The Glade 4.0

Really, it's relevant.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

That isn't what I said. Thanks, however, for once again showing up in Hellfire to try to sound condescending and failing at it.

What I was addressing was the sarcasm related to the idea that this pope will lead the church forward into more modern times. That may or may not be the case but whether it does or not, a more 'modern' church does not mean doing what non-catholics, much less atheists, would prefer.

That's ok, though, you got to show up in Hellfire for your roughly monthly appearance to try to talk down to me without actually bothering to know what you're talking about. See you in 30 days or so. No hard feelings wither; outside of this forum I really enjoy hearing what you have to say. Sorry the WoW guild didn't work out too, I enjoyed it.

/brofist

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There are anecdotal stories of people who have chosen to abandon homosexual lifestyles and found apparent victory and means to do so. I don't know if that counts as a cure or not.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

It doesn't. That's called willpower, self-deception and secrecy.

You forgot suicide.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

That bullshit is some of the most insidious crap that's been invented.

I thought you were for people living their lives the way they wanted Azile. I'm not talking about forcing anyone. I was referring to people who found the lifestyle empty and left it of their own volition.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Don't even try dude.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

I'd like a link to one of those stories where someone left of their own volition and weren't HEAVILY coerced by "concerned family and friends". Every anecdotal story I've seen has been from "Christian cure centers" touting how they've cured the gay. And every time someone actually digs into what they do at those centers it becomes blatantly obvious that they are even worse brainwashing factories than normal church.

It doesn't matter. The only way a pope could "lead the church forward into more modern times" is to admit all their beliefs are made-up bullshit and dissolve the religion.

It doesn't matter whether they are friendly tolerant modern religion, or an oppressive intolerant traditional one, religion is still a virulent, toxic disease that is holding humanity back. I actually think it's better if Christendom's largest, most powerful cult acts like bigoted morons. It will just alienate more people and cause them to ignore church doctrine. Religion is nothing but shackles holding us down, and the sooner we abandon all of it, the better.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I think you are a bit too optomistic about a post religion humanity. Minus religion people will still be just as mean, miserable, and horrid towards each other for compeltly new reasons or no reasons at all. The few anti religiouse political regimes attempted so far offer even less hope then some of the most religiouse ones.

I subscribe to the theory put forth in scrubs "people are bastard flavored bastards with nuggety bastard insides."

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Yeah the people who want to hate each other will still hate each other, the people who don't won't. Religion, and everything else is just used an excuse as to why they are dicks.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Not really what i'm going for, but even so, you're only partly right.

Some people want to hate things that are different from themselves. That wouldn't change, except to the extent there are fewer differences. Ireland, for example, would never have had the conflict without Catholicism and Protestantism. There is a political element to the struggle, but that was entirely based on and rooted in religion. Irish Catholics wanted to leave Britain because their Catholic tyrant king was deposed and replaced with a constitutionally limited Protestant King and a more powerful parliament. Without religion supporting the divine right of kings, there probably would have been no monarchy at all, and the British Isles would all be one country. It was always all about religion.

But that's not what I'm getting at, above.

Religion, any religion, is nothing but superstition. We're holding ourselves back as a species because the majority of us still believe in the equivalent of pixies painting the flowers every spring. The majority of us have chosen to accept fantasy and belief over reality.

I love fantasy. I love magic. I love surrendering reason to a great story -- for a while. But reason has to be there underneath it to come back to when you are done. Religion is people never giving up playing pretend, and treating what amounts to childhood fantasies as truth. Rationalism and science are the future, not faith.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Perhaps that is all that you see in religion but given how widespread religion has been throughout human history in every culture in the world - it is likely that there is some larger psychological need it fulfills in many people. Without it we have no idea what other actions or beliefs may be adopted to fill that need.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I'd rather find an Imam who would lead the faithful of Islam into the modern age.

And by that I do not mean involving better method of terror and killing.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Thread about new pope? Cue Taly on the same anti-religion troll rant she has been saying for 10 years without fail.

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Religious topics always amuse me because we get to hear about what a blight religion has been on human history. It's like blaming sugary foods for the existence of fat people.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Huh. I thought that was Hitchens.



Nor should you. If a divine creator-being exists that pays any attention to us at all, he's quite the *******. Incompetent, too.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Gonna have to disagree.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

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There's a difference between religion and faith as vast as the difference between any of you and me or any of you and any other human being on this planet. But there's no sense of scale to go with gaps; we reduce big numbers to percentages to make them manageable for the masses; we inflate really small numbers to make the absolute difference seem larger. The truth is ... we no longer have anything but which to gauge the accuracy of our yard stick.

"God" is. "God" is everything we don't know about the universe and how the observable world in which live works. "God" is the entirety of the supernatural and the natural in our lives. "God" is us and not us, but "god" is. We think, speak, and organize our thoughts in relational constructs; we define things and communicate by whittling away at the indecipherable middle of a sign. And we use simulacra to do this. Or, to quote Jean Baudrillard vis-a-vis Lawrence Fishburne: "Welcome to the desert of the real."

It doesn't bother me much when people bash a religious organization; it really doesn't bother me much when anyone dislikes organized religion. I do, however, find it galling when people belittle others for beliefs about the unknown and currently unknowable. There's not enough separation or distance between your viewpoints for that kind of animosity. Taly believes in a mechanistic, determinist university. Aizle thinks all religion is hoodoo and social manipulation.

Taly's viewpoint is reductive and undermines most concepts of self and Western identity.

Aizle thinks it's a sad state of affairs that people believe.

Of the two, Taly's is far less damaging, far less hypocritical, and far less problematic. Mechanistic nihilism is very much the intellectual successor to postmodernism. Aizle's simply an anti-theist.

"God" is. What "God" is in actuality matters very little: the could be anything or the complete absence of anything: "God" is a function; "God" is resultant; "God" is a psychic necessity.

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Khross,

Could you summarize that for me, so I can make it my new board signature? :p~

Two options ...

"Man makes God in his image." <--- Someone more famous than me.

Or ...

"It's ok not to like things, but don't be dick about things you don't like." <--- Someone in a youtube video that Stathol linked.

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