sun
1yr ago
That's not how I think of blame. You can't accuse an NPC of anything by definition, they're not in control of themselves (by definition). If that results in the pejorative use collapsing... I guess think of another pejorative? We have pejoratives for players who don't play in the way one considers "correct" or "true".
sun
1yr ago
So what, just because the song got popular the people here were wrong to dislike it?
sun
1yr ago
Indeed, I could almost believe you're actually read the book.
1984 is the Harry Potter and MCU of the dissident right.
sun
1yr ago
A self-aware person wouldn't be an NPC by definition, no? They're just a PC who isn't roleplaying.
sun
1yr ago
How do you distinguish the ultimate playable character from a DMPC, a vehicle with no real personality that only exists to put the plot on whatever rails the owner of the game wants at the moment?
sun
1yr ago
It's better for a 30-year-old man to have been working shitty, dangerous jobs for $5/hour cash under the table than to have never had a job.
If he can live on the land without ever participating in the exchange of goods and services, no it's not.
sun
1yr ago
You can play the "but what if an 11/10 asked them" game in your head, but the fact is that there are plenty of gay men who are indeed exclusively gay.
sun
1yr ago
No offence, but that just sounds like received aesthetic indoctrination. Western culture has been historically low on tattoos, probably since Leviticus, which itself likely spawned from local hygienic concerns, like not eating pork. Overall we see that people have been using their body as a canvas since time immemorial. It can look trashy and it can look good (and even, shockingly, better than the unmodded version).
sun
1yr ago
I would not take Russian public insinuations at what is or isn't existential to them at face value.
sun
1yr ago
We've had a recent example of what attempts at "zero X" look like with zero covid. Notably, it looks like that people who aim for zero crime and people who aim for zero covid are different sets of people.
sun
1yr ago
When we increase cop power to the extent that they can enforce 0 purse thefts, are you so certain that this power won't be used to enforce other things you might disagree with?
sun
1yr ago
It's not enough that the silver spoons have to do it - they also have to lack the ability to segregate themselves to cushier-than-average deployments.
sun
1yr ago
However, people obviously do not become authentic bar regulars instantly upon hitting drinking age. So when do you start?
sun
1yr ago
For there to be exploration you need something interesting to find, otherwise why send people to Mars? For them to fuck around and waste expensive to ship supplies?
sun
1yr ago
there is no judgement apart from social standard and self-guilt, which is inferior to judgment from the perfect being.
There is no real judgment from the perfect being here, though. What we're looking at is anticipated judgment from an imagined perfect being, which is not the real thing.
At this point you might as well skip the middleman of convincing yourself that there is a God and he will judge you even though he does love you because he sacrificed himself to himself and still remained alive etc etc... There is too much doublethink overhead to be reliable. Speaking of athletes, they go for every advantage they can get away with and I haven't ever heard of religion being recommended as doping. Instead what gets emphasized is Willpower. Internal motivation and internal judgement. As long as you're hacking your reward function, why bother building up fragile constructions of divinity rather than hardcode "do good thing = good"?
Contrary to the Bible hiding from God is a lot easier than hiding from yourself, and judgment is quite immediate instead of being promised ~60 years later.
sun
1yr ago
I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something.
Not only that, but also your theist is not doing nearly as much thinking as you demand from a "thinking atheist". You describe a simplistic (and only slightly less contradictory) version of Christianity. That's not a belief born from dwelling on the nature of God and trying to arrive at the truth assuming there's God - it's just motivationmaxxing, no more enlightened than an "unthinking" atheist who sticks his fingers into his ears and goes "la la la, can't hear you, secular morality is worth following because it just is!".
sun
1yr ago
No, I do not grant that those are similar types of belief at all. There is no "objective" outside of humanity's scope, therefore by definition it matters. Once the last observer in the universe dies, the universe does not exist and does not matter for all intents and purposes, whether it lasts for a year or an infinity afterwards.
Human flourishing is a real and evident thing, choosing to believe in its importance is an opinion. Choosing to believe into an external source of objectivity, especially deliberately, is self-brainwashing.
The rest is just "you simply haven't prayed hard enough" goalpost moving, not to mention that a perfectly loving being cannot by definition be imagined by an imperfect mind. I suggest you try harder to be a thinking atheist who doesn't need nor want a God to lord over and judge him, and if you can't, well, you're just not thinking hard enough.
sun
1yr ago
I have motivation and purpose. Theists still have crises of faith, so it doesn't look like much of an improvement. Besides, brainwashing oneself into a belief that I'm glaringly aware is false doesn't sounds like something a "thinking" atheist does.
God as Father and Lord also does not motivate me in particular. If I had reason to believe he existed, I would likely feel smothered and shackled by the existence of such a being. The most Loving and Just a God can be is to effectively not exist and free up the celestial throne for the uplifted humanity.
Of course, you can continue to call "finding value in things out of your reach" faith and "if God is real, it better be me" religion if you want. I find that really tortured and useless for the purpose of explaining power, though.
And the 2500 years of poetry and stories on God is beneficial simply because now you have libraries upon libraries to bolster your teleology. Whereas thinking atheists just have Dawkins, Hitchens, maybe some Sam Harris, Rick and Morty…
Most literature isn't purely Godly the way you've picked out the counterexamples to be "purely atheistic". I reject the attempt of Christianity to claim full credit for all those 2500 years.
sun
1yr ago
What is this benefit of faith that believing in a Just and Loving God maximizes?
sun
1yr ago
A “thinking atheist” would not simply do what others tell him. That’s my point.
Why not, if he finds that he prefers the world where he followed the rules over the one where he didn't? You're just substituting an edgelord psychopath for a "thinking atheist". But even psychopaths understand the value of good habits and good reputation, especially thinking ones. And while religion did take over as the substrate of prosocial memes for a long time, I see no reason to view it as the origin.
Suppose I really do believe that prosociality as I see it will lead to maximal flourishment of humanity, including, yes, more pleasure.
If you want to count everything as part of the story, you're free to. Doesn't make it an important story. Certainly not "bigger than the Indians landing on the moon".
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