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Comment by tnecniv | Hacker News Reader

Actually religions, or at least the ones I know about in some detail, don’t model that much. For example, Christianity doesn’t really model the afterlife beyond being Heaven being in the presence of the Lord. I think Eastern religions are similar in that you reach enlightenment after many lifetimes and ascend to rejoin some greater plane / consciousness instead of being reborn again.

Catholicism even celebrates various “mysteries,” which are things like the trinity which they do not think can be understood fully by mortals.

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I agree, but a vague abstract model is still a model. the model is a model for what happen while you're alive, why you are alive, and what happen after you're alive.

this vagueness is a feature of surviving religions the more details you add the more your predictions become falsifiable. this leave room to theologians to speculate and when they are wrong it's not the religions that false it's the person who made that specific inference and when it's right, well it was already written.

this is not an /r/atheism checkmate post just pointing out the evolutionary dynamics, since even if there was a religion that described things in great details and all of it were true the people at its inception would just violently reject it without expanding efforts to verify the claims, since they don't have the means.

for example image you go thousand(s) years in the past and preach the standard model (lets ignore all the pesky details about how you'll probably die or become a slave regardless of ethnicity since you have no social backing in the era).

>Actually religions, or at least the ones I know about in some detail, don’t model that much. For example, Christianity doesn’t really model the afterlife beyond being Heaven being in the presence of the Lord.

Gates, perfection, eternal peace and happiness, etc. but the catch-all for modeling reality or beyond reality in most religions tends to be that the supreme deity fixes or resolves any inconsistency or unknown. So, the afterlife is whatever your supreme deity decides and makes it, you just don’t know about it. It’s modeled (which is partly why it’s so successful) it’s just that you may not know the details explicitly, a sort of black box model you don’t get to peek inside of.

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