I’ll say it again, I’ve never seen a bigger sacred cow than BLM. If you are white and criticize them you are racist. If you are black and criticize them you are a sellout. Any other minority criticizes them, they are racist.
I am, and I'm a hardline atheist. The past ten years have solidly convinced me that most people are not cut out for living without a religion - they'll say they don't have one then they'll fit something else into the same slot of their brain and we're no better off.
Worse off, in fact: I'd rather the competing mix of old standards each with established rules and power structures to this morass of new-and-crazy where everyone's looking for - or making - power vacuums to exploit.
At the height of the Evangelical moral panic power I used to make fun of them on accounts with my real name. Today there's an orthodoxy with a priesthood so powerful and a laity so rabid I dare not affix my real name to even mild criticism. If I'm ever found out I'll suffer consequences similar to excommunication at the height of the Dark Ages - not able to interact with others, not able to work, not able to engage in simple commerce. I've been made a member of a church I never signed up for and I will suffer like any other heretic if I botch a shibboleth.
So yeah, please come back Jehovah! I still don't believe in you but boy do I ever need you; you're way more mellow than your replacements.
Christopher Hitchens called the Abrahamic concept of God "a celestial North Korea." But surely, a metaphorical totalitarian state is preferable to the physical totalitarian states that rise in its absence.
The problem is that we vaunted intellectuals lost the most basic thing of all: The theory of mind. You put a little kid in a room with a basket and a dresser, then have a man come in and hide a ball under the basket. Then have a woman come in and move the ball from the basket to the dresser. Then ask the kid where the man will go to look for the ball. The kid will say the dresser because he/she hasn't yet sussed out that other people aren't working with the same info.
The hell of it is, theory of mind covers a lot more than that. To use a computer metaphor, that basic example above is essentially about people not having the same data. Problem is, the software and the hardware platforms are also unique and we forgot (or never realized) that. Whatever part of us lets us keep running our code isn't standard loadout and if anyone without the right (or wrong) wiring who tries it is going to fuck it up. So we saw this whole godless trend exemplified by Internet Atheism and thought "Neat! More people like us!" when they really weren't. So we got blindsided by stuff like Atheism+ and the fuck-your-god-dad atheism that thinks Islam is juuuust fiiiine. And, irony of ironies, we're now in a Hell of our own devising.
I’ll say it again, I’ve never seen a bigger sacred cow than BLM. If you are white and criticize them you are racist. If you are black and criticize them you are a sellout. Any other minority criticizes them, they are racist.
I am, and I'm a hardline atheist. The past ten years have solidly convinced me that most people are not cut out for living without a religion - they'll say they don't have one then they'll fit something else into the same slot of their brain and we're no better off.
Worse off, in fact: I'd rather the competing mix of old standards each with established rules and power structures to this morass of new-and-crazy where everyone's looking for - or making - power vacuums to exploit.
At the height of the Evangelical moral panic power I used to make fun of them on accounts with my real name. Today there's an orthodoxy with a priesthood so powerful and a laity so rabid I dare not affix my real name to even mild criticism. If I'm ever found out I'll suffer consequences similar to excommunication at the height of the Dark Ages - not able to interact with others, not able to work, not able to engage in simple commerce. I've been made a member of a church I never signed up for and I will suffer like any other heretic if I botch a shibboleth.
So yeah, please come back Jehovah! I still don't believe in you but boy do I ever need you; you're way more mellow than your replacements.
Christopher Hitchens called the Abrahamic concept of God "a celestial North Korea." But surely, a metaphorical totalitarian state is preferable to the physical totalitarian states that rise in its absence.
The problem is that we vaunted intellectuals lost the most basic thing of all: The theory of mind. You put a little kid in a room with a basket and a dresser, then have a man come in and hide a ball under the basket. Then have a woman come in and move the ball from the basket to the dresser. Then ask the kid where the man will go to look for the ball. The kid will say the dresser because he/she hasn't yet sussed out that other people aren't working with the same info.
The hell of it is, theory of mind covers a lot more than that. To use a computer metaphor, that basic example above is essentially about people not having the same data. Problem is, the software and the hardware platforms are also unique and we forgot (or never realized) that. Whatever part of us lets us keep running our code isn't standard loadout and if anyone without the right (or wrong) wiring who tries it is going to fuck it up. So we saw this whole godless trend exemplified by Internet Atheism and thought "Neat! More people like us!" when they really weren't. So we got blindsided by stuff like Atheism+ and the fuck-your-god-dad atheism that thinks Islam is juuuust fiiiine. And, irony of ironies, we're now in a Hell of our own devising.