You ever heard of these?

It would be stellar if you formatted your posts differently. I see a wall of text and instantly dismiss it.

Oh come on, it's perfectly readable. I've read articles with longer paragraphs than that.

Religion itself gives people this idea of an absolute good and an absolute bad, and I think our entire concept of justice down to the core of our existence is majorly screwed up, like it’s completely backwards. We treat people as if they’re accountable for their actions, but I’d say in a world where people don’t have free will, we’re only as accountable as our circumstances brought us up. Like, if you’re a good person, you were just lucky enough to have the nature and nurture, biological factors and environmental factors, to make you into a good person.

Some people have a problem with the no free will argument but I see it as extremely liberating, because it would mean that instead of hating people for the way that they behave, it would mean that we understand each other and understand that no matter what a person does, there is a reason that they act that way and a way that they became that way. I think that if everyone thought that way then it could completely eliminate prejudices in our society. Yet, all of us operate on the opposite, the sort of concept that we are free and we are responsible for our actions, and we hold people accountable to an arbitrary moral system of bad and good.

I was just thinking, that while it may be true that some people are coded to always feel bad and have unfortunate biology, I think that it's also important to point out that in some cases there is such a thing as "learned helplessness", which is where a person feels that since there's no way to ever improve, that there's no reason to ever even try to improve. As someone who has a method of improvement through philosophy and self reflection (which I admit is an extremely long and arduous process which takes years to come to effect, and a lot of times isn't even successful), I just feel that you should be really careful with how you treat psychiatric drugs unless you really need them.

I really feel that in the society we live in, a lot of what creates depression for people is societal caused. So, I often find it ironic to try to treat things like depression with drugs, if, and that's a big if, their depression is caused by society and not caused by internal factors that have to do with an imbalance in their brain chemicals. Now, i'm not saying I am in any way qualified to diagnose a person as having one of these two causes I've outlined for having depression, but I'm just saying it seems obvious that if there's different possible explanations for why a person may be depressed, then it's possible that there could be some people where the causes aren't addressed, and only the symptoms. That's something I think about a lot when it comes to pharmaceuticals and drugs, I am just very cynical and skeptical about the whole thing.

Quote from: Loaf on December 04, 2016, 04:40:29 PM

Quote from: Dietrich Six on December 04, 2016, 03:40:53 PM

Fuck, you faggots are annoying.

Hi, please don't use the word faggot, it's meaning is inseparable from the insult to gay people as a core part of their identity. Thank you.

YouTube

I was using the word correctly, faggot.

Please watch the video I linked. Thank you.

I think post irony has seeped into my identity somewhat, because I have become so self aware of what is ironic and mockable about myself, sometimes I even have some poe's law seeping into the mix too, where I act intentionally ironic in a way that people can't even tell is sincere or not. I think though, that once you've reached that level of memes that you start to play on a whole other level of interaction, and thus new memes are born.

Really though, wouldn't it be better if society in general was always post ironic? Then you could always assume irony over sincerity, and any irony which is actually ironic (perhaps what can be called new sincerity), could also be looked at as merely an extention of the meme. Because really what I am proposing is a new society, in which we all become entrenched in one massive meme.

Fuck, you faggots are annoying.

Hi, please don't use the word faggot, it's meaning is inseparable from the insult to gay people as a core part of their identity. Thank you.

I’ve been beginning to notice the lack of foreign policy that any of the news sources I read talk about. The only news source that I have read that has a whole lot of news about foreign affairs is the economist, who seem to have pretty good articles.

I think news in general is more about drama than hard hitting journalism. That’s especially true of the american media who payed so much attention to scandals and controversies and payed 0 attention to issues like climate change or gay rights, and covered hillary’s emails something like 5 times more than all of her other policies combined.

I know that there’s a lot of factors that go into why hillary clinton lost the election, and a person like donald trump could even win the whitehouse, but I think that one of these factors is the apathy towards real hard hitting journalism in our culture and more focus on drama.

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That could also be what drives us all so far apart, because intellectuals should be able to find common ground on positions in spite of disagreements. That’s how it should work, people should be able to come to agreements on issues and good ideas should prevail from honest discourse. I’d like to know more about what it is intrinsically about our culture that drives people apart based on our political and religious affiliations.

It’s so easy to say that someone you disagree with is a piece of shit, and without a doubt I find great comfort in calling people I disagree with pieces of shit in politics all the time. However, today when I was calling someone who was questioning whether trump really lacks the experience to hold public office a moron, someone else pointed out to me that calling people morons doesn’t actually help and we’re already a deeply divided country and I realize I probably am just being counter productive and driving a wedge deeper between the divide.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people have an identity that they stick to, and a lot of what has to do with people becoming entrenched in their own political echo chamber has to do with confirmation bias.  I’ve heard about studies that show that the brain will even become more entrenched in what it believes when presented with facts that contradict it’s beliefs.

Perhaps on some fundamental level, we’re all afflicted with this political binary mentality, I know that I certainly have bias against republican news sources. That may be a good thing, because I tend to have a red flag go off in my head if something sounds right wing to me, but inversely the people who have a bias against liberal ideas essential have the same system of confirmation bias inside of their head. So in a way I think that we actually share a lot of similarities with others in that way, I think it’s very hard to be innocent, or perhaps even claim that someone else is guilty, if this is the way that our brains work.

The problem remains though, that it’s incredibly hard to find a common ground when people on either side don’t want to hear each other’s arguments. I will say though, that it seems that republicans seem more biased towards lies and lack skepticism than liberals who seem to have more of a bias against lies, for some reason. I see this all the time with people accepting any news about blacks or lgbt people being inferior, or denying evidence for climate change and evolution

I, unfortunately, can’t seem to come up with any solution at the moment to how people in general could see eye to eye on more things. In my mind - and a lot of people will disagree - liberals are more open minded than republicans on pretty much everything. I don’t think it’s hard to tell a liberal some facts and change their mind about a subject if new facts about it come to light. It is, however, hard to get a person entrenched in conservative politics to accept view points that contradict their own. This is apparent to me when I see the level of pseudo science and lies and acceptance of liars like donald trump coming from conservatives.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that the problem is going to go away as long as there’s media outlets propagating fake news like fox and breitbart.

It's not about equality, it's about aesthetics. I don't wanna look at an ugly guy. Guys tend to be uglier when wearing girly clothes

That's not even true, there's plenty of guys that look really hot in girls clothes.

When women are like "I'm non binary". It's like, bitch fuck you. Not because I don't think you're non-binary, but because guys have a lot more trouble saying they're non binary because of the stigmas associated with feminization of males. So you think you can just go around saying "omg I feel really masculine today!" Like, that's okay if you're actually trans and you're transitioning into a male, then you actually have an excuse. But it's really insulting when you're just like "omg I JUST FEEL SO MASCULINE TODAY, BUT HMM TODAY I FEEL FEMININE". Fuck you, bitch. If a guy acted like that he would have a lot harder time, with women everyone just thinks you're cool and a tomboy.

Choked on their own pretension and sanctimony.

They were the smartest people on bnet.

I really miss them.

I really miss her, she was amazing.

Quote from: Loaf on December 01, 2016, 06:15:06 PM

Quote from: SecondClass on December 01, 2016, 05:55:19 PM

Quote from: Loaf on December 01, 2016, 05:33:48 PM

Quote from: SecondClass on December 01, 2016, 04:03:58 PM

Loaf's post seems edgy and I always hesitate to talk about atheism on the internet, but still.

When I look at a mountain range filled with trees, animals, and rivers, look up and see a huge cosmic generator giving them life, and having it all live in perfect harmony - I think the fact that it just happened through billions of years of astronomical progress is so much more beautiful and awe inspiring than if a magic humanlike god willed it all into existence.

I agree with the part about nature, but my point isn't edgy. We need to make these people stop holding their stupid beliefs somehow, because the world would be much better off without it.

For one, supernatural and religious thinkers have a hard time understanding the natural world. That's why in their heads something like religion makes sense to them. If you take away magical thinking and replace it with skepticism and desire for evidence, you have a much smarter civilization. You also have a civilization who doesn't base their hope for the world on the afterlife, instead of focusing on more productive things like how they can actually look at the life they have as beautiful and worth while. And you take away people's prejudices that arise from when religion divides people, you stop having all these stupid problems with the government where they try to implement laws about social issues, parents stop telling their kids that masturbation sends them to hell which makes them feel ashamed of themselves for doing it, it stops making people who are gay feel ashamed because people keep telling them that there's something wrong with them. It helps the world in so many ways, you can't even imagine how much of a cancer that religion is, it literally makes everything worse.

So yes, we need to make these people stop believing in god. No, that's not edgy because a world without religion would be an infinitely better place.

No, we don't. Nonexistence and death are terrifying concepts, and people cope with that in different ways. Who are you to impose your mindset on others, to force them to believe something they don't want to? You're no better than the religious zealots who want to force everyone to be Christian.

It doesn't matter who's right or how different society would be without religion. What matters is personal choice. If someone wants to believe in something and they're not imposing it on others, then you have no grounds to object.

You bring up the Christians who take it too far and impose their beliefs on their children, that's obviously wrong. But that's a problem with the individual, not the religion. Plenty of religious parents let their children choose what to believe in for themselves.

Religious people can't defend their stupid beliefs with reason which is why people get upset when you insult belief in god. That pisses me off, I don't care whether or not you think I should just but out of people's lives. I will be clear to as many people as I can, I think religion is stupid and I think having supernatural beliefs is fucked in the head. And, not that you need to hear this secondclass, but other people do; can we get it through our heads that if you believe in the supernatural that's just the same as believing in god? I fucking hate it when morons have to say that "I don't believe in god or like religions, but I feel there's a presence". Okay, so you're superstitious either way, you just rebranded it, it's literally no different. You're just trading one silly belief for the other.

I don't see how you can look at all the problems that religion imposes on the world and just think, yeah that's okay, all I need to do is focus on the "bad stuff" that people do in the name of religion and hopefully everyone will just start deciding to be a "good christian". No! The problem is systemic, and it's people not having critical thinking skills in the first place. You need to make everyone knock off the stupid fucking game and start acting like an advanced species of ape, because honestly I feel like, you know how when you're playing a video game against a cpu enemy, but it just doesn't feel the same as playing against a real human being? It lacks that human quality? That's how it feels talking to people in general who believe in god, I just realize that they have an incomplete understanding of the world around me and it's just as boring (not to mention the damage the cause the world) talking to them as it is to play against a video game cpu.

Guess what - none of that matters. Your logic is the same as "black people commit more crimes than whites, the solution is no more blacks!" Religion carries problems on a social level, but that doesn't justify forcing everyone to abandon their beliefs. We can't run around imposing our world views on everyone, because everyone is different and needs different things.

There's probably very little I can do to change the beliefs of everyone in the world, or even people in a small vicinity around me, but hopefully in the future with the spread of technology and the possibility of artificial enhancement of our brains through technology, or living in a society that has become so prosperous through scientific advancements that the education level and prosperity of the population rises so much that people no longer need religion, then we can finally live in a world without it. Until then, I guess I'm just going to have to keep making posts to spite these fucking imbeciles then, aren't I, because I'm just a bad person. Although, deep down I have good intentions.

and yes, when I say religion, I mean being stupid enough to believe in the supernatural, all you "hurr durr I'm not religion I hate religion, but I believe in a presence of a higher being."