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SLAYER's KERRY KING: 'I Don't Believe In God Or The Devil; I'm An Atheist'
In a new interview with Germany's Moshpit Passion, SLAYER guitarist Kerry King spoke about the increased prevalence of lyrics about religion and occult themes in heavy metal today compared to how it was when the band first started out more than 40 years ago. He said...
#Cholon was the 1st #ChineseSettlement established in #Vietnam in 2nd half of 17th century, after the fall of the #MingDynasty in #China, by the people who remained loyal to the fallen emperor and exiled to Vietnam.
Then, later during the 18th century, a 2nd wave of #Chinese immigration arrived to Cholon, as a consequence of the demographic pressure in China.
*My patriarch ancestors fled from China in 18th century & starting rebuilding life in Saigon. This thread is about where we lived.
I spent a lot of time reading this weekend, and it got me thinking about epistemology, knowledge acquisition, mental models, and belief systems.
We constantly encounter, evaluate, and integrate new information into our mental models, whether consciously or subconsciously, but we don’t always take the time to re-examine our deeply- and long-held beliefs in the context of that new information.
Imagine how far into the #DunningKruger effect you'd have to be to go on television as a non-#lawyer, and release statements asserting that a career #judge got a legal decision wrong. This is the cancer that permeates the #GOP. They dismiss any inconvenient #fact, and reject the assessment of any #expert that doesn't support their preconceived #beliefs, and then they posit themselves as the actual experts with all the real knowledge.
#Religious freedom for #Christians means they have the freedom to impose their #beliefs on the rest of us, and leverage the power of government to ensure that their #religion is the only religion in public life. In this case, a misguided #Christian#student wrongly described #meditation as a religion, and sued to have it banned from her public #school. This is the ultimate intersection of #ignorance and #entitlement, and it's par for the course for uninformed Christians.
#Christofascist#MikeJohnson doesn't seem to grasp the fact that there's a difference between being a #Christian, and injecting your Christian #beliefs into #government as an #elected official. He's completely free to identify as a Christian, have Christian beliefs, and live his live according to his Christian #ideals. What he's not free to do is #legislate from the #pulpit, and impose his #religious beliefs on the nation through his status as an elected official.
It Stops Here: Standing Up for Our Lands, Our Waters, and Our People chronicles the author’s experience in leading the Tsleil-Waututh Nation opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in British Columbia.
But the story is much more than just about a pipeline. It’s about ancestral connection to the lands and waters and a West Coast people’s legal and spiritual systems.
In this week's blog post, Aliosha Barranco Lopez argues that foundational hinge commitments, which give meaning to and underlie a great many of our #beliefs, are #arational beliefs. @philosophy
First, the #categorization of #political views along a single left-right #axis is almost #useless. This has long been known, and alternatives exist that present a much more accurate picture, but the traditional #media is #addicted to "#left this" and "#right that" and is lazy, so they'll probably never get better.
If you are #skeptical that these sorts of large-scale, centrally-planned #interventions can solve social problems that have existed in #human#societies for hundreds or thousands of years, then you fall towards the bottom end of the #rationalism axis.
If you think about your #beliefs in these two areas, you might find yourself #surprised at where you fit on the chart, and what other belief systems fall near you. It's a lot more #insightful than the #meaningless left-right single axis.
Even more interestingly, think about #friends and #family that you think you mostly share your #political#views with. See where you #disagree with them, and how that might represent differences on these two axes, and where your guesses about their values would put them on the chart.
You might find that people you thought believed "mostly like me" are quite close on one axis, but far apart on the other.
It certainly seems as though these moral #crusaders want to expunge these #books from #libraries not because they are #pornographic in nature, but because these books threaten some of their fundamental #beliefs, such as the belief that #white, #cisgender, #JudeoChristian lives are somehow more important, and more central to the #American experience, than other lives.
A text published in 2014, but still very useful today to understand socio-political dynamics and especially the rejection of ideas that contradict our beliefs:
"How politics makes us stupid" by Ezra Klein
"Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love".
There is only one thing society has to fight for
So many people attack and insult each other for their political and other beliefs....
How accurate is Zeitgeist? (the religion part)
There's an entire section about religions being an amalgamation of thousand year old beliefs....