b_chocolatey @b_chocolatey@qoto.org

@lack As for myself, I would say that I am a post-modernist, in the sense that I have two different definitions of “god” which seem to mostly overlap. If you ever have seen #MattWalsh do his troll routine of “what is a woman?” I would say that my own belief system can boil down to “What is a god?” Trolls #Christians and #atheists equally. #woman #women #adulthumanfemale …

@lack As for myself, I would say that I am a post-modernist, in the sense that I have two different definitions of “god” which seem to mostly overlap. If you ever have seen #MattWalsh do his troll routine of “what is a woman?” I would say that my own belief system can boil down to “What is a god?” Trolls #Christians and #atheists equally. #woman #women #adulthumanfemale …

@lack I would say that you are half-agnostic, or soft atheist, in that case.

@MtnStateNomad @lack the woke religion likes to mobilize sympathetic churches leaders and religious organizations towards their preferred in-group whenever possible. They gain nothing by making a principled, internally consistent, unpopular argument for no-god-because-dinosaurs. The Current Thing has already moved on

@MtnStateNomad @lack that may be true to an extant, but the Current Thing seems to have moved on from atheism to what can better be called the #woke #religion. There is only so much mischief you can do with atheist NPCs. “Hate whitey, loot Walmart, stop using normal words, cut your dick off” doesn’t quite fly with engineering grads, for the most part. Atheist true-believers from the upper class actually like math, logical debate, freedom of speech, and object permanence

@wagesj45 And, the fact that they didn’t believe in the same supernatural being suggests that atheism/materialism seemed equally implausible to non-overlapping civilizations separated by geography, culture and language

@wagesj45 Come to think of it, the very first #Christian was also punished, by death, for apostasy. That didn’t prevent #Christianity from emerging as the prevailing culture

@wagesj45 2. the punishment for apostasy was also death in seventeenth-century #France, and twentieth century #China. Why was there never an #atheistic tribe before that time? Surely they, too, would have punished apostasy with death.

@wagesj45 1. The very point I was trying to make earlier was that the sharpest #scientific minds of the current age are absolutely pitiful compared to their 25000 BCE equivalent. Surely somebody would have “discovered” #atheism relatively early on, but belief in the paranormal and supernatural has been the norm among the #literate classes since the invention of #writing.

@lack it seems that I have more in common with a squirrel or a lizard than I do with the Charles Babbage mechanical adding machine. The squirrel has Life in it, which it received from its lineage and ancestors, just like I have life from my ancestors. And Life has existed in an un-interrupted chain, since, well, the dawn of time! Before that, even! Who knows! Maybe this elder sage knows, he seems to have something witty to say, every time he sniffs that flower

@lack It’s easy to imagine oneself as an invisible, airy force-field looking out of one’s eyes and moving one’s legs. It is very difficult to imagine one’s self as the sum total of electrified eye-cells and brain-cells and leg-cells. Otherwise I would be no different than an alarm clock, or an internal combustion engine - and I am a person. I have feelings.

@lack “it’s god unless you can prove it’s not” because, well, how would you define god - except as an intelligence, a personality, that exists before and independent of the natural world? Before there was a God, there were gods. I live in my body, I move it around like a vehicle, grandma used to live in her body, grandma’s vehicle broke down, she no longer sits in her vehicle. This is the default way of seeing the world.