Sadly, the real question is the one you’re avoiding.
The real question is the question you have flipped around because you’re too afraid to face it.
The real question is a reversal of the deflection you have concocted to protect the lie you live by.
The real question is: What makes the bible believable for you?
The talking snake or the talking donkey? How is love expressed through mass murder? How can one’s female children be chattel to be sold? Talking bushes? Magic?
What in any of that is believable or moral to you?
Do you sincerely believe that animals from around the world travelled thousands of kilometres to sit peacefully, predators and prey alike, in a small boat for months while the entire globe was flooded and most of life was wiped out?
Do you believe an entire species born of two people who bear male children can magically fill the Earth with enough children to fill the globe?
Can an entire sea be temporarily parted to make way for peasants to cross on foot? Perhaps you’re one of those who think the moon can be chopped in half and reconstituted? (No? Different book, eh?)
Can a person be swallowed by a massive fish and live inside its belly with all the abdominal acids for three days without any ill effects?
Can people indeed be brought back from the dead? Can water truly be converted into wine? Can rocks be transformed into bread? Did people live for almost one thousand years? Was an entire river converted into blood? Do cherubs and demons genuinely exist? Can people be transformed into pillars of salt?
What exactly do you find believable within the bible?
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “As there is no evidence that consciousness emerged from unconscious matter, then who created consciousness, according to atheists?”
The people you should be asking this question are not atheists but specialists who have expertise in this subject.
Atheists understand that one of the most glaring fundamental flaws in the believer mentality is that you expect knowledge to be a one-stop shopping process where you don’t consult authorities who specialize in a knowledge domain.
Believers like yourself behave as if your knowledge authorities are shopping centres of expertise.
This is why you look to your priest, minister, or religious leader to answer all the big questions in life, even though they have no clue what the correct answers are. Most of them pull nonsense out of thin air, and you lap it up like it were gospel. This is why so many of you struggle with a simple definition of disbelief for atheism.
That’s why you struggle with mastering simple tasks like knowing how to get real answers to your questions.
It is this kind of intellectual laziness that destroys your critical thinking skills.
For example, you pose questions like these as if they’re effective “gotcha questions” that can score you a win against your theological enemies.
You don’t care to understand the answer because you’re more interested in embarrassing atheists so that you walk around like a cock on a block and brag to your insular friends.
It’s pretty sad because the simplest way to address your nonsense question is to ask how you think any “who” is involved in the answer or even matters in considering an answer.
You presume a “who” is involved without any justification beyond the conditioning you have been subjected to daily since first learning how to say “momma.”
No one but you claims consciousness emerged from unconscious matter because you don’t bother to educate yourself on what humanity has learned about consciousness, what it is or how little we know about it. You don’t have the slightest clue how little you know about consciousness, but you behave as if your pat answer of a “who” is your secret weapon to put atheists in their subordinate place.
That’s just sad.
I doubt you even understand that what you have concocted is a straw argument. You create a fiction in your mind of what you think atheists believe about consciousness. You behave as if being an atheist magically imbues a person with knowledge in the scientific domains of biology, neurology, physics, and psychology — to name only a few that have explored the subject of consciousness.
You make this grotesque mistake in judgment because you have been taught to believe the magic words “God did it” answers every important question in life.
That’s just sad, annoying, and frustrating when believer after believer repeats the same nonsense daily by the dozen on every social media site.
Because of that, we know you don’t care about learning, much less understanding the numerous answers to your oversimplified question. You don’t realize that your simple question hides many questions you have no real answers to beyond “God did it.”
For example, you can’t identify or define what you mean by “unconscious matter,” but it’s clear from your wording that you’re thinking about something as simple as a rock. In your mind, the difference between a rock and a thinking being is magic. Forget about prions or viruses that behave like living creatures but aren’t.
You expect atheists to answer your question with humming and hawing that you can interpret as a win in the same way that MAGAts get off on “stickin’ it to the libs.”
If you cared about the concept you invoked, your question would be more specific and up-to-date with what science has discovered.
You would be asking not atheists but a mycologist about consciousness in mushrooms and fungus. You would be fascinated with how trees can talk to each other, and you would be respectful enough of the people you ask your questions, not assuming every atheist you encounter has knowledge and expertise in these fields.
The simple answer to your simplistic question is that there is no “who” beyond the wishful thinking of a childlike mind.
The existence of consciousness is accepted as a fact, but we don’t know what it is, how it exists, nor even the limits or range of forms in which it exists.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is it called when you believe in a higher power but don’t know what it is?”
It is a paternalistic instinct we are born with and inculcated during childhood socialization, and is called “wishful thinking” for adults.
There are many “higher powers,” at least when contrasted against whatever “powers” a human being has.
None of those higher powers are a replacement for one’s parents, no matter how much one wishes theirs were not so toxic. The sad reality is that such wishful thinking is a byproduct of centuries of generational trauma.
If you’ve ever noticed how well-adjusted people are from loving families, you’d have realized how much natural self-confidence tempered by humility they exude. All that is required to develop that maturity is a parent who understands love and expresses it honestly, even when it’s most arduous and demands the most brutal honesty with oneself by admitting one’s shortcomings to one’s children.
This attitude and desire are biologically driven instincts with the essential elements guiding them. These are built into the brain’s hardwiring in the prefrontal cortex, from which a sense of justice and balance within the universe is derived.
“What is particularly interesting about these findings is that they suggest that the sense of justice is not something learned through experience or socialization but rather something built into the brain. This is consistent with the idea that certain moral principles are universal across different cultures and societies, such as the idea that it is wrong to harm others or that honesty is a virtue. These moral principles may be rooted in how the brain processes information about social interactions and relationships.”
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do scientists believe that the universe and the Big Bang can come from absolutely nothing but find it so hard to believe in the Holy Spirit?”
Creatio ex nihilo
This is a Latin phrase which means “creation from nothing.”
It is a phrase used in all three Abrahamic religions. The idea of something from nothing comes from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions, not from science.
Scientists don’t claim something came from nothing. Your religion makes that claim.
Instead of learning about your religion, you invent nonsense derived from your religion and concoct fiction about a discipline you choose to remain ignorant of while using your fiction as justification for smearing what you have made no effort to learn anything about.
Don’t you think that’s a bit convoluted?
It’s referred to as a straw argument.
Your straw is a religious phrase you attribute to science, and then you use that false attribution as justification for fraudulent criticism. You imply hypocrisy in science while embodying hypocrisy in your question.
If this were a behaviour that rarely occurred, it would be easy to overlook. Instead, the hypocrisy you have demonstrated occurs so often that it’s almost a surprise when a question by a believer to atheists isn’t hypocritical.
Where does one find a “Holy Spirit” buried under so much hypocrisy from religious folks?
My memories of church doctrine don’t seem to include hypocrisy as an attribute of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps I missed that while my eyes rolled back up into their sockets as my head began thumping from all the mind-numbing nonsense I was being exposed to.
It could be my knees getting sore from the padded board while I wondered when I could sit back in my seat.
At any rate, I always found myself more interested in learning about scientific concepts because they made sense. I felt like my imagination was lit up when learning something tangible, while my mind felt dulled into a stupor every time I felt forced to endure the mind-numbing religious patter.
I never understood why people would prefer being lulled into a stupor to stimulating their imagination. I used to chalk that up as a subjective preference indicating benign differences between people.
I have come to realize, however, that the incuriosity of people who prefer to wallow in fiction rather than choose to stimulate their imaginations with knowledge indicates a tremendous gulf which creates problems in society.
Dialogues online with religious people rather than in person seem to provide greater freedom in exploring those differences in thinking, so perhaps you can address in more personal terms why it is that you don’t know your doctrine and believe the doctrine you don’t know but have heard it somewhere is a product of science.
Aren’t you in the least embarrassed to realize you have admitted to being ignorant of both science and the religion you seem to want to be associated with?
How does one go through life pretending they are devoted to this thing called religion but remain so ignorant of it at the same time?
I’m sure your first instinct is to dismiss these words as “fake news,” so I’ve included an AI summary to help you cope with how you have just humiliated yourself in a way not unlike peeing in your pants in public.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are we now expected to blindly accept mainstream science and not question it even though the way you make scientific breakthroughs is to question science in the first place?”
Science is about asking questions because every established scientific fact and theory accepted by “mainstream science” is a transparent data repository.
Let’s first address this notion of “mainstream science” for the abomination of prejudice it is. There is no distinction between “mainstream science” and “non-mainstream science.” There are not multiple streams of acceptable sciences. There is “fringe science,” which involves investigations into concepts not grounded in science, but at least attempts to follow the investigative methodologies of science to prove their conjectures. “Fringe sciences” conforming to this definition include investigations into aliens, the afterlife, and all the supernatural. These are specious leaps of the imagination without grounding in proven scientific principles.
Any of the many investigators who have looked into these phenomena could identify something previously undetected. They can then provide evidence of their discovery through a context conforming to scientific rigour. Their findings can then be validated by any party’s ability to replicate their results predictably. If third party tests validate the propositions made, then their discoveries are incorporated into what you want to refer to disparagingly as “mainstream science.”
In the media world, “mainstream” refers to popularity while “fringe” refers to often extremist and not-popular venues of presenting information. There exists no validation system within media to ensure accuracy of the information presented. Your use of “mainstream science” attempts to transpose the chaotic nature of information presented within a media context onto a discipline built upon rigorous processes to ensure accuracy and transparency.
You’re not “expected to believe anything” that has been accepted by “mainstream science” but if you have questions, you have every right to repeat the tests conducted to derive the results described within each scientifically accepted fact or theory.
Nothing within the discipline of science expects anyone to believe anything. The expectation is that you disbelieve and question everything. The problem lies in the degree of effort people put into their investigations before accepting or rejecting any scientifically credible fact or theory.
When people pose questions like this, they admit to a poor understanding of the scientific process and approach their criticism with an arrogant form of indignity — as if they’re being lied to. The harsh reality, however, is that they are admitting to wallowing in ignorance and expect the world and the science discipline to cater to their personal biases like profit-chasing enterprises in media do.
When such minds reject a scientifically credible fact or theory, they’re not rejecting valid science or identifying flaws within testing methodologies, data collected, or conclusions. They are indulging in a wholesale dismissal of an entire branch as an excuse for failing to study their subject sufficiently to identify flaws. They’re indulging in pure bias — subjectively driven drivel.
We see this nonsense play out in every space a believer indulges in dumping their biases onto the world while pretending to possess enough of an understanding of science to dismiss the work of an uncountable number of professionals dedicating their lives to discovery. Professional scientists adhere to principles of integrity that can reveal fundamental and profound truths about the universe we inhabit. We cannot learn anything without rigorous discipline practiced with integrity, no matter how much the ignorati wish to drag the only means by which we, as humans, have developed for acquiring knowledge into an abyss of prejudicial ignorance.
The garbage perpetually barfed up by the scientifically illiterate is obnoxious, and it seems never to be cured by our species as it recurs like a herpes virus. After all the years of addressing the fundamental misapprehension of humans evolving from apes and the multitude of memes and discussions online about how utterly idiotic that degree of ignorance is, someone posed that question yesterday — and with righteous indignity. I couldn’t believe my eyes. “If humans evolved from apes, then why do apes still exist?” — the degree of blind stupidity in this question is abhorrent on far too many levels to tolerate. We cannot afford to tolerate this threat of ignorance to our survival as a species.
Yet, this is the kind of mind that believes science is the equivalent of mainstream media, and they are entitled to regard a massive branch of science as a repository of opinions, not facts. They dare to be arrogant enough to believe themselves entitled to be angry with people lying to them. The ignorance in such a position is appalling. It’s like a two-year-old child telling an adult that two-plus-two doesn’t equal four — then they stamp their feet and demand to be told they’re right.
That’s how your question was perceived when I first read it.
That’s what prompted me to check out your profile because this screams ignorance of science and I suspected first, that you were a troll who knows better and barfs up provocative nonsense for the insipid sake of getting a reaction… but you’re not.
Your profile indicates that you’re sincere in your questions, and that’s horrifying AF. I can accept how you might be a youth still in grade school, but if you’re a high school graduate, this question is an indictment of your education.
I feel sorry for you, but worse, is that I’m horrified for a nation that is poised to start another world war that almost guarantees human civilization as we know it will be destroyed forever. If that happens, the main culprit won’t be utterly evil monsters vying for power, but the ignorance of the poorly educated.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Dear Atheists, do you think its better to have faith, or no faith?”
Believers should learn to understand how various forms of faith exist that don’t require you to check your brain out of service to maintain them.
For example, one can have faith in all the other drivers on the road to mostly observe the rules of the road.
One can also have faith in the referee for your game who is sincerely interested in being objective.
One can also have faith that the person they hire for a job sincerely wants to succeed and contribute to your success.
None of these forms of faith are guarantees against misjudgment but are optimistic expectations that will generally pan out positively. The odds of a negative outcome are far fewer than a positive outcome.
These are forms of faith based on an awareness of the world and an objective understanding of how people generally behave.
We know there are outliers and sometimes disappointments, but for the most part, one’s faith in these conditions is met with positive results.
This is a justifiable form of faith.
What is not a justifiable form of faith that essentially amounts to wallowing in self-serving delusion is believing in the existence of a human-like entity endowed with magical powers seen nowhere else in the universe… particularly when assuming such an omnipotent being of galactic proportions will intervene in the life of something less than a speck of bacteria to it… and most especially in matters of convenience like one’s favourite team winning a ballgame or a parking spot opening up in a timely manner.
Otherwise, it is much better to have enough faith in oneself to ignore the naysayers in one’s life than not because one will never have any hope of realizing one’s goals or dreams without it.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can we determine the truth about the existence of God? Should we rely on the beliefs of atheists or believers?”
This question is heartbreaking.
There is not a single thing in your life that you struggle with determining whether that thing exists other than your desire to believe what other humans have told you is true.
No other human has ever had to tell you the sun exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you mountains exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you oceans exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you cold viruses exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself. No other human has ever had to tell you snow exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
Nothing other than supernatural nonsense puts you into a quandary of wondering whether it exists or not.
You might wish to believe ghosts exist but will never see or experience tangible evidence to support any belief because no evidence exists. The same applies to goblins, leprechauns, fairies, angels, demons, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. All of these imaginary beings are products of fiction, in which you will never experience a real-life manifestation of any of them.
It’s not that no one has been looking — quite the contrary. Millions worldwide have been searching for evidence of these phenomena for centuries. There have been television programs for decades with teams of people equipped with the most modern technologies to help them find evidence.
Let’s contrast that against something that was theorized to exist in 1964. A particle officially referred to as the “Higgs Boson” was determined to exist by extrapolating from the evidence that showed a massive gap in our understanding that could only be explained by something the public became aware of as “The God Particle.”
It was named so, not because it bore any relationship to your magical sky daddy, but because it was difficult to find. A physicist by the name of Leon Lederman wrote a book in 1993 called “The Goddamn Particle,” which was an expression of frustration over how difficult it was to find.
Everything about physics on this scale showed that it had to exist, but it couldn’t be found.
It was finally discovered forty-eight years after theorizing that this particle must exist to explain how mass is transferred to other particles like electrons and quarks. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland gave us the first proof of its existence. We had no tangible evidence of its existence up until then. We did, however, have tangible evidence of its necessity to exist to explain other phenomena that could not otherwise be explained without it.
IOW, without the existence of the Higgs Boson, much of physics would have just broken down into a jumble that could not make sense, be adequately explained, or avoid being relegated to the same realms of the imagination that the supernatural exists.
Without tangible evidence of its existence, all scientific discovery was at risk of being viewed in the same terms as magic — inexplicable woo.
Physicists set out to find it according to the clues pointing to where it must exist, and that’s where it was found.
No such corollary exists with the god concept.
Nothing in the universe requires god as an answer to an unanswered question.
The only reason you and everyone else who struggles with the concept are hung up on it is that it appeals to your emotional need for the universe to make sense in a paternalistic way… in the very same way, life made sense to you as an infant in the cradle whose parents or guardians ensured you had food in your belly. Life made sense to you as an infant when your diapers were changed to keep you comfortable and warm each day.
Your yearning for God is the desire of an infant wistfully hoping the chaos of life makes sense on some level beyond your comprehension… and that may very well be the case, but it isn’t due to some magical parent who will care for you like an infant in a cradle.
Atheists have no beliefs about god, so turning to atheists to answer questions that are your responsibility to answer for yourself is a disservice to you.
Other believers will tell you what they are desperate to believe is true, while atheists will tell you they don’t believe that nonsense.
This atheist will tell you that if something like a god creature exists, it doesn’t exist in any form that any human has been capable of imagining. Our universe is too vast, alien, and too far beyond human comprehension for us to have the slightest hope of untangling its mysteries enough to know anything with any certainty.
This atheist will also say that every manifestation of god by humans is an extension of their egos and represents the epitome of delusional human arrogance.
This atheist will strongly recommend that you stop wasting your valuable intellect on pining for a cosmic super daddy of the imagination and focus it on trying to detangle the complexity of life on Earth. There is already plenty here for us to figure out on our own, wasting valuable time and effort in pining on something irrelevant to the physical reality we share.
Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a Father Cosmos is an abdication of your agency. It is a way of giving up on your gift of free will that you would expect someone to dictate your life to you instead of rising to the challenge of living your own life. It is a way of running away and hiding from the freedom you have been given, which has been hard-fought and won through bloody sacrifice after sacrifice throughout history for you to benefit from.
Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a magical authority is giving up on yourself and retreating into a darkness of slavery and hopelessness in an existence of oppression made worse by the fact that you would only be serving the most depraved humans on the planet who don’t care in the least about a god beyond how they weaponize that concept against you and steal your life from you to benefit themselves.
This atheist strongly encourages you to live your life for yourself and not for some fantasy peddled to you by a parasite who wants you to believe nonsense because it benefits them at your expense.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “When will people understand that their constant selfish reckless belligerent greed is what brought society to its current disgusting miserable state of existence?”
Let’s look at someone like Donald Trump. He has spent an entire lifetime spreading hatred while bullying people to feed shallow desires, and he entertains himself through acts of cruelty he enacts on fleeting whims. He’s been behaving in ways that epitomize constant selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed, ostensibly his entire life.
His response to being criminally convicted was not remorse but to have the conviction overturned.
This question naively presumes that a person who behaves in destructive ways throughout their life will magically experience an epiphany of conscience in which they will transform into the “decent human” imagined by this querent.
Never has any evil monster throughout history found any turning point in their life that magically transformed them into saintly beings. Most who claim to have “seen the light” assume such a position as a fraudulent means of continuing their prior agenda of self-benefit at the expense of others.
The short answer to your question is “never.”
People cannot change their essential nature. They may choose to improve, but that presupposes desire that has always existed and a lifetime of dedication toward that end.
People like Donald Trump see nothing wrong with their behaviour and so will never make an effort to improve.
Epiphanies such as this question presume to be possible constitute wishful thinking on a highly destructive level of delusion that prevents us from addressing the fundamental issues of broken psychology that we must dedicate ourselves as a society to addressing on the most basic levels.
We can never truly call ourselves civilized if our systems enable and empower the kind of evil embodied by people like Donald Trump — and make no mistake about it, we encourage his evil.
Our societies embrace and enable selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed.
Until we can address the fundamentally broken human psychology on a system-wide and social scale, we will continue to be plagued by these behaviours.
Ten percent of the world’s wealthiest are destroying our planet at a rate practically matching the total of the other 90% of the rest of humanity. Instead of doing something to restrain their destructive behaviours, we put them on pedestals and worship their harmful behaviours.
Changing humans in ways that address destructive behaviours embodying selfishness, recklessness, and belligerent greed means we must start at the top and change all of human society.
“Atheists are a group which share characteristics or interests or views in common beyond disbelief in a God creature.”
“Atheists have no morals.”
“Atheists reject or hate God or worship Satan or any fictitious creature imagined by theists.”
“Atheists believe in science.” (No one, atheist or otherwise, who understands or has a basic understanding of science “believes in” science. Science is not a matter of faith, so please stop superimposing your insular paradigm onto others.)
“Creationism is an alternative to evolution.” (Also, don’t ever call people, atheists or otherwise, “evolutionists” because that’s just plain ignorance at an incredibly ignorant level of insular stupidity.)
Other statements like “God bless you” are contingent upon an individual atheist’s perspective on the matter. (I’m okay with people expressing positive sentiments in terms they are comfortable with and interpreting them as such.)
Atheists do not, as a whole, hate theists; they want them to stay in their lane and stop pretending like their beliefs trump facts because they don’t. Freedom of religion is the freedom to believe as you wish, not the right to impose your beliefs onto others. I don’t care if you think your interpretation of your scriptures causes you to believe homosexuality is wrong; you’re not God, and you have no right to pass judgment on people for how they were born… oh, and stay out of politics or start paying taxes like everyone else does.
By the way, Jesus wasn’t white, and his views were liberal. He did not support wealth but service to his fellow humans. He was not a narcissist who cared more for himself than the poor. His life was dedicated to peace, not war, nor to becoming wealthy or superior to others. He washed the feet of lepers to show you what that means, so betraying your saviour with your idiotic divisiveness and hatred will only send you to the hell you fear (if your beliefs pan out to be confirmed).
Even worse than simply betraying your beliefs, you make life hell for others — yes, I know, not all religious types are hypocrites. Still, all religious types must call out hate-mongering hypocrites like Steven Anderson, Kenneth Copeland, Jim Bakker, and the Westboro Baptist Church, who all prey upon your fellow believers by feeding on their insecurities. Make an effort to show the world you do believe what you claim to believe by raising a humungous stink over the very many atrocities committed by supposed religious leaders. There is no bloody way any religion can have any claim on morality when the predation of minors is institutionally protected. You must clean out the corruption in your own house first before you can hypocritically claim to care about so-called “unborn babies.” All this hypocritical crap makes people justifiably hate you and everything you claim to believe in — even the innocent ones among you; and worse for you, it makes people run away from your toxicity while eviscerating your credibility in everything you claim to believe.
That should cover most of the broad strokes I can identify from the top of my head (yes, it’s true, my references were Christian because that’s what I am most familiar with, but that doesn’t mean every other form of theist fantasy gets a pass because these sentiments apply to you, too.) We are living in a world characterized by disinformation and hatemongers to disenfranchise innocent people who cannot defend themselves. At the same time, hate crimes escalate as a monstrous hypocrite profits from selling autographed bibles.
(I wrote this five years ago and have been discussing these issues throughout my entire life, and instead of seeing any improvements with your lack of integrity issues, we’re seeing an increase in the kind of hypocrisy that would send chills down the spines of your venerated saviours. It’s horrifying just how little effort religious followers put into holding their leaders accountable for the hate they spread, and you dare to pretend you have a moral high ground. It is this kind of hypocrisy that’s driving people away from you.
If you want to be legitimately viewed as a moral people, then concentrate on feeding children in your schools instead of putting up fraudulent props like your Ten Dogmatic and repetitive Commandments. Kids need nutrition to focus on school and succeed at getting an education, not orders barked at them with threats of eternal punishment. This isn’t supposed to be the dark ages any longer. Those were over 500 years ago.)
All I can say as a summary is, Thank God I live in Canada because Americans are in for one helluva wake-up call over these next four years. What truly sucks, though, is how much of a negative impact you’re going to have on the entire rest of the world as you grapple with your lack of basic human decency.
This is a leading question. Lumping all “social expectations” into a “freedom bag” produces only “freedumb” — the inability to distinguish between regulating destructive behaviour and encouraging positive behaviour to support the social contract.
Laws against murder can conceivably be considered restrictions on freedom, but they’re also a means of protecting freedom for the victims of predators in society.
There is no universal single-size-fits-all means of parsing this question. It’s just a nonsense question designed to appeal to those who already perceive society as children complaining about having to clean their rooms.
Here’s a counter-intuitive example for people who don’t quite understand the nuances of laws and social expectations.
It can be argued that in a Mad Max dystopia, one has the greatest “amount of freedom” possible because there are no such “restrictions” (parameters) as those in a world where anything goes. The harsh reality in such a case is that what constitutes freedom for some (the powerful) constitutes enslavement for the rest of “society” to a persistent fear of having one’s life snuffed out on a whim.
Sometimes, restrictions produce greater freedoms than would otherwise be the case.
In the art world, for example, the greatest creativity can be produced simply by putting parameters on one’s work and approach to doing one’s work. In a personal case, I restricted my palette to black and white for about half of a semester after being told by an instructor that my colours looked like Disney had barfed them up and onto my canvas.
I struggled with colour and all the many nuances of colour, so I had not developed the nuance of understanding how colours work in balance, just as shapes do in a composition. Removing colour from my palette allowed me to focus on developing harmonies between shapes and finding ways to establish compositional balance without the added complexity of colour as a dimension to throw me off.
That restriction allowed me to understand my work from an entirely different and much more free perspective. I discovered freedoms I did not know existed before my self-imposed colour restrictions.
Society is much like that because it has become so complex it’s difficult to parse which aspect is beneficial and which is toxic. We can no longer live with the simplistic view of the world we once nurtured through symbologies like a difference between white hats and black hats. We live in a world of anti-heroes, and that makes demands on our ability to apprehend nuance through developing critical thinking skills. We must learn to be capable of adequately parsing subtle distinctions that can threaten to transform freedom into subjugation within the slimmest of margins.
People find the freedom to be themselves within their tribal associations but can also find their freedoms stripped by the dogmatic application of tribal expectations.
Another example I’ll take from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (which I applied — or interpreted as Japan in the 1980s) was the planet Terminus. Hari Seldon’s group was consigned to a planet that was slim on resources to mitigate the potentiality of becoming a threat. Instead, what happened was that scarcity of resources encouraged their creativity such that over time, they produced faster and more powerful ships that were smaller than the Empire’s massive vehicles.
This means that freedom cannot be measured by its constraints but by the results of the limitations (or parameters) placed upon a society. Those constraints can facilitate freedom when they are balanced between the needs of the many and the individual’s desires.
The mythological free society in a harmonious state of anarchy is a pipe dream founded upon a delusional presumption that all humans value the social good above one’s benefit.
The U.S. is a case study for the ages over just how toxic extreme individualism is. For a nation that pretends to value freedom, its privatized prison population screams to the world how subjugated and servile its society is. The U.S. is so “free” that they allow children to be gunned down in schools, not just once but repeatedly. The U.S. is so “free” that people are killed for profit.
A football game with rules is a dynamic tension that draws engagement from an audience, while football without rules, for example, becomes a chaotic bloodbath that disperses an audience.
This question is a testament to how badly butchered the concept of freedom has become within this modern dystopia.
Perhaps this question should be reworded as “What is freedom?”
Bonus Question and Answer: To regulate and control human behaviour, what do you understand by that?
I understand that too many people think a valid strategy for accomplishing this is imposition and subordination to power under the threat of subjugation.
The positive, proactive, and ultimately democratic means of accomplishing the goals of regulation and control are through the development of a human capacity for self-regulation by encouraging the improvement of emotional management skills bolstered by critical thinking skills while addressing fundamental threats to personhood such as living insecurities and forms of persecution through the repression of rights and freedoms.
Showing people how to achieve their potential is a far more effective means of proactive regulation than the barbarism of reactionary punitive measures. This approach also leads to far more long-term stability in society and a much more engaged citizenry actively working toward supporting the social contract by choice.
We can achieve our potential as a species only by helping all of us to be better rather than forcing conformity to myopic structures made vulnerable by their inflexibility and inability to adapt to an ever-changing universe.
Happy New Year! — Here’s hoping your 2025 is a good one. Thanks for reading.
thotbag 