aaa
1d ago
Yes, the Dark Ages were real. They were not "and this lasted up to the 14th/16th century until 18th century Enlightenment/19th century Rationalism/20th century mass Atheism came along to liberate us!"
Eh, on some metrics it did last until the 14/15 hundreds. Some of the graphs do look shockingly similar to the "hole" meme, tbh. The "enlightenment came to liberate us" part however is much more complicated.
It does matter who invents the name and the concept, or do you indeed agree with this stunning example of fact-based representation?
That meme has a lot of problems but who invented it is not one of them.
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
Yes, original invented by Christians Easter. It is based around the Jewish festival of Passover
Well, there you go. Original much like sonichu.
aaa
1d ago
Oh, you wanna get into "When were the Dark Ages, what were the Dark Ages, and why did the Independent Free-Thinking Ain't Nobody Gonna Tell Me What To Believe set wholeheartedly and uncritically accept Protestant polemic propaganda?" Because let's fight about history while we're at it!
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-dark-ages https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2024584895847121066 https://x.com/GuthmannR/status/1741216526760374312 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
The dark ages are real, the name is merited and who came up with it first doesn't matter.
Throw in Easter
The original, invented by christians, do not steal, holiday of easter?
aaa
2d ago
Those things exist as rhetorical devices. See these people were shown miracles and still doubted, how foolish of them, what retards. The people around you who don't believe? Retarded like them. Don't pay attention to the trick and it works.
aaa
2d ago
The fine-tuning argument is one of the best counter-apologetical arguments against God’s existence because a God has no need of anything of the things you’ve described.
You are presupposing an omnipotent god because you are thinking about this as if it was an argument for the christian god. But if you think more in general, it works a lot better as an argument for a more limited kind of god that is specifically interested in creating matter.
But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.
This is a better argument against it. The fine tuning argument talks about probabilities but really is more about aesthetics.
aaa
2d ago
A very interesting website is the amusingly acerbic History for Atheists website, https://historyforatheists.com/ .
I think that Tim O'Neill is actually a smug idiot and there's a lot of ideas that he's promulgating on that website that are worse than the new atheist positions he's trying to debunk, like the dark ages ages weren't dark, the date of christmas, the christianity of various traditions of christmas and easter, mythicism itself and even flat earth.
most of the public New Atheist figures were not just deeply ignorant (and indifferent) about history, they also tended to be deeply ignorant about philosophy and subfields of philosophy like ethics and epistomology
I think you are mistaking rejection for ignorance. I have a lot of sympathy for the position that philosophy is just as useless, if not more so, than religion.
There is a irony here, too, which is that part of what made New Atheism so incredibly vulnerable to Wokism (with Atheism+, etc) was exactly this deep ignorance about history, philosophy, ethics, and so on, and misunderstanding that the older, much bigger history of Enlightenment Atheism (and Deism) and its role in things like the French Revolution, the rise of Communism, 20th Century Communist revolutions, and so on
If you actually read some of the history of atheism you will find that in the west there are actually two atheisms. You can conceptualize both as different forms of christian heresy, if you like. The first one is theological it says "we examined your theology and found it discordant with the evidence". The other one is moral, it says "we examined your theology and found we can be more pious without you" hence woke.
Those two types of atheism keep getting rediscovered throughout history and they are often allied but reached a breaking point now that religion has become almost completely irrelevant in the west and the ideological differences can come to the surface. For example:
- On immigration. Theological atheism: "can we make it work?", moral: "love your neighbour"
- On rape. Theological: "is this rape accusation real?", moral: "believe the victim"
- On transrights. Theological: "you don't have a woman's soul because you don't have a soul", moral: "you are literally killing them by questioning it"
etc etc
aaa
2d ago
My 2 cents: as much as it can be fun to talk about the existence of god in the abstract, it is actually useless. The word god has very little meaning divorced from a particular religion. Philosophers and theologians try to give it meaning, usually in the direction of some kind of neo-platonic thing a zero on some kind of axis (of change, of contingency, of morality, etc).
I don't find those arguments convincing but even if I conceded, it would change nothing in my life. And it wouldn't even make a difference in the life of the apologist, because it's just the first step in some grand apologetics project where every subsequent step is harder. And in a way it already happened, everyone (including me) is now convinced that the big bang happened. If you squint you'll find that there's basically no difference between the big bang and one of those neoplatonic gods.
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling
Not for me, I find all discussion of consciusness increasingly repulsive. I'd have to go with the anthropic principle, altough the ontological alrgument can be made to be formally correct so it gets a special mention.
aaa
2d ago
The unmoved mover argument goes like "everything that moves is moved by something, this can not be an infinite chain, therefore there must be an unmoved mover, which is god". If god moved it would fall within the category of things that move and the argument would be contradictory, i.e. there can be things that move without being moved by anything.
aaa
2d ago
My schizo theory is that generations of being divided into castes made indians not see themselves as a unified one: "it doesn't matter that those people are shitting on the streets, that in that village they bathe in cow excrement, they are not like me, it doesn't reflect poorly on me that they do. In fact how dare you imply that it does #notallindians".
aaa
4d ago
I wouldn't know where to begin. Jesus moves and changes yet he's the god that is not supposed to do either of those things, if he's omniscient and omnipotent he knows from the start that he'd die on the cross and set up the universe precisely so that it would happen and why would it have any meaning in that case and why would it be a sin that the powers that be and Judas went along with the plan just as he wished would happen.
Although it isn't even just Jesus, basically everything in the Bible, except maybe chapter one of Genesis, works best if you imagine God as a version of Zeus with more superpowers rather than the neoplatonic "thing" in classical theology.
aaa
4d ago
It's hard to square the story of Jesus as God incarnate with any part of classical theology (unmoved mover, etc)
aaa
6d ago
The red blue button experiment is about morality, IMO morality only truly exists for practical, non-abstract, circumstances and the fact that people argue for a difference what people say and what they would do reinforces this conviction.
aaa
6d ago
I don't think the problem is recursive thinking here. Newcomb's problem is fairly simple to analyze recursively, I think the problem is just that people strongly dislike the idea that freewill doesn't exist, so much that they are recalcitrant to even accept it as a premise to a thought experiment. Unsurprising since if it weren't so there would be no discussion of freewill, since it obviously can not exist.
aaa
10d ago
I think that the wokes did see gamergate as a victory for a long time: circled the wagons around journalistic malpractice and bent over a whole multibillion dollar industry to their aesthetic tastes.
However long term it's proving to be a costly victory, with western gaming development eating flop after flop, all of which get hang around the head of activists as woke failures: The Saints Row reboot, Forspoken, Concord, Star Wars Outlaws, Highguard, Dragon Age: Veilguard, etc.
The fallout from Gamergate is like the cultural version of South Africa, left victory with disastrous consequences that they would rather not talk about anymore and needs a constant stream of academic excusecrafting (it's the microtransactions, it's executive interference, it's online naysayers, it's competition from tiktok...)
aaa
10d ago
- Revolutions tend to cluster around a charismatic leader, this leader then naturally becomes a dictator. This is true of non-communist revolutions as well, think Franco, Pinochet, Mussolini and Hitler, for example.
- Communism is a centralized system, there needs to be something that makes all the decisions that would be taken by the distributed system of price signals of capitalism. This something has a lot of power and naturally tends to become and stay a dictatorship.
As for repression, it's inevitable in a dictatorship. If you are unhappy with the work of the dictator the only way to express it is through rebellion and rebellions need to be dealt with with repression. That's just how it goes.
Typically the pattern that you see is that the first dictator is overall a high quality individual that does a decent job governing and sees the need for repression decline over his reign. But every subsequent successor is a lower quality individual that's only good at playing court games, does a worse job governing and needs to apply further repression. So my recommendation to dictators is to make sure it ends with them, but that's easier to do in a capitalistic system than in communism. Communism however still has the AI god emperor option, it just has never been tried.
aaa
12d ago
I think it's just that dictatorships have a tendency to suppress dissent and communism for a series of reasons has a tendency to become a dictatorship.
aaa
13d ago
I have to admit I find theodicies appealing to skeptical theism abhorrent, and personally I've never managed to get over the problem of evil.
God has already created a world of infinite joy in heaven, a little bit of finite suffering on this side is mathematically irrelevant. What you should be worrying about is not newborns dying (they got off easy), but hell.
aaa
14d ago
I mean, how do you know God didn't ensoul Claude? At some point a long time ago all matter was inanimate and now there are lots of animals and also humans, so at some point God started putting souls into matter, he doesn't have to notify us that he started putting souls into different kinds of matter and the bible doesn't tell you which kinds qualify for it, definitely it's silent on attention heads.
I don't think adding more ill-defined words to the discussion is going to help you solve it.
aaa
14d ago
As a layman, I just want to put it out there: Anti AI consciousness people, you haven't lost me, but I wish you were making better arguments. Every time I hear about qualia my eyes start to glaze over. Unfalsifiable philosophical constructs and arbitrary opinion on where they might "exist" are not the kind of reassurance I'm looking for when machines are getting this convincing.
I understand you so much. I've been blasted by so many stupid arguments from philosphers about consciousness that the moment I hear the word I feel myself get agitated, in the fight or flight sense, at the prospect of being blasted by a bunch of literal nonsense. The other day I was listening to the Alex O'Connor podcast about it and I had to turn it off after about 20 minutes because I couldn't take it anymore.
Perhaps we should only worry about what the consciousness question entails, and address those things directly. As far as I can tell the only entailment is if a thing has moral value or not. IMO they don't because the way their memory works is too different, and too janky, compared to the way human, or animal memory works.
I will refer you to my previous messages.
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