The good in setting a bad example

I do understand what some people mean about the importance of setting a good example in certain situations. But we have to define what is a good example? Is it really always civility and the virtues we want others to emulate, or can it be useful to teach by making a bad example? I will explain later.

There is a lot of room for disagreement on what is a generally good behavior, and while peter boghossian takes a softer Socratic approach to persuade Christians, Christopher Hitchens is combative and debates on hard facts. Certain techniques work better on certain personalities and we need to support both doves and hawks to get our message out.

I personally think I need to be more aggressive. I think we should even mimic their hypocrisies at times if we see an individual using them, so that Christians will see it and call us out on them, and then hopefully realize they’re looking in a mirror and fix their ways. For example, it might be useful to act like you’ve lost your temper around someone who loses their temper easily, to teach them a lesson about maintaining self-control if you want to be listened to. It might be useful to be excessively prideful around a proud psrson for the same reason. I guess this is the opposite of setting a good example, and I haven’t heard anyone else use it, but I think it has uses.

It’s a pre-liminary lesson that needs to be learned somehow or other to listen. Otherwise no discussion or real exchange of ideas can occur. If you ever meet someone who is 70 years old and cannot remain calm, rational or humble enough to listen to a word you say on anything, but who loves to berate and throw out uninformed prejudices, I think It’s justified to mirror them and show utter disrespect until they realize their wrong.

Why am I so amazingly smart?

 

Why am I so amazingly smart? QFT

Nietzschecrying.jpg

You experience this illusion because you’ve been surrounded by your intellectual inferiors your whole life. Leave your home and find a place where you will frequently be the least intelligent person in the room, and you will be able to grow and learn far more than ever before.

 

/ fucking saved. Someone took my shitpost on te philosophy board seriously, and reaffirmed the value of something I’ve told myself for years.  I gotta trust myself and get out of this stupid country.  To do anything but seek intellectual abroad is the real escapism!

Why I don’t study Chinese

Chinese can be open and unapologetic about their racism, as though they don’t realize the importance of either civility or genuine empathy beyond borders. Anyone who moves to China has sold their soul and mental health for money. Don’t listen to the moronic sociopaths who tell you China is gonna be a superpower so you ought to study their language, because you really don’t. I stopped studying Chinese because the Chinese I met were so damn unpleasant, and the country was dreary and so obviously polluted that I kept getting a sore throat and coughing. You can’t have good conversations with them because they’re nationalistic and apathetic, and they frown mightilly if you talk about the pollution even on days when it’s HANGING LIKE A BLACK CURTAIN OF DEATH THAT BLOTS OUT THE SUN AND IS CHOKING TRAFFIC. Let someone who has baser motivations deal with the cult of Mao worshipping sociopaths.

 

Ps: fuck Denmark.

https://rottenindenmark.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/why-i-could-never-move-back-to-denmark/#comments

article: why rural america wont change

Hah, he burned the south pretty well! http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/fundamentalism-racism-fear-and-propaganda-an-insider-explains-why-rural-christian-white-america-will-never-change/

I don’t think white racism as well covered up as some people believe. The excues used by racists sound hollow to anyone who is commited to removing biases and I have a pertinent anecdote.

It used to annoy me how often “right wingers/American conservatives/the alt-right/colourists” would say Obama wasn’t fit to be president because he was not an American, or how they would circulate emails about how the bible said it’s justified to not follow illegitimate leader like Obama (in regards to Obama, the Kenyan Muslim.) Not long after he was first elected, I listened to one Christian teacher explaining the birther conspiracy to another Christian US history teacher. She went on a long rant about the bible, and the American constitution, and how there was a section that didn’t allow anyone who had been born in America to become a president.

(In my view this is a historical safeguard, meant to prevent a British politician or hostile invader from legally taking over a new country.) I turned to one of them and asked if were technically true, why would it matter if he had lived in America for his entire life? (Obama was educated in America and worked there his entire life. Voters had decided he shared sufficient views and connection, and was therefore good enough.)

“IT DOES MATTER!” One of them shouted at me, as Christians like to do. And that was all they had to say, as if that line had decisively answered the question.

What the birthers really want is a narrow excuse to act like bigots and be stubbornly opposed to groups or individuals, while pretending they aren’t bigots and their words are both clever and acceptable. But their mask is transparent to anyone outside of their bubble of bigots. The cleverest excuse is transparent to anyone who doesn’t actually want to delight in saying stupid prejudiced things, like a tribal savage, or listening raptly to the invalid arguments that constitute hate speech.

 

後生は？

後生は何の姿？　僕たちは周期をずっとずっと繰り返す者の存在ですか?

それでは、僕たちはゲームの中に不具合を経験しているの？

ずっと。。。ずっと。。。？

天国と地獄は同じで、どんどんに楽しくなくなるですよね？

 

この問題に、黙示録と仏教はあまり別じゃありませんね？

Study finds religious students are meaner

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/religious-children-less-altruistic-secular-kids-study

And this research ironically was funded by a Christian think tank.

Why can’t singles adopt kids?

Why can’t a single easily adopt children?

The kid would be a hell off a lot better than living in a foster home where kids are seen as nothing more than a government paycheck. Maybe I will never get married, but I could probably afford to take care of one kid, at least if the adoption costs aren’t like 30 k right off the bat. I would probably enroll the kid in after-school programs and tutoring, have the kid help with some chores around the house, and raise an independent, self-reliant, and well-read child. A stay at home parent isn’t necessarily better off she’s gonna watch TV or brainwash the kid, and two parents is hardly better if both are working.

Isn’t this just a religious bias against people who don’t follow the conventions?

And why shouldn’t I be “prejudiced” against Christians?

I don’t agree with what Dawkins retweeted. This website with its platitudes did not make me see a reason to become more accepting when dealing with irrational bigots. The only parts that spoke to me were the point that if you can’t correctly explain someone else’s argument and have it accepted, then you don’t understand it enough to refute it. Active listening is a problem in our society. Of course, theists are bad listeners and very impatient so you will not usually get that far.

The other line I liked from the comments is that “Perfection is the enemy of the good” -Volataire. I take it to mean that we must choose our allies and work for small changes if we are to be progressive, rather than being ideologically pure isolationists/special snowflakes. It’s true I don’t agree with Sam Harris on certain things, while he is clear minded and has insights in others and shouldn’t be shunned simply because he doesn’t fit into a familiar box idealize.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dogmadebate/2017/06/reasonably-controversial-regressive-left-killing-atheist-movement/

So if I agree with that, then what is the problem you ask? I’ll tell you. Reddit and others tell you to attack ideas and not people. So It’s okay to attack Christianity or Islam but not Christians or Muslims. I question why not?

The two are interwoven. If you are a Christian you subscribe to Christianity.

You will potentially act in ways that hurt me. If an skeptical atheist hears a voice and sees visions telling him to go to an abortion clinic and blow up some doctors, he will dismiss it and get psychiatric help. A Christian might too, but he could potentially think It’s the voice of God. That alone makes Christians a threat. And generally Christians are predictable, irrational bigots, and are relatively lame to hang out with. I feel justified in disliking Christians and attacking them along with Christianity. The only argument that might stay me is that attacking groups of people and/or individuals can sometimes be ineffective or counter-productive.

Moreover. I do not respect their underlying epistemology enough to even respect a difference of opinion as I might with someone who looked at the same set of facts I did, and came to another opinion of politics. That’s just finding a difference of view when there is a margin of doubt. But with Christians their underlying facts are definitely wrong. And if I attack Christianity you will still feel insulted that I don’t respect your core values, and react as though I attacked you personally. Why keep up the pretext of not attacking them? For civility? As Hitchens quipped, “Civility is overrated.”

What do kids find cool now?

I was just thinking about the things kids found cool in the 90’s which were in turn influenced by earlier things.

Back then yo-yos and skateboards were cool, and then “hackers” thanks to the Cyberpunk fad, the sudden influx of computers, and the Matrix. Rollarblading was cool for a while. Blonde kids who were edgy and cynical were cool. What about now?

Have the same things evolved into fidget spinners and those hover board things? And what is cool attire today? Is it still Hawaiian shirts with shades, or the classic black leather motorcycle jacket? I’m not sure, but coolmess doesn’t seem to be changing that rapidly. Some kids seem to be enamored with fast talking youtube celebrities who make factoid videos or film themselves doing stupid things. Is rationality or cosmopolitan internationalism considered cool?

 

And what will be cool in 10 years or then in the distant future?

christian theology is self contadicting

(Not my post.)
The extra-Biblical “free will” theory itself implicitly demonstrates that the Christian god is an evil being. It contains the self-contradictory premise that an allegedly all-good deity would have installed in his humans the ability and the desire to do evil. By definition “all good” means “no bad”, so ipso facto it would be beyond the ability of that god to perform such an evil act as to program his creations this way. We are told to believe that god has, for reasons of his own, endowed humans with the ability to reject “his will for them”, which, since they are made in his own image and likeness, is to do good. Here, humans contradict themselves by imposing limitations of their own imagination on what they represent as the infinite, which, again by definition, cannot be limited by idiosyncratic (and culture-specific) human value judgments such as “good” or “evil.” And, since he is all-knowing, god already knows exactly what mischief this dubious endowment is going to bring about, and who will fail to meet his expectations and who will not.
.
But, oops, since god is also all-powerful, does that mean there is nothing he can’t do, including being evil and good at the same time? Can god make a square circle, a dry liquid, or the proverbial rock so heavy he can’t lift it? God then is reduced to no more than a caricature of a human wish-fulfillment fantasy, happily churning out one logical impossibility after another. Truly, we cannot say anything about god at all, for to acknowledge the obvious evil that he has wrought in the guise of “free will” is to deny him claim to the titles of “all good”, “all knowing” and “all powerful” all at once.
And so it goes. The point of this is the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of Christian theology. The reality of the innate human love of cruelty and selfishness completely voids the concept of a supreme being-creator who is both all-good and all-powerful. And sorry “God works in mysterious ways” just doesn’t cut it. Unless of course you can supply a coherent argument to demonstrate that faith is superior to reason as a means of obtaining accurate information.

 

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All revelation in the books can’t be used for scientific discovery or for meaningful prediction. I read some CS Lewis today, and the guy said miracles shouldn’t be defined as events that break the rules of the universe, so fuck off with your logic Hume.

Haha, then everything is a miracle and the word lacks meaning. It’s a miracles my old car started on the first try today, and CS Lewis said regular human births are miracles. Theology is a joke. Religion is for boys dressed in their mothers’ panties who ride litthe pink bikes with the training wheels still on, because they inherited it and the extra wheels make them feel safe.