Phi for All

Define "electrifying feeling", please. Have you ever touched wires and gotten a shock, is it like that? Is it painful or pleasant or neither? Is "entire body" an exaggeration, or do you feel it simultaneously in your toes and your face? "Throughout" implies that it feels like it's moving on a path, rather than a static buzzing all over, is that right? Does it feel like you're activating it by meditation or just focusing to hold it?

Or, we can believe that behaving kindly to others brings inherent benefits. There's no need for consequences, other than not gaining the benefits of fair treatment. Reduce the friction and the whole system has less stress and functions more like it's supposed to.

Do you have any evidence to support this position? I don't think "ants v humans" is equivalent to "humans v extraterrestrials" for a variety of reasons, but mostly because our understanding of the universe is enhanced by a unique combination of skillsets and evolutionary features. An ant isn't designed for much beyond its capabilities, but our brains allow us to specialize and grow new skills and knowledge, and to adapt accordingly. There could be extraterrestrials that are far more advanced than we are, but the probability of them existing in such a way that we can't detect them at all is very low.

! Moderator Note Trying to discuss this with you in the Lounge is pointless. If you have evidence and can support your explanation, it should be in Speculations. If you have more than "this makes sense to me" sort of "logic", I can move it there if you like.

This can't be true since there are no bullet points.

! Moderator Note Don't use ChatGPT to make your arguments for you and your posts won't be moved to Trash.

Right?! Can't be true. Everybody knows heavy metal fans love their bacon. But seriously, I hope the media in other countries don't give him the blank check the American media does. He says crap like this and they all see $$$ as people try to unravel the lunacy, and nothing holds them accountable for the horrible damage their news entertainment reporting process inflicts on the world.

Same playbook, flood the zone with shit. He claims one thing, Project 2025 says another: https://www.newsweek.com/project-2025-women-abortion-gender-equality-1926453

Of course I would have. If swansont had "cringed" when I posted about Atomic Physicist Terrorists, I would have berated him for his predisposition towards Atomic Physicists. I would have pointed out that his bias might be enabling terrorist bombers. Honestly, I think you've doubled down on a bad stance. As swansont mentioned, three descriptors highlights the intersection of a Venn diagram. You claim you don't care, but you "cringe" when white and Christian are included with Nationalists, ignoring the fact that the intersection doesn't include you at all, not even a little bit. Are you imagining that the intersection is 2/3 you, is that the problem here?

So never use three descriptors if one is considered bad? That seems a fragile stance.

Not to point fingers, but I think this is part of the problem. You "cringed" when I spoke negatively about white Christian Nationalists, because you're two of those things, which means you're predisposed towards white Christians, even those who want to bar any other religion while making Christianity the recognized state religion. You may be guilty of giving a pass to people who look like you and sound like you but who want the government to control or suppress the rights of others. I don't think you'd "cringe" the same way if I was railing against Canadian/Italian pedophiles (for whatever reason), would you? You'd understand that you're only two of those things, and should be relieved nobody thinks you're the third.

I could agree with this if it weren't for the fact that people who don't judge others based on these attributes (or try very hard not to) don't have these problems. Living alongside others should mean acknowledging the special problems they face from society. Many of these issues are about "us" acknowledging "our" differences. Picking up tampons at the store should be an "us" problem, but only men turn it into "us vs them". Religions should be about us, but white Christian Nationalists turn it into us vs them. Sexuality and racial equality should definitely be all about us, but homophobes and racists are the ones who build walls and draw lines in the sand.

Harder, no, not for the reasons the OP listed. Different, yes. The only thing that's harder about men's mental health is that they usually ignore it due to peer pressure. Like many things in our society, women lack privileges that men take for granted. No doctor is going to tell a man that he's being hysterical. Women's mental health issues have been misdiagnosed for centuries, usually based on the idea that their hormones are somehow imbalanced. Many women these days have physical pain that gets diagnosed as a mental problem when the doctor can't find an underlying cause. Rather than a referral for further testing, the doctor tells them it's in their heads, and I have yet to find an example where doctors diagnosed men this way. If a man says something hurts, the doctors believe him.

Which "key" accounts for the surge in voter registration we're seeing? It not easy to see where this information is being accounted for: https://www.salon.com/2024/08/29/with-democrats-fired-up-by-harris-candidacy-young-people-are-now-registering-to-vote-in-droves/ These numbers are unprecedented. I predict Lichtman will change his prediction.

So he completely switched from popular to electoral college predictions 8 years ago. Add COVID, the misperceptions about how well Biden has done, and TFG's criminal record and I think this methodology is flawed. I don't think the Dems are one "key" away from defeat. Far from it. I predict Harris/Walz is going to destroy the GOP, or at least force it to power wash its leadership.

So much suffering going on there! But the cat won't learn morality without torture, so bring out the feather wand!

You can't put your cursor in the Title box?

Put your cursor in the Title box and type out your title. Tab will move your cursor to the next box, which is where your post should go. Do you plan on making a poll? If not, ignore that part.

I agree, I said the same thing later in that post. Disbelief is actually more like a religious belief to me, whereas not believing is accepting the lack of evidence as a sign that there's a better explanation. If not believing is a religious belief, then bald is a hair color.

You don't need any magical foreknowledge to answer this question. It's pretty simple. Your god claims to be infallible. It claims that it created people already flawed, and unless they worship this god they'll spend eternity being tormented by the fires of Hell because of those flaws. Your god knew how it would all work out, and is apparently still torturing sinners to this day. This is the deity you claim loves us all, yet it seems vengeful and petty, with all the fragile masculinity we've come to expect from men who don't know how to be a real father.

Are you going to be sidestepping all responses like this? I, for two, would like to hear your excuse for your god purposely creating an imperfect species he was always planning on tormenting for eternity. Is this the perfect father we're supposed to emulate?

I don't have any irrational motives for not believing in gods. At the most basic level, we've seen how Iron Age peoples thought their gods were responsible for many phenomena. Then, over the intervening centuries, we've seen rational explanations replace those mystical beliefs. In the end, there's no real questions I have that aren't answered by the knowledge humans have accumulated. If the churches were wrong about so much, maybe they were wrong about it all. I also don't think of it as "disbelief". I'm not actively refusing to believe in gods. I'm not reluctant to accept them. I simply see no evidence of them, so they don't qualify to be included in the way I explain anything. The idea that any atheist doesn't want there to be gods "simply out of spite against followers of a God" is laughable. Where's the reasoning behind that? Fear of the challenge of wild-ass guesswork about life after death? Please. The part about morals is actually quite insulting, given how morally unaccountable the churches have been throughout history. If you want to discuss morality here, I'd be happy to show you how weak your faith is in that regard.

Science does a much better job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Theory is provisional where it applies, and it stops being a theory as soon as it's shown false or fails at prediction. We don't build on a rotten foundation. The Abrahamic religions ignore many parts of the Bible that are unphysical or are contradicted by other texts of the time. They feel free to drop the inconvenient parts like Mosaic law or Catholic canon (Hamburgers on Friday!) as they see fit, yet want us all to believe the system is still good despite being built on a lot of Iron Age ignorance. In particular, the violence of the OT seems to accentuate the choice to believe in human kindness and benevolence, but we see very little of that historically. The churches have raped and pillaged their way throughout the pages of history, never holding any real moral high ground, pretending to care about people while simply setting themselves up exactly like the worst offenders from scripture. After thousands of years, we still have this horrible vertical moral scale that judges everybody based on a perfect father figure, who is still often used to justify modern violence done in the name of religion.

It's a good thing morality isn't based on belief in gods, isn't it? Think of all the religious people who have great crises of faith, when that's all their morality is based on. When they question their gods, they can question all the behavior as well. My morality is aimed at the people living side by side with me in this society. The religious people I know think they're better than me, they want to be considered above me when it comes to morality and who gets into their god's kingdom. These are the folks who only think morally when it comes to those who believe the way they do.

Do you have any evidence that such a situation was ever the case? This person who makes $1B but gives away all but $10M sounds made up to drive your point. And perhaps charities wouldn't be needed in the first place if more Christians weren't so fixated on extreme wealth (or extreme nationalism, or extreme behavioral modification, or, well the list goes on). I personally don't consider it charity if it's for tax purposes.