Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?
No relation to the sports channel.
Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?
Being targeted by Nazis doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And thus, there’s nothing you can avoid doing, that will protect you from Nazis.
Anti-science, misogyny, etc. are bad independently of whether they are done in the name of religion, or pseudoscience, or political ideology. Doing bad things in the name of religion is exactly as bad as doing them in the name of communism, or capitalism, or racial ideology, etc.
Sure. Voting for religious genocide is just as bad as voting for non-religious genocide: e.g. on the basis of nationalism, pseudoscience, or the like.
Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of “religion” being attached.
Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don’t sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you’re good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.
Prayer? Okay, take “religion” off of it and they’re meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That’s good. Unless they’re thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.
Going to worship services? Okay, they’ve got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about “everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever” and the speeches are about hate politics. If they’re about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of “religion” on it, great!
Dietary rules? It’s okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn’t Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)
Beard, not mullet.
Anxiety stopped having nearly so much of a hold on me when I realized that there usually wasn’t a “why”, that it was just anxiety chasing its own ass and only pretending to have anything to do with the stimuli.
I’m for ending the war through a unilateral surrender of Russian forces and the trial of Mr Putin for crimes against humanity. However, my opinion doesn’t have a lot of influence over whether that happens.
Similarly, I’m for ending the war in Gaza through the voluntary disarmament of Hamas, the repudiation of terrorism as a way of life, the handover of illegal settlements to displaced Palestinian Arabs, and the prosecution of Netanyahu for treason and war crimes. But I don’t expect to get to make that decision either.
Microsoft, the state of South Dakota, and the Freemasons have been infiltrated by the Unified Buttjones Imperial Court (UBIC), formed in 1834 by the merger of the Imperial Buttjones Society and the All-Ireland Industrial Arsing Federation. UBIC agents camouflage themselves as janitors, assistant product managers, or beagles, and spread an invisible green slime over toilet seats to infect the minds of their targets. Through this mental infiltration, they obtain control over the vazween or pony-flavored sector of the human soul, creating Inter-Vazween Buttjones Networks (IVBN) through repeated application of the Greater Invoking Pentacle of Pony Erotic Revelation (GIPPER). Using an apparatus constructed from illegal immigrants, UBIC uses the IVBN and GIPPER to insert bugs into Windows, Masonic initiations, and the Lewis & Clark State Recreation Area. Anyone who denies this obvious truth is a buttjones.
If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.
Plenty of goth squirrels in parts of the Bay Area, California too.
In Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, a businessman threatens to put a corporate logo on the moon … in order to get a rival company to bid higher to keep the moon un-logo’d.
Mispi
“Heck, I had a truck like that once.”
“Evolution is so complicated. Can’t you see that it’s just simpler to admit that God did it?”
Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.
Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.
There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.
“The Electric Company” came on TV, so of course we were dancing around the TV in excitement … and knocked it over. Crash!
It’s not clear there is one! One of the nice things about liberal-democracy is that different people can create different forms of social and economic organization to meet their needs and interests. A family business, a worker-owned cooperative, and a publicly traded corporation can coexist in the same economy (and even on the same street). People can start monasteries or communes in the woods if they want to; or move to the big city to seek their fortunes.
But again, freedom isn’t free: there has to be enforcement of individual rights and fair trade to ensure that the most powerful & successful don’t get to run over everyone else with force and fraud. Right now I suspect this looks like some form of liberal social democracy; probably with more worker protections than the US has right now, but probably with less bureaucracy than the EU has right now.
Kaczynski’s madness was manufactured through calculated psychological abuse in the Harvard laboratory of one Henry Murray. Look it up, dude.
How many 1700s drinking songs does anyone know the tune of today? Well, there’s “To Anacreon in Heaven”, better known as “The Star Spangled Banner”.
“Aura Lee” is from the 1860s, but the tune is better known today as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.