This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can a believer provide evidence for God’s existence to refute the claim of atheists?”
The real problem here isn’t that you don’t know how to provide evidence for God’s existence but that you see that no evidence exists but still insist your God does.
The lack of evidence should be the cornerstone of your disbelief in the existence of something.
It’s the same reasoning you would use to refuse to make a significant purchase like a vehicle without taking it for a test drive.
Your approach to your God belief is like reading an ad without pictures for a $100,000.00 sports car and sending money to an address in another country while expecting your sports car to appear at your doorstep the next day.
Do you usually make your major purchases without inspecting them first?
Would you recommend buying a house without doing a walkthrough?
Why, then, would you structure your entire life around something you can’t verify?
The best you have is someone else telling you it’s true.
You can invest in some incredibly valuable swampland from me if that’s how you make big decisions for yourself.
The harsh reality you’re struggling with is that atheists make no claims.
Atheists only refuse to buy swampland from an obvious charlatan whose only interest in you is how much money they can siphon from your pocketbook.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will money and economies still exist, if all jobs get automated? If all jobs are automated, what will people work to earn money? If all jobs are automated, will people receive everything they want and need, for free, without having to work?”
Within a fully automated society, people will have their needs taken care of.
Wants are an entirely different beast.
If you want money to travel around the globe, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.
If you want to buy a sportscar instead of using public transit, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.
How you make money will be more a choice for you rather than a necessity made of compromise by a perpetual lowering of your expectations.
You won’t be forced to take a job you hate because you’re afraid of being made homeless. You’ll be able to hold out until you find a vocation you like and that brings meaning to you and your life.
You’ll have many more options for being self-employed than now in ways only emerging today as viable systems to help you bring your imagination to life.
I’ve recently discovered an entirely new concept for doing just that. Check it out:
The site is called “Makeship.” What makes it unique is that you can design your character, and if your design is accepted, it will be made into a plush toy that you can sell for a profit. They handle all the “heavy lifting” from converting your design into a 3D plush toy, its production process, and, to a large extent, a lot of your marketing through crowd-funded campaigns.
Many new initiatives are sprouting up everywhere that approach manufacturing, sales, and distribution from a service-oriented perspective.
You’ve probably already heard about dropshipping, where you can essentially choose products from a distribution catalogue and assemble them in a store where you handle all the sales for those products. They handle all the packaging and shipping for you.
This is just the beginning of the new world of automation.
Large entities will capitalize on individual ingenuity, innovation, and effort by empowering the little people to go out and carve their niches in the commercial world.
With the assistance of AI, we’ll be able to produce full-scale movies for distribution simply by the prompts and tweaks we make to flesh out our creative visions in ways that others would want to consume.
Life won’t cater to people without ambition or desire to work, but it will become a panoply of options and opportunities everyone can exploit.
With these tools at our disposal, we’ll finally enter an age where merit is not lip service disguising favouritism. Whatever you imagine will stand or fall on the strength of your effort without being buffeted about by the day’s politics.
Instead of fearing automation, we should be learning to embrace it and leaning into it to begin pushing our governments to adapt to a new world without waiting for widespread suffering through the transition process to compel them to solve problems that can be avoided.
UBI will save millions of lives if we begin implementing it now. If we wait until millions of jobs are lost, then we will lose a lot more than millions of lives, and we’ll end up coping with the daily chaos of ongoing riots and widespread destruction of property.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think more and more progressive liberal voters will leave Twitter and go to other sites where their views will be more respected?”
Being on Xitter right now is like being outdoors at a campground that’s become a free-for-all and sitting in front of a fire, watching a massive log slowly burn itself into ash.
Nothing is stopping anyone from cross-posting to any or all of the competition. At this point, there’s no reason not to while waiting for the log to crumble into dust. Xitter still has a massive database of postings and a long enough history to be helpful on some levels for research.
Knowing which of the alternatives will emerge as the front-runner is still early in the game, and it could very well be the case that all three (Mastodon — https://mastodon.social/@, Threads — https://www.threads.net, and BlueSky — https://bsky.app/) will establish comfortable niches for themselves. There may emerge reasons for choosing only one, but it’s too soon to do that now.
This phenomenon is an example of how socializing on a virtual scale robs us of experiences that are common IRL. For instance, it’s been less than one year since I predicted Xitter would die within five years. I received a lot of mockery for it then. Less than six months ago, when it was announced that Xitter had lost 40% of its value, I posted that it was tanking faster than I thought it would and made a softer prediction about its data being sold off in less than five years. I received a lot of mockery from Elonia’s fanbois for that. A few days ago, it was announced that Xitter is now worth only 25% of its purchase value. It’s tanking faster than I expected. Elonia’s doing a marvellous job of teaching the little people how much contempt the rich psychopaths among us have toward their pawns.
(To be clear, not all the rich are as contemptuous, but they are obnoxious because they are captains of industry and de facto leaders in society. They should all be like Nick Hanauher and banging a drum for positive changes for humanity. That’s the least that can be expected from them. If they’re not doing that, they are callously egomaniacal for a myopic and self-serving regard toward the benefits they enjoy and take for granted. They’re also quite stupid for failing to apprehend how they would be much better off if they supported dignified living for the little people.)
This is one of those cases in which I am not only happy to be way off on my prediction, but I can also boast about it, and I have no idea who those people were while I’m sure I blocked a lot of them. If this were IRL, I’d be enjoying a lot of gloating while downing several beers at a bar that were owed to me by people I’d have made bets with.
Eventually — and sooner rather than later, the people who continue to use Xitter exclusively will begin to wonder if their experience is worth the effort to log into it, and that will be the day the Xitting dies.
If you’re posting on such sites to build up top of mind, there’s no reason not to cross-post. That way, you can see what kind of attention each gets you, and that will let you know who to focus on and with targeted messaging that can be most effective for your goals.
I’m generic in that respect and don’t have a specific target or strategy for sales or what you have in mind, so my approach is just “put my shit out there and see what happens.”
There appear to be developing differences between the alternatives. While Xitter is emerging as the haven for lunatics, there are still a lot of progressive voices there that seem to be there while cross-posting on other platforms. Robert Reich, for instance, appears to be on all three.
People more focused on a specific community to engage with will find it tough to know where best to put their eggs right now, particularly since all three platforms are still establishing themselves.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Should we conclude that the only way America can be first is by making everyone else weaker and second including American citizens?”
If that’s considered a valid conclusion, it is derived from a mindset that fails to comprehend how strength arises from unity, not division. Such a conclusion is a recipe for weakening all parties, especially the U.S.
I would argue that it is this insular and protectionist mindset that has produced a Trump presidency that will end U.S. dominance as a global power.
The best way to think about this is to remember Clinton’s words: “The world is more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”
Playing at being the toughest on the block in a childish King of the Hill game is an invitation to be knocked off one’s throne — and that’s precisely what Putin will leave behind as his legacy when he gets “retired” by one of his insiders.
Since the U.S. wants to be viewed as worthy of leadership, it faces the daunting task of making up for severely grievous misjudgments. Electing Trump for a second term is merely the final straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
The U.S. still needs to put Bush and Cheney in front of an international tribunal to face war crimes.
That’s how far off the mark this question is.
You are in for seriously rough times ahead, and it would be easy to write you off to face your self-fulfilling prophecies alone. Still, you’re going to disrupt the entire world’s economy during your downfall, and that truly sucks big time.
The consequences of being a global leader mean having to live up to being a leader, and you’ve just proven to the world that was utter horseshit… utterly dangerous horseshit.
Your days as a global power are numbered. You’re going to become the United Kingdom for the next century. You may as well start practicing your “sorries” now.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do I cope with life knowing I am not good enough to do what I want?”
Life is about learning to cope.
One goes about coping by not obsessing over what one cannot do but by finding joy in what one can do.
There is no “good enough” because that’s an illusion that limits your potential and destroys your capacity for finding joy in doing something meaningful for yourself.
When you think about it, being “good enough” is a metric others apply toward you. You can choose to either accept other people’s insulting views of you, learn to internalize them and begin feeding a growing suicidal ideation, or you can stand up and say, “Fuck you.”
Almost everyone who has done something special has faced people who judge them as “not good enough.”
You can either accept the judgment of people who will never know “the real you” that you know lives within, or you can assert “that real you hidden inside” and embody it to become the “real you” that you know exists and is bursting to have a life of its own free from judgmental assholes.
Here’s a secret most don’t understand: Whenever someone judges you as not good enough, they confess to their insecurities that they are too afraid of not being good enough. So they project them onto people they can victimize. It’s an expression of a mentality called “crab psychology” — if they can’t be good enough, they will do what they can to ensure you’re not good enough.
Whatever you do with your life, don’t become one of those assholes. Be sure to encourage people to be their best because that’s the only way we’ll be able to crawl out of this hole of primitive barbarism that we’re still trapped in.
Atheists have no expectations of an imaginary figure.
Atheists do have expectations from unhinged believers who hypocritically betray their faith and their God’s commandments to treat others like they are all God’s children,
to stop passing hateful judgments and bearing false witness against atheists,
and to render unto Caesar by staying in their lane and out of politics.
Atheists also have hopes believers that they may, one day, realize how their condemnations of atheists only condemn them to an eternal pitchfork enema while being spit-roasted in a lake of fire.
We hope for this because it may finally result in them abandoning their addictions to hatred, violence and overt destruction of all that does not comply with their fascist expectations.
We hope for this because we realize that doing so could finally reduce the number of victims of violence and war to almost nothing.
The mid-East alone would experience a real Renaissance of the kind of love and peace that religions pretend to value. The rest of the world could finally prosper by dropping believers’ widespread misanthropic attitude toward each other and everyone in general so that we could also experience a return to sane values in communities where people work together in peaceful harmony.
It’s a dream, but it’s worth having because without it, one can only descend into the madness spread by unhinged believers, and that is the worst hell of all.
After all, what do you gain by assaulting atheists with childishly delusional questions like this?
Your question is just the result of your addiction to hatred porn. It does nothing productive for you or helps you in any way.
Do you think the people in your life appreciate your efforts to demonize atheists?
Really?
Are you sure they’re not embarrassed by behaviour like this?
Maybe it would help if you understood how this hateful behaviour of yours is what drives people away from religion to make it a rapidly shrinking phenomenon in society.
Here, have a look at the effect you are having on your religion with your perpetual hatred spew:
Try to think of what Jesus would do before overtly betraying everything you pretend to believe in because you’re only helping atheism to grow…
And we atheists don’t mind that at all… the sooner you drive everyone away and your mythologies into obscurity, the happier we atheists are.
Thank you for doing our work for us.
Forget everything I said and keep up the excellent work… wallow in your hatred porn because that’s just you drinking poison while hoping your enemy will die from it.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will Trump’s enemies change direction and become his worshippers if he really can stop the war in Ukraine within the first 24 hours of his presidency?”
People who view themselves as his enemies don’t hate him for what will be his betrayal of Ukraine. They hate him for the damage he’s deliberately done to them. Handing the Ukraine over to Putin will only make them hate him that much more.
Everyone else who is disgusted by him doesn’t hate him because they hate YOU for allowing that monster a second attempt at doing a more thorough job of destroying the nation than he did the first time.
Most people understand and acknowledge what kind of demented egomaniac Trump is, and they understand that he doesn’t care in the least about policy or that he doesn’t have any vision for the nation beyond whoring himself out for attention while bilking the American people out of every penny he can for himself. Most people understand from the first time around that he’s going to sell national secrets for personal profit and that he will put the lives of American agents in jeopardy by doing so. Most people know who he is, what he’s done, and what he can do.
No one knows better than a New Yorker who’s had to deal with his rapacious stupidity for decades and up until they finally ran him out of the state.
People are not unclear about the consequences of another Trump presidency.
People are angry at the utterly contemptible stupidity that has put the entire nation at risk and will forever change American standing in the global community.
You have crossed a threshold, and you still haven’t a clue what kind of nightmare you have invited into your lives and that you have imposed upon the people you think you care about. You still don’t understand how your wives and daughters will hate you for the rest of your lives. Your grandchildren will hate you. Hell, your great-grandchildren will want to piss on your graves because you have fucked up on such a biblical level.
What’s worse is that you’re going to continue blaming anything and anyone before you understand how the nightmare you have imposed upon your nation is YOUR fault… not Trump’s fault, not the Democrats’ fault, not the fault of “librulz,” but entirely YOUR fault.
You have already lost your right to overtime pay, and I’m sure you’ve glossed that over as unimportant in your mind until you have found yourself working without sleep for a few days while expecting a huge bonus in your pay and getting peanuts in return for all your hard work. Sure, you’ll complain about how unfair that is. You’ll still drag your ass to work another three days straight, though or get fired. You will have no coverage because the budget for unemployment will have been cut back while your qualification requirements have become so restricted that most everyone is rejected.
Meanwhile, the medical health plan you counted on to keep your kid on insulin alive no longer covers them and the price of insulin skyrockets. To keep your kid alive, you’ll have to sell your car and walk to work for a 36-hour shift. Then, when you fall asleep at work because you’re too tired, you’ll get fired and lose the health coverage you need to keep your kid alive. Oh well, you can always make another… amirite?
Meanwhile, your daughter gets pregnant and then gets hauled off into jail because she tried crossing state lines for an abortion that you set up for her because you can’t afford another mouth to feed.
Then you’ll start protesting, and hope will return when “the Don” himself shows up to grace you with his presence. Then he throws you a roll of paper towel and tells you to suck it up.
Then you’ll start crying to anyone and everyone who will listen about how unfair it all is, and the “librulz” who tried to prevent all of this will flip you the same bird you flipped them when you strutted around like the cock on the block, enjoying your “librul” tears.
You won’t have anywhere to turn or anyone to turn to besides your brothers in stupidity. All you idiots that brought this nightmare to the nation will have nothing but each other to console yourselves while concocting excuses for why this isn’t your fault.
You will then realize you have only one of two choices: end it all or sacrifice yourselves to make things right.
I suspect many more of you will choose the coward’s route rather than try to make things right.
By then, the nation will be in tatters as the price of eggs will have skyrocketed to more than ten times what they were when you were complaining about Biden.
And after all that, you’ll still try to sell the notion that Ukraine should have just surrendered to Putin because you are all cowards and hypocrites at heart.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is the least amount of authority governments can have in the market to allow functional free-market capitalism?”
Let’s begin answering this question by precisely identifying the role of government in market capitalism.
We, the people, through government, determine the rules by which the “game of capitalism is played.”
The government implements, administers, and referees those rules for “we, the people.”
The authority of government in this and all cases is determined precisely by the demands of “we, the people.”
Whatever authority a government has is authorized and endorsed by “we, the people.”
This is a basic explanation of how a democracy functions and from where its authority is derived.
There is no magic formula for determining how much or little authority a government has within any specific context, be it the marketplace or other social issues. Government authority is a dynamic thing which spans a spectrum of ideologies from right to left and top to bottom.
Generally speaking, “we, the people,” make demands of government, and the government responds to those demands.
Identifying who comprises “we, the people,” is where all our problems with government begin.
In the modern U.S.A., a society with arguably the most wealth and power on the planet has several stakeholders with varying degrees of power and influence on government operations — policies, procedures, laws, authority, and scope for implementing and enforcing their decisions.
This is no different than any other nation on the planet, except for how big the money and power pie is in the U.S.
The human condition is such that a contingent of us are so drawn to money and power that they deliberately influence government in ways that disempower and impoverish the many to secure money and power for themselves.
The largest pie attracts the largest contingent of the greediest among us. This is the cause of suffering for hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens today, which spills out onto the rest of the world because of its undue influence on global dynamics.
In many ways, the best thing for democracy worldwide is for the U.S. to lose most of its power and influence. If it becomes a sinking ship due to the recently elected corruption, the rats will abandon it for brighter prospects worldwide. Today, China is poised to become the greatest beneficiary of America’s power drain. It’s already benefiting from Russia’s hubris and overreach. China has been playing Putin in the same way that Putin has been playing Americans through Trump.
At any rate, to specifically answer this question, the least “amount of authority” the marketplace will have in its refereeing is already the “Lassez Faire” strategy the U.S. has been indulging in for decades. This is why the housing bubble and Great Recession occurred during the Bush Administration.
A complete lack of oversight means the predators in society have a heyday of mining suckers through fraudulent strategies to obtain their goodwill, support, and resources.
If you haven’t noticed yet, you might want to take a trip through Facebook and make note of all the advertisers.
There are at least ten scams for every legitimate advertisement because for a private, for-profit entity like Meta, generating revenue is a much higher priority than protecting their community. Ironically, they are serious about penalizing people for violating community standards.
Governments today have adopted a similar approach toward their administrative functions by outsourcing much of their responsibility to for-profit entities. The U.S. prison system is one such grotesque abomination of immorality practiced by the government through the authority it has been granted to administer national affairs under a for-profit mindset.
The fraudulent argument used to forward this human rights betrayal is an alleged saving to the people. The reality is that such a strategy represents a cost increase to the people with a dramatic reduction in the quality of service. This pattern of rapacious manipulation of government through propaganda fed to the people is most commonly associated with their (lack of) healthcare (health exploitation) system issues.
The goal, of course, in these cases is to appease the few with disproportionate power and influence in society to boost their annual incomes and quality of life at the expense of millions.
Their influence grants the government greater authority in areas that betray the people’s needs while strategically benefiting themselves.
In terms of authority in the marketplace, people are fed the lie that minimal authority is good for the market, while the reality is that it’s suitable only for the predators in the market.
To make matters worse, they succeed in their propaganda by delivering mindless solipsisms that dull critical thinking like a grifter convinces a desperate mark that they will receive a million dollars from a Nigerian prince by simply giving them a thousand dollars.
Like any sports event, a referee requires enough authority to enforce the game’s rules. If the field is big enough, additional referees are put on the field to ensure violations are spotted and dealt with effectively.
Without that oversight and the ability to respond to violations, the game is corrupted to such a degree that it’s no longer worth participating in any capacity.
Without the ability of the referee to exercise independent judgement, they end up favouring one team over all others to ensure they win every time.
In some ways, this is how the market has been corrupted by the notion that referees are unnecessary to ensure every player and every team has a fair shot of doing well in the game.
In some ways, the market has been rigged like a casino where the house always wins, and in this case, the house is the corporatocracy and the billionaires who own the house by proxy.
The less authority a government has independently from the stakeholders rigging the game in their favour, the less effective the market is for the economy. The restrictions on government oversight that are about to be stripped by the incompetence and malice characterizing the incoming administration will lead to widespread systemic collapse. This will be due to the predators among us experiencing a resurgence of freedom to victimize an entire population that will make the nation a new “Wild West of exploitation.”
By stripping consumer protections such as in food and environmental oversight systems, the outcomes are guaranteed to be fatal to an unpredictable number of mass casualties.
The next four years will be a supremely harsh lesson for those who buy into superficial soundbites because they are desperate to believe the Nigerian prince, who seems so concerned about their well-being, will sincerely deliver on their promise to drain the swamp rather than infest it with predators.
This bleeding heart bleeds for all the victims, be it left or right, liberal or conservative — but I will feel nothing but contempt for the self-serving MAGA addiction to hatred responsible for the ensuing chaos and destruction.
The people who fail to take heed of the nightmare ahead will be in for a lifetime of seriously bitter crows to chew on. I won’t be enjoying their humility, though, because I’ll be too busy grieving over the unnecessary casualties they will have imposed upon the nation.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively when discussing progressive policies? Is there a significant difference between socialism and liberalism?”
Socialism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with no practical connection between them.
Liberalism is built on three fundamental societal values: Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. These values inspire and guide liberal minds in supporting greater degrees of social justice in a broadly unjust world.
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Socialism essentially strips plutocrats of their wealth and forces an entitled class of people to live alongside as equals to the people they prefer to benefit from their exploitation.
These two disparate concepts are often conflated as part of a centuries-long class war waged by society’s plutocrats against the proletariat (the working class) while employing the bourgeoisie (capitalists) as their armies of oppression.
Every movement toward social justice is met by resistance to the entitled classes in society who possess the leverage of despair against the working class to enrich themselves while impoverishing the weakest among us.
Every movement toward social justice is a strip of power taken from the entitled classes to enable the weakest among us to survive and prosper without suffering a dehumanizing indignity imposed upon them by the wealthy classes.
For the working class to fight for and win weekends off from labour is a cost to the wealthy class that they deeply resent and respond to with strategies to strip further dignities from the working class.
Their deep resentment toward increasing social justice and decreasing power over the working class has been deeply embedded into their psyches due to historical events like the Russian Revolution of 1917. A monarchy was violently abolished through two successive revolutions and a civil war, which spread a sentiment of hatred for the ruling class in society across the globe to inspire a similar German Revolution of 1918.
The nightmare of breadlines persists to this day and has been used as a weapon of ideas against another uprising by the working class.
The plutocrats of today have learned to do whatever they can to insulate themselves from another violent uprising that would result in them losing their wealth and power to angry mobs of desperate working-class citizens.
They have invested billions over the decades to have people automatically associate socialism and communism with extreme poverty and extreme oppression. Their efforts have been supremely successful to the degree that the poorest in society today will fight to protect plutocrat wealth at the expense of their well-being.
Here’s an example of a random right-wing website, their fearmongering messaging and how successful the plutocrats have been in conditioning the working class to defend what they view as the saviours of humanity they refer to as “job creators.”
(Please do take a moment to “bask” in the sheer hatred they have cultivated within their loyal lemmings toward any form of social justice for society. These are the slugs in society who beg for a salt bath… and are deeply committed to taking all the rest of us with them on a trip to human oblivion.)
We can see the cancerous attitude as a caricature of humanity within the American political system as a corrupt plutocrat who has become a convicted felon can still campaign for president. In contrast, every other convicted felon is stripped of their right to vote while they rot in prison.
The plutocrats in society have been quietly waging their class warfare for centuries; before, they were plutocrats and considered a monarchy that assumed power over the little people through physical warfare.
They have persisted for over 100 years in a steady and patient strategy of protecting their wealth and power through every influential channel they can.
Look through this resource to see how the plutocrat class influences legislation creation through a group called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). This association has been responsible for literally writing the laws that are implemented verbatim to benefit themselves at the expense of the public good… and this is only the tip of the iceberg for their machinations:
Most hide their money behind organizations like Blackstone Inc., which bills itself as an “alternative investment management firm” and dumps millions into SuperPAC to fund the campaigns of politicians who will support their wealth acquisition strategies at the expense of the working class and the constituents who vote for them.
These are highly paid grifters whose job is to scam hundreds of millions of people out of the value of their labours, and they have succeeded to the tune of over $50 trillion from the middle class in the last few decades alone.
They have successfully converted a system of empowering the most vulnerable among us into a system of oppressing the most vulnerable among us.
They have invested billions in their war while reducing the costs of waging it to a small tax.
Their coup de grâce has been the outright purchase of the highest court in the land, seeking to convert the world into a facsimile of a medieval state with a two-class system of rulers and serfs.
Ironically, they have succeeded so well in entrenching their power to repeat the historic levels of income inequality threatening global stability one hundred years ago that we are on the verge of repeating the same tragedies.
It’s been easy to blame the motivations for all their socially destructive activities on simple greed, but the sheer irrationality of their behaviours transcends greed. It is a self-destructive behaviour that has abandoned rationality.
All of which is intended to prohibit these kinds of social justice goals for the working class:
The minimal costs of a social safety net don’t justify the extremes of greed they’ve been displaying. The only explanation for their extreme behaviour, which resembles the trajectory of an addict, is that they have been deeply scarred by history.
The revolutions of the little people throughout history have scarred them deeply, and that explains why they have invested so much into the optics of language to cause the public to viscerally reject a concept like socialism without bothering to consider aspects of the concept that can and are beneficial to society.
No one blinks about socialism when it involves public money spent on the military because security is more important to many, particularly among those who loudly and repeatedly profess their love of freedom the most.
The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that, as captains of industry and leaders in society, one would hope they would be astute enough to avoid making manifest that which they fear so much… yet, this is the state of affairs today:
Pushing people to extremes of desperation makes it seem like they’re begging for the pikes and guillotines to come out and repeat history.
They can see the escalations occurring throughout the globe. Instead of taking action to avert catastrophe, they invest in secure bunkers to save their asses from the conflagration while hoping their billions will be worth something when the entire world’s economy collapses.
For a group of people who are generally viewed as more intelligent than the masses, they seem to wallow in more profound stupidity than the under-educated people they love to manipulate while convincing themselves of their superiority.
The environmental nightmare they are inviting into our world is rapidly approaching a tipping point in which there will be no return to stability without a dramatic shifting of power throughout the globe. Yet, no inkling of this impending catastrophe seems to grace their awareness. It’s as if they’re watching a massive iceberg drifting toward them, and they’re more fascinated by its structure than what it will do when it strikes.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can I say I’m an atheist, when I’m actually agnostic? If I say I’m agnostic I’m worried that people will either say that it’s not real, or try to convert me.”
You can say that your beliefs are your own. You have no obligation to share intimate details of your journey with anyone who isn’t a part of your life.
Anyone who presses you doesn’t respect your boundaries, and if that’s the case, tell them whatever they want to hear to get them off your case. They’re not interested in getting to know you as a person because they want to be closer to you but because they’re looking for some information about you that they can use for their benefit.
People in life will ask you questions about yourself only because they’re looking for weapons to use against you.
You cannot trust people who cannot respect your boundaries. Life does boil down to being as simple as that.
The next time you wonder if you’re “allowed to say something” or another about yourself, try to remember how an orange Nazi turd concocts bullshit about himself and others with every sentence spewing out of his lying piehole.
I am certainly not advocating for any “benefits” of becoming a pathological liar because that’s just disgusting. I am simply pointing out that you have no reason to tie yourself up in knots over how you describe yourself to someone else.
The harsh reality is that you could likely spend an entire month describing intimate details about your life and why you arrived at certain conclusions that prompted you to think one way over another. The chances are excellent that 99% of what you say will be lost on your audience. People remember only 20% of what they hear.
Most of what you say about yourself passes through another person’s perceptual filters, and you have no control over how they interpret what you say. The only thing you can do is make your best guess at understanding them well enough to use the right combination of words that will get them close enough to understand something resembling what you want them to know and then hope for the best.
Your thoughts and feelings are your own… and if you’re anything like what I’ve gone through, then one day, you’ll be agnostic within a specific context and then a militant atheist within another context the next day. The following day, you’ll be amenable to believers, and later on that afternoon, after encountering a zealous believer, you’re back to hating religion and thinking of yourself as an anti-theist while thinking atheism itself isn’t firm enough to get the stench of the zealous asshole off your body and cleared from your mind.
The entire point I’m getting at is that human beings are not robots. As much as too many people want to create labels and stuff people into neat little boxes, humans are not that defined in such discrete terms.
Humans are more like water or vapour, constantly shifting in the wind or changing direction and flow depending upon the shape of the land one moves over. Whatever defines you as you is summed up entirely as your collection of memories.
Meanwhile, your memories are not stored like magnetic particles on a hard drive. Your memories are stored in eleven-dimensional space as “signposts” — symbols that your mind unravels as you recall events from your life… and your recollection changes as your state of mind changes.
Humans are more fluid than literal fluids in nature.
The next time someone asks you what you are, tell them you’re human.
The next time someone asks you what you believe, tell them you believe dinner is being served at 6:00.
Unless you find yourself in a long and deeply meaningful conversation with someone who truly wants to know your person, you have no obligation to barf up serial numbers for their mental registration of who they want you to be.
Be you and let the “Nosy Parkers” in your life be confused. That’s a “them problem,” not a “you problem.”
Being worried about how other people will respond to you because you’re trying to be honest with them about trying to figure yourself out is an unfair and intrusive expectation from another person.
You may not feel annoyed enough by such prying yet. If you manage to get on to your senior years, you’ll find yourself pissed off at such a rude and entitled attitude precisely because you have gone through a lifetime of being worried about telling people what you fear might be the wrong thing.
Don’t apologize for being who you are. You will only end up hating yourself for doing that. If someone decides they have a right to push their beliefs onto you, tell them to fuck off. Seriously. If Helen Mirren can endorse this response out of regret for being more polite than she should have been, you should not ever feel guilty about drawing your boundaries with a nosy someone in the harshest of terms.
Now that I’ve gone on this rant, I bet you might remember a half-dozen words… assuming you read any of it with any consideration instead of skimming over it all.
Good luck in navigating through this monkey house we call life. You’ll do fine if you can learn to duck and weave around all the flying feces.
thotbag 