Libra00 @ Libra @lemmy.ml

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492

Joined

3 mo. ago

Yeah, I love places like ProPublica that do serious investigative journalism, though I dunno if they count as 'independent' anymore.

Fair point. I am not very familiar with Orthodox Christianity at all, save a little of the very early history. You also sound fairly well-educated on the subject, which makes you twice over not the usual kind of person who responds to my comments about religion.

So, first, let me apologize for making assumptions; the usual kind of person I get is an American evangelical protestant who hasn't read most of his or her own bible and is of the opinion that anything important for them to know would be whispered on the wind directly into their ear by god himself, so they have a pretty dim view of learning in general, but also of learning about their religion in specific. That's clearly not you. My bad.

Second, it's my understanding that Orthodoxy (probably not the right word, my bad) uses fundamentally the same scriptures as Catholicism and Protestantism, with some additions to the Old Testament. My issues come from the bible's descriptions of god, events, and people, so I'm going to assume there's enough common ground that my these translate to Orthodoxy as well as the others. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I have 3 core issues with Christianity:

1. Original sin: imposing the consequences of one person's actions on others is called collective punishment and it's a war crime, and needless to say baking a metaphysical war crime into the very heart of a religion - its origin story - is just not ever going to fly with me. It certainly doesn't help that this is further complicated by #2.
2. Omniscience/free will: either god is omniscient (lit: all knowledge, which includes perfect knowledge about the future) and free will is impossible so we can't choose to love god, or he isn't omniscient. His claims about moral authority are held together by this linchpin, and honestly either way it falls doesn't look great. If we can't choose to love god then punishing us for 'choosing' otherwise is effectively god punishing others for his own crimes since he made us unable to choose otherwise, so we're right back on the war crimes train. If he's not omniscient then he doesn't have a plan, can't judge sin in the hearts of men, etc. Is he even still a god at that point? Also that would make him a liar, which again is not a great foundation upon which to build a claim to moral authority.
3. Vengeful/loving god: the Old Testament is full of examples of god as an angry, petty, vengeful tyrant, only for him to change his ways or something in the New Testament and be all about love. There are exceptions in both, obviously, so I'm referring to general trends. I think Jesus had some great ideas (best summed up by Bill & Ted as, 'Be excellent to each other'), but the rest reads like infantile revenge-porn. And I'm not buying that 'hate the sin, love the sinner' thing either (that's probably an evangelical thing), because god sure wasn't raining fire and brimstone and calling for the wholesale slaughter of the sins, that was inflicted upon the sinners. And their sin mostly seems to boil down to not believing in god.

These, to me, seem like unsolvable, unavoidable paradoxes. I see two paths when faced with them:

1. I'm forced to admit that the 'perfect eternal Divine Truth' is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god's nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.
2. What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn't necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.

I don't begrudge people who believe or find comfort in it, mind you, but it's not for me. I'm searching for Truth, not a search for 'it's probably not true but I guess it's a nice idea?'

That looks like a list of words to use instead of 'very

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Oh yeah I didn't think about the fact that it's porous, shit. Yeah I've had my ceramic skillet set for like 15 years and never done anything special with them, but also no salt water and stuff growing on every available surface. Fair point.

Yup, or any hex editor that could target memory addresses (some of them were limited to run on a certain file or whatever.) But yeah I used to do similar when I was a kid, I would go into my game files (all DOS games back then of course) and change text strings you could find in there with a hex editor. I'd just change goofy stuff like 'Copyright' to 'Copyleft', 'The bandit strikes the princess!' to 'The dude slaps a ho', etc. It was endlessly amusing when I was that age. :)

Oh, shit, I didn't realize. I'm still getting used to this lemmy/instance/federation thing, my bad.

And ad-supported is far from the only model for journalism.

It's not, but it's what most of them use and they seem to be reasonably successful at it, so as a measure of the abandonment of journalism I think it's a reasonable yardstick.

I see a fair amount of Christian-related posts in your post history so I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that this is probably a conversation you don't want to have. I'm trying not to be an asshole here, but I am very well read on the subject of Christianity, so suffice to say that contradictions exist, they are widely known, and I find Christian apologia on the subject wholly unconvincing.

That said, if I'm really the person you would like to go on this journey of discovery about your religion with then I will take you, but I can't say that you are very likely to enjoy the results.

Why would I want my reddit account here? Yeah it kinda sucks to lose 14 years of history, but I couldn't even tell you how much karma I have, f.ex. What I would bring over from reddit is the people and the many active niche communities.

Yup, same. I would get this sense of deja vu except instead of feeling like I've been somewhere before it was feeling like I had previously dreamed the events that were about to happen. And yeah it was always minor stuff, a conversation, mom coming home angry about having dropped something expensive at work, the solution to some coding problem a friend was about to tell me, etc. I tried playing with it, and if I changed anything ('Oh, I know what you're about to say', etc) it would disrupt it and not happen, but otherwise it happened the way I dreamed it every time. Sadly it got more and more uncommon as I got older, and now it's been probably 10-15 years since the last time I remember.

Depends: for how long? 1 finger = 10% of humanity has all of their basic survival needs met forever? Done and done, take all 10. Seems like an extremely tiny price to pay to alleviate a colossal amount of suffering in the world forever, and without all those people being distracted by meeting their basic needs odds are technology is going to advance even more rapidly, along with the quality of things like medical prosthetics and neural interfaces and shit. So, yes please bring on the cyberpunk without the dystopia.

Having my feet up helps with back pain because it changes the natural angle that my lower back sits at, which affects the level of strain of the surrounding muscles. I sat with my feet up on my desk for a long time before I finally realized why I was doing it and just bought a recliner and a desk that could accommodate it.

Sorry, what on earth is a Beehaw and how does it relate at all to this discussion?

So, where does it come from?

I meant the idea that the general populace is no longer getting their news (directly or indirectly) from sites like that. If they weren't writing articles that got linked around the web they wouldn't sell ads, and if they weren't selling ads they wouldn't exist anymore.

And the people who don't know that you should check LLMs for hallucinations/errors (despite the fact that the press has been screaming that for a year) are definitely self-hosting their own, right? I've done it, it's not hard, but it's certainly not trivial either, and most of these folks would just go 'lol what's a docker?' and stop there. So we're advocating guard-rails for people in a use-case they would never find themselves in.

You’re saying this like they’re equal.

Not as if they're equal, but as if they're both unreliable and should be checked against multiple sources, which is what I've been advocating for since the beginning of this conversation.

The problem is consistency. A con man will always be a con man. With an LLM you have no way to know if it’s bullshitting this time or not

But you don't know a con man is a con man until you've read his book and put some of his ideas in practice and discovered that they're bullshit, same as with an LLM. See also: check against multiple sources.

No, this was via debug, a command that's been included in MS-DOS since like version 2.0 (before there even was a Windows, much less full-OS windows like Win95/NT/etc rather than 3.0/3.1 that were just fancy launchers that sat on top of DOS.) It can let you view and alter the contents of memory at a particular address, etc. We also used it to wipe hard drives by forcibly writing 0s to every block on the drive.

Huh, I haven't treated my ceramic skillets special at all, just rinse 'em out when I'm done and throw 'em in the dishwasher, or if I have to hand-wash I can just scrub them real quick since they're not nasty with food gunk all over them. To the best of my knowledge they don't require special treatment, I only suggest not letting them sit with food on them because that'll make anything harder to clean up.

Nope, and not even because of the current administration: this country is by, for, and about rich people, and people are getting deliriously rich off of our data right now so there's no political will to do anything about it.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't give your data to companies: their executives and shareholders care more about their bottom line than your privacy.

Alright, thar cute little guy will forever be known as Chocolate Chip.

I don't believe in the Christian god because there are too many contradictions and I don't think the divine truth is corruptable. Anything so corrupt it doesn't even agree with itself cannot be divine truth.

I have bad eyes and a love of computers/gaming, so I spent 30 years hunched over a keyboard squinting at the monitor. It fucked my back all the way up, I've had chronic back pain every day for ~20 years now. Fortunately nowadays I have a recliner and monitors/keyboard on arms so I can see while in a comfortable position. Take care of your back, kids.