Unconventional strategy.
Unconventional strategy.
It’s … wild because this is part of the roots of the Jewish people being chased from their lands.
In a world where folks accepted other peoples gods but revered their own … the monotheistic Abrahamic religions fucked all that up.
K.
Id like anyone who read my comment to not see this comment and think it follows what I’m saying or expands on it.
This dude is standing alone
You can respect someone and still think they’re wrong. Just like I respect you right now.
But if you truly believe in your religion, then you must believe that other religions aren’t right.
I used to be. I learned a lot about a lot of religions. I was seriously Catholic for 18 years. They all have a dogma that their believers don’t follow well. They’re often internally inconsistent in their rules. They don’t get us new knowledge or truth or understanding of the universe.
If you objectively look at religion and how it’s used, it seems to be a convenient way to keep sociopaths under control (threat of a punishing father figure), a way to cope with mortality, and a way to funnel money and accomplish social goals. They had interesting uses in the past as forms of local government and keeping people from killing each other. They’re often used by horrible people to enhance their power and abuse others.
But today what’s the point? Get a hobby, join a club, follow the laws, and accept that death is the end.
Sorry if it seems flippant, but I’ve been down this discussion before. Done the research before. And I’ve come to conclusions already taking into account what you sent. A quick Google of “what religions believe other religions are right” would get similar results.
The end result is: all religions make up their rules. It’s just people finding ways to live with other people. There’s nothing in them that isn’t explained easily by reality, or disproved easily by saying “no it isn’t”.
I think you’ve just talked yourself into a circle. You can’t both believe something and doubt it. Doubt is the opposite of belief.
What you’re talking about is possibly belief in belief. That’s the belief that you should believe, or belief that you do believe. That is not the same as actual belief.
If your bar for believing something is that you’re 100% certain that it is true (i.e., a complete lack of doubt), then you’ve rendered the whole concept of belief useless as there is no proposition this applies to.
Me, if I see a cat sitting on a mat, I will believe there is a cat on the mat. But it might be that it’s a capybara wearing an incredibly convincing cat costume. Very low odds, but the possibility is there. It could also be that I was a bit careless in looking, and the cat is actually sitting on an especially mat-like section of the newspaper. There is always doubt. Sometimes there’s more (maybe the lights were off), sometimes there’s less (I spend a good hour examining the cat-mat situation, consulting biologists and mat experts), but there is always doubt.
Asserting you have no doubt is asserting you made no mistake in assessing reality, i.e., that you’re perfect. And call me a dick, but I don’t think you are.
There’s a big difference between having no doubt, and thinking you’re infallible.
I believe if I drop something it will fall to the ground because objects with mass produce gravity. It may be that some other completely different force is at work, besides gravity. But I don’t believe that to be true. But if there is evidence that it is true, I will change my mind.
A good way to check if you believe something is to look at how you act. You see the cat, you act like. It’s a cat, you believe it’s a cat. If you see the cat, and hesitate and doubt, then you don’t believe it’s a cat. You may do some thinking and then determine it is a cat, and start believing it. And then you will act accordingly.
And that’s why funerals disprove religious belief. If people truly believed in their religion, and believed in the afterlife, funerals would be happy not sad. But they don’t believe in their religion. They hope that they’re right. But they don’t believe it.
Ok, so I think our wires cross regarding terminology here. We’re roughly on the same page. So, when you believe something, you can put some probability on how likely it is to be true. I think we both agree that putting probability 1 is either mistaken or a lie. It is asserting that you’re infallible. And I think we both agree that asserting your infallibility is silly. So, to every belief you have you put some probability. If I look at the cat on the mat in broad daylight I will put 0.999, and I’ll put 0.99 if it’s a dimly lit room or whatever. In any case, despite believing the cat to be on the mat, I admit that I am human, therefore fallible, and I will assign some non-zero probability to the negation, namely 0.001 or 0.01. And here I think we’re still on the same page.
Here I think we diverge, and it’s just a matter of definition. I’ve been referring to that small sliver of probability of the negation of my belief being true as “doubt”. So with my definition of doubt, you will agree, there is always some doubt. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it is always there. Let’s refer to my definition of doubt as “schmoubt”.
If feel like your conception of doubt is basically when schmoubt reaches a certain threshold, namely where you’re no longer comfortable saying you believe the proposition. So for example, we might dim the lights quite a lot, and maybe my schmoubt goes all the way up to 0.4 or whatever, and I no longer believe there is a cat on the mat. I’m pretty sure there’s something sitting on something, but my schmoubt for the statement “the cat is on the mat” is too high for me to justify my belief to myself. So clearly you believe schmoubt is real, but you wouldn’t call it doubt. What do you call it?
Regarding the funeral thing, I think you need to be a bit more critical of your analysis. It is perfectly consistent to believe in an afterlife but also be sad when someone passes. Because for the time being, you will be separated from them. You will be going at it alone, for quite some time in some cases. It’s the same as being sad your significant other will work abroad for a while. You will see them again, and this is temporary, but you are sad because you will not be able to enjoy their physical presence for a while.
Your comment on funerals reminds me of my mother yelling at me for crying over my grandpa’s death (the first death I experienced as an adult/college student). She told me “Why are you so upset‽ You’ve been to church more recently than I have!”
Anyways, that thought lives rent-free in my head, even though I no longer speak with my mother.
(mini rant: she gave me exactly as much space to feel my feelings when my own dad died more recently. Yes, she sucks.)
My grandma’s funeral was not a sad occasion. She’d lived a long life and died very demented, so there was a bit of sadness, but mostly those feelings had been dealt with over the years as her mind changed. The primary feeling seemed to be relief. The sermon was very “we’re not burying her, we’re planting her, rejoice for she will be reborn” and I wanted to throttle the preacher because he said nothing specific to my grandma, it was very generic. My main feeling at the funeral was stress from navigating the disfunctional relationships of family members I hardly knew.
You can’t both believe something and doubt it.
I have beliefs about what I think is the most probable truth. That means I can both believe something is true, and acknowledge the probability that I’m wrong. Whenever my beliefs change, there’s necessarily a period where I gradually come to see the probability that I’m wrong as larger than the probability that I’m right, at which point my beliefs about what is right change. However, the acknowledgement that I may still be wrong remains.

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I honestly don’t even think I get your position here. Do you somehow not believe that you live in some kind of objective reality together with the rest of us? Do you think this is all just going on in your head? Like… is this some kind of far-out simulation theory thing? Even if we do live in a simulation, that simulation itself must exist in some kind of “real world”.
Please explain
Your perceptions are influenced by your beliefs, and your beliefs are influenced by your culture. So if someone can buy control of our cultural media, they can control reality for the general population. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. The owning class have literally constrained our ability to imagine and perceive a fair and just world. For example, they spent centuries silencing queer people, and as a result, most people became literally incapable of perceiving a nonbinary person. When they looked at someone like Me, they would see a man or a woman instead. Their foundational perception was and is distorted.
For a revolution against the owning class to be successful, we need not just to destroy the state apparati of physical control, but also of mental control. We need to destroy the belief in a capitalist cisheteropatriarchal reality. https://soulism.net
The belief in an objective reality is a prerequisite to the owning class’s control of reality. People let the media tell them what to believe, because they want to believe in objective reality. They don’t want to actively participate in creating their own subjective world.
And that’s exactly why the belief in an objective reality is a dangerous and corrupting technology. We shouldn’t leave such a powerful tool for control lying around where evil people can get their hands on it. We need to raise the next generation believing that the universe is subjective in nature, armed with the knowledge of all the horrible atrocities that realists have committed throughout history. The crusades. The slave trade. The stolen generations. The holocaust. All motivated by the belief in an objective reality, with objective reasons to oppress the weak. Realism is an evil technology.
The MAGA people are realists. They believe that they are thinking and acting in alignment with objective reality. You and I can think they’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t realists. When it comes to the question of objective reality, they’re on your side, not Mine. They don’t think their perceptions are subjective. They don’t think gender and race are social constructs. They don’t take responsibility for their perceptions like I do.
You’re making the mistake of conflating being wrong with being a subjectivist. Have a serious think, you believe they think gender is a subjective social construct? Not a chance!
They don’t think gender and race are social constructs.
Whether they think that has nothing to do with whether they believe there’s an objective answer to the question. What they do, however, is take positions that are in blatant violation of the observable facts around them. The whole “alternative facts” this is basically an exercise in “taking responsibility for your perceptions”, and choosing to believe whatever you think is right, regardless of the objective reality around you.
You have a point, and I’ll admit that rich conservatives give their followers propaganda that defies their beliefs about objective reality. If we’re talking about alternative facts, then yes, that’s the rich not caring about the truth. That’s the rich… using magic. Changing people’s beliefs to alter the subjective world their followers live in. Yes, the rich and the corrupt politicians are not realists.
And we can’t beat them if we give up the powerful weapon that is magic. They’re using magic, we should use magic too. Magic is a technology that can be used for good or evil, but when it’s used to enforce an idea of objective reality, that’s when it becomes evil. The rich DO NOT WANT their followers taking responsibility for their own perceptions. They want their followers perceiving whatever their rulers tell them! We need to break their magic by freeing the poor conservatives from their realist programming, so the working class can control our subjective world.
A realists accountability is to reproducibility and observability.
But if you can believe anything, and that makes you happy, then good. I personally believe red is green and drive how I like. Sure I’ve killed a few people, but that’s in reality so I don’t believe it.
Have you ever heard of this social experiment that was done a long time ago.
A teacher in 1968, following days after MLK was murdered, decided to teach kids about racism. It ended up becoming a famous experiment about how people who are discriminated against will often do the same back to others. And that we are all equally capable of being taught to discriminate even when we ourselves have faced discrimination and know what it’s like.
Here is the premise. (All kids were white, I believe)
The teacher told the students that Brown color students were smarter than blue eye eye students because the pigment in brown eyes was related to intelligence.
Here is the rest copied from Wikipedia
“Initially, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott led the children to believe the false premise that melanin was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, the initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades on simple tests improved, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored more poorly on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.[10]
The next Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed children in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned.[6]”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott
Here is an in-depth article by PBS on it. www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/…/introduction-2/
Here is a documentary about it , also made by PBS. m.youtube.com/watch?v=1mcCLm_LwpE
It’s a fascinating experiment into human behavior and self reflection.
Black slavery really wasn’t that long ago either.
1863
163 years.
That’s roughly only 2 lifetimes ago.
Two.
But yeah segregation was 50 years. People are alive today that weren’t allowed to use the same toilets as whites or share drinking fountains. Restaurants wouldn’t serve them.
Sundown towns. Lynchings.
The latter is still occurring.
Because you are only watching one sided propaganda.
The majority of Jews in Israel are Mizrahi, meaning from the Middle East and Mediterranean region.
And that makes everything US-upon-middleast does okay, got it.
Historical wrongs don’t let you invade your neighbours. And given that Israel was founded as a way to export people from their existing homes, maybe it shouldn’t exist. Maybe the forces that formed Israel should repatriate their citizens and stop this leibensraum shit they’ve picked up from their past abusers.
I have no issue with Jews, none at all. I think all of the various sky-daddies are fucking ridiculous. But I do think that they’re building their own self-destruction. They’ll be unstable forever as a result of their actions.
I’m scared of the things that will happen when the US stops supplying munitions to Israel.
Again: I don’t have strong opinions on race or religion, I just think that all of Israel’s neighbours would like to see US influence in the region gone, and that would include Israel. And the cause of this is entirely Israel’s own aggression as a state.