New Testingstan

the sad thing is
(well, one of the many sad things)
that is actually a pretty blindingly obvious statement
but some of them won't see it, or will deny it
because religion is evil and for stupid people who are ruled by their EMOTIONS why can't they be like me and use LOGIC and REASON to see the truth mr spock come and beam me up and take me away from this horrible place

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ba7XwD550kI

Oxymoron wrote:Well, I've stopped caring about that place for a few months now, so I haven't been able to observe any recent changes there could have been.

SDN has basicly lost it's purpose since it was created in mid-2002-ish, and it sure as hell hasn't weathered the years well.

Jung wrote:

Baks-kun wrote:remembering buck utsra

It's kind of funny that the SDN crowd uses influence of religion as a implicit way of implying something is wrong and bad.

Cause I see the fingerprints of Christianity all over their preferred brands of atheism.

This is more-or-less an inevitable thing, I suspect; ideologies don't just emerge spontaneously in isolation from 2000 years of cultural context.

and rly its part of evolution

yes lots of christianity and other religulons are totally silly

but there are also elements of them of compassion and ethics and stuff that, while very imperfect, were still used by people back then for social order and for some modicum of decency and goodness

it wasn't all blergh grimdrakstrak of far past history skullbannerspikeskulls etc.

I'm not a particular fan of religion, but I do remember that tryhard Purple trying to win points with the board with his final solution for the problem of religion: killing all the religious people. He was far enough out there with that to earn a lot of ire, though.

so on the anarchist ethic thing the reason i like it is i dislike coercion and i like personal responsibility and it hit both those things

personal responsibility = like taking ownership of a problem. when you see it, you take care of it yourself and see it through

i don't do this myself a lot of course but i like the idea



and coercion is just like blargh in general. see the way i see it a moral system's strongest thing is to help you make your own decisions, and coercing yourself is ridiculous

if we can make that work to convince others too, great



so i like the idea.


===


so for a while i was as rabidly anti-religious as the next teoite and now i've kinda swung around

i sorta like it

as long as i'm the god

lol

I dunno, being a god would be pretty stressful I think

evilsoup wrote:for me at least, well, partly I was bored with that place
but mostly I was actually pissed off at bakustra & his majesty getting banned
it's not like I really lost anything of value, most of the people I enjoyed talking to there are here, and those that aren't I have other ways of contacting

But when season 3 of MLP starts, where will you go?

Well, aside from Ponygoons.

xon wrote:At worst, I've got an SSD to put the database on if too many queries start taking longer than a second.

maybe I'll start a thread here

aye one time i wrote up a little essay about that, talking about the events of HIDE AND Q tng

see if you have the moral duty to serve and you have great power, you have to use it

so this puts a huge burden on you



on the other hand though the other mortals in teh universe have a similar ethical duty to help relieve that burden from you; it isn't right that you endure all the pain of existence

if each individual person can take a little bit of pain to save you from a lot of pain, shouldn't they do it?



so i came to the conclusion that god helps those who help themselves

when you say 'god'
do you mean the omniscient omnipotent omniloving God of theologians
or the fallible, limited God of the bible
or a member of a pantheon
or something like the Q
or?

there i was thinking Riker as Q

Q is god like

but Riker is human


he has all the power but he still has the same fallibility and stress etc. that we can relate to, so we can put ourselves right in his shoes

Re: Adam

The second half of the whole thing you set up sounds too self serving to work well after you've accepted the first half. "You have a duty to share my suffering so I won't fix your problems" doesn't really work after I've taken responsibility for things. It's like one is picking up this huge heavy thing just so one can proclaim nobility, only to then put it down and forget about it. It's kind of... worse than not picking it up in the first place.

Actually yeah. I think that's true. To say "I'm moral, but morality compels me to be a raging asshole" is worse than just being a raging asshole, because you're sort of perverting this moral idea into an excuse to be a bigger asshole.

Which is why fuck Ayn Rand.

Anyway, stuff like this. That's why I think omnipotent beings work if they're really inscrutable (and have complicated reasons you can't understand).

Or if they can actually just say "fuck it, who said I was morally perfect or had unlimited imagination to think of ways to make the world better? Have you ever stopped to think about how much more I could have made the world suck?"

Which is pretty much abandoning the moral high ground, but it's not like normal people can seriously say they're better than this on average. If we were, the world wouldn't suck so much in the first place. Instead, we mostly give a shit about our own immediate backyard and put a lot less effort into far away stuff. And we organize ourselves in ways that exaggerate that tendency, and give decision-making power to jackasses who like it that way and are sometimes even less moral than usual.

So God could actually be pretty normal by human standards and still let us live like this because meh, who cares? Especially if there actually is some kind of afterlife and he's not being a jerk about it, which some religions believe and some don't of course.

There's probably a theological word for "being bitter at God for not being what we expect him to be."
__________________

[looks at the SDN stuff und bannings]

Huh. Wacky.

I'm not a big fan of temper tantrums, but I'm actually having a hard time thinking it was entirely a mistake for Wong to do that. It's... hard to explain I guess.

EDIT: The sudden mass post erase is seriously some bullshit though.

with that kind of power, I think I'd feel really nervous about using it. I mean, there's obvious stuff like 'oh those nukes are flying through the air, I'll just make those disappear'... but then, even other stuff that seems like it should be simple - sure, I can make that soil be nutritious enough to feed the local people again (and I would), but then what's to stop some agri-corporation from moving in and shitting over everything again? Do I take control? It could easily come uncomfortably close to might-makes-right.

I'd ask for a link to this essay, but I assume it was burned in The Purge?

Or if they can actually just say "fuck it, who said I was morally perfect or had unlimited imagination to think of ways to make the world better? Have you ever stopped to think about how much more I could have made the world suck?"

that is basically the book of job

Shroom Man 777 wrote:and rly its part of evolution

Now that you mentioned it, if you think about it the sheer popularity of religion suggests there may have been evolutionary selection for being predisposed to that kind of thinking which in turn suggests it might have had survival benefits. I seem to recall there being an experiment once that showed if you just paint a pair of eyes on a wall people will behave better. It's not hard to imagine how belief in unseen potent forces that respond to human behavior might play a role in strengthening group cohesion.

Which is a funny thought in the context of antitheists advocating evolutionarily grounded morality.

I have heard it suggested (by Dawkins? I think) that religion is a by-product of the group-cohesion and pattern-spotting stuff

i figured it was also the human tendency to anthropomorphize

gah i type too slowly but meh this is more of an addendum to my last post


any individual ought to be willing to take on all the burden himself to help his fellow man

and if each and every individual did this (which they ought to do too), things would even out and you have an egalitarian society


now if you apply utilitarian reasoning to it, self-serving isn't necessarily bad; you have to consider yourself in the calculations too, and if you are a slave to the greater good, you are not registering a lot of utils for yourself

whereas the marginal cost of people taking care of themselves is low, given the right conditions


now where it gets to helping those who help themselves, that's creating a kind of incentive structure to get other people to buy into it; i mean it literally that god will help those who help themselves

so the idea is if you take some of the burden off my hands (by helping yourself), i'll take some of the burden off yours. do this times a trillion and the improvement to your life as god is even bigger than the aggregate harm to everyone else's life by having to do a little bit for themselves

but if you refuse to do your part, fuck you buddy





anywho tho a lot of these moral systems i play with not because i love them but because i think they can make for nice villains


you take something that sounds good, but go a wee bit too far, and you have an understandable villain who practically writes himself

well that's the idea anyway

Well, that would make sense if it were as hard for a god to, say, pick up a rock as it was for a man- and so it is a utilitarian equal for the god to have to pick up a billion rocks and for a billion people to pick up one rock each.

But generally we imagine omnipotence (or even extreme power) as making it pretty easy to work miracles. If all you have to do to be rid of the Syrian dictatorship is wave your hands and boom, smote by thunderbolts, it's a lot harder to come up with an excuse not to do it. Even "but there'll just be another tyrant!" doesn't work too good unless you might run out of ammo or something.

Real people have to put real effort into these things. Even if you are not a pacifist and say "the US air force could just drop a bomb on some shit," that isn't free or even cheap. Making all that stuff takes a huge amount of work that is paid for with taxes and national debt and whatever, and there's real opportunity cost to fighting little intervention-wars all the time.

You can't just push a button and make all the bad men go away for free, then say "I SATAN MCHAGGIS DECLARE THAT SERIOUSLY, FUCK SYRIAN DICTATORS" or whatever.

evilsoup wrote:with that kind of power, I think I'd feel really nervous about using it. I mean, there's obvious stuff like 'oh those nukes are flying through the air, I'll just make those disappear'... but then, even other stuff that seems like it should be simple - sure, I can make that soil be nutritious enough to feed the local people again (and I would), but then what's to stop some agri-corporation from moving in and shitting over everything again? Do I take control? It could easily come uncomfortably close to might-makes-right.

Well.

The easiest thing for a god to do would probably just to actually smite anyone they thought was an asshole until everyone got the idea. Being able to read minds would help. This actually is might makes right, but that never stops the assholes, so it probably wouldn't stop an averagely-moral god who actually wanted to change things.

This is like Watchmen.

You see, at the time I was misquoted. I never said "The Super-man exists and he is American," what I said was "God exists and he is American." Now if you begin to feel an intense and crushing feeling of religious terror at the concept, don't be alarmed. That indicates only that you are still sane.

That really should be pretty scary to think about. Maybe we should be happy that if such gods exist, they pretty much leave us alone.

Or if they can actually just say "fuck it, who said I was morally perfect or had unlimited imagination to think of ways to make the world better? Have you ever stopped to think about how much more I could have made the world suck?"

that is basically the book of job

Yes. But my babbling had gone on long enough anyway.

Pieman wrote:Well, that would make sense if it were as hard for a god to, say, pick up a rock as it was for a man- and so it is a utilitarian equal for the god to have to pick up a billion rocks and for a billion people to pick up one rock each.

that's true. I guess it needs moar quantitative thought or something

but it is fucking late so ttyl

RogueIce wrote:

xon wrote:At worst, I've got an SSD to put the database on if too many queries start taking longer than a second.

One of these, which is almost as much overkill as your image:

gah i stayed up to do one more email then checked that thread again

simon_jester is actually someone i consider to be a teoite moderate

he and i are kinda sorta on the same side, though we clash a lot


but i just saw him saying this

"You're better off just straight never doing something that seems to end in tears every damn time, instead of leaving a loophole you know is going to be exploited constantly and that only helps in bizarre contrived scenarios."


yes absolutely if i was still there i'd praise that post and jung said it too so praise there as well


anywho bed for real

well, you can always continue talking to simeon jestater here

Jung wrote:

Shroom Man 777 wrote:and rly its part of evolution

Now that you mentioned it, if you think about it the sheer popularity of religion suggests there may have been evolutionary selection for being predisposed to that kind of thinking which in turn suggests it might have had survival benefits. I seem to recall there being an experiment once that showed if you just paint a pair of eyes on a wall people will behave better. It's not hard to imagine how belief in unseen potent forces that respond to human behavior might play a role in strengthening group cohesion.

Which is a funny thought in the context of antitheists advocating evolutionarily grounded morality.

there's some goodness and decency in religious concepts

but since mang was primitive and small brained and stuff, the conveyance of these concepts was through religulons and spirits and gods and other stuff

like

similar to how mang used superstitious stuff to explain the outside world

mang also used these things to explain the inner world of the mind, the soul, etc.

and as these superstitious stuffs got replaced by sciences to explain the outside world

so too did these get replaced to explain the inner mysteries thanks to philosophies and more complicated ideas that developed and advanced from previous more simpler concepts of self-understanding

some of the fundamental concepts of being good and nice are kept, though their explanations change from 'because skyman will keel you' to 'society something-something needs of mangy outweigh needs of the few live long prosper'

like how the fundamental concept of lightning being scary and explodey is kept, but it changed from 'zeupiter is killing shit' to 'static litenings electrocities in the skiis'

or something

oorahooah111!

strange, i actually think that this is a positive thing for buck and destro and possibly zak (not counting evilsoup since from what i saw of the past, TEO wasn't really making him fat i think, compared to those guise contrarianizing the shit out of that place because of their own inherent fat compulsions), since leaving that place will do them nothing but good

as for the board, well, who knows, one of the reasons why i left after the attn: rabid thread and my spiel of disillusioned ramblings over there etc. was because i realized that pretty much all of the guys who i had fune with in that thread were here*, and most of the other guise there were bleh

*hell, the attn: rabid thread was made because back then i wasn't a member of testingstan yet, but was lurking and laughing at you guys making fun of the fatties, and i saw oxymoron post something nice in this goddamn thread, and i replied to him in TEOtesting