Good. Fuck this paedophile fascist and all his fascist buddies.
I wish hell was real so he could rot in it, but I’ll settle for the rest of his life being ruined, his fortunes forfeit, and hopefully some jail time.
I also urge any of the young women he’s abused to come forward. I know that’s very hard, believe me, but this bastard needs to be held to account in every way possible. You will have support.
God is either omnipotent and a dick for making you suffer anyhow, or not omnipotent in which case why would you believe?
I was born with a severe congenital issue that causes me constant pain.
Why would a benevolent god do this to me? It’s sadistic.
So I had a head start in thinking the Christian god is a sadistic bastard. The priests I encountered tried to tell me I was being tested for reasons. How do you explain testing a four year old for your faith? What the fuck did your god want me to learn?
My constant, unrelenting pain was part of what stopped me believing that bullshit. They could never explain my suffering to me, except to say I was chosen by god to endure it, like the saints. I was not a saint, and that was just cruel.
The more I learnt about it all, the more I understood it was all just bullshit. It was just stories made up by those in charge to stop regular people from questioning their rules. When your own story is used by the church to justify the stories of saints, it becomes painfully obvious.
Let’s begin again, and I’ll give you every benefit of the doubt, assuming I’m a complete idiot and that you’re making your point in earnest: what point am I missing?
Honestly, I feel like we’re talking past each other, and I’d rather have an earnest conversation.
Okay, thanks, that gives me a bit more to work with, but I’m still quite confused.
Your original reply to my personal story was:
Maybe secondhand stories are a bad way to understand it.
And I’m confused because mine was a first-hand story.
I get the ‘it’ is ‘god’. I never saw anything strange. My point was my pain was used when I was a toddler by priests to justify the stories of saints, especially their pain and sacrifice. How exactly is that a second-hand story? How is that something that can be dismissed as metaphor? How does that relate to language? It’s a direct, literal and personal experience in the Christian church. Full stop. You don’t have to like it, but it’s a real thing that happened. And no matter how it hurts your feelings, I am not alone.
This is not fan fiction. It’s real. I don’t care if you believe it. I honestly couldn’t care less about your beliefs in general. I’m just sharing my experiences because it helps me to talk about it. Your opinions about me don’t matter to me at all. I’m only engaging with you because I feel bad when people believe the lies told by the church, and I care about other people. If you’re going to be a dick about it and dig in your heels, I’ll stop being interested in talking to you.
I’m sorry you seem to feel that way, and you should probably stop trying to engage atheists until you can open your mind a bit.
A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water....
You’re making your regular commute, a bit annoyed with the sudden traffic backup, and then you’re suddenly falling with no warning, then struggling to not drown in your car.
It’s insane how everything can go from normal to terrifying. I hope those who lived through this have help coping, and am sorry for the victims and their families. It’s so tragic.
This wasn’t just drowning, though. This was drowning after likely sustaining significant impact injuries after hitting the water from many dozens of feet in a vehicle that basically belly-flopped, which is the worst way to impact the water. It’s like hitting concrete from that distance. And then panicking because you’re strapped inside your sinking vehicle.
This was anything but the peaceful drowning scenario you’re referencing that some people have.
Most crime has declined dramatically since the 90s. And yet right wing media is scaring the shit out of people, saying there are murderers, rapists, and terrorists behind every bush.
The world is actually becoming more empathetic and safer, but some people want us to be scared because fear keeps them in power. Don’t believe them.
Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.
Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.
Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).
Get a job programming video codecs. Then you get to feel superior and inferior at the same time. Also eternally frustrated by doing things that help everyone and no one, and that you can never finish. It’s the best of all worlds.
I keep saying this and people say I’m crazy, but whales, elephants, and some other animals for sure have religion (a codified mythos of spirituality passed down through generations). Our experience is not remotely unique.
Recent studies show that birds, whales, and many other animals use consistent grammar and have accents. They’re not just making mindless sounds, they’re communicating with purpose. We’ve documented empathy in several other species. Some other species outperform us in memory and certain cognitive tests.
And many animals have been observed objectively playing and having fun. It’s pretty narcissistic to think we’re that much more advanced than other animals. Just because our culture places great emphasis on our ability to manipulate our environment doesn’t mean those that don’t aren’t as ‘evolved’ as we are. That’s very egotistical, and has led to some of our subcultures oppressing even other humans that lived nomadically or with nature as ‘subhuman’.
Wanting our cheese wrapped in plastic doesn’t make us more highly evolved. We’re just as evolved as everything else alive right now, and of course it’s probable that some other animals appreciate fun. It’s a concept even our newborns understand. It’s ludicrous to assume otherwise, imo.
Some pods of whales will revisit certain coordinates yearly, or on longer timelines that are extremely regular, where there’s no discernible reason (no food, they’re not mating, etc). They hang out for a while, then leave. They don’t do anything special there but vocalise more, and they’ll put off hunting for this social interaction. It’s reminiscent of early human history when we were nomadic and would sometimes gather, foregoing hunts in favour of sharing stories, often in the form of legends. Our earliest mythologies and spiritualism grew from this, and there’s no reason to discount their behaviour as so different from early hominins.
Elephants have been known for revisiting the bones of family members for decades, and a recent paper has been submitted with evidence they’ve been observed burying their dead on purpose – carrying babies for miles to man-made trenches. They obviously can’t do that with their larger dead, but they appear to prefer their dead to be protected from predation if possible, and they stay with the bodies for days, trumpeting. That strongly suggests they have some kind of opinions surrounding death, which again, in our own ancestors is inextricable from spirituality.
I personally think some other animals have religion – I have no real evidence as that’s just my opinion. I think we vastly underestimate animals and overestimate our relative importance.
Someone is for sure making a video titled ‘top ten things to search & replace that give away your paper as ai generated’ as we speak, and this is #1. The smart ones are selling a plug in that does it for you.
A pop and a puff of smoke meant we were going to miss the rest of our show, but would go on a fun trip to the electronics shop with dad. I loved that shop. So many cool things.
We had a smokers’ wall in high school: a corner of the break yard next to the cafeteria that was designated by a yellow stripe painted on the ground. It was always full-to-bursting at every break, and if you had even a toe over it whilst smoking, it was immediate detention.
Rudy Giuliani telling Mar-a-Lago pals he’s trapped in ‘nightmare world,’ ‘can’t believe it’s real’ as he faces bankruptcy, legal woes (pagesix.com)
Its not unconditional if it has conditions (midwest.social)
Baltimore bridge collapses into river after being hit by cargo ship (www.theguardian.com)
A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water....
Serial Killers Have Rapidly Declined Since The 1980s (www.discovermagazine.com)
until we meet again! (lemmy.ml)
Math and Physics Majors (feddit.de)
The Jesus Mask: Why evangelicals are so easy to deceive (rolltodisbelieve.com)
A grim murder story illustrates why it’s so incredibly easy for predators to fool evangelicals into thinking they’re good Christians.
mice (mander.xyz)
double slit (mander.xyz)
#justElsevierthings (mander.xyz)
www.sciencedirect.com/…/S2949891023010035?via=ihu…
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Tell me what it means (lemm.ee)
Millennials, Gen-Z Want Original Movies and TV, Not Remakes — Survey (www.indiewire.com)