Recent content by nomadthethird

Mr. Tea's inbox being full.

No, you wouldn't even believe who it was if I told you. They swear up and down it wasn't them, but if it wasn't, it was someone who went very far out of their way to frame them. Some people are seriously sick, and they absolutely love the internet.

Timing is everything People who cyberstalk other people and hack their computers, then claim it isn't them when you confront them...but mysteriously enough, the attacks to your computer and connection stop at the exact moment when you inform their family and the police.

brownsville? gentrified? have things in brooklyn really changed that much since i left? when i was living there nobody wanted to live in brownsville.

Is that the "giants used to roam the earth and they 'went into' the daughters of Adam" part? I also quite like when you raise objections to the notion that religion makes people moral, or that morality and ethics are founded in a belief in god, or when you point out that religion has been...

I remember almost fainting at times from being so lightheaded from standing through the 45 minutes of singing (which they called "worship" and which seemed like creepily sexual in nature to me...) In the summer it would be very hot and stuffy with only fans and no air conditioning. I distinctly...

Kafka was not longwinded. His prose sparkles, it's very crisp and clear and concise. (He also uses the simple past tense a lot, which gives makes it seem sort of archaic and authoritative. Sacred texty...) Maybe you're thinking of Thomas Mann. Nor was he a Zionist- where are you getting that...

Bible verses are so much more impressive in German, they're like lines from Kafka...

Yeah, I think that's exactly where a lot of the impetus for religion comes from. But I also think that Biscuits is being overly literal about that part of the speech where Thompson talks about children inventing god. What he's really saying is that the normal, unsophisticated human mind will...

John Gray is easier to refute than... Zhao. j/k! I agree with Zhao on most of the important things, it's just the little stupid things...

Hmm... well, it just seemed ludicrous that out of all cultures in all of human history, all of which had differing accounts of the divine origins of the universe, none of which made any logical sense, that only one got it right- and this was supposed to just happen to be the one I lived in. All...

Fwiw, my parents tried to make me believe there was a god when I was a kid, but it didn't work. So I think there are some children who don't spontaneously create the god concept. I think Thompson was just remarking on a general tendency of young, discontinuous minds.

But there's another option. It's also possible (and imo highly likely) that theism isn't itself hard-wired, but is a byproduct of certain tendencies/deficiencies in human thinking that *are* based in our neural hardwiring. The types of models that chalk up theism to blindspots or general...

The mob is good at it. Patriarchy's based on it. It's called a protection racket. Make up a threat so you can provide the protection against said threat- at a price! In the case of the church, it's eternal damnation. In the case of patriarchy, it's rape and prostitution.

There aren't absolute values even in a universe where you insist there's a Ceiling Cat, either. There are some pretty useful constants though, yeah. Why would an axiomatic moral system need God? You could posit the same moral axioms (it's wrong to kill, don't steal, etc.) without positing the...