I really like fanfiction. Reading and writing it. Nobody in my life knows and I plan on keeping it that way.
Pretty much everything from AI to Atheism to Lemmy to whatever interesting things I’m mulling over because I’m stuck disabled, living with crazy religious nutters family that have no fundamental logic skills.
Holy shit bro, hang in there - any chance of dating (maybe other disabled?) people and getting the hell out of there, or something like that? There are flats disabled people share, where they help each other, too, right?
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“Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby”
I like “in the same way bald is a hair color”
Evidence based existence is what I believe in personally. Speculation and fantasy can be useful in some parts of life, but for me, imaginary friends are a mental health disorder in anyone claiming they are real.
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Logic and reasoning preferably with scientific evidence.
Sort of like how you can only get so much evidence for aliens or Bigfoot and you just have to trust the conspiracy theorists about the rest
It is weird the feds admit UAPs are real now. Of course they don’t say “it’s aliens” but then again we wouldn’t yet know, it could or could not be. Maybe China has sufficiently advanced tech that we think shouldn’t be possible, maybe they’re aliens, maybe extra dimensional, maybe under the water somewhere, but what we do know is that there does appear to be something strange in the neighborhood.
It is weird the feds admit UAPs are real now.
No it isn’t. While it’s as easy as ever to fake it, the ease of sharing evidence these days makes denying that “weird stuff sometimes happens” much harder than it used to be, and it is such an obvious claim that denying it doesn’t serve much purpose.
but what we do know is that there does appear to be something strange in the neighborhood.
Usually, when it happens often enough that we can actually investigate rather than just saying “this one time weird fluke in our cameras was weird,” it turns out to be “the atmosphere is bendier than most people think” or “wow, what weird things your shadow can do sometimes.”
Idk if you have seen the videos released by the navy during covid, but it ain’t shadows.
Imaginary friends are quite common among children, and there are processes in some mental wellness practices that invoke imaginary friends.
One of them is the wise mind in Dialectic Behavior Therapy, in which one taps into their adulting conscience (related to the adult in transactional analysis).
If a patient struggles directly invoking the wise mind, they can invoke a fiction, similar to the Christian tradition of WWJD A patient struggling with a home management problem might imagine asking Albert Einstein for advice, and then imagine how Einstein might respond. (Substitute anyone, including darker archetypes: Satan, Darth Vader, Joan Collins, Barbara Bush…)
Given some people who do believe in spiritual or supernatural elements might get the same effect from talking to God, or channeling spirits, they can get the same benefit even if their beliefs can be inconsistent either with modern science, or with their own ministries (who want their parishioners to go to them for direction).
So, no, regardless of whether or not delusions, misinformation or self-deceptions are involved, imaginary friends are not intrinsically dysfunctional or a sign of mental illness.
You are comparing a mental exercise to a belief in an alternate reality. These are not the same. I don’t support making excuses for people that lack fundamental logic skills.
I’m totally with you and I get it, and the previous commenter could have written in a kinder tone, but
imaginary friends are a mental health disorder in anyone claiming they are real.
I don’t think therapists usually encourage their patients to claim they actually got the advice from Einstein or Darth Vader or whomever. And I can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant “adults” rather than “humans” when they said people.
Firstly, mental disorders aren’t determined by cognitive positions or even behavior. I get that culture in the 2020s still likes to regard mental illness as something worthy of derision or contempt, but it’s kinda like shitting on someone for being blind or deaf, and in the meantime, mental illness has real definitions beyond beliefs you don’t like.
In the psychiatric sector, mental illness is defined when a given compulsion causes a living dysfunction. If I secretly believed the moon was made of green cheese, while that might be regarded as a provably counterfactual belief, I could hold it my entire life without it once impeding my life. So as much as you can disagree with religious beliefs, or disparage religious identity, equating it with clinical madness not only is inaccurate and ableist, but conflating religious hate movements with people who suffer from mental illness is also an insult to people suffer from mental illness. By far, those of us with diagnoses are actually trying to manage our madness, and be functional, moral people.
That said, having counterfactual beliefs is super common (let alone an internal model of nature that has few embarrassments – you’d be hard pressed to find someone with a near-perfect internal model). When we talk about mental illness, the psych sector considers what is typical, and counterfactual beliefs are extremely typical, hence the reason newspapers and news sites still have horoscopes.
In fact, human beings contend with a wide range of cognitive and sensory biases that inform how they perceive the world in ways that do not reflect reality. I am confident even you, personally, struggle to grasp the actual breadth or age of the universe, and our place in it. We all do.
And that said, my own path to naturalism involved some not small existential crises and confrontation with not only my mortality but the infinitesimal breadth of my significance. We are tiny and brief, and I will forgive anyone who is not ready to confront how small and alone we are. (Or for that matter, how deterministic the path we carve through time.)
So, you know, you are free to do what you want, but I’m going to think it’s a dick move to shit on people for their illusions, especially in a world like ours in which nature and society both teem with life suffering under parasitism.
When it comes to the fellow whose post you’re attempting to reframe, I’m done with him. He’ll figure things out in his own time – or not, but I assume he will gain no useful ground through me. And I do understand that religious ministries – speaking of parasitism – manipulate people by the tens of millions to their detriment, causing a lot of preventable suffering. But that’s something we have to change at the sociological level, not at the psychological. It’s about humans having exploitable biases, not about a given person having a character failing by which they discard rationality.
How about you define your own belief system and let others choose their own words?
Right? Imagine telling someone claiming to be a Christian that “actually, Christian implies you believe (specific idea about Jesus my church goes for and yours doesn’t).”
That’d be a good way to get bloodied in a lot of places
No they don’t and agnosticism isn’t an upgrade, it’s just sitting on the fence.
Most athiests are agnostic to some degree and vice versa.
The burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim.
I disagree with the person you are replying to using the word “upgrade”, but also with your characterization of agnosticism as “just sitting on the fence”. It’s a coherent belief in its own right, not simply a refusal to choose between other options.
Now that you mention it, I’m not entirely convinced it is a fully coherent belief in its own right, more of a lack of wanting to enter the debate or a subcategory of atheism.
Shall we try it with unicorns? Unicorn believer says they saw a unicorn.
Atheist viewpoint would say something along the lines of “To persuade me they exist I’d need to see one in the flesh or at the very least a full anatomical breakdown of how their magical properties work with corroboration from other unicorn enthusiasts.”
The agnostic standpoint is what exactly? “We can’t know whether unicorns exist or not so there’s no point discussing it.”?
As someone who leans agnostic, I would say this is a strawman argument. Unicorns and religions/gods are not related.
How does one “lean” agnostic?
It’s not a strawman argument, I’ll let you pick any imaginary creature you please.
I would say “there’s no point in arguing about it if neither of you can prove your position. If it is unprovable then I don’t care if unicorns exist or not. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It doesn’t affect me. I won’t waste mental bandwidth thinking about it or discussing it further.”
Mind if I take some of your income to fund my unicorn sanctuary instead of improving tangible public services?
You’re already taking some to find out if japanese quail become more promiscuous under the influence of cocaine, this wouldn’t be too different tbh.
Agnostic atheist: Doesn’t believe in any gods, claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable
Gnostic atheist: Doesn’t believe in any gods, claims to know no gods exist
Agnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims the existence or nonexistence of gods is fundamentally unknowable
Gnostic theist: Believes in god(s), claims to know that those god(s) exist
I think all four types of people exist in decent numbers, but personally I, as an agnostic atheist, think either version of agnosticism is the only logically sound position. Gnosticism just feels disingenuous to me. Unfortunately I get the feeling that Christianity in the US is slipping further and further towards gnostic theism, and with that comes very dogmatic and oppressive rhetoric and actions.
As an atheist who would fully accept the existence of a deity if any form of rigorous proof was provided, these boxes are dumb.
Not really dumb and not really so different from how you describe yourself.
I identify as an agnostic atheist. I don’t think it is possible to prove a deity exists, but I’m fully open to the prospect of being wrong and as with anything else in science, should new evidence/data somehow come along and prove that there is some kind of deity/creator/what have you, I would look at it and potentially change my mind.
I don’t think it is possible to prove a deity exists, but I’m fully open to the prospect of being wrong.
Sounds like straight up atheism to me…
It’s agnostic atheism. I don’t believe one exists, but I also admit I don’t know for sure.
Gnostic atheism is only unsound if you insist we make absolute statements like 2 != 1 instead of speaking in absolutes as shorthand for probabilities that tend towards insignificance which is literally how people think and communicate outside of math. Attempts to approach philosophy like math are generally nonsense because our understand is far too underdeveloped for that to be anything but cargo cult antics.
Atheism is a lack of belief, not a belief in a lack
What would you call a belief in a lack?
Gnostic atheism, as opposed to agnostic atheism. Atheism as a label doesn’t imply one or the other, it’s simply a lack of belief in a god.
atheism is a belief “God doesn’t exist!”
The only people who think this are theists. Gnostic atheists and agnostic atheists are both atheists.
Atheism runs a long gamut of epistemic positions. Rare are those who hold a fast believe that God doesn’t exist (by any definition). The default atheist position is that we don’t know and the standards we use to test or hold positions of belief regarding other things we don’t know about (from the nature of ball lightning to the possibility of cyptids or – to cite some common thought experiments – invisible pink unicorns or fairies at the bottom of the garden) can also be applied to spiritual and supernatural elements like human souls, Hell and God.
This may sound agnostic, and as per other identities, we are each free to choose the identity name we prefer. But what we have established from centuries and centuries of observation stacks pretty heavily against the supernatural assertions of popular religious faiths. We can expect that Jesus didn’t likely actually rise from the dead, just as much as we can expect neither Zeus nor Thor nor Adonai command the thunderbolts (rather they seem to hold fast to electrostatic mechanics, and replaceable grounded lightning rods do a lot of heavy lifting redirecting lighting away from the big iron bells in steeples and bell towers… or doing too much damage to Christ the Redeemer in Rio De Janero.
Classical agnosticism comes from a Christian tradition, asserting we don’t know which interpretation of scripture is right, or if there’s another explanation, but that is part of the test of faith. In the modern day as Dawkins noted in his 2002 Call to Arms TED lecture, agnostic is atheism lite, not willing to admit that God as He is (They are) understood to be by most folk, is not just improbable, but infinitesimally probable based on our knowledge of the mechanics of the physical world…and on the conspicuous silence of the supernatural (We checked! A lot!).
So a safe differentiation might look like this:
Agnostic: I believe there’s a 10% chance Jesus was resurrected by divine miracle.
Atheist: I believe there’s a non-zero but insignificant chance Jesus was resurrected by divine miracle
I’m a naturalist, which is to say, I haven’t been able to find any evidence for supernatural events, and regard them much the way I would the notion there are invisible pink unicorns that live in Angeles Crest Forest. This is not to say science has figured out everything (we still struggle to make sense of ball lightning, though it’s definitely a thing in Missouri) but much of what we figured out points away from all the other common models.
I can speculate there is a God (or a pantheon of gods) but this gets classified with a range of other possibilities, such as the simulation hypothesis, or Azathoth’s dream. (We may all be figments of Azathoth’s imagination, but if so, Azathoth has provided for a robust dream-scape that is extremely consistent with its physical mechanics, even when we try to break reality.) Any of these could be true, but for sake of day-to-day living, our world appears consistently to behave as material, and nothing else.
What’s the real difference(evidence) between Religion and Schizophrenia?
What’s the real difference (evidence) between Religion and Schizophrenia?
This is something of a problematic question, and my first take on it is that it was asked contemptuously, or in bad faith. It’s also very easy to infer you imagine schizophrenia as Hollywood insanity, what is used to justify Mrs. Voorhees or Michael Meyers as slasher killers rather than as an actual mental health diagnosis from the DSM. I can’t help but wonder if you regard all persons who suffer from mental illness as violent or degenerate or otherwise less of a person than those who are undiagnosed.
So one difference between religion and schizophrenia is this: The psychiatric sector estimates one in three-hundred people worldwide content with schizo-effective disorders. 251 people in three-hundred are associated with an organized religion. As identities and clubs go, religions are way popular.
In fact, there are multiple fields of study about the interaction between religious practice and mental health, including abnormal psychology, or the study of mental illness, so I’m not going to imagine I can infer the meat of your juxtaposition.
Diagnoses are not intended for any other use than to inform treatment for the patient. They are especially not used to deny civil rights to a given person because they received a diagnosis from a medical professional. In order for someone to be committed (in a modern, civilized society) they have to be an imminent danger to themselves or others, which has to be established beyond a diagnosis.
Schizophrenics are statistically less of a danger to themselves or others than the general population. They are represented disproportionately among victims of violence, including officer-involved violence. And schizophrenics can sometimes operate heavy machinery, including firearms, safely and expertly. That doesn’t mean they aren’t affected by their illness, just that in some cases, it doesn’t interfere with their career. Contrast religious people who, as a demographic, are more violent than the general population and are convicted of violent crime more often than the general population, but not by much, since most of the general population is religious.
Irreligious people, like tabletop role-players are just not very violent.
All that said, I don’t know what exactly you were trying to ask. I read it something like what’s the difference between an orange and a sparrow egg? Well, one’s bigger?
Here’s another way to look at it, then. By popular definition, an agnostic person believes that there is no ontological proof for the existence or non-existence of God, or the divine. The agnostic person is thereby operating within the conceptual framework of religion. (A lot of agnostics in the Western world are agnostic specifically about the existence of the particular God of Abrahamic religions.)
On the other hand, atheists are simply not concerned with or do not recognize divinity, as a concept. In a way, it’s like how nobody holds an affirmative belief that Spiderman does not exist as a real human, because superheroes are categorically fictional, and it’s not even ontologically possible.
Umm, I’m Spider-Man agnostic, actually. There’s still time for 2099 to prove canonical.
The statement that god doesn’t exist can be best described as dismissal of a class of theories asserted without evidence and thus dismissed without any. People don’t exhaustively examine the universe they examine enough of it to make theories and draw increasingly strong conclusions. Pretending there is no difference between asserting for no reason something is true AGAINST mountains of actual evidence like asserting your particular religions deity is real and drawing strong theories based on reasonable analysis is disingenuous. You didn’t examine every chimney to conclude santa isn’t real and I didn’t examine every iota of the natural world to conclude it doesn’t have a creator. .
What’s the next end of the world year?
D,E,&I. I work with and am generally surrounded by a bunch of conservative MAGA fucks.
Literally last week my team coach said to us that anyone who got the jab deserves to die. What a fucking idiot.
Are people still on about that? Haven’t those ones moved on to the next thing after we didn’t all die? Call them out, it’s 6G cell towers now and eh, another kabal. Revelations Any day soon! Promise!
Lol
With things heating up in Israel, and AI showing, my boss thinks it a definite sign of the end times. He was convinced that the riots were a sign, now he’s all in on the rapture coming.
I call them “Left Behind” Christians, after the books.
they’re not left, they’re just Behind
Anyone who says others “deserve to die” needs to be removed from society. That kind of mindset is dangerous, bordering on threatening.
Average day in a red state
I would not be able to resist the urge to ask him directly if he thinks I deserve to die
What’s D,E&I?
No one IRL knows I help run a Lemmy instance and I plan on keeping it that way for now as it’s going to take too much explaining.
I’ve tried explaining Lemmy to people and they do not understand. They are like “just use reddit bro”
I stopped using Reddit when the API protests happened and haven’t gone back. I honestly think Lemmy is far superior. I love seeing and interacting with the same people in varying threads. Feels like an actual community.
“Reddit but run by non profits” is the simplest I find, even though that’s not completely accurate
“Like reddit but not owned by a single company” is how I’ve put it.
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Now Reddit had straight up opened their doors for AI training, which ofc they get money for. Off the Reddit users content. Fuck you Spez.
Sadly, that’s the reaction I’ve gotten as well. Most people I know in real life just don’t care enough to even look into it, and the fediverse in general is an incomprehensible subject to them.
*sigh
I am halfway through. I deleted my old account and tried to use Lemmy, but formula1 is dead here and only on Reddit I find my dose of
heroinnewsThe bargain I’ve made with myself is that Reddit is now a read-only adblock-only resource for me, and I’m prepared for it to go away on it’s own. I don’t post there, but I was active in several niche communities, and was a voice in the crowd on a few more popular ones (sportsball related) that don’t get a ton of traction here (though this college football season was fun. Hang in there, !cfb@fanaticus.social ), and I’m not going to completely give up checking in on things, but I engage on the Fediverse and a few forums full of crotchety old bastards who never “got” reddit in the first place.
Same, but replace sportsball with hobbies and gaming
You stole my “joke” :P
I think it’s just a pretty common experience.
I am looking forward to casually dropping into the conversation that I run a social media network.
Nice try mom
Your mom’s on Lemmy? You should be proud.
It’s really hard but I struggle to tell people about my operating system. I use Arch BTW.
I don’t want any of you to know either.
This is my answer. There’s like a 1% chance that someone i know would find out and i’m not taking it
Sometimes I find myself mourning the person I used to be. I experienced something traumatic in 2018 that changed my entire personality and now suffer from Bipolar II.
I get that. I do the same often enough. I went from an outgoing fun person to an anxious shut in that is scared of people.
I hope you find that part of yourself that you lost.
I don’t think one ever goes back to that, but you can learn to be comfortable with who you are now, and that’s more than most people ever achieve.
That’s… Hard. I don’t really know how to do that. I miss my old psychologist lol
Definitely.
High quality fresh mozzarella sliced thinly into delicate slivers like sashimi, dipped in high quality traditional aged Japanese soy sauce. Eaten with chopsticks of course, similar to conventional sashimi.
I’ve done a fair share of fine dining and make some very intricate conventional dishes but this weird combo just kind of to gets me. I’ve never mentioned this to anybody as to not disqualify myself as the “chef guy” but I can’t help but like it.
Both my brother and my brother-in-law are professional chefs and they each eat the weirdest nonsense on their own. It’s like their palettes have to be so refined at work that they need to throw the wildest combos of flavors together at home to feel like they’re eating something different.
So if anything I think this qualifies you as the “chef guy.”
No lie, that actually sounds kinda good and I want to try it.
It’s gotta be THIN, around 5mm or less. Frankly the thinner the better, it gives it a sort of luxurious melt in your mouth consistency (room temp too). For soy sauce I use Tsuru Bishio 4 year aged soy sauce. It’s like 40$ a bottle but it’s so strong and rich that I tend to use very little at a time (one bottle lasts me like 6 months).
Ok that sounds heavenly
Fuck, that sounds good. Gonna try it!
One of my favorite snacks lately is tamari almonds and a slice of smoked provolone cheese.
I need someone to know me really well before I let them know I watch anime, because a 30 year old dude who likes anime paints a certain picture
In your area perhaps. In mine it’s pretty common.
ASMR
I could never get ASMR. Like I understand it but it never triggers. Whispers, plastic crimples, etc. It finally happened to me. Completely by accident.
Backyard metal melting in forges.
The flame of a forge got me the goosepimples good.15 min in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgo4hH1WDyY
I was about to recommend bigstackd to you just to click the link and see it was one of his videos. I could watch that guy melt stuff all day
I went down the rabbit hole looking at people making their own hydro powered electric generators (from junkyard washing machine parts and some 3D printed parts) to people breaking down stuff and ended up at melting metal…
Wild ride to hit ASMR without planning to!!
ASMR just kinda means “pleasant tingling”, and videos with asmr in the title tend to just be “neutral stimuli that I hope will make you tingle pleasantly.” Mostly they’re indistinguishable from “oddly satisfying” videos with the addition of, like, sensual whispers, or something?
I wouldn’t be too surprised either way if metal melting in a forge wound up in either collection of asmr or oddly satisfying.
Ah, I have nothing I’m hiding from anyone, and I’m totally not posting this from an alt-account
username DEFINITELY checks out
Surprised how often “furry” came up in this thread. Seems like it would be more fun if more people IRL knew. Granted, perhaps its probably better when those IRL people originally were online furry friends that became IRL friends? Idk. Don’t consider myself a furry, but also not exactly not-a-furry. But its no secret I watch a lot of furry twitch streams for my immediate family.
I’ve never been one for the “fandom”. I just like the pretty pictures. Otherwise, the term has so much baggage since it’s so all-encompassing that depending on your social status or workplace, you might not “survive” it coming out
I’d prefer if my family and my coworkers don’t know my wife and I met at a bdsm event. I don’t hide it from friends though
I’ve been really into early Christianity / Biblical textual analysis. I found a priest I like on YouTube I really like and I’ve watched 100+ hours of lectures of his, plus a couple podcasts and audiobooks.
I’m not religious at all and kinda the stuff I like is the “huh, this is pretty obviously fake/contradictory, interesting nobody saw through this” stuff. It’s like anthropologically interesting.
Obviously a dominant religion, not like a fringe thing to know about, but nobody’s into these facts in just this way. Don’t want to talk about it to religious people, non-religious people don’t want to talk about it to me.
even in the deepest depths of my “bitter newly-deconverted atheist” phase i always found the bible and its history downright fascinating. mainline christians and critical atheists alike sell it so short.
I read Zealot by Reza Aslan and I thought it was a very interesting look into historical Jesus and early Christianity. I’m likewise not a Christian (I grew up as one, but became cynical at around 12 years old), but I do find fascination in the religion.
Historical Jesus is really interesting to me and stuff like how John The Baptist…baptized historical Jesus into something. So probably, Jesus was an acolyte of John The Baptist who went off and founded his own, similar movement. But then early Christians didn’t like the implications of their main guy being a spinoff so these weird interpretations like John himself saying at the time ‘I don’t deserve to do this baptism, but I’m going to anyway for some reason and this other guy is the main guy and also in one gospel I’m Jesus’ cousin.’
And also then Jesus’ brother James the Just running the church after Jesus and there’s a non-canonocal gospel (Thomas I think) that says ‘James, for whom the Earth and Sky came into being’ or something like that. And Jude calls himself Jude, brother of James. But James is the brother of Jesus so probably he is also the brother of Jesus, but that isn’t the most relevant thing about Jude. So what an interesting alt-history you could write where Paul doesn’t exist and James’ church wins out and he’s…also co-God? Or Jesus gets demoted and they’re both just Mohammad-style brother prophets?
Oh boy. Here I go theorizin’ again.
Yeah there’s a lot to talk about. I think however that if Paul didn’t exist, Christianity would have remained a Jewish cult.
Paul was the Don Draper of the 1st century. He effectively took an illiterate desert people’s religion and molded it in such a way where it would be approachable to the gentile and educated Roman citizens.
He was a Greek Jew who understood the gentile world. And he made fantastic stories. Iirc in his earliest letter, which became one of the Bible books I don’t remember which, there was nothing about immaculate conception or the 3 day resurrection, or the 3 wise men, etc
But adding all that stuff adds to the legend and mythology and it helped really spread the religion.
I think in a lot of ways, Paul is the founder of Christianity. Of course, Jesus is important. He must have been a fascinating figure in his time. Pontius killed thousands of Jews a year, but we really only talk about one.
non-religious people don’t want to talk about it to me.
There are definitely non-believers who look at the history or philosophy of religion. In high school I remember enjoying a unit about Kierkegaard relating to Jesus’s temptations in the desert (Matthew 4, maybe?). Kierkegaard himself may have had some religion, but that’s certainly not the case for all the existentialsts.
Whether you’re likely to run into agnostics or atheists into religious philosophy on a daily basis is another matter, I suppose.
Religion fascinates me so much as well. It also thoroughly disgusts me because of how fucked up a lot of practitioners are. The history of it all is interesting AF tho
There are terrible people everywhere, they don’t need religion to make them that way. What really gets me is religions like WBC that do make all of their people over that terrible stereotype.
- Fanfics, too. I love fanfics exploring what-ifs of a work, and myself wrote two or three of those, but assumers immediately associate them with the lemons.
- Isekai. Same deal as fanfics, except with escapism instead of porn. (I’m a sucker for fantasy dammit.)
- Machine text generation. Yeah, I don’t want to be confused with a functionally illiterate tech bro.
Fantasy is so good at helping forget irl issues. I love it.
Escapism…
Started with anime. Then manga/manwha. Now I’m reading novels…
I love fanfics exploring what-ifs of a work, and myself wrote two or three of those, but assumers immediately associate them with the lemons.
This is it for me, too. I’d wouldn’t mind talking about some of the fanfics I’ve read, but you can’t even mention fanfiction without people assuming you’re essentially reading porn.
None of my family members know what a furry is and i’m keeping it that way.
Thank you
