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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It is a position you hold until a belief system provides sufficient evidence for you to form and hold a belief.

    Gnostic atheism is a specific form which nobody actually holds to, which says that there positively is no god and this is known to be a fact. Any reasonable person would admit you can’t know this. And so virtually all atheists are agnostic atheists.

    Being an agnostic atheist does not mean you are “on the fence” or “undecided” or “accepting of all beliefs equally.” It means you are intellectually honest that you cannot prove the non-existence of a god any more than you can prove there isn’t a planet in the universe where it rains lemonade. But until you have a firm reason to believe that some god exists, you’re going to proceed as if they don’t, because that’s the conclusion, however perpetually provisional, that best matches the evidence.



  • scarabic@lemmy.worldtoAtheist Memes@lemmy.worldMyths, lies, delusion
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    2 days ago

    There’s actually a nuance here that religious people love to make much of. They would say that just because everyone who’s ever lived has died does not mean you know we all will. They would say you are just generalizing from the examples you have to all cases, which is fine but is inductive reasoning and therefore involves faith. They will say you cannot conclude deductively that we will all die, you can only reason inductively that you think we will, therefore you are operating in uncertainty and therefore you are exhibiting faith. Therefore science and religion are the same thing. (They’ll say).

    This seems to be the latest favorite philosophical whipping post among religious people trying to find some basis in the modern world for their magic sky fairy beliefs. The funniest thing about it, to me anyway, is that it is an argument that boils down to “you’re just making shit up as much as we are!”




  • Well, I have a plan and I’ll tell you what it is.

    This idea of a majority Jewish state, kept so through military occupation of Arab-dense territories, needs to simply go away.

    I’m a one-state solution guy. Let everyone there practice their religion in peace and access their holy sites freely, and let democracy reign.

    Israel’s big sin is that they want democracy BUT only with a majority Jewish population and an official state religion etc etc etc. It’s more than a Jewish homeland - it’s an ethnostate.

    That is what needs to end. It doesn’t go somewhere else. No one gets pushed into the sea. We just stop pretending like we can use arms to carve out the “democracy” we want, and Israelis and Palestinians all live in a state that guarantees their freedom and safety.

    Some fear that extremists will rise and take over that pluralistic society: build a constitution that prevents this. Embrace pluralism. Marshall Plan the fuck out of Gaza until the Palestinians see they have more to lose than their misery.




  • Without getting into subjective topics like what it was like to be alive in the 1960s, there’s certainly a few ways you can argue that delivering on today’s building codes is more complex than it was back in those times. Buildings are also safer now as a result. This is a simple thing and surely never took up an iota of HST’s attention, but it’s a straightforward fact about how you just get more now than you did then, even if it is something invisible like the safety of improved electrical wiring.



  • You said:

    There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.

    And my comment followed directly from this, wondering how possible it might be to achieve a past, arguably lesser, standard of living today. Attempting that would bring any wage/price gap with the past into focus by eliminating the overhead costs of modern regulatory bars, and the lifestyle creep factor that people sometimes cite. This is decidedly on-topic.


  • This might actually make sense. Borrowers can’t lose or destroy a digital copy, or bring it back late. Probably a digital copy enables more checkouts. Max of 26? Well think about he condition if the last library book you checked out that had 26 stamps on the list. Hard copies don’t last forever. Sad that they had to charge more based on these assumptions, but you can imagine some reasoning to them.