squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on Banana 4 days ago:
Because you can make explosives out of that.
- Comment on Honestly Bizarre 1 week ago:
And this is the whole point of the controversy: The same word can have multiple meanings in different contexts and some people have trouble with that concept.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
I very much agree with that. There’s a ton of stuff being mixed up together.
There’s cultural and political Christianity, that both neither require faith (or even belief) in Christ or really have anything to do with Christianity as a religion at all.
And that’s quite a bit of the issue at hand. You have people like Trump, who has no connection to Christianity (the religion) at all, who runs as the “champion of Christian values”, while being pretty much the opposite of that. Because it’s political Christianity.
And here you get a ton of this “us vs them” into play, that doesn’t really have anything to do with Christianity (the religion) at all.
Cultural Christianity is in a very similar boat. In my country, ~70% of the people say they are Christian, according to census data, and a total of ~78% of the people say they belong to some organized religion (Christianity, Islam, …), but only 22% of the people say they believe in some kind of God.
So more than two thirds of these so-called religious people, are not Christian by religion, but Christian by culture. I personally know quite a few people who don’t believe in God, don’t go to church, but who want to marry in a beautiful gothic church and use their Christian label to hate on foreigners and their foreign religions.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
And a christian who doesn’t even follow (or doesn’t even know) the basic teachings of Christ is also using the wrong label.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
So you can’t see a difference between “I irrationally believe that God doesn’t exist even though there’s no proof against it” and “I don’t care whether God exists, there’s no proof for or against it, and it doesn’t matter to me”?
Atheism is being religious about the non-existence of God.
Atheism is believing that black swans are impossible, because all swans you have seen so far are white.
Agnosticism is the logical conclusion based on the knowledge we have. Atheism is just another religion.
If you can’t see the difference, it’s hard to continue the discussion.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.
Yes, you do, that’s what the whole thread here was about.
And you mistake my position on belief as well. I am mostly agnostic.
And yes, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is huge, except if you are too uneducated to understand the difference, which makes it weird that you have such a strong opinion on the matter.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
I don’t really agree with that. A program could break out of the sandbox and get to know the things around it. In fact, there are many programs that interact with the real world, gathering information about it and acting on it.
If there was something like an actually sentient program, it would be totally conceivable that said program could use cameras, microphones and other sensors to get to know its programmer.
The difference between the science and things considered supernatural is that one is something we have a solid understanding of and the other is speculation.
If there’s an unexplained phenomenon and we find a solid explanation for it, it becomes science. Weather and other natural phenomena used to be in the realm of the supernatural, same as dragon bones, mermaid bones and the kraken. Until we found out what they really were and how they worked.
If magic were to exist in reality, it wouldn’t be magic but instead just a branch of science.
A lot of things we can do nowadays would be called magic a few centuries ago. I mean, we can literally make frogs float in thin air. We can make incredible amounts of power from some magic rocks (nuclear power). We can even inscribe magic patterns into sand to make it think and talk (computers).
So coming back to the beginning: If we talk about something like a Simulation Hypothesis scenario (which is de facto identical to a scenario where God exists outside of our plane of existence, however that is defined), it’s totally in the realm of possibility of that scenario that the simulated could break out of the simulation.
Or in case of the Big Bang Theory, it would be theoretically possible to peek before the big bang.
I’m not saying that it is actually possible, but I’m saying that we can’t summarily dismiss the possibility.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
Again: “They are no true Atheists because they believe in God.”
No true scotsman or not?
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
A large number of people who attend religious ceremonies don’t even believe in the deities or take things literally, they are there for the community.
And these people are people who attend religious ceremonies, not Christians.
Same as someone attending a meeting about Atheism doesn’t become an Atheist by attending the meeting but by being convinced that God doesn’t exist.
Person B is an idiot who doesn’t understand words because atheist is a simple label with a singular meaning.
Is that so? A lot of agnostics call themselves atheists. In general, if you ask atheists specifically about what they believe, quite a few of them actually describe agnosticism, as in they do not firmly believe that god doesn’t exist, but rather believe that there’s no basis in believing that god exists.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
Ok, let me put it in a way that you might understand:
- Person A: "You aren’t an Atheist if you believe in God."
- Person B: "But I identify as an Atheist and I believe in God."
- Person A: “Then you aren’t an Atheist.”
You: “No true Scotsman! Anyone who calls themselves an Atheist is an Atheist, no matter if they believe in God.”
Do you see how this makes no sense?
An Atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in God, not a person who calls themselves an Atheist. And saying you aren’t an Atheist if you don’t believe in God isn’t a fallacy but just purely the definition of the term.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition of a Christian:
A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
(Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christians)
So someone who does not follow or adhere a religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is not a Christian. Not by fallacy, but by definition.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
Funnily, you see similar things with e.g. Americans who lived for generations in America, but still identify as Irish, German and so on.
My wife’s late grandma had a daughter who moved from Germany to the USA at age 18. Her children never lived in Germany. Some of them have learned a bit of very rudimentary German. None of their children (the cousins of my wife) learned German in any meaningful way and they maybe visited Germany once or twice as children. One of these cousins (the second generation born in the USA) now had a kid (third generation born in the USA) and they called their kid “Schaefer” to “honour their German heritage”.
“Schaefer” is a misspelling of the word “Schäfer”, which means “shepherd” and is, if anything, exclusively used as a last name in German (German countries are quite strict about what’s a first name and what’s not). There’s actually a registry of first names that were given to children in Germany, and the name “Schaefer” doesn’t occur once over the last 80 or so years that this registry covers.
So they identify as “German”, even though they never had any meaningful contact with the country and couldn’t even be bothered to google whether the name they chose to “honour their German legacy” was actually a German first name.
TLDR: People identify as all sorts of garbage, because it makes them feel cool or makes them feel part of something, even if they have no clue about or interest in what they identify with.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
Another part was that Jews were quite spread out over a lot of areas and didn’t have a “home country” to back them. You see a similar level of distrust, historically and even today, against Roma and Sinti.
So Jews were always a minority that was easy to scapegoat for all sorts of problems.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
It makes sense if you don’t think of it from the viewpoint of principles and ideals.
Antisemites are in general all for zionism. Antisemitic Brits were the ones who made Israel possible in the first place, and even the Nazis supported the creation of Israel. Because it’s not about the Jews having their own country where they can (supposedly) live in peace, safety and freedom, but it’s about Jews moving far, far away.
And with Israel being a western “outpost” pretty much in the centre of the Muslim world, there’s a secondary effect: If Israel and the Muslim countries around it are fighting, that hurts Muslims without causing too much trouble for people living e.g. in the USA.
(These are obviously not my views. I’m just trying to explain why many antisemites are pro Israel.)
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
Which fallacy is this? It’s not the “No true Scotsman” one as explained here: lemmy.world/post/37452533/19987098
For example, let’s turn that argument around:
- Person A: "No true atheist believes in God"
- Person B: "But I call myself an Atheist and I strongly believe in God"
- Person A: “Then you aren’t a true Atheist”
Did person A argue fallaciously to you? Or is person B just an idiot who took on a wrong label?
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
No true Scotsman
Knowing a name of a fallacy doesn’t mean you understood what the fallacy means.
The No true Scotsman fallacy is a very specific thing and it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Here’s the name-giving example of the No true Scotsman fallacy:
- Person A states an absolute statement: "No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge."
- Person B disproves that by offering a counter-example "Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar in his porridge."
- Person A declares “But no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.”
So for an argument being the No true Scotsman, there need to be three elements. If one or more are missing, the fallacy doesn’t apply:
- Person A does not retreat from the original statement
- Person A offers a modified assertion that excludes all counter-examples by definition (this turns the argument into a tautology: "No true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge, and a true Scotsman is a Scotsman who does not put sugar in his porridge."
- Person A uses rhetoric to signal that change
So why does the no true Scotsman fallacy not apply here?
Because it’s about this change, not about whether something can be classified as something.
Take for example this exchange:
- Person A: "A true Scotsman is someone who lives in Scotland, holds a Scottish passport and identifies as a Scotsman."
- Person B: "But Angus, who was born in the USA, and holds an US passport and who’s only connection to Scotland is that his great grandma was from there claims that he is a true Scotsman."
- Person A: “He can claim what he want, he is no true Scotsman.”
In this case Person A
- Did not retreat from the original statement
- Did not modify the original statement
- Did not use rhetoric to signal a change, because no change existed.
That’s what @Demdaru@lemmy.world argued:
- A true Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ.
- American “Christians” claim to be Christians but are largely against the teachings of Christ.
- Hence they are no true Christians.
The “no true scotsman” fallacy is about changing your argument into a non-falsifiable tautology. It’s not about using the words “true” or excluding some group from some definition. And it certainly doesn’t mean “Everyone who calls themselves X surely and irrefutably belongs to group X”.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
The question itself doesn’t really make sense, because it just boils down to “Why don’t we know everything?”.
The same question would lead to the same answer (“We don’t know”) if we ask it about e.g. the Big Bang. “If everything was created by the big bang, what created the big bang?”
It also applies literally in every field where we don’t know something yet (“What’s beyond the stars/beyond the universe?”, “What are quarks made of?”, “What’s past infinity?”). We don’t even know what’s in the dark at the edge of the solar system. Judging by orbits and gravitational patterns, there’s likely an entire large planet that we don’t know of because it’s too far from the sun and thus too dark.
It would be idiotic to summarily dismiss every field where there are things we don’t know, and where there are edges to our knowledge that are so far away that we cannot know or understand them.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week ago:
“If God created everything, then who created God?”
There’s a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don’t think this is one.
The reason being that God’s existence doesn’t actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as “If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?”
So you could use the same argument to “disprove” literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory (“If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?”).
But you can not only “disprove” every potential answer to “where does everything come from”, but you can also rephrase the question to “If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?” or to “If there’s an end to the universe, what is outside of it?”
If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes “Why don’t we know everything?” and that’s a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.
Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn’t know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.
- Comment on A roundabout 1 week ago:
I think he got enough of a boost.
- Comment on Truly 2 weeks ago:
It’s boring because the only thing making it interesting is the prospect of making money off it. It’s like work, only that if you suck at it you pay instead of getting paid.
- Comment on Best stay away from that guy 2 weeks ago:
If you keep getting into relationships with crappy people, that it might not be because everyone is crappy, but because that’s what you subconsciously look for.
- One bad relationship: Bad luck.
- Only bad relationships (especially if you keep getting into the same crappy relationship with different people): The problem is with you, you are subconsciously looking for people like that.
Check out How we love if you want to know more.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 2 weeks ago:
This must be that higher male military standard Hegseth was talking about.
- Comment on If Peter Molyneux had a time machine to remake his cursed cube game, 'what you would give, now, would be a cryptocurrency thing' 2 weeks ago:
Chris Roberts isn’t too far of, but Molyneux certainly takes the crown.
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 3 weeks ago:
One of them is the boss, the other is the people who have to read the AI garbage.
- Comment on Truly 3 weeks ago:
Without money, pretty much all gambling games turn out to be extremely boring.
I don’t even do in-game gambling because it’s just annoying. The last time I tried that, I ended up instead buying the 9999 coins with cash to get a Porygon, because the slot machines were so boring.
- Comment on Truly 3 weeks ago:
Poker isn’t really a fun game. Try playing it without money. It gets boring super fast.
If a game needs money to be fun, it’s not a fun game.
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, they could just as easily pivot to “Well, sure, autism was around before that, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.”
In fact, that was their actual argument. This is what Trump said:
First, effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians that the use of, well, let’s see how we say that. Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen. Is that okay? Which is basically, commonly known as Tylenol. Can be associated with a very increased risk of autism. So taking Tylenol is not good. I’ll say it, it’s not good.
Within the rest of the rest of the speech you can clearly see where Trump goes off script and does his regular monkey-in-a-suit act, and he says stupid shit as always, but that up there is the core claim: “Can be associated with a very increased level of autism.”
That’s a claim that’s totally not affected by the “but autism existed before Tylenol” argument.
The whole argument is a strawman, nothing else. And that’s really infuriating because there are ample real arguments for this point. It’s not hard to argue that Tylenol has no link to Autism. But making up a strawman argument and butchering to even tear that strawman down is ridiculous.
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 4 weeks ago:
People died already 10 000 years ago.
The Ford Model T was released in 1908.
Anyone trying to tell you that being run over by a car kills people is entirely full of crap.
There’s real arguments that can be used. No need to publish weak crap that’s easily refuted.
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 4 weeks ago:
Adding to that what @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works said: “links to” doesn’t mean “is exclusively caused by”.
That gotcha would only work if that was the claim.
So the argument reads a little like “People died before the Ford Model T entered the market, so obviously deaths aren’t caused by cars running over pedestrians.”
- Comment on it's just science, i guess 4 weeks ago:
Adding to that: “links to” doesn’t mean “is exclusively caused by”.
That gotcha would only work if that was the claim.
So the argument reads a little like “People died before the Ford Model T entered the market, so obviously deaths aren’t caused by cars running over pedestrians.”