*pokemon battle music*

JUDGE casts Legal Action on MAN-WHO’S-ABOVE-THE-LAW!!

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It’s not very effective.

Relentlessly attacks the rights of subset of US citizens.

Criticized for ‘not resonating’.

“Yo Hittler, could you ease up on the whole murdering Jewish people thing? The rest of the globe isn’t really vibing with it.”

Because a moment’s or even human lifetime’s suffering is effectively nothing when compared to eternity. Show me someone who wouldn’t trade a hundred years of suffering for an eternity of bliss and I’ll show you a silly goof.

And if that were a real scenario a mortal was faced with, yeah it’d be a good tradeoff; but we’re talking about god, and he doesn’t need to make those kinds of decisions.

So, just like my friend’s kiddo getting jabbed, yeah, sucks in the moment but no reasonable person would really call it horrific suffering given that, while unpleasant, it lasted under a day compared to her (hopefully) ~ 35,600 days on Earth. Saying because suffering exists on a human time scale when you’re talking about infinity is similarly silly.

The vaccine makes sense for us to do despite the pain because failing to do so leads to more pain - but all of our options regarding vaccines are all within a system that includes pathogens. If we had the option to just magic our immune systems to perfect without any suffering at all, you bet your ass that’s what we’d do. But vaccines are the best we got. But god made the pathogens, and god gave us vulnerable immune systems to those pathogens. God had the power to create a universe without them, or without our susceptibility to them, but he chose not to, allowing us instead to suffer at his whim. Not all good.

You keep coming back to this “why can’t God make free will without evil? If he can’t, he’s not all powerful!” But it’s a basic definition problem. You’re effectively asking God to make 1 = 1 AND 1 = 2, which fine, could do but it eliminates the entire usefulness of 1 as a number.

Did you just skip over that whole spiel? I gave an example of free will without evil. So, now you’re just just whipping up some strawman bullshit about ‘1=1 and 1=2’ - I’ve already explained why that’s not the case. You also skipped over why the ability to commit evil is always so pivotal to the concept of free will. Again, in the system that god made that is our universe, I’m not free to shoot lasers from my eyes or fart out unicorns: why are those any less of a requirement to having free will? Without those freedoms, we’re just automatons, right?

Similarly, if the idea of free will is to find and reward good people and punish those who squander free will (by being jerks) free will probably necessitates the capacity for evil. (Otherwise, just stick with angels. Haven’t read the bible thoroughly but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the point of angels, perfect beings incapable of doing evil except for the one God made rebellious etc.)

Yeah you might want to read it a little more thoroughly before trying to defend it: scripture is pretty explicit about not giving a fuck about you living a sinful life, so long as you repent in the end. …you’re familiar with Jesus, right? That’s kinda his whole story. Like, you could live absolutely stuffed to the brim with sin, defraud your way into a position of high office, use it almost excusively for greed and to do things like start wars to distract the world from your visits to some sketchy island to rape children… and then open your heart to Jesus on your death bed, and enjoy eternity in heaven with no consequences at all.

And going even further than that, according to scripture you can live an extremely moral life and still get thrown into hell if that moral behavior was for its own sake and not as a function that repentance. One of the stories is about the Pharisees, which is a big cautionary tale about walking the walk without actually believing in the message. Doesn’t matter if you’re doing good, if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, yer gonna burn!

…I grew up in a Christian household, church, sunday school, the whole 9. If your only exposure to it is through sermons and things like sunday school, you’re not going to notice all the red flags, cuz they’re not gonna talk about them. Start reading that shit on your own, and take the time to really understand what it’s saying… it gets pretty fucked up. But again, don’t take my word for it - read the fuckin thing.

Why are you asking me? Those already have established meanings, there’s no need for me to reinvent them, nor do I have any kind of authority on our language even if I wanted to.

I couldn’t find the OC, so I made my own shitty version, but you get the gist:

You’re conflating this existence with all of eternity. Those are very different things.

Those are very different things, but I don’t see how or where they were conflated. Nor how conflating them would even be problematic in this context: they’d both be within god’s full scope of control, right?

Similarly, an all powerful, good God can be okay with someone suffering

So, not ‘all good’.

self imposed constraints on power. If I build a system and choose to work within that system, that’s still me being all powerful.

And if that system you just built includes evil, again we’re in not ‘all good’ territory.

I know that a half moment of unpleasantness means an eternity of bliss

According to self imposed rules that include evil

that’s a tradeoff a good and all powerful God may make.

A tradeoff? Why would god need to trade? If he wants something, he just makes it so – unless he isn’t all powerful. Or unless we’re still in the self-imposed-rules that allow for evil, which again is claiming that god is evil.

(so I can reward free will, instead of just creating a bunch of automatons)

Yeah free will usually comes up in these conversations, but right out the gate that’s an attack on god’s power: does he not have the ability to grant free will without also allowing evil? And even if he can’t, and ignoring that that claim is that he isn’t all powerful: why is the ability to commit evil always a criteria for free will? We can’t fly, shoot lasers out of our eyes, or fart out unicorns either, so with or without the ability to commit evil our freedom is still not absolute - does that make us a bunch of automatons?

Or rather, if the ability to commit evil was taken away from us, would we lose our free will? Let’s look at your freedom of choice within the context of dinner. Half a second’s thought, and I’ve got dozens of restaurant options, or grocery stores that allow me to cook up something that might fall outside of what the restaurants here offer: the number of options, while technically finite, are so mind-bogglingly huge that it might as well be infinite: so I’m gonna say my freedom of choice here is almost literally absolute.

One of those dinner options is to kidnap my neighbor’s 4-year old, throw him in the oven, and cannibalize him. Why? Cuz god lets me, right? Sure it’s illegal, but we don’t care about legal authority, we care about god’s. So if god snapped his fingers and changed our reality so that I’m no longer even capable of considering that, let alone committing it, evil is officially off the menu… but the billions of other possible combinations are still open, so I’d argue that my freedom of choice didn’t actually change all that much. Does that make me an automaton?

…and what about the things that I already don’t have the freedom to eat? Most of our reality isn’t edible. And even if it was, I can only fit a few handfuls of it into my belly at a time - I can’t have the moon for dinner, it won’t fit. …does that make me an automaton?

Point is our free will already exists within a system that has limits. Evil is one of many, many, many parts of that system, so even ignoring Epicurean Paradox, why is evil always a focal point of free will?

🌏👩‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

This always boils down to the Epicurean Paradox.

So, most religious mythology (including Christianity) defines its god as 3 absolutes:

• All good (not a shred of evil)

• All powerfull (its will is our reality, period)

• All knowing (it’s fully conscious of literally everything that happens in its universe)

So how is it that evil can exist? Cuz we can see that clear as day, everywhere. God either…

• is aware of it, has the ability to stop it, and chooses not to, in which case it is not all good.

• is aware of it, wants to stop it, but doesn’t have the ability to, in which case it isn’t all powerful.

• Has the power and desire to stop it, but isn’t aware it’s happening, in which case it isn’t all knowing.

Every single attempt to answer the Epicurean paradox does so by rugpulling one of the three pillars and presenting god as instead only being two of those absolutes. (and if anyone reading this takes that as a challenge, feel free to give it a go).

How can this be explained, other than God doesn’t exist?

Either Christianity and most other religions are being deliberately dishonest about the nature of their gods, or, as you said, god doesn’t exist.

We’re in the only place, unfortunately.

…and? That didn’t make Hitler any less of an enemy to Germany or the rest of humanity, nor does the horde of neonazis lined up behind Trump make him any less of an enemy to the US or the rest of humanity.

I guess I’m not really understanding your goal here. Mine is to spur some much needed action against Trump, especially from within the US. You’re insistent on refuting that, but you also seem pretty clearly anti-Trump, so why the contradiction? Or if that’s not what you’re getting at, what is?

Why is that the question? Adolf Hitler had a lot of organic support, but that didn’t make him any less of an enemy to humanity, to include the Germans who opposed him, and regardless of whether or not those Germans were a minority opinion.

Trump is using the same tactics to manipulate the same kinds of idiots, and while those MAGA (Nazis) are a very real issue in their own right, that doesn’t make Trump any less of an issue that also needs to be addressed.

Even if 90% of Americans (Germans) voted for him of their own volition, that still leaves you with 10% of the US population as potential allies.

Late 30s with insomnia here: all nighters I’ve got down pat.

But, boss, I do infact be tired as fuck.

You speak as if half Americans did not actually vote for Trump.

Um… half of Americans did not actually vote for Trump. That’s how halves work. The US isn’t one person.

If half the US is lining up to suck Trump’s micropenis, and the other half want his head on a pike, which half do you think is my target audience here? The us has a Nazi problem, like fucking bad, but it also has people who aren’t Nazis, and Trump absolutely does not represent those people. What they need to be is spurred into action - lumping them in with the Nazis will only serve the Nazis.

Let’s not draw a conclusion from a single data point. Blow up a few more data centers, observe the results, and again, and again.

Once we have a sufficient amount of peer review and replicable data, then we can determine if a reduction in misinformation bot activity is or is not among the plethora of other benefits of blowing up data centers.

For science!

You’re not wrong, but I don’t think that’s really hitting the reality of what’s going through those people’s heads. Like, no 18 year old is sitting down and crunching a pros and cons list of a ticket to school vs committing war crimes to help distract the world from the fact that their president raped children on some sketchy-ass island.

There are a lot of reasons someone might decide to join the military… and some of them are legit just psychopaths who get off at the thought of killing someone, but those aren’t the ones my previous message is directed at. Those are a lost cause, fuck em.

But propaganda is a hell of a drug, and you gotta consider the environment these kids grew up in: in the time took between their mom squeezing them out, and walking out of that hospital front entrance, lil baby John Doe has probably already been hauled passed at least a couple of posters with some soulless “thank you for your service” shit. From literal day one, we’re inundated with propaganda touting people in the military as ‘heroes’ selflessly devoting their lives to serving their community.

As John Doe grows up, he’s made aware of some of the more horrific shit the military involves, but even that is tied into the whole altruism schtick: yeah you’ll need to kill people - but they’re the bad guys! Yeah you might get injured or killed - but who else is going to defend your family??

So John Doe is nearing adulthood - he’s developed a sincere sense of patriotism and has been conditioned to believe that the best way to act on it is by joining the military. So he does.

Fast forward a couple years, John has been paying more attention to things like global politics; that brain of his is about finished developing, and he’s noticing some increasingly grating incompatibilities with his world view vs what he’s actually seeing with his own eyes.

He sees the news from back home, and it’s the same shit the rest of us are seeing: people are being disappeared by unnamed police agents, families literally torn from eachothers’ arms, people just straight up shot in broad daylight. Human rights are walked back on a daily basis, corruption and malice in office are so rampant that it’s become difficult to even distinguish real news from cartoonishly overt parody.

So now we’re back to my original comment here - I’m addressing the Johns. The ones who joined for all the right reasons, only to realize after the fact that they are in fact the baddies. But that’s the thing, John, you swore an oath to defend us from all threats, foreign and domestic: why do you think it specifies ‘and domestic’? The amount of damage someone can do to our country from a position of high office would be (and has been) catastrophically worse than any threat even the most hardcore stereotype of a jihadist with an AK could possibly pose to our country. Your chain of command, all the way up to the president himself, has violated their oath - but you don’t have to. This isn’t why you joined, but you’re uniquely suited to actually do something about it, so stop following that domestic enemy’s orders, and actually do something about it.

Anyway, sorry for the long tangent, but the point is there are potential allies within the military. Even if that’s a minority of the military, the number is higher than zero, and it only needs to be one. Belittling John for making a shit decision (and it is a shit decision) to enlist isn’t going to accomplish anything; acknowledging the sense of conflict growing in John and encouraging him to make it right despite the atrocities of his chain of command… well, it doesn’t hurt to try. Hasn’t worked yet, and at this point I don’t exactly have high hopes, but the military’s a big group, and we just need a single one of them to finally take their oath seriously.

Here’s a better message for Catholics in the army:

You swore an oath to defend the US and its constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. A domestic enemy is actively soiling the office of the president, and rather than defend us against him, you continue to follow his orders. Stop doing what’s easy, and start doing what’s right.

having kids now and being in charge of cleaning for a decade and a half, I really get anakin’s

Oh no, oh fuck…

hatred of sand

Ah. Nevermind.

Machines of legend, said to have existed before The Collapse, but archeologists have yet to find physical evidence, just old tales called “user manuals” passed down from generation to generation.

If having two people talking to you at the same time makes both of them just mix together into meaningless gibberish, you might want to see an audiologist and ask about “auditory processing disorder”.

It’s a weird one where your ears themselves are fine, but your brain does kind of a shit job of handling the signals from them.

So, you’ll pass a normal hearing test with flying colors, but then constantly need people to repeat themselves in real world conditions.

In all fairness, 20% of that town’s population is Professor Oak. Other than him we’ve got Ash, Ash’s mom, and Oak’s 2 grandchildren: MrPoopyAssFucker and his sister… am I missing anyone?