That’s about its only useful contribution.

The church has friendship with every nation that will have them. I believe that they are spineless cowards but I get that from their point of view this allows them to be able to help their people inside the country and continue to have influence and continuity after the fascist government fails.

The church has learned to put its own existence over everything else. An instinct that has clearly paid off, however spineless it may be.

I mean they are the original globalists and Jesus was literally a communist so…. I don’t know, they might be right. The church just doesn’t like to telegraph it too much.

All psychology is.

Not saying it isn’t useful before a psych major jumps on me. But the entire field is basically explaining how to cope with a society that is hostile to human nature.

It’s a very bad faith (heh) argument to compare god to a mythological creature. I’m not arguing that the abrahamic god is real or that Zeus et al are real. I’m saying that as the thing that encompasses everything that exists, the universe, could be a god of sorts. Or the God if you want.

The argument is that atheists believe so much that god does not exist and become so hostile to the notion of religion itself that it behaves as a religion and becomes like a religion itself.

Perhaps the fault in communication here is that atheist mostly define gods as intelligent and willful entitities when there is nothing that suggests that other than the deities that we invented in our own image. But to say, conclusively that god does not exist, meaning that we know that the universe is without a doubt not a transcendental entity is just faith that god does not exist because you have no proof of that nor any way to prove it without looking at it from outside of it.

I think the problem is that most people think of god as non material. In my view m whatever you want to call god is a material thing and you are touching it right now. And there’s absolutely no conclusive evidence to prove that this isn’t true and most thought exercises will have you reach the conclusion that there is a high likelihood that we are indeed part of a bigger thing that could be defined as god.

I guess a big divide here is how you define god, for most people it’s this intelligent and willful being. But that’s just what a human, who fashions gods in his image, thinks a god is.

For me intelligence is not a requirement for supremacy. I believe the universe itself for all intents and purposes is god. It has no will and no intelligence but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

I’m not talking about it what i am, I am saying that atheist have as much proof of there being no supreme being as they have of there being one. There’s really no way to prove anything yet until we find a way (if there is one) to look at our universe from outside of it. We could literally be an atom in the balls of a weird fourth dimensional creature for all we know.

But their belief in the non existence of a god and their outright hostility towards anything that might suggest some kind of divinity makes them act as any other zealot would. So atheism works a lot like a religion, which was my argument.

This isn’t as smart of an argument as you think it is.

Well atheism is not just denying the abrahamic god but the idea of any supreme being at all.

Ok internet tough guy.

It does require faith when you’re disbelieving something that has as much proof of its existence as of its non existence. There is no conclusive proof against the existence of a supreme being, in fact like I said in another comment there is physical evidence of one if you observe the universe, which is that all of existence collective is god.

If you zoom into a human being there are millions of microorganisms and bacteria that inhabit us, and at that level of zoom they all look like they inhabit their own little planets, zoom in more and you start to see the very molecules that make us up. But you zoom out and see a person, zoom out and see a planet, then a galaxy, then clusters and so on. Who’s to say that if you looked at the universe from outside of it, it would not be the very body of another living organism?

I am an atheist so far as I can say that there is no intelligent deity that snapped its fingers and created the universe. But I cannot definitely conclude that the universe itself might not be the living body of a god. An atheist™️ would say that there is nothing transcendental about the universe itself, despite the proof of their very eyes that it is transcendental. If you’re not in awe at the sheer magnitude of the universe then maybe you’re too self centered to realize how truly insignificant we are in the greater universe.

An atheist would say that a god needs some kind of intelligence, but does the lack of intelligence and will makes a being less of a being? What do we make of plants and bacteria then?

I know the biblical god isn’t real. I know the Ancient pantheons are also not real. I don’t know that there is no such thing as a supreme transcendent being. But I think there’s enough prove to make an argument that there might be one.

Right, it bears pointing out that atheism is in itself a faith, or at least its adherents treat it very much like one to the point that it might as well be one. For me it is the faith in the non-existance of a supreme being or deity.

Compassion should not be reserved only for those that are good, but for everyone, and I think especially for those that are bad and may not realize that they are bad. Right and wrong are not black and white things and it is very difficult to be objective about one’s own situation, and realizing that hey “I’m doing wrong”. In this case I would argue that for Fetterman, he might not even yet realize how irrational his behavior is, maybe even the people around him have not fully realized it. So instead of trying to eat him alive, you can point it out, explain how his actions are harming people and kindly ask that he step down instead of acting rabid about it. Berating him is not gonna make him want to step down more than being kind about it so you might as well be kind, unless this is about realizing some kind of gratification for you.

Well this couldn’t be further from my truth but maybe other people are like that. I dunno. I also don’t actually hate kids, I thought my comment was evidently hyperbolic bu I guess not.

I’m being hyperbolic, if the last bit about growing people out of a vat didn’t make that clear enough.

Listen, I just hate kids man. It’s probably my most consistent thing since I was a kid. Fuck kids. We should just be growing adults out of a vat, it’s 2025 for fucks sake.

Everybody, including him, knows it’s a shitfest. That’s the joke. As much as you might dislike him, most people agree that he’s funny. That’s what makes him so appealing to “everyday” Americans (whatever that fucking means).

Not too poor to buy things, only poor enough that you’ll consider it twice before buying another plastic piece of shit you don’t need off of Amazon. It’s absolutely messed up that the ONLY reason we can consume as we do is because we moved all the pollution and exploitation to where we can’t see it, so that we can consume with a clean conscience. I don’t know how you can defend this shit, because I can’t. If your country’s economy depends on the exploitation of the people of another’s that just colonialism disguised as free market trade.

China was an example because it’s the most well known one. Second I never said that the implementation was good itself, I just think the concept of universal tariffs is very much solid especially in terms of ethics (which Trump somewhat frames it that way, of course his intentions are both bad and not well thought out so it’s only superficial ) with the caveat that it results in short term destruction of wealth which depending on the point of view is not so bad. I at least don’t think the levels of speculation in our markets is good and anything that pops that bubble is a good thing.

I think it’s the one thing everyone can agree on.

But you have to be aware that it depends greatly on your point of view of how economies should work. Do the dynamics of economics exist simply to push up the GDP or do they exist to create abundance and prosperity that everyone can take part off? The current economic system as it works simply exists to push up the GDP increasingly through financial alchemy, speculative assets and debt. Neoliberals will hold that this is good, but I’m not convinced because my eyes and ears tell me different. This is not a sustainable economic system, even if it looks good on the surface. Or more specifically it is not a sustainable economic system for the middle class. It is schrodingers economy in a way, good and bad existing in superposition.

This is why China keeps gaining ground, they plan for the long term and have high tolerance for short term pain. Their corporations don’t sweat a bad year, look at Huawei for example. An American company I think would rather sell of its assets and give every exec a gajillion dollars before going though the trouble of rebuilding themselves from being banned from one of their largest markets. Our corps only plan on a quarter by quarter basis, our government on 4 year terms, and entire organizations change plans on a bad day at the stock market. It’s frankly ridiculous how short sighted we’ve become, and our economy really is emblematic of that short sightedness.