Don't get me wrong, insulting people in any medium is fun, but it's less fun in real life because
- you're limited to insulting only those in physical proximity, and the logistics of traveling around and repeating insults for greater insult coverage are a hassle,
- your insults are easily traced to your identity, opening the possibility of social or legal consequences,
- and, unlike the Internet, physical harm is an option in real life, which is a very bad consequence!
That's why, for assholes or political dissidents alike, the Internet is so wonderful!
like censorship doesn't happen in the usa. remember all that media coverage sanders got when he was packing stadiums while Clinton could barely fill a highschool auditorium? me neither.
how many mass shootings china had last year? oh wait
how about all those bombs dropped daily in the middle east? ah ooos sorry, america again.
That’s not censorship. Censorship is when the government restricts speech. The government doesn’t control American news media.
With that said I have no disagreement about the hypocrisy of USA bombing foreign countries.
As for shooting, how would we know if this happened in China since the government does control the media there. They could suppress anything they reflected negatively.
consider that the internet is the new imperialism of the west. people are so quick to wag the finger at china but no one stops to think that they are looking iut for themselves. Companies like google and facebook promote western values and they do it subversively: whats the old Billy G quote? Integrate, assimilate, dominate, elimate or some such?
this article is just another western propaganda piece trying to paint China as this overbearing big brother entity (which I will admit is a very compelling narrative to western individualists).
thanks for sharing. I watched it, but remain unconvinced. I'm a little disappointed, because I was hoping for a compelling or novel take on the issue. That worldview just looks so narrow and reductive to me. The god of Abraham exists, but only because people think he does. He's real in the same way our thoughts are real. I see this as a far more profound position because god becomes a manifestation of his believers' collective consciousness (for better or worse).
The electrons bouncing between the neon molecules in a bar lamp and our electrochemical responses occurring in our neuron synapses orders of magnitude closer to the notion of god than than the rituals and ceremonies religions use to worship him, in my opinion.
This is why I see Christianity as hubris. to claim atheism requires faith is to say that religion asserts it has absolute knowledge (the doublespeak goes both ways). If god is this all powerful, omnipresent creator of all space and time, its overwhelmingly likely that we wouldn't be able to comprehend him. We barely comprehend the <literally anything> and I'm expected to believe ancient peoples could comprehend the nature of gods existence? Nay, instead they willed him into existence, their actions an expression of that will.
didn't mean for this post to be so long. I guess I'm just a little unimpressed by this preacher who states we're not trying hard enough to understand each other then strawman's the arguments for atheism.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I have some to share in response, and I don't disagree that some arguments against atheism are strawman arguments.
But I do think that calling it reductive, while at the same time explaining all of life in mechanical, chemical and electrical terms seems contradictory.
One theory I've read on Quora somewhere, which for me is intriguing, is one that was used to explain why there might not be any evidence of alien life.
The theory, if I'm remembering correctly (and am too busy ATM to go looking for it) is that alien life forms may have evolved to a size and lifespan so far beyond our own that they may move at a pace that seems glacial for us, and hence we don't recognize it as intelligent or even as a single entity.
This also reminds me of the description of the largest or oldest organism in the world (I believe) in a North American forest (again, too busy to look up the details) and it's been posited that it may have slowly migrated across the North American continent over the span of human history, which on a different time scale, would look as an intelligent being moving around.
For me, this line of thinking could explain apparent lack of evidence for God (though I think there is compelling philosophical reasoning for at least a theistic position).
Of course, this will fall within your own presuppositions for what it might indicate.
But I think that in the same way that God is outside of the physical realm, you wouldn't really find concrete evidence of Him in the physical world.
That requires a leap of faith that many are uncomfortable making, but I have found that there are plenty of atheists and theists who are comfortable making leaps of faith on all sorts of matters (like if their spouses or children love them, or believing in aliens as the creators of life without bothering to ask where the aliens came from).
I don't have a problem with faith, but I hope my mind never becomes so rigid as to not explore other options, or so flexible I never decide to believe in anything.
Regarding your view about the video, one thing I appreciated about the book that I don't remember seeing in the video, is the acknowledgement that God doesn't have anything that one can definitively declare as absolute proof, but rather something that is open enough for you to come to your own conclusion on.
I do think atheism requires faith, as it states a position that is ultimately unverifiable.
But again, I don't have a problem with faith. I think strong atheists (those who proselytize the absence of deity) operate far more on faith than those who are merely skeptical.
Do I think that ancients could comprehend an omniscient, all powerful creator fully?
Of course not. As you say, we barely comprehend anything.
But do I think that ancients had the ability to reason, understand when something was a miracle and when it wasn't? Of course.
For instance, when Mary showed up pregnant, everyone's default reaction wasn't to assume that the God of the universe had impregnated a 14 year old girl with the Messiah that would redeem humanity.
Instead, everyone, including Joseph, went to the logical conclusion, and assumed she'd stepped out on him.
I think there's often a modern day bias against ancient thinkers because they didn't have all of the information we have today.
But I don't believe that instantly makes them wrong.
I don't say any of this in an attempt to intellectually convince you of anything, but rather to explain the areas of my thought that allow me to reason my way to belief in God (though there's more that would go to specifics).
And, btw, thank you for watching the video. It's a long time to commit to watching something where you're not sure you'd get anything out of it, and it sounds like there wasn't much new there for you to buy into, but I appreciate the time you committed to understanding my viewpoint :)
that's what happens to people when they feel like they're competing in a closing-off market. want to see a similar level of people clawing at each other's throats, being petty & antagonistic, competing for scraps? look no further than the music industry, especially the amateur scenes. more beef than an industrial cattle farm.
you have a severe case of hindsight bias. nms has perhaps the most outspoken hatred of any game launch ever. heck how long ago did it come out? Year+? and you're still whining about it.
