Makaze

A Critique of Pure Power: Do you know how to heal yourself physically? Do you know how to heal yourself mentally? Power is only as good as your knowledge of how to use it. Remember Tetsuo. I'll take my power with a side order of whatever AKIRA is having.

This thread... I tried to kill it many ages ago. I thought I succeeded.

... How did this come back? Why?

CHRIST

The no love tap thing was pointless, I agree with that. Her useless pride tripped her up.

She was a badass heel, though. I will be sad to see her go.

Oh, it's an actual term.

how do you mean (I haven't seen the fight)

i did not know damn

A Critique of Pure Knowledge: Is the universe one where the natural can heal you? Is the universe one where the power you need is attainable? Knowledge can answer these questions truthfully, but not desirably.

what the fuck

I don't know many ways I can say this, but it does not make sense to compare something to a class that includes it. What if said "a serial killer has qualities that also exist in humanity"? It doesn't work because we already know that the serial killer is in the group called humanity. Likewise, what if I said "this group of humans has qualities that also exist in humanity"? Still not making sense. Now on to government. What if I said, "a particular group that seeks and has had power in the past has qualities that also exist in groups that have power"? It follows logically that if A is a member of B, then some qualities of A contribute to the qualities of B. Therefore the qualities of B are the sum of qualities of its members, such that B.qualities = { C.qualities, D.qualities, E.qualities, F.qualities ... Z.qualities, A.qualities }. Suppose you loop through and compare all of the qualities of A with all of the qualities of B one after the other. Eventually you will get to comparing the qualities of A to the qualities of A, proving that the comparisons are a category mistake. My comparison would compare A as it exists within B to C as it exists within B. Once again, I can compare A to C while filtering for qualities within B, not A to B or C to B. I could not compare C to B, A to B, D to B, or any of B's members to B. I cannot compare secular ideology with government. I cannot compare any ideology with government as long as government is not an ideology. Neither can you. Yes. Yes, I can. Because the end is not achieved and I have not proposed that we come up with a plan to achieve it. In fact, I am not even saying that it should be achieved. I am saying that the universe would be a better place if it were no longer a factor. Personally I don't believe it is even possible to eradicate it without magic or some equivalent force. I don't care. I am capable of talking about how religion is harming people and how it would be better if that did not happen even if I personally believe it cannot possibly happen. Side note: Emotional pain and physical pain are comparable. They are both signals in the brain. It is possible to be unable to feel either due to "problems" with the wiring, even if your arm is cut off or you lose someone who is of use to you. We can also quantify which events cause the greatest damage to relative to mental faculties, short term and long term, or relative to physical faculties, short term and long term. Using a statistical analysis we could probably form a conclusion about which type of event is more damaging relative to several factors. I never said there was a community. You invented a backstory. There is no backstory. All I'm saying is that the world would have been better if C had compensated A. That can never happen. I never said the world would be better if citizen D compensated A. You're implying I meant that the world would be better if A got money through any means possible. That's wrong. I was trying to say "it is literally impossible for A to get what they deserve by any means, period, and they still deserve it". In other words, the world is a harsh place, but even if can't get what you deserve... You still deserve it. I was never defending that. I never so much as suggested it. I said, "We can demonstrate that religious ideology is more harmful than secular ideology in practically every context you have brought up." You ran with that statement, literally the words I said and nothing else, and added this on to the end: "... and because of that, any and all possible measures should be taken to make religious people change their minds, including harassment and violence." Then you proceeded to argue against the imaginary second half of my sentence. I've been avoiding calling this a strawman because calling it that doesn't add anything to the discussion. I prefer just saying that you're jumping the gun, because that is what you're doing. Read my posts. Scour them for any hint that I want violence, emotional or physical, visited upon the religious. I mean it. You need to know your enemy if you want to continue this. Imagine my saying "Right-handed bullies are worse than left-handed bullies" and you saying "You are wrong to propose that we should abuse right-handed bullies." It would be obtuse of you to say that, right? Something similar is happening here. I don't even know what dondon's position is on this issue. I countered your analogy comparing religion and government in response to Irysa. Government had previously been irrelevant to the main discussion. I took us on a completely different path. Short version: You assume too much. For what it's worth, I don't believe in justice or that people can deserve things independent of context. That's just how that word works. In my view, punishment and condemnation are only useful to the extent that they make the world a better place. I've been using "deserves" in place of "the world would be a better place if this were the case" because it's the word you were using and it's close enough to be understood. A good way to put it is that I think the world deserves to be the best it can be, but no particular person deserves for anything good or bad to happen them unless it helps the world at large.

I think I just weaponized sarcasm.

... Everything you've said above is untrue or misled. Every bit. First paragraph: You cannot compare government in general and ideologies in particular. This type of comparison simply doesn't make sense. You would be comparing all the results of one ideology to all the governments that result from all ideologies. That includes governments that result from the ideology you are comparing to. This leads to a comparison of the ideology to itself by proxy. It's circular. Instead, you have to compare ideologies with each other by how the interact with government and vice versa so that there is no recursion. Second paragraph: ... I... What? How did you miss the many times I said the literal words "secular ideology"? Third paragraph: What people should do about the problem is outside the scope of this discussion. What I set out to do here is identity that a problem exists. You keep implying that if I do not have a way to eradicate religion then I have no right to say the world would be better off without it. I am not obligated to reason out how we would get from point a to point b if I can prove that point b is better. How to get there is for another time. Fourth paragraph: Don't go into shock, but I have some bad news. We just learned that showing that two things have something in common is what we call a comparison. Whew. I'm glad that's on the table. Now, what was you said? Oh, yes. That government and religion have something in common. They are both atrocious. My goodness, how did you make that comparison before I made the false assumption that they were comparable?! Where was it said that the person should or would be purged? You're getting way ahead of yourself. Let me put it another way. Suppose that someone gets wronged. They deserve compensation. They cannot get it through the way they deserve to get it, peaceful negotiations. Above and beyond that, they cannot even get it by using force because they are too weak. They cannot even speak on their own behalf. They are powerless. Do they not deserve compensation despite all that? You mistakenly assume that saying "X deserves Y" means that I support killing someone to makes sure X gets Y. Not so. I'm just saying that world would be a better place if X gets Y. It's the same with religion. I'm not saying we should kill all religious people. I'm not even saying we should make it harder for them to organize. I'm just saying the world would be a better place if faith were not a factor. What I'm reading is "The world would be a better place without religion." followed by "Such a world cannot exist. Therefore, it would not be better if it could exist." If your position is that a world where religion magically didn't exist would be great, but a world where we violently force religion out is not great, then it was a problem of precision of language. "Get rid of" and "stamp out" are not as expressive as what I just said. To me, it looked like you were talking about literally the same type of elimination in both scenarios. Hence a contradiction.

I don't know how you mixed this up. I did the opposite of what you said. I was pointing out that you cannot compare an ideology to government in general unless government in general is an ideology in itself (it is not). Therefore your point doesn't make sense because you are comparing an ideology with something else. Go back. Start over. Religion and theocracy are not mutually inclusive. My comparison draws from potential harm. If an ideology would do more harm than another ideology when given the same amount of power as the other, then that ideology has a more harmful nature even if no one has any power. That's how inherent nature works: it persists independent of context. Therefore a religion that has no power is still potentially as dangerous as a theocracy because it in its nature to be that way. In this part of the conversation we were talking about the inherent nature of the beast and not the way things actually happened because you didn't like it when I appealed to the way things are right now. At this point it's feeling like you want to switch between "it's not inherently that bad" and "it's not literally that bad" to suit your whims while blaming me for only arguing against religion it in one of the two ways at one time. I didn't start to argue for the existence of religion as an institution by comparing it to government (all governments are institutions). Earlier in the thread I explained why I believe even personal faith is detrimental. This institution tangent happened because you drew a comparison with government. This one's on you. You're not listening to yourself. Read these statements again. Firstly, what someone deserves is not dependent on whether it can happen to them by any definition of the word. I hope you can see the logic behind the argument that if someone deserves justice, they deserve it even if they cannot get it due to a legal loophole. With that in mind, there is no way that these two statements do not contradict. In order to resolve this contradiction, either statement a or statement b must be a lie (what I read into it), "stamping out" must be different from "getting rid of" (in which case resolution requires more precise language), or you are using your own definition of "deserve" that depends on how possible it is. As things stand, what you said reads like this: "X deserves to be eliminated on its own merit." -> "X cannot be eliminated, therefore it does not deserve to be eliminated on its own merit." If that's not what you meant then it's a simple misunderstanding. Does that clear up why it looks like a contradiction to me?

Pretty sure they meant "bomb the hell out of them".

Didn't think so.

Is it worse than hearing the phrase "turn the desert into glass"?

Wisdom.

Or not behold.

Seriously though... I am in a committed relationship.

I have never killed someone!

I've never seen that movie.

Mine.

I think you've gotten mixed up. A government without the power to govern is not a government. If you take away the ability to abuse power then you must have either abolished the sovereign institution or created a more powerful one that can govern it. Governments take all shapes--theocracy, dictatorship, state communism, democracy, republic. Why? Because what makes them governments is their power to govern people, not their structure, nor their ideologies. Let's get something straight. When religious people are in power, they are the government. They aren't "in control" of the government. They are it. Likewise, when secular people "have control of the government", the secular people are the government. You're implying that there is an inherent separation of church and state even if the church is the governing power, which is wrong. Restated, we can substitute different types of government in your example: "If a theocracy is such a beast that it abuses power when it has it, then it is the nature of the beast to abuse it even if it is never granted that opportunity." "If a secular republic is such a beast that it abuses power when it has it, then it is the nature of the beast to abuse it even if it is never granted that opportunity." These two statements can be compared. However, it does not make sense to compare a particular instance of a government to the class of government itself: "If a type of government is such a beast that it abuses power when it has it, then it is the nature of the beast to abuse it even if it is never granted that opportunity." "If government is such a beast that it abuses power when it has it, then it is the nature of the beast to abuse it even if it is never granted that opportunity." Because this is just generalizing the statement, not comparing different examples. You can't say which is worse because you've made a category mistake. Comparing the first two statements is what I am trying to do. My position is that both statements are true; secular governments are abusive in their nature, and so are theocracies. However, they are not equally abusive. Theocracies are worse. Ergo, the nature of the beasts are not equal. The nature of the ideology behind theocracy is worse than the nature of the ideology behind secularism, even if one of them is granted the opportunity to abuse and the other is not. Wrong. You are saying you want to get rid of organized religion. You would if you could. This is a claim that organized religion deserves to die. Then you say that organized religion does not deserves to be demonized as something "to be stamped out". This is another way of saying "Organized religion does not deserve to be told that it deserves to die". You have created a contradiction by saying the very thing you believe we should not say. That was about your original claims. These new claims contradict the old ones directly. How can you want to do away with religion and in the same instant think that religion is worth having around? The logical conclusion of your statements is that we should defend and justify the status quo, whatever it may be (government, religion), until it can be eradicated without a fuss. Then the gloves can come off and we can drop the pretense that what is going on right now is okay.