I really like fanfiction. Reading and writing it. Nobody in my life knows and I plan on keeping it that way.
Pretty much everything from AI to Atheism to Lemmy to whatever interesting things I’m mulling over because I’m stuck disabled, living with crazy religious nutters family that have no fundamental logic skills.
Holy shit bro, hang in there - any chance of dating (maybe other disabled?) people and getting the hell out of there, or something like that? There are flats disabled people share, where they help each other, too, right?
What’s the next end of the world year?
Fundamental logic skills also imply that atheism is a belief “God doesn’t exist!”
As an upgrade, try agnosticism: “Do we have good evidence that God exists?” So far, the only argument in favor of atheism I know of is the Occam’s Razor (those manifestations of God could also be explained in other, possibly simpler ways).
“Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby”
I like “in the same way bald is a hair color”
Evidence based existence is what I believe in personally. Speculation and fantasy can be useful in some parts of life, but for me, imaginary friends are a mental health disorder in anyone claiming they are real.
In general, I support your stance. The devil is in the details, though, so to speak. You can only get so much evidece first-hand, and need to believe others about the rest. How do you distinguish fraudsters from honest bet mistaken people from people knowing the truth?
Logic and reasoning preferably with scientific evidence.
Sort of like how you can only get so much evidence for aliens or Bigfoot and you just have to trust the conspiracy theorists about the rest
How about you define your own belief system and let others choose their own words?
Right? Imagine telling someone claiming to be a Christian that “actually, Christian implies you believe (specific idea about Jesus my church goes for and yours doesn’t).”
That’d be a good way to get bloodied in a lot of places
Atheism is a lack of belief, not a belief in a lack
What would you call a belief in a lack?
Gnostic atheism, as opposed to agnostic atheism. Atheism as a label doesn’t imply one or the other, it’s simply a lack of belief in a god.
No they don’t and agnosticism isn’t an upgrade, it’s just sitting on the fence.
Most athiests are agnostic to some degree and vice versa.
The burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim.
Agnostic atheist: Doesn’t believe in any gods, claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable
Gnostic atheist: Doesn’t believe in any gods, claims to know no gods exist
Agnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable
Gnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims to know that those god(s) exist
I think all four types of people exist in decent numbers, but personally I, as an agnostic atheist, think either version of agnosticism is the only logically sound position. Gnosticism just feels disingenuous to me. Unfortunately I get the feeling that Christianity in the US is slipping further and further towards gnostic theism, and with that comes very dogmatic and oppressive rhetoric and actions.
As an atheist who would fully accept the existence of a deity if any form of rigorous proof was provided, these boxes are dumb.
Not really dumb and not really so different from how you describe yourself.
I identify as an agnostic atheist. I don’t think it is possible to prove a deity exists, but I’m fully open to the prospect of being wrong and as with anything else in science, should new evidence/data somehow come along and prove that there is some kind of deity/creator/what have you, I would look at it and potentially change my mind.
I don’t think it is possible to prove a deity exists, but I’m fully open to the prospect of being wrong.
Sounds like straight up atheism to me…
It’s agnostic atheism. I don’t believe one exists, but I also admit I don’t know for sure.
Gnostic atheism is only unsound if you insist we make absolute statements like 2 != 1 instead of speaking in absolutes as shorthand for probabilities that tend towards insignificance which is literally how people think and communicate outside of math. Attempts to approach philosophy like math are generally nonsense because our understand is far too underdeveloped for that to be anything but cargo cult antics.
I disagree with the person you are replying to using the word “upgrade”, but also with your characterization of agnosticism as “just sitting on the fence”. It’s a coherent belief in its own right, not simply a refusal to choose between other options.
Now that you mention it, I’m not entirely convinced it is a fully coherent belief in its own right, more of a lack of wanting to enter the debate or a subcategory of atheism.
Shall we try it with unicorns? Unicorn believer says they saw a unicorn.
Atheist viewpoint would say something along the lines of “To persuade me they exist I’d need to see one in the flesh or at the very least a full anatomical breakdown of how their magical properties work with corroboration from other unicorn enthusiasts.”
The agnostic standpoint is what exactly? “We can’t know whether unicorns exist or not so there’s no point discussing it.”?
As someone who leans agnostic, I would say this is a strawman argument. Unicorns and religions/gods are not related.
How does one “lean” agnostic?
It’s not a strawman argument, I’ll let you pick any imaginary creature you please.
I would say “there’s no point in arguing about it if neither of you can prove your position. If it is unprovable then I don’t care if unicorns exist or not. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It doesn’t affect me. I won’t waste mental bandwidth thinking about it or discussing it further.”
Mind if I take some of your income to fund my unicorn sanctuary instead of improving tangible public services?
atheism is a belief “God doesn’t exist!”
The only people who think this are theists. Gnostic atheists and agnostic atheists are both atheists.
Here’s another way to look at it, then. By popular definition, an agnostic person believes that there is no ontological proof for the existence or non-existence of God, or the divine. The agnostic person is thereby operating within the conceptual framework of religion. (A lot of agnostics in the Western world are agnostic specifically about the existence of the particular God of Abrahamic religions.)
On the other hand, atheists are simply not concerned with or do not recognize divinity, as a concept. In a way, it’s like how nobody holds an affirmative belief that Spiderman does not exist as a real human, because superheroes are categorically fictional, and it’s not even ontologically possible.
Umm, I’m Spider-Man agnostic, actually. There’s still time for 2099 to prove canonical.
The statement that god doesn’t exist can be best described as dismissal of a class of theories asserted without evidence and thus dismissed without any. People don’t exhaustively examine the universe they examine enough of it to make theories and draw increasingly strong conclusions. Pretending there is no difference between asserting for no reason something is true AGAINST mountains of actual evidence like asserting your particular religions deity is real and drawing strong theories based on reasonable analysis is disingenuous. You didn’t examine every chimney to conclude santa isn’t real and I didn’t examine every iota of the natural world to conclude it doesn’t have a creator. .
D,E,&I. I work with and am generally surrounded by a bunch of conservative MAGA fucks.
Literally last week my team coach said to us that anyone who got the jab deserves to die. What a fucking idiot.
Anyone who says others “deserve to die” needs to be removed from society. That kind of mindset is dangerous, bordering on threatening.
Average day in a red state
I would not be able to resist the urge to ask him directly if he thinks I deserve to die
What’s D,E&I?
Sometimes I find myself mourning the person I used to be. I experienced something traumatic in 2018 that changed my entire personality and now suffer from Bipolar II.
High quality fresh mozzarella sliced thinly into delicate slivers like sashimi, dipped in high quality traditional aged Japanese soy sauce. Eaten with chopsticks of course, similar to conventional sashimi.
I’ve done a fair share of fine dining and make some very intricate conventional dishes but this weird combo just kind of to gets me. I’ve never mentioned this to anybody as to not disqualify myself as the “chef guy” but I can’t help but like it.
Both my brother and my brother-in-law are professional chefs and they each eat the weirdest nonsense on their own. It’s like their palettes have to be so refined at work that they need to throw the wildest combos of flavors together at home to feel like they’re eating something different.
So if anything I think this qualifies you as the “chef guy.”
No lie, that actually sounds kinda good and I want to try it.
It’s gotta be THIN, around 5mm or less. Frankly the thinner the better, it gives it a sort of luxurious melt in your mouth consistency (room temp too). For soy sauce I use Tsuru Bishio 4 year aged soy sauce. It’s like 40$ a bottle but it’s so strong and rich that I tend to use very little at a time (one bottle lasts me like 6 months).
Ok that sounds heavenly
One of my favorite snacks lately is tamari almonds and a slice of smoked provolone cheese.
Fuck, that sounds good. Gonna try it!
I need someone to know me really well before I let them know I watch anime, because a 30 year old dude who likes anime paints a certain picture
In your area perhaps. In mine it’s pretty common.
ASMR
I could never get ASMR. Like I understand it but it never triggers. Whispers, plastic crimples, etc. It finally happened to me. Completely by accident.
Backyard metal melting in forges.
The flame of a forge got me the goosepimples good.15 min in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgo4hH1WDyY
I was about to recommend bigstackd to you just to click the link and see it was one of his videos. I could watch that guy melt stuff all day
I went down the rabbit hole looking at people making their own hydro powered electric generators (from junkyard washing machine parts and some 3D printed parts) to people breaking down stuff and ended up at melting metal…
Wild ride to hit ASMR without planning to!!
ASMR just kinda means “pleasant tingling”, and videos with asmr in the title tend to just be “neutral stimuli that I hope will make you tingle pleasantly.” Mostly they’re indistinguishable from “oddly satisfying” videos with the addition of, like, sensual whispers, or something?
I wouldn’t be too surprised either way if metal melting in a forge wound up in either collection of asmr or oddly satisfying.
I’d prefer if my family and my coworkers don’t know my wife and I met at a bdsm event. I don’t hide it from friends though
I’ve been really into early Christianity / Biblical textual analysis. I found a priest I like on YouTube I really like and I’ve watched 100+ hours of lectures of his, plus a couple podcasts and audiobooks.
I’m not religious at all and kinda the stuff I like is the “huh, this is pretty obviously fake/contradictory, interesting nobody saw through this” stuff. It’s like anthropologically interesting.
Obviously a dominant religion, not like a fringe thing to know about, but nobody’s into these facts in just this way. Don’t want to talk about it to religious people, non-religious people don’t want to talk about it to me.
I read Zealot by Reza Aslan and I thought it was a very interesting look into historical Jesus and early Christianity. I’m likewise not a Christian (I grew up as one, but became cynical at around 12 years old), but I do find fascination in the religion.
Historical Jesus is really interesting to me and stuff like how John The Baptist…baptized historical Jesus into something. So probably, Jesus was an acolyte of John The Baptist who went off and founded his own, similar movement. But then early Christians didn’t like the implications of their main guy being a spinoff so these weird interpretations like John himself saying at the time ‘I don’t deserve to do this baptism, but I’m going to anyway for some reason and this other guy is the main guy and also in one gospel I’m Jesus’ cousin.’
And also then Jesus’ brother James the Just running the church after Jesus and there’s a non-canonocal gospel (Thomas I think) that says ‘James, for whom the Earth and Sky came into being’ or something like that. And Jude calls himself Jude, brother of James. But James is the brother of Jesus so probably he is also the brother of Jesus, but that isn’t the most relevant thing about Jude. So what an interesting alt-history you could write where Paul doesn’t exist and James’ church wins out and he’s…also co-God? Or Jesus gets demoted and they’re both just Mohammad-style brother prophets?
Oh boy. Here I go theorizin’ again.
Yeah there’s a lot to talk about. I think however that if Paul didn’t exist, Christianity would have remained a Jewish cult.
Paul was the Don Draper of the 1st century. He effectively took an illiterate desert people’s religion and molded it in such a way where it would be approachable to the gentile and educated Roman citizens.
He was a Greek Jew who understood the gentile world. And he made fantastic stories. Iirc in his earliest letter, which became one of the Bible books I don’t remember which, there was nothing about immaculate conception or the 3 day resurrection, or the 3 wise men, etc
But adding all that stuff adds to the legend and mythology and it helped really spread the religion.
I think in a lot of ways, Paul is the founder of Christianity. Of course, Jesus is important. He must have been a fascinating figure in his time. Pontius killed thousands of Jews a year, but we really only talk about one.
Religion fascinates me so much as well. It also thoroughly disgusts me because of how fucked up a lot of practitioners are. The history of it all is interesting AF tho
There are terrible people everywhere, they don’t need religion to make them that way. What really gets me is religions like WBC that do make all of their people over that terrible stereotype.
- Fanfics, too. I love fanfics exploring what-ifs of a work, and myself wrote two or three of those, but assumers immediately associate them with the lemons.
- Isekai. Same deal as fanfics, except with escapism instead of porn. (I’m a sucker for fantasy dammit.)
- Machine text generation. Yeah, I don’t want to be confused with a functionally illiterate tech bro.
Fantasy is so good at helping forget irl issues. I love it.
Escapism…
Started with anime. Then manga/manwha. Now I’m reading novels…
What I fap to. I’ll never hear the end of it and I’d like to have life be normal between faps.
Communism
This one right here. I mean people know that I am pretty left-leaning or whatever, but if my dad found out that I think socialism is actually a good idea, I think he’d react worse than when he found out I was trans.
I work in Florida for Raytheon and most of my coworkers likely have a photo of either Reagan or Trump above their fireplace. I don’t get to talk politics very often. My mom knows , but the rest of my family doesn’t. I get into yelling matches with my mom over politics all the time.
Nice try, FBI
Anime
I am incredibly picky with the anime I watch, so I don’t watch much of it. Thankfully I associate with people who also watch anime, so I don’t have to hide it lol
My problem is that the people I associate with that watch anime, watch anime that I don’t. It’s not a genre, it’s a medium, and there is not much common ground between Haibane Renmei and My Hero Academia
But yeah, it is nice to be able to have computer wallpapers and wall art without the people I know thinking I’m an /a/ style weeb
World of Warcraft: Classic.
People know that I play, but they do not know that it has consumed me. All that I do, I do to spend time existing as a dwarf.
Azeroth is home.
I’ve really been enjoying my time with wow classic. I started playing on a vanilla private server a couple of years before classic came. I’ve really enjoyed the journey through all the expansions again.
Just cleared gnomeregan yesterday in Sod. Good times.
Homestuck, Undertale, Hazbin Hotel, and all those popular pieces of media that get overshadowed by their shitty fandoms
I have so much more fun with most things just enjoying it and not engaging with the fan base at ALL.
Exactly
I knew about Hazbin, but the others are new to me. Thank you for the suggestions!
I feel like homestuck, at least, is hard to disentangle from its fandom just because of the level of outsourcing the author did.
I got into it blind and only learned about the fandom and the surrounding history after finishing it. It felt like reading a parallel story and it was actually pretty fun, but it only cemented my feeling of not wanting to be associated with them. I mean, the bucket. Just wow.
I never got too far into the fandom, and I’ve never really investigated it. I have no memory or knowledge of the bucket.
But I did enjoy looking at fan art and such whatnot, “trollsonas” and such, at least a bit. I got into the lore about as far as I do any
I recommend watching a youtube recap of the history of the fandom as it really helps contextualize the whole comic, and it is quite fun, as such an excentric comic attracted an equally excentric fanbase. There are plenty of fun and gross anecdotes. As for the bucket, you can watch for yourself, but let me warn you…
"spoiler"
It’s a bunch of people collectively spitting into a bucket in a restaurant
