Thanks to Fallen London, I find myself in a situation where I'm casually attempting to justify, to my friends, the act of selling one's soul to devils. They're very nice devils. There's a treaty.
It seems to operate on Supernatural logic, where the soul is basically a conscience... and holds memories, while the brain also holds memories. So when a soul is returned (in Supernatural and presumably in Fallen London) you essentially re-enter your body and remember everything it did in your absence.
Inevitable edit: Specifically, I'm justifying the Sunless Sea option to simply offer your soul to a lonely deviless in exile. She only wants company (at least, that's what she says). She promises that when "you" drown, you'll actually stay with her in pleasant company. There's an implication that she would set you free and replace you if/when said company became tiresome, but she's a devil. In exile. It's not even a promise.
But maybe that form of immortality would be preferable to the unknown, at least for a while? The main danger would be boredom, a problem she is equally eager to confront day-by-day.
One of my theories of souls(I speculate about most things...) is that your "real" self is the mind and body and that the soul is basically a safety-net that wraps around the person and absorbs various life-experiences, such as thoughts, memories, behaviours, interactions with others... and when you die the soul moves on with al this accumulated familiarity with your person and represents you as a sort of legacy. This, is, of course, pretty much the opposite of the concept that you are using but it is fun to speculate. If you lost it then it would be less developed than if it had stuck around until your kicked the bucket. Selling it would put your legacy under someone else's control, whether that means harvesting it for information, conscripting it into an army, using it as clothing... is no longer something that would go according to your wishes. Of course the really fun thing would be to absorb it and use it as glue to stop your mortal self from dispersing. This makes for a fun theory of immortality with the downside of making your otherwise-immaterial soul vulnerable to mortal interaction, but I for one would would welcome the chance at personal immortality at the cost of the certainty of a perpetual representation for my self that no longer exists... And if people's souls really do persist as their full, living self then why are they not constantly messing with us. I really don't see that the median soul would fail to desire to return and meddle in mortal affairs, and if they have any agency at all then surely the massive bulk of souls would be able to petition for a measurable effect on their old haunts...
But to address your problem, if your soul is your real self, and it is on an island, then the person who continues their adventure is not you. If you are happy to live on the island, then you should be willing to quit the game when you make the deal, otherwise it seems that your character is not ready to retire to a life on some remote island while their double goes off to do all the fun stuff. To be fair, there is no reason not to satisfy idle curiosity, and if your double can set some of your affairs in order then that is all the better. So you do not need to quit the game, but you should be at a point where such is acceptable, otherwise you would be dishonest with your character's wishes...
I do believe that it is possible to worry too much, and eventally stare oneself blind, as it were, on scripture and which one is precisely the right one. There are many paths to God (in whichever form it may be). Further, scripture is made and written by men. It is an aid, but cannot be followed to the letter, even though that would be a comfortable way to handle matters. Be it religious congragations trying and wanting to live by the very letter of unapplicable ancient Old Testament law, or people who are against scripture but would still like the people appointed as opponents to stick perfectly to it to keep their conflicts all pleasantly absolute and black and white, it is not a good choice.
Then, there is the matter of who to follow. Many claim that there is (or should be, for tidiness' sake) only one true choice. I disagree. I am quids in on Christ, myself. That is mostly because that I was I was born in and raised with. It is familiar, and I like it because it is mine, so to speak. If I were born elsewhere, I would likely be the same dabbling follower of the faith given to me. What matters is that I try to become, and be, a good and decent chap, and I would like to think that would be true no matter which particular path of ink I was invited to follow. Christ is one way of many. It is not a particularly difficult thing.
The matter of our maker and our being is not one of picking and comparing holiday destinations in adverts and leaflets. Aspire to be a good person, and to die on good terms with your life. That is what matters, and you need not worry about having chosen the "wrong" package tour. Unless it is a path of cruelty or spite that hampers you from doing good to your fellow men, the particulars of it will not matter. Indeed, not choosing a particular path of faith, in a religious context, is a valid choice. You do not, strictly speaking, need scripture or ritual to be a good person, and to honour your maker. I doubt it matters if you even believe that your maker is real, it matters so little next to the reality of how you live and who you are. Try to do good, try to be good, and live the best life that you can. It will all be well.
1: There are too many paths to god. Cannibalism, murder, mutilation of children, torture, these have all been religious practises that people have been born into a culture of and they do not seem compatible with your good. Just look at what happens in the old testament when people get in the way of divine edict. I have heard that some of the most revered examples of a virtuous life involved arbitrary conquest and massive abuses of civilians(my contemporary sensibility want to use the term "heretically malevolent"...). Religion's problem in this respect is that it has nothing to do with being goodly, all it cares about is being godly. There are some forces compelling godly to be goodly, an openly malevolent church tends not to do well, but godly remains very arbitrary from a mortal perspective. Ultimately, either you understand god, in which case you should only support it if it supports your own sense of morality, or you do not, in which case you should support your own sense of morality in case this god that you don't understand is not actually something whose goals are tolerable to you. So from my perspective, religion is irrelevant to virtue, there is no point associating the two.
2: But christ is not a path to goodness. Treating others as I wish to be treated would earn me nothing but hostility as I appear to be too alien to my would-be peers for such a philosophy to work. Turning the other cheek does not resolve the inherent hostility within society. Sharing a single loaf and fish with a thousand results in a thousand hungry people, doing so is just wasting the limited resources, perhaps it could have been used to gain an audience with an employer who would feed a thousand in exchange for services? A few days of torture is not pleasant, but it is well worth it in exchange for a certain reward of infinite value. Certainly it is a means of spreading your message when there are few alternatives, but too much faith in your ideal blinds you to its flaws and prevents it from being improved. Jesus constantly endorsed faith, "believe in yourself and you can do anything!"... Faith cannot compete morally with understanding and faith is, by definition, ignorant... If you wish to help someone, understand their circumstances lest you harm or insult them. If you encounter conflict, seek to understand the causes and spread knowledge of them. If your situation is desperate, seek a path that ends the desperation and seek to know yourself so that you do not succumb to panic. If you believe that your message must be shared, then share it as best you know, and be mindful, as you learn more, that your message continues to seem worthy.
Fundamentally there is a terrible flaw in the Jesus narrative. Jesus was not human, Jesus had certainty of the divine, Jesus had faith in a god that was personally known, that is not the human condition in which religious matters are inherently mysterious. It is like knowingly gambling on a rigged match and saying that your victims should have had better judgement. Jesus cannot serve as a guide or example any more than god can.
3: As I already addressed, The Maker is irrelevant. It is, as an absolute truth, the product of what practically amounts to random chance. Every tiny little facet of reality is also a product of this same entity. This entity does not possess a will or desire or plan nor anything else that would be associated with a god that can be worshipped in any meaningful way. Also, everything is certain, not necessarily predictable, but the idea of "a new world comes into being every time a decision/random-event occurs" is objectively invalid as there is only ever one possible outcome to any scenario(although there just randomly being a whole lot of worlds that are just minor variations of one another is entirely plausible, it is just the cause that isn't viable). This all makes it pretty clear that The Maker is not as responsible for our natures as random inevitability is and it is itself subject to that same master. Given that there is something both higher in status and closer in presence it is obvious that The Maker, while possibly being worthy of respect for other things, is not a big deal simple for being one of the step involved in our making...
On a similar note, I often hear about free will as a gift. Between peer-pressure, chemical contamination, brain-damage, insanity, hormones, sleep, oppressive environs, addictions, physiological needs, panic, advertising with horrific amounts of money and expertise supporting it, patriotism and other born affiliations, various "instincts"... I find myself compelled to seek a refund...
I believe that religion obscures the path to being a good person. It provides an arbitrary path to goodness. Religions almost always focus upon the state to attain at death, to be without unresolved sin, to attain enlightenment, to possess positive karma... I see these as harmful because thy are unsubstantiated and could be misleading. My religion feels that any possible afterlife is a mystery, and all that we can do to prepare is to strengthen our self-identity so that what little we retain will be most prepared for a completely alien experience. Other religions will tell you to rely upon another party, or to seek alignment to a concept, or to bind your self-identity to the well-being of others, and all of these seem harmful to my perception. I have heard many stories of christians causing harm in their efforts to aid others. I preach that if wisdom does not guide one to goodness, then one requires more wisdom, and that goodness without wisdom is too inept to consistently achieve goodness.
... Does paetheist work? To aggressively seek religion by confronting all comers and hoping that some form of
established doctrine can withstand your assault.
Humbug. Religion in general is intellectually dishonest, we still let them carry on with it.
I note that human sacrifice has declines significantly in recent history... So long as religions lay no claim to morality or authority I see little harm in them, a bit of fantasy can do a lot for morale. But once they start saying that they need to mutilate children or slaughter animals or regulate laws in some specific way and back up their claims with "because that's what god wants" and god refuses to defend these claims then I will persist in believing that religions are hostile to civility. And let's not even get started on how easy it is to use religion to gather support for outright villainy...
Most philosophy which believes in truth believes itself to be true, by it's nature (if it didn't, people wouldn't hold the philosophy).
I mean, like, look at, say, absurdism, solipsism, epicureanism, nihilism, empiricism, rationality (in terms of the philosophy), egoism, platonic forms...these are all (mostly) separate philosophies, and I'm not sure how much you can say that they're based on solid reasoning and science whereas religion is all hocus pocus bollox that no one of any intellectual integrity would believe. Religion is a way of explaining and viewing the world, which originated as an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Which is why I'm guessing you think of it as intellectually dishonest; we now have science which does that, for much of the things religion previously did. And yet, religion is still a way to find meaning in the world, much like philosophy is a way of finding meaning (or a lack thereof) in the world.
Theology and philosophy are on the same level of scientific merit; it's difficult if not impossible to find a way to bridge the is/ought barrier, after all.
Is:
It is perceived that we act.
Action, even the lack of such, has consequence.
Consequence creates agency.
The self desires the self.
Ought:
The self should have/seek control.(more of an intellectual+self control really, but I am trying to keep this brief...)
...
Cooperate, endure, preserve variety, and seek wisdom!
Philosophy is exploration, religion is explanation. Philosophy is honest about its origins and generally open to modification through established methodology, and people typically won't burn you at the stake for obstinately insisting that your version is better than theirs... Religion generally resists analysis and criticism because its origins are inaccessible and it is very sensitive about threats(Especially the monotheisms, polytheisms seem to be more inclined towards religious tolerance...). Religion is fundamentally flawed because it relies too much on faith. Most everyone knows that faith needs some form of consistent observation to support it. You don't blindly trust the used-car salesman, or the Nigerian prince, or the candy-donating windowless panel-van. Intellectually you know that, in theory, their could be completely legitimate, but you appreciate that no matter how trustworthy and virtuous they seem when they speak to you, you really ought to investigate their claims through alternate sources. Rationalisation is not required to find flaw in faith, people already have faith that pure faith alone is insufficient to make important decisions well. People just arbitrarily give religion a free pass because surely no god would publish a big-old load of public relations fluff and there is certainly no reason that your friends and family would blindly adhere to the doctrine that they already devoted their entire lives to back when they were in your situation and whose absence would invalidate their- well, aspects of nearly every facet of their existence from lost opportunities to lost friends to enduring difficult relationships and, well, way too much to summarise...
Religion is dishonest because it expects more faith from less presence. Give my claims as much faith as God's. We are both mysterious texts from beyond your experience that may or may not be watching you.
Science is not a thing like that. It is just a methodology, and to a lesser extent the product of that methodology. Science has no truth aside from "this seems reliable". But Science is so good that some parts of it are known to be false but they are still in use because they work well enough for most purposes. Fundamentally, religion makes claims that it cannot support, science doesn't really make claims. Comparing the two is kind of silly. Philosophy to me is a game, its virtue is that you don't need to devote yourself to it any more than you agree with its reasoning, religion doesn't really give you any reasoning at all and insufficient devotion can be difficult when confronted with peer pressure, or lynch mobs...
While I am unsure precisely where the tithe goes (on the admittadly rare occasions I attend), I believe it goes for maintenance and charity work
I am uncomfortable with charity work associated with religion. I do not really see a difference between a religion's name on a charity and a company's name at a sports event. I regard public acts of a religion as comparable to actually using a company product in full display of the audience. It may seem like a small and natural thing for a minister to oversee an orphanage, and to say grace at every meal, and to hold communal means, but the potential to influence the religious views of the orphans should not be discounted... I would regard it as innocent on behalf of the minister, they are just living by their own tenets, but the close association has an effect regardless.
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