oats_son
13hr ago
It's probably not something I should make a habit of, but I feel compelled to give some support to Israel here. Israel didn't steal any land any more than anyone else won or lost land before and after World War II, but the difference is the reaction to them has been way crazier because they planted themselves in the middle of a sea of extremists based around a nucleus of religious sites (geez, how many holy sites are Muslims entitled to? The Jews just have a few right there, right?). Much blood has been spilled because there was no postwar liberal consensus in the Middle East as there was in Europe. The postwar liberal consensus had to be created by Israel basically all by itself, with limited success, as the situation in Gaza shows. Israel was making some serious progress on a two-state thing, but that whole deal was killed by rampant terrorist attacks, and due to these sustained attacks, the Palestinians have never been farther from their own state. That's never what they wanted, anyway; they want everything, river to the sea.
Israelis are considered more valued by both sides. You can see this based on the prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel. Always, Israel releases hundreds or thousands of militants in exchange for a handful of their own soldiers or civilian hostages. Hamas is glad to accept these deals that bear the implication that one Israeli is worth thousands of Gazans, so I can't blame anyone for believing it's true. But disproportionate casualties have always been acceptable in war, which is what this is. Those civilian to militant casualty ratios are not even out of the ordinary for war. Massive assaults on civilians have also always been a decent cause for war, especially ones committed by the literal government of a territory.
If Israel is an ethnostate (it probably is), it's not a very good one. Do you think that Nazi Germany would accept having a populace composed of 20% Jews?
Normally, I find the idea of actual genocide to be pretty terrible. Ethnic groups and DNA and culture are fascinating to me, and to see something like that die entirely is a huge bummer. Gaza tests this value of mine. Never has a people been more problematic than them and never has a people been more determined to reject their lot in life. Basically their entire purpose nowadays is to take back every square inch of Israel, no matter how impossible that is, no matter how many people on their own side and on the enemy side are killed. Before the 20th century, they absolutely would never have been tolerated. They would have been, at the very least, brutally slapped around until a huge percentage of the population was dead and the rest was too weak and scared to retaliate. If this is not done, this conflict will likely never end. Even forcibly moving every Gazan out of the area probably would not fix the problem, because they are extremely intent on getting their territory back, and distance does not stop the likes of the Houthis and the Iranians either.
I am a little fascinated by the right wingers who do not like Israel. For them, it's generally a much more obvious case of antisemitism than it is for left wingers. My father introduced me to the fact that antisemitism is really, really old in Europe. For Christians, it makes a lot of sense; they were a very radically different group that lived in close proximity to them, considered sinners, forced into a universally disliked profession as bankers, and there is some basis for the idea that they killed Christ and called down a blood curse upon themselves. This, plus random grievances accumulated throughout the centuries just from tallying up every negative incident they could find. For the non-religious, I do not know why they would dislike Jews in particular. My best guess is conspiracy reasons related to Hollywood or perhaps certain Holocaust deniers. If anyone here is agnostic or atheist or otherwise not a Christian, and really doesn't like Jews, please let me know your reasons. I'm interested, scientifically. My father really liked Jews before his, uh, awakening, and he hated Muslims. Now he basically loves Gazans and hates Jews, while still mostly hating Muslims in Europe.
oats_son
17hr ago
Regarding culture war aspects of this: I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere. I have already seen some on reddit saying they'd rather that Iran have nukes than Israel because Israel has been the main aggressor in the region since its existence and Iran having nukes would help reign them in. I doubt we'll get huge rallies of people shouting "Free Iran!", though.
oats_son
22hr ago
I found out recently that Google Translate, when translating from English to Japanese, will translate "gooner" to "Arsenal fan", no matter the context. I know what you're really doing by being an Arsenal fan.
oats_son
2d ago
Others will have better things to say than me, but I think women like it when you're actually interested in them and eager to bed them. NoFap helps on that front. Any other benefits they claim, I would be pretty suspicious of.
oats_son
2d ago
That's what we started with, remember? No magic. So we are in agreement here.
No, that's actually not what we started with. Did you read this thread in its entirety? I'm not convinced we really disagree with each other, I was assuming you came in here in defense of Tenaz's writings.
Tenaz writes:
I don't believe prayer is guaranteed to achieve results--for that to happen I'd need a perfect understanding of who God is, rather than a pretty good one. I just think it raises the odds, basically proportional to how good my understanding of God is (and reality, too).
Furthermore, he writes regarding the probability of your lost dog coming back:
Human reasoning isn't perfect but I do think it's capable of overcoming this sort of error with enough study. The dog will probably come back eventually, so if you want to use [dog comes back] as your test of prayer then it probably needs to be focused on timing. How long does the dog normally take to come back? How long did it take to come back when you prayed for it? A few of my desired outcomes were this sort of test (though a bit less trivial).
And in this separate comment he linked:
Recently my (quite remote) ward was broadcasting stake conference. There were 3 2-hour sessions to be broadcast, including 2 which would contain highly-anticipated talks (sermons) from a church higher-up. Unfortunately, the broadcast wasn't working. So the wonderful members of my ward sat through 5 hours of screechy whines, the words of the talks only very rarely intelligible at all, and even then only for a second or two at a time. At this point there's only an hour left, everyone looks quite grumpy as they sit and bask in the sound of unholy microphone screeching, and I feel impressed to suggest that we pray for the sound quality to improve... ...So, the congregation thankfully went along with the suggestion, and the static immediately cleared up completely.
This is the magic I'm arguing against that I presumed you were arguing for. You think this is not correct, right? Does it make you an asshole who thinks people are stupid to disbelieve this and straight up tell him there was no correlation?
oats_son
2d ago
You make some great points, but not any that I don't already agree with. I fully admit that greater wellbeing and protection against addiction are great things and can reasonably be attributed to belief in God, prayer and everything else that goes with it.
Critically, @Tenaz's posts are going outside the scope of this and claiming that prayer can positively affect factors outside of your control, as long as you're praying for things that God wants. If he kept inside the scope you and FCfromSSC typically stay within when you talk about prayers being more about relationship with God, I would never have posted what I did.
I wish more people mentioned the tower of Siloam as you have. The Christians I have talked to have not noted its significance, and they don't usually have very well reasoned responses to my problems of evil, which goes against what @AnonymousActuary says when he writes
though it seems like you are just hoping bringing up the problem of evil will somehow magically turn someone atheist again like they've never thought about it in their life?
Many of them have not thought about it.
oats_son
2d ago
Are you sure? If somebody prays and becomes a better person, father, wife, child, boss - it is only a selfish benefit or does it have a wider effect?
Of course that's a good thing, and if prayer gets you there, that's great. But it is no magic bullet. I don't really like your magic serum analogy for the same reason. While there are a lot of addicts who find salvation to be the way out, I have to imagine there are many pounds of dead bodies who tried it and found it lacking. And, furthermore, Tenaz's post goes outside of the scope you're setting. He tested more than just addictions, and presumably, material outcomes that didn't depend on himself.
What if the serum only worked for gay people? You should just go gay, right? That's impossible for a lot of people. What if it required you to believe in astrology?
You are assuming winning studies is the only goal anybody could reasonably pursue. For some people, it could be true. But it's certainly not true for all people. There's a lot to life beyond winning studies.
Tell that to the Creation Research Society, bashing their heads against an Old Earth over and over again, presumably for preaching the faith to skeptics who have heard the evolution lie. If they throw themselves at that complicated problem of radiometric dating and rock layers over and over again, they really ought to be throwing themselves at the much easier problem of verifying prayer. It would be super cheap and testable anywhere, compared to copious use of labs for dating of various samples. If it was verifiable, anyway.
Obviously some winning studies would be exceptionally helpful to the faith. Most Christians are tired of losing the battle against science by now.
If people claim there's a thing that works for them, you certainly can disbelieve them and think they are just stupid. But at some point you'd have to ask yourself - what exactly you're getting from believing so many people are stupid? Is that working well for you?
I can't say I get anything out of knowing that prayer has no material effect on outcomes outside of yourself. But sometimes, the truth hurts.
I'm not going to say anyone's stupid for believing it. Many very smart people believe much more plainly false things. I'm probably going to say something if I know it's plainly false, especially on a forum dedicated to searching for the truth. Or as close as you can get to anything called truth.
oats_son
2d ago
Obviously prayer does do something, if you're counting spiritual feeling or literal mouth movements as "something". If you read this far down in the thread, hopefully you remember the original claim causing me to post at all, but since you asked what I meant by "does anything":
But what really brought me back was simple, undeniable, tangible evidence. I decided to try to pray for something (freedom from an addiction I had) and the result was spectacular, far beyond anything I'd have expected. I then set about more formally testing prayer and related things and found consistent, similar results.
It's just plain false that there is undeniable tangible evidence to anyone except the prayermaker themselves. If it wasn't, all kinds of religious organizations would be falling all over themselves commissioning study after study.
I used to pray, and not as a magic ATM, but there's only so much placebo can do for you once you know it's placebo.
oats_son
3d ago
I do appreciate your sincerity, and your honorable attempts to explain the gospel remind me of the valiant and zealous missionaries of the past, as shown in movies like Black Robe (1991). Growing up, I thought Mormons were really weird, and you are another in a long string of non-weird Mormons who challenge that stereotype. I thought the same about Catholics, as well, until @SubstantialFrivolity made a post giving quite the steelman of the branch. Like him, you are perfectly willing to wade into the difficult stuff.
With that out of the way. My wife read what I wrote here and told me (in nicer words) that I was being excessively callous and autistic. Sorry about that. What I wrote was not even correct, really--God doesn't ever want his children to commit suicide. But he'll also never make a choice on our behalf. His ability to step in without harming our agency is ultimately pretty limited.
No problem. To be honest, you did articulate something that it is not polite to think, yet I think many people think it privately to themselves - that some unpleasant lives would be better off if they were not alive. It is humanitarian to strive for the best for everyone, and that they continue living for as long as possible, but in many cases, the thought springs up anyway. If we actually take that thought seriously, we get some scary hypotheticals, like "at what point is it acceptable for lifelong chronic depressives to just give up and step into traffic", or "maybe you should kill your kids so they don't get a chance to lose the faith as adults". And if it was okay for her, as an abuse victim who was awfully messed up herself, to take her own life, then that has bad implications for other people who struggle with chronic depression or bad childhoods. I shouldn't have gotten mad at you, though, especially since you realized your mistake later anyway.
I hope she will be okay too, but an entire childhood of fundamentalism telling me that people who commit suicide go to hell and unbelievers go to hell cannot be washed away by the same fundamentalists backstepping with "God is perfectly just, so you can trust Him to make the right decision". You didn't say that, but there are so very many interpretations of the Bible that many people who genuinely were looking to God to give them the interpretation came to it. All of them genuinely feel their way is the right one and can cite scripture and cite their own internal spiritual uplifting upon praying. For Mormonism, the problem is even more acute, as @TracingWoodgrains found out through testing Moroni's Promise on an open minded Christian.
For these reasons, and more, I am afraid my faith is permanently disrupted. I don't think it's a good thing, so I appreciate your defense anyway.
oats_son
3d ago
I'm not asking anyone to become atheist. But the idea that prayer does anything is chafing enough to me to cause me to comment. As I said elsewhere, I think religion is healthy, though I struggle to accept the good with the bad.
oats_son
3d ago
I know Trace messes around with AIs a lot just to see what the machine can say, especially after some training on progressive wrongthink. I'd guess for most people, it's just a tool to idly wonder about the world. I wondered idly if there were tsunamis before life existed on Earth, and that question hadn't been directly answered, but Google Gemini took some evidence about possible tsunami deposits from a certain time period to deduce that they did exist. There are lots of weird questions I have that I can freely ask an AI about, if it isn't too edgy.
As for talking to it in sincerity, I think that's the realm of children and actual weirdos who form cults or kill themselves based on a machine. Wasn't there an article about a man who developed a God complex from talking to one? Otherwise, maybe if you're super bored? I would never myself, of course...
oats_son
3d ago
To be clear, I am the one that made that point that ackshually AI is good. The original artist made no such claim, just a complaint that graphic design requirements for musicians make no sense and nowadays has the added benefit of occasionally getting you into AI shitstorms.
oats_son
3d ago
One of my favorite bands just took a bunch of AI accusations, I guess, and he wrote a somewhat-pissed Substack post. That lead singer doesn't often step into culture war stuff, but this was close enough, I think:
Unfortunately, as soon as we released the other day, people started accusing us of using an AI image. Now, I want to be clear, this is not an AI generated image, and I have the layered design files to prove it, but I get that it has certain features which can easily make someone think it is, particularly the similar-ish smiling faces. And everyone is talking about AI nowadays, and so they’re all primed to think it is AI. Seriously: Fair enough, I’m not blaming anyone. But I’ve seen the design templates, it really isn’t.
and goes on to say that fighting AI art in this way is fruitless:
And so, there is no “solution” to the problem of AI imagery other than the one the Luddites came up with over two centuries ago: smash the machines. Until we can actually smash the machines (literally or semi-literally), the AI will just get better and better until no-one can tell. This day is fast coming. So, I think we should either start figuring out how to smash the machines or accept our fate. There is no middle way. And so, with all due respect for those honorable people who just hate AI and want real art to prevail, calling out artists because you think you can “tell” is just another one of those doomed middle ways.
I regret that the culture war is poking random people in a new way in the last couple of years, and I can't help but cynically laugh at it. Not to mention how short-sighted it is. In that post, the lead singer details how much of a pain it is to do graphic design for music, and videos, and other art, and he hates it. Imagine if you could get a machine to do it? Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
I'm not sure I have any real thesis for this post, but I haven't been very good at directing discussion for my own posts, so, reply to this anecdote in any way you see fit. I thought it was interesting, and a little sad.
oats_son
4d ago
I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if @FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.
But it's an old question: the problem of evil, the problem of random things inherent in nature hurting you for no reason. Why are there so many things that are absolutely awful, caused by immutable nature, and are only explainable to us modern humans? To ancient humans, it seemed functionally equivalent to being smitten by God to get tuberculosis and die slowly. They likely thought that prayer had something to do with getting bubonic plague and dying, similar to Tenaz's idea that prayer causes better outcomes. The Aztecs thought that sacrificing people was statistically likely to keep the world from ending. Perhaps they sacrificed something and felt some sign from God twitch within themselves. But they couldn't have been further from the truth. Do you think we modern humans are more pious than ancient humans? Not a chance.
I have seen from some young earth creationists the idea that it's because humans are fallen ever since the Tree of Knowledge was eaten from by Adam and Eve. But that only works in a young earth model of the world. If there is no young earth, there was no Adam and Eve, and we are just animals, and the world was always fucked up, right from the start, before any human was involved at all.
In this case, I'd say a lot of that probability mass should be taken from the theory that being alive was actually good for her--that what you were praying for is actually what you would have wanted with full knowledge of all the details.
Ha. Haha.
I have sometimes thought that someone being dead means that you will never worry about them again, because their story has ended; they are right where you left them, and you will always know where they are, what their status is.
Offense taken, all the same. What an absolutely awful way to view life. I suppose everyone who is dead is better off dead, otherwise they wouldn't be dead, right? Not to mention the conclusion that perhaps the suicidal ought to take their own lives since their earthly ones suck so bad.
Regardless, I wish you the best in your theories, though I will continue to doubt them.
oats_son
4d ago
Let's say that the study really did prove that prayer works.
Okay. What kind of wording was used during the prayer? How many people prayed for the subject? Did they pray a long, individual prayer, a short, individual prayer, or multiple prayers throughout the days? Does length of time spent praying increase the statistical likeliness that the prayer works? Do acts of faith (fasting, attending worship, displaying faith artwork) improve the outcome? Does Biblical conduct (charity, honoring the Sabbath, honoring one's parents) improve the outcome? Does the intensity of the prayer (praying for one's child recovering from cancer as opposed to praying for one's stubbed toe to stop hurting) affect the outcome? Are people in the faith more likely to have a support group that helps them relieve stress?
Do you see that there are an impossible amount of factors involved in such a study? I guarantee the study was not so rigorous as to specifically probe every single aspect that I've listed here. Even if you asked them, you wouldn't get straight answers. People forget, people don't understand their own minds or why they think certain things or do certain acts.
It's really not hard to do, as I did, a "controlled" study of the efficacy of prayer.
This is the same problem we ran into last week with the gender dysphoria thing. It's impossible to look inside someone's mind. Do you tally your successes to failures? For how long? Are they correlated at all with the other upswings of your life?
In my youth, I thought that when I was worried sick about my dog, calling for it to come back over and over, praying desperately for it to come back, that it was certainly a miracle when it did, in fact, come back. The problem is that there is no evidence for this whatsoever. There is no way to run two exactly matching sets of reality, one where I prayed that my dog came back, and one where I did not pray that my dog came back. For such a trivial matter, it is easy to say that my calling had more effect than prayer. What about for not-so-trivial matters? The feeling that a miracle happened would be even greater, but it would have no more basis than my dog anecdote. I felt spiritually uplifted by that event, just as I guarantee a girl who mistakenly thought she was a boy would feel great relief at wearing boys' clothing and being called by a masculine name. But feelings are not proof of anything. We are not scientific beings. We are animals, a big ball of emotions, tightly wound at times.
I can tell you I prayed for a troubled girl once every night, and despite my devotion, despite pledging I would never ask for anything more besides if this wish was granted, she ended up shooting herself due to chronic abuse that I had no idea about. It was after some years of sustained nightly praying that her soul did not go to Hell that I realized the utter stupidity of such a venture.
oats_son
4d ago
If you really think that this is something that works empirically, it should be easy to design some studies that properly prove it. Has anyone done it? Or maybe there are too many confounding factors like true belief? If you fail to pray for something and it happens anyway, did God do it?
I'm perfectly happy to let Christians have their faith. I think it's healthy. But I really can't stand these kinds of outrageous claims about how prayer really works when it's been pretty clear that it does not work at all for years. If God only grants you specific, insignificant, entirely-taking-place-in-the-mental-realm prayers, can you say it's that useful, especially if something like stoicism grants you similar results? Is God pleased by secular stoicism? If we compared prayers made to God to prayers made to stoicism, what would the results look like?
oats_son
4d ago
It's the idea that absolutely awful things can happen to you for reasons outside of your control at any time for many multitudes of reasons that were decided by seemingly nobody.
oats_son
4d ago
The fact that prayer is what brought you back is really strange to me. Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works? What about other statistical evidence, like people who live on coasts that have earthquakes tend to die more to tsunamis? Completely area-based, unless you make the argument that people who live on coasts are more sinful and thus encounter the wrath of God more often. How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out? Knowing that statistics has incredible predictive power is enough to dissuade me that prayer does anything at all.
oats_son
4d ago
Myth TFL had some physics that made the multiplayer fun and broken, yes. The fetch lightning propelling the dwarf bombs sounds like a lot of people did it. Unfortunately, it is not present in Myth II. Generally, you have to keep the AoE guys away from the melee guys, yes. You frequently see melee dudes mopping up other melee dudes though.
oats_son
4d ago
I think you should try Myth II: Soulblighter. It's a real-time tactics game where the multiplayer really shows how it can shine with regards to troop placement and management. I think the multiplayer community eventually settled on the best formation for melee being all of them packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, though.
oats_son
7d ago
It makes sense to me that different things framed differently can get more or less popular at different rates. With the amount of media coverage being dedicated to transgenders, it is likely more normie-coded than wearing assless leather out in public, giving cover to anyone undertaking the transgender path. I'd argue a huge part of the discourse is in trying to present an obviously sexual thing as not sexual at all. The way it's presented is "transgenders are just normal people like you and me trying to navigate their mental illness (even though dysphoria isn't actually a requirement in the public eye anymore), so most restrictions are hateful." I think that kind of framing would have a big impact on uptake of any paraphilia, or any trend at all, like T-shirt wearing or membership in a gun club or motorcycling.
oats_son
7d ago
I don't think naraburns meant to say that transgender is the hot new thing for crossdressing enthusiasts, just that crossdressing is one of many sexuality related reasons for doing it. If you're a woman who got abused and doesn't want to be seen as a woman anymore, transitioning into a man is one way to do it, and that's still related to sexuality.
oats_son
8d ago
Well, then! I guess those are more achievable than they sounded. Now I guess it's up to whether you actually have enough free time and willpower to do them all. If you have 8 hours and don't spend much time cooking/eating dinner or on hygiene or on other pursuits, then probably possible. If you have 4 hours after work and after your PhD efforts, and you have those other pursuits to contend with, maybe not. I can't tell you what you should value more, though to be honest, reading this site and others are a huge sink on my time, personally, so cutting those out would give me a huge boost to doing more stuff without having to cut much important. Anyway, you can do it!
This state of affairs reminds me of Kyle Rittenhouse a bit. One guy shooting three other guys? He has to be in the wrong, right? He's so violent. Well, actually, he's only violent because everyone around him is forcing him to be, and they're actually the unreasonable ones. But a lot of people disagree, some of them partly because they don't see the unreasonable ones as so unreasonable.
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