New Testingstan

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprise if the main difference is optimist vs pessimist. Another thing too is "higher power" is kinda ambiguous and isn't necessarily tied to traditional religion.

Flagg wrote:

adr wrote:My issue with atheism is that it generally tolerates the worst kinds of activity. Yes the vast majority of atheists are good, decent people, but the ones that aren't are a bane on civilization.

Yeah, except it doesn't hold up to reality.

Indeed, I agree that most atheists are not, in fact, good, decent people.

Go suck Ron Paul's cock or something.

But my blue dress is still at the cleaners!

Page one hundred, you know what this mean ?

Time to come up with a good title for the new thread, guys.

Oxymoron wrote:Page one hundred, you know what this mean ?

Time to come up with a good title for the new thread, guys.

The Chat Thread IV: The Quest For Chatting

Bakustra wrote:According to the abstract, there's also correlations between belief in a higher power and expectations for treatment and credibility assigned to the treatment, so I find Stark's idea that the materialist perspective leads people to downplay the capabilities of psychology and psychiatry credible.

At this point I can't help but think of the disdain for soft sciences and humanities you sometimes see from the internet "rationalist" type. If you were half-convinced your psychiatrist is a quack I imagine it might interfere with the therapy.

I also wonder also about the rationalist tendency to prefer an accurate but ugly picture of the world to an inaccurate but beautiful one. Combined with psychological disorders and rationalizations thereof I could see this being a problem; "look, the simple obvious fact is I'm a pathetic looser and I'd rather face reality than live in some pleasant delusion of adequacy."

BTW, side issue, but I wonder how common a negative perception of the afterlife really is in comparitive religion terms. Thinking of the major religions where I know anything vaguely about what their idea of the afterlife is like (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) IIRC they all hold out hope for an afterlife better than your present existence.

Bakustra wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:Page one hundred, you know what this mean ?

Time to come up with a good title for the new thread, guys.

The Chat Thread IV: The Quest For Chatting

Ron Paul's cock

adr wrote:

Flagg wrote:

adr wrote:My issue with atheism is that it generally tolerates the worst kinds of activity. Yes the vast majority of atheists are good, decent people, but the ones that aren't are a bane on civilization.

Yeah, except it doesn't hold up to reality.

Indeed, I agree that most atheists are not, in fact, good, decent people.

Go suck Ron Paul's cock or something.

But my blue dress is still at the cleaners!

Your trolling is weak old man.

Jung wrote:

Bakustra wrote:According to the abstract, there's also correlations between belief in a higher power and expectations for treatment and credibility assigned to the treatment, so I find Stark's idea that the materialist perspective leads people to downplay the capabilities of psychology and psychiatry credible.

At this point I can't help but think of the disdain for soft sciences and humanities you sometimes see from the internet "rationalist" type. If you were half-convinced your psychiatrist is a quack I imagine it might interfere with the therapy.

I also wonder also about the rationalist tendency to prefer an accurate but ugly picture of the world to an inaccurate but beautiful one. Combined with psychological disorders and rationalizations thereof I could see this being a problem; "look, the simple obvious fact is I'm a pathetic looser and I'd rather face reality than live in some pleasant delusion of adequacy."

BTW, side issue, but I wonder how common a negative perception of the afterlife really is in comparitive religion terms. Thinking of the major religions where I know anything vaguely about what their idea of the afterlife is like (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) IIRC they all hold out hope for an afterlife better than your present existence.

Yeah but doesn't the existence of forever torture in a pit of fire kind of mean they rule by fear rather than hope?

Flagg wrote:Your trolling is weak old man.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=EZD1f9RTEJU

Flagg wrote:Yeah but doesn't the existence of forever torture in a pit of fire kind of mean they rule by fear rather than hope?

I think it's a mixture of both: you've got the carrot in the form of Heaven, which gives people hope and comforts them and attracts them to the faith, and the stick in the form of Hell which awaits those who break the religion's commands.

Also, I think to a certain extent the notion of divine punishment is part of the comfort of religions that believe in it: no matter how unjust things are here on earth, the people who were huge cockbags here will get what's coming to them. Warlord McFatass The Barbarian might have ravaged your land and enslaved your family who ended up dying grim miserable deaths while he sits atop his solid gold toilet seat and enjoys every advantage and luxury until he dies easily in his sleep at 95, but after that he'll get what's coming to him, oh yes he will. It's arguably pretty mean-spirited and the notion of literally infinite punishment is pretty fucked up, but, well, I can see how a lot of people might find a notion of divine justice and punishment comforting.

Jung wrote:

Bakustra wrote:According to the abstract, there's also correlations between belief in a higher power and expectations for treatment and credibility assigned to the treatment, so I find Stark's idea that the materialist perspective leads people to downplay the capabilities of psychology and psychiatry credible.

At this point I can't help but think of the disdain for soft sciences and humanities you sometimes see from the internet "rationalist" type. If you were half-convinced your psychiatrist is a quack I imagine it might interfere with the therapy.

I also wonder also about the rationalist tendency to prefer an accurate but ugly picture of the world to an inaccurate but beautiful one. Combined with psychological disorders and rationalizations thereof I could see this being a problem; "look, the simple obvious fact is I'm a pathetic looser and I'd rather face reality than live in some pleasant delusion of adequacy."

BTW, side issue, but I wonder how common a negative perception of the afterlife really is in comparitive religion terms. Thinking of the major religions where I know anything vaguely about what their idea of the afterlife is like (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) IIRC they all hold out hope for an afterlife better than your present existence.

Overall, I think it was very common in the past (see, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek stuff about Hades, Yoruban faiths, the story of Izanagi and Izanami, etc.) and the rise of modern religions is possibly because they reject death as an eternity of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Flagg wrote: Yeah but doesn't the existence of forever torture in a pit of fire kind of mean they rule by fear rather than hope?

Not all religions do that. Buddhism doesn't, for example.

Bakustra wrote:Overall, I think it was very common in the past (see, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek stuff about Hades, Yoruban faiths, the story of Izanagi and Izanami, etc.) and the rise of modern religions is possibly because they reject death as an eternity of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Wasn't the depressing afterlife notion often tied to the idea that there was a more pleasant afterlife but only a small number of people like kings and heroic warriors could get into it? This makes me wonder about A) how different this really is from things like the Christian concept of Heaven and Hell B) the beliefs of people who would supposedly get consigned to the bad afterlife, which probably weren't written down. The kings or warriors might imagine the good afterlife was reserved for them, but was everybody else buying into that notion too?

Considering the behavior of the typical Internet Atheist (including some stuff I used to do) and its visible correlation with MRAdom and other bigotries masked under rationalism, I have to agree that (especially the rationalist antitheist form of) atheism isn't exempt from the category of beliefs that can engender bad habits. That it is not identical in its magnitude doesn't mean it doesn't have issues of its own that need to be looked at. I mean, look at some of the near-worship of Dawkins despite his notably terrible misogyny.

As for religion and mental illness, I have my own example that probably doesn't apply to many others. Over the past year, especially at my low at the end of 2012, my depression interacted with an emergent sort of assumption of reincarnation. It wasn't something I believed in or even had thought about, but I noticed that the belief had snuck up upon me that after death I would start a new life and, hopefully, this one wouldn't have all the things messed up that I currently have. Overall the effect was that it greatly exacerbated my suicidal thoughts. I don't actively hold any supernatural beliefs, so I wonder how much that affected me; did my lack of belief despite it being tempting keep me from the effects being worse, or would an existing afterlife belief have inoculated me from one that destructive at that point in my life, or something else?

Jung wrote:

Bakustra wrote:Overall, I think it was very common in the past (see, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek stuff about Hades, Yoruban faiths, the story of Izanagi and Izanami, etc.) and the rise of modern religions is possibly because they reject death as an eternity of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Wasn't the depressing afterlife notion often tied to the idea that there was a more pleasant afterlife but only a small number of people like kings and heroic warriors could get into it? This makes me wonder about A) how different this really is from things like the Christian concept of Heaven and Hell B) the beliefs of people who would supposedly get consigned to the bad afterlife, which probably weren't written down. The kings or warriors might imagine the good afterlife was reserved for them, but was everybody else buying into that notion too?

We don't know the extent to which this was the case. The Elysian Fields are a late addition to Hellenic religions, and there is no coherent picture of the Norse view on the afterlife, since ancestor-worship rites were common alongside the afterlives of Valhalla, Hel, and Folkvangr, and alongside the Helgafjell where the dead lived on like they did in life. The Celtic myths are similarly confused- Mag Mell/Annwn/Tir Na Nog are paradises but only become afterlives after Christianization as far as can be determined. These are the only myth-sets which I know have this concept.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:Considering the behavior of the typical Internet Atheist (including some stuff I used to do) and its visible correlation with MRAdom

What's MRAdom?

Mens rights activists.

ah thx

Yeesh, I posted a link to that thread a few days back, it's sad to see it managed to degrade even further into STEMholery.

It's sadly amusing to see how smugtheism seems to emphasize the worst of what they accuse the 'sheeple' of: Blind us-vs-them mentality, over-generalization, heavy-handed lectures on morality that blunder into ignorant offensiveness, willful-ignorance that others might have a fundamentally different worldview from them which prevents them from 'seeing the light of reason'.

And the embarrassing part is I used to be one of those smugtheists. I like to hope I've grown out of it and try to cleave to the view of, "Believe whatever the hell you want as long as it makes you happy and gives you the drive to leave the world a better place than you found it".

Afterlife-wise, I like to pretend the world is like Silent Hill, where once freed from your physical constraints, your psyche builds a new reality around you and populates it with manifestations of your own strongest mental/emotional quirks. The closest thing to 'Hell' there is people who can't confront their own neuroses and come to terms with their demons, so all their torture is ultimately self-inflicted. Those that do ultimately accept themselves for who they are, good, bad, successes and failures, transcend their self-inflicted purgatory and get to chill with everyone else who's truly comfortable with themselves.

Djinnkitty83 wrote:And the embarrassing part is I used to be one of those smugtheists. I like to hope I've grown out of it and try to cleave to the view of, "Believe whatever the hell you want as long as it makes you happy and gives you the drive to leave the world a better place than you found it".

I can relate.

For me I think a big part of abandoning that was hearing stuff like John Gray and realizing what a Christian mode of thinking that really was. When I started thinking about "atheist liberalism is the bestest and most awesomest and everything else should die" in terms of a carry-over from Christianity instead of the logical result of some humanitarian impulse that the world would be better if everyone was rational and enlightened it changed my perspective.

Thinking about things through that perspective changed my view on things and I think made me less of a less arrogant person.

Jung wrote: Thinking about things through that perspective changed my view on things and I think made me less of a less arrogant person.

Maybe it's just me but this sounds a bit like bragging.

Zod wrote:

Jung wrote: Thinking about things through that perspective changed my view on things and I think made me less of a less arrogant person.

Maybe it's just me but this sounds a bit like bragging.

It is just you. But that's unsurprising when you're in the company of a very handsome super-genius like moi.

adr wrote:1) there's a whole mess of politics behind the specific word 'comrade'. they didn't want to call ppl things based off "my lord" to show moar equality and so on. huge story behind it so when a character calls someone "comrade" that one word can tell you a lot about him and point toward a fun political history as to be most meaningful there's gotta be some contrast in there

The Chinese word for 'comrade' is now slang for 'homosexual'

Zod wrote:

Jung wrote: Thinking about things through that perspective changed my view on things and I think made me less of a less arrogant person.

Maybe it's just me but this sounds a bit like bragging.

I am the absolute *best* at modesty.

Djinnkitty83 wrote:

Zod wrote:

Jung wrote: Thinking about things through that perspective changed my view on things and I think made me less of a less arrogant person.

Maybe it's just me but this sounds a bit like bragging.

I am the absolute *best* at modesty.

Fuck you, I'm like ten times more modest and humble than you are.

this thread goes to 101!!!!!!!!!!!!