I am also an atheist, but recognize religion as damaging, forcing a tilting cognitive fog. Never helpful, a net negative to believers and society.
The degree of bad depends on the religion and the believer.
Plus one must not forget that, for most believers, religion preceded adulthood, even maturity. Meaning it was never a choice, but imposed through indoctrination and immediate social pressure.
It clearly is helpful to believers at times. For example, when a loved one dies, it can be extremely comforting to think you'll see them again soon in a paradisical heaven. Comfort when you're hurting is helpful.
That's an interesting point, though I think it would have to be if and only if all grief is positive. For example, if grief is 99% positive but 1% negative (negative being more pain than gain) then there's positive value.
For someone about to die, I think any grief is probably negative. Any personal growth or development won't be utilized. I think of it kind of like morphine, if you're dying it's fine to keep it flowing even if you are getting seriously addicted to it
>Many atheists take science as a religion for example
Admission to thinking about science as a belief betrays lacks of understanding of the scientific method, which is founded on rigorous doubt and verification.
Religion, by definition, is a social construct explicitly built to foster a collective identity that isolates those in the in-group from the out-group. It inherently implies hostility against the non-believer; the only difference is the form this hostility takes. For some, it's just condescension for people who don't perceive the "truth", for others it's literally declaring them infidels who don't deserve to live. All religions in this world fall within the spectrum of these two extremes. No religion in this world is open to having its foundational ideas challenged or debated in any manner.
I'd be happy if you can tell me which religions fit (a). A quick scan of the news indicates that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Scientology etc. don't fit the bill, at least not without a lot of no-true-Scotsmaning. I think I can easily find evidence of followers of all of those religions killing their neighbors in the name of their god.
N.B. I'm not trying to shit in the milk of any religious person. You do you. Just don't try to claim that your club is actually less blood-soaked than the others.
Those murders were conducted by oppressive governments with a specific agenda, that didn't come from some atheist scripture.
> What you’re describing is a people problem, not a religion problem.
It's a problem of organized groups of people motivated by a collective ideology. This is manifested primarily by religions, since most religious texts have some passages that reject foreign groups, or outright invite acts of violence against them[1,2].
Agnostic atheism is a form of atheism. Atheism isn't a religion. It's not even a belief. It's just a lack of a specific kind of belief. Are there gnostic atheists? Sure. But even that is just a belief, and not a religion.
> One thing for sure is that life is uncertain. We never really know what situations may yield us—good, bad, or otherwise. Whatever happens in our life, we’ll never be sure of the consequences it may bring in the future.
If that's true, "maybe" we should have let Hitler live.
In real-life, losing a horse or breaking a leg is a bad outcome over 99% of the time, and gaining free horses and avoiding conscription (and defeating despots attempting to conquer the world) is a good outcome over 99% of the time.
Hitler could have united Europe. Had he won and taken over Russia and Europe it could have been much better. Had Genghis Khan not attacked so many places, legends of centuars may not exist and the world could be better. We don't know.
I find this line of argument to be a compelling refutation of any kind of consequentialist ethics from a human perspective. No human being ever has had or ever will have the ability to predict out the full consequences of an action throughout all time.
I assume that sounded clever to you when you typed it, but I invite you to consider how it completely fails to follow in any way from the statement that human understanding of higher order consequences rapidly approaches absolute deficiency as the causal chain lengthens.
My practical ethic is something closer to deontology. And it includes things like “don’t mutilate your body.” It’s precisely because I can’t follow those higher order consequence chains that I settle for following general moral principles instead of attempting teleological justifications for my actions.
Why doesn't your practical ethic include the general moral principle of not promoting religious nonsense? The causal chain is simple. People who believe religious nonsense can be easily made to believe any nonsense that hurts them (and have done so again and again), including mutilating their own genitals and the genitals of their children, which conflicts with and takes priority over your other moral principle.
Your defeatist attitude leads to bad public policy, where the powerful take advantage of the weak because the weak are stupidly convinced that they cannot understand the consequences of limiting their own exploitation.
I'm simply stating facts about religious mutilation as an impartial outsider who has never mutilated their own body or others'. I can understand why you might not like facts given your likely upbringing within a fact-denying community, but facts are what the rest of the world use as the grounding of a common framework for understanding.
Or more likely, Hitler would have exterminated millions more, and civilization would have crumbled under fascist ideology.
Why don't you chop off your arm? You don't know if that will turn out to be good. Stories like that of the Chinese farmer and Pippi Longstocking are for children, not for thinking adults to blindly believe. The point of the Chinese farmer for children is that even though bad things happen, things can get better, which helps them get over it. To make it go down easier, they show that even though good things happen, things can get worse.
Do you really think Hitler's additional extermination would be limited to Russia had he completed his world conquest?
I assert that if you don't understand the "why don't you" question, you don't fundamentally understand the fable. Why don't you tell me why it doesn't apply?
> Just don't try to claim that your club is actually less blood-soaked than the others.
I'm in Sweden. Religion here has sort of faded into the background. Very few people are religious. We observe the religion here more or less as as a cultural thing. It's something we do at births, school exam celebrations and burials but not much else.
Human beings are observably religious by nature. We’re going to worship and make devotion to something, whether it’s God, ourselves, the sky, an economic system, science, or whatever else. There will never be a post-religious age.
The issue “dragged,” one State Department official involved told us, “and it lingered, and then the inevitable happened.” Wong was arrested in September 2020 and then remanded in custody in late November. Last year, he pled guilty to charges of subversion under the national-security law.
If lua is used only as an adapter, that is an intermediary between the client and host converting objects to table and vice versa. You cannot dump function definitions (hence only serializable) except in bytecode. Who'd pass that around? You can store code as pure function strings and eval them as a module to provide a transformer module. Certainly a hash can be embedded in the code or sent over the server to prevent tampering with no security headaches
I'd wager that if the person you're responding to posted because they were unsure if they understood you correctly, then after this comment they're probably sure that they don't. (But I could be wrong.)
Surprised to see steady increase in recent years. What are the 2019 numbers? 2020 and 2021 are the pandemic years, and Maersk should've been one of the most heavily impacted companies in the early months.
It appears they have executed a strategy to become a vertically integrated end-to-end logistics company rather than just a container shipping company. Profits during the pandemic allowed them to accelerate the change.
Maersk went hard into the 3PL and fulfillment business, includimg hiring quite a few people from Amazon. They are in a quite interesting position for that.
Just to be clear: Bill Gates and Microsoft weren't anywhere near inventing this. They bought what was mostly a clone of CP/M and called it PC-DOS/MS-DOS. That's where they got the file extension scheme from.
Digital Research (the creators of CP/M) also didn't invent this. For more details, see the stackexchange link.
No need to apologize. I do a terrible job at ignoring IQ rationalists. Guess it balances out because IQ rationalists do a great job ignoring well-substantiated data from biologists.
How cursed it must to be so growth oriented with a fixed mindset.
I have lived a life of anger over the world being robbed of the "gifted artistry" of her and Rob Schneider being canceled on the American version of Men Behaving Badly.
So, no, not all religions are violent and/or harmful.
I've been an devout atheist since about the age of 10. That doesn't stop me from seeing that:
a) some religions are relatively harmless and mostly helpful to their believers
b) some religions are very destructive to everyone
I don't think we should go much further from here.