caste privilege.
Yeah, tbh I wish I knew more about the Indian caste system so I can properly understand how horrible it is. It's like someone who has never lived in a capitalist society, doesn't understand what steam trains are or what mustard gas is, and has only a basic understanding of the Abrahamic religions mostly via American Christianity, trying to explain the Holocaust to themselves beyond "Nazis kill children" and "Hitler was an evil overlord who hated Jews"; It gets the general picture (slave labor, cruel oppression, etc.) but is far too vague to trigger the sadness, anger and desire to never forget or repeat it that should accompany it.
and also never forget that the Catholic church, some of whom were actual nazis, helped war criminals escape to south america. The US also had a hand in that, to counter communist movements.
But yeah, back to how much religions suck. All of them with no exception.
Any good quality they impart is better derived from secular humanism, imo
People overlook it because they're largely ignorant of Eastern religions, and they've somehow embedded themselves in our culture as this kinda harmless alternative/mystical belief system that can solve all problems.
But when I saw Buddhist monks leading rampaging mobs against the Rohingya in Myanmar... let's say the scales fell from my eyes.