domain:experimental-history.com
Crowstep
4m ago
Bor, if I lose my faith, I lose it completely. If I don't believe in God, Jesus, or the rest of it, there's no "well there's some buncha guys who went 'yes we agree with you that your former church was completely wrong about 90% of everything, or maybe 100% if we're one of the set that denies they were ever Christian at all in the first place, but this is the 10% we do agree is True and that you must and should believe', I guess I can switch to them" that will cajole me over to them. Because they didn't stumble across the True Original Gospels in a cave and read them for the first time, they broke away from the body which had handed on to them these things and which shaped them and which made the water in which they swam Christian.
If I become convinced "the entity that introduced the Gospel to me is all fake", why will I believe the "encounter with Jesus" is anything more than conditioning, brainwashing, self-deception, and some kind of cultural contamination where I convinced myself I had the 'burning in the bosom' to prove it all true? I'm not basing my faith on "well I like Gothic chasubles", dude. I'm basing it on "this is a truth-telling thing". If I don't believe it's truth-telling, I don't believe any shard of the wreckage is true. Why should I trust my warm fuzzy feelings about Jesus, when I can as easily find it in myself to have warm fuzzy feelings about Shiva or Buddha? Plenty of believers in those faiths have a personal relationship with the god, it's called bhakti. I am very fond of both Sun Wukong and Hanuman, that fondness has not convinced me to become a Daoist or Hindu.
HereAndGone
23m ago
Do you actually sympathize with the plight of a person who wants to change their name, but isn't eligible or can't be bothered to file for a $50 name change?
If they can't be bothered, why should I be bothered to address them by their new cool name? OP seems (and apologies if I'm misrepresenting them) to be saying "why can't I just get a driver's licence in my new name of Biggus Dickus, the Alabama law says a common law name is good enough, the mean ol' DMV wants a legal piece of ID stating this is my name and that's infringing on my freedoms".
Well yesterday I read a news report about a woman who faked her own death, claimed to be her own sister in order to do so, and did all this name changing stunt in order to avoid going to court over fraud charges. If this specimen could just rock up to the local tax office and go "Hi, my name which I am commonly known by is Susie Susan, new licence I can use as legal ID please", you think she'd avoid doing that?
The hard cases are "the people who want to change their name but aren't eligible", the reality is "some sex offender or fraudster" attempting to have multiple IDs in multiple names.
You don't have to argue practicality to me. I already did it, for all the reasons you name. I was only elaborating in reply to this comment asking why I said that what I did is “cowardly”.
Bending over and doing the wrong thing because it's “preferable” to me...
“Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other (‘defecting’).”
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
...doesn't magically make it the right thing.
Most people do not do the bare minimum of things that they are strictly required to do but the things that makes everything the most straightforwards
Suing the DMV would not be "strictly required", either, but if I were to win* it would "mak[e] everything [more] straightforwards" for the next guy who would then only have to fill out an Alabama DS-60 clone instead of waiting for a court order to get approved — so by your own logic, that seems like the right thing to do?
*As a boring tactical matter, I probably wouldn't anyway; I don't have any history of crimes involving moral turpitude, I do have a reasonably well-paying job, and I think my county offers hardship fee waivers for the court order even if I were bereft, so I'd be a pretty poor candidate plaintiff due to the question of standing... but that's just contingent.
Corvos
42m ago
The Chinese have managed it fine, in practice. Things the CCP don’t want to work don’t work, and neither do most VPNs. I’m sure it’s possible to bypass the firewall but I think it would be very difficult to do in an untraceable way.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
42m ago
There was a time just about when Burning Crusade came out that I played WoW. My god that game kept me out of trouble (albeit my soon-to-be wife despised that I played it.) I loved it. It's the only game I ever really got into, and I was well into my 30s at the time. I thought about doing the WoW Classic when it was released but I simply don't have the time now, as a husband/dad.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
47m ago
People are assholes. Also I haven't heard / seen the word "Jewess" in a long time.
Will it be “post-modern corrosion” or will it be time? Genghis Khan Is believed to (1) have caused the deaths of enough people to slightly alter climate, and (2) have been the most-prolific rapist of which we are aware. And, currently, there are a couple of restaurant chains named after him here in America.
I once saw an inflatable, bounce-house type slide made to look like the Titanic. Kids would slide down the tilted deck, onto a landing area made to look like the sea. Fifteen hundred people died in the actual tragedy.
There is typically a loosening of taboo once knowledge of horrible events passes out of living memory. Are those around WW2 going to be different?
(West is certainly, dementedly ahead of the curve, here.)
Guy might well have been ambitious, and I'm more "this is dumb" than truly outraged, but comparing "guy only pretended to be devout in order to get top job, now is pissed he was passed over and thinks he might as well have been a sinner because he never genuinely believed at all in the first place" to "guy makes joke that is obviously meant to be a joke about the Wars of Religion", is not comparing similar levels.
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