I remember watching a video awhile back where Fox News was interviewing a furry. The interviewer started out about as mean-spirited as you would expect, but the furry was so passive and patient that, by the end of the interview, the interviewer actually mentioned of his own accord what his...
I've noticed. That's something I've respected about you for awhile now. I wish more believers took that kind of approach. It would make dialogue with them a lot more productive. I've noticed that even you struggle to have conversations with other believers because of your rational mindset, and...
You don't think video games reward and reinforce aggression? Do you know how much thought video game designers put into making their gun firing sound snappy and feel responsive? The fun of those sorts of games is a direct consequence of rewarding aggression through scores, sound design...
There are a lot of conflicting anarchist philosophies out there, some of which are borderline mutually exclusive. The (post-)leftist infighting gets pretty strong around the subject. Really, I think the only ideas that anarchists agree on are that they reject hierarchy and that...
Yes, I have chosen my truth, in a sense.
I've chosen my basis for truth, at least. I make a choice every time I decide to take a thought process and scrutinize it for logical validity. I make a choice every time I double-check something I hear that sounds right in order to make sure it actually...
Does it desensitize us to real violence? Does it stoke real aggression?
These are questions that I've had for awhile, but I've found conflicting data any time I try to research it. I do think it can make someone more familiar with (and therefore more comfortable with) the idea of torture, at...
I think it's interesting that so many theists focus on the metaphor of God being a father, when I think it would make more sense to treat God as a kind of cosmic artist. After all, the main defining feature of God is that he created everything, so it makes more sense to me to focus on the...
Death will be nice. I've read many accounts of people who have experienced it and they uniformly describe it as a warm silence that's quieter and more peaceful than any sleep they've ever had. To be honest, I kind of look forward to finally being able to rest.
The pain used to scare me a lot...
To me, this sounds kind of like when two schoolgirls say that they're married to each other. The marriage isn't actually valid. It's not recognized legally or religiously. So they aren't really married. In the same way, people who consider an object their god, I don't think it's "really" their...
I don't think it's either bad or good. I don't think it's about finding some kind of golden mean between extremes, either.
I think it completely depends on how it's used, which I think is true for virtually everything. If self-love helps you be a better person, then it's good. If it hurts you...
Oh, this thread is over a decade old and the most recent post was spam. Sorry. I only really focus on the content of a message when I post a reply, so I often don't recognize the user who posted it, the time they posted it, etc. Usually, that improves the quality of my responses so I'm not...
I don't think there is anything more harmful than irrationality and I think faith is irrational.
Except when I read "faith," I usually see it as a synonym for confirmation bias. When somebody tells me that they have faith in God, for instance, it usually implies that they trust God and believe...
I think "pantheism" like "polytheism" or "deism" only describes one very particular issue. Currently, the people who self-identify as pantheists tend to do so for fairly similar reasons and, I think, are often of similar mindsets and backgrounds. There's no reason to believe that has to be the...
Exactly that. That their worldview is informed by a Western perspective. It doesn't say much else, so "Western" only has limited, contextual value as a description.
The same can be said for other descriptions like "Christian," "communist," and "atheist." Interestingly, one person can be a...
I think that's fair.
That said, I also kind of disagree. I don't think that you can honestly say that a deified object is a god if you believe it isn't worthy of deification. For something to be a god, it has to be deified. If you don't deify it, then you can't say it's a god.
These are fantastic articles. If you're interested in the subject, I would love to have more in-depth conversations about computability, information theory, and Godel's incompleteness theorems. Have you read G.J. Chaitin, Marshall McLuhan, or Douglas R Hofstadter? They could serve as a jumping...
I have a question about that.
Let's say that you have religious texts A, B, C, and D. A, B, and C all agree on X, B, C, and D all agree on Y, but A posits !Y (not Y) and D posits !X (not X). According to your process, which conclusion is accurate: X&Y, !X&!Y, !X&Y, or X&!Y, and how do you know...