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So a lot of folks had a lot to say about my last journal entry. For a little bit I was responding to various comments. After a while though I became a whole lot more interested in the types of objections I was seeing. Not refutations, mind. There were zero of those. Not one.
Seriously, not one of the ranty hate nuggets made even the slightest claim that the plan I laid out, if followed conscientiously, would not produce some very decent human beings. Every last one dealt with how others have practiced Christianity throughout the years, told me I didn't understand the source materials, or other utterly irrelevant to the point of the journal entry arguments.
It really amazes me how many people very obviously have a chip the size of Texas on their shoulders about any mention of Christianity or Jesus, to the point that they cannot even study or discuss it without seeing anything but what they want to see. They have pre-judged (literally what the word prejudice means) it as the worst thing ever and will not allow themselves to even understand discussion that does not align with this.
It's sad, really. I hate seeing minds not just closed but closed, locked, the key melted down, welded shut, and guarded by rabid tasmanian devils. If you're unwilling to consider the possibility that you're wrong, you're completely unable to improve yourself. Ever.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday February 23 2019, @03:43PM (1 child)
Tasmanian devils get rabies? We need to do something about that. There oughtta be a law.
Anyway, that kinda intrigued me, so I did a search for tasmanian devils with rabies. At first glance, it seems they don't get rabies. Of course, I haven't waded twenty pages through the hits yet . . .
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @12:11PM
There is no rabies in AU, which is why we were going to shoot Johnny Depp's dogs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @03:58PM (161 children)
Some pointed out that your own method failed based on your ideology that goes against Jesus' teachings. Your approach is too reliant on subjective assessment and tons of "bad stuff" is sprinkled all over the bible so how does someone know which "words of God" they should take seriously? Others gave examples of other texts which achieve the same stuff with less bullshit.
Your journal entry would have been better suited for a Christian discussion board. I will agree that Christianity gets a lot of flak, but looking at the history of repression and ignorance pushed by the friendly neighborhood Christians it isn't unreasonable.
Nothing wrong with your approach but it isn't suitable for most people because they aren't really that interested in the effort or capable of making the selective edits. Also, the average Christian blatantly violates their savior's teachings so the problem is more than just selective interpretation.
What is truly sad is your narcissism.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:20PM (14 children)
You can't read, can you?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:34PM (13 children)
I just explained that bit, can YOU read or are you stuck in trigger mode?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:46PM (12 children)
Which bit explained how following the method I laid out would not generally result in pleasant people to share the world with? Point it out to me if you would. Otherwise you're just saying "nuh-uh" when I tell you you were attempting to argue irrelevancies.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:13PM (9 children)
Your approach is the eudev approach, yes? Then why even bother calling it Christianity? We might as well say that OpenRC with eudev is still systemd!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:36PM (8 children)
Christian only means Christ-like. If you're attempting to be so, no matter the path you choose towards that end, you are practicing Christianity. It's like OpenRC and systemd; one of them is fucked up beyond belief but they're both still init systems.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:33PM (1 child)
How does Buddhism fit into this framework?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:43PM
Plenty of good things to say about ole Sid. I think him and the Mexican-named Christian guy would have enjoyed hanging out. So, let's say OpenRC vs. runit. Somewhat different paths to the same end of not being a dick to people.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @02:43AM (5 children)
If "Christian" means "Christ-like," what are the defining characteristics of other religions? Do you agree with the implication of your statement that it is possible to be a Christian without actually believing in the divinity of Jesus? Do you think it is possible to be a Buddhist-Christian, Muslim-Christian, Shinto-Christian, or even atheist-christian? At that point, doesn't the label "christian" essentially become meaningless?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @05:26AM (4 children)
I was giving the literal meaning, in practice it means more along the lines of attempting to be such and a worshiper of. The bar's no higher than a decision that you want to be one. You've no need to ever set foot in a church or subscribe to a formal denomination if you don't feel the desire to.
And, yes, you technically could be a Buddhist-Christian relatively easily. Possibly a Shinto-Christian as well with the right set of mental convolutions. Not so much the others really, though it'd be fun to see someone try the atheist-christian thing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 25 2019, @05:56PM (3 children)
That's like saying you can have an x86-ARM processor. Sure, they're both processors, but that doesn't mean they would work well together. Now, if you make compromises, etc, etc. Sure, but in the end it won't be either.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @06:34PM (2 children)
Tell that to AMD. Most every processor they make now is exactly that. Well, x86_64-ARM. You forgot about the PSP, didn't you?
Seriously though, the above is light banter. Nothing's served by demanding it be absolutely correct in every aspect.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 25 2019, @07:11PM (1 child)
While I'm certainly no electrical engineer, I have read about various platforms, and architectures over the years. To my knowledge there has never been an attempt to squash x86-64 (AMD64) and ARM (32-bit or 64-bit) together.
The original PSP had a "333 MHz MIPS R4000" CPU, so not x86, x86-64, or ARM. The PSVita has a "Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore", which is an ARM processor, not some x86-64-ARM hybrid.
Note in wikipedia's entry on x86-64 denotes a clear distinction between AMD64 and 64-bit ARM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 [wikipedia.org]
My point is that you can't have your cake and eat it too. Sure, you can claim to have whatever religious beliefs you feel like, but strictly speaking you won't be either in the analogy you gave.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:28PM
The Platform Security Processor in AMD chips is an ARM chip on-die with the x86_64 processor that has full read/write access to all memory but is not user accessible. It's essentially a hardware rootkit that you have no ability to even detect changes or spying from. Intel has one too but they use a Quark processor as the evil one rather than an ARM one. But, yeah, that's a tangent.
The main point is really just semantics though. Words are just tools to convey concepts from one person to another. As long as what is meant by Person A is understood by Person B, getting bogged down in debating word meanings (barring attempts to change the meaning of a word for propaganda or legal judo purposes) is kind of pointless unless you're just bored.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @11:33PM (1 child)
3rd paragraph. They also need the moral foundation in order to assess the morality of the text so you get a chicken and egg problem. The whole point of the book is also to provide a complete framework for morality.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @05:41AM
The moral foundation is provided by the two things I mentioned. It was answered by Jesus and recorded by both Mark and Mathew as the answer to what the most important commandment/commandment above all others was. If you had perfect understanding of your actions and their consequences as filtered through those commands, the rest of the book would be superfluous. I don't know anyone who has that though.
And, yes, I know what the point of the book is. I've mentioned that is its purpose rather than history many, many times over the years.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:37PM (79 children)
He's one of the single worst Dunning-Kruger cases I've ever encountered. At least 3 people on that previous thread, myself included (and it's obvious I'm the unnamed target of his pathetic whinging in the OP here...) know the Bible orders of magnitude better than he does.
He's found a comfortable relative minimum in his life, and for some reason thinks that means he's some sort of expert on everything he decides to speak about. I have a hypothesis, and he's one of my samples under consideration, that people with a less pro-social attitude and a more selfish orientation are going to be more prone to Dunning-Kruger-itis. It's an interesting if informal ongoing experiment, though one that makes me feel like my soul needs a hot shower rather quickly.
Notice he's employing the same strategy he always does: shit out a bunch of bare assertions and self-aggrandizing pronouncements, stonewall and insult anyone who says otherwise, and then when the thread he starts reaches a critical mass of people calling him out on his bullshit, start a new thread whining about it and pretend he "won." It's one of the weirdest combinations of playing the victim and triumphalism I've ever seen.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:47PM (78 children)
Darlin, you're not even capable of studying the bible at all. You are utterly unable to see anything but what you think you should see because of the enormous stick up your ass and chip on your shoulder.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:08PM (77 children)
Aaaaaahahahahahaha! 13 years, going on 14 now, Uzzard. Can you speak a single word of Koine? Do you even fucking know what Koine refers to?
Jesus, I must have really burned your fat feathered ass hard. Newsflash, shitbird: you can scream and whine and cry and flap around like a plumed sack of dirty diapers all you want, *it doesn't make it true." You know what? I'm almost wondering if I should start trolling, just to see you react like this. I've had a taste of blood, and it is *good.*
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:21PM (76 children)
No amount of study is going to do you any good if you go into it with your conclusions already formed and only allow yourself to see anything in their light, so it really doesn't matter.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:49PM (75 children)
That's absolutely correct...now apply that advice to your own life. Honestly, the projection is incredible. I'm glad I've got an extra welding mask as backup, just in case.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Redundant) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:02PM (74 children)
I do. Every minute of every day. I am one of the most disagreeable people you will ever meet and I do not exclude my own thoughts and beliefs from that disagreeableness; the most certain way to never have to admit that you are wrong is to make sure you're not wrong to begin with and that requires a fuckton of self-examination. I occasionally get lazy about one thing or another for a little bit but nothing escapes intense scrutiny for very long.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:27PM (67 children)
Funny, because for all that effort, you don't seem to have reaped much reward for it. Real life doesn't give As for effort and multiple people on this site have consistently pointed out where, why, and how you are wrong. Your response, rather than further self-examination, is to stonewall, insult, abuse, and inevitably, flee the scene.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:31PM (66 children)
On the contrary, I take every serious assertion that I'm incorrect and examine it. If I find it to hold water, I change my position. You seem to be laboring under the impression that because you disagreed with me I am wrong though. Unless you believe you are perfect in all things, this is an absurd position to hold.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:44PM (65 children)
You're starting from the position that you're correct because you put a lot of effort in, and "since no one else examines themselves this closely, they have to be wrong when they say I'm wrong." This leads you to dismiss out of hand very real problems with your worldview and very real critiques of the same.
This is a result of the same pride that forces you to be so unsparing of your own positions, at least nominally. I get it, I used to have a real problem with that too, but just cutting back on the caffeine and attempting to partially kill my ego through meditation and study of some of the Buddhist sutras really helped with that.
I'll grant most people don't examine their lives or thoughts in much detail, but you've met at the very least your match in me. I've gone all the way down to the very basic axioms and attempted to gut them alive using the via negative approach (summarized by a friend as "axioms are destruct-tested by the theorems they give rise to). I didn't spend those almost 14 years solely on the Bible, either; most of it was actually on logic, philosophy, apologetics and counter-apologetics, and comparative religion, with a little Koine Greek and even some Hebrew and Latin thrown in. This on top of trying to keep a roof over my head, help friends do the same, deal with the fallout of an abusive upbringing and adulthood, hold down a minimum of one job (usually two), and squeeze in some time to study sciency stuff and Linux.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:23PM (64 children)
I'm starting from the assumption that I'm correct because I've put a lot of adversarial thought in and been unable to disprove any given position, yes. That's how forming a view should work. I'm not closed to the possibility that I'm wrong though, which is why I enjoy arguing with intelligent people so much. Not to win but because there's a possibility they may convincingly show me something I'm wrong about or that I may do the same favor for them. Correcting something you are wrong about makes you objectively more right, so it is a good thing. Not always pleasant but always of real value.
Trolling (Which I haven't done much of at all in quite a while. Haven't been in the mood.) is another matter; done mostly for amusement and to wind someone up as much as possible. Winning or losing there is an afterthought.
If you meant that in any other tone except in a self-deprecating manner at how much you've had to correct yourself, you're in need of a little more for your hubris. I certainly am but I only claim outstanding charm, wit, good looks, and sense of humor rather than perfection.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday February 24 2019, @12:26AM (63 children)
They do say that the closer to the light you get, the longer your shadow becomes. Yours appears to have long since eaten you alive. Oh well, always a danger with this sort of thing. Sure glad I kept that welding shield on...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @04:44PM (62 children)
My view on this is that being right trumps knowing a lot of Bible verses.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 25 2019, @04:50PM (45 children)
Good thing I happen to both know the verses and be right :)
The issue here is that Uzzard's doing what pretty much everyone who wants to use the Bible to make a point does: cherry picking ideas and verses, and claiming that in part or in whole the Bible says things it simply does not say. And his motivation for doing so is mere self-justification, nothing noble or useful.
You're tone-trolling again. You don't like that I'm being bitchy, nasty, rude, and direct to someone who deserves it. Cry more for me.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @05:56PM (44 children)
In other words, using it as intended. And what does he claim incorrectly that the Bible says? That seemed to be missing from the criticism I read earlier, but it is possible I might have missed a post. As to motivation, that is your opinion, and very vague like all the other accusations you made here. What is being "self-justified" for example?
I stated already the reason. Unconstructive criticism that doesn't add anything to the discussion. Sure, the bitchy, nasty rudeness is salt in the wound, but I wouldn't mind so much, if you could deliver. There's a place here for that, if you can back it up.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 25 2019, @06:35PM (43 children)
Excuse me? Using scripture to further one's own agenda and justify one's own selfish, sociopathic tendencies is "using it as intended?" You had better be glad Christianity isn't true because you'd have earned yourself eternity shrieking in hellfire for that one alone.
I'm getting tired of repeating myself: if someone wants to take the things Jesus said seriously, they have to take *all of them.* It's not a fucking lunch buffet. And they especially don't get to elevate Paul above Jesus. And if someone wants to claim that the overall thrust of the Bible is X, Y, and Z, they would do well to read the book(s) thoroughly and make sure it's not actually A, B, and C. Which he has plainly failed to do.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @07:01PM (42 children)
Which scripture? Which selfish, sociopathic agenda?
Repeating yourself doesn't work as well as thinking does.
Except when they don't want that, of course.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday February 25 2019, @07:04PM (1 child)
Shut up, khallow. You're out of your league. Go back to renting backhoes.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @11:48PM
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:48AM (39 children)
Any scripture, and any selfish, sociopathic agenda. This isn't difficult. Except that you seem to want it to be.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @12:45PM (38 children)
Sounds like you're not speaking of TMB. What makes your posting at all relevant?
It shouldn't be. But it is.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:55PM (37 children)
What makes yours relevant? All you've done is bitch and tone-troll.
See, Uzzard's selfish, sociopathic agenda is one data point in the set of "selfish, sociopathic agendas." And the Bible is one data point in the set of "scriptures." So the overlapping Venn diagram of "selfish, sociopathic agendas" and "scriptures [used to justify them]" by definition includes a point which corresponds to his use of the Bible to justify his own agenda.
I'd draw you a picture except the lameness filter would likely eat the ASCII art. That and you're trolling anyway.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:14PM (6 children)
You're right. Trying to get people to treat others with respect and kindness is pretty fucked up. I'll stop.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:17PM (5 children)
Lead by example, then. And I mean real respect and real kindness, not this transparent, insulting veneer of "civility" you think passes for the real article. As long as we're talking Christian scripture, look up the phrase "whited sepulcher." Jesus has a lot to say about people like that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:43PM (4 children)
No deception going on here, just me being a perfectly ordinary, imperfect human being. It's enjoyable to give you shit when you're talking utter nonsense that even you know to be untrue and I don't always resist the temptation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:21PM (3 children)
Odd, because you seem to be putting yourself on a pedestal above all the rest of us plebes due to how much you "examine" your worldview (hah!). The point of imperfection is to improve on it, not to wallow in it like a pig in shit.
I'd say you didn't get much bang for your investigational buck; try going lower in the stack and examining some of your fundamental ideas about human nature and human society. That book I've been recommending, de Waal's "Our Inner Ape," would be very enlightening for you *if you let it.*
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:27PM (2 children)
Being right about something doesn't make you superior to anyone, just right.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 27 2019, @05:09PM (1 child)
In some circumstances it does. Speak of purpose here: if there is a purpose, a task that needs to be done, do you want someone who knows how to do it or someone who doesn't?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:08PM
Fitness for purpose, yes. Inherent value as a human being, no. It's a very important distinction. I don't even hold people I'd be perfectly willing to kill as less than me; that's not required for killing them unless you're making the decision from emotion rather than reason.
Take Islamic terrorists, for instance. Most of them are doing what they believe as right and good. That's to their credit even if I absolutely disagree with everything they believe. I'd still shoot them in the face and not lose any sleep over it though, because they're my enemy; they are trying to harm me and mine. I don't need hatred or to feel someone is less than human to do what is necessary. I don't even want it; it poisons the fuck out of your soul.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:07PM (29 children)
Actually, it's zero data points since you haven't demonstrated this agenda exists or that it is selfish and sociopathic.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:05PM (28 children)
Just look at his post history, or hang out on IRC sometime. There is an observable trend of ignoring reality in favor of pushing his own self-referential looping worldview, he thinks he's some kind of paragon of manliness and success by living a very low-responsibility life, the highest cerebral pleasures he gets are to do with fishing and pornography, and the list goes on.
You can do your own research. If I told you the Earth revolved around the Sun, would you demand I provided you with the data?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:19PM (10 children)
Nah, I just think chasing money beyond what satisfies your needs and enough of your desires to make you content is a waste of time you could be spending enjoying yourself. And I try to minimize the level of fulfilled desires necessary to be content. I would have figured you'd recognize where I picked up a philosophy along those lines.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 27 2019, @05:18PM (9 children)
Oh, no argument there. *That much* you get right. It's how you go about it that there's some problems. I keep saying, go deeper, go back to the roots of your epistemology and your moral theory. You're missing a few important pieces there.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:37PM (8 children)
Our main disagreement is over Patrick Henry. It fundamentally alters what we see as the greater good and lesser evil and how we do the calculus thereof. Taken to its logical extreme for the sake of illustration, I would genuinely much rather be dead than be a slave. I fundamentally value individual liberty more than life itself. I'm not an anarchist though. I fully realize that's an unstable state that always leads to the opposite of why you wanted it in the first place. While there is no such critter as collective liberty (because collectivism by its very nature about taking away the liberties of those who want something other than the majority does), it is not out of line to use collective power to guarantee individual liberties. Said instance of "liberties" needs to always be defined as "the ability to do as you please" though. "The ability to make others do as you please" is in fact the opposite of liberty.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 28 2019, @04:40PM (7 children)
A level lower down, please. Again: the fewest rules up front does not make for the most individual liberty. This is the same problem the BSD license partisans have with the GPL guys. There is a nonzero, and indeed nontrivial, amount of infrastructure, regulation, and law enforcement necessary to guarantee maximal possible freedom for the most possible people.
And, incidentally, the "freedom" to starve, die of exposure under any bridge within walking distance, or rot away from perfectly treatable diseases due to no one giving a shit and you not having money is not freedom. If anything, it's needlessly burdensome constraint, and could be alleviated at far less cost to individuals en masse than is caused to the individuals suffering so by just allowing it to happen. There is an entire dimension you don't seem to consider here that I do: what it is to be human. We're social animals, we do our best (which includes creating situations to maximize freedom) when we cooperate, and there is no good reason to subordinate people to profit.
Indeed, doing so is a perfect example of not limiting your own freedom to swing your fist to where your neighbor's face begins. Just because it's done by proxy and through an abstract system rather than personally and face to face doesn't change that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 01 2019, @01:30PM (6 children)
That's not lower. Zooming out to look at humanity instead of the minimum necessary two people to judge interactions on is in fact higher level thinking. Let's do the actual fundamental level thinking instead.
You're still looking at only the greater good while you're ignoring the greater evil. I get why you're doing it. I really do. It's your aversion to pain. Be it your own pain from personal losses or the empathetic pain you feel when you see anyone suffering. Pain aversion is instinct though and not subject to reason.
Let's expound on the first sentence of the second paragraph there. You're very obviously looking for the greater good but you're blowing off all the evil that has to be done to achieve it because it alleviates your pain. Enforcing your will on others is evil, no matter what excuse is given for it. It's sometimes the lesser evil but it's always, always, always evil. To do so you have to treat everyone you're enforcing your will on as less than human; fundamentally inferior to your more highly evolved self. That's not only harming everyone you're attempting to control, it's harming you quite a lot as well. Every time you accede to doing evil in order to accomplish something good, you make it easier to convince yourself to do even more evil the next time. This can only go on so long before you're an incredibly evil person and unable to even recognize it.
The calculus you need to grok here is that doing good is not the opposite of doing evil if your action has more than one effect. Helping others is quite good. Bending others to your will is extremely evil. Helping one person by your own means is unarguably a good deed. Helping fifty million by forcing three hundred million to do your bidding is not; it has both good and evil aspects and the evil far outweighs the good.
I told you on IRC the other evening that my little brother had committed suicide. It wasn't something that happened a long time ago. It was less than ten years ago, so it still hurts like hell, and he was arguably the person on this Earth to whom I was closest. And I still would not have stopped him had I been right there with him. I would have tried like hell to convince him to change his mind. I would have begged, pleaded, and offered to do anything in my power to get him to stop. No amount of my own pain would be worth treating him as less human than myself and enforcing my will on him though. I did not live his life and I did not have the right to make his choices for him.
So, I'm not lying to you or even to myself and I'm not looking at it from too high a level when I state my positions on charity via jackboots. I fully understand what I'm saying, why I'm saying it, and do not take the issue lightly by any stretch of the imagination. You're free to disagree but you have not thought it out more thoroughly and do not understand the issue better than I do. You just disagree.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 01 2019, @05:38PM (5 children)
God, why did it take so *fucking* long for you to finally break down and start talking like a human on here?! I predicted you were going to say basically this, eventually. It's the obvious reply, because it's the one that's shown up piecemeal on many of your previous posts to begin with. It's also condescending as hell, but that's to be expected.
What you still miss, again, is this: emergent properties and supervenience. Society supervenes on the properties of what it is to be an individual human being, and what emerges out of the the interactions of many, many, many humans is a society. All sorts of new, unexpected behaviors and problems and issues crop up, many of which couldn't be predicted just from the properties of an individual human, in pretty much the same way you couldn't predict the properties of glucose from just looking at a handful of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms in isolation. Much like a society, it's the arrangement of and interactions between the C/H/O atoms that produce glucose; there is no ideal-form-of-glucose-ness floating around free in some Platonic phase space somewhere.
What this means is that you can't realistically apply the same and only standards you would for a single human being to all of society, not least because many of the legal fictions spawned by the social technology toolbox--corporations, banks, laws and law enforcement, etc--simply do not work this way. They are composed, at base, of humans, but they are not humans, and it's this failure to avoid the fallacy of composition that leads to a lot of dangerous nonsense. Especially from self-proclaimed libertarian types.
Honestly, I'm also really, really insulted that you think I'm some kind of unthinking "collectivist" (that's the snarl word of the day, right?) drone who never considers the individual good. It's precisely the opposite; I'm looking for solutions that maximize individual freedom and happiness within the framework of a functioning, technological, globally-connected society. I also recognize that there is always going to be tension between individual liberties and a functioning society, and am constantly searching for ways to balance the two. It's not just that we disagree, it's that I've seen what happens on the medium and large scale where people try your ideas, and it always results in thuggery and lawless gangs.
Finally, I also have a thorough understanding of the fact that resources, money, and safety *are,* if not themselves freedom, the keys to obtaining such. Another large fallacy on your part is this idea of completely separating "individual liberty" from the rest of human experience. This is simply incoherent; it's another case of searching for a Platonic monad where none exists. The starving man is not free, save for the "liberty" to die slowly. His entire life, indeed, constricts to a single set of actions: find food, or die. The sick man, beyond the obvious shackles put on his body and mind by disease, is even *less* free in a hard-capitalist society where he is quite literally put in a "your money or your life" situation, doubly so if family is involved because the entire family could well go bankrupt due to the illness. The homeless and other extremely poor people are cut out of the loop of society almost entirely, and what "freedom" they have consists of the "freedom" to scrounge for food, shelter where they can, be mocked and ignored and freely targeted for harm or death with law enforcement complicit in their abuse, and to slowly rot away from the inside out as society deliberately ignores them for fear of poverty being a communicable disease.
Do you get it now? There's *always* going to be a tradeoff. You are just as much looking for the greater good as I am; you just don't seem to think the implications of your preferred policies through, and given that we have historical examples of what happens when they're tried, this is inexcusably stupid. You've not only chosen the wrong hill to die on, you've anaesthetized your conscience and willfully blinded your historical search to do it, and fallen into the trap of immediately assuming anyone who doesn't think like you do is either ignorant or evil.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @06:09PM (1 child)
He makes grudging exceptions for things he can't conjure up an explanation for, like the military, and calls taxes to pay for it a "necessary evil". As he said he understands your points and simply disagrees.
When someone views death (military) as more important than life (healthcare) there really is no way forward until they change that mentality.
Thanks for taking the time to deal with this thread.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 02 2019, @12:16PM
You're not terribly bright, are you? Without a sufficient military, you have the government you want only so long as you're not worth invading to some nation that does have a sufficient military. Which means without a military, you don't get to have the healthcare policies you want. Basing your security on the good will of others is base idiocy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 02 2019, @02:22PM (1 child)
Okay, I managed a couple hours of relaxation time this morning due to scheduling conflicts, so I'll get you your reply now. Answers first then to the meat.
I should hope so. It tells me I've been intellectually consistent and you're capable of telling your ass from a hole in the ground best two out of three.
Hyperbole, darlin. I'm sure you think. I just don't believe you do so thoroughly enough. I don't believe your emotions will allow you to. I have extremely good evidence for this in the form of all the obvious anger that comes out in your posts. When I'm being a dick, fair enough. When I'm not, like now, it's a huge indicator to how your mind works. You are a collectivist though. There's no way you can be anything else given the positions you take. Maybe not a full on Marx worshiper but you definitely meet the minimum qualifications.
Please. I expect better of you than atrociously misrepresenting my positions in this discussion. You know full well I am not an anarchist. Not even close. I would prefer it to living in Russia, China, Cuba, Scandinavia, or Venezuela but not to the US or OZ; I'd have to think on it a while for most of Western Europe but I'm pretty sure I could dig on Poland.
Now to the meat. You asked to take things down to the fundamental principles. I did. And you categorically rejected my statements based on higher order precepts.
Why?
This is a serious question that I genuinely want you to consider the answer to. Take a while to ponder it before you fix a response in your mind. A knee-jerk answer isn't going to have any serious thought behind it and won't be of any value at all to either of us.
Now some things for further consideration.
The fundamental balances of good and evil in a choice do not change as a function of the number of people making a decision. Further, guilt for the evil of any given decision is not divided by the number of people making it, each is credited the full amount.
The number of people affected by a decision does not have any effect on the amounts of good and evil in the decision except in the additive sense. A billion people affected by 10:1 good:evil gives you a ten billion to one billion result.
Abstract entities are absolutely people. Whether the abstraction is a corporation or an entire society is irrelevant; there is no agency other than people to bear the responsibility for an abstract entity's deeds except the human beings that it consists of. The only difference is the number of members in the group. And those people absolutely should be held accountable for the decisions they make and actions they take just as any individual would be.
You misunderstand what freedom fundamentally is. The number of options you have when making a decision is power. Freedom is the ability to make your own decisions (Within the limits of your ability. Absent external hindrance.). You may not like your choices but nobody ever really does. Power and freedom are very much relevant to each other but they are not the same thing. Not even sort of.
Now, since I am neither for absolute freedom nor absolute control but have nuanced conditions upon which I base what acceptable limits are, I'm perfectly in favor of taking the "what should and should not be" portion of the discussion to a less fundamental level. This does not change the truth of the fundamentals in any way though, which is what you argued. You should have taken the position that I was correct in my previous post but that what specific decisions should be made given those truths necessitate further conversation on a higher level.
And a couple other less relevant bits.
Yes, in a corrupt society power can buy extra liberties from the government. Private liberties. Private law. Privilege. No, I am not in favor of that. Yes, I would absolutely support viable minimum-force-necessary steps to remedy that type of corruption on any scale, wherever it is found.
Happiness has no relationship to freedom in most people. They give very little of a shit about things as abstract as freedom. They only want tomorrow to be more or less the same as today, though they wouldn't mind it being a little easier. Witness social media. The largest platforms all have a blindingly obvious built-in bias in what is allowed to be seen and heard but people don't care enough to stop using them. Yes, I am fully aware that I am atypical in my attitudes regarding freedom.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 02 2019, @11:02PM
What was the point of all that? Just when it looked like we were getting somewhere productive, you dug your heels in and doubled down on nacht-einmal-falsch. Worst part is, this *starts* off well enough; the moral arithmetic checks out, for example.
I am *not* arguing from higher principles, but lower ones. This isn't difficult: we need to start with what it is to be a human being. In my view, you're putting far too much weight behind an abstraction, and an abstraction that emerges from other things at that. I'm sure you're familiar with Maszlow's hierarchy of needs; "liberty" as you have it is closer to the peak than basic survival needs. Sorry, that's just the way it is. It took centuries of technology and agricultural evolution before anyone but a few cloistered monks and religious types and philosophers could even begin to think seriously on ideas like "liberty" and what it means. Knock the bottom out from under a society materially, and all that liberty will vanish. Humans are animals, and we act like it when we can't get our basic needs met.
Abstract entities are. Not. People. Whether the abstraction is a corporation or an entire society is indeed irrelevant, but these entities are capable of evolving power and bringing forces to bear that no single human could by him- or herself. This is, again, the fallacy of composition: you can ignore the fact, but it won't make it go away, and will just lead to your ideas being some combination of irrelevant, ineffective, counterproductive, or outright evil. How can anyone be expected to make good choices based on bad or incomplete data? You're correct that individuals need to be held responsible for their roles in causing these abstractions to go awry, but that doesn't change any of the above facts. This is precisely why we have oversight and regulation (and why regulatory capture is so incredibly damaging).
The final irony here is that you admit yourself that you're atypical in your attitudes regarding freedom. Been there, done that, understand exactly what you mean, if on a somewhat different wavelength. Most humans really do seem to sleepwalk thoughtlessly through life. But ask yourself, now...since you know this to be the case, how do you know and by what metric do you judge your beliefs on liberty to be 1) correct and 2) superior (in whatever way they are superior) to what the typical human believes?
In the end, my problem with your analysis is that it's self-destructive, and we've been over why this is the case before. Fewer rules up front does not necessarily mean more happiness *or* more individual liberty; in fact, without certain rules in place, the majority of people very quickly find their liberties, whatever they may be, completely and permanently curtailed. Beyond this, if you refuse to see the very real fact that severe material deprivation is itself anti-liberty, I can't help you. It has nothing to do with a corrupt society or buying "extra liberties" from government.
...wait, did you just make an argument for universal healthcare and UBI? Holy shit, I think you did...you're a left-libertarian!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 02 2019, @02:52PM
Damn, I said one thing that was incorrect in the above reply. I don't want to deprive you of the justified enjoyment from busting my chops about it though, so I'll wait to correct it until you have.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:44PM (16 children)
I have.
Ok, so what? I'm not seeing any actual problems on that list. I'd rather have a low responsibility person who doesn't create problems for other people over a supposed high responsibility person who does.
For a topical example, President Trump can be considered low or high responsibility depending on which responsibilities you choose to assign to him and how much you care about whether he acts on those responsibilities. When he shutdown a portion of the federal government in order to build his promised wall, was that acting responsibly or not? Depends on your point of view. For if it was responsible (which I don't think so) then it was a larger exercise of responsibility than anything you'll find on SN.
If I had done my own research and come to the opposite conclusion, then yes, I would demand your data. It's just common sense.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 28 2019, @04:35PM (15 children)
That's all just NOISE, Hallow. Especially your last sentence. It's not actually common sense that geocentrism is false; from down here it sure looks like it's true. Don't confuse what you believe with common sense.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Friday March 01 2019, @10:11AM (14 children)
Once again, back at you on that.
That's because you aren't thinking and thus, not obtaining that common sense. You are conflating a claim that is obviously true (Earth not center of universe) with one that is not (TMB has exhibited certain selfish/sociopathic traits which you have yet to provide evidence for). The real world analogy would be some ancient time where evidence against geocentrism is much harder to come by and arguments need to be substantiated, not merely stated.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 01 2019, @05:40PM (13 children)
Any time I provide evidence, you just say it doesn't meet your standard. What can anyone do with someone like you? Aside from kick you in the ass, I mean.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 01 2019, @06:33PM (12 children)
Let's look at some actual SN-based HTML, in case that's part of the problem. For example:
<quote>Any time I provide evidence</quote>
<a href="https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30251&page=1&cid=808802#commentwrap">Link</a> for discussion.
I'm not great at typing HTML examples inside HTML. But that's the general approach I use when providing evidence/quoting from someone's posts. Here, the reference URL to your comment was provided by clicking on the number of your post, 808802.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 01 2019, @06:51PM (11 children)
For one example, see AC's comment here: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30251&page=1&cid=808814#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
Don't tell me you don't see this pattern. There is something fundamentally broken about claiming to be in favor of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and then making an exception to your "taxation is theft!!1111one" no-dissent-allowed rule for the military. Do we need a military? Yes. We also need healthcare, arguably more so. So the only thing making one kosher and the other verboten is the person's internal state of mind. Thanatos is winning over Eros, and that is a bad thing, as among other things it's self-destructive and opposed to the outwardly-professed ideal of maximizing liberty and happiness.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 01 2019, @07:47PM (10 children)
That last statement is particularly bad faith. There's a good reason to pay for a good military. Namely, it keeps you alive and free when other parts of the world want your stuff. Meanwhile what is "healthcare"? It can mean extending your life, keeping you as healthy as possible, and easing suffering when you're on the way out. Or it can mean a great tool for profit and vote buying. I don't automatically assign militaries to the "death" category and healthcare to the "life" category, because I want to see how they are used first. Consequences.
Second, and this a point that a lot of people don't get. Military security of the US necessarily has to be a nationwide thing. The federal government is naturally the best scope for that with funding, reduced conflict of interest, and powers/credibility to carry out the task. Healthcare is not. It's necessarily personal in scope. Those who try otherwise are taking money from someone and giving it to someone else with the sick patient as middleman. I think that's in the death category myself, but YMMV. Otherwise, this phony morality adds nothing to AC's post. TMB didn't view death as more important than life, thus the argument was a waste of my time.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 02 2019, @10:46PM (9 children)
Two obvious rebuttals:
1) The military as we have it goes well the fuck beyond morally-permissible self defense. And has since at least the Monroe Doctrine.
2) Make sure that you have something worth fighting for, if you're going to fight for it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 03 2019, @03:50PM
Morally-permissible self defense? So there is a reason to have a military then.
A lot of stuff goes well past its morally-permissable purpose, including the nebulous health care. Why the former goes in "death" while the other in "life", particularly when more deaths are expected in a proper health care system than in a proper military system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 03 2019, @03:58PM (7 children)
As to the Monroe Doctrine, it has considerable morally-permissable self defense value. After all, at the time the Doctrine was issued, a large portion [wikipedia.org] of the Americas had recently become independent of the European powers. The US by taking that position made it somewhat more difficult for European powers to reconquer the Americas because they had to factor in possible US interference.
So why would that be "morally-permissable self defense"? Because of the obvious long term strategy of divide and conquer. If every country of the New World were to defend only itself, then it would be rather easy for a outside power to capture countries one at a time, leading potentially to a time when the US would suffer in turn such conquest. Such potential for future subjugation of the US is sufficient grounds for the Monroe Doctrine as a result.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:06PM (6 children)
Good grief, you cannot be this stupid. 100+ years of propping up tinpot dictators and installing murderous, torturing regimes in the name of profit is not morally permissible self-defense, or even self-defense at all.
Say hi to Pinochet (among others) when you get to Hell, asshole.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 04 2019, @11:06PM (1 child)
FTFY. And almost anything can be abused for political gain. It's remarkable how ignorant you are about the original Monroe Doctrine. Almost all of the Americas had just become, or would shortly become free (see the link to that map again from my last post). The Monroe Doctrine was a huge boost to that anti-colonial independence movement with the simultaneous effect of helping to preserve the US's independence as well.
Second, the Monroe Doctrine was a political not a military policy. The US had plenty of options shy of outright war to encourage and maintain the independence of the Western hemisphere.
Any other straw men that are obviously not morally permissible? It should be obvious to you, but the Monroe Doctrine doesn't require the US to install murderous dictators. Nor in the mentioned case of Chile does Socialism require the predecessor government to Pinochet to do all the nasty and incompetent stuff they did which paved the way for Pinochet either. Nor does so ambiguous and extremely watered down definition of self defense mean that the US should casually throw away its interests every time some other party decides to steal assets from a US business or commit other threats on US interests. We're discovering that there are far better ways to address such things. But the basic conflicts of interest and such will remain no matter how morally impermissible they may be.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 05 2019, @11:23PM
Now you're just splitting hairs. This is another form of tone trolling, which I'd call "dictionary attack" if that wasn't already taken.
No one says we should "casually throw away its interests every time some other party decides to steal assets from a US business or commit other threats on US interests." That's a strawman, like 2/3 of the bullshit you post. The point is that there are far more effective ways to protect ourselves, and I mean ACTUALLY protect ourselves, as opposed to playing les buggeures risibles with geopolitics via proxy warfare that inevitable blows back on us like attempting to light a fart in front of the world's largest propane tank.
Have you been paying attention to nothing at all the CIA has been doing since the end of the 19th century? Does the name "United Fruit Company" ring a bell? Do you know what happened in Iran in 1953? Remember Reagan arming the precursors to the Taliban to stick it to the Russkies? This shit is not "self-defense."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:41PM (3 children)
100+ years of propping up tinpot dictators and installing murderous, torturing regimes
Would you rather have the Russians and Chinese doing it, and moving their missiles into our back yard? I don't think you understand the great battles that go on in this world, little girl! All the great pirates (empires) suck, but the one that sucks the least is the one that points its guns away from YOU! Think you might ever get the drift?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 05 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
Do you truly think that hadn't occurred to me, idiot?! Thing is, though, this empire is on its way out, and one of the two others you mentioned (or maybe both) are going to take over rather soon, at this rate. I know very well what's coming in the next 10-20 years; we've snapped the timeline entirely in half, and it's flailing around in the temporal gale looking for a new equilibrium point.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @01:19AM (1 child)
Treat me like a fool, Treat me mean and cruel...
Oh yeah! Feel the hate!
So, you picked your new sugar daddy yet? Or are you going out like a famous Kung Fu master, by autoerotic asphyxiation?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @04:09PM
Again the abuse of her privileges! Admins, please help! This isn't right! I'm just having a bit of fun. There is no trolling on my part. You've seen how she responds to people, including me up above. Who's the troll?! Don't stop her from commenting, she is funny sometimes. But take away her ability to downmod people, let her up mod all she wants. Let's try to direct her towards the positive.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @04:56PM (15 children)
I know plenty as well. I was raised Christian and I learned the Bible as quickly as I learn anything else. I just don't think they're particularly useful in this discussion. The only purpose they can serve is getting bogged down into a theological debate about irrelevant to the point minutiae. Which is what she's likely been trying to do since she can't refute the core premise in any way but feels compelled to argue with me. She tried exactly the same thing last night in IRC. We were talking the political strategy of the DNC and she tried just about every trick she could think of to win the argument. Joke's on her, I guess, because I wasn't even arguing, just discussing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @05:56PM (2 children)
I don't think anyone except Freeman might take issue with your approach, what people have been pointing out is that your approach is not good general advice. If you plop the bible down in front of someone and say "pick and choose which parts are useful" you might end up with a psychopath waging yet another religious war.
The very basis of the bible is founded on "very bad things" codified into some supernatural rule book. So nothing inherently wrong with your approach, but it simply will not work as well as you might think.
That is rich coming from you, and every discussion becomes an argument when you have conflicting view points.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @06:36PM
I didn't say pick and choose, I said filter everything through the two commandments Jesus said were the most important.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @06:37PM
We didn't have conflicting viewpoints. I was talking about what the DNC needed to do to win in 2020 (as was she at the beginning) and she starts ranting about Trump and every last person who voted for him. Which I did not engage with.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday February 25 2019, @06:38PM (11 children)
Your core argument is based on false premises. You are cherry picking individual verses and using them make broad, sweeping claims like "the Bible is basically about how not to be a dick."
When you have been shown otherwise, instead of acknowledging that, you stick your fingers in your ears and scream "no, no, no, you're wrong, you're the stupid one, what you say is irrelevant, I'M RIGHT BECAUSE I SAY I'M RIGHT WHAAAAAAAAAAAA~!"
You very clearly have not studied the source material in any serious depth. This leads to you making absurd claims like the above. THAT is what you are being called out on, and you don't somehow become less guilty of it by accusing others of having closed minds. You may as well say that anyone opposing your idea for perpetual motion machine based on known physics has a "closed mind." That is a simple, bedrock staple of people arguing in bad faith. It's old, busted, and ineffective.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @01:03PM (10 children)
What makes that a false premise? The golden rule is after all one of the most important concepts of the Bible.
(Score: 0, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:32PM
She's just flailing about with any argument that comes to her head at this point. She's trying to win an argument rather than have a discussion, which is why she's faring so horribly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:08PM (8 children)
The golden rule is older than the Bible; Confucius expounded a version of the positive golden rule some 400-500 years earlier (this as opposed to the "silver rule," which ALL religions have had for millennia and is phrased as a negative).
One concept does not an entire book make. By sheer weight of text, the Bible is much more about etiological myth, genealogical record-keeping, history, "history," and a hell of a lot of "begats" than actual moral advice. Buddhism has far superior ethics to Christianity (and therefore also to Judaism and especially Islam), Deism and the various forms of pantheism and panentheism gel better with observable reality, and the Abrahamic faiths' morals are grounded in divine command metaethics, which is empty.
Wake me up when you have a coherent argument. The ethic of reciprocity is older than the Bible and doesn't need divine fiat to point it out.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:16PM (3 children)
One concept, when stated as the originator of a religion as the most important bit, does though. Thanks for playing. Please insert $0.25 to try again.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:23PM (2 children)
Er, no. No it doesn't. If you want to focus solely on Jesus' supposed teachings (remember, we have not one jot or tittle written by his hand...) say so. Jesus did not write the Bible.
And, again: the Golden Rule predates Jesus, Buddhism does morals better than the entire Abrahamic corpus, and you're still full of crap. I'll take that quarter, thanks :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)
You reckon Christianity should focus on the teachings of someone other than the guy they refer to as Christ? Well you're not the first but that's still pretty fucked up.
So what if it does? The copyright had long since expired, so he wasn't obliged to refrain from giving good advice just because someone else had already given it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:15PM
You seem to have a talent (er..."talent," sure...) for getting precisely the opposite of what I actually said out of my posts. What makes this even more amazing ("amazing...") is that there is a text record of precisely what was said; it's not just hearsay. How you got "Hazuki says ignore Jesus" out of me posting almost half a dozen times the exact chapter and verse whee Jesus says *not* to ignore the OT and asking why you don't take that seriously if you want to follow Jesus' teachings is beyond me. You're reaching Runaway-levels of reality-distortion field here.
No, shitbird, I reckon Christianity should focus *solely* on the teachings of the guy they refer to as the Christ. Which involves, among other things, keeping the Mosaic Law. All of it. There are actually a few weirdos on my father's side who do just this, referring to themselves as variously "Nazarenes," "Jews for Jesus," or "primitive Christians."
It's still batshit, but at least they're consistent. Unlike you.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:35PM (3 children)
And why is that supposed to be relevant?
It doesn't look to me like TMB was trying to reconstruct the Bible from the Golden Rule.
So what? Are you going to claim that the people who assembled the Bible in the first place used the metric of "weight of text" as the means to decide what was important? Else it seems yet another of those irrelevant observations you insist on making.
Here's the coherent argument:
TMB stated a subjective opinion about what was important in the Bible and how to apply that to make better people, deliberately excluding the Old Testament in the process. When you mentioned Jesus's pronouncement on the Old Testament, TMB indicated that he disagreed. At that point, there are a variety of choices for continuing or not rational discourse that one could pursue. You didn't pursue those.
The fallacy of argument from authority, where you bragged about how many years you studied the Bible, wasn't one of them. Nor was arguing from some fantasy viewpoint, such as claiming without a shred of evidence that TMB had a selfish and sociopathic motive for initiating the discussion, that no one cares about. To critique someone's subjective opinion, you have to at least partially engage with their viewpoint.
Thus, you haven't contributed to the discussion beyond the first one or two posts.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:01PM (1 child)
Your entire post is bullshit tone-trolling except this one part:
> When you mentioned Jesus's pronouncement on the Old Testament, TMB indicated that he disagreed. At that point, there are a variety of choices for continuing or not rational discourse that one could pursue. You didn't pursue those.
This disagreement is a matter of fact, Hallow. Cold, hard, fact. Mt. 5:17-20. Uzzard can disagree all he wants, but he's wrong, and all it does is highlight how cavalier he is about taking anything he thinks is useful to prop up his own self-centered assholery, no matter what it may be or where it may be from.
And you don't get much more egotistical, self-centered, and assholish than staring straight at reality and saying "no, fuck you, my ignorance trumps reality."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:25PM
Not if the tone is relevant. Here, where's the relevance to TMB's point of view or his resulting opinion?
I agree, but I also agree that the cold, hard fact is irrelevant just like the acceleration due to gravity is roughly 9.8 meters per second squared. You could have listened to TMB at some point to find that out for yourself.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:33PM
I don't actually disagree with Jesus's pronouncement on the OT law. I just think people should understand why the laws existed in the first place before they get all concerned about them. Doing something because you're told to doesn't do anything for you either mentally or spiritually. Doing it because you understand exactly how and why it helps you be a better person improves you in both areas.
I also think some bits of it were only temporally relevant and that relevance has passed. Tattoos back then, for instance, ran a very real risk of infection for which there were no antibiotics, which could leave you crippled or dead and a burden on your family. Thinking of others. They also made you more imposing, which is not how a Christian is supposed to approach dealings with other people. Today they're near zero risk and less shocking than wearing bell bottoms.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:30PM (5 children)
Damned if you don't sound like the typical alcoholic roughneck (with a beat up girlfriend back at the trailer) still making payments on your '79 Trans-Am! That's some funny shit! Used to hear it at the bar every night, especially when the loan comes due.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:39PM (4 children)
My Toyota Echo was paid for in cash, I enjoy a drink but a bottle will last me several months barring special occasions, don't have a girlfriend/wife in favor of dialing up booty calls who always leave healthy and very satisfied as I feel the need, and I've not stepped on a drilling site since my father was wagging me to them as a very young child. Not that I'd mind having a '79 Trans-Am, there are just other things I'd rather do with my time/money. You're really not good at this game.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:48PM (1 child)
Jeeze! I give you props for your acting ability, and this is the gratitude I get? If it makes you feel any better, you're no Tom Cruise!
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:22PM
That does indeed make me feel better, thanks. Though I quite liked Risky Business and Top Gun.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday February 25 2019, @07:10PM (1 child)
Sometimes, even a very little bit of information is too much information. I now grok the TMB. (And wasn't there a Robin Williams movie about this? Echo, with the cracked windshield?)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:35PM
It was cheap, gets great mileage, will pull my little boat, and I never get asked to come haul things for people. I don't need a ton and a half dualie diesel to feel like a man.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:43PM (65 children)
The entire Bible is anti-Goddess and misanthropic propaganda anyhow (mostly misogyny, but the idea that men are meant to be instruments of death--that they should abandon their healing hands and engage in ritual genital mutilation--is misandry), from beginning with the snake and Eve, the counterrevolution against Ishtar's red dress Jezebel, right up until Yahweh's Army of the Apocalypse (only trying to make it sound as silly as it really is) engages the final battle of
RagnarökArmageddon against Ishtar's (the "whore of Babylon") Anunnaki Expeditionary Group, N-Day, and the "rapture" where Yahweh's refitted colony ship, the New Jerusalem, transports 10,000 elect humans off to a zoo somewhere while the rest of us slowly die on an irradiated planet.It can be safely thrown out with other superstitions like Goddess worship. This also has the convenient effect of solving our Zionist and Mooooooooslim problem in a single stroke of critical thinking. It should only have serious interest among historians and anthropologists. We should prefer the approach to ethics advocated by Aristarchus. Sagan's The Demon Haunted World should be required reading in high school.
Yahweh worship is only capable of being counterrevolutionary. In the feudal era, it is counterrevolution against capitalism in support of the divine right of kings. In the capitalist era, it is counterrevolution against socialism, in support of some weird divine right of capitalist elites. Hopefully it will not persist once humanity has advanced to a socialist culture, but the danger to the permanent revolution is that it will support some assumed divine right of the inner party.
Indeed, Yahweh worship is not even about Yahweh. It is a pattern of uncritical and fervent acceptance of all forms of exploitative rule by a small minority over the vast majority.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:49PM (64 children)
Me: I say something and everyone replies with off-topic, strawman objections.
You: *Makes an off-topic, strawman objection to me saying that.*
Me: *Blinks then shakes his head.*
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:01PM (63 children)
You have to defend your sysadmin methodology, man! How do you decide which parts to deprecate and throw out? Must I remind you that many sysadmins don't mind dread systemd?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:16PM (62 children)
My bad. One of my major failings is I assume most people can understand when I say something that I would understand without further explanation. Here's your answer: if you do not see how it would fit in with the two listed precepts, either you do not understand it, it was situational and is not applicable to you today, or it has changed. It would behoove you to find out which but this was an absolute noob primer not an exhaustive changelog and I don't plan on going into all the errata. If I were actually a Christian, specifically a Christian interested in spreading the religion, I might be inclined to put that sort of effort into it. That is not the case though. I'm an irredeemable heathen, happy to stay that way, and too lazy to do a whole bunch of work for someone else.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:22PM (61 children)
So then if we are discussing an ethical system, why do we need god? Can we not simply excise god with Occam's razor and instead study ethics?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:53PM (24 children)
I'd go much further and say you can have either one or the other but not both, or at least that any postulation that morals come from a God-figure ("Divine-Command Metaethics") is empty.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:33PM (23 children)
I see it differently. Any ethical system not based on external morality can be nothing but inherently arbitrary and thus meaningless except to the person or people that hold(s) it. This absolutely includes my own, which I'm fine with since I don't demand that others adhere to it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:30PM (4 children)
You're falling into the same trap the apologists do: assuming that the only choices are either "This is morality and it came from above" or "morality is entirely made-up and subjective."
Neither of these are true. There is a very eye-opening book called Our Inner Ape by Franz de Waal which explores morality among our close relatives, the great apes. One thing the book makes clear, without saying as much, is that morality is older than God or gods; if anything, we have God(s) because we're moral, not the other way around. Morality is very much due to an external standard; we call it "observable reality" or "how things are," and our own constitutions and evolutionary history are a part of that.
Morality is social technology, and the moral machinery that allows us to generate morals is separate from any individual moral. Once this is understood, one of the greatest roadblocks to giving up toxic ideas about God and religion is knocked down.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:42PM (2 children)
Our Inner Ape
Yeah, the bonobo has better ethics than the chimpanzee [youtube.com]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:17PM (1 child)
Big David Allen Coe [youtube.com] fans, apparentlly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:00PM
Damn! That has to be the most American song ever made! There's a message to the world you can believe, eh? Too bad we don't hear it on the radio.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:55PM
Two things:
First, I didn't say the external source had to actually exist. Existing only as an abstract point of authority is functionally the same unless your deity A) actually exists and B) enjoys taking an overt, active role in its worshipers' lives.
Second, great apes do not have collective morality, which is what we're speaking of. Except possibly the bonobo and you can't really call the disposition to resolve any situation by fucking the shit out of everyone involved a morality. Great apes have their own individual but often very similar, somewhat-learned/somewhat-self-created proto-moralities but collectively they follow whatever the alpha's morality is without necessarily believing it unless enough of them get pissed off at him to kill him or chase him off.
Beyond that, I don't really disagree except on a mostly academic chicken/egg level.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:31PM (13 children)
They are all arbitrary but to varying degrees. They are not meaningless to people that do not hold them because the ethical system can be assessed in terms of its impact upon those other people. Adopting an ethical system can alter the outcomes of decisions which in turn can alter the fates of other individuals. That means that you can rank ethical systems according to their intended or actual impact, be it in terms of health, happiness, wisdom, entropy, wealth, etc.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:57PM (12 children)
True enough on most of it, you're missing the problem there at the end though. What you use to rank them are qualities that your morality values, so around and around we go.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:13PM (10 children)
Up to a point, yes, but at the far edges of the moral spectra it's not too difficult for people to form a rough consensus. If someone's belief system is reducing the health, happiness, wealth and wisdom of almost everyone else then pretty much everyone (perhaps even including their supporters, when being honest) will agree that they're a prick. So, as I've said before, the absence of religion is never an excuse to completely abandon attempts at morality.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:20PM (9 children)
That's just taking an average of individual moralities. It doesn't hold any special meaning for being common. It could hold less even if it's something that's built into our DNA rather than something we believe because we've put thought into it.
I agree but that's just my opinion. Using religion just makes it easier to spread a morality more widely than using reason.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:24PM (2 children)
That was definitely true historically and probably still is. I wish humans weren't so irrational.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:26PM (1 child)
We're shaved apes, whadda ya spect?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:39PM
True dat.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday February 23 2019, @11:13PM
"Using religion just makes it easier to spread a morality more widely than using reason."
God's, today you'd be better off putting it on the Dr. Oz show or something: I've seen people go running into drug stores saying "Do you have such and such, Dr. Oz says it's the best fucking thing EVER!"
Just get Oz to say "You need to treat each other better" and people would probably shit themselves being nicer.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday February 24 2019, @12:17AM (4 children)
Actually, the research indicates that brain function, thus behavior, is pretty much inherited (tho anyone who breeds performance animals can tell you that. If you've been selecting for terrier behavior, you don't suddenly get pointers, not even if your environment shifts from alleys and rats to prairies and pheasants. Humans are not magically different above the neck.)
And ethics could be distilled to: how much theft from the individual are you willing to tolerate? Posit 'murder' as the ultimate theft from the individual, and work down from there. Whether you follow OT or NT ethics maybe depends if you consider retribution and restitution or punishment and forgiveness (sometimes defined as withholding hellfire) a better response to said theft.
Side thought: leftist arguments are so damned predictable. Despite being couched in a spew of clever insults and hifalutin' verbiage, they invariably boil down to: "You're stupid, therefore I'm superior."
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @05:46AM
I recently heard someone suggest drastic measures to punish someone for a violation reminiscent of "off with their head". The catch to this discussion is that the punished act would be 100% legal in a supervised clinic. Sounds like you start from a similar perspective.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @06:00AM (2 children)
Seeing most of the world as less human than they are is the single most common trait among progressives. It completely explains their perceived need to help those incapable of helping themselves as well as the fundamental moral inferiority of their enemies. They genuinely see everyone outside their elite circles as lesser beings who do not have the same abilities they have. It's pretty much a necessity for someone to believe they have not just the right but the obligation to tell everyone else how to live their lives.
Conservatives do this to, though to a lesser degree of late.
Libertarians see others as equals and just as capable as themselves. They may be incorrect in their thinking but being incorrect doesn't imply inferiority because we know we're just as flawed and capable of being wrong about something.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 25 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)
They genuinely see everyone outside their elite circles as lesser beings who do not have the same abilities they have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @04:42PM
The difference there is those are choices, not inherent traits. Everyone makes bad choices, so the ones to your credit does not make you inferior or superior to anyone else; only possibly right or wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:01PM
I'd better qualify what I said about people arriving at a consensus for a moral code. It's not quite that straightforward because some care needs to be taken to avoid it degenerating into mob rule permitting the persecution of minorities. The "do as you would be done by" ethos is a helpful guideline here although it has limitations.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:58PM (1 child)
Any ethical system not based on external morality can be nothing but inherently arbitrary and thus meaningless except to the person or people that hold(s) it.
Finally! You spell it out clearly! But that is hogwash and you are wrong. Everything about us, including "morals" and "ethics" emerged from the meat. The pharisees simply conjure up a connection to "mystical" forces to scare the ignorant heathens into submission. There is no "external" authority. The laws of nature are just there, not giving a tinker's fuck about man's authority
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @06:04AM
A) I didn't say the external source had to actually exist. Simply a made-up construct suffices to unite disparate moralities if it can be sold to them.
B) Laws of nature say it's perfectly acceptable to kill you so I can fuck your woman without listening to you cry about it. Our closest genetic relatives do it routinely.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 25 2019, @03:49PM (1 child)
...since I don't demand that others adhere to it.
You just throw a bitchy little tantrum when they don't.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @04:47PM
No, I try to convince them otherwise. I might also mock them but I haven't been doing much of that lately. Nobody on the entire Internet except my family has the ability to get me more than mildly annoyed for a few seconds, and even that's pretty rare.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @05:55PM (35 children)
Interesting question, seriously. Without religion, there would never have been ethics. If you as an individual are sufficiently bootstrapped to manage your personal ethics without an external touchstone and without becoming an epic shithead, more power to you. Not everyone is though and I expect we never will be as a species. You need to acknowledge that your ethics are rooted in religion(s) if you're interested in being honest with yourself though.
You may not believe any religion(s) but that is most assuredly where most of the ideals you hold were first espoused. Any ethical framework needs a foundation, a reason for being, the answer to the question "why" or it's missing its most fundamental component and both meaningless and useless. From our earliest history up until now we've mostly used religion for this as it is a whole lot easier to use an external source of authority when trying to get groups of people to agree upon one definition of good, one definition of evil, and one code of behavior.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:13PM (27 children)
We use religion the same way as nationalism, to mark territory, like dogs and cats pissing on a tree. It is an organizational tool. The mysticism serves to subdue any doubts. We can give it credit for spreading a message, which, as everybody knows, spreads much faster and more effectively through FUD. You hardly need the TV and radio.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:22PM (26 children)
So, we're agreed on its effectiveness and thus utility then?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:40PM (2 children)
Of course, I've never disputed that, but it's still by our own personal choice.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:44PM (1 child)
As it should be.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:06PM
Yeah well, it would be nice to have an alternative choice to, *either your brains or your signature will be on the contract*.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:40PM (22 children)
What is the utility of your theory of the original of ethics. Why must be suppose that ethics are of Anunnaki origin? If there is an ethical system in the Bible, what proof do we have that god is involved? Did this ethical system not originate with man in the first place?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:44PM
Woah, that'll learn me not to type and do my hair at the same time! Replace that with: What is the utility of your theory of the origin of ethics?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:48PM (20 children)
The utility is that it gets large groups of people on the same ethical bandwagon very effectively. It has the ability to turn many tribes or individuals into a single tribal unit. If there is an actual deity involved or not is largely irrelevant to that, only the externalization of moral authority.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:00PM (17 children)
How may we reconcile this tribal externalization of moral authority with libertarianism?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:14PM (1 child)
Free weed?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:13PM
Sure, for a loose value of "free". I mean grow all you like but you still have to pay for their care with either your time, money, or a combination of the two. TANSTAAFJoint.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:16PM (14 children)
Individual choice on whether to subscribe to said collective morality or not. Libertarianism doesn't demand the absence of any form of collectivism, it only demands that membership be voluntary.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:22PM (13 children)
Yes, that is what libertarianism is. How does this reconcile with moral authoritarianism?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @08:09PM (12 children)
Don't ask me, yo. I roll my own beliefs because I can't abide another entity saying what is right and wrong for me when I'm the one who has to live with my actions. Plenty of authoritarian morality systems have some good stuff in them taken as advice but I'm not willing to outsource responsibility for my decisions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @09:45PM (11 children)
So in other words, you reject moral authoritarianism and therefore your Christianity is reduced to a vague belief that the Anunnaki are up there, somewhere, guiding humanity, and only if their ideas survive critical examination. Well, that is good at least, because the tribal authoritarian thing leads to tragedy.
The method of religion as tribal organization along with god is deprecated by the advance of philosophy and ethics. The moral authority of god is rejected by the natural intellectual evolution of humans. Such things happen, such with the bourgeois revolutions that toppled feudalism. The priesthood is deprecated by the advance of liberal education, made possible by capitalism. And yet there is no reason to assume that we have reached the End of History.
Therefore, it is time to remove god from LTS and advance to the next major version.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:00PM (10 children)
I'm not a Christian. First words of the original story, yo. I'm just providing a noob primer for folks who choose to use that tool so that they'll not make too much of a nuisance of themselves.
Oh, and we're nowhere near doing away with religion. You won't see that happen in your lifetime, I guarantee it. It'd be pretty entertaining to watch you go try convincing the Muslims that Allah isn't real and Mohamed was just some asshole who wanted everyone to do what he said though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:22PM (9 children)
My bad. And yes, the Mooooooslims must also be convinced of the reasons we deprecated god. The best way we can do this is to integrate them into the capitalist permanent revolution both by welcoming them into our developed capitalist countries and by ceasing imperialism so that bourgeois revolutions can proceed naturally. Capitalism allows for the advancement from feudal culture, dominated by god and his priests and kings, to capitalist culture, where god has no real place.
Of course, the killing blow to god only comes during the next advancement after capitalism it seems.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:45PM (8 children)
Two things:
First off, you should work on losing the stick up your butt about religion. It's not hurting you for someone to believe in a higher power of whatever sort but getting your panties in a twist over it is objectively making you less content with life. That's sound advice not an insult, by the way.
Second, we're nowhere near the point where humanity can behave like decent human beings without religion. We're doing good if we can behave like decent human beings best three out of five with religion.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @11:13PM (1 child)
If humans are not now ready to live without god as capitalism nears the end of its curve of development, when?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @06:05AM
Who knows? Maybe never. I'm observing not setting rules.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @02:45AM (5 children)
we're nowhere near the point where humanity can behave like decent human beings without religion.
Ah, cool, so it's an evolutionary thing. I mean, we know we don't need religion, but biological instinct precludes comprehension of that, for now. Maybe in a few hundred thousand years or so we might get over it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @06:06AM (4 children)
Possibly. I'm pretty sure it won't happen in my lifetime though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 24 2019, @05:47PM (3 children)
Well, it could, if everybody decides to make the choice. It's up to all of us. We can actually direct evolution of the species, in a conscious manner. Something that makes us unique in nature.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @05:34AM (2 children)
You're overestimating humanity by several orders of magnitude. Most people don't spend very much time per day as what would even qualify as sentient. Ditch all the time they spend being entertained and every decision that's made by emotion or instinct (possibly rationalized after the fact) and there's really not much left over. Sentience requires thought before decision and that's a lot of work.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @09:17PM (1 child)
You're overestimating humanity by several orders of magnitude.
No, you simply fail to understand that, as humans, we do everything by choice. All blame passing is bullshit, an excuse to say somebody else did it. Fuck that!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:40PM
We're not talking blame. We're talking the ability of humanity to think things out first and make rational choices. Individuals can occasionally achieve this but even the most self-aware of us don't manage it nearly as often as we'd like or even as often as we believe; as a group we're not even close to that enlightened.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Saturday February 23 2019, @11:31PM (1 child)
Unfortunately it can just as easily get large groups of people on the same 'wrong' bandwagon: killing fellow people, slowing scientific discoveries drinking Kool-aid....
I have no problem with religion and DO see it trying to convey the message of 'be good': my problem is with organized religion being about power more than morals and ethics. Absolute power...leads to molested children.
I am not religious, even with everything going on with my wife (she was just diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (funny how Google follows your history: type in 'chronic' and the rest is suggested)), but I do, generally agree with what the 10 commandments/Bible says (except Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka SHOULD be killed...horribly...there is THAT much evidence against them).
I am not a good person, generally, because of a fear of a diety. I am good, generally, because that's who I want to be and how I want to be seen...a legacy, in a way. That's who I am.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 24 2019, @06:09AM
Ditto, for the most part. Even epically fucked up power structures running a communal religion lower internal strife compared to a lack of it though. Suicide cults may be retarded as fuck but everyone's on the same page and working together towards some common goal.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:50PM (6 children)
Wrong. Backwards. Without religion, there would be ethics. Religion exists to justify unethical behavior.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:09PM
Religion exists to justify unethical behavior.
Religion exists to organize an army. "Ethics" is irrelevant.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:23PM (4 children)
An absurd claim from someone posing as a Greek philosopher. There is very strong evidence that religion predates homo sapiens. There is no such evidence I'm aware of for collective ethics beyond "stop that or I will hit you quite hard with my club".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:43PM (3 children)
Interesting! What do you mean by "religion" that predates Homo Sapiens? And what makes you think it was not ethics, instead? And, "posing? Oh ye of little faith!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:52PM (2 children)
Primitive superstitions mostly. Primates are apparently hard wired to attribute to "Fuckin Magic" any phenomenon they don't understand. I think it's the narrative minds we have. We need to be able to tell a story to ourselves about why $that just happened. There's really no telling how far back in the evolutionary chain the first family or tribal deity was venerated.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 26 2019, @12:00AM (1 child)
Argumentum ad Ignorantium , Old Buzz.
And,
leave the Insane Clown Posse out of this.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:45PM
Argumentum ab Rectum, Ari.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.