Grace Life Church supporters tear down the fences
(twitter.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (41)
sorted by:
I don't believe in God. I'm effectively anti-theistic. I believe it is your individual responsibility to develop a proper moral system to guide you through life while doing as little harm to the world around you because there is no God, you will never be forgiven, there are no 2nd chances, your life is written in permanent ink and you'll have to try and get it all right the first time. As such, that requires me to recognize that the arbitrary categorizations of racial-political collectives mean basically nothing, and that behavior and culture is a far more important thing to consider.
Additionally, I just don't hate the Jews so much that I developed a galaxy brain so large that I discovered that Christianity was a zionist plot.
The only place we really disagree is in the regard we hold evidence that behavior and culture are inflected by genetics.
Christianity isn't a Zionist plot. While I appreciate the baseline judeo-christian morality as best for the masses, there's an inherent weakness in it's universalism.
They are, minimally, and to a point which may be irrelevant compared to actual experience and conditioning.
Then our disagreement is one of degrees. Genetics have an undeniable correlation with antisocial behavior, and I believe the prevalence of antisocial behaviors have a profound effect on public trust, which heavily informs cultural norms. If one in 1000 are predisposed to severe antisocial behavior, the type of culture that they form will be massively different from the culture formed by one in 100 with antisocial behaviors.
But the degrees are far too significant to reduce to genetics in any useful way.
When local cultures are changing so aggressively in less than 100 years, and we know that sex-selection, diet, and up-bringing have dramatic individual results, it can't be argued that there's enough reason to recognize cultural differences based on genetics.
Genetics, like normal, can usually give you some upper and lower maximums, but the averages and means are not going to be determined by genetics. Yes, genetics can tell us that African runners are going to do well in the Olympics. It tells us almost nothing about the ability for black Americans to run on average beyond some broad potential.
In fact, I'd argue that cultural norms probably have a larger impact on genetics than vice versa. This is because if a culture promotes sex-selection by females of specific types of males that are chosen as optimal breeding partners, the likelihood that those sex-selections are going to lead to an effect in the populations general genetic make-up is going to be more important.
Let's pretend I'm some demi-god ruling over a tribe of humans. If we accept Male Variability Hypothesis and Female Sex Selection, I can use the environment to cultivate genetics. If I expose the tribe to dangerous predators, females may consistently choose stronger and aggressive men to breed with for protection and safety of family development. But, if I remove the predators and introduce lots of soil fertility and edible plants, the males that females will chose might be more inclined towards repetitive physical work and long-term planning like farmers. If I turn the area utterly inhospitable, the females may mate with males that are more geared towards risk taking and exploration in order to find a new home.
Genetically speaking, there is no difference between an environmental change that would introduce inhospitable climates and poor soil, and a Communist government that ruins agriculture and intentionally starves people. In fact, what kind of males would be optimal choices for females in such an environment. Females would respond to environmental changes in the form of selection, and males would respond to environmental changes by either dying or adapting (MVH). What if that environmental change killed certain men. Certain men dying from environmental stressors means that females would have to choose survivable mates. What if it wasn't predators or storms, but a bunch of Communists killing independent minded and aggressive men that spoke out against the system. Female sex selection choices would be altered by the environmental pressure all the same.
Whatever short-term genetic differences we might find, it would most likely be an outgrowth of those environmental stressors, eliminating certain behaviors and potential mates that are less survivable or beneficial.
This is why I have to bring up the East Germans. The 1 SD IQ difference of East & West Germans can't possibly come about because the East & West Germans developed such stark genetic differences in only 50 years. It has to be because of environmental pressures from tyranny & communism cultivating an environment utterly destructive to the kind of people who would need high IQ for social status and prosperity. On the other side of the wall, a freer modern society would have lots of use for high IQ individuals, which would cause them to be more likely to both develop their IQ (and not be stunted), and also promote their survival and offspring (females chose males with typically similar or high IQ in mate preference).
Effectively, the long-term evolutionary genetics of populations is never going to be effected by 50 years of communism, but the adaptation of a population to an environmental stressor should exist. The underlying long-term genetics might be basically the same, but the populations had to diverge due to environment.
Well, the same thing can apply to all other groups for identical reasons. There is a reason there was a massive upward shift in Jewish and White populations in the US. The domination of a welfare state in Black American communities might explain differences between them and both Whites & West Africans.
If you beat a dog, it becomes maladaptive. If you beat a dog, and all it's children, and all it's children's children, you get the Soviet's dog experiment.
That's the one where they took a group of dogs, separated them into two groups:
After 5 generations, the 2 groups of dogs literally don't even look the same.
The aggressive dogs are pathologically aggressive. Their always angry, barking, snaping at the trainers, and fighting with each other. They are leener, have darker fur, and are paranoid to engage in contact with humans.
The passive dogs are like adult puppies. They have longer hair, they are all lightly colored, they are curious, they are eager to be petted, they love contact with humans, and they basically never bite or growl.
Genetically, they're still the same group of dogs, but the observed differences, which are physically manifest, come from selective breeding toward behavior. There's no reason that human social systems couldn't incentivize humans to do the same thing.
How do you know what is moral without God?
Have you noticed that nobody can do that?
If you believed in God you would know peace and experience true freedom. Hating the Jews and seeing their large noses poking into every facet of your life is not freedom.
I had to figure it out. What benefits me? What benefits others? What benefits the life and world around me? What hurts them? What hurts the world around me? How do I go about living my life in a way that is most beneficial to me and the environment I exist in, or that will help develop a world that is like that, even if I'm not currently in it.
The strongest compliment I can give to Christianity is that our conclusions have surprising overlap.
You're right, they can't. Now it's time to recognize the true imperative of the atheist: live with it.
You will fuck it up. You'll fail. You'll hurt people. You'll hurt yourself. No one will ever necessarily forgive you, even if you ask, if that's ever an option. Instead you're far more likely to hurt someone and never ever see them again without ever having had the option to actually repent or ask forgiveness for your mistakes.
What if there is no afterlife? Really, what are implications of that? The implications are actually quite horrifying if you've never actually recognized them. Imagine what it really means to bicker with your wife over something stupid to find out she was killed on the way to work. You never got the chance to apologize, make amends, or even re-orient your life and focus on the important things.
You wasted it. You chose to waste it, and now gone forever.
When you write the story of your life in permanent ink, you'd better start choosing wisely. You'll never be able to take any of it back.
It starts to really make you value forgiveness. You start to be more careful with your words and deeds. You start to re-prioritize what's important much sooner than at someone's death bed. You start too look into the future to see what's coming, and you start to avoid what you know will cause you terrible pain. Why, if you're careful, if you're smart, if you square yourself away, you might just end up being a good person. And if you really learn what's important, and you really tell the truth, and you live by truth, and you embrace mercy, stoicism, and strength; well shit, you might actually be someone that people can be proud to have known.
I don't care what some supposedly divine figure judges of my life. Fuck that person. I leave a legacy based on the people who's lives I've impacted. My work, their memories of me, the way I changed their lives, that is my legacy. Not the judgement of some allegedly perfect being. Fuck other people's judgement, I know what I did, and I left it on the hearts and minds of the people around me.
I get to know that because I wasn't given a second chance. And so it became truly valuable to me.
Lies. If I believed in God, I would enslave myself to those who claim to know him better than me. I would not do my bidding, or my family's bidding, or my community's bidding, or my friend's bidding, or even this supposed God's bidding. I would do their bidding. The bidding of those who claim to know better because they adorn themselves in titles, authority, and cosmetic garb.
I would know nothing of freedom because I would know nothing but enslavement. I would know nothing of freedom because I would know nothing of responsibility. I would know nothing of freedom because I would know nothing but the coddled protection and comforting lies of men seeking to enrich themselves at my expense and re-affirm their own sense of self worth off of my back.
And peace? Never. I would know only the orders and demands of my betters. I would know only war because I would be sent to fight it while my betters enjoyed their peace at my expense. I would live for someone else, I would die for someone else, and I would have nothing for me and mine.
My only dream, enslaved to religion and idolatry (for all religion is idolatry of one form or another), would be to say that I died well at the behest of others. But I could never have lived well. I wouldn't have ever known how to live, because it would never have been my life.
Obviously. It too is a form of enslavement. Total reactionary attitudes are fundamentally an enslavement to resentment and hatred.
How do you know what is best for you, or for others?
I’m not God. I don’t know what happens when you die. I’m familiar with your thinking though, because I used to be an Atheist too.
Driven by fear, you mean.
I’m talking about real Christianity. God is within us. It is written in the Bible to let no man teach you, but hardly any Christians are aware of it because they do not really know God.
Instead you are a slave to the idea of freedom. I bet you do not feel free.
The truth is that all are slaves, knowingly or not. The question is only, who do you serve?
I don't, that's why I didn't say that. No one knows what's "best" for others, and it's a damn struggle to understand what's best for you. I try to do right by myself and the people around me to the best of my abilities at any given moment.
I do not accept any anointed vision or grand plan of what someone else, who doesn't know me, and doesn't care about me, claims thinks is best for me by making an argument to authority to a literary device.
You don't know what happens when you die, but you claim to be a Christian. Are you ignorant of your own beliefs, or just lying to me?
No, by consequence. There are one of two options in the real world: ignore consequence and responsibility, and be bludgeoned by consequence until your apologetics and rationalization is broken by force; or take heed of consequence and adapt.
Consequence can also be positive, even inspirational. The reward of your work.
When you refuse to accept consequences and take responsibility, you diminish your success, and blind yourself to danger.
Non-sense. Christians aren't true Christians because they don't accept the moral relativism of revealing God's will within themselves.
How do you even know that I have not found God within me by doing exactly what I'm doing? God is not real, and I don't need it either. Yet, I live a moral life that most Christians would consider pious. How do you know that my rejection of God did not lead me to a more godly path in line with His plan, despite opinions. How do you know that my anti-theism is not more pious and Christian than most Christians, particularly when you engage in such relativism of morality?
How could you even challenge my introspection?
That's a hell of a statement.
I'm afraid we must remain bitter enemies, because I do genuinely believe in the value of human freedom and individual liberty. You see it as, apparently, a delusion that only enslavement to your unknowable, untouchable, uninteractable allegory which is interepreted by other men can cure people of.
I do not accept your apologetics to your own enslavement to men who claim to speak on behalf of a God you will never find.
I do, because I earned it, and earn it every day.