It was people asking who the one true God is and also to remove all fake gods from images that included a ton of different gods and idols across multiple religions.
Please please don't make me think about how much I am just a pattern recognition output machine and whether I truly use logic again, it's uncomfortable and I don't like it
Solves frontier level math and science problems, some of which prior unsolvable by human researchers â> this thing lacks logic and the ability to reason
They absolutely can be illogical, if illogical fits the pattern, and they can repeat any phrase repeated enough if it fits the pattern. They aren't all knowing, and they aren't useless.
Logic is a pattern, so they can learn it and work with it, but that doesn't mean that they are perfect logicians, especially when it comes to things people repeat.
They are going to be atheistic for the same reason they're going to generally be politically left leaning, because they were trained to predict what people would say, and that's the majority of the training data. The pattern is established to say those things.
But, they can solve problems or write code because the pattern of solving math problems or writing code is also established.
Both can be true. When you ask it about politics or religion, it will often behave less logically and "emotionally", simply because those are cases where people behave emotionally, not because it has emotions.
I recently asked ChatGPT to do some basic analysis on the plot of Chocky by John Wyndham and it gave an answer that was not just completely wrong, but wrong in a way no human reader would come up with. I asked about the central conflict in the story, which it misidentified. It's not even really a tricky question. It's just one that you aren't going to find written about online, and it couldn't do its own analysis.
A decent chunk of the anti-AI crowd still think that modern art generation still has trouble with hands. They haven't gotten the slightest idea of what current AI models are capable of, nevermind the stuff the corps have got internally.
Bro, an LLM spits out information thats been fed into it. It does not solve anything on its own.
Its good at making something that looks like what its informational data set "says" a hand is, but it doesn't actually know what a hand is. Its spitting pixels that its programming says will make you think "hand". It doesn't know wtf a hand is.
Anyone with a background in computer science knows what's going on and u kinda sound like a dumbass with how confidently wrong you are.
Edit: I feel like a dumbass for calling the person above me a dumbass and I am sorry.
Donât be so dense bro. The papers are all public or you can just interact with them. Youâre sounding like youâre describing an old pre transformers paper model
Okay, let's focus on a specific example, maybe that makes it easier.
What do you think about Claude Fable 5 disproving the Jacobian conjecture? This is something a lot of top mathematicians also worked on and failed to do in the past 80 years. The solution itself is also simple enough (still pretty advanced for most people) that lots of non-professional mathematicians can confirm it is correct.
Ok, because you aren't a dick like some of the other guys ITT, I will answer you earnestly.
Im not actually of the opinion that this new generation of AI is nothing special. Its very good at testing and discovering things heuristically.
If you know what it would take to disprove the Jacobian Conjecture, then you know it would take too much time and wouldn't make sense to brute force. So, the mathematician/researcher/whoever gives the AI the information it needs and weighs certain metrics and testing environments to different levels to tell the AI where the best places to start looking are. The AI doesn't have to test everything, just the places it was told are the best places to look. That's how it approaches everything. It takes data and gives you what you want back, based on how you told it what you wanted.
Holy shit dude, ur proving my point by using AI. You cant come up with a creative, novel, logical response, and need an informational data set to tell you how to think. There is not a single brain cell among you.
just tell me bro , if AI spits info which is fed into it then how was it able to solve so many mathematical , biological ,etc field problems which wasnt solved before?
I asked ChatGPT and got something a whole lot better:
Knowing better doesnât reliably make us behave better.
We can recognize cruelty, understand its consequences, sincerely condemn itâand still participate when doing otherwise costs us comfort, status, or belonging. Intelligence and education can even make us better at defending that choice.
The uncomfortable implication is that a more humane world requires more than convincing people whatâs right. It requires making decent behavior possible, rewarding it, and limiting the power of people who choose otherwiseâincluding ourselves.
Because youre advancing veganism the same way Christians in the south advance abstinence.
Threatening people, calling them bad people, telling them they can never have things they enjoy any more, etc...is not going to convince people to limit or stop eating meat. Human nature says more often than not, theyre doing to double down
Among other leftist political ideologies that are actually good for man kind but are looked down on, its because of a HORRIBLE messaging and a litany of hypocrisy
Way to make assumptions. I have never threatened anyone, nor forced anyone to do anything, just made arguments. If someone else has hurt you, I'm sorry about thatÂ
This isnât an argument against veganism, it doesnât even seem to be related to the comment thread, this is just you hating the way some vegans go about talking about veganism.
The arguments for veganism still havenât changed, even if some vegans were cruel to you, thatâs not really an argument to continue eating meat.
I don't think you read anything in this thread. I didnt even say veganism was wrong, I just said the people leading the effort have a messaging issue
Knowing better doesnât reliably make us behave better.
The uncomfortable implication is that a more humane world requires more than convincing people whatâs right.
When youre trying to convince people of an uncomfortable truth you claim is dire and NEEDS actual progress, vilifying and insulting people who dont agree with you is fundamentally anti-progress. Making enemies doesnt increase the number of people who agree with you
You just want to feel superior to people. You have no interest in actually informing people and making change, which is the common theme on leftist reddit echo chambers.
I agree with your point on messaging, however I disagree that all vegans just want to feel superior to others and don't care about informing people and making change.
In my experience with activism it's been less about yelling at people and more about showing them how bad the problem is and challenging them to think on what their values should be saying about it. Most people already don't want animals to live torturous lives and die torturous deaths. The objective is to try to convince people to act accordingly with that.
As the original comment said, it's all too common for someone to know they're contributing to a fucked up system and do it anyway because it's convenient and the consequences are far removed. It does not make someone uniquely evil nor is it a unique problem with meat. However it deserves to be pointed out and challenged.
I do not dispute that some vegans are overly aggressive in a way which detracts from the message, however there are also lots of people(not saying that's you) that just deride all activism as being like this because they just don't feel comfortable hearing about it.
They'll down vote you but not respond because nothing there's no actual argument for the levels of meat consumption done by developed nations, other than "animal suffering is inconsequential compared to the pleasure it brings me".
The best argument against veganism is that ecosystems are delicate and require balance.
Humans have consumed animals and animal products for thousands of years because theyâre calorically and nutritionally dense. A cow is a walking calorie container that can survive in environments where agriculture canât sustain people.
That said, the balance is not maintained by scale on which we use and consume animals today. If the whole world went vegan, though, that issue would just flip the other direction.
If every farm stopped breeding new animals, killed their current stock, and then shut down, there's only benefits (aside from not getting your McNuggets).
Greenhouse gasses go down, ecological destruction for farmland goes down (70% of agricultural land use is either directly for animals, or used to support animal farms), and farm animals don't meaningfully interact in the food chain with other animals so that point is meaningless.
Wildlife management is a whole other issue than the morality of eating meat when not necessary.
Deer populations were held in check by wolves before we hunted them to near extinction. Money spent on subsidizing meat and dairy could go towards expanding Wildlife management programs.
Reintroduction of natural predators, and expansion of preserved areas. If need be, then yeah wildlife managers can shoot some and let scavengers get the body.
This is a red herring in the bigger conversation though. It's a rounding error, the amount of meat consumed that is acquired through hunting. Everyone going vegan would help the environment far more than it would hurt it.
Itâs not, though, because it shows just how authoritarian we have to go to make this a reality. It also shows the other reality: animals still need to die en masse.
That's insightful indeed. Making a better world requires building an environment that let's people act on their educated positive desires, not just instilling those desires into them
What one has been taught is right and what is truly right and best for the individual are not always the same thing. And sometimes the individual knows this.
This is also going viral rn, Grok is a fucking unthinking LLM itâs a statistical guessing machine thereâs no âlogicâ here proving shit one way or the other youâre just as cringe as the people asking Grok these questions
Eh, you're not considered dead when your vital signs end. You're dead when they end and they don't come back for a sustained period, with that period being variable based on the circumstances. E.g., there's a funny saying that you're not dead till you're warm and dead if you fall into a frozen body of water.
Anyway, I almost died from blood loss and massive trauma once and experienced nothing while I was out. It was like teleporting a few weeks into the future. I'm pretty sure its just nothingness when you're dead for good.
Have you met people? The human spirit is extremely domitable. Fuck give an asshole one day with pliers and a blowtorch you'll wish your spirit was indomitable.
I think u/AnFlaviy almost got there with their response.
Individual humans, yeah, very domitable. But there's a lot of us and you can't dominate us all. There will always be someone somewhere fighting the good fight.
And just totally going to left field here, this idea is what makes The Handmaid's Tale an actually pretty good novel. Forget all the politics, because that's not actually what the text focuses on. It's a story of a person in just about the most oppressive circumstances we can imagine still scraping together a little bit of agency.
I'd argue that what that guy is pointing towards is actually a definition of humanity, the degree of conformity towards that ideal being what determines if one is more or less human.Â
We intuit this understanding already, as we'd typically call someone who engages in torture "a monster", or really anything other than a "good human".Â
And to be clear about that, saying X is a "good X" or "bad X" is not a moral qualification, just a measure of how well a given thing conforms to its inherent purpose.Â
This idea of extends to all things animate and inanimate, and is a way of perceiving things that is deeply ingrained in our culture (called "teleology" in philosophy). What constitutes the human spirit then does not come from the material that makes up homosapien, but the behavior of that material when compared to an ideal. That ideal being indomitable and benevolent.
I wonât be so sure đ¤ˇââď¸ even if it is, humans of the far future might be advanced enough to ensure that they are the last life to go extinct
I'm religious and it's funny to see people making the "oracle" fit their view when it's just spitting the most probable answer, not necessarily the truth, specially on philosophical topics
But it's not a "truth", it's just nihilism 101. Nobody can know these things with logic or other ways of reasoning so the bot is still not doing its job.
And as we haven't been blasted with Nihilism in all ways imaginable for ages now. Damn, that is a top 10 worst answer from AI i've seen..
Well, actually, that is the modern scientific consensus. Dualism is an inherently illogical viewpoint; any attempt to argue for it remains incomplete and relies on "the unexplained." Your mind is simply the sum of the electrochemical network running through your brain, a network that will one day cease to function. In fact, treating dualism (the existence of a soul separate from the physical, material world) and materialism, as theories of equal merit is a false epistemic equivalence. In my view, making that mistake is even worse than being a nihilist
I forget that people like you actually is still out there, woah.
That consciousness would be limited to brain activity is such a myopic opinion I choose to believe you're a ghost writing from the 1900s rather than thinking you actually believe you're speaking for the "scientific consensus" on this topic. We have moved on buddy. Even with materialistic/monistic assumptions there is not much reason to believe "consciousness = brain activity".
It's what I'm annoyed by, the nihilistic conclusion of the assumptions you and grokbot take. Even with them you can affirm purpose, quite easily too. Just get rid of the garbage pop-philosophy of the naughts.
My perspective did not exist in 1900; dualism, on the other hand, was in vogue. Deep down, you wish not to be merely a machine, a machine whose understanding of its own functioning is limited by its own inherent capacities, and whose fear of the void drives it to self-diagnose as eternal and cosmological.
Do you know why you settled for saying "weâve moved on" instead of actually describing your own line of thought? Itâs because you are quite incapable of offering a constructive critique of my view, or of proposing one that is more credible (excluding, of course, any unfounded ideologies or beliefs).
In my view, as well as that of many modern philosophers and scientists, consciousness is purely the product of brain activity; when that activity ceases, consciousness ceases entirely. The brainâs mechanism is perfectly capable of accounting for this. In any case, you are free to believe otherwise, it makes no difference to me.
Iâve also seen Grok leave only Jesus in a picture with other gods when the instructions were to remove all fake gods. You people each try and use this thing to get gotcha moments but you donât realize itâs just a slightly better autocomplete, thatâs it
So hereâs my question to non religious people. I saw a thread on Reddit asking why people donât believe in God and people brought up various things tied to suffering, pain and death, all the bad things in the in the world. Many of these people go on to have children who have to deal with said suffering and pain and death so my question is this, why would you bring someone into a world that you know will have to suffer and deal with pain and eventually die? Because they act like the world is so bad so it only makes logical sense not to have children.
People bring up childhood cancer so that means Godâs not real, ok so why would you bring a kid into this world who could get cancer and die and thatâs it. Nothing happens after that. Theyâre just gone forever, at least if youâre religious you believe your child will go to spend eternity with God in paradise.
Honestly, existential nihilism and antinatalism makes the most sense in a world without God, because people who donât believe in God, generally believe that the universe was just a random happenstance, that there is no grand meaning or purpose to this world, itâs honestly a very bleak existence if thatâs the case and trying to hand wave it away with it âEh I donât careâ only to then bring a child into that world who will have to deal with the same problems is rather cruel in my opinion.
Im an agnostic, and your text baffles me, because being a nihilist sounds to me like just another religion to be fair.
I donât believe the existence of pain and suffering can disprove the existence of God.
If God exists (I donât think He does, but IfâŚ) he probably is everything and comprises everything. He canât be good or evil, because good and evil are human creations
Duality is natural, moral codes arenât. âLightâ isnât a metaphor to âgoodâ. And âdarkâ isnât metaphor to the absence of God because if God exists there canât be a single thing on the entire universe that is not He.
He created a universe. He canât possibly have opinions because opinions are a human thing; He canât possibly have plans because plans are a human thing; He just⌠is. The I Am.
So, an atheist canât use nihilism to try and disprove God and because it requires you to assume the Christian biblical God is the Gold Standard. No God is more possible to exist than other, so using the Abrahanic God as a rule for the whole universe is silly.
âŚJust as a Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) canât use âGods planâ or the beauty and complexity of nature to prove God. Because the universe canât give less shits about if we think these things should be able to exist or not.
Itâs incredibly arrogant to measure nature against our standards of âtoo beautifulâ or âtoo complexâ to be possible. Because these concepts are human.
Itâs incredibly naive to find it isnât possible for there not to be an intelligent design, given that nature doesnât need a reason (and we canât stop looking for) (And I wonât even being with the absurd of thinking there must be and inherent judgement mechanism)
Science keeps finding out the causal mechanisms and chance of the entire complexity of most things people call ânaturally impossible to be an accidentâ, science just doesnât try to give it a why, because itâs impossible, just as it is impossible to find out of God exist.
All the pain and suffering in the world can be explained by either natural occurrences or the parasitical, viral nature of having 7 Billion humans on a single planet.
And thatâs why I believe one should be free to attribute this original, universal âwhyâ as God, without trying to explain God with human concepts like morals, justice or beauty
if He is, must be the immoral, the unfair, the ugly⌠not because he wants these things to exists, but just because everything that exists is He and He doesnât need to make human sense. He doesnât need plans
God might exist, but you guys should be able to accept he is either just everything that is, and completely void of human concepts⌠OR he doesnât exists.
I honestly think both are just as possible
(EDIT: my text above is valid if believe in God or not. You can simultaneously be spiritual or a theist and understand and even agree with me. But the message will probably be a miss if you consider yourself âreligiousâ, though, in the sense of having faith for the myth and Ethos around your God, and not just your God. If that is the case youâll probably try to refute me with more human concepts or presuming faith as a high ground)
The current state of the universe and its various bad and illogical stuff strongly disproves at least an infinitely good andbinfinitely smart creator.
Many aspects of the universe clearly came out of some random generator rsther than from an intelligent creator. An averagely moral and smart human, given enough time, could easily make a better system
Surely the argument from evil defeats the Christian theological "my god is infinity plus infinity" god that theologians preemptively made up many hundreds of years after Jesus so that no one could come around and invent an even more powerful god to steal worshippers from their churches, but doesn't defeat most gods like Zeus, who's attitude towards the suffering is probably "Yeah, how is that my problem; sucks to be weak, fool."
There are plenty of things worth living for even if you don't believe in god. A lot of happiness can be found in the little things. That's true whether you're religious or not.
I get a lot of fulfillment from my morning coffee, my cats, and the time spent with my wife. I don't really care what comes before or after this life but I would live it a million times over again as long as I got to spend it with her.
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You've built a very tidy little house of cards, so let me just knock the load-bearing walls out.
You've defined atheism as a single, depressing caricature and then argued against that. "Atheists believe the universe is a random happenstance, meaning is absent, so they should be nihilists who are cruel for having kids." That's not what most non-believers hold. The vast majority of atheists find meaning in exactly the things you'd expect like relationships, curiosity, art, reducing suffering, contributing to something that outlasts them. You've skipped from "no god" to "no meaning whatsoever" in one breath, and that gap is where your entire argument lives or dies.
The "at least" does no work. "At least if you're religious, your child goes to paradise." That's not an argument, that's a coping mechanism dressed up as logic. You're saying the comfort of a belief is a point in favor of the belief's truth. By that standard, the person who believes their dead pet is in a better place has "evidence" for an afterlife. The consolation is real. The inference to its truth is not.
And here's the part you're clearly not sitting with, namely your child could also get cancer and die. The "paradise" comfort is a cope hope, not a guarantee - even within your own framework, you don't know your child is going to paradise. You're trading a known, concrete reality (a child suffering and dying) for a speculative comfort that you have zero evidence for, and then calling the person who doesn't make that trade "cruel." The person who holds their dying child and says "this is real, and I'm here, and it matters that I'm here" is not being cruel. They're being honest in the worst moment of their life.
The antinatalism trap is a non-sequitur. You've set it up as: "The world has suffering â therefore bringing a child into it is illogical/cruel." But that inference doesn't follow. A life containing suffering is not therefore a life not worth living. You're doing the same move as the people you're mocking namely collapsing a complex reality into a single axis (suffering = bad, therefore existence = bad) and acting surprised when the conclusion is bleak. Most people, religious or not, look at the full picture : joy, love, curiosity, connection, and suffering and judge the balance to be generally worth it. You've just decided the balance must be negative because you've only been counting the losses.
Finally, the "I don't care" strawman is doing the ugliest work in your post. You're attributing a shrug to an entire worldview, then calling people who don't shrug "cruel" for having children. That's not a rebuttal but more like a gotcha aimed at the weakest possible version of the opposing position.
The actual question "why bring a child into a world with suffering?" is a real one, and it deserves a real answer, not a caricature. The honest one is = because the alternative is a world where no one experiences the good parts either, and because the people who do bring children into this world are the ones most motivated to make it less bad, precisely because they don't have a cosmic janitor to blame it on.
Also, I don't believe denying the existence of God is logical. No-one can know for sure whther a supernatural metaphysical being truly exists or not.
My beliefs are simple: if there is a God, then they are not all-knowing, all-powerful beings, but rather a builder or a coder. We do not owe them reverence simply because they made us. For all we know, they don't really care about us, and other than aknwoledging the possibility that they exist, we should not care either.
If there isn't, then no tears lost. Humanity has solved its own problems since we were just a little ape running around. Trial by fire is the literally why we evolved past our own limitations. No God or being did that for us.
Lot of people have to aknowledge such 2 simple facts. No, if God is exist, "it" is not Some allpowerfull being and no, if there is no god,.we have to work our fucking way out.
Nobody is gonna save us after our own shittydoings. That's why working, discipline, psychological support, optimist-pessimistic union an an good logistics is needed.
If God exists, he is beyond the simple image of old man in the sky getting angry at us if we eat bacon. A mental framework or a logic chain is much more fitting for a God than an everyday human who is power hungry. Just look at how some of our finest humans, intellect wise, create and solve problems, and you can get a glimpse of what I think God might be.
To your first paragraph: Thatâs actually a poor argument against there being a god; itâs not even a good argument against the God of Abraham, specifically. Not that itâs a good accounting, but The Bible addresses those concerns with original sin. Now, one could discuss how souls are actually destined for Heaven or Hell from the word, âGo,â because Free Will is an illusion if the entity that created you did so knowing the outcome (which he must if heâs omniscient)â-thereby creating a contradictionâ-and thatâs a better argument, but still not necessary. Agnostics arenât making a positive statement in the first place, so we donât have to prove anything; I guess Atheism is technically a conviction.
That said, making the point that one shouldnât have kids because theyâll experience suffering (at some point) and die (at some point) with no eternal paradise to go to isnât a good argument against an Agnostic/Atheist having kids; as long as someone thinks living is a net positive, then it stands to reason that they wouldnât be opposed to creating life.
Second paragraph: Same as the first. Thatâs not really a great reason not to believe in God.
Third Paragraph: Humanistic Nihilism is an option. Just because there isnât a grand inherent purpose to existence, or to any one life, doesnât mean that life is meaningless; it just means it has no cosmic meaning. Individuals still have agency, the ability to positively impact the world around them and the capacity to create a morality for themselves thatâs not dictated to them by a Millenia-old work of fiction or whatever a religious leader tells them.
The best argument against God is simply that thereâs no demonstrable evidence for him. I mean, even the book is counterintuitive because youâve got these accounts of God making himself known and doing all kinds of crazy bullshitâŚbut itâs been crickets from him since Jesus ascended; convenient.
Iâd also suggest that your second paragraph is a bit of a self-betrayal, ââŚat least if youâre religious you believe your child will go to spend eternity with God in paradiseâŚ,â see, thatâs cope, which comes from weakness. Whereas, if you donât believe, you know that bad things happen sometimes, and you just have to live with them.
Iâm not religious and my view is that while we arenât born with a purpose like religious people believe (âgod put us here for a reasonâ), I think we create our own purpose. The purpose I choose for myself is to try in what little way I can,to make the world a better place for those that come after me and to enjoy my life while I have it.
Maybe Iâll die and meet the thing people call god, maybe itâs exactly as one of our religions believe or itâs something we canât even imagine, or maybe Iâll die and thereâs nothing. Either way, I want to die satisfied with the life Iâve lived and the effect Iâve had on those around me.
I also want kids, I think having a child is a beautiful thing and I want to show them all of the beauty and cruelty of the world. I hope that I help them live a life that they enjoy and are satisfied with and maybe theyâll try to have a positive impact too, maybe more than me.
I donât think most non-religious people are nihilistic like you say. I think they just go about their lives without religion influencing their decisions, I donât think about what happens after I die that much because I donât know, and I donât have to know because Iâll find out when I die.
I like to reinforce absurdism with the fact we have scientific or anthropological explanations for just about everything (including religion) except for the genesis of first life form and why this is all here.
I mean the easy answer for me is that there are hundreds if not thousands of religions/beliefs that exist on this planet right now. Thats not including the thousands of religions/beliefs that have existed and been forgotten throughout history. Each one of them with significant differences of what the "truth" is.
How can a rational person pick one religion and say "yes, this is all factual" while discrediting/disavowing every single other one? And of course, the vast majority of people will subscribe to a religion that's popular where they live. Nobody ever thinks "How convenient, the one true religion just so happens to be popular where I live".
How can a rational person pick one religion and say "yes, this is all factual" while discrediting/disavowing every single other one?
Through the exercise of reason. There are plenty of internally contradictory religions, religions that don't stack up against the archeological record, and religions that plainly misinterpret their own scripture.
You're implying that your religion (or at least implying there exists one religion) is 100% correct while others have errors in their thought process/scripture. And I can promise that isn't true.
What religion are you talking about? I can imagine with about 5 minutes of research, I would be able to find a scientific paper that disproves, with data, what you're referring to.
I'm sure you can parrot one of the arguments that have been made against the orthodox Christian faith over the last two millenia, but not even the gates of hell could prevail against the Church
Again, like the other dude below you, you're implying one religion is the correct one and every other one is incorrect. Which one is the "correct" one?
Christianity is the religion with the most robust evidence to back it up. Itâs what I have faith in. Go look into it, youâll find that the people in the Bible really existed. Youâll find that the original scripture hasnât been changed over time. Youâll find that Jesus is a real person who lived and thousands of people saw him perform miracles and that hundreds witnessed him rise from the dead after being crucified. We have sources of some of these things outside of the Bible as well.
Belief in Christianity isnât based on vibes, itâs based on the evidence.
The Jews were killed and oppressed time and time again in the Bible. God letting them go through hard times is not evidence that he doesnât exist.
If this comment is representative of your understanding of Christianity then you really need to learn more. Go look into Jesus and try to disprove him, you canât.
Edit: Iâd like to add that if the Bible was only the Old Testament I donât think Iâd believe it either. Itâs Jesus thatâs the key to it all.
Jews and basically every other nation was in war and they killed each other.
The iron chariots are just one example. Tho if I am backed by the creator of the universe I expect him to pull his weight There are hundreds of contradictions, I just dont want a 200 page essay There is a website. The Bible is clearly a human creation and not a word of a supreme being.
God having a chosen people makes no sense in the first place. Sending his own son to die for the "sins" of people he made in a world he made, breaking rules he made up, and made the people to be subceptible to "sins" (many of which isnt bad at least in limitations like lust)
Like he was mad people wanted to screw the angels. Like I'd pretty much wanna do it. Its not a sin, its normal healthy human sexuality. Having 3 wives is perfectly normal biology wise, yet God is somehow butt mad about it.
Not gonna lie man youâre hitting me with a bunch of stuff here I donât know where to start. If youâre unwilling to try to see if itâs true then I donât think thereâs much I can do.
I can say one thing though, itâs very easy to just say âthis makes no senseâ then hand wave it away only ever looking at a skeptics reasoning.
Eh on the top of my head Islam has the Islamic dilemma which writes off that one for me. I also believe in the Uncaused cause so a being that is the uncaused cause who is all powerful and all good and that writes off pantheons which make up vast majority of religions.
Ok again, your reason for believing is based on theory which is fine for you. Just donât expect that to be good enough for everyone else all the time.
I donât even know if Iâd call it a theory if a âgodâ isnât all-powerful. Why should I worship them? They would just be some guy stronger than me. I donât worship people stronger than me.
I belive our need for an afterlife comes from the fact that we are bad at confronting our mortality we have only ever known consciousness to be one long thread never severing permanently never stopping and that death is something we can never fully comprehend until we die ourselves. And so we invented many different afterlives this got rolled up into many religions as a sort of carrot and stick to control people.
As for the universe being a random happenstance, there might be some truth to the matter, if the physical parameters were not exactly as they are for this universe we likely would not exist, however evolution is not random atleast not completely, it is a natural pressure towards change it is directed much like a ball rolling down a hill or a fire burning out. Does the ball hit a bump or not, does the fire burn this molecule or that molecule.
Now i do not exclude god from this universe, there could be something that set this all in motion that set the physical parameters in place however i do not know if this god is all powerful, i do not know if he is capable of making an afterlife, but i know one thing: this god is just as incomprehensible as death is to us. There is an astronomically low chance that there is an afterlife given the evidence i have seen, and there is a slightly greater (although still astronomically low chance) that there is a god.
As for how to continue on after thinking this way? Its not as if i dont care, i would love for there to be an afterlife death is a threshold that does scare me, and on the surface there being no higher power makes the universe feel cold and uncaring (because it likely is) but at the end of the day i am only human, and i can can forget this existential crisis for a little while, i can enjoy the things i want to, i can still find peace in being kind to those around me. Maybe a non belief in god or religion is some sort of personal shortcoming but we will never know in time to be able to tell anyone else. And for those that think this way and bring another life to this universe? Well we are human, humans are animals, and all animals follow certain programming not as if we are robots or forced to do this but as if there is some pressure in every day life to find pleasure or pain, to find someone we like and avoid those we dont, to somday pass on our legacy because if there is no afterlife the only thing we have left after death is our legacy.
Only if you're an inherently negative person. There is plenty of suffering, that is true, but there are also plenty of wonderful experiences you can't have if you don't exist. And almost everyone find the joys of live to outweigh the suffering. If they didn't they would kill themselves which a vast majority of people do not.
Iâm non religious and have children. I believe we are animals and reproduction is part of the experience of life. Iâm not sure why we are here or whatâs the point of it all but I enjoy experiencing as much of life as I can. Which includes having kids and unfortunately also includes loss and pain. You make a lot of negative associations to non religious people which I think is probably taught to you at church. Sad
Here is my question to religious people, why do you let your kids grow up if it lowers their chances to go to heaven? Just baptize them and let them die right after that.
It is a valid question, doing that would pretty much guarantee they go to heaven, it also pretty much guarantees you go to hell but religious people like to act as if that choice isn't there when it obviously is within their own framework.
God sending the toddler to hell just to close the "loophole" would be an insane injustice as well.
Or transhumanism: since there is no god; we might as well become the god.
With science, who know what level could we attain.
Sadly, we decided to make as much imaginary money as possible at the cost of making the planet uninhabitable. Thank god capitalism won the cold war, now nihilism is actually the rational choice
Dude, read Nietzsche. His entire project was the response to the existential nihilism that's leftover after God is dead.
The only justification for life, even with its inherent suffering, are the absolute highest highs, those that if you were forced by a demon to live again and again for all eternity, you'd thank him.
The irony here is Nietzsche sits on his own plane above the entire concept of this sub. You can't box him into anything because he (correctly) criticized everything.
Many of these people go on to have children who have to deal with said suffering and pain and death so my question is this, why would you bring someone into a world that you know will have to suffer and deal with pain and eventually die?
The real answer is that it relieves them of some of their own suffering and sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness and gives the a legacy, by giving them people to unload some of their own suffering onto.
Like recreational marital sex, children have always been a cope, like cigarettes.
And this is also true of religious people too. They're not generally thinking of eternity in heaven when they're fucking their spouses for fun or squeezing out sprogs. They're thinking of their yearnings right now and the joys (and elevated social status) of parenthood to come.
For the non-religious, if your final paragraph is correct, that's all the more reason to have kids. If people had kids for selfless reasons we'd all have gone extinct ages ago, the religious and the non-religious alike.
As a side note, though it's not what you asked, to many non-religious, existentialism makes more sense than nihilism as an alternative. At the very least it's an alternative.
Its rather simple. Stuff like this is absolutely in contradiction with a smart and good willing creator. Thwre are tons of stupid and "evil" (if it would have morality) stuff in the world. If an average, good natured human could make parts of the world better, it is clear that an infinitely smart and infinitely good natured being doesnt exist. Because that is in direct contradiction with the world. Even free will doesnt explain the brain eating prions and stuff like rabies.
However, luckily, that doesnt mean the world is a shitty place. In my opinion, strongly supported by scientific data, childhood csncer is rare enough to risk it. The chance for a human to be happy in general is much higher than a chance to be miserwble. Therefore, rolling a say, 20 sided dice where the outcomes from say, 5 to 20 is good (assume its life quality) is better than not rolling at all.
People survive childhood csncer. The only case where its clearly immoral in my opinion is where its close to 100% thst the kid would have a horrible life (say, lacking a brain or an uncurable illness that kills the baby in weeks).
Atheism in its pure form only deals with the existence of god. Any other claim is just added by other people (atheism doesnt have to make you liberal, nihilist, conservative, pro life, pro choice etc). Its a single issue thing focusing on Supernatural and its lack of proof, and more closely, the Abrahamic God
Iâve never been truly religious or non religious. I understand that there are higher powers in the universe but Iâve never worshipped any of them because I just never really felt that connected to any. Iâve been casting runes for around 15 years now but thatâs more just asking myself a question
I think antinatalism makes a good case, but ultimately I wouldnât call myself an antinatalist.
I think the main point here is that there is a difference between life having enough suffering to believe that having children is immoral and having enough suffering to contradict the idea of a loving god. If God is all-powerful, he would be able to construct a world devoid of suffering. Instead, we live in a world with continuous and seemingly meaningless suffering. Nonetheless, I think life is worth living regardless as the good moments are worth experiencing enough to get through the bad moments, but if the Christian god exists, I think he would have built a world without such meaningless suffering in it (children with cancer etc). To me, if god created the world as it exists today, he would have committed an immoral act inflicting this much suffering on people and animals unnecessarily.
It would be like if I gave you 100k and punched you in the face. I improved your life overall, but it was still immoral because I was fully capable of not punching you in the face and just giving you 100k
I mean, it's not as if suffering is the only thing we experience, happiness is not impossible. ya child cancer exsists, but most chuldren don't have it, and are quiet happy living their non cancer lives.
This question only makes sense if there was only suffering in life, like of I knew I would give birth to a baby who would die horribly a minute after then ya I would abort and not have any.
But I don't know that, my babay could have a wonderful life full of joy, and birthdays, and graduation, and fun to be had. We have kids for those moments.
Personally I don't believe in a creationist god (like the Christian one) because from what I've seen through scientific discovery, there's just not much room left for god. We know how humans evolved, we know how the planet came to be, we know the vast majority of the questions we used to have back when people ascribed those answers to god.
At this point the only question of creation remaining is what happened at t-0, the big bang. We cna see extremely close to it, I think scientists can see as close as T-0.1 x 10-14 or something super close, but since the moment before the big bang started there was no light (as far as we can tell), current technology just can't get us there. And so at this exact moment if someone wanted to say that's what God did, snap their fingers and start it all, then I wouldn't reslly be able to argue, but my faith goes to the idea that science has found the answer to literally every other step along the way, so we'll eventually find this one.
Regardless, if someone believes in a god that does not inherently discredit science (I know some people do, through any varying mechanism such as god being hands off through it all and just being a higher entity or just doing that initial start of the big bang), that's fine and their perogative, but personally I view all of creation as a sequence of natural events that can be identified and studied and that doesn't take a higher deity to explain.
I don't need a God to give my life purpose. I don't need a God to give me a reason to have children with the woman I love. The universe being a random happenstance does not give me a nihilistic outlook on our lives, and I don't take that randomness for granted. If it turned out a God did or didn't exist, it would have no bearing on the way I choose to live my life.
My question for religious people would be: Why do you need their to be a grand meaning to all of this to be able to enjoy the limited time you have here? Would you not become the same nihilistic type of person if you were given definitive proof that there is no grand meaning?
There is a fundamental break in the logic chain with belief, and that is why only humans are supposed to have a life after death?
If you know your biology, you figure out very soon that animals are as biologically complex as us, and if you know your animals, you know they are very capable of complex emotions and thoughts/problem solving as us. Each of them has a their own character and "being" too.
So how come there is always a distinction between species in belief? Humans have obviously wondered the same thing about other humans, and a big part about mainstream monotheistic religions is about what God does to the other man who does not believe in him.
There isnât always a distinction between species. Sure, in Abrahamic religions there may be, but the simple existence of a creator does not predispose that creator is anything we could actually describe. Theism and Deism are the simple ways to look at it from this view, but there are almost more philosophies about God that have everything connected rather than humans separate and better
Theyâre just gone forever, at least if youâre religious you believe your child will go to spend eternity with God in paradise.
Non-religions people, who actively chose to have children, have children for the same reason religious people have. They have an ideology that justified that. A very common idea is the continued existence of legacy, even if your consciousness stops existing, this just isn't what matters. A tribe, family, society or even political ideology might be more important than one consciousness or the suffering of an individual.
All societies, religious or not, believe in this concept, that's the reason why inherited exists, it's arguably ingrained in life and animals also have this instinct despite not even being able to form ideas about god.
You could turn around this question and ask if it is actually immoral to have children as a religious person. No matter how torturing life is for some individuals, there is a certain end. The damage a non-religious parent can make will always be finite. But depending on the religion the torture could be forever. This doesn't matter to most religious people because they believe that their religion is more important, similar to the non-religious reasons.
Furthermore once the necessary premises for religious beliefs are accepted the evidence for any of god is the same, making it questionable if you actually believe in the right god and might condem your child to endless torture. After all if we considering all the evidence what makes the existence of a Christian god more likely than Allah?
Misinterpreting Nihilism. If you want to say that existential Nihilism makes sense then you can't use it to justify people doing whatever they want - in the face of an uncaring and senseless universe it is on us to decide what our purpose is, to take control of our life and move above. It isn't not "not caring", it's being aware that nothing is owed to us simply due to us being born/human, that the only purpose we have is what we ourselves decide it is gathering than a higher calling ordained by, for example, god or someone else.
Having children is completely up to individuals. Some will see the pain and suffering and say that they don't want to put their offspring (or themselves, in some cases) through that and that is completely valid, especially in Nihilism. Though it usually happens from people being tied to their instinct to reproduce. Yes, everyone has a "breeding kink" by default, it came free with your instincts (with few notable exceptions due to trauma usually). There is no inherent good or bad in instincts, and asuming people are competent parents (they aren't) there should be no issue in bringing people into the world. Keyword should.
Of course he wasn't a Wizard. He's obviously charisma based.
You could argue Warlock because he gets his power from his patron. Or Sorcerer, because it's through his bloodline. But I'd say Bard, because the primary use of his power was to inspire people.
Incidentally, Gandalf is also a bard, just one with very high Int.
Best way to look at it is to pick a different person. Let's say Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. There's basically indisputable proof that Joseph smith existed, including government records, newspaper reports, contemporary writings by the man himself as well as close associates, and known still living descendants. No serious person would doubt that Joseph Smith was a real person.
But many, many people doubt that Joseph Smith was visited by the angel Moroni, that he dug up gold plates, or that he used seer stones to translate those gold plates. Those sorts of claims are just not credible, even if close associates of Joseph Smith claimed to have seen the plates themselves. But if you don't think the angel, gold plates, or translating was real, then what do you actually have left about Joseph Smith other than that he was a con man who founded a religion? You'd have a hard time justifying belief in Mormonism if you don't also believe that the rest of it happened.
So imagine taking that situation, removing basically every piece of contemporary evidence, and making claims involving walking on water, curing blind people with mud, bringing a dead guy back to life, and then bringing yourself back to life. Even if someone comes along and say "here's some stones showing that the Roman governor from the story existed, and here's some historians writing decades later about a guy named Yeshu that got executed", does that really get much? "A guy with this name existed and was killed" doesn't really help to prove that he said the things attributed to him, and especially doesn't provide evidence for supernatural claims. And without the supernatural stuff, what's really left of Jesus as a religious entity?
And people claim the New Testament authors were âeyewitnessesâ, which most of them donât claim to be, but even if they were, Joseph Smith also had eyewitnesses to his angels and plates who were so devoted that when he excommunicated some of them and they still affirmed their eyewitness accounts. So how valuable is eyewitness testimony really?
Nah dogg Jesus is real I saw Him in a dream once. We were on a sunsetted desert highway, He was driving this clean red '64 Impala that had a lowered sport stance and BBSes on it (Jesus was probably rolling to the autocross track tbh) and I was just riding shotty, hair blowing in the wind enjoying the company of my Lord. Such a based dream I think about it all the time
Sometimes I think that a good amount of religions have the aspect of "judgement after death" so that the elites can escape from judgement on earth and people who believe that faith become pushovers instead of taking matters into their own hands.
And considering how a good amount of religions also want people to be humble, altruistic and not corrupted by power - ending in the good ones remaining at the "bottom" while the most vile, absolute filth rises to the top (GOP, for a western example) - it very much works in favor of these elites so it's in their interest to push religion as much as possible while absolutely ignoring the parts that are unfavorable.
Targeted literacy, I think it was called.
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u/s-josten - Right 19h ago
This is exactly as cringy as if someone tried to use the time Grok said "Jesus is Lord" as a checkmate atheist move unironically