When I got engaged to my wife and we were going over our finances, her student loans blew my mind. The way they set up her payments, more than half of her loans were growing despite making monthly payments. The freaking interest was higher than she paid in every month.

What a fucking joke.

Finally finished deleting all my old comments and posts from my 12 year old account and hit that delete button. (Had to use old Reddit to get it to go through.) Feels good.

The Kars for Kids jingle was made by satan himself.

Crusty neck beard grease.

It's funny how relaxing Lemmy feels. It's like I've been the frog in the slowly heating pot over the years and had no idea how harsh Reddit had become. Right now Lemmy feels like I thought Reddit has always been. But the idea of Reddit now feels so ugly. It's the same feeling as getting away from bumper to bumper traffic and finally being able to set the cruise control and enjoy the ride.

One of my favorite moments in politics was when Virginia tried to get Minnesota to return their blood soaked civil war flag that was taken as a trophy.

Jesse Ventura put it perfectly: “Why? We won.”

A new algorithm was entered into our mainframe to help persuade us all to join a new website. In the control universe, life is going on as normal.

Lemmy is a fantastic reminder of what Reddit used to be like. There's something relaxing and fulfilling about being surrounded by like-minded individuals who are here for good. Once it becomes too large and easy to navigate, you get flooded with trolls and creeps. I honestly don't care what happens to reddit at this point. The blackout and upcoming loss of third-party apps has converted me to Lemmy for the foreseeable future.

For me there's no problem with tying agnosticism to atheism. Agnostic comes from the Greek word agnostos, which means unknowable. One of the core concepts to most atheists is that there's no way to prove or disprove the existence of a deity. Basically, most atheists agree that it's unknowable, which makes them all agnostic.

It's been a long time since I've read Dawkins... but I'm pretty sure it was in the God Delusion where he took some time to hash out the ideas of "agnostic atheists" and "atheist agnostics." There are those who don't mind the idea of a god and those who do. But the unifying truth for them both is that they acknowledge you can never be sure. It is unknowable.

Atheism is a spectrum like everything else in life. The difference between Agnostic and Atheist is really whether you believe in your heart that there might be a god or not. We all have a different place where we land on that line, but when it comes down to it, we're all agnostic at heart. We have all rejected religion (at least for ourselves).

Although, that brings up another spectrum, which leads to some fun thought processes. Dawkins was a big supporter of gathering for mass. He saw great benefit in bringing the community together and practicing rituals that bonded and unified people. He also loved religious hymns (which are just music written by some of the greatest composers of their time).

I think websites like this where we all gather together to try and connect and correspond with each other show our need for that sort of thing. And some atheist communities have started regular gatherings to offer the same sort of "spiritual" connections that religion offers.

One more interesting thought I had while reading your post is that being an atheist doesn't mean you're automatically more ethical or not... While this is true, it still does come down to a bit of a percentage game again. Some of the best people I know are religious. But the number of times I've had someone question what stops me from doing evil without a god to punish me is severely concerning. It's truly a terrifying thought that the only thing keeping some people from killing, raping and pillaging, is the fragile thought that some invisible power might punish them for it.

How shitty would it be to go from secret service to prison guard?